Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. Welcome to it could happen here,
Speaker 1: a podcast about things falling apart, how they came to
Speaker 1: be that way. I'm your host, Christopher Wong, and today
Speaker 1: we're doing part three of our series of Neoliberalism. We're
Speaker 1: gonna start today with one of the most famous episodes
Speaker 1: in history of neoliberalism. September eleventh three Coup against Salat
Speaker 1: or Ende was a democratic socialist of a type that
Speaker 1: has broadly ceased to exist today. A committed Marxist to
Speaker 1: believe that class of society could be created by means
Speaker 1: of electoral democracy, he embarked on a campaign drastically more
Speaker 1: radical than any modern social politician has done, more than
Speaker 1: dream of mass nationalizations, in an attempt to develop a
Speaker 1: technical system that would allow the government to democratically plan
Speaker 1: as much of the economy as humanly possible. In part
Speaker 1: his hand was forced by Chile's workers who had embarked
Speaker 1: on their own unsanctioned campaign of takeovers of minds and factories,
Speaker 1: which I Andy disapproved of and now sought to bring
Speaker 1: under the national planning scheme. To do this, he brought
Speaker 1: in British cybernetics theorists Stanford Beer, who embarked on an
Speaker 1: operation called Project Cybersend to collect and coordinate information between
Speaker 1: various factories and allow democratic planning at the ground level
Speaker 1: in a way that would allow stantaneous reaction to crises
Speaker 1: and immediate changes in production levels and conditions inside the
Speaker 1: factories themselves to deal with them. All End, for all
Speaker 1: of s. Bark's credentials, was fiercely critical of the bureaucratization
Speaker 1: of the U. S s R, and, in particular in
Speaker 1: the economic sphere, the way it's planning systems were essentially
Speaker 1: unable to react to local changes quickly in a context
Speaker 1: where plans were only created every five years. Cybersen would
Speaker 1: solve these problems by workers participation at the factory level
Speaker 1: and constant updated data flows to the planning office. As
Speaker 1: the project went on, Beer became progressively more radical. Strike
Speaker 1: by right wing truck workers backed by capitalists in the
Speaker 1: CIA in nineteen two threatened to grind the nation to
Speaker 1: a halt. In response, workers formed enormous cordonas industrialities or
Speaker 1: industrial belts to help self organized production and bypass the
Speaker 1: striking right wing workers. In coordination with the Andia's government
Speaker 1: and a new cybers in control room, they were able
Speaker 1: to outmaneuver the strike and maintain production and distribution and
Speaker 1: nearly full capacity by tracking where goods were going and
Speaker 1: where they needed to go along what roots. Beer rapidly
Speaker 1: became convinced that quote the basic answer of cybermntics the
Speaker 1: question of how the system should be organized is that
Speaker 1: it ought to organize itself, in essence that Cyberson should
Speaker 1: be used to eliminate the bureaucracy in the state entirely
Speaker 1: and allow workers to directly or nights production themselves. Now,
Speaker 1: Cyberson in theory is what the near a libals claim,
Speaker 1: at least in public, to want, is an anti bureaucratic
Speaker 1: system that uses the centralized control over the means of
Speaker 1: production to combat totalitarianism and ensure that the state respects
Speaker 1: individual rights and liberties. In fact, as a Vengi Motoro's
Speaker 1: put it, Pierre and Hyak knew each other, as Beer
Speaker 1: noted in his diary. Hyak even complimented him on his
Speaker 1: vision for the cybernetic factory after Beer presented at a
Speaker 1: conference in the nineteen in Illinois. So, naturally, when the
Speaker 1: system was actually implemented, at least in part in Chile,
Speaker 1: the new liberal position was that every single person involved
Speaker 1: in the entire economic bearment needed to be killed. Chile
Speaker 1: was put under economic blockade by the US and multinational
Speaker 1: corporations with full neilerable support, an ironic position given Milton Friedman,
Speaker 1: Hyak and Rope case pure and absolute opposition to economic
Speaker 1: blockades of South Africa. Rhodesia to its eternal shame. The
Speaker 1: a f l c i O s American Institute for
Speaker 1: Free Labor Development provided training and fun to the right
Speaker 1: wing unions that opposed the leftist government and others across
Speaker 1: Latin America. In Chile, working directly with the CIA, the
Speaker 1: a f l c i OS organizations to train the
Speaker 1: right wing truckers. Here's nineteen seventy two strike we've already
Speaker 1: discussed and he's nineteen seventy three strike would pave the
Speaker 1: way for Pinochet's coup. In many cases, organized labor, especially
Speaker 1: in the US, but also in places like Italy, spent
Speaker 1: the seventies battling their own left flank in defensive capital.
Speaker 1: The reward for their services was capital turning around and
Speaker 1: dutting them like a fish. In the eighties two fought
Speaker 1: a series of battles with his left flank. Disarming the
Speaker 1: mass workers assemblies that had formed in nineteen seventy two
Speaker 1: could have saved him from the coup. The results was
Speaker 1: the other nine eleven, on which day in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: the military overthrew Allende and a coup, and Allen shot
Speaker 1: himself in the presidential palace. The man who would emerge
Speaker 1: on the top of the power struggle in the military
Speaker 1: at the end of the coup was one Augusto Pinochet. Now.
Speaker 1: Pinochet from the beginning had the support of Chile's own
Speaker 1: domestic neo liberals, which they were a fairly large number.
Speaker 1: Upon taking power, he carried out what would become the
Speaker 1: standard neoliberal program, returning nationalized industries to the capitalists, eliminating
Speaker 1: price controls, and increasing interest rates, but full scale neoliberalism
Speaker 1: didn't come immediately. Inflation, which Pinochet had nominally in large
Speaker 1: part taken power to control, continued unabated, and in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four Milton Friedman arrived in Chile to argue for
Speaker 1: neoliberal shock therapy. But it wasn't until Pinochet's desperation from
Speaker 1: money drove him to the i m F that he
Speaker 1: would fully embrace neoliberalism. Most of the world had refused
Speaker 1: to do business with new dictatorial regime, with the exception
Speaker 1: of the U S and oddly enough MAOS China, which
Speaker 1: poured money into the regime and Pinochet's personal pockets. But
Speaker 1: that money was insufficient, and the i m F was
Speaker 1: the only remaining body who would actually lend money to
Speaker 1: Pinochet without any requirements on improving Chile's at this point
Speaker 1: of bismo human rights record, much of the full neoliberal
Speaker 1: turn that hit Chile in nineteen seventy five came from
Speaker 1: demands from the I m F itself, who demanded terconian
Speaker 1: measures to control inflation. Here, Pinochet was aided by the
Speaker 1: support of the neoliberals, whose legitimacy and academic standing allowed
Speaker 1: them to negotiate and secure favor from the I m F,
Speaker 1: which they had already begun to infiltrate. At this point,
Speaker 1: the infamous Chicago Boys, economist trains at the University of
Speaker 1: Chicago by Milton Friedman, were put in charge of the economy.
Speaker 1: University of Chicago trained economist Sergio di Castro, known as
Speaker 1: the Pinochet of the Economy, was put in charge of
Speaker 1: the Ministry of Economics. The Castro privatized an enormous portion
Speaker 1: of the remaining profitable state industries, eliminated tariffs and implemented
Speaker 1: free trade policies, deregulated the finance sector, and eliminated any
Speaker 1: remaining price controls. Chicago Boys would go on to do
Speaker 1: things like privatizing the entire dele and pension system, with
Speaker 1: the exception of the military, which is a good education
Speaker 1: of any as to what the regime thought the actual
Speaker 1: effects of privatization would be. In nineteen Pinochet declared something
Speaker 1: called the Seven Modernizations, with quote reforms in labor, education, health,
Speaker 1: regional decentralization, agriculture, and justice policy. The goal of these
Speaker 1: reforms was to introduce the market into literally every aspect
Speaker 1: of society. Now, in Episode one, I very briefly mentioned
Speaker 1: the Virginia School as one of the major schools of
Speaker 1: deal liberalism. The Virginia School the people behind public choice theory.
Speaker 1: Their thing is essentially taking the absolutely absurd set of
Speaker 1: beliefs Chicago School holds about people humans are all knowing, rational,
Speaker 1: calculating gods, optimizing their behavior to get the most of
Speaker 1: every single interaction to maximize the utility, and then applying
Speaker 1: it to political science and then literally every other field.
Speaker 1: If you've ever heard someone say, there's no rational reason
Speaker 1: to vote, because if you're a rational, self interested person,
Speaker 1: the cost of voting outweighs that benefit because your vote
Speaker 1: only matters if it's deciding one. Therefore, it's against your
Speaker 1: interest to vote. That's the Virginia School and their public
Speaker 1: choice theory bullshit at work. Pinochet's seven Modernization was an
Speaker 1: application of Virginia School doctrine to the entire Chilean state
Speaker 1: and as much as the society is humanly possible, with
Speaker 1: the goal of transforming it into a market. I'm going
Speaker 1: to read a section from the Road to Mount Pelion
Speaker 1: describing Virginia School titan James M. Buchanan's work quote ineffectual
Speaker 1: consequences in the political market place were blamed solely on
Speaker 1: the fallacies of political decision making. Quote. We can summarize
Speaker 1: public choice as a theory of government failure end quote.
Speaker 1: Buchanan delivered a highly abstract paper titled Limited or Untitled
Speaker 1: Democracy to the Montpellion Society in Vinea del Mar in Chile,
Speaker 1: which some constructed as a critique of the host country's
Speaker 1: mobilization for action history. Buchanan stated that if limited democracy
Speaker 1: was a polity predisposed to disable a political market that
Speaker 1: would otherwise promote the most efficient allocation of resources, the
Speaker 1: only meaningful task of the government would be to deprive
Speaker 1: the polity of its ability to do so. Public choice
Speaker 1: theory thus sought to limit democracy and deep politicize the
Speaker 1: state in order to enable uncontraded market forces to guide
Speaker 1: human interaction. Since the Pinochet regime was committed to using
Speaker 1: its governmental powers in precisely this manner, Buchanan's paper provided
Speaker 1: theoretical support for the regime, even if it did not
Speaker 1: openly endorsed the authoritarian rule. Buchanan, of course, would spend
Speaker 1: a bunch of time doing lectures in Chile throughout Pinochet's icatorship,
Speaker 1: but he was not that regime's most vociferous neoliberal supporter.
Speaker 1: That award goes to Frederick Hyak Chris Hiek when asked
Speaker 1: about Chile, which had been to nineteen seventy eight and
Speaker 1: that blessed with his approval. A dicatorship can restrict itself
Speaker 1: in A edicatorship which deliberately is restricting itself can be
Speaker 1: more liberal in its politics than a democratic assembly which
Speaker 1: has due limits. Chile's nineteen eighty constitution was drafted in
Speaker 1: part by one of Yek's friends. She has wrote Rode
Speaker 1: Abount Pelion Again. The constitution was not only named after
Speaker 1: hys book The Constitution of Liberty, but also incorporated significant
Speaker 1: elements of hias thinking. Above all, the constitution placed a
Speaker 1: strong emphasis on a neoliberal understanding of freedom. Guzman's version
Speaker 1: of freedom is intrinsically connected to private property, free enterprise,
Speaker 1: and individual rights. Individual freedom, in his interpretation, can only
Speaker 1: evolve in a radical market order. The Constitution was dedicated
Speaker 1: to guarantee such an order without constraining any economic activities.
Speaker 1: In order to protect free market conditions and individual freedoms
Speaker 1: against totalitarian attacks or democratic interventions, the constitution stipulated a
Speaker 1: necessity of a strong central state authority to guarantee the
Speaker 1: established rule of law, and thus above all else is
Speaker 1: hampered in the application of discretionary government power. Exempted were
Speaker 1: measures to uphold the status quo, inasmuch as Guzman aggressively
Speaker 1: supported continuing the state of emergency, which legalized the use
Speaker 1: of whatever discretionary powers were deemed necessary to quial opposition.
Speaker 1: That Folks is a high achi in constitution used the
Speaker 1: state to murder any one once democracy or God to
Speaker 1: help them wants to control the production they're forced to
Speaker 1: serve every day. Chile is near liberalisms voltron by binding
Speaker 1: the power of all four major schools of neoliberalism Chicago
Speaker 1: School and Monetary and Economic policy, Australian School Constitutional order order,
Speaker 1: liberal reliance on the international bureaucracy and legal institutions like
Speaker 1: the i m F in order to promote a market economy,
Speaker 1: and Virginia School public choice theory running the state. You
Speaker 1: get a neoliberal, right wing military dictatorship. Now most conventional
Speaker 1: accounts of neoliberalism will move from Chile to Reagan and
Speaker 1: Thatcher and next episode will cover the neoliberal kind of
Speaker 1: revolution in the angle sphere, But focusing on purely national
Speaker 1: events gives a skewed perception of how neoliberalism actually spreads,
Speaker 1: and in order to correct that, we're going to look
Speaker 1: at Venezuela. I'm going to be drawing heavily here from
Speaker 1: the work of the legendary Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando core and
Speaker 1: Neil in his book The Magical State, which I highly
Speaker 1: recommend as one of the best things that are written
Speaker 1: about oil and the Venezuelan state. So readers be warned.
Speaker 1: Chapter one is an absolute slog that, on the one hand,
Speaker 1: is one of the most interesting explanations of what oiler
Speaker 1: rents are have ever encountered, but also features Corneal inventing
Speaker 1: a new trielectic and then stubbornly refusing to explain what
Speaker 1: it is or literally anything about how it works. So
Speaker 1: read The Magical State skip chapter one now the guiding
Speaker 1: principles of the new mass capitalists, democratic parties and posted statorship.
Speaker 1: Venezuela since the nineties sixties had been developing sovereignty by
Speaker 1: economic independence. The keystone of this project was an attempt
Speaker 1: to use the power of the state in new oil
Speaker 1: rents to develop an automotive industry. The project has sort
Speaker 1: of stalled out from its origins in the sixties until
Speaker 1: the rise of the G seventy seven Opeque Alliance in
Speaker 1: nineteen nineteen seventy four that we discussed last episode. In
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five, Venezuela's Assembly passed a law that granted
Speaker 1: the president's special powers to speed up the developments of
Speaker 1: the Auto Industry Corp. The Auto Industry in Venezuela Corinial
Speaker 1: described it thus quote. The central goal was to have
Speaker 1: of the vehicle's value, including the drive train, produced locally.
Speaker 1: By nineteen five, major components would be produced by enterprises
Speaker 1: having at least fifty one percent of their capital from
Speaker 1: local private sources. Existing foreign companies would have to become
Speaker 1: mixed or national firms in accord within day Impact regulations
Speaker 1: if they wanted to benefit from the common market. Now,
Speaker 1: this plan is what's called industrial import substitution. Developing countries
Speaker 1: would attempt to develop industries, in this case, auto manufacturers
Speaker 1: inside of a country to produce cars for internal consumption
Speaker 1: instead of importing them from other countries. The other key
Speaker 1: of this plan is Danda Impact, an association of Bolivia, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru,
Speaker 1: and Chile that was collaborating to develop a regional industrial
Speaker 1: economy that we use local resources to build a local
Speaker 1: industrial economy producing industrial goods made entirely inside of the
Speaker 1: countries themselves from their resources. Now, Venezuela joins the pack
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy three, and Peano Shane notably leaves in
Speaker 1: the key sticking points in this joint and day impact
Speaker 1: venezuela attempts to build an auto industry was that Venezuela
Speaker 1: needed technology held by multinational corporations in order to actually
Speaker 1: produce the vehicles. Multinational car companies were willing to go
Speaker 1: ahead with the project to build cars in Venezuela in
Speaker 1: the short term because they were hurting from the oil
Speaker 1: shock and thus were willing to help national plans develop
Speaker 1: cars as long as they could use the parts to
Speaker 1: build their own cars with parts sourced from around the world.
Speaker 1: And this is where the neoliberal defensive intellectual property rights
Speaker 1: becomes extremely important, because the companies who held the patents
Speaker 1: for the drive trains essentially had a technological strangleholder for
Speaker 1: car development. Now, Venezuela conducted an extensive bidding process for
Speaker 1: companies to make cars in Venezuela, but the car companies
Speaker 1: essentially sabotaged by submitting designs that failed specs. The result
Speaker 1: was a kind of political war inside Venezuela and particularly
Speaker 1: inside the Venezuela and ruling class, between national developments and
Speaker 1: international profits. The Venezuelan developmentalists needed a breakthrough. What they needed,
Speaker 1: in essence, was new international economic order and its corporate regulations,
Speaker 1: debt relief, and technology transfers. Without them, even a third
Speaker 1: World country like Venezuela, flush with oil money, was incapable
Speaker 1: of developing an industrial economy. The new international Economic Order
Speaker 1: never came. All the G seven had to do in
Speaker 1: order to stop it was stalled the G seventy seven
Speaker 1: out until commodity power faded. The G seventy seven had
Speaker 1: to fundamentally change the structure of the economy in order
Speaker 1: to allow them to industrialize before the sort of damocles
Speaker 1: hanging over all their heads the mounting Third World debt
Speaker 1: fell and decapitated them. The G seven strategy to outlast
Speaker 1: the G seventy seven was to pull the various factions
Speaker 1: in the seventy seven apart, in particular pulling the moderate
Speaker 1: governments away from the radical wing of OPEC and the
Speaker 1: African Socialists. They attacked OPEC by using Saudi Arabia to
Speaker 1: undermine its unity, and attempted to peel the so called
Speaker 1: less developed countries away from their alliance with OPEC with
Speaker 1: a promise of aid to patch up the damage dealt
Speaker 1: by increased oil prices. Neither worked incredibly well, but when
Speaker 1: combined with the US essentially shutting the u N down
Speaker 1: by refusing to let any business get done, refusing to
Speaker 1: vote for or even vetoing routine matters, the stalling worked.
Speaker 1: No new international economic order was forthcoming. Instead, the world
Speaker 1: would get neoliberalism. Neoliberalism arrived on the world stage in
Speaker 1: the form of the Vulcar Shock. In nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Vulcar as the Chairman of the
Speaker 1: Federal Reserve for the broad mandate to do whatever he
Speaker 1: wanted to reduce inflation. Vulcar had become a disciple of monitorism,
Speaker 1: a Freedman Night Chicago School belief about the role of
Speaker 1: the money supply in the economy considered to be absolutely
Speaker 1: crank even by modern neoliberals. His solution, which became known
Speaker 1: as the Vulcar Shock, was to increase interest rate. This
Speaker 1: essentially blew a crater in the American economy and immediately
Speaker 1: sent it into recession. And we'll get to vulcar at
Speaker 1: Reagan's efforts to roy American labor in the next episode.
Speaker 1: But the damage to the Third World was even worse.
Speaker 1: G seventy seven governments had for decades taking on adjustable
Speaker 1: rate loans pecked to something called the lybor rate. When
Speaker 1: they took the loans out, interest rates were virtually negative,
Speaker 1: but when the Vulgar Shock hit, the skyrocketed. Now, as
Speaker 1: we talked about last episode, a major part of the
Speaker 1: crisis of the seventies was enormous piles of oil money,
Speaker 1: mostly from the Gulf States, floating around that nobody could
Speaker 1: actually get returns on because of declining manufacturing profit rates.
Speaker 1: This money wound up flowing back into the American finance system.
Speaker 1: When capital controls were lifted nineteen sevent the banks through
Speaker 1: the money at loans in the Third World. Now, some
Speaker 1: of that money had been put into industrial development that
Speaker 1: had yet to pay off. Some of the money had
Speaker 1: simply been put directly into dictator's bank accounts, but the
Speaker 1: bank's essentially didn't care if the loans they were making
Speaker 1: had little to no chance of being repaid without some
Speaker 1: kind of structure reformed. Because in control of the I
Speaker 1: m F fell to an arch neo liberal named Jacques
Speaker 1: de la Rosier. I really don't know if that's how
Speaker 1: to pronounce his name, but he is evil. So neo
Speaker 1: liberals further took control of the World Bank in knee
Speaker 1: from the I m F and the World Bank, a
Speaker 1: sepsia of ne liberals enshrined the key principle of the
Speaker 1: new neoliberal order Debtors must always pay back their debts.
Speaker 1: Creditors would no longer assume risk for their loans. Instead,
Speaker 1: loans would be repaid at gunpoint. This was no mere
Speaker 1: rhetorical slogan, As the G seventy seven imploded as a
Speaker 1: political body under the weight of hundreds of billions of
Speaker 1: dollars of debt now with interest. Thomas Sankara, the socialist
Speaker 1: president of Burkina FOSSO, attempted to rally its remains to
Speaker 1: collectively negotiate debt relief. Sakara was promptly shot by a
Speaker 1: former ally who accused him of threatening Borkino Fossil's relationship
Speaker 1: with France. With all resistance slaughtered, entire nations were reduced
Speaker 1: to debt servicing machines, as tax dollars were directed from health, education,
Speaker 1: and social security programs into the coffers of international banks,
Speaker 1: which used the newly neo liberal controlled International Knowledge Very
Speaker 1: Fund as their enforcer. The anthropologist David Graeber described the
Speaker 1: consequence of one such IMF hosterity program in debt the
Speaker 1: first five thousand years. Quote. For almost two years I
Speaker 1: had lived in the highlands of Madagascar. Shortly before I arrived,
Speaker 1: there had been an outbreak of malaria. It was a
Speaker 1: particularly virulent outbreak because malaria had been wiped out in
Speaker 1: Highlight Madagascar many years before, so that after a couple
Speaker 1: of generations, most people had lost their immunity. The problem
Speaker 1: was it took money to maintain those mosquito radication programs,
Speaker 1: since there had to be periodic tests to make sure
Speaker 1: mosquitoes weren't starting to breed again, and spraying campaigns if
Speaker 1: it was discovered that they were not a lot of money.
Speaker 1: But owing to IMF impost austerity programs, the government had
Speaker 1: to cut the monitoring program. Ten thousand people died. I
Speaker 1: met young mothers grieving for lost children. One might think
Speaker 1: it would be hard to make a case that the
Speaker 1: loss of ten thousand human lives is really justified in
Speaker 1: order to ensure that City Bank wouldn't have to cut
Speaker 1: his losses on one irresponsible loan that wasn't particularly important
Speaker 1: to its balance sheet anyways. Following the old old or
Speaker 1: liberal dream of a legal framework to ensure neoliberal market economies,
Speaker 1: the new generation of neoliberals used the I m F,
Speaker 1: World Bank and other bureaucratic institutions to act as dead
Speaker 1: enforcers and the the imposed neoliberal policies from above, without anything
Speaker 1: so petty as democracy interfering with it. In fact, one
Speaker 1: of the first new liberal structural adjustments, one of a
Speaker 1: bewildering new array of terms for I m F and
Speaker 1: force austerity programs, was implemented by the Jamaican socialist Michael
Speaker 1: Manly in nineteen seventy seven, which in a single year
Speaker 1: wiped out every gain in education in public health that
Speaker 1: Madly had spent his first term building up. Similar faith
Speaker 1: would be fall health, education, and justice programs across the world.
Speaker 1: The death toll remains unknown. Venezuela would fall victim to
Speaker 1: a similar fate without the new International Economic Order. Venezuela's
Speaker 1: industrial policy imploded. As post VOLCRA shock, government debt skyrocketed.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen eighties, the government began to impose im
Speaker 1: st ctraal adjustments. Carlos Andres Perez, the man who led
Speaker 1: the industrial pushing in the nineteen seventies, was elected a
Speaker 1: second time in nineteen eighty nine, running a campaign that
Speaker 1: I've seen euphemistically described as quote against liberalization policy. It
Speaker 1: was somewhat more extreme than that, featuring lines such as
Speaker 1: calling the I M F quote a bomb that only
Speaker 1: kills people. But Perez was negotiating with the I m
Speaker 1: F behind the scenes and imposed even harsher I m
Speaker 1: F Asteria measures upon winning the election, leading to a
Speaker 1: mass uprising in nineteen eighty nine that was suppressed in
Speaker 1: a bath of blood, with hundreds killed by the army.
Speaker 1: But even more structural adjustments were imposed after Perez was
Speaker 1: deposed for corruption Nino, implemented ironically by the founder of
Speaker 1: the movement towards Socialism, Teodoro Petkoff, the head of Venezuela's
Speaker 1: planning agency in nineteen ninety six. All of Venezuela's economic
Speaker 1: crisis from the nineteen eighties until now stem from the
Speaker 1: failures of nineteen seventies industrialization without any kind of industrial economy.
Speaker 1: Even the socialist that took power in the national level
Speaker 1: were reduced to shuffling oil rents around, and with the
Speaker 1: market economy still in place, the economy is simply imploded
Speaker 1: again when wild prices fell. This is how neoliberalism comes
Speaker 1: to most countries, not as policies implemented by anything even
Speaker 1: remotely resembling the will of the people, but enforced by
Speaker 1: the international economic system itself and the bureaucrats the I
Speaker 1: m F, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.
Speaker 1: It is imposed by enormous states at gunpoints, constituted by
Speaker 1: the mass looting of the population in order to pay
Speaker 1: corporate debt. Masters new liberals have effectively achieved their goal
Speaker 1: and transcendent democratic politics entirely from their purchase in the
Speaker 1: international bureaucracy. They can dictate policy to even hostile leaders.
Speaker 1: But tomorrow we'll see what happens when they take power domestically.
Speaker 1: As we would conclude our Neoliberalism series with a man
Speaker 1: rotting in Hell with Paul Walker Ronald Reagan, Yeah, welcome
Speaker 1: to it could happen here a show about things falling
Speaker 1: apart and is for one final time this week about
Speaker 1: why and how things have fallen apart in this specific way. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm I'm your host, Christopher, and today with me
Speaker 1: I have Garrison. Well, Garrison, Hello, how you doing. I'm
Speaker 1: doing fine. We're gonna talk about something that is not fine.
Speaker 1: It's not fine at all, is in fact extremely grim
Speaker 1: and bad, which is part four of our series of
Speaker 1: deal Liberalism, i e. All of the bad things happened
Speaker 1: at once, so in in in in all last episode
Speaker 1: we talked about how throughout throughout most of the Third
Speaker 1: World or you know, what was at the time known
Speaker 1: as the Third World, new liberalism is not really imposed
Speaker 1: by people voting for it. It's mostly imposed by either
Speaker 1: external fours is, via coup or by just the I
Speaker 1: M f going okay, just we're running the country now. Um,
Speaker 1: but this this, yeah, We're we're gonna shift our focus
Speaker 1: a bit this episode with the people who were I
Speaker 1: don't know, unfortunate enough, misguided enough decided that they hated
Speaker 1: each other enough to actually choose neoliberalism for themselves. Now,
Speaker 1: one of the sort of stories we've been tracing here
Speaker 1: on sort of a very broad arc is the reaction
Speaker 1: by Neil Bulls to kind of kind of compromise. It
Speaker 1: has been worked out between labor and capital, particularly the
Speaker 1: US after sort of the open class warfare in the
Speaker 1: directeen thirties. And you know, there's essentially there's there's a
Speaker 1: kind of deal that's set up informally, which is so
Speaker 1: the we're working class will stop literally constantly going on
Speaker 1: strike and showing up the strikes with like enormous numbers
Speaker 1: of guns and shooting at people, and they will you know,
Speaker 1: stop trying to overshow the government in exchange, the state
Speaker 1: gives you welfare programs. The state will give you a house.
Speaker 1: And this is the is particularly after what we'd two
Speaker 1: the Americans say it just you know, does this massive
Speaker 1: homeownersial campaign. And you know, if if you're if you're
Speaker 1: if you're you know, a union worker, particularly if you're
Speaker 1: a white man, like this, this you know, working working,
Speaker 1: working one of these union jobs will put you into
Speaker 1: the middle class. You can take vacations, you can have
Speaker 1: a house, um, you can get pensions. Your unions are
Speaker 1: legal now, which is the thing that like you know,
Speaker 1: hadn't happened before. And this is essentially you know, this
Speaker 1: is essentially a kind of insurgency tool um. The goal
Speaker 1: of this is to stop people from you know, doing
Speaker 1: the kinds of revolts. So we're happening in at the dirties,
Speaker 1: but by the nineteen seventies it's becoming very clear that
Speaker 1: this sort of the like can't it can't really be
Speaker 1: maintained because it's too expensive for sort of the capital
Speaker 1: states to maintain and trying to maintain both well. And
Speaker 1: you know, the secondary thing here is is, you know, okay,
Speaker 1: so this deal specifically goes out to white men right
Speaker 1: now throughout the sixties and seventies, you get a bunch
Speaker 1: of other people who are not white men attempting to
Speaker 1: enter the workplace in time when you get the same bargain,
Speaker 1: and you know, they're in a lot of ways significantly
Speaker 1: on militants, and this causes en normal sponsetermentional strife. You
Speaker 1: get you know, the US is murdering the black panthers.
Speaker 1: You get similar stuff in the UK. And the neoliberals
Speaker 1: basically are the people who just fully called this to
Speaker 1: tant off and are you know, essentially going to return
Speaker 1: to full scale class war. And so now now we
Speaker 1: are we are finally getting to Reagan and Thatcher and
Speaker 1: one day we will do a full episode about how
Speaker 1: Ronald Reagan, in a weird, shadowy cabal of Italian intelligence
Speaker 1: services rigged the nineteen eighty election by planting fake stories
Speaker 1: about Jimmy Carter's brother and the press, which is if
Speaker 1: you hear the story, Garrison, No, but it sounds like
Speaker 1: regular media manipulation that happens all the time. Now, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's yeah, there, there's, there's there's there's there's a
Speaker 1: whole three line there because you know a lot of
Speaker 1: those like same kind of intelligence tactics are gonna be
Speaker 1: used South I Rock war, and there's there's this whole
Speaker 1: sort of thing. Then you know that there's also the
Speaker 1: specific Italian angle of uh yeah, the Italian States being
Speaker 1: run by this rogue Masonic lodge led by a fascist
Speaker 1: and it's it's a time this is all going on there.
Speaker 1: But that's you know, I'm just I'm just thinking like
Speaker 1: Hunter Biden laptop and all of that. Yeah, yeah stuff.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh so that's just the same playbook. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's the same thing, except like they were like
Speaker 1: actual intelligence people running it instead of just sort of
Speaker 1: like whatever. Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlos said, Glenn Greenwall trying
Speaker 1: to get people care about this thing that just nobody
Speaker 1: gives a single ship about. Yeah, you know, it was,
Speaker 1: it was, but the Ages version of it was significantly
Speaker 1: more effective. And you know the product of this is
Speaker 1: that Reagan sort of Reagan finds like the secret sauce
Speaker 1: for right wing politics, which is kind of you know,
Speaker 1: in in in some ways, and Nixon had been trying
Speaker 1: to develop it hadn't quite gotten right, which is no, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he he figures out that you know, if you want
Speaker 1: to do ne liberalism, if you want to destroy the unions,
Speaker 1: you want to stroy the welfare state, the way you
Speaker 1: do it is basically a combination of racist tax and
Speaker 1: welfare recipients and you mobilize new religious right. And this
Speaker 1: is extremely effective and it's but I think it's also
Speaker 1: interesting in worth noting that, you know, if if you
Speaker 1: got all the back to episode one, like this is
Speaker 1: this is rope keys like white nationalism, like sure German
Speaker 1: white nationalism. Thing is this is explicitly a ropeky sort
Speaker 1: of strategy for implenting the liberalism. Was the problem is
Speaker 1: he was German and Catholic, which meant that like it
Speaker 1: could never work in the US, but you know, you
Speaker 1: get Reagan, suddenly you get the American version of it,
Speaker 1: that is, you know, white but American, and then also
Speaker 1: works off the sort of of off of the sort
Speaker 1: of mass Protestantism in the US, and this becomes a
Speaker 1: force study is responsible for like almost every bad thing
Speaker 1: that exists today in some form or another, a lot
Speaker 1: of them. Yeah, I mean not not often, but you know,
Speaker 1: I the thing, things go extremely badly. And so Reagan
Speaker 1: wins this election and then almost exactly the same time,
Speaker 1: Margaret Thatcher wins the wins her election in in the UK,
Speaker 1: and that the combination of those two things, and also,
Speaker 1: as we talked about last episode, the Vulcar Shock, where
Speaker 1: Vulcar raises the interest rates raised, defendation become so Vulcar
Speaker 1: is installed weirdly, not by Ronald Reagan but by Jimmy Carter,
Speaker 1: but is given this sort of mandate to just do whatever,
Speaker 1: literally do whatever you have to to to get inflation
Speaker 1: under control. The thing that he decides to do is
Speaker 1: just literally nuke the entire world economy. You know, when
Speaker 1: we talked about the effects of this had on sort
Speaker 1: of the world in the last episode. But in the
Speaker 1: US this sets off a recession at last, basically from
Speaker 1: like nineteen seventy nine to Night two. At the height
Speaker 1: of it, it's like it's I think we finally got
Speaker 1: more people unemployed during the pandemic, but I'm like sure
Speaker 1: that between World War two, in the pandemic, that was
Speaker 1: the single largest number of people who have been unemployed
Speaker 1: in the US, which just yeah, it was just apocle,
Speaker 1: just apocle devastation. And you know, there's there's there's a
Speaker 1: whole thing here where the head of the a f
Speaker 1: l c. I oh is literally begging Vulcar like, please
Speaker 1: don't do this, like we can get inflation under control after,
Speaker 1: you know, after the economy recovers, and vocals just like no.
Speaker 1: The consequence of this is that you have you have
Speaker 1: an economy in which is no MOUs number people unemployed,
Speaker 1: and the unions are weak, and both Reagan and Thatcher
Speaker 1: sort of see this. Now the unions in the UK
Speaker 1: are in a snifful better position of the American unions.
Speaker 1: Reagan is able to sort of smash the American unions
Speaker 1: very quickly. There's there's the you know, the famous air
Speaker 1: traffic control strike where a bunch of American air traffic
Speaker 1: controllers go on strike technically illegally, and Reagan just has
Speaker 1: literally every single one of them fired and replaces them
Speaker 1: with just like like like people from flight school, like
Speaker 1: people who just just like literally anyone he can just
Speaker 1: like pull off the street who sort of kind of
Speaker 1: knows how to how to land an aircraft, like they
Speaker 1: put on people from the military. It's it's just like
Speaker 1: this absolutely wild sort of feet of strike breaking. And
Speaker 1: then you know, and when when when that falls and
Speaker 1: that that strike fails, you know, the air traffic controllers, well, okay,
Speaker 1: funnily so, the air traff controllers had actually backed Reagan.
Speaker 1: They were like the only union that backed Reagan in
Speaker 1: the election, and they immediately just get you know, they
Speaker 1: get gutted for it, which, like I have mixed feelings
Speaker 1: about because like, on the one hand, like, yeah, that's that's,
Speaker 1: that's what you get. But on the other hand, this
Speaker 1: is basically what the stories this, this is the consequences
Speaker 1: that this is basically what the stories like trade unions
Speaker 1: in the US because at this at this point, everyone
Speaker 1: realizes that the unions a week and they just start.
Speaker 1: You know, there's you get to the point where employers
Speaker 1: are deliberately provoking strikes so that they can just fire
Speaker 1: all the unionized employees. And it's extremely effective. In in Britain,
Speaker 1: the fight is a lot more intense um in in
Speaker 1: in Ninity four, Thatcher cuts cold, Like basically Thatchery wants
Speaker 1: to provoke a fight with with the coal unions, and
Speaker 1: so she basically wants to shut down a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of coal production and fire like twenty miners, and the
Speaker 1: miners go on strike, and they go on strike for
Speaker 1: over a year. But Thatcher had basically stockpiled enough cold
Speaker 1: to stay off the worst effects of the strike. And
Speaker 1: then she makes these incredibly elaborate network of deals with
Speaker 1: like She's like this this whole scab driver like union,
Speaker 1: like basical basically this whole network of scab drivers, like
Speaker 1: make sure you can move the coal around while the
Speaker 1: strike's going on. There there's all of this stuff, and
Speaker 1: you know, and and she eventually is able to trust
Speaker 1: the coal strike and this also just just completely annihilates
Speaker 1: like the British trade union movement, I mean union participation,
Speaker 1: I think dreaming Thatcher's term alone falls by and it's
Speaker 1: gotten way worse since then. So so with with those
Speaker 1: two incidents, the air traffic control and the coal did
Speaker 1: did those just and of make people be disillusioned? Or
Speaker 1: did that just like pave the way for similar tactics
Speaker 1: to be acceptable for every other union that tried to
Speaker 1: do the same thing both And then the everthing was
Speaker 1: fear because you know, so with the air traffic controllers, right,
Speaker 1: the air traffic controllers are you know, these are the
Speaker 1: most highly skilled like people people in there there. These
Speaker 1: are a bunch of people who are incredibly highly skilled,
Speaker 1: and they're in there, in there in a logistic industry, right,
Speaker 1: so you know, in theory, these are the people who
Speaker 1: have like the maximum amount of impact if they would
Speaker 1: go on strike. And when Reagan shows that you can
Speaker 1: literally just fire twenty four thousand people of like the
Speaker 1: most highly skilled sort of workers in the in the US,
Speaker 1: you can fire them and just break the strike and
Speaker 1: nothing will happen, and you know the result is total
Speaker 1: defeat and none of these people ever work. Again. That
Speaker 1: basically spreads this massive wave of fear through the union
Speaker 1: movements because you know, if they can fire those guys,
Speaker 1: that can fire anyone and then you know, the the
Speaker 1: employers should start doing it. And the other thing that's
Speaker 1: been happening here is that for really since the end
Speaker 1: of the forties, the unions have kind of So we'll
Speaker 1: we'll talk about this more in in in an interview
Speaker 1: that's gonna come out probably next week about the sort
Speaker 1: of the history American union movements, but American unions basically
Speaker 1: so American, like the union movement was built by radical
Speaker 1: organizers and in the forties and sort of moving on
Speaker 1: from there, all these people get expelled from the labor
Speaker 1: movement and labor fights this basically incredibly intense battle against
Speaker 1: its own left flank, and you have you know, like,
Speaker 1: for example, in in there's this thing called the Dodge
Speaker 1: Revolutionary Union Movement, right, which is a bunch of mostly
Speaker 1: black workers in Detroit, who are you know, there there
Speaker 1: there there there forming unions. They're going on strike, but
Speaker 1: they're also fighting against the the u a W because
Speaker 1: the U a W is cooperating too closer but the
Speaker 1: bosses etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And there's there's there's these you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's there's basically this battle between like not even
Speaker 1: just basically between the unions ranked and file and the
Speaker 1: radicals and the sort of business union management, and in
Speaker 1: fighting that battle, the unions had basically like massively weakened
Speaker 1: themselves and then you know, and bye bye bye. By
Speaker 1: the time you hit the eighties, especially in the US,
Speaker 1: the unions are just sort of a shell out their
Speaker 1: form ourselves, and and Reagan just sort of like smashes
Speaker 1: them aside. And Thatcher the British unions are much stronger,
Speaker 1: but you know, I mean that Thatcher is preparing to
Speaker 1: like like there she she has plans to like the
Speaker 1: army is going to come in and suppress the strike.
Speaker 1: There's these and especially there's there's just, i mean just
Speaker 1: an absolutely incredible amount of police violence. Um that's you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is this is something that had happened
Speaker 1: before dream strikes, but the the the the level of
Speaker 1: intensity of it is just like massively increased. And there's
Speaker 1: also another thing that's happening basically at the same time
Speaker 1: with this, which is squeezing the unions from the other side,
Speaker 1: which is there's this, I guess you could call it
Speaker 1: like an internal class war inside the ruling class between
Speaker 1: well specifically inside inside of the sort of corporate management
Speaker 1: between the sort of traditional like manager CEO class and
Speaker 1: the sort of like I guess you could call them,
Speaker 1: I don't know, the sort of Wall Street finance bank
Speaker 1: types and so so yeah. So one of the other
Speaker 1: things that that happens at the end of you know,
Speaker 1: basically after the war is the sort of class compromise
Speaker 1: was talking about like this, this happens inside of the
Speaker 1: company too, and people start to see the corporation as
Speaker 1: like a social institution and it has you know, it's like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: so there's this alliance between middle management and the workers,
Speaker 1: and you know, it's like, okay, so we we both
Speaker 1: worked with each other, and you know, the compromises that
Speaker 1: you guys got to have unions, but the unions won't
Speaker 1: sort of disrupt production. Will all work together and we'll
Speaker 1: just make like I don't know, we'll we'll make really
Speaker 1: really good ballpoint pens together. And so yeah, you have
Speaker 1: this alliance between sort of middle managements and these unions
Speaker 1: and and this this is embedded into the structure of
Speaker 1: the corporation because you know, you not you not only
Speaker 1: have the unions, but you have corporations paying pensions. One
Speaker 1: of the things that that Reagan does is that Reagan starts,
Speaker 1: you know, Reagan does this massive series of financial deregulations.
Speaker 1: And the other part of this agreement basically had been
Speaker 1: that like the high level of finance class has sort
Speaker 1: of stayed out of the way of management, and so
Speaker 1: management kind of like you know, the you get this
Speaker 1: like this independent sort of CEO class that that's that's
Speaker 1: a distinct thing that you know that there people who
Speaker 1: come up through the company who managers and worked away
Speaker 1: at the top. And this is a distinct thing from
Speaker 1: sort of the finance people who are like they're not
Speaker 1: supposed to be allowed, like you know, the touch production.
Speaker 1: But in the nineteen eighties, the finance people start to
Speaker 1: look at this and go, wait, hold on, why are
Speaker 1: we not running things? And the finance people have because
Speaker 1: they have there are two things on their side. One
Speaker 1: they have a sort of neoliberal ideology, and the second
Speaker 1: thing they have is so Michael Milken he figures out
Speaker 1: how to do this thing called a leverage buyout option.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's a it's a kind of complicated financial instrument.
Speaker 1: The short and simple explanation of what it is is
Speaker 1: he figures out a way too basically go into a
Speaker 1: bunch of debt and he he gets he gets people
Speaker 1: to givehim a bunch of money, like in the form
Speaker 1: of these bonds, and then he uses it just buy
Speaker 1: out entire companies. He buys one percent of the company.
Speaker 1: And if you own fitment of the company, now you control,
Speaker 1: you have controlling interest. And so he goes in and
Speaker 1: she just he just raises the stock prices of all
Speaker 1: these companies. And now you know, but I mean, now
Speaker 1: he's gone into an enormous amount of debts right in
Speaker 1: order to buy in order to buy this company, and
Speaker 1: so you know, in order to pay off that debt,
Speaker 1: he just starts strip money in the company. And so
Speaker 1: he starts, you know, anything that can be sold for
Speaker 1: money that he can put in his pocket to pay
Speaker 1: off his debt starts getting sold. And you know, every
Speaker 1: every anything the corporate that the company is doing, it
Speaker 1: doesn't immediately make money or doesn't immediately raise the stock
Speaker 1: price gets cut. And so you know, there there, there,
Speaker 1: there are. There are two major things that a company
Speaker 1: has that don't immediately make money and don't raise the
Speaker 1: stock price, and that is pensions and research and development.
Speaker 1: And this this has you know, this, this, this, this,
Speaker 1: this becomes known as the sort of this is the
Speaker 1: hustle takeover waves. It gets rebranded as mergers and acquisitions
Speaker 1: in the nineties, but it's it's this huge sort of
Speaker 1: wave that's these corporate scripts corporate America, and it turns
Speaker 1: the corporation from this kind of social body where it's like, well,
Speaker 1: everyone's cooperating and companies sort of have this responsibility to
Speaker 1: like provide for their workers and provide sort of for
Speaker 1: like the social good into literally the only like the
Speaker 1: single entire purpose of any company is to raise the
Speaker 1: stock price. And this, yeah, this is really bad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and and you know, the part about it that's
Speaker 1: awful is that, you know, okay, so all all literally
Speaker 1: all a corporate rad has to do in order to
Speaker 1: buy out one of these companies is be able to
Speaker 1: is be able to offer a price for the stock
Speaker 1: that's higher from the stock price of the company now.
Speaker 1: And this means even so they're they're they're there's a
Speaker 1: very famous series of battles they buy out. An enormous
Speaker 1: number of companies get bought out into strip minds like this,
Speaker 1: and you know, and the over and again, these are
Speaker 1: these are very very profitable companies. Right. These are companies
Speaker 1: with large research development budget. These are companies that are
Speaker 1: making enormous amounts of money and they're just completely destroyed
Speaker 1: in order to sort of just like satiate these just
Speaker 1: like absolute ghoul corporate like vulture rader people. This is
Speaker 1: you know, if you remember, might be too young for this,
Speaker 1: but Romney's campaign for so yeah, one of one of
Speaker 1: the reasons why Mitt Romney loses is that like he's
Speaker 1: one of these guys like he's he's like he's the
Speaker 1: big bang capital guy and everyone's kind of looked at
Speaker 1: him and goes like, you're the reason we'd like guide
Speaker 1: to this mess in the first place. But the problem,
Speaker 1: the problem is that these people who have enough money
Speaker 1: and they have enough power if they were able to
Speaker 1: do this and in order to stop them, So either
Speaker 1: there there there's a massive there's a massive fight. A
Speaker 1: bunch of people try to take over good Year, who
Speaker 1: you know, they make the tires, they have the blimps,
Speaker 1: and Goodyear CEO is like fanatically opposed to all of
Speaker 1: this because you know, he's he's from the old ceo
Speaker 1: crop who's like, well, okay, we're here to like make
Speaker 1: things instead of you know, increased stock prices. But the
Speaker 1: problem is the only way he can save off the
Speaker 1: raiders is by increasing a stock price. And the only
Speaker 1: way to increase stock prices is by doing the things
Speaker 1: the corporate raiders already doing. So he starts slashing contains,
Speaker 1: he starts slashing with your development budgets. Yeah, and this
Speaker 1: and this, this sort of cycles because now you have
Speaker 1: you know, there's there, there's it's it's it's you're not
Speaker 1: only having pressure from you know, like the government that's
Speaker 1: that's anti union. The corporations themselves are being forced to
Speaker 1: become more anti union because they're you know, they now
Speaker 1: have this pressure on them from the top down, from
Speaker 1: from these sort of these sort of finance schools, and
Speaker 1: the finance schools in a lot of ways just the
Speaker 1: perfect nilable subjects, right because they they only see the
Speaker 1: world in money. They see everything as a market that
Speaker 1: they literally think that like they they are like these
Speaker 1: like shamans if if if there's a really good ethnography
Speaker 1: that I've plugged before on here called liquidated and an
Speaker 1: ethnography and void yet liquidated an ethnography of Wall Street,
Speaker 1: where an anthropologist goes onto Wall Street and works there
Speaker 1: for a while and then you cannot a bunch of interviews,
Speaker 1: doesn't it doesn't adempological stuff. And the way they talk
Speaker 1: about the market, they literally talk about as if they're
Speaker 1: channeling it, right, like it's like something and they're like,
Speaker 1: these are yeah, these are these are that's what's one
Speaker 1: of the new gods of of our world? That yeah,
Speaker 1: that's I mean, that's that's not a uncommon term of
Speaker 1: phrase to describe stuff like this. Yeah, and and what
Speaker 1: what what What I think is interesting about it, though,
Speaker 1: is that you know that conception of the market of
Speaker 1: like every person is just like a peer like completely
Speaker 1: socially unbounds like thing of capital that you, oh, well, okay,
Speaker 1: if you lose your job here, you can just move
Speaker 1: another firm. Right, So this makes sense side of the
Speaker 1: context of Wall Street, because these people like like these
Speaker 1: Wall Street firms they have they have like like thirty
Speaker 1: turned over a year, and so all these people are
Speaker 1: constantly being fired and shuffle onto the next job, and
Speaker 1: fired and shuffle on to the next job, and so
Speaker 1: you know, they so they they do they do this
Speaker 1: very common sort of fallacy thing where they assume that
Speaker 1: because this is the way that it works for them,
Speaker 1: but this is the way it's gonna work for everyone else.
Speaker 1: And then they genuine and a lot of these people
Speaker 1: genuinely believe this. They're like, well, okay, so the things
Speaker 1: we're gonna with, things that we're about to do, like
Speaker 1: you know, when we destroy these workers entire lives, when
Speaker 1: we you know, when we close their factories, when we
Speaker 1: take their pensions, when we literally destroyed like every community
Speaker 1: and every like thing that's every just in your lives,
Speaker 1: they're like, oh, they'll just pick themselves up and go
Speaker 1: to another place and they'll be fine, because you know,
Speaker 1: if you're if you're you know, a Wall Street finance school, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's what happens when you get fired every three months.
Speaker 1: And so these people, these people basically take control of
Speaker 1: the entire corporate sector. They do they do this very
Speaker 1: quickly by you know, they start this and in the
Speaker 1: sort of early eighties and uh, Milliken, the guy who
Speaker 1: comes up with the junk bonds leveraged buyout scheme, like
Speaker 1: he he goes to jail for I think securities fraud.
Speaker 1: They get him for fraud, but it doesn't it a
Speaker 1: lot of those guys got yeah, all of these people,
Speaker 1: Like again, all of these people are just doing crime,
Speaker 1: Like now, yeah, that's how finance standards, this is how
Speaker 1: this is how the Action Park guy got kicked out.
Speaker 1: You got kicked out doing all the same stuff. And again,
Speaker 1: I want to put this out, like the stuff they're
Speaker 1: doing is so illegal that like even the Reagan administration
Speaker 1: was like, no, we have to prosecute you. Like it's like,
Speaker 1: this is the this is the Ronald Reagan Justice Departments,
Speaker 1: and they're like it was it was so much crib. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's really bad. And and you know the result
Speaker 1: of this is just basically the total visceration of of
Speaker 1: the working class, just like at and movements and you know,
Speaker 1: all the left wing parties are sort of shaped by this.
Speaker 1: And you know, and you know, we we've been focusing
Speaker 1: on the US and UH and the UK here, but
Speaker 1: this is not the only place this happens. And you know,
Speaker 1: so one of the you know, like this, this happens, this,
Speaker 1: this also starts happening like in socialist states. Um and
Speaker 1: we talked about this in more detail in our interview
Speaker 1: with Arnessa Kusutra about Bosnia, but one of the big
Speaker 1: things that Miloshevik is doing in Yugoslavia. And when when
Speaker 1: he takes power and he starts like actually being a
Speaker 1: real political force in nink in eighties, is he starts
Speaker 1: doing basically all of the same stuff that that that
Speaker 1: reagaan at thatacher doing. He starts, he starts implemented shock adoction,
Speaker 1: he starts privatization, he starts um like marketization, he starts
Speaker 1: cutting studying, cutting price controls, he starts, he starts doing
Speaker 1: I don't know if decollectivization is quite the right word,
Speaker 1: because Yugoslavia's economic system is complicated and weirder than uh
Speaker 1: the USSRS. But you know, he does this, and this
Speaker 1: is one of the things that starts Yugoslavia's death spiral,
Speaker 1: because you know, you have this enormous economic devastation from
Speaker 1: the increase in oil prices for the oil shock, and
Speaker 1: then that gets paired with, you know, the the economic
Speaker 1: devastation from everyone losing their benefits, people losing de pensions,
Speaker 1: these state own industries going under, getting privatized, um the
Speaker 1: sort of like collective ownership structures imploding. And the product
Speaker 1: of this is that you know, melos Vic looks at
Speaker 1: this and it's like, Okay, how can I stay in power?
Speaker 1: And his answer is just genocide on that. It's just
Speaker 1: genocide on nationalism. And this sort of collapse or sort
Speaker 1: of state in social life is you know, and and
Speaker 1: the leaders at the top realizing that they can weaponize
Speaker 1: sort of nationalism is one of the things at least
Speaker 1: directly to the Boston and genocide. Now, towards the end
Speaker 1: of the eighties, the whole Soviet block starts coming apart um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, the Berlin Wall falls and eventually, you know,
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union dissolves, and the people who are trying
Speaker 1: to end the Soviet Union, the things that they want
Speaker 1: basically are like freedom of speech, uh, the ability to
Speaker 1: like leave the country, and basically like Scandinavian style social democracy.
Speaker 1: And it was like reasonable from the Soviet Union. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, I mean these these people like you know,
Speaker 1: this is these you know, like they they they wanted
Speaker 1: to live in Scandinavia and instead they got hey, welcome
Speaker 1: to the US, but like even worse. Yeah, and so yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's really bad. And you know what they get
Speaker 1: said is just these this enormous way of privatizations, Uh,
Speaker 1: the worldfare state just vanishes and you know this this
Speaker 1: causes basically like total societal collapse. Um. Like one of
Speaker 1: my one of my professors, and this this happens basically
Speaker 1: across the whole Soviet block. One of professors in college,
Speaker 1: and I think she was fumble Gary. Um. She she
Speaker 1: told me about how dream the nineties like when she
Speaker 1: when she was growing up, like she and her family
Speaker 1: would just the only thing they had to eat was
Speaker 1: raw millet because there's no food. There's there's literally no
Speaker 1: food anywhere. The entire economy is collapsed. Nobody has any money,
Speaker 1: and so you know, I was like, well, okay, everyone
Speaker 1: just eating raw grain because you know that that's what
Speaker 1: that's that's the only thing you can you can you
Speaker 1: have to survive. And you know, it's this it's it's
Speaker 1: literally so bad that in Russia it causes the single
Speaker 1: largest life expectancy drop in post World War Europe. It's
Speaker 1: like like it's the life expected to decrease is about
Speaker 1: like four years because so many people die from this. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, and on one of the one of the
Speaker 1: ways this happens is that there's so the way they're
Speaker 1: they're going to deal with like the state owned industry
Speaker 1: thing is they they okay? And I've never been able
Speaker 1: to figure this figure out if it was like they
Speaker 1: they actually took Murray Rothbar's plan for this, or if
Speaker 1: they just independently developed were a Rothbar's plan for for
Speaker 1: for dissolving state own the industries, which is give like
Speaker 1: everyone who worked in it a share of the company.
Speaker 1: And so they do this right, and everyone has these shares,
Speaker 1: but these shares are just like paper, and you can't
Speaker 1: eat this paper. So a bunch of sort of like
Speaker 1: organized crime guys and the people who have been you know,
Speaker 1: like like the sort of the people who've been richer
Speaker 1: or like had been sort of connected party people who
Speaker 1: were just like I'm just gonna cash out start, you know,
Speaker 1: just just going through cities and they're they'll you know,
Speaker 1: they'll be like, okay, we'll give you a pair of gene,
Speaker 1: like we'll give you some food if you give us
Speaker 1: their share, and you know, everyone people just give up
Speaker 1: their shares. And the result of this is that like
Speaker 1: just every industry at Russia immediately falls under the control
Speaker 1: of just just like absolutely psychotic oligarchs. And you know,
Speaker 1: the the West definitely sharing this on that this this
Speaker 1: whole process is engineered by just a bunch of just
Speaker 1: like pure neoliberal ghoul like Harvards, like weird Harvard grads
Speaker 1: who gets sent into Russia and who are like, oh,
Speaker 1: we're gonna we're gonna run the Russian economy and we're
Speaker 1: gonna like fix everything, and they just just absolutely destroy it.
Speaker 1: And you know, the West has the thing whether they're
Speaker 1: they're you know, they're they're they're cheering on this whole process.
Speaker 1: They have this thing about how like everyone has to
Speaker 1: do belt tightening and it's you're gonna suffer for a
Speaker 1: bit and it'll all be worth it. And meanwhile Boris
Speaker 1: Jelson is just completely drunk off his asked like shelling
Speaker 1: the parliament with tanks, while like the U. S. Press
Speaker 1: is cheering, and you know there's the sort of like
Speaker 1: you know, the tragedy this is like it's not really
Speaker 1: like Russia got like more free, you know, like they
Speaker 1: still they still torture and disappeared anarchists and secret prisons,
Speaker 1: like you know, there's there They still just like randomly
Speaker 1: assassinate political dissidence with through increasingly bizarre like poison bullshit.
Speaker 1: Yeah they sure do. Yeah, but you know, the big
Speaker 1: difference is that a bunch of Harvard grads made an
Speaker 1: indescribable amount of money. You now, no one has any pensions,
Speaker 1: um and there's there's this is great like this is
Speaker 1: a great Russian joke from this period that goes he's
Speaker 1: talking about the communists. Everything they ever told us about
Speaker 1: communism was alive, but everything they ever told is about
Speaker 1: capitalism was absolutely true. Yeah, that's that seems to be
Speaker 1: roughly accurate. Yeah, it's basically true. And you know, and
Speaker 1: and the product is sort of neoliberalism coming to Russia
Speaker 1: is that by by by the end of the nineties,
Speaker 1: Russia is just literally controlled by the mob and these
Speaker 1: monsters oligarchs. And Putin's campaign is like, I am better
Speaker 1: than the mob, and I will bring them. I will
Speaker 1: bring the mob and the oligarchs under control. And this
Speaker 1: is you know that, this is how Putin takes power
Speaker 1: because and he has failed to hold up to that
Speaker 1: probless to be fair, to be fair, the you are
Speaker 1: significantly less likely to just like randomly be kidnapped in ransoms.
Speaker 1: Not me, No I have, I have wrote for a website.
Speaker 1: He does not, like I cannot That's true. That's true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if yeah, if you kiss off Putin, you might be
Speaker 1: held for ransom. But it's like, you know, the number
Speaker 1: of random people who don't do anything political, who are
Speaker 1: just like randomly held for ransom did kind of go
Speaker 1: down a bit, and like, Okay, that's I mean, all right,
Speaker 1: all right, you gotta hand it to Putin, Okay, I
Speaker 1: give him. Yeah, well, okay. The thing on hand to
Speaker 1: Putin is that he restored the state's monopoly on violence.
Speaker 1: Now that's not a good thing now, but he did it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he well he did it. And you know this this
Speaker 1: was the basis of sort of because his power and
Speaker 1: political support was that and sort of nationalism. And this
Speaker 1: is like you know, and and there's always just the
Speaker 1: sort of liberal line on on on Putin. He's like,
Speaker 1: oh he's an SKGB guy, and like oh, it's still
Speaker 1: communism again, and it's like no, like no, no, and
Speaker 1: that this this brings me back to the single thing
Speaker 1: that I need everyone to understand about need liberalism, which
Speaker 1: is that near liberalism does not decrease the size of
Speaker 1: the state. Like there there were more there were more
Speaker 1: bureaucrats now in the Russian state than there were under
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union. No, and it definitely in order for
Speaker 1: it to operate, it definitely extends drastically like the hands
Speaker 1: of the states in terms of like like like military, police,
Speaker 1: law enforcement, like all those things. In order to keep
Speaker 1: this weird market driven thing alive, you need to have
Speaker 1: a lot of like enforcement on people who don't have
Speaker 1: but both both people who like actually make money and
Speaker 1: but most of the people who don't make very much money.
Speaker 1: So it increases not only like the bureaucratic state, but
Speaker 1: also like the enforcement armor of the state. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think there's there's there's there's there's two interesting ways
Speaker 1: this happens. One is that, well, okay, there's three ways happens.
Speaker 1: One is that anytime someone says they're gonna they're gonna
Speaker 1: do deregulation, like deregulation does not mean that they're going
Speaker 1: to decrease the number of regulations there are. What it
Speaker 1: means is that the regulations are bad for this company,
Speaker 1: and so they're they're going they're going to they're going
Speaker 1: to add more regulations in a way that is good
Speaker 1: for this company. And the thing is this actually this
Speaker 1: you know, this net increases the size of the state
Speaker 1: right there, They're not like they're not like they're not
Speaker 1: decreasing the number of laws or whatever. They're you know,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're they're they're writing like incredibly like absolutely
Speaker 1: in comprehensible banking legislation that like, let's banks charge like
Speaker 1: interest rates that previously only organized crime could do. And
Speaker 1: then there's there's another aspect of this, which is that,
Speaker 1: you know, so the welfare that remains right, you know,
Speaker 1: it becomes means tested, and you know that means that
Speaker 1: there's so you have the bureaucracy right that like gives
Speaker 1: you things, and then you have another bureaucracy on top
Speaker 1: of that that decides whether or not you should be
Speaker 1: allowed to do the thing it puts you. You know,
Speaker 1: there's this this is just just this like process of
Speaker 1: abject humiliation that you have to go through to receive anything, yeah,
Speaker 1: from the state. And it's like and that sucks. And
Speaker 1: then because that is so awful, there's another layer of bureaucracy,
Speaker 1: which is like social workers and stuff, whose job it
Speaker 1: is in large part is to help you bypass the
Speaker 1: second layer of bureaucracy. So that creates another layer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's there's there's so much. Yeah it is, and
Speaker 1: but but this is you know this, this this is
Speaker 1: one of the things that the liberals do, which is okay,
Speaker 1: So you know, you you have you have you have
Speaker 1: your two doctrines. Right, you have the thing they actually believe,
Speaker 1: which is enormous bureaucrat military state, and then you have
Speaker 1: the thing they claim to believe, which is, oh, the
Speaker 1: state needs to be smaller, state needs to be decentralized,
Speaker 1: the state, shouldn't you fear in the market. And so whenever, whenever,
Speaker 1: like the things that they do get too bad, they
Speaker 1: have this other thing that can turn to you to go, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: the reason there's too much bureaucracy is because the state's
Speaker 1: getting involved too much. Elect us and we will get
Speaker 1: rid of the bureaucracy. And then you elect them and
Speaker 1: they make the state bigger, and you know, you get
Speaker 1: this started perpetual cycle. I think the reason people get
Speaker 1: confused by this is that when when people when most
Speaker 1: people think of the state, right, they think of the
Speaker 1: state is something that provide services. You know that the
Speaker 1: quintessential thing of state does is build roads roads. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, and you know, when we can talk
Speaker 1: about how like the US building roads probably doomed the
Speaker 1: entire earth climate change. Oh yeah, no, like the way
Speaker 1: that we've done roads around cars and the type of
Speaker 1: things we make roads. Yeah, it's horrible, but yeah it's awful. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but but there there's there's there's another thing about roads
Speaker 1: which is interesting, which is that roads are you know,
Speaker 1: so the original reason why states built roads was they
Speaker 1: can move armies around. And and this comes back to
Speaker 1: the core of what a state is. Right, there is
Speaker 1: nothing in the actual core definition of a state, which
Speaker 1: is basically it's a hierarch couple of localized monopoly on violence. Right,
Speaker 1: there's nothing in that that has that like says at
Speaker 1: all the state has to do anything for you, right
Speaker 1: like if if you know, if if two guys with
Speaker 1: guns show up and sees a place, right, they can
Speaker 1: create a state. They don't have to give you anything.
Speaker 1: The state is the fundamental core of the state is
Speaker 1: just a bunch of armed people who can order people around.
Speaker 1: And you know, but people people sort of can people
Speaker 1: sort of confuse the two and the neoliberalisms entire thing
Speaker 1: is increasing the increasing the military. You know that the
Speaker 1: part of the state that takes things from you at
Speaker 1: gunpoint and decreasing the part of the states that like
Speaker 1: gives you things. And you know, one of one of
Speaker 1: the there's one of one of the other things that
Speaker 1: that happens in this period is that labor increasingly stops
Speaker 1: being about making or doing anything and just becomes pure
Speaker 1: guard labor. So, you know, the the the last big
Speaker 1: neoliberal project that doesn't really get talked about as a
Speaker 1: deliberal project ever, is that mass incarceration is a deliberal project.
Speaker 1: It started under under Nixon and under Carter. But you know,
Speaker 1: so when when Reagan takes office that the American prison
Speaker 1: population is about three thousand. When he leaves office, he
Speaker 1: has basically doubled it to uh six, seven thousand. We
Speaker 1: have now more than doubled it again. And you know
Speaker 1: it it basically it you know when whenever you get
Speaker 1: a large nealiberal administration that they you know, they double it, right,
Speaker 1: it basically doubles again drained bedween the Clinton administration. You know,
Speaker 1: it keeps accelerating and you know this is this is
Speaker 1: this is the other thing that that neoliberalism brings in,
Speaker 1: which is that Okay, so neil libils and produces this
Speaker 1: enormous population of people who don't have any jobs, have
Speaker 1: no opportunities whatsoever, are just screwed. So what do you
Speaker 1: do with them? And the answer is slavery. And basically
Speaker 1: everywhere that you stay using neoliberalism, you see massive increases
Speaker 1: into prison population. Espect like the US is by far
Speaker 1: the worst example of this, but this happens. You know
Speaker 1: that the seven is basically across the world and what
Speaker 1: what what you see is in place of you know,
Speaker 1: it's this is this one of the things that drives
Speaker 1: politics in sort of in rural reasons in the US,
Speaker 1: which is that you have these places that used to
Speaker 1: sort of have industry is used to particularly like coal mining,
Speaker 1: things like that, and it gets replaced by prisons because prisons,
Speaker 1: you know, having a prison in your sort of rural
Speaker 1: town is is the only way to sort of ensure
Speaker 1: that you have a large economic base. And so you know,
Speaker 1: like local local city councils are you know, incredibly pro
Speaker 1: prison because it's like, oh, well, the president will bring
Speaker 1: your jobs and you know, this means that okay, so
Speaker 1: so so the people a lot of people who are
Speaker 1: prison guards are just you know, fascists, but there's also
Speaker 1: people who are prison guards who normally would just be workers. Yeah, no, absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 1: who have just been sort of but you know, there's
Speaker 1: nothing left right and they they're fighting, uh Mike Davis
Speaker 1: talks about this, that they're fighting. This just incredibly desperate,
Speaker 1: ferocious struggle to like stay in the places they love
Speaker 1: and stay with their families, and stay with their friends,
Speaker 1: stay with their communities. And the only way they can
Speaker 1: do this is, you know, by becoming part of this
Speaker 1: like just the neo liberal health state. And you know
Speaker 1: they don't like it either, but that's you know, that's
Speaker 1: what the liberalism is, right, is you no longer have
Speaker 1: a job. The only job available to you is picking
Speaker 1: up a gun and pointing it at someone who is
Speaker 1: exactly the same as you, except you know, they've been
Speaker 1: thrown into the slavery part of the system instead of
Speaker 1: the people holding the guns at the slavery part of
Speaker 1: the system. And one of the things that that happens
Speaker 1: a lot of people just really conflu late about what
Speaker 1: neoliberalism is they can use it libertarianism and they're not
Speaker 1: the same thing. And and this this is a condus
Speaker 1: is a very confusing problem because well, a the term
Speaker 1: nea liberals don't get used in the US all that much.
Speaker 1: When people use it, they usually use it to mean
Speaker 1: something bad. And that's just about it. Yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: and you know and and also another part of the
Speaker 1: problem is that even if you go into like the
Speaker 1: Montpellion Society, right, which you know this is this is
Speaker 1: this is the arch new liberal institution, and it's just
Speaker 1: like basically like a think tank generator, there are there
Speaker 1: are libertarians in there. There there are there are narco
Speaker 1: capitalists in the Montpellion Society, and the one Pellion Society
Speaker 1: is fighting this sort of constant internal battle between the
Speaker 1: people who actually believe the things that they say publicly,
Speaker 1: like you actually believe you should have a small state
Speaker 1: blah blah blah blah, and the people who understand that
Speaker 1: all the small states stuff is just like stuff you
Speaker 1: tell the masses in order to get them to like
Speaker 1: slash welfare things while you just hire more cops. And
Speaker 1: probably the single biggest distinction between the libertarians and and
Speaker 1: the New Liberals is about border control. Now, if if
Speaker 1: you listen to New Liberals on Twitter, or you listen
Speaker 1: to Neil, or you listen to libertarians, right, capitalism is
Speaker 1: supposed to have open borders, is supposed to be free
Speaker 1: moving to people, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Um, if you look
Speaker 1: at literally everything every neo liberal government has ever done,
Speaker 1: it's exactly the opposite. It's they don't like that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they hit it. And and and you know this whole thing
Speaker 1: about like oh you need workers to uh yeah, if
Speaker 1: if you, if you, if you let workers from other
Speaker 1: countries go into into the US, like oh they'll they'll,
Speaker 1: they'll decrease wages, blah blah blah blah. So the period
Speaker 1: in which the US like had strong unions and strong
Speaker 1: wages and stuff, with the period where there was like
Speaker 1: basically no militarization on the Mexican border. I mean there
Speaker 1: were some and you know there there's there's there's a
Speaker 1: build up sort of dream the Vietnam War and they're
Speaker 1: they're they're sort of been one back like around election
Speaker 1: revolution era. But you know it's it's nothing. It's literally
Speaker 1: nothing like it is today. Today. The US border is
Speaker 1: this just absolute hellscape. Um. I mean just like there's
Speaker 1: there's there's this enormous perimeter of the U. S border
Speaker 1: where just the Constitution doesn't apply, where like the Bill
Speaker 1: of Rights just doesn't exist. If if if you're, if you're,
Speaker 1: if you're close enough to the border, it's just it's
Speaker 1: all suspended. Uh, it's not entirely supended, but like basically
Speaker 1: the border patrol can just do whatever the funk they
Speaker 1: want to you, and you know, like this, this, this
Speaker 1: is this is how the border patrol was able to
Speaker 1: be deployed in Portland, right because Portland's technically on the border,
Speaker 1: and the border patrol has increased power is there and
Speaker 1: the actual goal is so people people are always going
Speaker 1: to move, right, And what the new labels figured out
Speaker 1: was that you know, these these these enormous market labor populations,
Speaker 1: the best way you can exploit them as if they're
Speaker 1: just absolutely terrorized by just this, you know, an incredible
Speaker 1: sort of ferociously hostile, murderous just border regime run by fascists.
Speaker 1: And it works, like they kill, they kill enormous numbers
Speaker 1: of people, They do horrible things, They put people with
Speaker 1: concentration camps, they sterilize people they like, they sexually assault children,
Speaker 1: they disappear people they like, still people's babies. And this
Speaker 1: is you know, this is what neoliberalism is, right, This,
Speaker 1: this is what it actually is in practice. This is
Speaker 1: you know, like, this is the this is the this
Speaker 1: is the policy that has imposed money liberal states. And
Speaker 1: I think I want to end on that, and I
Speaker 1: want to end on a note about what the quintessential
Speaker 1: sort of figure of neoliberalism is, because I think, you know,
Speaker 1: in the neoliberals mind, right, the quintessential neoliberal figure is
Speaker 1: like the small entrepreneur who's like guy who's you know,
Speaker 1: turned their own creativity and like harnessed it into like
Speaker 1: the ability to create value, and you know, they're creating
Speaker 1: things for the world and they're reaching themselves. And I
Speaker 1: think a lot of just think of it as like
Speaker 1: the quintessional The liberal is you know, a Chicago, Chicago
Speaker 1: School of Economics person. Yeah, and I want to suggest
Speaker 1: that they quit. The single quintessential like neo liberal figure
Speaker 1: is a riot cop, and specifically specifically that the you know,
Speaker 1: if if you know, if every everyone by now knows
Speaker 1: what a riot cop looks like, right, I want everyone
Speaker 1: to go back and even even from from like two
Speaker 1: thousand one, look at what a riot police officer looks
Speaker 1: like in two thousand one versus what they look like now,
Speaker 1: and then go back to even like the nineteen sixties
Speaker 1: and look look at look at what those guys look like. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, looking at the footage from the sixties and
Speaker 1: riot cops is like really depressed it because they're like,
Speaker 1: I could take these guys. They're they're just wearing T shirts.
Speaker 1: They're just guys. It's it's way more of a fair fight.
Speaker 1: They have T shirts and sticks. We could have T
Speaker 1: shirts and sticks. That is a that's like the arriety
Speaker 1: of the sixties. It sounds like now they also in
Speaker 1: some cases will be much more willing just to murder
Speaker 1: tons of people. Now there is that exception, but in
Speaker 1: like a big street brawl, it is it is generally
Speaker 1: a bit of a fair fight. I mean, I will
Speaker 1: say also, sixties police love love dogs. They love like
Speaker 1: sicking dogs on people, which is really bad. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: I'm looking at it, looking at it at the two
Speaker 1: thousand one riot cops, and yeah, they are not nearly
Speaker 1: as robo copy. That's what they are now. Drin the
Speaker 1: Twin Chilean uprising in I was talking to someone in
Speaker 1: Chile and they were talking about how like they were
Speaker 1: describing it as like the cops were just like like
Speaker 1: something had a change, beating Ninja turtles like it was
Speaker 1: like fighting the Shredder. There's yea. Even even even the
Speaker 1: L A. P. D. Riot cops for the nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: two riots, they're also still just wearing like shirts like
Speaker 1: they just have they just have colored shirts and one stick. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now now they're wearing there whatever dumb armor they have. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But you know, and this is this is you know
Speaker 1: and this, this is this is if if you want
Speaker 1: to trace the path in neo liberalism, it's this. It's
Speaker 1: a lot of the army surplus stuff that like the
Speaker 1: police have gotten a lot of. It's really scary. A
Speaker 1: lot of it also sucks, like a lot of those
Speaker 1: a t v S every like everyone who's ever had
Speaker 1: the drive them hates them. But you know, like like
Speaker 1: my my like absolutely tiny dinky town has a bear
Speaker 1: cat and that shouldn't that shouldn't be. And I know
Speaker 1: where it is too, Like I know where the bear
Speaker 1: cat is. It's like, there shouldn't be a bear cat.
Speaker 1: My town is a tax cutout, like it's it's literally
Speaker 1: a tax carve out like that that's the reason, that's
Speaker 1: really reason it exists. And it has a bear cat,
Speaker 1: and like, you know, this is this is sort of
Speaker 1: the this is the consequence of of of what neo liberalism,
Speaker 1: isn't it. Vicky usta Well talked about this on on
Speaker 1: on the Occupy episode. It's it's the comps become more
Speaker 1: like become more like the army. The army becomes more
Speaker 1: like the cops. And you know, the result is this
Speaker 1: sort of pen out to con surveillance states, where like
Speaker 1: if you and seven people stand on a sidewalk, sixteen
Speaker 1: cops will show up. Yeah, they've they've really excelled in
Speaker 1: making the capitalist realism Dumer philosophy be almost like the
Speaker 1: base philosophy for anyone who takes two seconds to think
Speaker 1: about the world that they live in. And you know,
Speaker 1: and this has been really effective in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: But you know, David Graeber point pointed this out, which
Speaker 1: is that the problem with doing this is that, you know, Okay,
Speaker 1: so like the the the enormous amount of guard labor, right,
Speaker 1: the enormous amount of sort of prison guards. Like that's
Speaker 1: all unproductive labor, right. You know, you you you make
Speaker 1: you make some of that money back off that the
Speaker 1: companies make some of the money back off the slave labor. Right,
Speaker 1: But like, but that in general. There the guards aren't
Speaker 1: adding anything. They're not they're not they're not produced any
Speaker 1: goods um and not really much service either. No. And
Speaker 1: and this is you know this, this this is a problem,
Speaker 1: right because because neoliberalism is profit driven, and so you know,
Speaker 1: what what you have is is that the system has
Speaker 1: a choice between either it functioning or it making it
Speaker 1: appear as if it's the only system. And that's the
Speaker 1: thing is that it's it's it's kind of profit driven.
Speaker 1: But honestly, the more that I the more that you've
Speaker 1: been talking like, no, it's just about eliminating any alternative.
Speaker 1: So it's not not even profit driven. It's that it's
Speaker 1: forcing itself to be the only acceptable option. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: how it gets so much of its power. Yeah. But
Speaker 1: but you know the problem with this is that all
Speaker 1: of that sort of ideological coercion only last as long
Speaker 1: as the police can hold the streets, which is which
Speaker 1: is they're good at it. They're they're sometimes they're decent,
Speaker 1: you know. And one one of the story I want
Speaker 1: to end on is so there's you know, there there
Speaker 1: has been in some with more varying degrees of success,
Speaker 1: there has actually been resistance in neoliberalism, and there are
Speaker 1: places where people have won the people. There are places
Speaker 1: where people have run the I m f out those people.
Speaker 1: There's places where people have you know, defeated coups, where
Speaker 1: they've like you know, where where they've where they've they've
Speaker 1: they've successfully sort of taken over the state. There's places
Speaker 1: where you know, I mean there's there's there's places like
Speaker 1: you know, we're gonna talk about couple of things in Mexico,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I mean there's there's the Appetistas who have
Speaker 1: you know, are constantly besieged, but have carved out a
Speaker 1: territory in which they have you know, like totally defeated
Speaker 1: the Mexican almost really defeated the Mexican state. And I
Speaker 1: think one of the sort of forgotten incidents in in
Speaker 1: the two thousands is this uprising in Wahaka where they, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a there's an enormous sort of a bunch of
Speaker 1: teachers are going on strike. And you know, Wahawka's teaching
Speaker 1: unions are enormously powerful, incredibly radical, and so you know
Speaker 1: that they one of the things they do is that
Speaker 1: they go into the city and they have these like
Speaker 1: these giants started protest tents that they showed up and
Speaker 1: they have these like giant camps and she just in
Speaker 1: six the police attack them, and so they start attacking
Speaker 1: and and the teachers fight back, and so you have
Speaker 1: this you know this, this this massive battle erupts um
Speaker 1: it's just in the city and you know this is
Speaker 1: this is all the police attack it like three in
Speaker 1: the morning, right, but then they there's not enough of them,
Speaker 1: the clear teachers out and the teachers hold and they
Speaker 1: hold and they hold, and the city of Wahaka wakes
Speaker 1: up to this just enormous battle in the streets between
Speaker 1: a bunch of just like teachers and the cops. And
Speaker 1: when Wahawka wakes up, they are just like what the
Speaker 1: fuck is this? And you know, they joined the teachers
Speaker 1: and they go fight the cops and they they they're
Speaker 1: largely successful in like like they beat them. They drive,
Speaker 1: they drive the police from the city, and you know,
Speaker 1: and and for for for for for several months, the
Speaker 1: city is basically under the control of these like direct
Speaker 1: democratic councils and like they're there are these there are
Speaker 1: these things they call the mega marshes, which just a
Speaker 1: million people will do a march to the streets and
Speaker 1: the police there's the police just can't stop them because
Speaker 1: you know, there's a million people. And yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: the only way that I've seen it be successful, whether
Speaker 1: it be you know, just to sure sheer massive people
Speaker 1: driving cops out of a police station, or you know,
Speaker 1: an entire city rallying behind people like in in in
Speaker 1: Portland when the fence came, it's like you need to
Speaker 1: have like everybody to show up, because they could fight
Speaker 1: two hundred like twin canarchists very pretty easily. You usually, um,
Speaker 1: but when you have like all of the moms and
Speaker 1: dads and regular people come up, that is much more
Speaker 1: of a complicated of fight on like on on their end,
Speaker 1: because yeah, we'll still have the teenage front liners throwing
Speaker 1: at the cops, but when you have like regular people
Speaker 1: behind them, that creates the whole median sative to be
Speaker 1: something totally different. And it got the Feds to back
Speaker 1: down in Portland when Trump really wanted to not happen.
Speaker 1: And I think also the thing the thing that that
Speaker 1: was increding incredible aba hawkause it wasn't just people sort
Speaker 1: of like standing behind them, like like tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of people just joined the fight in in a way
Speaker 1: that you know it like if you know, if if
Speaker 1: there's like fifty thou people in a city throwing bricks
Speaker 1: at you, like you you either have to start shooting
Speaker 1: into the crowd or try to hold them. Can't You can't.
Speaker 1: And even when he start shooting into the crowd, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they tried it. And the disaster it made it made
Speaker 1: even people the crowds were larger, and like, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things that happens is, uh, the the
Speaker 1: revolutionaries try to like you know, they go to the
Speaker 1: radio station or like okay, well you broadcast this. The
Speaker 1: radio station says no, and so they start seizing radio
Speaker 1: stations all over all over the city. Yeah, and they yeah,
Speaker 1: and then you know, and then they had they had
Speaker 1: these they had these like bonfire at the edge of
Speaker 1: the city where if one's at a meets and like
Speaker 1: they're there's they're they're sending their they're they're sending radio
Speaker 1: like messages like over the radio stations they've taken over
Speaker 1: from like barricade to barricade, and you know, eventually the
Speaker 1: police and like the like the Mexican Army shows up
Speaker 1: and at that point they're able to sort of retake
Speaker 1: the city. And there's a couple of other things happening
Speaker 1: in Mexico at this point that are sort of this
Speaker 1: is giants are left wing tied, and the way that
Speaker 1: it gets stopped is that the Mexican army basically fully
Speaker 1: kicks off the drug war and they kill I mean,
Speaker 1: I've seen numbers up to like eight hundred thousand people
Speaker 1: in ten years. They just they basic they basically genocides
Speaker 1: the indigenous population of of of Mexico. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think I think that's that's that's sort of a
Speaker 1: place to leave it because more big hopeful note to
Speaker 1: end to the show on. Yeah, but I mean I
Speaker 1: think I think it is it is worth it is
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's it's it's worth thinking about. Is one,
Speaker 1: it is possible to beat the police to the ruling
Speaker 1: class will literally bathe the entire country in blood, like
Speaker 1: they will destroy their own company. Is different. The way
Speaker 1: I mean this gets discussed and season will happen here,
Speaker 1: but like the way the American military works, I think
Speaker 1: it will be less likely to do that. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, and I want I want to put this
Speaker 1: oide like, so the thing that the Army doesn't directly
Speaker 1: murder people. What they do is but what they do
Speaker 1: is basically like they they set off a bunch of
Speaker 1: fighting between the cartels and then and the cartels fucking
Speaker 1: murder enormous members people. But you know, we will happily
Speaker 1: murder each other. But yeah, yeah, well and also you know,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's also this is this is you know,
Speaker 1: it's the thing with the Mexican state. It's it's very
Speaker 1: very difficult to tell where the cartels stop and where
Speaker 1: the Mexican Army begins because a lot of them are
Speaker 1: the same thing. And like you know that there's Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not to end on and just but just to
Speaker 1: make the ending a bit better, I do want to
Speaker 1: say I'm no longer going to call anyone U a liberal.
Speaker 1: I made this joke in the group chat yesterday and
Speaker 1: nobody responded to it, so it was set. So I'll
Speaker 1: say it now. I'm only going they called them Thomas
Speaker 1: Anderson liberals. That that that that's that's that is what
Speaker 1: I'm calling them now. Um, And I'll make everyone wait
Speaker 1: two seconds to understand what's going on and then sigh
Speaker 1: and then motion to get me out of the room.
Speaker 1: So thank you Chris for talking about them, and thank
Speaker 1: thank thank thank you all for joining us. This this
Speaker 1: has been ni could happen here? Um. You can find
Speaker 1: us on Instagram and Twitter. If you so desire, if
Speaker 1: you want to get if you want, if you want
Speaker 1: people to know that, you follow us and create a
Speaker 1: whole network of surveillance based so everyone knows what you're
Speaker 1: watching and what you're listening to, to create a better
Speaker 1: picture who you are online so you can get get
Speaker 1: better advertisements. Yeah, follow us online, joined the Panopticon. Throw
Speaker 1: bricks at it. It is pretty funny how they tricked
Speaker 1: everyone into carrying around gps is wherever they go. It's
Speaker 1: pretty funny. Yeah, it's it's amazing. It's like, oh everyone everyone,
Speaker 1: everyone in my town is like, oh, we can't get
Speaker 1: the vaccine. They have micro chips in it's like you
Speaker 1: have a phone. It's hilarious. They tricked us into carry
Speaker 1: around speakers, cabras and gps is everywhere we go. It
Speaker 1: is really funny. It's amazing. All right, Well, bye funny Fye,
Speaker 1: welcome to it could happen here? Um. The show that
Speaker 1: is normally introduced by me shouting a tonally, but today
Speaker 1: I did like a professional. Um, because today myself and
Speaker 1: my colleagues Garrison and Christopher are talking to someone I'm
Speaker 1: very excited to chat with Mr Corey. Doctor Oh Corey,
Speaker 1: welcome the show. Thank you very much. It is my
Speaker 1: pleasure to be on it. It's great to meet you
Speaker 1: all in to be talking to you today. Corey. You
Speaker 1: do a lot of writing about kind of technology and
Speaker 1: surveillance and cultural issues around those. You're also an author.
Speaker 1: You've written some great fiction. I think today will probably
Speaker 1: talk most around books like Attack Service and walk Away,
Speaker 1: but you've written a lot of wonderful stuff. Um. And
Speaker 1: you've also worked with the e f F for years
Speaker 1: and years. UM. So you you you're coming at what
Speaker 1: I love about. I mean, we're gonna be talking today
Speaker 1: broadly about surveillance and kind of the future of of
Speaker 1: the Internet. Will probably talk about some metaverse e stuff.
Speaker 1: What I love about the way in which you think
Speaker 1: and write about the future is that you're kind of
Speaker 1: coming about it from a number of angles, both as
Speaker 1: like a tech industry journalist, as a fiction writer imagining
Speaker 1: the future, and as somebody who's kind of weighted in
Speaker 1: as an activist to this and um, I'm kind of wondering,
Speaker 1: where do you see like the greatest potential for actual
Speaker 1: like change. Um? Is it? Is it in kind of
Speaker 1: is it in lobbying and engaging as an activist, or
Speaker 1: is it in sort of imagining as a as a
Speaker 1: as a fiction writer? What might be? So I I
Speaker 1: see them as adjuncts uh, you know, diversity of tactics
Speaker 1: and all that stuff. Um. The thing is that tech
Speaker 1: policy arguments are often very abstract, uh, And they are
Speaker 1: only visceral for the people who would provide the kind
Speaker 1: of political will to do something about them. Usually that
Speaker 1: that comes when it's too late, right, people, people care
Speaker 1: about tech monopolies once the web is turned into five
Speaker 1: giant websites filled with scripted shots of text from the
Speaker 1: other four. But not when Yahoo is on a buying
Speaker 1: spree of tech companies and we're saying, oh, that's how
Speaker 1: tech companies grow, and all tech companies will grow in
Speaker 1: the future by buying all their nascent competitors and rolling
Speaker 1: them up into a big vertically integrated monopoly, which is
Speaker 1: kind of how we got Facebook and Google and the
Speaker 1: rest of it. And um, you need to be able
Speaker 1: to make policy arguments to policy people but you also
Speaker 1: need to be able to put uh, some some sinew
Speaker 1: and muscle on the bone of that highly abstract kind
Speaker 1: of argument. And and that's where fiction comes in. It's
Speaker 1: kind of a like a fly through of like an
Speaker 1: emotional architects rendering of what things might look like if
Speaker 1: we get it wrong or if we change it. It
Speaker 1: preserves the sense of possibility. You know. I think one
Speaker 1: of the great enemies of change is the inevitable is
Speaker 1: um of capitalist realism and the idea that there is
Speaker 1: no alternative. So if you can make people believe in
Speaker 1: an alternative, then they might work for one. And certainly
Speaker 1: the opposite is true. If people don't believe there is
Speaker 1: any alternative possible, they won't work for one. Why why
Speaker 1: would you? Uh? And so all of that together, I
Speaker 1: think is part of how you mobilize people to care
Speaker 1: about stuff. Yeah, I mean that makes that makes total sense,
Speaker 1: and it is It's difficult, I think because I first
Speaker 1: came into technology as a journalist, and it's very difficult
Speaker 1: to get people to care about out stuff. And I
Speaker 1: think in particular privacy, which there was it has been
Speaker 1: one of the most interesting cases of like the kind
Speaker 1: of thought leaders in in an industry freaking out over
Speaker 1: something and people not really having an issue with it
Speaker 1: because we kind of all agreed to hand over all
Speaker 1: of our data to a number of big side not all,
Speaker 1: but I don't know. I'm interested in your thoughts and
Speaker 1: that I understand the idea that like fiction is um
Speaker 1: is a much better way to try to get people
Speaker 1: to care about these things because it makes them feel
Speaker 1: as opposed to kind of reporting on I think people
Speaker 1: can get kind of lost in the weeds of acquisitions
Speaker 1: and like uh pivots and you know, tech companies acquiring
Speaker 1: each other and whatnot. Well, look, I think that the
Speaker 1: part of the problem with privacy, the reason that we
Speaker 1: we're late to wake up and do something about it,
Speaker 1: is because it was obfuscated. You know, if you've ever
Speaker 1: seen the maps of like how an ad tech stock works,
Speaker 1: the flow diagrams, uh, you know, there are some things
Speaker 1: that are complicated because um, there are some things that
Speaker 1: are hard to understand because they're complicated. And then there
Speaker 1: are some things that are made complicated so they will
Speaker 1: be hard to understand. And I think in the case
Speaker 1: of the surveillance industry, the latter is true and it
Speaker 1: wasn't just that they were trying to play us for suckers,
Speaker 1: they were also playing their customers for suckers. Right. One
Speaker 1: of the reasons that the ad tex st Act is
Speaker 1: such a snarled hair ball is so that the people
Speaker 1: who buy ads and the publishers who run ads can't
Speaker 1: tell how badly they're being ripped off by their intermediaries.
Speaker 1: But this also has the side effect of making it
Speaker 1: very hard for us to know as the as the
Speaker 1: kind of inputs to that system, how our own dignity
Speaker 1: and private lives and safety and integrity are being put
Speaker 1: to risk by these systems as well. Um. And you know,
Speaker 1: it may be that people, if they had been well
Speaker 1: informed about what was going on, they might have been
Speaker 1: indifferent as well. But I think that when most people
Speaker 1: were very poorly informed, right when all theirs was this
Speaker 1: kind of that privacy discourse was just like stuff as
Speaker 1: being your personal information is being siphoned up, but no
Speaker 1: kind of specifics on how that was being used and
Speaker 1: how that was being done and how it might bring
Speaker 1: you to harm. Um, it's not clear that that you
Speaker 1: can say that that the reason they were indifferent is
Speaker 1: because they were fully informed. It didn't care if you
Speaker 1: know that they weren't fully informed. If you know that
Speaker 1: they were barely informed. M hm, I mean yeah, I
Speaker 1: think you're absolutely right. Because when the Cambridge Analytic Is
Speaker 1: scandal broke, which was I think one of the first
Speaker 1: times that there was a really huge international story that
Speaker 1: made it clear some of the consequences of all this, Like,
Speaker 1: it did provoke a lot of a lot of anger.
Speaker 1: Um I I do you worry at all that, Like
Speaker 1: there's a degree to which because it because people got
Speaker 1: tricked or whatever you want to frame it, and it's
Speaker 1: gone the the kind of um, financialization of people's private data,
Speaker 1: people's like personal information. Because that has gone so far,
Speaker 1: there's a risk that people are just kind of inured
Speaker 1: to it. Um yeah, well, well, I mean that kind
Speaker 1: of gets to my theory change here, which is that
Speaker 1: there is always going to be uh a point of
Speaker 1: maximum and difference peak indifference. You know, Um, if you
Speaker 1: think about something like being a smoker, the likelihood that
Speaker 1: you care about cancer goes up the longer you smoke
Speaker 1: and the more health effects you feel. And certainly there
Speaker 1: will come a point in your life when you will
Speaker 1: only ever grow more worried about the effects of smoking
Speaker 1: on your life. But there's also a point of no return.
Speaker 1: Right If the point at which you you're you're concern
Speaker 1: reaches the point where you're actually going to do something
Speaker 1: about smoking is the day you get diagnosed with stage
Speaker 1: four lung cancer, then that um denialism can slide into nihilism.
Speaker 1: You can say, why bother, right, it's too late. It's
Speaker 1: like if if we spend years arguing about the crashing
Speaker 1: population of rhinos and then finally there's only one left,
Speaker 1: and you say you're right, there was a problem, you
Speaker 1: might as well say, like, why don't we eat him
Speaker 1: and find out what he tastes like? It's not like
Speaker 1: the rhinos are ever going to come back, right, And
Speaker 1: so for me, so much of the work is about
Speaker 1: shifting the point of peak indifference to the left of
Speaker 1: the point of no return on the timeline, so that
Speaker 1: people actually start to care earlier, because it's it's it's
Speaker 1: if you haven't a genuine problem, right, like the overcollection
Speaker 1: of our private data, the mishandling of it, the abuse
Speaker 1: of it, that genuine problem will eventually produce tangible effects
Speaker 1: that are undeniable, right that the the our ability to
Speaker 1: ignore it just goes monotonically down. It's the thing about
Speaker 1: the climate emergency. You know, even if Shell had not
Speaker 1: our Exxon had not hidden the data had had on
Speaker 1: the role that it's products were playing in climate change
Speaker 1: in the seventies, it would have been hard to muster
Speaker 1: a sense of urgency in the seventies, right, because the
Speaker 1: story is that in fifty years something bad's going to happen.
Speaker 1: But here we are, fifty years on something bad is
Speaker 1: really happening, and a lot of people are caring about it.
Speaker 1: They still don't seem to care about it enough, or
Speaker 1: maybe they've slid into nihilism. There's certainly, I think on
Speaker 1: the part of the elites, a kind of nihilistic sense
Speaker 1: that maybe they can all retreat to like mountaintops and
Speaker 1: build fortresses and breathe their children by harrier jet, you know,
Speaker 1: and and and you know that nihilism, I think is
Speaker 1: is what you get when the point of no return
Speaker 1: has passed before peak denial. Uh and the privacy um
Speaker 1: catastrophe that is looming in our future that we haven't
Speaker 1: quite reached yet. I mean, we've just had the first
Speaker 1: kind of trickles of the dam breaking that's in our future.
Speaker 1: It hasn't been enough yet to shift people away from it.
Speaker 1: But but we might be getting there, right, We might
Speaker 1: We might eventually be able to do something about it.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that will hasten that moment
Speaker 1: is um restoring competition to those industries. That one of
Speaker 1: the reasons that uh, the industry that spies on us
Speaker 1: is able to foster denial and indifference is because it
Speaker 1: is a monopolized industry. To companies control eighty percent of
Speaker 1: the ad market, Google and Facebook, and as as monopolist,
Speaker 1: they're able to extract huge monopoly rents. They're among the
Speaker 1: most profitable companies in the history of the world. And
Speaker 1: some of those monopoly rents, rather than being returned to shareholders,
Speaker 1: can be mobilized to distort policy, to to make us
Speaker 1: think that there's nothing wrong with the way that they
Speaker 1: collect data and use it to forestall regulation, to pay
Speaker 1: Nick Clegg four million a year to go around Europe
Speaker 1: and the world and say, as the former Deputy Prime
Speaker 1: Minister of the United Kingdom, I'm here to tell you
Speaker 1: that Facebook is a friend of the democratic regimes of
Speaker 1: the world. And and you know, if if the anti
Speaker 1: monopoly movement, which is a thing I've become very involved
Speaker 1: with is able to go from strength to strength. It's
Speaker 1: surging now. Then one of the things that we might
Speaker 1: do is is destroy the ammunition that's being used by
Speaker 1: these large monopolistic firms to distort our policy and harm
Speaker 1: us in these ways with impunity, and and then maybe
Speaker 1: we can actually take the the nascent and natural alarm
Speaker 1: that people do feel about the invasions of their privacy
Speaker 1: and and actually turn that into privacy policy that is
Speaker 1: meaningful in respect of these big companies that actually reigns
Speaker 1: them in. Yeah, And I think I like that you
Speaker 1: frame it as a privacy catastrophe because I think, I mean,
Speaker 1: what I just exhibited earlier in this episode, is this
Speaker 1: this tendency that I certainly see in myself and I
Speaker 1: see in other people to get kind of eaten down
Speaker 1: by the continued um excesses of this industry and the
Speaker 1: continued kind of failure of anything to be done to
Speaker 1: curb it. And I think you're right, it has to
Speaker 1: be viewed as um as a calamity. And I and
Speaker 1: nothing I think makes that clearer than some of the
Speaker 1: watching some of the stuff Facebook in particular has put
Speaker 1: out about their plans for the metaverse and kind of
Speaker 1: thinking back from all of these sensors they want to
Speaker 1: store in your house, all of the ways in which
Speaker 1: they want to map everything around you. Um, they never
Speaker 1: you know, they they kind of advertise as like you'll
Speaker 1: be able to play basketball with somebody who's in a
Speaker 1: different state, But really what it is is you're giving
Speaker 1: Facebook access to every measurement of your body and you know,
Speaker 1: the pulse of the beat of your heart and all
Speaker 1: this this stuff that like maybe we don't quite know
Speaker 1: what it would be useful for from financialization standpoint, but
Speaker 1: they it's unsettling to think that they'll have to find
Speaker 1: a way because they'll have it. You know, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't know what is to be done about that,
Speaker 1: other than, as you say, kind of breaking up these monopolies.
Speaker 1: Well and and I mean breaking up is like one
Speaker 1: of the things we can do to monopolies. And and
Speaker 1: it takes a long time, you know, Um A T
Speaker 1: and T. The first enforcement action against it happened sixty
Speaker 1: nine years before it was broken up in nineteen two.
Speaker 1: I don't think we can wait that long. But there's
Speaker 1: a lot of intermediate steps, right like we can force
Speaker 1: them to do interoperability. We can block them from from
Speaker 1: predatory acquisitions. We can force them to divest of companies
Speaker 1: and engage in structural separation. We can do all kinds
Speaker 1: of things. It actually looks like the United Kingdom is
Speaker 1: going to stop them from buying Giffee, which might seem
Speaker 1: trivial after all, it's just like animated jifts, but um,
Speaker 1: what it actually is a surveillance beacons in every social
Speaker 1: media application, right because if you're hosting a Jeff from
Speaker 1: Giffee in your message to someone else, Facebook has telemetry
Speaker 1: about that message. Um. And so the the the not
Speaker 1: the i c O, the Competition Competition and Markets Authority
Speaker 1: in the UK was like, yeah, this is just going
Speaker 1: to strengthen your market power. That's why you're buying this company.
Speaker 1: You have too much market power already. We're not gonna
Speaker 1: let you do it. Um. It was almost the case
Speaker 1: that the Fitbit merger was blocked Google's Fitbit merger. I
Speaker 1: think it's still not too late to roll it back.
Speaker 1: And Lena Cohn, who's the new fire breathing dragon in
Speaker 1: charge of the FTC, who is an astonishing person who
Speaker 1: was a law student three years ago. Uh, she has said,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, this this like one point three trillion dollars
Speaker 1: worth of mergers and acquisitions that you're doing right now
Speaker 1: to get in under the wire before we start enforcing.
Speaker 1: Guess what, We're gonna unwind those fucking mergers if it
Speaker 1: looks like they were anti competitive. And not only are
Speaker 1: you going to lose all the money you spent on
Speaker 1: the M and A due diligence and the paperwork and
Speaker 1: the corporate stuff, but all that integration you're going to
Speaker 1: do between now and then, you're gonna have to de
Speaker 1: integrate those companies when we tell you that you don't
Speaker 1: have uh, you don't have merger approval and you're on notice.
Speaker 1: You can't come and complain later, right Like, you can
Speaker 1: either get in line and wait for us to tell
Speaker 1: you whether an out your merger is legal, or you
Speaker 1: can roll the dice. But I tell you what, if
Speaker 1: you come up sneake, guys, you are fucked. And that
Speaker 1: is amazing, right, That is a powerful change in American
Speaker 1: industrial policy that really makes a difference. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: and that is a beautiful thing to think of being
Speaker 1: in place and actually hitting as hard as it could. Obviously,
Speaker 1: the concern is that like who will be you know,
Speaker 1: picking the head of the FTC in three years in change?
Speaker 1: And like how how how much influence is Peter tal
Speaker 1: going to have their in the Like um, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: and Peter Til of course loves monopolies. He says competition
Speaker 1: is for losers. So you're right, I mean, obviously elections
Speaker 1: have consequences, but you know, one of the ways that
Speaker 1: you win elections is by making material differences in people's lives,
Speaker 1: and so you know, if people are policy, then uh.
Speaker 1: One of the most important policies Biden has set so
Speaker 1: far is hiring Lena Khan and her colleagues cantor at
Speaker 1: the d o J and Tim Wu and the White House. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I would I would love nothing more than
Speaker 1: to see particularly like Facebook reigned in at this point
Speaker 1: because I'm one of the casualties of the of the
Speaker 1: of the the ad market like crash of started in
Speaker 1: like two sixteen seventeen. It feels like the odds of
Speaker 1: them being able to like, I don't know, we we've
Speaker 1: got three years where we know, you know, theoretically these
Speaker 1: policies will be in place, and and I don't know,
Speaker 1: I'm hopeful, Like when I when I because the Republicans
Speaker 1: are talking a lot about regulating social media too, about
Speaker 1: even breaking up these companies, but they often tend to
Speaker 1: be talking about it in a very different way and
Speaker 1: with a very different kind of end goal in mind. Um,
Speaker 1: And I guess you know, obviously they know that, right Facebook,
Speaker 1: they are well aware that like this might be a
Speaker 1: weight out the clock situation for them, and they have
Speaker 1: some arrows in that quiver. I mean that may be so,
Speaker 1: but also remember that Facebook's users are outside of the US,
Speaker 1: and that even a change in a minister aation here
Speaker 1: won't won't um put Marguerite vest Dagger, who's the Competition
Speaker 1: commissioner in the EU, back in the bottle. And she's
Speaker 1: another fire breather, right, She's another amazing person, And so
Speaker 1: you know, I wouldn't be too quick to write that off.
Speaker 1: I mean, Facebook needs its foreign markets. Yes, It's U
Speaker 1: S customers are worth more to anyone else because we
Speaker 1: have the most primitive privacy frameworks, so it can extract
Speaker 1: a lot more data for like we're the we're the
Speaker 1: richest people with the worst privacy. So that's that's um,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a real home court advantage for Facebook.
Speaker 1: But it needs that other eight percent of its users.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't be what it is without them, and that
Speaker 1: makes it subject to their jurisdiction. And you know, one
Speaker 1: of the things about ad driven firms like Facebook, UM
Speaker 1: is that they really need sales offices in country. Uh
Speaker 1: So you know, even before we we had the proliferation
Speaker 1: national firewalls, which don't get me wrong, I don't think
Speaker 1: it's a good thing. UM. These large global firms that
Speaker 1: operated UM sales offices in country, in every territory they
Speaker 1: worked in, were vulnerable to regulation because if you have
Speaker 1: staff in a country, then you have someone that can
Speaker 1: be arrested, right, And so it's not like they can
Speaker 1: just be like I don't know, like the Tour Project,
Speaker 1: which just you know, it has people um who who
Speaker 1: sit and hack on tour who are close to lawyers
Speaker 1: who can defend people who sit on hack and on tour. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, if the Tour Project had to have staff
Speaker 1: full time in Turkey and China and Russia and Syria
Speaker 1: in order to operate, it would be a very different project.
Speaker 1: But you know, Facebook and Twitter and Google, they all
Speaker 1: have staff in those countries, and it makes them vulnerable
Speaker 1: to regulation and So you know, China is really interesting
Speaker 1: because because m jin Ping, for his own reasons, which
Speaker 1: are not my reasons and distinct from the Democrats and
Speaker 1: the Republicans reasons, is doing stuff to rein in big
Speaker 1: tech in China. And it's a actually quite interesting because
Speaker 1: you know the argument that Nick Klegg makes when he
Speaker 1: says why we shouldn't break up Facebook, as he says, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, China is coming for your UM, for your
Speaker 1: I P and for your industrial competitiveness with its big
Speaker 1: tech giants that it treats as national champions that projects
Speaker 1: soft power around the world. Meanwhile, China is like these
Speaker 1: tech giants, we hate these tech giants. They present a
Speaker 1: countervailing force to the hedgeminy of the the Communist Party
Speaker 1: and the and the executive branch that she should bring
Speaker 1: sets at the top of We're gonna neuter them and
Speaker 1: we're gonna we're gonna disappear their founders like Jack Montt
Speaker 1: fucking googlogs right Like, they're like, we don't want national
Speaker 1: champions because the nation that you know, we Bow and
Speaker 1: Ali Baba is the champion four is we Bow and
Speaker 1: Ali Baba and ten Cent. They're not They're not champions
Speaker 1: for China by any stretch of the imagination. They don't
Speaker 1: give a shit about China, and so you know, they're
Speaker 1: all of these companies are going to face regulatory pressure,
Speaker 1: anti monopoly, regular tory pressure all over the world, and
Speaker 1: you're you're so much more um optimistic. I guess about
Speaker 1: about the potential for that to bite than a lot
Speaker 1: of people I talked to, and I think more knowledgeable
Speaker 1: as well. And I kind of wonder because there's this
Speaker 1: very strong, obviously influenced by decades of cyberpunk attitude that like,
Speaker 1: we're in this age of mega corporations whose power is
Speaker 1: you know, there's nothing that can stop Amazon from doing
Speaker 1: what Amazon wants to do, right, Facebook is going to
Speaker 1: keep doing whatever they want to do forever. You you
Speaker 1: clearly don't believe that, and I you know you, you
Speaker 1: clearly know your stuff. I'm wondering why you think that
Speaker 1: that image is still persist, so persistent that like attitude
Speaker 1: in our heads of these these these are kind of
Speaker 1: monolithic forces in our society that um just have to
Speaker 1: be endured. So I think it's a belief in the
Speaker 1: great forces of history, right, UM, and the great man theory.
Speaker 1: You know that the the these um uh you know
Speaker 1: that these rich people are driving history. Yeah, these these
Speaker 1: these powerful figures are driving history. They're in charge there
Speaker 1: in the driver's seat. I mean, that's kind of what's
Speaker 1: behind Trump arrangement syndrome, right, the idea that Trump is
Speaker 1: a uniquely powerful and talented demagogue as opposed to just
Speaker 1: like a demagogue shaped puzzle piece that fit in the
Speaker 1: demagogue shaped hole that was left by the collapse of
Speaker 1: credibility of capitalism. Uh. And you know, a man who
Speaker 1: is clearly too stupid to be a cause of anything,
Speaker 1: that will only ever be the effect of something. And uh,
Speaker 1: you know the for me, the theory of of history
Speaker 1: and how it goes was really transformed by an exercise
Speaker 1: that my friend Ada Palmer does. So. Aida is a
Speaker 1: science fiction novelist. She's she's just published the fourth book
Speaker 1: of her Terra Ignota series, her debut series. It's in
Speaker 1: an incredible series of books. But she's a real like
Speaker 1: kind of multi talented, multi threat. So she's a librettist
Speaker 1: and singer who's pretty album length operas based on the
Speaker 1: Norse mythos. She's also a tenured history of UM, a
Speaker 1: tenured professor of Renaissance history in Florence at the University
Speaker 1: of Chicago, where she studies heterodox information, pornography, homosexuality, witchcraft,
Speaker 1: and so on. During the inquisitions and every year with
Speaker 1: her undergrads, she reenacts through a four week long live
Speaker 1: action role playing game, the Election of the Medici's Pope,
Speaker 1: and each of her students takes on the role of
Speaker 1: a cardinal from a great family and the in the
Speaker 1: actual election of the I forget what year was, uh fifteen,
Speaker 1: fourteen ninety or something, I forget, but they each take
Speaker 1: on this role and they have a character sheet and
Speaker 1: has motivations like a dinner party, murder mystery. But for
Speaker 1: four weeks they make alliances, break alliances, stab each other
Speaker 1: in the back uh stage surprise reversals, and at the
Speaker 1: end of the weeks there's a u faux Gothic cathedral
Speaker 1: on campus and they dress up in costume. Aida has
Speaker 1: a a Google alert for theater companies that are getting
Speaker 1: rid of their costumes, so she clothes them in the
Speaker 1: garb of the Medici's cardinals, and they gather and they
Speaker 1: go into a room and then a puff of smoke
Speaker 1: emerges and you get the new Pope and every year
Speaker 1: four of the final candidates, uh, there are four final
Speaker 1: candidates rather, and two of them are always the same
Speaker 1: because the great forces of history bear down on that
Speaker 1: moment to say those people will absolutely be in the
Speaker 1: running for the for the papacy, and two of them
Speaker 1: have never once been the same, because human action still
Speaker 1: has space to alter the outcomes that are prefigured by
Speaker 1: the great forces of history. And so for me, the
Speaker 1: idea of being an optimist or a pessimist has always
Speaker 1: felt very fatalistic. It's this either way, this idea that
Speaker 1: the great forces of history have determined the outcome and
Speaker 1: human action has no bearing on it. And I think
Speaker 1: that rather than optimism or pessimism, we can be hopeful.
Speaker 1: And that's the word you use before. Hope is the
Speaker 1: idea not that you can see a path from here
Speaker 1: to the place you want to get to, but rather
Speaker 1: that you haven't run out of things that you can
Speaker 1: do to advance your your goal, right, Because if you
Speaker 1: can take a step to advance your goal, you can
Speaker 1: ascend the gradient towards the peak that you're trying to reach,
Speaker 1: then you will attain a new vantage point, and from
Speaker 1: that vantage point you may have revealed to you courses
Speaker 1: of action that you didn't suspect before you took that step.
Speaker 1: So so long as the step is available, there's always
Speaker 1: another step lurking in the wings that you can't see
Speaker 1: from where you are. And the reason I'm hopeful about
Speaker 1: this is I can think of like fifty things that
Speaker 1: could improve the monopoly picture that we're living in now,
Speaker 1: and it's up from thirty things last year. And so
Speaker 1: even though I don't know how we get from here
Speaker 1: to a better future, and even though I absolutely see
Speaker 1: the blockers you're talking about Trump landslide, uh losing Congress
Speaker 1: because they let Joe Mansion and Christmas Cinema newter the
Speaker 1: build back better, Bill, Um, you know all of those
Speaker 1: things that can happen. I have hope, you know, which
Speaker 1: is not the same as optimism or a belief that
Speaker 1: things will be great, or even even like a sense
Speaker 1: a lack of a sense of foreboding. I have that
Speaker 1: in spades. But I have hoped that when the next
Speaker 1: phase of the fight begins, that we will have many
Speaker 1: um vulnerable spots we can strike at, and that we
Speaker 1: can capitalize on whichever victories we attain to find more
Speaker 1: vulnerabilities and move on. I think that's so important and
Speaker 1: I think it goes in line with to bring up
Speaker 1: climate change again. The idea that like one of the
Speaker 1: most toxic things you can think are e climate change
Speaker 1: is that there's nothing to do. We're already past every
Speaker 1: point of no return and there's no there's no positive
Speaker 1: action because it just leads you to doing the same
Speaker 1: thing as the people who deny it. UM and it's
Speaker 1: it's yeah, I think it's it's very important to um
Speaker 1: recognized that like, not only are there things you can do,
Speaker 1: but when you do those things, you start taking those steps,
Speaker 1: other steps reveal themselves. Yeah, and you know what, if
Speaker 1: you're feeling nihilistic about about climate I'm nearly through Saul
Speaker 1: Griffith's book Electrify Uh. Saul's an old friend of mine.
Speaker 1: He's MacArthur Winner's electrical engineer, and he's just done the
Speaker 1: He's it's a popular engineering book. It's one of my
Speaker 1: favorite genres. They're like popular science books, except instead of
Speaker 1: telling you about how science works, they tell you about
Speaker 1: how engineering works. And he's basically like, here is why
Speaker 1: all the estimates of how much renewables we need are
Speaker 1: hugely overestimated, and it's basically that like keeping uh fossil
Speaker 1: fuel power online requires a lot of fossil fuel, right,
Speaker 1: so something like of that estimate is just it's the
Speaker 1: energy that we need to make the energy, and it's
Speaker 1: not present in electrical models. Here's how we can manufacture it.
Speaker 1: Here's how we can distribute it. Here is basically how
Speaker 1: if we can figure out the financing, Americans can uh
Speaker 1: spend less money every year than they do now to
Speaker 1: get more stuff that they love every year. That we
Speaker 1: can do this without hair shirts. It's a spectacular book. Um,
Speaker 1: And you know, I don't agree with everything Saul says
Speaker 1: every all the time, but he is very careful about
Speaker 1: his technical facts. There aren't technical errors in this. There
Speaker 1: might be assumptions that we disagree with, but as a
Speaker 1: technical matter, he's basically written a piece of design fiction
Speaker 1: in which, over the next fifteen years, using clever finance
Speaker 1: and and solid engineering, we really actually do avert the
Speaker 1: climate emergency. And yeah, as always, kind of the main
Speaker 1: barriers to doing the best version of the thing is
Speaker 1: the political realities on the ground. You know, you have to,
Speaker 1: but I think that's the that's the value of at
Speaker 1: least trying to make it clear that there are options.
Speaker 1: I wanted to shift for a moment um. I was
Speaker 1: thinking recently about I think probably the earliest back book
Speaker 1: of yours that I've read, Pirate Cinema, which is heavily involved.
Speaker 1: I think I'm gonna you know, if you're one of
Speaker 1: the folks like me who was on the Internet back
Speaker 1: when you know, file sharing sites, when that was a
Speaker 1: huge topic of discussion, when the r i A Was
Speaker 1: going after people, when like copyright was kind of a
Speaker 1: a much more prevalent part of kind of the online discourse. Um.
Speaker 1: It deals a lot in that and these kind of
Speaker 1: I think there's elements of it that kind of prefigured
Speaker 1: what Disney has done buying up every imaginable fictional property
Speaker 1: in the world. And that's kind of the the elements
Speaker 1: of dystopia that book deals with is is, you know,
Speaker 1: the attempts of these this these giant multinational entertainment corporations
Speaker 1: to shut down the free tape trading of ideas, remixing
Speaker 1: and all that stuff. And then kind of thinking about
Speaker 1: the difference between the focus of that and the focus
Speaker 1: of books like Attack Surface, where you're really delving more
Speaker 1: into you know, I the fictional versions of real life
Speaker 1: companies like Tiger Swan that do it, uh what the
Speaker 1: surveillance on protesters and all around the world, and that
Speaker 1: are kind of using tactics that were pioneered by other contractors,
Speaker 1: and like Iraq and Afghanistan years earlier. I guess kind
Speaker 1: of the things that I find interesting about that as
Speaker 1: as I can remember when I was first on the Internet,
Speaker 1: the big social kind of crusades online with the people
Speaker 1: that that I paid attention to at least was all
Speaker 1: around copyright. It was about not just you know, the
Speaker 1: attempts to stop people from remixing and sharing copyrighted work,
Speaker 1: but about um attempts to like buy up copyrights and
Speaker 1: like into these these ever kind of larger uh agglomerations,
Speaker 1: and and that's kind of hit. It seems to have
Speaker 1: hit like a terminal point with the you know, movies
Speaker 1: like ready Player one and kind of a lot of
Speaker 1: the stuff we're seeing in Marble where everything is showing
Speaker 1: up everywhere, Space Jam two. UM. I guess the part
Speaker 1: of it that feels less dystopian the days attempts to
Speaker 1: crack down on file sharing, which I don't think went
Speaker 1: kind of in the worst case scenario. I'm interested actually
Speaker 1: in your thoughts on that, UM, because I can remember,
Speaker 1: you know, when the r I A would be threatening
Speaker 1: people with years in jail and whatnot over sharing stuff
Speaker 1: on kaza we seem to be I don't know. Is
Speaker 1: it just that it gets less like I'm interested in
Speaker 1: your in your thoughts on that. Is it just that
Speaker 1: it's less publicized when they crack down on people, or
Speaker 1: has kind of the nature of their response to that
Speaker 1: really changed. Well, I think that what's happened with the
Speaker 1: kind of steady state of the copyright wars has been
Speaker 1: the introduction of um brittleness and fragility into our speech
Speaker 1: platforms like Twitter, uh and and Facebook and YouTube, where
Speaker 1: it's very easy to get material removed by by making
Speaker 1: copyright claims UM. And you know, we see out with
Speaker 1: the sleazier side of the reputation management industry where they
Speaker 1: use bogus copyright claims to take down criticisms. You know,
Speaker 1: there was a group of leftists who are really celebrating
Speaker 1: the idea that if you if Nazis were marching in
Speaker 1: your town, you could stop them from uploading their videos
Speaker 1: by playing copyrighted music in the background, and I was like,
Speaker 1: you have no idea, what a terrible fucking idea that is.
Speaker 1: And you know, within a couple of years, cops and
Speaker 1: Beverly Hills were doing it. Whenever people tried to film
Speaker 1: the police there, they would just turn on some Taylor
Speaker 1: Swift to try and stop uploading. UM. You know, the
Speaker 1: thing about the copyright wars is that the real action
Speaker 1: turned out to be in UM wage theft through monopolization. So,
Speaker 1: you know, the neutering and destruction of label independent music
Speaker 1: distribution platforms like Khazah or Groster or Napster, and the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court decision, the Groster decision that supported that meant
Speaker 1: that the only UM way that you could launch a
Speaker 1: service like that was in cooperation with the big labels,
Speaker 1: and the you know, most successful one is Spotify. Spotify
Speaker 1: is actually partially owned by the labels, and the labels
Speaker 1: use that ownership stake to negotiate a kind of formalized
Speaker 1: wage theft where they allowed for a lower perse stream
Speaker 1: rate because when they get royalties for a stream, part
Speaker 1: of that money goes to their musicians. And that meant
Speaker 1: that the firm Spotify, retain more profits which it returned
Speaker 1: to it in the form of higher dividends, and dividends
Speaker 1: go just straight to their shareholders. They don't that there's
Speaker 1: no claim that musicians can make on this. And because
Speaker 1: they set the benchmark rate, it meant that everyone, irrespective
Speaker 1: of whether you were assigned to one of the big
Speaker 1: three labels, ended up getting the same per stream rate
Speaker 1: as as Universal's artists. So they were able to structure
Speaker 1: the whole market. In the meantime, in the industrial side,
Speaker 1: UH copyright laws, notably Section twelve of one of the
Speaker 1: Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is a law past that
Speaker 1: makes it a felony to remove DRM to bypass a
Speaker 1: technical protection measure UM that has become the go to
Speaker 1: system for blocking, repair, interoperability UH and to prevent third
Speaker 1: parties from um UH from from creating services or add
Speaker 1: ons that accomplish positive ends like improved accessibility, improved security,
Speaker 1: um AD blocking and privacy and so on. They just say, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we we put a one molecule thick layer
Speaker 1: of DRM around say YouTube, and when you make a
Speaker 1: YouTube downloader for archival purposes or whatever, UM, you you
Speaker 1: just create a um A UH you bypass our technical
Speaker 1: protection measure and so you're committing a felony, and you
Speaker 1: can go to prison for five years and and pay
Speaker 1: a five dollar fine. And so you have this like
Speaker 1: relentless monotonic expansion of DRM into like automotive tractors. Medtronic
Speaker 1: uses it to block people from fixing ventilators. UM. So
Speaker 1: you know, this, this UM assault on the ability to
Speaker 1: reconfigure a technology that is ever more prevalent in our
Speaker 1: lives and that increasingly holds our lives in its in
Speaker 1: its hands right its choices determine whether we live or
Speaker 1: die has been really consequential. And I know we don't
Speaker 1: really think of it as a copyright problem. We think
Speaker 1: of it as right to repair. We think of a
Speaker 1: security auditing our accessibility. But the rule that is being
Speaker 1: used to block into operability is a copyright law. It's
Speaker 1: what printer companies used to stop you from buying third
Speaker 1: party inc um. It's what Apple uses to stop you
Speaker 1: from installing a third party app store. And you know,
Speaker 1: the absence of a third party app store is why
Speaker 1: when Apple removed all the working VPNs in China, Chinese
Speaker 1: users couldn't just switch to another app store that had
Speaker 1: working vp ends in it. And so you know that
Speaker 1: this um endgame of the copyright wars is I think
Speaker 1: a lot more dystopian than uh merely suing college kids. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's actually really screwed us in ways that are
Speaker 1: that are hard to fathom. Yeah, it's a fascinating example
Speaker 1: of kind of dystopic creep because, at least kind of
Speaker 1: from my more more ignorant position, when I was nineteen,
Speaker 1: I was like worried that all of these these people
Speaker 1: remixing music and movies that I liked, like we're going
Speaker 1: to get cracked down on or have their stuff pulled
Speaker 1: um And the the kind of thing that I didn't
Speaker 1: I don't think a lot of people saw coming until
Speaker 1: it hit. I certainly didn't, was what you were just
Speaker 1: talking about the fact that kind of the logic of
Speaker 1: how these these entertainment companies were looking at like an
Speaker 1: album or you know, a movie and and cutting up
Speaker 1: pieces of that they've they've applied to like a tractor,
Speaker 1: you know, and now you can't like repair your John
Speaker 1: Deer or modify your John Deer so it works better.
Speaker 1: And then you know, you get situations like we just
Speaker 1: kind of averted with the John Deere strike where there
Speaker 1: was a very real possibility that we wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to get a large chunk of a harvest because there
Speaker 1: wouldn't be parts and you can't put your own in.
Speaker 1: And that's to think that that the thought process that
Speaker 1: led us there started with like trying to protect Metallica.
Speaker 1: In some ways, it's kind of funny. And this is
Speaker 1: why the anti monopoly critique is great because it shows
Speaker 1: you that there's cause for solidarity between John Deere tractor
Speaker 1: owners and John Deere tractor UH makers the workers who
Speaker 1: work there, because the same force that has allowed John
Speaker 1: Deere to cram down its workforce for forty years is
Speaker 1: the is the force that allows it to um uh
Speaker 1: take away the agency and economic liberties of farmers who
Speaker 1: own John Deer tractors. And it's it's the it's the
Speaker 1: political power that comes with monopoly. And so you know,
Speaker 1: if John Deer were a smaller, weaker firm, it would
Speaker 1: be less able to resist both the claims of its
Speaker 1: work force and the claims of its um uh customers.
Speaker 1: Mhm yeah, I mean that makes that makes sense, and
Speaker 1: it is like I like that idea of of because
Speaker 1: it's not just kind of solidarity between John Deere purchasers,
Speaker 1: UM and and the people who work in the factories.
Speaker 1: It's also there's kind of solidarity between a wide like
Speaker 1: anyone concerned with UM copyright. It's a much broader base
Speaker 1: of solidarity than just people who are worried about you know,
Speaker 1: what's happening uh to fiction or like what Disney is
Speaker 1: doing to like copyrights around Mickey Mouse or whatever. Like
Speaker 1: it's it. You can you can draw in concerns from
Speaker 1: right to repair to a bunch of other things, which
Speaker 1: potentially means there's there's a greater body of people available
Speaker 1: for action if you can make them see kind of
Speaker 1: um converging interests there, which is I think is an
Speaker 1: interesting idea. Well, I think you're getting something really important
Speaker 1: and this is UM. This comes from James Boyle who's
Speaker 1: a copyright scholar at Duke University and was really involved
Speaker 1: and found in creative commons and in those early copyright
Speaker 1: fights and and Jamie makes an analogy to the coining
Speaker 1: of the term ecology. He says that before the term
Speaker 1: ecology came along, you know, someone us cared about owls
Speaker 1: and someone us cared about the ozone layer, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't really clear that we were on the same side.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not clear. If you're Martian looking through
Speaker 1: a telescope, you might be hard pressed to explain why.
Speaker 1: You know, the destiny of charismatic charismatic nocturnal birds and
Speaker 1: the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere were the same issue,
Speaker 1: right in the term ecology. Let all these people who
Speaker 1: cared about different things find a single point to rally around.
Speaker 1: It turned a thousand issues into one movement. And I
Speaker 1: think that in the in the course of resisting corporate power,
Speaker 1: which is to say, resisting monopoly, we have the potential
Speaker 1: to weld together people from very diverse fields. You know,
Speaker 1: farmers and people who make tractors. Sure, but you know
Speaker 1: if you grew up watching professional wrestling and now you're
Speaker 1: a ghas that the wrestlers that you loved are begging
Speaker 1: on go fund me for pennies to die with dignity,
Speaker 1: you know, once someone explains to the reason that that's
Speaker 1: happening is that thirty wrestling leagues became one wrestling league
Speaker 1: that was able to practice worker's classification, turn those performers
Speaker 1: into contractors, take away their health insurance, and leave them
Speaker 1: to die. Then Suddenly you're on the same side of
Speaker 1: the people who were worried about big Tech and big
Speaker 1: tractor and the people worried about the fact that there's
Speaker 1: only one manufacturer of cheerleading uniform uniforms and two manufacturers
Speaker 1: of athletic shoes, and two manufacturers of spirits and two
Speaker 1: manufacturers of beer. One manufacturer of eyewear that also owns
Speaker 1: all the eye wear stores and the eyewear ensure. You
Speaker 1: know that Duff Beer thing from the early Simpsons where
Speaker 1: there's like Duff Beer raspberry thing, Dulci, Gabana, Oliver, People's Boushan, Loam, Versaci.
Speaker 1: Every eyewear brand you've ever heard of is one company
Speaker 1: coach all of them. And they also own Sunglass Hut
Speaker 1: and uh Target Optical and Years Optical, and lens Crafters
Speaker 1: and Specsavers and every other eyewear story you've ever heard of.
Speaker 1: And they bought all the labs that make the lenses,
Speaker 1: so more than half the lenses in the world come
Speaker 1: from them. A division called and they bought Imed, which
Speaker 1: is the company that bought all the insurance companies that
Speaker 1: ensure I wear, and so they're also the company that's
Speaker 1: ensuring your glasses, your your eyes. One company and I
Speaker 1: Wear costs a thousand percent more than it did a
Speaker 1: decade ago. They stole our fucking eyes. Right, So people
Speaker 1: who care about that have common cause with people who
Speaker 1: care about wrestlers and people who care about beer and
Speaker 1: big tech and the fact that there's four shipping companies
Speaker 1: and they have no competitive pressure and so they just
Speaker 1: keep building bigger ships that gets stuck in the fucking
Speaker 1: Suez canal Right, we're all on the same side. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I I like the idea that I like. I
Speaker 1: like hoping that that kind of inherent solidarity, if you
Speaker 1: can point it out to people, is potentially an antidote to,
Speaker 1: or at least a partial antidote to the level of
Speaker 1: the layer of politicization that's fallen down over everything um
Speaker 1: that stops people from actually considering matters but instead considering
Speaker 1: Like I don't know, is this owning the libs? Right?
Speaker 1: Like if you if they if if you can get
Speaker 1: them to see that, like, yeah, their favorite wrestler is
Speaker 1: like dying because he couldn't afford insulin, and that that
Speaker 1: that's tied to the issue of like the reason his
Speaker 1: dad can't get tractor parts this year or whatever, um
Speaker 1: and that that's tied to other issues that are maybe
Speaker 1: championed by people he would reflexively dismiss. But like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I I I find that really inspiring. It's still a
Speaker 1: significant there's a significant challenge for people who are trying
Speaker 1: to make those connections, for folks who are who are
Speaker 1: trying to like inform them of that state. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. And you know, like Steve Bannon will tell
Speaker 1: you that the reason to do cultural world culture culture
Speaker 1: war bullshit is because politics are down downstream from culture,
Speaker 1: and there's probably an element of truth to that. But
Speaker 1: I also think the reason that he full fine culture
Speaker 1: war bullshits so attractive is because they got nothing else. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we we talked about that a lot within
Speaker 1: the context of conservative for politics. I grew up very conservative,
Speaker 1: and I do remember how the tenor of things I
Speaker 1: was hearing through the Bush ears changed from advocation of
Speaker 1: policies to just all culture war, all the time, all
Speaker 1: all striking the dims all the time. And it was
Speaker 1: the kind of um it and that's not the only
Speaker 1: place that's happen you see it on the left to
Speaker 1: absolutely like it's it's endemic. Now it's it's a poison
Speaker 1: in kind of the discourse. But I think that there's
Speaker 1: a lot that needs to be I think there's a
Speaker 1: lot to be discovered still for like how to break
Speaker 1: people out of that. I'm kind of bullish when we
Speaker 1: talk about these issues, like you were bringing up with
Speaker 1: sort of the monopolization of these industries you wouldn't expect
Speaker 1: to be monopolized. I'm hopeful about the future that stuff
Speaker 1: like three D printing presents for that. We have an
Speaker 1: organization in Portland that does kind of three D printing
Speaker 1: glasses frame since stuff and is helping people with that
Speaker 1: sort of stuff. And I'm in conversations with like the
Speaker 1: Four Thieves Vinegar Collective. I think it's called UM. Yeah,
Speaker 1: some of the folks doing like trying to do working
Speaker 1: on pharmaceutical hacking making at the moment like lower cost
Speaker 1: uh kind of home scratch brewed versions of like different
Speaker 1: aids medications, and the Holy Grail is doing that with
Speaker 1: um insulin effectively UM and I think it is. And
Speaker 1: I do think one of the things that's exciting about
Speaker 1: that is because the way in which the way in
Speaker 1: which collaboration on three D printing works in the way
Speaker 1: in which actually spreading, like the ability to do stuff works.
Speaker 1: I think it synergizes nicely with the ability of people
Speaker 1: to kind of reach other folks through writing or other
Speaker 1: forms of content, because they can both spread through the
Speaker 1: same You can have a video or a story, and
Speaker 1: you can have like kind of embedded guides on how
Speaker 1: to do that. Um I I I don't know that
Speaker 1: I've I've runned into a lot of your writings on
Speaker 1: kind of the potent chell of three D printing in
Speaker 1: this space, But I'm interested, like to what do you do?
Speaker 1: Are you looking at that as kind of an area
Speaker 1: of hope or do you see that still is kind
Speaker 1: of to two niche and labor focus to really actually
Speaker 1: take off in the way that it would need to
Speaker 1: to crack some of these nuts. This is where I
Speaker 1: do my my Woody Allen, you know nothing of my
Speaker 1: work stick because I had this novel Maker Makers in
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight. It's it's why uh Bree Pettis
Speaker 1: went out and founded Maker bought uh and it's you know,
Speaker 1: credited with like kickstarting the homebrew three D printed revolution
Speaker 1: blah blah blah blah blah and um and it was
Speaker 1: a very bullish novel about three D printing. I UM,
Speaker 1: you know, the reality hasn't lived up to the hype yet.
Speaker 1: It may just be that we're in the long trough
Speaker 1: of despair, as the Gardner hype cycle model has it. Uh.
Speaker 1: But you know, I think the problem with UM three
Speaker 1: D printing was that the patents have been concentrated into
Speaker 1: the hands of two arch firms that had bought all
Speaker 1: their competitors, including Maker Bought and UM. When those patents
Speaker 1: finally expired. The big one was the laser centering of
Speaker 1: of powder. Patent expired, there just wasn't a big bang.
Speaker 1: And I think it's because the supply chain for it
Speaker 1: still had a lot of proprietary elements, and so producing
Speaker 1: the powder and producing the components that allowed for that
Speaker 1: powder printing remained a very high bar, and so we
Speaker 1: just didn't see the kind of new industry emerged that
Speaker 1: we would have hoped for. And you know, it's like
Speaker 1: seven years since those patents expired. Five years since those
Speaker 1: patent expired. Now we're seeing a few more of those
Speaker 1: powder printers. You get a lot more like UVY cured
Speaker 1: epoxy printers because those came off patent earlier, and they
Speaker 1: have a less complicated supply chain. Um, but still, I
Speaker 1: mean mostly when we talked about printers, we're talking about filament,
Speaker 1: and just filaments just not a great technology. It's been
Speaker 1: pushed in ways that you wouldn't even leave and people
Speaker 1: have figured out how to do absolutely incredible things with it.
Speaker 1: But it's not It's not something that you would make
Speaker 1: aerospace components for, you know, it's it's it's something that
Speaker 1: you make um novelty dungeons and dragons, dice out of
Speaker 1: which is an important industry to disrupt. Don't get me wrong,
Speaker 1: but I'm with you, with you. I can remember paying
Speaker 1: thirty bucks for a set of dice as a kid
Speaker 1: and thinking, somebody's gotta fix this scam. I can put
Speaker 1: you something for Christmas, Robert, thank you, Garrison. And you
Speaker 1: know now I I own a I bought a comic
Speaker 1: on a couple of years ago. I bought a tiny
Speaker 1: little D twenty made out of meteoric or I have
Speaker 1: a sky metal D twenty. Oh now that's yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's classy. Um. I'm curious. We've got a little bit
Speaker 1: of time left and I wanted to ask in your
Speaker 1: your novel attack surface. I know it was released right October,
Speaker 1: if I'm not mistaken. UM. And obviously a lot of
Speaker 1: that deals with again these kind of like corporations that
Speaker 1: have been contractors for the D O D doing like
Speaker 1: fucked up surveillance shit in Iraq and Afghanistan bringing that
Speaker 1: technology to crack down on like US, uh, sort of
Speaker 1: dissident left wing political movements. It comes out the year
Speaker 1: that we have a nationwide kind of uprising, UM that
Speaker 1: a lot of fucked up surveillance ship that had been
Speaker 1: kind of demoed state side around it like standing Rock
Speaker 1: and whatnot, gets gets really put into its own How
Speaker 1: much of that was written before ship went down? And
Speaker 1: I and I'm assuming, like I don't know exactly how
Speaker 1: your process works, but I'm wondering, like, I assume you
Speaker 1: started the project before everything went the way it did
Speaker 1: last summer. How much did kind of what happened last
Speaker 1: summer affect the way you imagined that technology in those
Speaker 1: tactics functioning in that book. Yeah, the the timeline goes
Speaker 1: the other direction. I wrote that book before the summer uprising, UM,
Speaker 1: long long, long long before that, And I wrote it
Speaker 1: about things like UM, the surveillance technology we saw in
Speaker 1: Belarus and chev and also at Occupy and Standing Rock
Speaker 1: and at other Black Lives Matter demonstrations and uprisings in Americans. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if you you know also the monotonic expansion of
Speaker 1: surveillance leagues right where you know, first we learned about
Speaker 1: MC catchers, and then we learned about dirt boxes, which
Speaker 1: are MC catchers on airplanes, and you know, like we
Speaker 1: just all of that stuff leaked like crazy because you know,
Speaker 1: these surveillance giants are are not good at what they do, right,
Speaker 1: which isn't a reason we should be hopeful. A company
Speaker 1: that's bad at what it does is in some ways
Speaker 1: even worse because one of the ways that they're incompetence
Speaker 1: expresses itself is that they often gather a bunch of
Speaker 1: data on innocent people and then leak it, right, not maliciously,
Speaker 1: just through incompetence. Um. And so you know, the the
Speaker 1: this expansion of surveillance has like been on my mind
Speaker 1: for a long time, and I've been writing about it,
Speaker 1: well at least since Little Brother, Right, So two thousand
Speaker 1: and six, I wrote that novel, and I've had my
Speaker 1: finger in that. Yeah, So I've had my finger in
Speaker 1: that for all that time and and working with the
Speaker 1: f F, it's impossible to miss sure. Was there a
Speaker 1: degree to which, um, I don't know, I guess we're
Speaker 1: you surprised by anything that happened last time? Or did
Speaker 1: it just kind of comprehensively feel like these are everything
Speaker 1: slotting into place that I knew was heading in this direction?
Speaker 1: Because yeah, I mean, you're right, I did like there
Speaker 1: was like everything was kind of presaged um years before.
Speaker 1: I'm yeah, I I'm wondering if if there was anything
Speaker 1: that kind of surprised you, um, or was it was
Speaker 1: it all just sort of what you've been braced for. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't feel like there were any kind of surveillance surprises.
Speaker 1: I mean the reverse the use of reverse warrants. I
Speaker 1: think we all kind of assumed was going on. There
Speaker 1: had been hints of it in Google's warrant canarias beforehand.
Speaker 1: But you know those geofense warrants, which again, if you're
Speaker 1: like sitting there going oh, geofense warrants are awesome because
Speaker 1: they're catching the one six rioters, Like, dude, you are
Speaker 1: going to be so disappointed, Holy sh it, that's not
Speaker 1: where they're going to keep using this yeah. UM, so,
Speaker 1: you know, learning more about those reverse warrants I think
Speaker 1: was was interesting. UM, but I don't feel like, I
Speaker 1: don't well off the top of my head, I can't
Speaker 1: say that there was any new technical stuff that emerged,
Speaker 1: you know. I I um kickstarted the audiobook for Attack
Speaker 1: Surface uh, and I offered as like the top tier
Speaker 1: you could commission short stories in the Little Brother universe,
Speaker 1: and there were three of those and I just finished
Speaker 1: the first of them, and it's about um future pipeline
Speaker 1: protests and uh. You know, I spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time in my research looking at the surveillance that was
Speaker 1: done on the pipeline protests, and a lot of it
Speaker 1: was provocateurs and undercovers who were just terrible at jobs, right,
Speaker 1: like the intercepts, long publication of of uh, you know,
Speaker 1: long documents about how those operators worked. They just like
Speaker 1: showed up in military haircuts and combat boots. And then
Speaker 1: we're like, Hey, I'm from Portland and I'm here because
Speaker 1: we're gonna funk up some bad guys. Let's go do it.
Speaker 1: Let's go do violence and save Indian country. And like
Speaker 1: everyone's like you, like, does anyone want to buy drugs?
Speaker 1: And and the actual protesters were like you're a provocateur,
Speaker 1: like go away, you know, like they could tell. I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess you know, there are a lot more effective
Speaker 1: in the UK in infiltrating the climate movement. You know,
Speaker 1: they impregnated several protesters, so you know, and had long
Speaker 1: term relationships with them and raised kids with them. So
Speaker 1: there is no but here stories yeah here, it was
Speaker 1: not that we did just didn't see that incredible efficacy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I do think that that's I think kind of
Speaker 1: the message I took out of it because I I
Speaker 1: was I started reporting on like dirt boxes back during
Speaker 1: Standing Rock, just having them, like it explained to me
Speaker 1: by people who were on the ground when I showed
Speaker 1: up that like, yeah, there's this your like phones don't
Speaker 1: work the same out here, and like we're trying to
Speaker 1: figure out what's going on, but like everything is is
Speaker 1: and it's not just that we're out in the sticks
Speaker 1: or anything. And I think the only surprise, the big
Speaker 1: surprise for me last year was how I think how
Speaker 1: little the technology accomplished for them and how much it
Speaker 1: just it just wound up back down to violence. It
Speaker 1: was like that was kind of the for all of
Speaker 1: the toys they had. The toys that actually made the
Speaker 1: most difference was gassing and beating people and violence and
Speaker 1: like old fashioned informants that was that was the stuff,
Speaker 1: and just having a dude there. Yeah, they were really
Speaker 1: relied on. And the fact that you that that you, Corey,
Speaker 1: weren't super surprised, but anything last year, I think kind
Speaker 1: of just more shows kind of the strength of your
Speaker 1: work in terms of how you're very good at seeing
Speaker 1: the trends that are already happening but taking them to
Speaker 1: their next logical place. Um. And it's a really great
Speaker 1: way to kind of get a sense of what is something,
Speaker 1: what what will something maybe look like in the next
Speaker 1: decade or so, because it's it's all based on already
Speaker 1: existing stuff, just in different kind of original ways. So
Speaker 1: that's why I think it's it's so useful to look
Speaker 1: at your books as as an activist, specifically around like
Speaker 1: surveillance and stuff, because it's it's just really it's it's
Speaker 1: really good for kind of keeping keeping an eye on
Speaker 1: keep my head, yeah, and and keeping an eye on
Speaker 1: what's keeping an eye on you, um, and all that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. This was a really lovely conversation was
Speaker 1: a lovely last thing to do in my home office
Speaker 1: in because I leave tomorrow and won't be back until
Speaker 1: the next year, and then I'm actually gonna be offline
Speaker 1: for a month after a joint replacement. So it was
Speaker 1: it was really lovely to meet you all on to
Speaker 1: chat with you. Thanks so much for chatting with us today.
Speaker 1: Glory my pleasure. You know what, I think it's time
Speaker 1: to do a podcast. All right, I did it, Sophie.
Speaker 1: This is it could happen here a podcast that's begun.
Speaker 1: We talk about how things are falling apart, and occasionally,
Speaker 1: when we're feeling good, how to maybe how to maybe
Speaker 1: put them back together a little bit. But today we're
Speaker 1: more talking about the growing consensus that things in the
Speaker 1: US culture wars are heating up to an unacceptable level
Speaker 1: and and maybe people are going to start doing some
Speaker 1: non culture type wars here in the near future, like
Speaker 1: a civil type war here in the near future. Those
Speaker 1: of you who know me, which why would you be
Speaker 1: listening to this podcast if you If you don't know,
Speaker 1: like the earlier seasons of this exact show, uh know
Speaker 1: that I talk a lot about the potential of a
Speaker 1: mass civil conflict in the United States. I've been kind
Speaker 1: of trying to warn about it for a while, and
Speaker 1: today we're gonna do an episode about some of the
Speaker 1: more mainstream sources that have started to kind of accept
Speaker 1: this as a possibility, um and get concerned about it. Garrison,
Speaker 1: You've presented us with three articles, one from NBC News,
Speaker 1: one from The Independent, and one from the Brookings Institute,
Speaker 1: all kind of fiddling around this idea that certain unnamed
Speaker 1: journalists have spent years discussing. So, yeah, we're gonna we're
Speaker 1: gonna get into it. Garrison. Yeah, so it is the past.
Speaker 1: The past few months we have well, I've I've been
Speaker 1: watching to see how how this idea has been slowly
Speaker 1: kind of getting in popularity. Of course, there was like
Speaker 1: a spike in this around like January six, but then
Speaker 1: stuff kind of settled down, and now we're kind of
Speaker 1: seeing it come back up against We had these these
Speaker 1: three pieces all published within like a month of each other, um,
Speaker 1: all kind of on this topic and specifically, like the
Speaker 1: pieces themselves are definitely going coming at this from a
Speaker 1: more like liberal perspective, But the thing that made them
Speaker 1: interesting is that they did have a decent number of
Speaker 1: like of of polls and uh and and surveys in
Speaker 1: them based on like what who who, what types of
Speaker 1: people think are like are thinking about this and think
Speaker 1: it's more more of a possibility. One survey published on
Speaker 1: November one, they've said eighteen percent of Americans believe that
Speaker 1: quote unquote patriots might have to resort to violence to
Speaker 1: quote save the country. Um so. And then that included
Speaker 1: a thirty percent of Republicans, um so, but eighteen percent
Speaker 1: of all of of of of Americans in general Republicans. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So using that very specifically turn of phrase is definitely
Speaker 1: uh notable. And then another pole from arlier in the
Speaker 1: year found that forty six percent of people thought the
Speaker 1: country was somewhat or very likely to have another type
Speaker 1: of civil war. And that's the plurality of the people
Speaker 1: pulled in that because only like said unlikely, So the
Speaker 1: majority of people are not the majority of people pulled,
Speaker 1: but like the most common leaned on, yes it is,
Speaker 1: I think maybe we're going to have us a war, yeah,
Speaker 1: which is not great. The one that uh NBC published
Speaker 1: included in their article had but like thirty three percent
Speaker 1: of people saying no, it's it's probably not gonna happen
Speaker 1: kind of on the maybe and and and and forty seven,
Speaker 1: leaning on yeah, this maybe this is this is probably
Speaker 1: gonna happen at some point soon. Yep. I mean a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot, a lot of what these articles
Speaker 1: are talking about is just like kind of the increased
Speaker 1: increased threats against like elected officials and then increased almost
Speaker 1: like militancy or performative militancy of elected officials types of
Speaker 1: like like you know, like a performatively bringing your gun
Speaker 1: into Congress and that type of thing. And it lays
Speaker 1: out like a list of a list of like of
Speaker 1: of of threats or stuff enacted against governors, congressmen, all
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff in in the past, in the
Speaker 1: past like a year year mainly. Yeah. One of the
Speaker 1: things I really disagree about the Brookings because Brookings is
Speaker 1: the one who kind of is analyzing that that big
Speaker 1: poll and talking about it. Has a list of reasons
Speaker 1: why we might have a civil war and a list
Speaker 1: of reasons why it's unlikely. And one of the reasons
Speaker 1: why it's unlikely is quote, most of the organizations talking
Speaker 1: about civil war or private not public entities, um. And
Speaker 1: note that when Southern states seceded in eighteen sixty they
Speaker 1: had police forces, military organizations, and state sponsored militias. The
Speaker 1: rights of that now, Yeah, Like there's a ton of
Speaker 1: signal posting from guys like Jim Jordan's uh Hawthorne, um,
Speaker 1: Gates Bobert um, a ton of signal posting of GOSAR,
Speaker 1: from elected Republican leaders, from governors, from state level elected officials, um.
Speaker 1: And like regular street cops. Yeah, and like regular street
Speaker 1: cops that are like civil war adjacent, um, if not
Speaker 1: directly advocating for internet scene violence. So I think that
Speaker 1: that I don't think Brookings, I don't think they're analysis
Speaker 1: is spot on with this. And I think there's just
Speaker 1: one other thing that's interesting about that, which is I
Speaker 1: think it was one of those are these our sps
Speaker 1: arguing that it was like, well, the Pentagon's not particularly
Speaker 1: civil like, well, the Pentagon doesn't want civil war, They're
Speaker 1: not gonna step into it. But but I think it
Speaker 1: is also important to note that, like, like if you
Speaker 1: remember what happened last summer, there's a lot of FEDS
Speaker 1: who are just like, you know, like when like yeah,
Speaker 1: so so you know, the the army kind of doesn't
Speaker 1: want Trump to like send the army against protesters. But
Speaker 1: like you know, like bor Tak for example, like was
Speaker 1: just like absolutely hyped up to just like absolutely just
Speaker 1: go disappear a bunch of peopowl and they were very
Speaker 1: excited about that part. Yeah, Yeah, they love they love
Speaker 1: this stuff, and it's like, yeah, the notion that it's
Speaker 1: less likely because it doesn't have like formal police backing
Speaker 1: is really silly because if you spend any time monitoring
Speaker 1: these type of militia groups, you know that a good
Speaker 1: portion of them are also members of some type of
Speaker 1: law enforcement or have like family connections to There have
Speaker 1: been a bunch of cases of weapons being stolen stolen
Speaker 1: from forts um, particularly in like the West coast right now, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a ton of connections to the and a ton
Speaker 1: of like members in common. It's like at the Capital
Speaker 1: riot there were like thirty something active duty police officers involved. UM.
Speaker 1: To say that there's not direct connections with law enforcement
Speaker 1: is nonsense. And it's true that like our military leadership
Speaker 1: remains pretty much a political and very like committed to
Speaker 1: being a political in the sense that like in the
Speaker 1: within the like US partisan context, right, like they don't
Speaker 1: come in to prop up the Democrats of the Republicans,
Speaker 1: And I don't think that's immediately likely. But police forces
Speaker 1: in the United States are extremely politicized and have more
Speaker 1: than enough power to carry out a counterinsurgency campaign nationwide.
Speaker 1: And as long as the US military didn't step in,
Speaker 1: and why would they, like the cops are willing and
Speaker 1: able to do the civil warring for the government. Why
Speaker 1: do you think they have all those tanks? You? So? Yeah,
Speaker 1: like there is there is a lot of backing um,
Speaker 1: at least performatively among certain types of like writing politicians
Speaker 1: and of course police. But I think a lot of
Speaker 1: what the politicians are trying to do is more like
Speaker 1: encourage regular folks or people in like civilian militias to
Speaker 1: just start doing violence against other elected leaders. That seems
Speaker 1: to be like like like Bobart and that, and those
Speaker 1: types aren't. They're not like telling police to go do this.
Speaker 1: They're speaking to like regular people. UM. And I think
Speaker 1: one one one decent point the actually the nbcp's actually
Speaker 1: puts out, it's it's all of this kind of like
Speaker 1: divisive um and and more violent of rhetoric and behavior
Speaker 1: displayed by and towards some of our like officials. Does
Speaker 1: not necessarily mean another like civil war in terms of
Speaker 1: like a military conduct contest between states. Um, it just
Speaker 1: does not mean that it's inevitable or even probable or
Speaker 1: even like probable. A more likely scenario is a turbulent
Speaker 1: era of civil disturbances, armed confrontations, standoffs, threats, assassination attempts,
Speaker 1: and other acts of political violence. In other words, one
Speaker 1: that's a lot like the last two years of American history,
Speaker 1: which I feel like, yeah, in terms of in terms
Speaker 1: of the likelihood of there being like a more formally
Speaker 1: declared kind of conflict versus just versus just like increasingly
Speaker 1: increasingly normalizing extreme violence against uh you know, quote unquote
Speaker 1: fellow countrymen. I think is is ah, yeah, like that
Speaker 1: there's we are going to be more likely to be
Speaker 1: just moving in that direction slowly, and at the point
Speaker 1: when there is frequent enough exchange of the fire, that's
Speaker 1: when we say, yeah, we're basically in a civil war.
Speaker 1: We're just not calling it that, um, which is you know,
Speaker 1: that's the points that you, Robert have made a lot
Speaker 1: in the in the past. Yeah, I mean, and there's
Speaker 1: I I'm I think a lot of this is just
Speaker 1: a failure of kind of imagination and ability to accept
Speaker 1: from a group like Brookings, who I know has paid
Speaker 1: some attention to the Syrian Civil War, that like civil
Speaker 1: conflicts in the United States or in the in the
Speaker 1: twenty one century often don't like there's no clear regional split.
Speaker 1: Like you look at a lot of what was happening
Speaker 1: in Syria. You had cities divided up by neighborhoods between
Speaker 1: like who who was in charge? Um, you know that
Speaker 1: that's very much what we see here. And you do
Speaker 1: see like clear regional split between urban and rural divides.
Speaker 1: And it's not like they say, within specific states, but
Speaker 1: like I would say, it's very specific and limited states
Speaker 1: that don't have huge urban rural divides. Um, Like, that's
Speaker 1: that is the norm everywhere in this country that I've been.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's different in fucking Vermont or New Hampshire, but
Speaker 1: I don't trust those places. Um yeah, And I guess
Speaker 1: I think they're overly optimistic based on kind of a
Speaker 1: fundamental misunderstanding of how these sorts of conflicts occur. Um
Speaker 1: that said, I don't know, Like it's it's one of
Speaker 1: those things I think the number one the number one
Speaker 1: thing you should be looking at in terms of whether
Speaker 1: or not a civil war is likely is the number
Speaker 1: of people who respond in polls with things like, yes,
Speaker 1: I think we need to use violence to restore the
Speaker 1: nation or whatever. UM that it's not just enough, like
Speaker 1: I I it's not just enough to think that a
Speaker 1: civil war is likely, because a lot of that's just
Speaker 1: based on people who don't want one, but are paying
Speaker 1: attention to the same media as everybody else and are
Speaker 1: watching the same stuff we're watching, and they're like, well,
Speaker 1: this seems sketchy. I think think the main indicator is
Speaker 1: the number of people who respond, yeah, I think it
Speaker 1: would be awesome to use violence as a like in
Speaker 1: order to make America more like what I wanted to be. UM.
Speaker 1: And again that doesn't mean we'll we'll creep over the point.
Speaker 1: There's a number of interesting things that have happened UM
Speaker 1: on kind of the we're headed towards the civil war side.
Speaker 1: The number one thing that I've seen recently is the
Speaker 1: use of paramilitary organizations UM to kind of choke uh
Speaker 1: local civil institutions UM like school boards. I I see
Speaker 1: that as very concerning and as kind of prelude to
Speaker 1: the sort of armed mobilizations that you would see unlocalized
Speaker 1: areas in any kind of civil conflict. It's it's the
Speaker 1: precursors to death squads. So that's the that's the thing
Speaker 1: that I see on the ground that worries me most. Um.
Speaker 1: In terms of the thing that I'm I'm less certain
Speaker 1: about honestly, Like one of the things they note in
Speaker 1: here in Brookings article that like the sheer number of
Speaker 1: guns in the United States is a reason why we
Speaker 1: might have a civil war, And I agree with that entirely.
Speaker 1: When you have four million weapons in private hands, it
Speaker 1: increases the odds that they'll be used in some sort
Speaker 1: of scale. UM. We've also seen historic numbers of non
Speaker 1: white people of of of like folks who are from
Speaker 1: marginalized communities, UM, not just buying up weapons that unprecedented rates,
Speaker 1: but organizing with them. And I'm not really sure how
Speaker 1: to think of that. There's certainly a way it could
Speaker 1: certainly be a very negative development, but it could also be.
Speaker 1: I think a big part of what I've seen from
Speaker 1: the right lately is the sense of impunity, UM. And
Speaker 1: I think the feeling of being matched uh in arms
Speaker 1: is an end to impunity potentially. UM. Then the big
Speaker 1: question is, like, well, what about the police, and like, well,
Speaker 1: if the police side with the riot against you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's still a number of questions there and we
Speaker 1: don't have any clean answers. But um, I don't know that.
Speaker 1: I I think that on the whole, I'm more worried
Speaker 1: than I was two years ago when I wrote it
Speaker 1: could happen here. Um, but it's not clean. And I
Speaker 1: think in some to some extent, I'm I'm a little
Speaker 1: more worried about something like the years of lead in
Speaker 1: Italy than I am about Syria right now, if that
Speaker 1: makes sense, I will say one thing about the years
Speaker 1: of lead, which because a lot of people talk about
Speaker 1: the years of less, so that the years a letter
Speaker 1: this kind of like a roughly ten year period in
Speaker 1: Italy of I don't know, mass terrorismating political violence with
Speaker 1: effigant body counts in a way that stood out from
Speaker 1: the years around it. Yeah, And I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: the years of lead haus And there's a litt also,
Speaker 1: there's there's a bunch of intelligence and she's involved. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of foreign kind of false false bombings, like
Speaker 1: hundred hundreds of people are being killed in bombings, and
Speaker 1: I think there there's one absolutely crucial difference between now
Speaker 1: in the years of let I mean, well, okay, so
Speaker 1: partially it's that unlike Italy, we don't have seventeen thousand
Speaker 1: intelligence agency is operating in the US and like trying
Speaker 1: to kidnap and kill the foreign prime minister. But the
Speaker 1: the other thing that's very important is that unlike unlike
Speaker 1: the Italian left, and you know, really unlike the whole
Speaker 1: global left of the seventies and eighties, there is no
Speaker 1: American like left wing like left wing I guess you
Speaker 1: could call like, there's there's no left wing terrorist tradition,
Speaker 1: right like the like the left doesn't do suicide bombings,
Speaker 1: the left doesn't kidnap people like like the modern American
Speaker 1: left doesn't do that, and that a big part of
Speaker 1: what was happening from the years of lad was that,
Speaker 1: you know, sometimes the left was doing this. A lot
Speaker 1: of times it was the state pretending to be the
Speaker 1: left carrying out bombings. And that isn't really something that
Speaker 1: is happening right now because there's just like the like,
Speaker 1: the the left is not in a place where everyone
Speaker 1: is going, we need to do armed durban guerrilla movements
Speaker 1: and yeah, so and then that that makes it harder
Speaker 1: to sort of pin things like pin actual urban guerrilla
Speaker 1: movement stuff on the left because there's just none of that.
Speaker 1: But I don't think and I agree years of Left
Speaker 1: is kind of like a broad Strokes comparison, because what
Speaker 1: I see is more likely is what we're what we're
Speaker 1: already witnessing on the ground with these right wing militant
Speaker 1: groups increases, and they moved to the point of kidnapping
Speaker 1: and executing and potentially in concert with law enforcement, like
Speaker 1: doing stuff like in states that have issued harsh laws,
Speaker 1: you know, banning certain books you have in a town,
Speaker 1: local law enforcement and militias like go after and grab
Speaker 1: individual leftists and either kill or imprison them, and conflicts
Speaker 1: over that, and you have the left increasingly organized an
Speaker 1: arm um as a defense against that, and then a
Speaker 1: number of armed conflicts, you know, as a result of that,
Speaker 1: which maybe then proceed to bombings and stuff that that's terrorism,
Speaker 1: or proceed to just more kind of skirmishes that the
Speaker 1: FEDS have a minimal response to, and local or state
Speaker 1: law enforcement kind of tacitly allows um like that. That's
Speaker 1: that's kind of obviously that's not a direct comparison to
Speaker 1: what happened in Italy, but of course we're a different country.
Speaker 1: But that's kind of that's kind of the kind of
Speaker 1: brush fire conflict I could see cropping up in the
Speaker 1: very near future in this country. You know what else
Speaker 1: will start a series of armed gun fights between left
Speaker 1: and right in American towns. The products and services they're
Speaker 1: they're working on it every day, the products and services
Speaker 1: that support this podcast urged violence on the streets of
Speaker 1: the United States. That's behind the bastards. Guarantee, Sophie, We're
Speaker 1: not doing behind the bastards? What what show are we?
Speaker 1: Who are we? Any? Here's ads? All right? Oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: Uh we're back. Yeah, what a great ad. I really
Speaker 1: nailed that transition. Um, just absolutely. So. The next thing
Speaker 1: that I want to talk about, um, something that I
Speaker 1: think has some some backing behind it and something that
Speaker 1: I think is kind of more silly, is that one
Speaker 1: of one of the reasons that this uh NBC piece
Speaker 1: by what's his name, uh, Brian Brian Michael Jenkins is
Speaker 1: uh he says, one of one of the reasons that
Speaker 1: we're kind of getting more okay with you know, uh,
Speaker 1: killing or hurting our neighbors essentially is um quote, Americans
Speaker 1: do fewer things together. Church attendance is declining. Membership and
Speaker 1: civic organizations and lodges have been decreasing for decades. PTA
Speaker 1: membership has dropped by nearly half from what it was
Speaker 1: in sixties, Bowling leagues have almost disappeared, and a shared
Speaker 1: national experience of military service disintegrated with the abolition of
Speaker 1: conscription in nineteen seventy three. Meanwhile, self proclaimed citizen militia's
Speaker 1: driven mainly by far right conspiracy theories, have surged since
Speaker 1: two US and eight, especially in the past five years.
Speaker 1: So he is wrong, but he's yes, militias have leagues,
Speaker 1: militias have risen. But is that due to bowling leagues. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's due to a drop in bowling leagues.
Speaker 1: I think it's due to the fact that all these
Speaker 1: guys are terminally online now and we're watching Fox News
Speaker 1: for twenty years before that. That is the thing is that, like,
Speaker 1: I don't think this guy, Brian Michael Dickens understands how
Speaker 1: the Internet intersects with extremism because he's he's doing this
Speaker 1: from a very like like he's he's acting like we're
Speaker 1: still in the seventies and he like, like, that's not
Speaker 1: how the war old works, and I like, people spend
Speaker 1: their time. No, people aren't doing bowling leagues, but yeah, woman,
Speaker 1: young men are spending and and you know, middle edgement
Speaker 1: are spending time online, whether that be discord in a
Speaker 1: terrorist group chat, or that be a Facebook group that's
Speaker 1: for a militia, and that's where that socialization is happening.
Speaker 1: And because the Internet rewards extremism and the hottest take,
Speaker 1: it's moving in that direction even with people who would
Speaker 1: ordinarily just have historically the past joined bowling leagues. I guess,
Speaker 1: but it very it's it's correlation doesn't equal causation. Ship
Speaker 1: it's wow, less people are in bowling leagues and going
Speaker 1: to church and militias have grown wildly, wildly, Um, this
Speaker 1: one must cause the other. And it's like, well, no,
Speaker 1: they're both both of those things. May have some causes
Speaker 1: in common, there may be similar factors that are driving
Speaker 1: both of those things, but they are not caused like
Speaker 1: they don't necessary. One doesn't necessarily cause the other. Um.
Speaker 1: And if you like, again, the smart person version of
Speaker 1: this would be to say, hey, people are doing less
Speaker 1: things together out in the world. People are reporting because
Speaker 1: you can find statistic backup for this. People seem to
Speaker 1: be lonelier than ever. UM, people are more depressed than ever.
Speaker 1: Suicide rates have risen, and while this is happening, militias
Speaker 1: and extremist groups have grown. Perhaps there's something about these organizations,
Speaker 1: UM that makes them particularly attractive when folks are vulnerable
Speaker 1: due to these things. And like, let's look at you know,
Speaker 1: the failure of our political system to confront these issues
Speaker 1: further feeds into the desire amongst some chunk of the
Speaker 1: populace for some sort of nihilistic cleansing violence. And again,
Speaker 1: pieces of all the pieces of this article could be
Speaker 1: could be reassembled into something with um some insight, but
Speaker 1: I I don't think Brian Michael Jenkins has much. I
Speaker 1: think it's also an interesting thing to note here about
Speaker 1: because so the lessing he talks about this, oh, is
Speaker 1: the thing that formed the commons or national identity was
Speaker 1: shared universal Military service. And it's like, okay, the the
Speaker 1: reason shared universal military service went away was that everyone
Speaker 1: kept murdering literally just blowing their officers up in Vietnam
Speaker 1: like that. And you know, if if you want to
Speaker 1: talk about like incredibly high levels of political polarization and
Speaker 1: like mass violence between Americans. I mean, the army basically
Speaker 1: fighting a civil war against itself in Vietnam is you know,
Speaker 1: in an enormously important part of this. And then simultaneously
Speaker 1: the sort of right wing vets returning home and you know,
Speaker 1: going Louis Beam and stuff like that that you know,
Speaker 1: he's relying on this kind of mythos of this. So
Speaker 1: there was a time when you know, it's it's basic,
Speaker 1: it's basically made it make America great again. But sort
Speaker 1: of like, yeah, that this type of rhetoric is actually
Speaker 1: very similar to like the return return to tradition stuff,
Speaker 1: being like the solution to our extremism that need to
Speaker 1: be going to church church again, being a part of
Speaker 1: civil organizations, joining bowling leagues and conscript conscripted military service.
Speaker 1: That's like that is that that is just the same
Speaker 1: that that is very similar to like the make America
Speaker 1: grade again, returned to tradition sect because those are those
Speaker 1: are also their goals, except that they're just willing to
Speaker 1: use violence to achieve those goals, whereas this guy just
Speaker 1: wants people to start doing that again. I guess, um,
Speaker 1: I don't know, Yeah, like in terms of like military
Speaker 1: service not leading to extremism, I mean, like Oklahoma City bombing.
Speaker 1: I don't, I don't, I don't really there is other
Speaker 1: stuff going on there. But like in terms of terms
Speaker 1: of that being like an example, it is, it is
Speaker 1: very silly because a lot of a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of the guys even inside you know, are are
Speaker 1: current like three per centers and stuff. A lot of
Speaker 1: them have former military service, so that I mean, but like, yeah,
Speaker 1: citizen militias in terms of gaining popularity, but specifically due
Speaker 1: to um kind of overall distrust of the federal government
Speaker 1: and the type of socialization that being online too much
Speaker 1: results in, has yes, grown, grown, grown the militia movement
Speaker 1: a lot um and and I just don't see how
Speaker 1: Bowling is going to solve that issue in terms of
Speaker 1: in terms of how do we mean to trust the
Speaker 1: federal government? Solve that issue? Garrison. But but you've never
Speaker 1: watched The Big Lebowski, so you wouldn't you wouldn't understand.
Speaker 1: I have not watched The Big Lebowski. So I'm kind
Speaker 1: of I'm kind of I'm kind of done with the
Speaker 1: kind of done with the NBC piece there. I know,
Speaker 1: there was there was something Brian Michael Jenkins. The other
Speaker 1: thing on on the Brookings thing that I have a
Speaker 1: decent issue with is that they're one of the reasons
Speaker 1: they give for and and this is actually something that
Speaker 1: Brian Michael Jenkins also brings up with the NBC piece,
Speaker 1: is that one of the reasons why they believe the
Speaker 1: civil war is not as inevitable is because there is
Speaker 1: no clear regional split like a North South divide, and
Speaker 1: they for some reason think this means that there is
Speaker 1: less likely to be civil conflict. Um. They they recognized
Speaker 1: there is an urban rule divide in most states, but
Speaker 1: because there is no large, kind of obvious North South divide,
Speaker 1: they think this is going to make a civil war
Speaker 1: less likely. Well, the map would really be a pain
Speaker 1: in the ass, so it probably won't happen, right, Like
Speaker 1: that's that's the thing they're thinking, is like, Oh, if
Speaker 1: I was gonna if I've have to map this out,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be too complicated. When I read that, I
Speaker 1: had flashbacks to my first trip to a war zone
Speaker 1: in Ukraine, where we were like taking Google maps up
Speaker 1: to a certain point and then we had to use
Speaker 1: like hand drawn notes because he was like, well, the
Speaker 1: different like the different chunks of this air next like
Speaker 1: twenty acres that are owned by the separatists as opposed
Speaker 1: to the government are like you can't use Google, It'll
Speaker 1: send you into enemy territories because it's not a clean
Speaker 1: break because you had literally suburbs of cities fighting each
Speaker 1: other and you still do. Yeah, this is a this
Speaker 1: is you know, I think personally, this this is this
Speaker 1: is a sort of peak American brain thing because you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's been like five ever civil wars that are
Speaker 1: broken like this, and the problem is that there's American
Speaker 1: Civil War and then we also fought in both Vietnam
Speaker 1: and North Korea. But like, yeah, yeah, we were really
Speaker 1: civil war. Yeah yeah, yeah, that's that's there was fighting
Speaker 1: between two halfs of the country that it was a
Speaker 1: proxy for two others several other kind of ye and
Speaker 1: that's yeah. And that's and that's the thing that like,
Speaker 1: it's the combination of the American Civil War was very
Speaker 1: unique civil war, and then the other major things that
Speaker 1: we think of as like quote unquote civil wars were
Speaker 1: you know, we're basically cold war stuff. And I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, like that there there are a couple other
Speaker 1: like yeah, I mean there have been other examples of
Speaker 1: like secessionist stuff like that. Like I mean, in in
Speaker 1: any civil war, like there's a lot of other countries
Speaker 1: that get involved. In the US Civil War, there was
Speaker 1: a significant amount of that sort of thing. And even
Speaker 1: even even even in the US Civil War, like there
Speaker 1: are just like towns in the middle of like Confederate
Speaker 1: Territory they're like, no, funk this, we're not going over.
Speaker 1: But everyone but people have this just like incredibly i
Speaker 1: optic view of what a civil war is. And it's
Speaker 1: like every other civil war that's been fought in the
Speaker 1: last like fifty years has been just seven thousand factions
Speaker 1: like neighborhood fighting each other. I don't know, it's just
Speaker 1: incredibly frustrating watch these people not understand this. It's very
Speaker 1: America brained, and it's very sad because I'm going to
Speaker 1: read a quote that's gonna make us want to purge
Speaker 1: our ears. There are urban rule differences within specific states,
Speaker 1: with progressives dominating the cities while conservatives reside in rural communities,
Speaker 1: but that is a far different geographic divide than when
Speaker 1: one region could wage war on another. The lack of
Speaker 1: a distinctive or uniform geographic division limits the ability to
Speaker 1: confront other areas organized supply chains and mobilize the population.
Speaker 1: There can be local skirmiches between different forces, but not
Speaker 1: a situation where one state or region attacks another, which
Speaker 1: is complete nonsense And that's not how like it's like
Speaker 1: they don't understand that really fighting exists, and they don't
Speaker 1: understand how the whole, the whole, the whole part about
Speaker 1: organizing supply chains and mobilized population, like that is just
Speaker 1: another way to fight a war is by exploiting that
Speaker 1: specific thing like the fact that cities are so isolated
Speaker 1: um and lack and and and lack of home much
Speaker 1: resources and the fact that rural areas are isolated in
Speaker 1: a different way and lack of separate resources. That is
Speaker 1: not something that makes a civil war less likely. That
Speaker 1: just makes it more complicated and makes it fighting over
Speaker 1: Amazon fulfillment centers and the like. Yeah, like it's it's
Speaker 1: the it is It is ridiculous, um saying that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: saying that the that that it's it's far different from
Speaker 1: a geographic divide that one reacher could wage one another
Speaker 1: is like that, No that you're you're just saying something
Speaker 1: that is just completely wrong and like you have not
Speaker 1: studied any type of like urban conflict whatsoever. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: and I think it's important thing to say, which is
Speaker 1: that regions mostly it's not that region's wage warning. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not. People don't do the fighting. Yeah, Like regions
Speaker 1: aren't the things that are fighting. It's the people in areas,
Speaker 1: and people can move around and people can block off
Speaker 1: access to areas, and like it's it's this, it's a
Speaker 1: weird it's a it's super a weird way to think
Speaker 1: about things. And it's the fact that if if this
Speaker 1: is something that like the Brooking Institution um is, if
Speaker 1: this is what they think on this topic, that's pretty
Speaker 1: sad indicator for what a lot of people how they
Speaker 1: how like a lot of mainstream levels are going to
Speaker 1: view the possibility of any type of civil conflict. And
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe they feel very secure in their cities, um,
Speaker 1: which which is a weird thing. I've I've not felt
Speaker 1: that in years. Yeah. And I think the other thing
Speaker 1: that's very weird about this is that because so a
Speaker 1: lot of people writing about this are x are um
Speaker 1: like are like kind of terrorism people, right, and the
Speaker 1: kind of terrorism kind of resurgence people. It's weird because
Speaker 1: they used to understand it, like you know, like a
Speaker 1: lot of like you know, because like in in you know,
Speaker 1: in the twentieth century and even sort of early century,
Speaker 1: like the the sort of the sort of standard like
Speaker 1: grilla insurgency doctrine was, you know, it's some some some
Speaker 1: some variation on the like maoists fish in the sea,
Speaker 1: like surround the cities where we're like ural areas, etcetera,
Speaker 1: etcet etcetera, and like and you you even see versions
Speaker 1: of this, you know, in things that are quite civil
Speaker 1: wars but are kind of like what happened like the
Speaker 1: water and gas wars and Oblivi and there the three
Speaker 1: thousand's where like you know, what what what, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: have kind of an urban reyal divide with they have
Speaker 1: allies in the cities, but the sort of you know,
Speaker 1: like the you have a bunch of rural indigenous groups
Speaker 1: that literally just you know, they blockade every road in
Speaker 1: the country and then start off the cities out right.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is this is this is this is
Speaker 1: just a thing that happened in like five six It's
Speaker 1: just like yeah, that is like, yeah, that is that
Speaker 1: that is going to happen sooner than later, whether that
Speaker 1: be caused by accident, by some type of climate natural disaster,
Speaker 1: or on purpose by a militia like that, it's just
Speaker 1: a matter of time until we have to deal with
Speaker 1: this massive problem. Yeah. Um. And it's like I've been
Speaker 1: reading recently about um Uruguay and what happened with them,
Speaker 1: and like the seventies when their dictatorship took over and
Speaker 1: they had a left wing group that was like very
Speaker 1: much engaged in kind of a lot of acts of
Speaker 1: poetic terrorism, like you know, robbing banks to steal paperwork
Speaker 1: that they would then hand over to like somebody to
Speaker 1: reveal malfeasance within a company, or like stealing trucks of
Speaker 1: food going to like some big wealthy Christmas party and
Speaker 1: redistributing it in poor neighborhoods. Pretty rad stuff. And one
Speaker 1: of the ways in which the new incoming dictatorial regime
Speaker 1: cracked down to them as they deputized like ten thousand
Speaker 1: jud's and gave them guns and sent them in with
Speaker 1: the army. Um. And I was like, yeah, I could
Speaker 1: absolutely see ship could that happen? Yeah, Like if there
Speaker 1: was some sort of uprising in a in a liberal city.
Speaker 1: There's areas around them filled with chuds there and there
Speaker 1: is precedent. There is precedent for police doing that. Um,
Speaker 1: they have done it within your r I shot Garrison
Speaker 1: like on small scales. So I think we'll have one
Speaker 1: more break and come back and talk about a talk
Speaker 1: about a hedge fund. Oh funk I love hedge funds.
Speaker 1: Let me get Let me get my hedge funds. Shared
Speaker 1: out the shirt that I wear when talking about hedge funds.
Speaker 1: All right, I have my hedge found shirt on UM.
Speaker 1: As you can all see, it's a picture of Ringo
Speaker 1: star filating himself. I don't know why that's my hedge
Speaker 1: fund shirt. I don't I don't know either, but I
Speaker 1: love the beach boys. Um anyway, so thank you perfect
Speaker 1: nailed it. Uh we should we talk about this hedge
Speaker 1: fund guy? Yes? I do want to talk with the
Speaker 1: hedge fund guy because this is when something with this
Speaker 1: much money he is talking about this one just for fun, right,
Speaker 1: he's doing this just for ships for funds. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: doing it for ships and giggles. And he wrote a
Speaker 1: book kind of on this topic and he proposed one
Speaker 1: one solution he came up with one thing that will
Speaker 1: prevent us from entering a civil war. Um, which shows
Speaker 1: how smart these hedge fund people are. Um. But first, uh,
Speaker 1: I Chris would love to I would love for you
Speaker 1: to explain who who this Who this dude is? Okay,
Speaker 1: So Rage Dahlio is a hedge fund manager and he
Speaker 1: is So he runs Bridge Bridgewater Associates one allegedly the
Speaker 1: world's largest hedge fund firm. Yeah, and it depends how
Speaker 1: you to find anything, but yeah, alleged it's a very
Speaker 1: large fund. And this guy, this guy is weird by
Speaker 1: like venture capital standards. So the Bridge Waters whole thing
Speaker 1: is that everyone in the company is constantly surveiled at
Speaker 1: all times, and anyone else in the company could look
Speaker 1: at when anyone else is doing. It's supposed to be
Speaker 1: like it's like total transparency, and what it actually means again,
Speaker 1: is it like you can you can look at, like
Speaker 1: fucking what any of your colleagues, like also working at
Speaker 1: this place, is doing, just sucking at their day job.
Speaker 1: You can see all their records, you can see everything
Speaker 1: they're looking at. And the other thing that he's known
Speaker 1: for is that he doesn't trust anyone else to like
Speaker 1: run the hedge fund after he retires. Your dies. So
Speaker 1: he's trying to build like like a cybernetic version of
Speaker 1: his brain to keep running the hedge funds. The like
Speaker 1: other hedge fund weirdos think this guy is fucking wild
Speaker 1: And yeah, he's he's a time and he runs one
Speaker 1: of the world's funds. It's great, it's we it's it's
Speaker 1: amazing and good we give these people this much money
Speaker 1: to control. So I will say, when it comes to
Speaker 1: his actual analysis of like whether or not it's likely,
Speaker 1: I don't particularly disagree with anything. Yes, I it's it's
Speaker 1: broadly reasonable. Yeah, his looking Yeah for what, he's just
Speaker 1: doing this because because he thinks it's fun. He has
Speaker 1: enough money he's gonna survive whatever. Um. But yeah, he's
Speaker 1: also I mean, part of why this is fairly credible
Speaker 1: is he's I mean, if you're if you're good at this,
Speaker 1: it means that you have one actual talent, which is
Speaker 1: is judging risk. Um. And I think he's probably pretty
Speaker 1: good at judging risk. Yeah, So he he he said
Speaker 1: that he believes there's like a high likely could that
Speaker 1: a civil war or something resembling it will break out
Speaker 1: within the decade. Um is the number he gives. He's
Speaker 1: the number he gives and then he, um, yeah, wait,
Speaker 1: let's see. Yeah he said there's also he have a
Speaker 1: quality says it's a we're we're in a we're in
Speaker 1: a high risk position right now. Um, and yeah. He
Speaker 1: he talks about the different kind of reasons why he
Speaker 1: believes so in this book, most of which are like
Speaker 1: pretty reasonable, um in terms of like uh in in
Speaker 1: terms of like looking at a population and how much
Speaker 1: how like you know, the various like polarization between politics
Speaker 1: and culture and all this kind of stuff. Um. But
Speaker 1: the solution that he gives to this is that, um,
Speaker 1: we should make a formal judgment for quote unquote close
Speaker 1: elections and have the losers respect the outcomes, and then
Speaker 1: once that happens, the order is going to be like
Speaker 1: restored and respected, and then we will avert a civil war.
Speaker 1: So he he thinks that a civil will will probably
Speaker 1: be like enacted by some type of election dispute, which
Speaker 1: that is actually very reasonable in terms of what happened
Speaker 1: in our last election. If there's like a big if
Speaker 1: there's big elections, that can absolutely spark some type of conflict.
Speaker 1: But the idea that we can avert a civil war
Speaker 1: by just having an organization to judge close elections is like,
Speaker 1: but that's not gonna solve Like, that's not gonna if
Speaker 1: you do that, that's not going to solve the close
Speaker 1: election problem. That doesn't even if you do it, that
Speaker 1: won't be a solution. You know, I will say, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: credit where minor credit is due. Raydalio is in fact
Speaker 1: right that the difference between two thousands, which is when
Speaker 1: the last time someone actually literally stolen election happened where yeah,
Speaker 1: but Bush Bush openly reads the election. It's incredibly obvious,
Speaker 1: like there there's like six ways he does this. Everyone
Speaker 1: knows what's happening. And the reaction is everyone just kind
Speaker 1: of shrugs because they're like, oh, this dream courts legitimate
Speaker 1: compared to both, which, yeah, that that's you know, that's
Speaker 1: that's that's there. There there's been an actual break there.
Speaker 1: It's just that I don't know, maybe I think it's
Speaker 1: it's almost just like a lip brained thing where it's
Speaker 1: like you think that if you have an institution that
Speaker 1: sets down rules this, this will make everything okay because
Speaker 1: everyone will obey it. And that's just not where we
Speaker 1: are anymore. Yeah, I mean there was just a poll
Speaker 1: that came out recently that should like Americans trust in
Speaker 1: the military has fallen to its lowest level ever registered,
Speaker 1: and like that was kind of the one thing left
Speaker 1: that most people felt positively about. Not to say that
Speaker 1: that's even a good thing, but just like the there
Speaker 1: is such a complete fucking lack of faith in institutions
Speaker 1: across the spectrum in the United States. But it's like,
Speaker 1: how unless you're hiring I don't know, um fucking no.
Speaker 1: I would say Tom Hanks, but Tom Hanks has even
Speaker 1: gotten politicized, even viruses. So yeah, there's no one they
Speaker 1: could pick to get do this job that people would
Speaker 1: feel good about if they Yeah, I mean, I'm sure
Speaker 1: if they brought Mr Rogers back from the dead, half
Speaker 1: the country would call him a cuck. So I don't
Speaker 1: I don't know what what, I don't know who Daio
Speaker 1: thinks is going to like get everybody on board. So
Speaker 1: maybe maybe, uh maybe, um, Danny DeVito, Danny DeVito might
Speaker 1: be able to do it. Well. I think if if
Speaker 1: we put all of our hope in Danny DeVito, that
Speaker 1: is a better solution than what any of these articles
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court. It beats it beats every other quote
Speaker 1: solution these articles. I mean Odin Kirk brought Twitter together
Speaker 1: that one week. Maybe yeah, yeah, you know with with
Speaker 1: the practice to your court. If you just picked twelve
Speaker 1: random people off the street, and we're like, that's that's
Speaker 1: the thing, it's like, I am, I am all for
Speaker 1: It's the term isn't the term isn't a democracy? Um,
Speaker 1: it's it's I forget the term yes of of almost
Speaker 1: I forget exactly. But it's when a government is not
Speaker 1: composed of elected leaders, composed of a random selected a
Speaker 1: random selection of people, and they made decisions and then
Speaker 1: their decisions over then we then we get a new selection.
Speaker 1: I'm all for that model of government over almost any other.
Speaker 1: It sounds way better than what we have. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So that that is. That is the three pieces I
Speaker 1: want to talk about. The independent piece on the Hedge
Speaker 1: Fund of Brooking Institution, on the Civil War, and then uh,
Speaker 1: Brian went no, not not Brian, yes of Brian Michael
Speaker 1: jenkins Um, senior advisor to the President of rand Brime
Speaker 1: I j who who who wrote? Who? Who wrote the
Speaker 1: thing for NBC. So yeah, that is just the terms
Speaker 1: of in terms of you know, people in institutions talking
Speaker 1: about the topic more generally and sometimes decent ways, oftentimes
Speaker 1: not decent ways. That is, that is the stuff from
Speaker 1: like the just the past between the past week, two months,
Speaker 1: of people with big salaries talking about the Civil War, yeah,
Speaker 1: or in terms of the in terms of the hedge
Speaker 1: fun guy, not a salary, just billions of dollars, Yeah,
Speaker 1: just billions of dollars and thinking it's neat. Um, I
Speaker 1: don't know, you know, every time one of these comes out,
Speaker 1: I get tagged by a bunch of people, um, saying
Speaker 1: like Robbert is the thing you were talking about? Other
Speaker 1: people are talking about it, and um, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't like that this is the thing other people
Speaker 1: are talking about that I've been talking about as opposed
Speaker 1: to mass Zeppelin, transit or something more fun. Yeah, these
Speaker 1: people could dedicate the resource into something more manageable for them.
Speaker 1: And because they don't have a good grasp, especially the
Speaker 1: Brian Michaeljakins guy has and has no grasp on how
Speaker 1: extremism works. Um, And it would be better if they
Speaker 1: dedicate the resources to something else. But this is the
Speaker 1: world we live in. It would be better if perhaps
Speaker 1: Brian Michael Jenkins dedicated his his efforts and his platform
Speaker 1: at NBC to looking into Mr Dario and whatever the
Speaker 1: funk he's been up to. Um that might that might
Speaker 1: do more? Man, he just did plan them on. He
Speaker 1: would absolutely Brian Michael Jakins would get PanAm on so
Speaker 1: fucking quick. The panamanias motherfucker in journalism, just just like
Speaker 1: not even not even downtime before that car gets bombed
Speaker 1: as he's talking on air. The Okay, Brian Michael Jenkins
Speaker 1: is seventy nine years old, so oh it won't it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be hard. I just that that that's like a
Speaker 1: ten minute job. I'm just I'm just thinking like Brian
Speaker 1: Michael Jenkins, he's a quote unquote an American expert on
Speaker 1: terrorism and transportation security with four neckends of analysis. This
Speaker 1: is why he doesn't understand modern extremism. It's because, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's still thinking in the seventies mode. That's why sure,
Speaker 1: I'm sure of his thoughts on terrorism are just him
Speaker 1: rehashing opinions about like Hezbollah in the eighties. Yeah, all
Speaker 1: of all of his stuff is superdated. So that's that.
Speaker 1: That's why I I said that previously, is that he
Speaker 1: still views terrorism as like as it was in the
Speaker 1: seventies and yeah, this is this is why. Um so
Speaker 1: that's great, that's that's him. Um anyway, that wraps up
Speaker 1: our show. Um, yeah, watch out for the one. The
Speaker 1: one Brian Michael Jenkins prediction I do think will happen
Speaker 1: is that there's a decent chance we might be back
Speaker 1: in an assassination territory because it is but it has
Speaker 1: been a long time since that has happened. It's it's
Speaker 1: it has been a hot minute and definitely decrease in
Speaker 1: bowling leagues. It keeps happening in the UK. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: love was meaning specifically in in America and well, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what I'm saying. We're We're not that far away
Speaker 1: from them in terms of like things happening, so that
Speaker 1: I'm kind of surprised it hasn't had. I think it's
Speaker 1: probably just because maybe American legislators are all much more
Speaker 1: concerned about assassination because guns, so people like our elected
Speaker 1: leaders take more precautions than British ones. Did I don't know.
Speaker 1: Maybe I don't know either. Well, speaking of assassinations, you
Speaker 1: can follow us on Twitter and Instagram. That happened here
Speaker 1: probably Coles on media. If we Go Missing it was
Speaker 1: great Dalo. If We Go Missing it was Ray Daldio.
Speaker 1: But could ye everybody welcome to could happen here? Talk podcast? YEP,
Speaker 1: I could say it a podcast. That's what we're doing,
Speaker 1: and it's about it's about how things are kind of
Speaker 1: kind of kind of falling apart sometimes, or at least
Speaker 1: it feels like it, and I don't know, maybe we
Speaker 1: can do some things to help make it better, like
Speaker 1: what happened recently in terms of forests. So, hey, a
Speaker 1: good news episode. Whoa rare rare rare episode drop for us? Uh,
Speaker 1: we got some good news. So I'm gonna be talking
Speaker 1: with Sam, who was on a previous episode discussing a
Speaker 1: forest defense, about an update on on all of the
Speaker 1: things that we were talking about a few weeks ago. Um,
Speaker 1: So yeah, I think we can. We can pretty much
Speaker 1: get into it and then then we'll talk about some
Speaker 1: other stuff around kind of forests in general. So Hello, Sam,
Speaker 1: Thank thank you for joining me again to talk about trees,
Speaker 1: one of one of our favorite topics. Hello, my pleasure always.
Speaker 1: So I think it was like a day or two
Speaker 1: after we dropped the episode or something, or I think
Speaker 1: I think it was. Actually it was maybe maybe even
Speaker 1: like right like right before Um, we got some extra
Speaker 1: extra news about all about the post about the postfire
Speaker 1: logging um near the bright Bush Watershed. Um, yeah what
Speaker 1: happened there? Yeah, yeah, it was pretty wild. Actually it
Speaker 1: was really serendipitous timing too. UM. We as I think
Speaker 1: we mentioned in the last podcast, we were awaiting the
Speaker 1: first hearing for the court case. Essentially, you know, we
Speaker 1: believed that the plan to log in that area for
Speaker 1: myriad reasons was not only unethical but also illegal. Um.
Speaker 1: And so it was going to court, and we were
Speaker 1: awaiting a hearing that happened on December three, Friday. And
Speaker 1: typically the judge does not rule from the bench in
Speaker 1: these sorts of hearings, and so we did not expect
Speaker 1: the decision on that day. UM. But sure enough, the
Speaker 1: judge felt h strongly enough about this case and sure
Speaker 1: enough about her decision that she did roll from the
Speaker 1: bench and rolled in our favor. And so yeah, victories. UM.
Speaker 1: Now we have um a preliminary injunction in place, meaning
Speaker 1: that no logging can happen there um at least until
Speaker 1: this uh timber sale has its real day in court.
Speaker 1: Or until the four Service just drops this Shenanigan entirely,
Speaker 1: which hopefully they will do, but we'll see. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: they they blocked, they blocked the posts far logging and
Speaker 1: the the the basically started start starting to clear cut
Speaker 1: these areas without without actual like public and put without
Speaker 1: actually going through the process as flawed as the process.
Speaker 1: Maybe they were just skipping it entirely. So that that
Speaker 1: was that was that was blocked by this by by
Speaker 1: this legal case. Um, what was I guess? Yeah, well
Speaker 1: what was what was the uh? What what was what?
Speaker 1: What was the reaction like in in in the room
Speaker 1: and in the various signal chats when this happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in the ether spheres, um, the reaction was super awesome.
Speaker 1: I mean, so many people love this place and that
Speaker 1: was kind of the whole point of what we were
Speaker 1: trying to do when we did the direct action out
Speaker 1: there a number of weeks ago. It was just demonstrate
Speaker 1: how many people love this place and how the Forest
Speaker 1: Service wasn't going to get away with what they're planning
Speaker 1: to do. Um, because people, as we promised, would be
Speaker 1: back if they tried to log it and move forward
Speaker 1: without logging, which as you pointed out, and as we
Speaker 1: said last time, was super sketchy, not only because it
Speaker 1: was a terrible plan that they're planning to do um
Speaker 1: in this beloved for us, but also because it was
Speaker 1: behind locked gates that in the public wasn't allowed into
Speaker 1: and so um, it was just this you know, travesty
Speaker 1: that was about to happen. And when we found out um,
Speaker 1: and when we heard the judges incredibly strong ruling, UM,
Speaker 1: we you know, were absolutely overjoyed. Um. The news spread,
Speaker 1: you know, like wildfire, excuse the pun it how to
Speaker 1: do it? Um, and just you know, all this the
Speaker 1: threads were popping, People were putting it on Twitter, people
Speaker 1: were reposting the sexy photos of the blockade with the
Speaker 1: giant slash pile and the fire truck and the band
Speaker 1: on top of the fire truck. And I just wish
Speaker 1: that we all could have hung out again and had
Speaker 1: another dance party because it was the best that doesn't
Speaker 1: incredibly incredibly rad UM was was like your this is
Speaker 1: this is this is something I don't I don't don't
Speaker 1: actually know, but I was like it was like the
Speaker 1: documentation that was taking place by by going to these
Speaker 1: places and showing hey, this is where they're cutting. Was
Speaker 1: that brought up in the court case in terms of like, hey,
Speaker 1: this is we actually went and saw what's actually happening.
Speaker 1: So it was was that type of evidence used and
Speaker 1: did it in your mind like um um uh kind
Speaker 1: of be a small part of like the result of
Speaker 1: the ruling. Yeah, it definitely was. And that is such
Speaker 1: an important point and I really hope that everyone who's
Speaker 1: listening can just like put that in their minds for later.
Speaker 1: How important it is for people to be UM field
Speaker 1: surveying or sometimes we call it ground truth thing um
Speaker 1: these places and actually collecting documentation photographic evidence. UM. A
Speaker 1: lot of folks do kind of like what we call
Speaker 1: community surveying and collect um some site specific um kind
Speaker 1: of like uh, community science sort of stuff. But all
Speaker 1: of that was used in court and it was super awesome. UM.
Speaker 1: I actually was one of the standing declarence, so I
Speaker 1: got to submit a lot of evidence from my many
Speaker 1: years of traveling that place. UM, and that all of
Speaker 1: that was referenced in court. So so so important. UM.
Speaker 1: Even you know, when the forest services essentially trying to
Speaker 1: kick everyone out and keep everyone out of these places,
Speaker 1: it's really important to go um and see them anyways. Obviously,
Speaker 1: you know, everyone needs to consider how they do that
Speaker 1: and their own security and safety. Um. And it's becoming difficult. Um.
Speaker 1: But certainly putting eyes on threatened places is one of
Speaker 1: the best tools we have to save them. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: just think that's really important to really focus on that
Speaker 1: as like a thing because like, yeah, stuff that people
Speaker 1: did actually had an impact on this not happening right now. Um.
Speaker 1: And yeah, but by going out there and documenting and
Speaker 1: then talking about it, um, it has like an actual
Speaker 1: like causal relation, which is very hard to It's it's
Speaker 1: it's hard to get direct causal stuff to happen in
Speaker 1: like the general umbrella of activism. Um. And it's I
Speaker 1: think it's it's just really exciting that that that this happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's so true. It does feel in the general umbrellaive
Speaker 1: activism really hard to point to things that we do
Speaker 1: that are actually making an effect, and this is totally
Speaker 1: one of them. I mean, when if and when this
Speaker 1: case does have its day in court, um, you know,
Speaker 1: outside of the preliminary injunction itself. UM, I am sure
Speaker 1: that so much of that evidence from all the folks
Speaker 1: who've been traveling there um and documenting it will be used.
Speaker 1: We documented, you know, so many green living trees and
Speaker 1: places before service that were dead, um, you know, so
Speaker 1: many like unused roads in places the Forest Service said
Speaker 1: they needed to log alongside these roads because they're so
Speaker 1: trafficed and they're posing a safety hazard. And so it's
Speaker 1: basically like, you know, the best way to expose their
Speaker 1: gas lighting and lies is to just go document what's there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because a big part of their ability to do this
Speaker 1: is utilizing deception in terms of like and and and
Speaker 1: utilizing like non information, Like they're just not talking about
Speaker 1: the stuff that's actually happening, or they're doing like white
Speaker 1: lies to make it sound better. So they're just they're
Speaker 1: they're lying about the type of like um uh, the
Speaker 1: type of sales that they're doing with these with these treets,
Speaker 1: and like how they're classifying the trees that they're logging
Speaker 1: to like get it past all of the loopholes. But
Speaker 1: they're not actually like that, that's not actually reality. They're
Speaker 1: just changing the terms to make it fit what they want.
Speaker 1: So like, as as soon as you start looking into
Speaker 1: this stuff, it gets all it gets very sketchy, because
Speaker 1: it is they're just about a lot of this stuff.
Speaker 1: Like if you're like listening and be like, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: be these people just love trees, Like, yes, we do
Speaker 1: love trees, but like the actual thing that's going on
Speaker 1: is like they're lying about the types of damage that's
Speaker 1: being done. They're lying about what areas this is happening
Speaker 1: in all to just rack up more timber sales like
Speaker 1: that that that is that that that is what's actually happening. Um.
Speaker 1: And that's so so important to say, like loudly and clearly,
Speaker 1: because the Forest Service and other management agencies are experts
Speaker 1: in making the public feel dumb and wrong and misinformed.
Speaker 1: And right now, even we sound a little wing nutty
Speaker 1: being like yeah, you know, but like let us be clear,
Speaker 1: a federal judge agrees with us. Yeah you know, like
Speaker 1: we're not the ones who are wrong here, and I
Speaker 1: think you're totally right. You know, they're using a mixture
Speaker 1: of blatant lies, um, but also euphemisms like we no
Speaker 1: one's they don't they don't use the word clear cut anymore.
Speaker 1: They're using all of these euphemisms, you know, regeneration, hard,
Speaker 1: a lot of and a lot of this stuff that
Speaker 1: they're deciding to do is like not open to the public.
Speaker 1: You need to do like fullial requests to to to
Speaker 1: actually learn what they're doing because they don't talk about
Speaker 1: it like that. It is all. It is all extremely sketchy.
Speaker 1: And yeah, like the fact that like a federal a
Speaker 1: federal judge agreed with like green activists is not a
Speaker 1: sentence you here often so like it's like, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is actually a thing, and it's it's important to remember,
Speaker 1: like you are not immune to propaganda, like all a
Speaker 1: lot of this stuff is uh is has people who
Speaker 1: want a lot of money are vested in making people
Speaker 1: believe things about about about about like force management all
Speaker 1: this kind of stuff. Um, yeah, I know it may
Speaker 1: it may sound crazy when we're talking about you know,
Speaker 1: the secret Illuminati of the Force Service. But like no,
Speaker 1: like it acts like it's it is a it is
Speaker 1: a governmental organization. All governmental organizations are kind of sketchy,
Speaker 1: especially when their sole purpose is to one of their
Speaker 1: purposes is to make money or assistant like sales of
Speaker 1: something like yeah, it's it's gonna have some sketchy stuff.
Speaker 1: Um absolutely, And also you know in the realm of
Speaker 1: just like the propaganda machine, Um, we you know just
Speaker 1: the other day, UM, a hilarious response piece UM came
Speaker 1: out from the timber industry, an organization called Federal Forest
Speaker 1: Resource Coalition, which is just a coalition of loggers. UM
Speaker 1: put out this hilarious little mini video responding directly to
Speaker 1: the line that we've been using in forest events, which
Speaker 1: is worth more standing. Our forests are worth more standing.
Speaker 1: And they put out a hilarious response that is essentially
Speaker 1: you know, pushing this timber slu this logging propaganda, saying well, actually,
Speaker 1: our forests aren't worth anything standing after they've been burned,
Speaker 1: and they're contributing to the climate crisis, and they're destructive,
Speaker 1: you know, and all these things, and so totally I mean,
Speaker 1: even people who see it with their eyes can be
Speaker 1: convinced by these voices that they're wrong because they're so good,
Speaker 1: so good at making us feel just like we're the
Speaker 1: wrong ones, but we're not. We got this, yeah, in
Speaker 1: terms of like this the secretive kind of decision making
Speaker 1: and stuff behind the scenes, In terms of like the
Speaker 1: types of like terms they are using too to you know,
Speaker 1: do like restoration, thinning, um and all this stuff around
Speaker 1: around trying to like basically just just take as many
Speaker 1: trees from the Bright British Watershed as they can, and
Speaker 1: the judge said that she was quote disappointed in the agency,
Speaker 1: uh for for all of their silly behind the scenes
Speaker 1: trench coat meat in the dark alley way to pass
Speaker 1: off information type of thing, um, which is yeah, like
Speaker 1: so what what what is what is some of the
Speaker 1: other kind of um stuff that the four Service and
Speaker 1: the related organizations were trying to We're trying to hide
Speaker 1: like what like what what? What? What? What? What was
Speaker 1: the stuff that like came out um via this legal
Speaker 1: process that was like, yeah, what was it? What was it?
Speaker 1: What was a few of the actual things that they
Speaker 1: were that they were trying to do that eventually like
Speaker 1: came to light mm hmm. The major thing is that
Speaker 1: they were trying to get away with changing the logging
Speaker 1: contracts without doing any additional environmental analysis or public engagement process.
Speaker 1: And so there were before fires, there were there was
Speaker 1: a plan to do what they what we had fought
Speaker 1: them so hard to get them to agree to do,
Speaker 1: which was not log a bunch of these this older
Speaker 1: stands protect tree. They had a diameter limit on trees
Speaker 1: that they were going to log. So we basically like
Speaker 1: slapped their hands off of all of these trees and
Speaker 1: finally were like, okay, we won't sue you if you
Speaker 1: move forward with the plan as stated, and it had
Speaker 1: very strong sideboards, and you know, even local folks were like, okay,
Speaker 1: go do this. And then the fires came through and
Speaker 1: so what they were trying to do was just change
Speaker 1: the plans. They turned it all into clear cuts in
Speaker 1: the forest that we slapped their hands off of. And
Speaker 1: they were trying to argue that they didn't need to
Speaker 1: do any an additional analysis and they didn't need to
Speaker 1: engage the public, and even in court, you know, that's
Speaker 1: what they were arguing. Um. They were they were doing
Speaker 1: some stupid magic math and you know, somersaults, um to
Speaker 1: try and explain how they had already done an analysis
Speaker 1: that accounted somehow for the fires that no one could
Speaker 1: have ever predicted. A. Yeah. So the judge was like
Speaker 1: just you know, she was just roundly like, y'all couldn't
Speaker 1: have predicted I like to give her, you know, Southern accident.
Speaker 1: Y'all couldn't have predicted, Judge Akinstone the South. No, Uh,
Speaker 1: you couldn't have predicted. Uh, you know that the fires
Speaker 1: were going to burn through and so there's no way
Speaker 1: you could have done analysis for fire that you didn't
Speaker 1: know what was going to happen here us silly little beasts.
Speaker 1: But she did talk to them, you know, as if
Speaker 1: they were just naughty little children, which I loved to hear.
Speaker 1: You know, the disappointed in the Forest Service was a
Speaker 1: major move. And I think the other one that came
Speaker 1: up is just you know, the Forest Service was arguing
Speaker 1: that they needed quote need to do this logging um
Speaker 1: for restoration, for economic recovery, um, and to prevent future
Speaker 1: wildfires from severely burning in the area. All of that too.
Speaker 1: BS Like, one thing that the judge said that was
Speaker 1: super strong, UM was that she sees and obviously on
Speaker 1: paraphrasing here um, but she she sees that the community
Speaker 1: loves this place. It's obvious that this is like a
Speaker 1: beloved place, and she, you know, essentially understands that the
Speaker 1: forest is worth more standing. She said that she wanted
Speaker 1: she thinks that the forest needs an opportunity to recover
Speaker 1: from the fires, and so basically just called the BS
Speaker 1: on the Forest Service for their hilarious you know, justifications
Speaker 1: for logging all the we're gonna save the forest by logging.
Speaker 1: It is just not it's not right, it's not accurate.
Speaker 1: In the judge agrees. Yeah, I'm very very excited about
Speaker 1: about this ruling and what it means for the future
Speaker 1: and at least at least at least postponing this until
Speaker 1: um if if if the if if the lawsuits going
Speaker 1: to go through, or if or if they're just going
Speaker 1: to drop this, which they also very well, maybe they
Speaker 1: might decide to focus on another part that is that
Speaker 1: they just don't tell anybody about and start doing it
Speaker 1: there and then you know, we'll we'll start we'll start
Speaker 1: this again. But for this particular area, UM. That is
Speaker 1: that is very exciting, and yeah, it is. It is
Speaker 1: rare for a federal judge to agree with people on
Speaker 1: this topic. UM. And now I want want to talk
Speaker 1: about a few other kind of stuff around like forests,
Speaker 1: um and how and how these kind of types of
Speaker 1: things work. I I didn't get an interesting comment which
Speaker 1: I totally agree with in terms of like how propaganda
Speaker 1: works in this department, um, and how like how like
Speaker 1: logging towns operate, or how like towns became logging towns,
Speaker 1: how like they're basically able to convince local populations that
Speaker 1: logging is is like good because like yeah, like they're
Speaker 1: they're gonna they're gonna move into this town. They're gonna
Speaker 1: restore the town because they're gonna bring in new money
Speaker 1: through like logging industry. Um, and yeah, this is a
Speaker 1: very like, very like a typical move, whether it be
Speaker 1: for like you know, coal mining, whether it be for pipelines.
Speaker 1: In terms of like big companies going into all towns
Speaker 1: and be like, hey, we can promise you economic growth
Speaker 1: if you can like assist in this you know, extract
Speaker 1: of process, and they'll be able to convince them with
Speaker 1: you know, misleading statistics and you know all that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. In terms of logging industry is getting getting
Speaker 1: really good at radicalizing rule populations to have them believe
Speaker 1: that it's one not it's it's not like economically destructive
Speaker 1: to take down trees. They might even say it's like good,
Speaker 1: um and all all that kind of stuff has have
Speaker 1: Has there been like any outreach in terms of kind
Speaker 1: of addressing addressing people in small towns who like maybe
Speaker 1: used to like you know, rely on unlogging or something
Speaker 1: and how does how does that works? I know, like
Speaker 1: they'll be like, oh, but you people come from the
Speaker 1: city and now you're coming out here into like the
Speaker 1: woods where I live, and I think it's good that
Speaker 1: they're chopping down these trees. Right there's there's there's there's
Speaker 1: like that kind of that that kind of disconnection because again,
Speaker 1: no one, no one's immune to propaganda. You can you
Speaker 1: just you just just have to find the specific one. Um. See.
Speaker 1: I'm just curious about, like in terms of in terms
Speaker 1: of like forest defense, how often this comes up and
Speaker 1: how and how you kind of yeah, I don't know
Speaker 1: what's what steps to make to to be like to
Speaker 1: tell people, hey, maybe you're believe these things because timber
Speaker 1: industries told you them, Like how how how do you
Speaker 1: start that conversation with people? Yeah, this is like actually
Speaker 1: the heart of the forest defense work ahead, what you're
Speaker 1: talking about right now, the heart of our work ahead. Um.
Speaker 1: And I would also say, you know, there's a there's certainly,
Speaker 1: um a dichotomy that the media especially likes to present
Speaker 1: between the rural logging communities and you know, Portland or
Speaker 1: city based environmentalists and the hippie environmentalists to come in
Speaker 1: and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, And everyone's familiar with
Speaker 1: that and there's of course some truth um to that,
Speaker 1: but I want to say, like super clearly, there are
Speaker 1: so many rural who do not support the logging industry,
Speaker 1: and so that's like a false dichotomy that gets presented
Speaker 1: to us right off the bat, and a lot of
Speaker 1: those you know, for in the in um the work
Speaker 1: that I've been doing on forest forest defense, essentially, we're
Speaker 1: always connecting with folks on the ground in literally the
Speaker 1: backyards of these logging proposals, and many of them are
Speaker 1: super uninterested in having their backyards clear cut. And so
Speaker 1: we you know, the we we pushed directly against that
Speaker 1: mythology that you know it's just environmentalists coming in from Portland,
Speaker 1: because we work directly with people, including for Brighton Bush,
Speaker 1: but with every single thing that we work on directly
Speaker 1: with people who are literally on the front lines of
Speaker 1: that logging. That said, there is absolutely um a huge
Speaker 1: pull um. You know Oregon specifically as you know, famous
Speaker 1: for logging. Like we talked about last time, there's a
Speaker 1: logger on top of the capitol. Um you know, are
Speaker 1: the mayor of Portland's logging money it's in Oregon's Oregonians
Speaker 1: black and for rural Oregonians. UM. There are economic realities
Speaker 1: where in some cases some counties benefit from UM logging
Speaker 1: in their total from the logging industry, their school you know,
Speaker 1: schools are tied to logging money UM. And there's you know,
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways, a narrative that is not
Speaker 1: really accurate anymore, but has like an element of nostalgia
Speaker 1: to it, like you know, logging towns and UM. This
Speaker 1: old story about how things used to work with small,
Speaker 1: small family logging. That's not how it is anymore, but
Speaker 1: that narrative that like nostalgic narrative, carries on into a
Speaker 1: lot of communities. And so what the way that I
Speaker 1: like to cut through that UM for people is by
Speaker 1: making it really clear that there's a difference between small
Speaker 1: you know, family loggers of lore UM and and you
Speaker 1: know of you know, people's what people are attached to
Speaker 1: and the kinds of what we're seeing today is we're
Speaker 1: looking at Wall Street logging. We're looking at Wall Street invested,
Speaker 1: UM invested huge you know corporate industries who owned who
Speaker 1: can who still own like you know, huge percentages of
Speaker 1: our drinking water sheds of our UM communities. Some some
Speaker 1: of the communities on the Coast are owned primarily by
Speaker 1: private industrial Wall Street funded UM logging corporations. And that's
Speaker 1: you know, those aren't mom and pop. They're not living
Speaker 1: in the community. They're living often not even on the
Speaker 1: Pacific Northwest. These are rich ass assholes who are destroying
Speaker 1: our bioregion. And you know, I think that making it
Speaker 1: clear that those aren't those folks are not like us.
Speaker 1: You know, those are not like rural Oregonians, your those
Speaker 1: are not your friends. Those are not you know, your
Speaker 1: pals or your neighbors. And just cutting through that narrative
Speaker 1: that like, oh, you know logging communities, Um, you know
Speaker 1: loggers are your friendly neighbor. Actually, no, loggers are Wall Street, um,
Speaker 1: you know investment corporations, rich money people who are doing
Speaker 1: this destruction. And just kind of like breaking that I guess,
Speaker 1: like that um, that attachment that people have to this idea,
Speaker 1: that's just not a reality anymore. The reality is that
Speaker 1: people who are for logging in rural communities are they
Speaker 1: have a lot more common with those of us who
Speaker 1: are fighting logging than the actual people doing the logging,
Speaker 1: if that makes sense. Like there's a lack of understanding
Speaker 1: of what the logging industry actually is it's like back
Speaker 1: to that nostalgia. Like people who are against logging in
Speaker 1: rural communities, um, you know, often genuinely do not realize
Speaker 1: that this is Wall Street and like who's doing this logging.
Speaker 1: They're still thinking it's their you know, neighbor or their
Speaker 1: friend and it's you know, these stories. But you know
Speaker 1: the reality is that, you know, this is corporate timber
Speaker 1: owners who are maximizing their financial gain by buying out
Speaker 1: small landowners all over the place, um ensuring that they
Speaker 1: aren't taxed by lobbying heavily in the government's so they
Speaker 1: don't you know, have any sort of taxation that then
Speaker 1: goes back to benefit our communities. Don't even get me
Speaker 1: started about how many taxes the timber industry skips out
Speaker 1: on that could actually benefit our communities and our schools
Speaker 1: and our libraries and our fire departments, but aren't. UM
Speaker 1: And then they're adopting exploitative labor practices. Basically, you know,
Speaker 1: the contracted workers who are in the logging industry right now,
Speaker 1: who are doing the logging and hauling UM and reforestation
Speaker 1: so called reforestation planting of mono crop plantations, they are
Speaker 1: experiencing flat wages and declining work quality conditions. Um. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: while the corporate timber forms are expanding their profits um
Speaker 1: and you know, getting more wealthy investors. So that is
Speaker 1: the reality of the timber industry. These are not you know,
Speaker 1: your friendly neighborhood loggers anymore. So a few other points
Speaker 1: I wanted to bring up, kind of on force itself.
Speaker 1: Someone someone said something about how we talked about like
Speaker 1: old growth, and and I guess they think that we
Speaker 1: said that all forests in this area is old growth.
Speaker 1: And that's not something we actually said old growth. This
Speaker 1: is a specific term that means a specific thing. And yeah,
Speaker 1: regardless of it being old growth or not, they still
Speaker 1: shouldn't be cut down. I don't know. So I'm not
Speaker 1: sure why this point was really raised, because we didn't
Speaker 1: I did. I don't think we did, uh say that
Speaker 1: every that every tree there is old growth. Um. A
Speaker 1: lot of them were planted in the past few hundred years, UM.
Speaker 1: But that that doesn't mean like they're like much less important.
Speaker 1: It's like, just because they're not old growth doesn't mean
Speaker 1: we shouldn't be preserving this particular watershed in this particular
Speaker 1: environment and not be clear cutting all of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: old growth is like, like the term old growth is
Speaker 1: just like become fetishized to me, and this like this
Speaker 1: thing that you know. This Also, let's be clear, that's
Speaker 1: not an agreement on what old growth actually means across
Speaker 1: the board, even between agencies, Like there's an arbitrary date
Speaker 1: cut off that the federal government uses to define old growth. Um.
Speaker 1: But obviously, if you walk into a forest stand, this
Speaker 1: a healthy you know, a healthy old growth stand is
Speaker 1: complex in terms of age diversity. There's going to be
Speaker 1: old growth individual trees, there's going to be a lot
Speaker 1: of younger trees, is going to be horizontal and vertical diversification. Like,
Speaker 1: old growth is complicated, it's messy. But the whole point
Speaker 1: is like you're right, like it doesn't actually matter if
Speaker 1: it's like quote in the CAD the small narrow category
Speaker 1: of what the Forest Service would define as old growth.
Speaker 1: If it's a forest that's been around for you know,
Speaker 1: a hundred years or even you know, I would argue,
Speaker 1: if it's a forest that's over like seventy or eighty
Speaker 1: years old, what are we doing cutting that down up?
Speaker 1: Especially now you know that's storing so much carbon safely
Speaker 1: in the ground, and also by that age, it's had
Speaker 1: the opportunity, you know, to to become more diverse than
Speaker 1: these like monocrop plantations that we're seeing younger forests. So
Speaker 1: I would argue any forest that's not a monocrop plantation,
Speaker 1: a young monocrop plantation, should absolutely not be clear cut.
Speaker 1: It's just an inappropriate activity to do in native forest.
Speaker 1: And speaking of a clear cut, there's another Another comment
Speaker 1: was about how clear cutting can sometimes be good because
Speaker 1: it creates new environments for other animals and living things
Speaker 1: to exist in. And I find this to be a
Speaker 1: really weird comment to make. Um, I don't. I don't
Speaker 1: quite understand this, this kind of idea, because yes, of course,
Speaker 1: if you cut down a forest, you are creating a
Speaker 1: new environment, but that's not where that environment should be,
Speaker 1: nor is it where it is. It's like if you
Speaker 1: if you erect a whole bunch of concrete skyscrapers where
Speaker 1: a force used to be. Yeah, you're also making a
Speaker 1: new environment. But I would say we probably shouldn't do that,
Speaker 1: though I don't. That's not that's not a good thing.
Speaker 1: The same thing with like the people obsessed with like
Speaker 1: putting solar panels in the desert, like the desert is
Speaker 1: an actual environment like it has there is reasons for
Speaker 1: why deserts need to exist and that have this whole
Speaker 1: like a whole like a whole whole environment and a
Speaker 1: whole um I forget the word, but like and as
Speaker 1: an entire system of living things that exist there. That
Speaker 1: should Um, we we don't need to terraform everything. I
Speaker 1: don't think that's like, I don't we shouldn't. I think
Speaker 1: preserving the environment in general, presuming the environments that are
Speaker 1: existing and who are creating like ecosystems, is a good thing.
Speaker 1: I think generally the less terraforming probably probably the better,
Speaker 1: at least right now, when we're being with a massive
Speaker 1: like looming climate crisis that's caused by US terraforming the earth. Um,
Speaker 1: maybe we should not do that as much. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: could call by the general role like no more terraforming,
Speaker 1: you'll just leave it. Let's just let's just leave us,
Speaker 1: let's leave us for a bit just as but for
Speaker 1: real though, whoever wrote that comment, I mean, that is
Speaker 1: a timber industry talking point that it's literally that is
Speaker 1: literally and whether they meant it or not, you know,
Speaker 1: this is how the timber industry gets us. They're real
Speaker 1: good at this. This is there, you know, nice sounding
Speaker 1: talking points that we rebut all the time, um, you know,
Speaker 1: not just in media but also in court. Um. And
Speaker 1: the talking point is clear cuts mimic natural disasters like
Speaker 1: severe fires by replacing you. And it's that they totally
Speaker 1: don't because it does not look at a clear cut.
Speaker 1: Go look at a fire. It's a completely different experience
Speaker 1: than I could go down that rabbit hole all day
Speaker 1: on fire ecology another time maybe, but suffice it's to say,
Speaker 1: you know, what they're arguing is that they're creating young
Speaker 1: forest or quote early several habitat by clear cutting an
Speaker 1: old forest. But what they're actually doing is deforestation. They're
Speaker 1: replacing an old forest with something that's not a forest,
Speaker 1: A young mono crop plantation is a crop. It is
Speaker 1: not a forest, and so they are deforesting, and um,
Speaker 1: it is ecosystem. It is ecoside, and it is it
Speaker 1: is egoside. And I think, yeah, the insistence that like
Speaker 1: it's it's good because it will allow some species to
Speaker 1: exist in this new environment, like yeah, but there's other
Speaker 1: environments where they can't exist, and we don't we don't
Speaker 1: need to be destroying the ones that are already kind
Speaker 1: of important and doing good stuff to make room for
Speaker 1: other ones that aren't already there. They argue that the
Speaker 1: deer and the butterflies love the clear cuts, and so
Speaker 1: just call that out as bullshit. Next time you'll hear that. It's,
Speaker 1: you know, spread the word that is some timber industry bs.
Speaker 1: They're tricksy, but don't let them get you. And the
Speaker 1: last thing I wanted to mention is why blocking off
Speaker 1: access to these areas is bad? Um, because I got
Speaker 1: someone someone said something like, um, you know, because fires
Speaker 1: are human caused, closing off public lands is it can
Speaker 1: be good because then fires someone gets hurt in those areas,
Speaker 1: And this really just misunderstands why fires get started. And
Speaker 1: also it's just a bad thing to do anyway, because
Speaker 1: like fire, if you look at like the map of
Speaker 1: where wildfires start, um, almost all of them are on
Speaker 1: the path of highways. Um. Specifically in California that when
Speaker 1: when the fires were really there was there was this
Speaker 1: firefighter who who made a great video about like why
Speaker 1: the fire line was all next to the highway, And
Speaker 1: there was like conspiracy theories of like including the antifa's
Speaker 1: driving down highways and setting the forest on fire, which
Speaker 1: was which was an actual popular talking point because we
Speaker 1: live in the hell world. Um, but like you know,
Speaker 1: he's explained like the reason why, Like they are like
Speaker 1: human caused, but they're not, like a lot of them
Speaker 1: aren't intentionally caused. It's because that's where power lines run,
Speaker 1: and this is where a lot of sparks can ignite
Speaker 1: stuff on the edges of of of highways that will
Speaker 1: then take out part of the forest. Now, every once
Speaker 1: in a while there's a gender reveal party that goes
Speaker 1: horribly wrong and does and and does ignite it. That
Speaker 1: is true, and I think the solution to that is
Speaker 1: not closing down the forest. It's not having gender reveal
Speaker 1: parties that we stopped selling uh on Amazon. I'm all
Speaker 1: thor Tanna right as an idea, But how about let's
Speaker 1: stop selling blue and pink Tanna right packets to people
Speaker 1: who don't know how to use explosives genuinely don't know
Speaker 1: about because yeah, like they're not they're not actually using
Speaker 1: tanna right for what it's meant for, and they're not
Speaker 1: using it to do like like training, Um, they're using
Speaker 1: it to say that they're having a baby, and this
Speaker 1: has caused a lot of wildfire death. So how how
Speaker 1: about we just stopped selling uh the gender reveal party bombs.
Speaker 1: I think that'd be a better solution than closing down
Speaker 1: massive swaths of public land. And how about our power
Speaker 1: line companies get their ship together and stop. Do actually
Speaker 1: have a plan for planned power shut offs? And actually,
Speaker 1: you know, we know now actually Pacific Corps is in
Speaker 1: court right now because they started the Santiam fires. Their
Speaker 1: power lines started the Santa Inspires and the Archie Creek
Speaker 1: fires and probably more. And so yeah, how about the
Speaker 1: power line companies get their ships together? But I feel
Speaker 1: like the other huge thing here is that, you know,
Speaker 1: the suggestion that we should close off these forests to
Speaker 1: the public, to me is just like more uh you know,
Speaker 1: it's you know, blatantly it's racist, um, and it's you know,
Speaker 1: I think it's wrong because these lands, these belong to
Speaker 1: Indigenous people. We should be giving these lands back to
Speaker 1: indigenous people. And think, you know, when we're talking about
Speaker 1: like rural communities too, in adjust transition, like rural community
Speaker 1: members should actually have more say in what happens in
Speaker 1: their backyard. Forests should be able to be more engaged
Speaker 1: UM in you know, the forests that literally provide them
Speaker 1: with their drinking water, UM, and you know all of
Speaker 1: the things that they need, um to survive. So we
Speaker 1: should not be you know, locking off these lands and
Speaker 1: keeping humans out. Humans have a place in these lands.
Speaker 1: I've always had a place in a role in these lands,
Speaker 1: and um, if we take leadership from the right folks,
Speaker 1: then we could totally live in a much more reasonable
Speaker 1: way than the gender revealed party path. Yeah, and like
Speaker 1: I don't know if you know this, but like being
Speaker 1: in the forest is great. It's like it is great
Speaker 1: to be surrounded by giant trees. It makes you feel awesome.
Speaker 1: The last thing I want to talk about is um
Speaker 1: you you mentioned before, like getting people who live in
Speaker 1: these rural areas who used to rely on logging, getting
Speaker 1: them are involved and doing a just transition, because this
Speaker 1: is a topic that comes out that comes up on
Speaker 1: climate change like everywhere in terms of like you know,
Speaker 1: like countries that are still developing not being able to
Speaker 1: have access to the same amount of fossil fuels that
Speaker 1: countries like the States you know had when they when
Speaker 1: when they were developing, and like how is that fair? Right?
Speaker 1: This this is like, this is a very common thing
Speaker 1: of in terms of countries that are better off. UM,
Speaker 1: need will you know, have kind of kind of like
Speaker 1: a duty to assist assist countries that are trying to
Speaker 1: develop and trying to get better standards of living. Um,
Speaker 1: because we profited off the fossil fuels and now they
Speaker 1: won't have the same opportunity if we're trying to you know,
Speaker 1: get to a carbon neutral world. UM. So in terms
Speaker 1: of like a just just transition, this is something like
Speaker 1: you know, a COP twenty six there was supposed to
Speaker 1: be funding for adaptation efforts in in the developing countries.
Speaker 1: Now that failed because of course it did. It's COP
Speaker 1: twenty six. But in terms of like, in terms of
Speaker 1: like this idea of a just transition, how do you
Speaker 1: see this like locally in the rural environment within the
Speaker 1: States and for for like these types of areas, because like, yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's similar to like coal mining the towns, similar
Speaker 1: to you know, logging towns. How how does how do
Speaker 1: you see this working? Yeah? This is something I think
Speaker 1: about so much. UM. And we actually put out a
Speaker 1: platform called a Green New Deal for our Forests in
Speaker 1: the Pacific Northwest that talks like all about what a
Speaker 1: just transition could look like for communities. But I mean,
Speaker 1: this is a dream, and I think it's like a
Speaker 1: really inspiring uh inspiring path forward because what it means
Speaker 1: is that, you know, we're not saying to end logging,
Speaker 1: and we're not saying that rural communities basically need to
Speaker 1: like stop existing and getting funding from logging. What we're
Speaker 1: saying is that rural community members, what we that nostalgic
Speaker 1: dream that are that people are playing to, we actually
Speaker 1: want to have something in that regard. We would like
Speaker 1: people to you know, engage with and interact with their
Speaker 1: local forests. Now that shouldn't look like clear cutting them,
Speaker 1: because um, that's irresponsible and that doesn't unefit local communities
Speaker 1: or you know, the benefit of future. But that could
Speaker 1: look like restoring these young mono crop plantations into complex,
Speaker 1: healthy forests. It could be looked like bringing fire back
Speaker 1: onto the landscape with prescribed fire and cultural burning, taking
Speaker 1: lessons from indigenous folks who are doing network um. It
Speaker 1: could look like education and recreation and so many things
Speaker 1: of like you know, hands on engagement with backyard forests
Speaker 1: that surround us um and you know that that could
Speaker 1: look like basically firing the freddies and uh taking this
Speaker 1: land and giving it to local communities with um, you
Speaker 1: know the with with conservation goals but also goals to
Speaker 1: economically support by all of those ways you know, jobs
Speaker 1: but also jobs and recreation, UM economically support local communities.
Speaker 1: So basically giving the land back to the local communities
Speaker 1: who rely on them and giving them power and control
Speaker 1: UM to care for them in ways that makes sense
Speaker 1: because right now, while streets caring for our four us
Speaker 1: and really it should be us. And I think one
Speaker 1: other thing on this topic, for like how how well
Speaker 1: propagando works when I was UM at the stop line
Speaker 1: three purchase camps last summer in terms of like how
Speaker 1: do corporations get towns to start supporting these ideas and
Speaker 1: how do they like foster this hatred of environmentalism um,
Speaker 1: despite you know, these areas often being the worst impact
Speaker 1: one of the worst impacted ones by these like effort efforts.
Speaker 1: Right uh, you know you're they're chopping down forests near
Speaker 1: where this town is. Pipeline is going next to the town.
Speaker 1: If it leaks, it's going to cause all this problem
Speaker 1: to like their water spline stuff. But like how they do.
Speaker 1: It's like the day of the direct action to block
Speaker 1: off the pipeline, Enbridge was sponsoring like a town fair
Speaker 1: in like the little downtown area, and it's like this
Speaker 1: super surreal moment of being like, oh, this is like
Speaker 1: I've read this happened in like comics before, Like this
Speaker 1: this is like this is like one of Lex Luthor's
Speaker 1: favorite things to do. Hell like like go into this
Speaker 1: like small town. Who's gonna start like this evil you know,
Speaker 1: evil like uh like lab At and he'll like fund
Speaker 1: like this small town event thing and like I've like
Speaker 1: seen this before in so many superhero comics, Like I've
Speaker 1: seen this trope and that I'm just like living it.
Speaker 1: You're just like watching it happen. You're like driving past
Speaker 1: the town to go block up pipeline and then you
Speaker 1: see like Enbridge with like a little stage and like
Speaker 1: a little like fair and like everyone in the towns
Speaker 1: like dancing and they're giving out like free drinks and
Speaker 1: like oh no, like this is yeah, Like you're you're
Speaker 1: like living the things like you know, a lot of it.
Speaker 1: It's about like this idea of like rein like reinvigorating
Speaker 1: like like you know, like the like the spirit of
Speaker 1: the town and injecting injecting new life into it. So
Speaker 1: like you know, this this is like a new one
Speaker 1: for like they're they're putting a pipeline down, but like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's the same thing for like you know,
Speaker 1: old like old cold towns, old logging towns, and these
Speaker 1: corporations will come in, you know, make the town more
Speaker 1: active again, start putting on events, make it feel like
Speaker 1: more of a place. And then that that gets so
Speaker 1: the company gets associated with positive changes. Right, so then
Speaker 1: people who live in towns like, oh yeah, and we're
Speaker 1: just doing all these good things for my town. That
Speaker 1: must mean they actually, you know, are gonna care about
Speaker 1: us here and then help and help us out. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: these people from all around the country are driving through
Speaker 1: and trying to block the pipeline, and the police are
Speaker 1: driving everywhere. Now it's all this chaos, right, these stupid environmentalists,
Speaker 1: they don't understand how this is gonna you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's we're creating so many jobs here, which actually didn't.
Speaker 1: Enbridge outsourced most of the jobs out of state, but
Speaker 1: they lied about the type of job creation. You know,
Speaker 1: all all all all this type of stuff, and this
Speaker 1: is a very very common thing totally, and like timber
Speaker 1: unity is like delivering would to people when the when
Speaker 1: when the snow storm happened and everyone was cold and
Speaker 1: didn't have power, and they were you know, going door
Speaker 1: to door with mutual aid support. Um. But that is
Speaker 1: why you know, a remember how everyone should remember how
Speaker 1: how tricks e and how dishonest these folks are. But
Speaker 1: also be why um, those of us who want to
Speaker 1: see a different way need to be doing mutual aid too,
Speaker 1: Like we actually need to be out there in our
Speaker 1: communities and making friends and building trust and not just
Speaker 1: showing up to function up when it's time to function up.
Speaker 1: And I think that kind of like circles back to
Speaker 1: the point we talked about earlier, which is like building
Speaker 1: relationships with people on the front lines. Um, looks like
Speaker 1: so much more than just like the defense of a
Speaker 1: bad thing in their backyards. It looks like, you know,
Speaker 1: mutual aid because the industry is doing it, um and
Speaker 1: they're they're good at it, and we need to be better. Um.
Speaker 1: I think that wraps it up for us today. I
Speaker 1: just what one thing I want to mention is like,
Speaker 1: what what is going to happen going forward? Now? After this,
Speaker 1: after this legal victory, what's kind of just just just
Speaker 1: just just just so people know, like what is like
Speaker 1: the next steps that are going to be taken on
Speaker 1: the legal process that will kind of determine what what
Speaker 1: happens UM with like you know, direct actions and going
Speaker 1: to see the forest in like in the future. Yeah, UM, Well,
Speaker 1: basically we're waiting UM for a date for this court
Speaker 1: case UM, and so that will hopefully be scheduled if
Speaker 1: it if it ends up having to go through, which
Speaker 1: it might not. UM. Obviously it is going to be
Speaker 1: an effort made on behalf of lawyers UM to try
Speaker 1: and get the Force service to just stop, to just
Speaker 1: drop this to Nanigan UM and walk away UM while
Speaker 1: they're you know where they're at. Because we we do
Speaker 1: think we have a really strong case UM that will
Speaker 1: win in court if it goes to court. So that's
Speaker 1: kind of like the legal avenue UM. Same story as
Speaker 1: what I said with the last time we talked. You know,
Speaker 1: if if logging is going to move forward in that area,
Speaker 1: whether that be because UM it happens in the future
Speaker 1: or because somehow this legal case is lost, direct action
Speaker 1: will happen. People will be out there in the way
Speaker 1: of logging. There's no way people are going to let
Speaker 1: that go down in the Brighton Bush community. UM. So
Speaker 1: right now we're kind of in a waiting game. We're
Speaker 1: watching and waiting. UM, but you know, I hope the
Speaker 1: four Service knows now that they can't just get get
Speaker 1: away with stuff like this. People are watching, UM, people
Speaker 1: are going to file public records request. We're documenting this
Speaker 1: and UM hopefully you know, we won't be seeing more
Speaker 1: of this, but because we live in the real world,
Speaker 1: the real sad world, we will be seeing more of this,
Speaker 1: and so, UM, you know, we'll be out there again
Speaker 1: when the next forest is on the chopping block, which
Speaker 1: is probably going to be you know, today, tomorrow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of always the thing. UM. Well, thank thank
Speaker 1: you so much for coming on to talk about this
Speaker 1: and the uh rare rare good news episode of Hey
Speaker 1: something good happened. Thank you. Thanks. In any of these sources,
Speaker 1: people can kind of follow along on the fight that
Speaker 1: the people can find online. Yeah, make sure to follow
Speaker 1: Cascadia Forest Offenders and Portland Rising Tide um who will
Speaker 1: be definitely tracking and posting. You can also follow Cascadia Wildlands,
Speaker 1: who um was the lead nonprofit on the lawsuit and
Speaker 1: they've been posting about it too. Great. All right, thanks
Speaker 1: everybody for listening. Uh go see a tree, touch tree. Yeah. Hey,
Speaker 1: we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
Speaker 1: now until the heat death of the Universe. It Could
Speaker 1: Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For
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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.