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 gotta be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. Hello, and welcome to another
Speaker 1: episode it could happen here. I'm your guest host of
Speaker 1: this episode where I'm hoping to take a woman to
Speaker 1: discuss the commons, the principles of successful commons management, and
Speaker 1: why sitting attempts to establish the Commons of field. My name,
Speaker 1: by the way, is Andrew of the YouTube channel Andrewism.
Speaker 1: You'd follow me on YouTube dot com slash andrewis m.
Speaker 1: I'm joined here um with my two cool hosts that
Speaker 1: will be Garrison Davis Hello, and James Stout. Hi. Awesome.
Speaker 1: But before I get into exactly what makes the commons work,
Speaker 1: I least want to discuss what exactly the commons are
Speaker 1: because despite being you know, common throughout human history, a
Speaker 1: lot of people can't imagine how they might have wooked
Speaker 1: what they are. Of course, the commons is a very
Speaker 1: specific definition of particular context of you know, feudalism and whatnot.
Speaker 1: But even outside of that, the idea of the commons
Speaker 1: is essentially the resources accessible to all members of society,
Speaker 1: the totality of the material riches of that community or
Speaker 1: even of the world, regarded as their whole inheritance, rather
Speaker 1: than being subject at inclosure and to privatization. Even today,
Speaker 1: despite the process of inclosure which is with you of
Speaker 1: its own podcast episode or series of podcast episodes or book,
Speaker 1: even even today they are still you know, viable existing
Speaker 1: commons institutions, and they've in some cases endured for well
Speaker 1: over a thousand years. Most famously Helena Ostrom, the economists
Speaker 1: who explored the concept in depth and depunct the Tragedy
Speaker 1: of the Commons, wrote in her book Governing the Commons
Speaker 1: that from you know, the alpine meadows of Torbell, Switzerland,
Speaker 1: to the three million hectares of Japanese for us, to
Speaker 1: the irrigation systems of Spain and Philippines, the possibility of
Speaker 1: community of popular rather than public or state or private
Speaker 1: or corporate ownership exists. The possibility of communal ownership as
Speaker 1: opposed to capitalist or state ownership exists. There's also the
Speaker 1: communal land of Chiapas in Mexico after the successful Zaptista Revolution,
Speaker 1: and of course, as I discussed in previous episode, there
Speaker 1: are the Commons of Barbuda, where the entire island of
Speaker 1: the twin island nation of Antiguan and Barbuda is owned
Speaker 1: collectively by all Barbudas and regarded as their collective heritage.
Speaker 1: These projects, of course an art static. The commons and Barbuda,
Speaker 1: for example, existed for about a hundred years, but had
Speaker 1: some precedents prior to that and are now honestly being
Speaker 1: encroached upon after the soul shock doctrine of the hurricane
Speaker 1: that ravaged the island has opened up an opportunity for
Speaker 1: again robilious government sort of swooping and privatize the land
Speaker 1: um for the benefit of foreign companies and foreign resorts.
Speaker 1: So the Commons is not this timeless internal institution that
Speaker 1: can't be interrupted, that's never change um. In the case
Speaker 1: in chap Us, you know, they had similar projects, similar
Speaker 1: institutions prior to colonization. Colonization ruled in and interrupted all that,
Speaker 1: and thanks to the Zappleas revolution. They were able to
Speaker 1: institute some semblance of that sort of commons institution, of
Speaker 1: that communal land um for their collective benefits. They respond to,
Speaker 1: experience conditions, to circumstance, to serve or in some cases
Speaker 1: eventually not to the people. But of course, not all
Speaker 1: commons are able to work, not all commons institutions operate effectively,
Speaker 1: and she talks about why, using various keys studies to
Speaker 1: illustrate her points. In the course of governing the commons,
Speaker 1: she used, of course, the existence case studies to develop
Speaker 1: sit in principles that she believed make the commons work,
Speaker 1: the principles that she found in common between Switzerland and
Speaker 1: Japan and the Philippines and Spain, and to then use
Speaker 1: those principles to examine the common institutions that didn't work,
Speaker 1: identified which principles were missing from the equation. But I'm
Speaker 1: talking all about what these principles about, these principles of
Speaker 1: successful commons management, and I haven't broken down what they
Speaker 1: are exactly. So to get into that, the principles of
Speaker 1: successful commons management as follows Number one, clearly defined boundaries.
Speaker 1: Boundaries in the sense of having of those involved the
Speaker 1: appropriators of the commons, the people who are directly access
Speaker 1: in the commons have in a clear sense of structure
Speaker 1: and characteristics of the resource system itself, whether it be
Speaker 1: through a scientific study or through generationally preserved folk knowledge
Speaker 1: as well as knowledge and a clear sense of who
Speaker 1: is involved and withdrawn from and sustaining it. Even if
Speaker 1: you know, even in the case where the entire world
Speaker 1: has been common where all land has been returned to
Speaker 1: common land, to the ownership of none and everyone simultaneously
Speaker 1: in such a case, in individual instances of common pool resources,
Speaker 1: whether it be a forest or a fishery, or a
Speaker 1: lake or groundwater basin, the people most directly accessing those
Speaker 1: that that segment of the commons, that system, that common
Speaker 1: pool resource needs to have a clear sense of exactly
Speaker 1: what that resource entails um, the limits of that resource,
Speaker 1: the renewability of that resource, um, and who is involved
Speaker 1: in withdrawing from and sustaining that resource, so that they're
Speaker 1: able to collaborate. If you know, as in the case
Speaker 1: with the tragedy of the Commons, everybody is just this
Speaker 1: isolated actor, not communicating at all, not collaborating. There's no
Speaker 1: collective institution in place to help them, you know, work
Speaker 1: it out. They basically canna end up in a case
Speaker 1: like the tragedy of the Commons, where the system is
Speaker 1: depleted because nobody has a sense of what anybody else
Speaker 1: is doing. Um, there's no there's no open channel of communication,
Speaker 1: which brings us, of course, to collective decision making power.
Speaker 1: That's the third principle. So I'm jumping ahead slightly, but
Speaker 1: it flows better this way, um having collective decision making
Speaker 1: power over the commons, meaning there's an institution in place
Speaker 1: that these who are drawn from the Commons are able
Speaker 1: to come together and discuss the rules of the Commons.
Speaker 1: How are they going to draw from the Commons, how
Speaker 1: are they going to deal with the Commons, how they're
Speaker 1: gonna deal with each other as they deal with the Commons,
Speaker 1: and so on. And to afford, the idea of rules
Speaker 1: is not anti anarchists as a concept, um, just the
Speaker 1: idea that there is not you know, popular inputs and
Speaker 1: collective inputs and free association in place. Um. And so
Speaker 1: with consensus, with this institution of collective decision making power,
Speaker 1: people be able to come up with and modify the
Speaker 1: rules as it suits their situations, as it's as it
Speaker 1: suits their shift in circumstances. Um. And of course, and
Speaker 1: this is the second principle, that they appropriation and provision
Speaker 1: rules of the Commons are compatible with local conditions. The
Speaker 1: whole ideas that do not relying on any external authorities
Speaker 1: to come up with these rules, to commit to these rules,
Speaker 1: to bind themselves to these rules, even when the temptations
Speaker 1: to violate those rules apply. So as a practice of
Speaker 1: you know, developing community, you need to have some sense
Speaker 1: of shared norms and developing those shared norms over time
Speaker 1: regard and behavior. And of course, as in the case
Speaker 1: in almost of all societies, of course, reputation and one's
Speaker 1: reputation will play a rule. Um, if you are known
Speaker 1: to be consistently violating the Commons rules, of course they're
Speaker 1: going to be social consequences to that. That's just a
Speaker 1: natural consequence. Just because the commons exist doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: people are free of the consequences of how they use
Speaker 1: those comments. Just like in the case of the environment.
Speaker 1: You know, just because you can cut down all the
Speaker 1: trees in the forest, doesn't mean you're free of the
Speaker 1: consequences from cutting on the trees of that forest. Your
Speaker 1: actions are still going to have consequences, whether it be
Speaker 1: environmental or social. There are of course limits, as there
Speaker 1: as there are in any other aspect of life. But
Speaker 1: of course simple norms regarding behavior or concerns about reputation
Speaker 1: may help. But you're also going to need the fourth
Speaker 1: and fifth principles established in some form effectively meant in
Speaker 1: social harmony. The fourth principle is of course, monitoring, which
Speaker 1: is the process of continuously evaluating the conditions of the
Speaker 1: common pool resource itself as well as the behavior of
Speaker 1: the appropriators. Now term monitoring, it's kind of spooky, right,
Speaker 1: It sounds a little bit like Big brothers watching you
Speaker 1: kind of fight, But that's not really the intention. It's
Speaker 1: just the idea that it's just this this constant, informal
Speaker 1: process of looking at and observing and collecting data on
Speaker 1: the conditions of the commons, the conditions including how people
Speaker 1: behave with the commons as well as the you know,
Speaker 1: commons themselves, the resources themselves, how much of them we have,
Speaker 1: how quickly they're being you know, renewed, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: And and through that process of each person, each appropriator
Speaker 1: of the commons, institutions um monitoring the system continuously, you
Speaker 1: begin to learn what rules work and what rules don't,
Speaker 1: and so you can adapt your rules to suit the circumstances,
Speaker 1: to suit how people actually behave, which is something in
Speaker 1: that centralized and hierarchical institutions have a bit of trouble doing,
Speaker 1: because when you have this horizontal common institution, you're able
Speaker 1: to look at, Okay, this is how things are going
Speaker 1: so far, and let me we can we can now
Speaker 1: talk about it. We're constantly in this dialogue. We're all
Speaker 1: able to contribute our information in this horizontal system and
Speaker 1: adapt our rules and our behavior to suit. Whereas in
Speaker 1: the pyramid structure of a hierarchical and centralized organization, but
Speaker 1: further up the pyramid ecal yes, the more power there is,
Speaker 1: as centralized institutions tend to have, but also less information
Speaker 1: because the narrowing of the pyramid leads to less and
Speaker 1: less information from the bottom filtering up to the top.
Speaker 1: And so when you have these centralized institutions, rules are
Speaker 1: a lot more rigid because they're not able to respond
Speaker 1: quickly and effectively and as informed as informally um to
Speaker 1: the situations as they arise. That's also why eighty percent
Speaker 1: of the planet's biodiversity is being protected by a very
Speaker 1: small percentage of indigenous people because they are on the ground.
Speaker 1: Because they are they're interact with the systems in real time.
Speaker 1: They're able to respond directly and quickly to changes in
Speaker 1: that biodiverlity, to changes in behavioral in order to maintain
Speaker 1: and sustain that system. Whereas you find that a lot
Speaker 1: of conservation projects, a lot of restoration projects, in environmental
Speaker 1: frustoration projects are feeling you know, I recently read an
Speaker 1: article about how a lot of these tree planting initiatives
Speaker 1: that governments have been doing these days, while you know,
Speaker 1: it gets them good, publicity gets them good, you know, social, social, political,
Speaker 1: international clouds. When you go back one year, two years,
Speaker 1: three years down the line, almost all, if not all,
Speaker 1: the trees are dead. The community is living by these
Speaker 1: reforestation projects, we're not involved in the process. They don't
Speaker 1: have any say in the selection of the trees. In fact,
Speaker 1: the trees aren't always even choosen in accord and with
Speaker 1: local conditions. They often isn't enough biodie felicity in terms
Speaker 1: of the trees. I mean when it comes to a forest,
Speaker 1: and that's what people don't understand. Forests are living organism.
Speaker 1: You know, it's it has multiple layers, has multiple pasties.
Speaker 1: You just pop us at the trees down and expect
Speaker 1: things to work out. Okay, you know, um James C.
Speaker 1: Scott talks about this in scene like a state. You
Speaker 1: can't just in these states they start these sort of
Speaker 1: forestry projects. They try to legible, legibilize, you know, these forests,
Speaker 1: these simple rules and organizations, and you cut out all
Speaker 1: the fluff, all the shrubbery, all the other plans that
Speaker 1: are competing coote and coote, you end up with a
Speaker 1: dead system, you know, to put the system that is
Speaker 1: very fragile, that is not able to respond to changes
Speaker 1: in the environments they arise because it does not have
Speaker 1: the buffers of a complex web of life in place.
Speaker 1: Indigenous groups and really anybody who is grounded in the
Speaker 1: local context is able to most effectively engage and respond
Speaker 1: because they have access to that information, because they're able
Speaker 1: to see the shocks to the system, the buffers, what works,
Speaker 1: what doesn't. Human culturists are able to you know, these
Speaker 1: intensive systems because they are constantly monitoring coming full circle here,
Speaker 1: constantly monitoring the feedback that they're getting from their systems,
Speaker 1: And of course there's a fifth principle. You know, in
Speaker 1: these sort of situations, you're still going to have a
Speaker 1: couple opportunistic people maybe attempt who may be tempted to
Speaker 1: take advantage of the trust presence in the group. Um.
Speaker 1: And when I say opportunistic people, I don't mean to
Speaker 1: create this other this group. I just mean it's in
Speaker 1: the sense of, you know, you have, like we all do,
Speaker 1: moments of weakness, right, and in those moments of weakness,
Speaker 1: it can be easy for some to falter, and in
Speaker 1: that falter and jeopardize the security of the system as
Speaker 1: a whole. And so the fifth prince will successful. Common
Speaker 1: spanagement is the practice of accountability and systems of accountability
Speaker 1: through graduated sanctions. Of course, empathy needs to maintain throughout
Speaker 1: the process. And I don't think that every infraction must
Speaker 1: automatically responded to with sanctions. Like again, I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to do something. It's just obviously when you have a
Speaker 1: system that has and I know I'm reference to ninety
Speaker 1: for like a right fringer, but yeah, I think it's
Speaker 1: finely reference if correctly, as opposed to like someone who
Speaker 1: hasn't read it or read anything else that he wrote, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can take it. But you know, obviously not every
Speaker 1: situation gonna respond to its sanctions, obviously empathytion, immunity and
Speaker 1: throughout the process. Um. But when you have a system
Speaker 1: in which a lot of people are dependent on the
Speaker 1: sustainability not just people living right now, but generations to come,
Speaker 1: and that's not something we accustomed to thinking about, but
Speaker 1: generations still coming out and think about. With these sort
Speaker 1: of commons institutions, you can't do as the capitalists do
Speaker 1: and just let people do whatever with minimal if any
Speaker 1: environmental protections, with minimal if any like standards in place. Yes,
Speaker 1: infractions varying severity and stuff, but when the livelihood of
Speaker 1: the entire community is that state, you know, things can't
Speaker 1: be so easy. When infractions are just you know, temporary
Speaker 1: deviations or and threatening to the overall survile the CPR,
Speaker 1: then you know, tolerance can be high. But it depends
Speaker 1: on the circumstance. And that's why it really is important
Speaker 1: that the prior four principles or in place. You know,
Speaker 1: you have the clearly defined boundaries, you have the rules
Speaker 1: of the commons established by collective decision making power over
Speaker 1: the commons, with a constant process of monitor in place,
Speaker 1: because again, the responsiveness of the people on the ground
Speaker 1: is a lot more in tune with the conditions of
Speaker 1: the commons and with the needs of the people themselves,
Speaker 1: because they are the people. And the fifth principle and
Speaker 1: the fourth principle, all the other principles would be nothing
Speaker 1: without the sixth principle, which is the presence of conflict
Speaker 1: resolution mechanism. Humans are kind of human, you know, we
Speaker 1: make mistakes, we have disagreements, and it needs to be
Speaker 1: some sort of means of discussing and resolving conflict and
Speaker 1: a healthy and effectively. There are a a lot of processes
Speaker 1: in place. UM. A lot of communities, Galterian communities throughout
Speaker 1: history have used some sort of system of mediation. UM.
Speaker 1: There's also arbitration, which tends to be more common in
Speaker 1: state societies. And they are also new models and methods
Speaker 1: of justice being established and drawn from from the past
Speaker 1: as well that we can look into. But they are
Speaker 1: conflict resolution mechanisms. They have to be in place the
Speaker 1: successful comments management. We live in a society, and society
Speaker 1: includes conflict. Conflict is not always necessarily a bad thing,
Speaker 1: but it's a thing, and you ignore it and expected
Speaker 1: to go away. The seventh principle is the freedom to organize,
Speaker 1: and this principle is, you know, the basis upon which
Speaker 1: the other principles arrest. In some places people have a
Speaker 1: lot of autonomy to self organize free of state control.
Speaker 1: In other places they don't. In other places, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of states encroachments on the commons because that has
Speaker 1: been the mission of the state to further their ten
Speaker 1: drils in every sphere of life and existence. So obviously
Speaker 1: the end goal, but one of the end goals the
Speaker 1: complete abolition of the state, and obviously the process upon
Speaker 1: which we reach those end goals would require pre figurative
Speaker 1: politics in the sense of establishing the institutions that we
Speaker 1: want in the future society in the here and now
Speaker 1: and building that dual poll capacity to provide a competitive
Speaker 1: excuse the capitalists terminology, but a competitive model that can
Speaker 1: you know, compete with rise from and separately from eventually
Speaker 1: replace um the existing systems and that state process of
Speaker 1: social revolution. Have a video coming up on that in December. Lastly,
Speaker 1: and this does not apply to every instance of commons management,
Speaker 1: but in some cases you need the eighth and finale
Speaker 1: principle for successful commons management, and that is nested enterprises,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, basically the same principle as an
Speaker 1: anarchist confederation. You know, if a particular community is access
Speaker 1: in a commons institution that other communities are access in,
Speaker 1: or if the commons that a group of communities are
Speaker 1: accessing are part of a larger regional commons or archpeologic
Speaker 1: commons or continental commons, then he wants to have means
Speaker 1: of collaboration bottom up of course, partom of organizations, but
Speaker 1: you know, maintain the power the local level while coordinates
Speaker 1: in these larger scaled commands and ensuring that there's a
Speaker 1: smooth running and smooth communication between the appropriators, you know,
Speaker 1: the people involved. These principles very clearly differentiate between success
Speaker 1: and the failure cases. To reiterate, the commons and the
Speaker 1: principle of successful commons management as follows. Clearly defined boundaries,
Speaker 1: rules compatible with local conditions, collective decision making power to
Speaker 1: establish those rules, monitoring to ensure that those rules are
Speaker 1: compatible with people and conditions. Graduated sanctions to ensure that
Speaker 1: rules are kept up with and the commons are protected
Speaker 1: from potential threats. Conflict resolution, mechanisms because humans are going
Speaker 1: to human freedom to eyes, particularly in the fragile early
Speaker 1: stages of establishing these projects and nested enterprises confederation from
Speaker 1: the bottom up. In certain failure cases, we see that,
Speaker 1: you know, none of the principles apply. Um. For example,
Speaker 1: in the book, eleanor Austrom references these two Turkish fisheries,
Speaker 1: the Bay of His Mirror and Boardroom, where there was
Speaker 1: severe rent diticipation continuing unabated. Of course, the book was
Speaker 1: written a while ago, so I'm not sure how the
Speaker 1: situation has evolved since then. But rent dissipation is basically
Speaker 1: a circumstance in which the commons corn pool resources are
Speaker 1: being depleted severely and the sustainability of those comments at take.
Speaker 1: And so with all those principles in place to ensure
Speaker 1: that doesn't happened, um, you get a situation like what's
Speaker 1: going on? But what was going on in the Bay
Speaker 1: of his Mirror? And put in the Kirin the oil
Speaker 1: irrigation project in Sri Lanka, they did have clay boundaries,
Speaker 1: that one principle in place, but the other principles were not.
Speaker 1: In Mojave, California, they did have the institution of collective choice.
Speaker 1: They did have contact resolution mechanisms, and they did have
Speaker 1: the recognized right to organize, but the other principles are
Speaker 1: not in place, and so that institution was also a failure.
Speaker 1: Or we can look at the case in the Mabella
Speaker 1: fishery also in Sri Lanka, where renticipation had become a
Speaker 1: very severe problem, particularly after nine Now they did have
Speaker 1: rules in place, they did have a monitoring system, but unfortunately,
Speaker 1: you know, despite having those rules, despite having you know,
Speaker 1: regulating regulating the access to the beach and the use
Speaker 1: of the beach scenes and the control of the number
Speaker 1: of nets to be used. I mean, they really did try.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a problem of ignorance the issuers that although
Speaker 1: they were aware of the consequences of adding too many
Speaker 1: nets and drawing too much from the fishery. The issue
Speaker 1: became that the appropriators, the fishermen themselves, they don't have
Speaker 1: the autonomy to make an enforce the rules of the fishery.
Speaker 1: That was deprived of them, and so the institution was
Speaker 1: not able to sustain itself in the long term. So
Speaker 1: in all these cases, you know, no more of the
Speaker 1: three design principles actually characterized any of these cases, and
Speaker 1: so they were unable to solve the problems that they faced.
Speaker 1: There of course, all sort issues where they are viable
Speaker 1: but fragile common systems where you know, they have more
Speaker 1: of the principles in place, but they still lack all
Speaker 1: of them. So also in Sri Lanka there's a gal
Speaker 1: oil where boundaries and membership were clearly designated, where rules
Speaker 1: have been devised and monitored, where collective choice arenas have
Speaker 1: been set up, but they you know, did not have
Speaker 1: the autonomy and they do not have collect conflict resolution
Speaker 1: mechanisms in place, and so the institution is not as
Speaker 1: robust as it could be. Of course, when it comes
Speaker 1: to the Commons and existing institutions, existing fragile institutions exist
Speaker 1: in successful institutions, existing failures of institutions. That does not
Speaker 1: necessarily need to limit all imagination of possibilities, but it's
Speaker 1: good to be informed as to what has worked in
Speaker 1: the past and what hasn't. We can still imagine future scenarios,
Speaker 1: next peraments and how they might play out. But the
Speaker 1: point is, if we're trying to reinstate the Commons, we
Speaker 1: need to understand what makes them work, at least what
Speaker 1: has made them work in the past and in the present.
Speaker 1: More information of the Commons and also the potential of
Speaker 1: library economy. You can check out my videos on the
Speaker 1: Commons and the library economy on my channel YouTube dot
Speaker 1: com slash Aurism. You can also check out Eleanor Ostrom's
Speaker 1: book Governing the Commons, as well as a book called
Speaker 1: Eleanor Astrom's Rules for Radicals, which I haven't read yet,
Speaker 1: but I felt it was pretty good. If you like
Speaker 1: what I do, you'd like to support me, you could
Speaker 1: follow me on pitture dot com slash same true and
Speaker 1: on Twitter dot com slash underscore, same true. That's what
Speaker 1: I happened today. It could happen here. Peace, Yeah, welcome
Speaker 1: to make it happen here. A podcast about things falling
Speaker 1: apart and then maybe kind of putting them back together
Speaker 1: again sort of. This this This is This is a
Speaker 1: special episode about the thing that happened where a thing
Speaker 1: that happened is the Brazilian election. And with me to
Speaker 1: talk about this is Garrison Hello and James Hello. So
Speaker 1: I think I think people probably know by now Louis
Speaker 1: Nacio Lula is Silva, better known as Lula, has defeated JR.
Speaker 1: Bosonaro in a absolutely terrifying squeaker of a presidential election. Um.
Speaker 1: This is like, by far the closest election that Lula
Speaker 1: there is, a former two term president of Brazil, has
Speaker 1: ever won. Um. Part of this is a camp pain
Speaker 1: of last minute voter suppression that Bolsonaro own his supporters did,
Speaker 1: where like like basically like the Brazilian federal police started
Speaker 1: setting up like they set up fifty roadblocks to stop
Speaker 1: people in the low strongholds from voting. There's like the
Speaker 1: assaulted people. Um, it wound up not mattering and right now,
Speaker 1: as as a time of recording, which is uh one pm,
Speaker 1: one third pm Pacific on Halloween, Bolsonaro was missing in action.
Speaker 1: There's no like, no one's seen him. The only the
Speaker 1: only thing, the only sign of life that there has
Speaker 1: been from him is he unfollowed his wife. Amazing stuff.
Speaker 1: It's it sounds like he just locked himself in the
Speaker 1: presidential palace and turn and turn all all of the
Speaker 1: lights off. Yeah, he's he's missing and no nobody's seen
Speaker 1: or heard from him. Um. So by the time this
Speaker 1: episode comes out, there's like a small chance there's been
Speaker 1: a coup. There's like small chance he's died from COVID.
Speaker 1: I don't know, probably neither of those have happened. But
Speaker 1: you know, so Lula won his election like he won
Speaker 1: like like fifty point eight percent of the vote roughly.
Speaker 1: And okay, so there's a lot of voter suppression, but
Speaker 1: even voters suppression cannot explain why Lula, who won his
Speaker 1: last elections with respectively sixty one and sixty percent of
Speaker 1: the vote, was reduced to like fifty point eight percent
Speaker 1: this time. And okay, so that this begs two questions.
Speaker 1: Who is Luis Snasia Lula da Silva and how did
Speaker 1: we get to this election? So the first episode of
Speaker 1: this is going to be answering the first question, and
Speaker 1: the second episode is largely the second question. Okay, so
Speaker 1: who who actually is Lula? Lula is born in actually
Speaker 1: his birthday is a few days ago um to a
Speaker 1: desperately poor family in Brazil's northeast um and this family
Speaker 1: moves from the northeast to what became known as the
Speaker 1: ABC region of Brazil, which is Santa Andre San Bernard
Speaker 1: sent sorry Santo Andre sal Bernard who who can't say
Speaker 1: names of Brazil? Now? This is this is not a
Speaker 1: famous name, this is sal Bernado. Wait, are you conflating
Speaker 1: Brazil and Argentina, which are famously not the same country.
Speaker 1: Different languages is the thing. If this wasn't Spanish, I
Speaker 1: could do this and I'm gonna make it. I can
Speaker 1: make this claim here. All my pronunciations to this are
Speaker 1: based on my terrible knowledge of Spanish. The problem is
Speaker 1: Brazil famously speaks Portuguese, a language that is not Spanish.
Speaker 1: So yeah, but okay, so there there's there's things of
Speaker 1: the ABC region because there's three cities there that are
Speaker 1: abc UM as part of this sort of mass migration,
Speaker 1: which is is popularly remembered as like this mass migration
Speaker 1: of people from the northeast to sub Hollow, But the
Speaker 1: sort of thing actually that that that's the memory of
Speaker 1: the actualities that millions of people flow into sub ho Hollow,
Speaker 1: like from all across Brazil Um. The ABC region becomes
Speaker 1: the Brazil sort of industrial heartland. Like every story you
Speaker 1: read about this, we'll call it like Brazil's Detroit, And
Speaker 1: that's kind of true and kind of not true. Like
Speaker 1: I don't know, every everyone who writes about Brazil is like,
Speaker 1: how can we make this the US? And like god,
Speaker 1: fibida out of countries have their own realities. Yeah, and like, okay,
Speaker 1: like there is an extent to which Brazil is also
Speaker 1: like the ex slave colony thing, right, but no, like Brazil,
Speaker 1: Bazil is its own country. Um. However, come up, the
Speaker 1: ABC region becomes the core of Brazil's massive metalworking industry. Um.
Speaker 1: In this industry is just like from the fifties of
Speaker 1: the eighties, just like purely expanding. Um. The historian J. D.
Speaker 1: French knows that the ABC is poppy relation increased by
Speaker 1: eight percent from the So Lula arrives in the middle
Speaker 1: of a veritable industrial revolution. Um, this is going to
Speaker 1: end in one of history sort of great built industrial
Speaker 1: working classes. But he's there. That's kind of not what's happening.
Speaker 1: Or The other thing, as you mentioned bout this region
Speaker 1: is that when I say metal working, So there's the
Speaker 1: reason there's so many Detroit comparisons, is that this is
Speaker 1: this is a reason that is massively involved in Brazil's
Speaker 1: auto industry, which in this period is expanding it. This
Speaker 1: is very large. Um. I think I think I've actually
Speaker 1: talked about this in the Neo Liberalism episodes. Um a
Speaker 1: little bit. But yeah, so Lula like leaves school in
Speaker 1: fifth grade to basically find whatever work he can in
Speaker 1: the street. And this is another sort of very famous
Speaker 1: thing that everyone talks about about Lula Abalkio, Like he
Speaker 1: has like a grade school education, and that's like sort
Speaker 1: of true, Like it is true that he never like
Speaker 1: like graduate, like you know, he never went to school
Speaker 1: past like fifth grade. Mostly. I thought we'll get to
Speaker 1: some other stuff that he did later. Um, what happens
Speaker 1: basically is that his his mom is able to get
Speaker 1: him into this this metal this this government metal working
Speaker 1: sort of apprenticeship program that is teaching like young people
Speaker 1: how to do how to basically become skilled metal workers.
Speaker 1: And this also is an education, right, like you know,
Speaker 1: the people people in this there's there's a lot of
Speaker 1: very interesting sort of like theory stuff about this about
Speaker 1: how these people like are are also kind of worker intellectuals.
Speaker 1: Because in order to like be a metal worker and
Speaker 1: to do all this stuff, you have to know a
Speaker 1: ship ton of stuff. You have to know. You have
Speaker 1: to know a bunch of tactical stuff about how metal works.
Speaker 1: You have to know that you know, it's it's very
Speaker 1: highly skilled, very high like degree of knowledge you have
Speaker 1: to have. So you know, he he gets this kind
Speaker 1: of education. Um, and he becomes a very very good
Speaker 1: metal worker, and he's he's part of a a like
Speaker 1: a highly skilled and the academic literature will call it
Speaker 1: highly paid. Although like, okay, this is highly paid compared
Speaker 1: to like someone like someone who is a worker, but
Speaker 1: who's not like a metal work like one of the
Speaker 1: sort of skilled quote unquote metal workers. Um, they're not
Speaker 1: like these people aren't like lawyers right, like they're they're
Speaker 1: they're so closer to the actual sort of working class
Speaker 1: than you know, so somelm like people who are sort
Speaker 1: of like auxiliary parts of the ruling class. And he enters,
Speaker 1: you know, he enders the sort of manufacturing boom as
Speaker 1: part of what's called the Brazilian miracle. Well, okay, so
Speaker 1: he he's there a bit before the sort of Brazilian
Speaker 1: miracle starts. But there's this period of the militaryed katership
Speaker 1: for sakes power where they kind of like luck into
Speaker 1: a functioning economy. Although I should I should mention this now, Um, okay,
Speaker 1: So in this period in Brazil, like inflation being good
Speaker 1: and under control is inflation is like when inflations everything
Speaker 1: is considered fine and when it goes up from it's like,
Speaker 1: oh no, we've lost control of inflation and this this
Speaker 1: kind of like this is a survivable thing because people's
Speaker 1: wages are short of indexed to um like that their
Speaker 1: index to cost of living increases to some extent, which
Speaker 1: is the thing that like, yeah, it would never happen here. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess if if you do the kind
Speaker 1: of stuff these guys do, you can probably get some
Speaker 1: of this. But yeah, so, but the sort of interesting
Speaker 1: thing about what's happening here is you have a very
Speaker 1: large industrial working class, but it's not really very militant
Speaker 1: for most of the time. Lula's in it, except for
Speaker 1: sort of right around the military, like Cui, Lulas sees
Speaker 1: some of kind of like the old radicalism, like he
Speaker 1: he talks about like you know, like watching people like
Speaker 1: storming factories because they're on strike. Uh, the Brazilian working
Speaker 1: class does. There's a lot of fun stuff that they do.
Speaker 1: Like they do things like okay so that everyone will
Speaker 1: show up to a protest with like a bunch of
Speaker 1: like pockets full of barbles, and when when a calvar
Speaker 1: recharge starts to just roll the all rolling barbles down
Speaker 1: the street and the person fall. It's an o G
Speaker 1: Battle of Cable Street. Yeah, yeah, my absolute favorite one.
Speaker 1: This is just like like pure looty tune ship. Um,
Speaker 1: they do this thing where Okay, so they'll string piano
Speaker 1: wire up like between light posts and then they'll bait
Speaker 1: calvalry units the charging at them and then they run
Speaker 1: the thing and the guys will just get sucking close lock.
Speaker 1: That's so good. Yeah, that's pretty great. Horse cups You
Speaker 1: didn't in America but not no, no, no, no, well
Speaker 1: they you see them sometimes, Like I have seen some
Speaker 1: horse cops. Portland's horse cops only like stop existing a
Speaker 1: few years ago. Yeah. Yeah. In the UK of until
Speaker 1: very recently they used them to police protest. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was fowenty of people getting run over by horses
Speaker 1: in the States. Yeah yeah, they still do this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: fucking sucks there. Actually, Okay, I think the most famous
Speaker 1: police horse relatest story in the US is a Philly
Speaker 1: sports fan. I think it punching a police horse. What
Speaker 1: a city. Yeah. The most famous British police horse thing
Speaker 1: is that the horse humping the cop. Critical support to
Speaker 1: the Yeah, it's quickly copy the image into the chat
Speaker 1: so you can want to enjoy it. I'm okay, I'm
Speaker 1: glad that we've taken this episode in this direction. Oh my,
Speaker 1: holy sh it. That Oh my god, Okay, I thought
Speaker 1: it was graphic. Do you know what else will take
Speaker 1: a cop and bend it over and nope, alright, well
Speaker 1: promise that, Garrison. Here's some advertisements, and we're back with
Speaker 1: other things that won't scar my soul forever. Oh boy.
Speaker 1: Up until sort of five there there had been a
Speaker 1: kind of left wing government in Brazil and then the
Speaker 1: military q like just overthrows it. And the left is
Speaker 1: kind of just like annihilated from this. And it's not
Speaker 1: just from the pure political repression which forces like like
Speaker 1: all the communist parties are forced underground like um. But
Speaker 1: one of the one of the things, like one of
Speaker 1: the real things that sort of like really shatters the
Speaker 1: Brazilian left is that, like the coup happens and the left,
Speaker 1: you know, the left sort of noses the cue coming, right,
Speaker 1: but they expect that when the coup happens, there's going
Speaker 1: to be strikes and like the working class is gonna
Speaker 1: fight them and they're gonna beat it, and everyone kind
Speaker 1: of just like in the factories kind of just shrugs,
Speaker 1: and nothing happens and they just get rolled over. And
Speaker 1: this is the start of this period of sort of
Speaker 1: like you know, this kind of like the workers movement,
Speaker 1: like nothing is happening in there's some sort of radical
Speaker 1: student groups trying to do stuff, but like I know
Speaker 1: there's a Brazilian version of sixty eight, but mostly what
Speaker 1: happens there was like one factory gets occupied and then
Speaker 1: the army shows up with guns and they get owned
Speaker 1: and it's really grim, and you know you have these
Speaker 1: sort of like like tiny like actually, okay, you're these
Speaker 1: tiny Catholic Maoist groups who these Maoist student groups. Yeah yeah, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: we just straight through that. It's it's not um normal,
Speaker 1: totally normal. Yeah yeah. And then you know they're trying
Speaker 1: who tried to do like drill in certainty stuff, and
Speaker 1: the army just sort of like kills them all. Um,
Speaker 1: they're horribly destroyed. So for for almost a decade and
Speaker 1: a half, like you have a very deep politicized industrial politaria,
Speaker 1: and and Lula's part of this right like from from
Speaker 1: from like when he enters the workforce until like the
Speaker 1: late seventies, he is not political at all. Are they
Speaker 1: doing the thing under the dictatorship where they have like
Speaker 1: pet unions. I guess when it's like one mandated union
Speaker 1: for the industry. I was about to talk about this. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the Brazilian libor system. And the thing is, so
Speaker 1: this wasn't set up under this military sectatorship. It was
Speaker 1: kind of set up under like a previous one. But this, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's still sort of a thing. All of the unions
Speaker 1: have to register with the state, and when they're doing
Speaker 1: contract negotiations, right, they're not negotiating with the corporations, negotiating
Speaker 1: with the state, and so this means that like the
Speaker 1: state is setting wage rage. It's gonna become important later.
Speaker 1: But yeah, there's a really interesting sort of problem here
Speaker 1: because there's this entire class of basically sort of like
Speaker 1: government union guy who's like basically a bureaucrat and it's
Speaker 1: like really corrupt and yeah, well and and this is
Speaker 1: something like and like like a lot of people just
Speaker 1: hate them because like that, like you know, because because
Speaker 1: they are like literally what these people are are like
Speaker 1: they're a guy who's doing this job to get ahead,
Speaker 1: and then their job is to sort of like like
Speaker 1: you know, technically it's like mediate the class struggle, right,
Speaker 1: but like what that actually means is like make sure
Speaker 1: that like there isn't actually sort of like like make
Speaker 1: sure the union isn't actually sort of a source of
Speaker 1: class conflict. And you know this, this is this is
Speaker 1: the whole sort of thing behind this because for like
Speaker 1: still had this really really built and like labor movement,
Speaker 1: they had a bunch of anarchists, like the archics tractor
Speaker 1: over the government a couple of times, maybe these huge
Speaker 1: general strikes, there's the communist parties like a real thing,
Speaker 1: and then the government tries to bring all of like
Speaker 1: you know, okay, we're gonna bring all the unions under
Speaker 1: our control. And it's still also true that these are
Speaker 1: like they're still technically unions, so there are people who
Speaker 1: are sort of doing union organizing in them, right, like
Speaker 1: they still do some regular union stuff. And yeah, we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about this a bit more later, but there's
Speaker 1: I don't know, these unions are fucking weird, Like they're
Speaker 1: not like unions anywhere else have've ever seen. Yeah, But
Speaker 1: so okay, So the other thing, like lu Lula in
Speaker 1: this point, like it's a political right people people keep
Speaker 1: trying to talk to Hi about politics, and he's like,
Speaker 1: I just want to play soccer and light chase girls.
Speaker 1: And he talks about this like changing like it speeches
Speaker 1: a lot. But his brother, who's known as Frey Chico,
Speaker 1: is a Brazilian Communist Party miility for like his entire
Speaker 1: life and being being a PCB militant in like the
Speaker 1: cities and seventies, this is like life threatening. Uh, the
Speaker 1: party is outlawed. Everyone is so clandestine that like fried
Speaker 1: Chico's own wife doesn't know that he's a communist and
Speaker 1: finds out that he's a communist when he gets arrested,
Speaker 1: like it's it's this, this is this, this is like
Speaker 1: this is like the level of like clandestine shit that
Speaker 1: everyone that that that like you know, the sort of
Speaker 1: communist parties are working on under here um. But fres
Speaker 1: Chico is also like an open union activists and everyone
Speaker 1: knows he's like he's a leftist basically because you know,
Speaker 1: the even even sort of like the unions are sort
Speaker 1: of like split between like there's sort of left factions
Speaker 1: that are like trying to actually do union stuff, but
Speaker 1: like for towards sort of leftist goals, there are like
Speaker 1: more moderate people who are like bread and butter trade unionists.
Speaker 1: And then there's also just like a bunch of people
Speaker 1: who are like just the corruption faction. UM. But yeah,
Speaker 1: like Lula doesn't like Lula like doesn't care about the
Speaker 1: union at all. Like he's not even in the union
Speaker 1: until Free Chico, like his brother just like like literally
Speaker 1: just like drags him, kicking and screaming into running for
Speaker 1: an elected position in the union because I like he
Speaker 1: needed a guy to run on a slate, but he
Speaker 1: couldn't run himself because everyone knew he was a leftist.
Speaker 1: So he was like, Okay, I'm gonna your brother, you run.
Speaker 1: You're you're you're not like openly a leftist. You can
Speaker 1: actually win this, and this is you know, and then
Speaker 1: this works and he gets elected. And this is where
Speaker 1: Lula like learns politics um from the book Lula and
Speaker 1: his Politics of Cunning quote. Lula would have to master
Speaker 1: the mundane aspects of union life, including bureaucratic routines, budgets, services,
Speaker 1: and preparing union assemblies. Lula would also undergo a gradual
Speaker 1: politicization through relationships with fellow directors, union lawyers and staff,
Speaker 1: and activists central to the union's turbulent internal politics. Finally,
Speaker 1: Lula would need to learn about the repressive dimension of
Speaker 1: working class life under military rule, including close supervision and
Speaker 1: surveillance by police, employers and labor ministry officials. And what's
Speaker 1: interesting about this story is, like everyone around him when
Speaker 1: he joins his union, including basically his boss and the union,
Speaker 1: is a guy named Vidal who's a very powerful union leader. Um,
Speaker 1: like you know, his brother to Like everyone thinks he's
Speaker 1: going to be this sort of like compliance like obedient fingerhead.
Speaker 1: And instead what they have done is they have created
Speaker 1: arguably the greatest politician of the twenty first century. Um,
Speaker 1: what are the things that's important to note here is
Speaker 1: that like, okay, so, like the unions are are like
Speaker 1: fucked up, right, and everyone kind of says they're sucked up,
Speaker 1: these are still probably the most like like these are
Speaker 1: probably still the most competitive democratic collections that are happening
Speaker 1: in Brazil. Like Brazil technically has elections that there's these
Speaker 1: sort of like two official parties. So okay, so it's
Speaker 1: kind of weird that the military like is in power,
Speaker 1: but like they have the sort of veneer that they're
Speaker 1: not and theydentically they technically sometimes have a civilian president.
Speaker 1: They have these sort of like parties that are kind
Speaker 1: of real, but you know, the the union actually has
Speaker 1: like there are like leftist slates, there are conservative slaves.
Speaker 1: Like there there's actually sort of politics going on. And
Speaker 1: Lula is actually able to sort of like make his
Speaker 1: mark through through his abilities just like make friends with
Speaker 1: people on both the sort of like radical and moderate
Speaker 1: side of the union um union sort of political aisle.
Speaker 1: And this is because Lula, like Lula is just it's funny,
Speaker 1: he loves playing soccer, he loves just like dancing and
Speaker 1: hanging out. And this lets him like win his election
Speaker 1: slate like pretty easily because you know, she's she's just
Speaker 1: she's just very popular. So these are things that like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, like the other workers in the factory
Speaker 1: a lot of times don't care that much about union politics,
Speaker 1: but they do care about like that you care about
Speaker 1: soccer a lot. And so Lula was able to build
Speaker 1: a bunch of support and this lets him sort of
Speaker 1: easily take a position in a union system that, like
Speaker 1: I it's basically a miniature state. Like the unions have
Speaker 1: their own welfare programs, they have they have their own
Speaker 1: education system, and you know, this is part of the
Speaker 1: thing that people talking about Lula is completely uneducated. Like, no,
Speaker 1: it's not like he he spends a bunch of time
Speaker 1: like in classes that like the the the union like
Speaker 1: puts on basically like university and academic classes right, for
Speaker 1: for its workers and for other people sort of affiliated
Speaker 1: with him. So he spends a bunch and this is like,
Speaker 1: you know, part of where he'd learned sort of politics
Speaker 1: and where he large political economy is like is through
Speaker 1: the through these classes the union has and he sorry.
Speaker 1: The union also like you know I talked about, like
Speaker 1: they run welfare programs, right, So he's like he's like
Speaker 1: a social worker, right, trying trying to sort of like
Speaker 1: help workers and pensioners with his job. He gets this
Speaker 1: position that like everyone hates, like he has his position
Speaker 1: basically like running running there sort of like like welfare
Speaker 1: program and like nobody wants it, but he like does
Speaker 1: it and he doesn't really well. And this makes him
Speaker 1: really popular because he's the guy that, like, you know,
Speaker 1: if you're like a pensioner, right, like he's the guy
Speaker 1: you go to to figure out pension bullshit, and he's
Speaker 1: the guy you just go to in order to sort
Speaker 1: of get stuff done. And yeah, you know this means
Speaker 1: he's spending a bunch of time doing paperwork and like
Speaker 1: negotiating with government bureaucracy, and he this makes him a
Speaker 1: very very effective politician. Um, he's from Lula's politics to
Speaker 1: cutting again. But Lula also gained access to an even
Speaker 1: larger constituency at the union headquarters, a working class public sphere.
Speaker 1: Do you know how many people passed by the union daily,
Speaker 1: he asked a journalist in ninety nine, at minimum fift hundred.
Speaker 1: Those frequenting the union did so for many reasons, often
Speaker 1: for various sorts of assistance or sistencia, which I think
Speaker 1: is yeah, like government union assistant stuff, but also to
Speaker 1: complain about work, shoot the breeze, or catch up with friends.
Speaker 1: Some union directors often arrived late to the headquarters and
Speaker 1: we're always busy when they did the Gregarius Lula, by contrast,
Speaker 1: maintained an open door policy, and his office became a
Speaker 1: gathering point form break and file workers, factory activists, and
Speaker 1: fellow directors still linked to production. And this is everything
Speaker 1: that's sort of important about this is that like, okay,
Speaker 1: like once you reach like a certain position in the union,
Speaker 1: like you're just a full time a union guy. And
Speaker 1: so there's a lot of people who like join the
Speaker 1: union and become like union people because it means like
Speaker 1: it takes you off the shop floor. And there this
Speaker 1: you know the government does is deliberately right, because it means,
Speaker 1: you know, you're creating they're they're they're they're the thing
Speaker 1: that they're trying to do, create a certain of bureacratic
Speaker 1: area between the working class and like their union. But
Speaker 1: Lula's like still really connected to what's going on the
Speaker 1: shaft floor because he's just like talking to everyone all
Speaker 1: the time. And the product of this is that Lula
Speaker 1: is becomes a very very like he comes to trade union,
Speaker 1: it becomes a very very powerful one. He who rapidly
Speaker 1: becomes the president of his union after some like Vidal,
Speaker 1: who's like his boss had there's this whole thing where
Speaker 1: he's trying to stay in power. But he doesn't run
Speaker 1: for president of the union because of some complicated political maneuvering,
Speaker 1: and so Lula ends up as the head of the union.
Speaker 1: Fadells like it's fine, I'm still going to be a
Speaker 1: control here, and that's not what happens you you you
Speaker 1: have just you have just given the presidency to like
Speaker 1: like a a a genuinely truly singular like political figure. Um.
Speaker 1: But but there's there's something that's very very important about
Speaker 1: Lula that you need to understand to figure to like
Speaker 1: to understand anything that's about to happen here. And basically,
Speaker 1: Lula is not a communist. This this is this is
Speaker 1: very important. Um. He could not have done what he's
Speaker 1: about to do, which is, you know, become literally like
Speaker 1: the living symbol of one of the largest strike waves
Speaker 1: in Brazilian history. He could not have done this if
Speaker 1: he was a communist. The military, if he was a communist,
Speaker 1: military would have you know, tortured and possibly executed him
Speaker 1: like they've done with thousands of other communists. His brother
Speaker 1: Frey Chico, was kidnapped and tortured horribly by the military,
Speaker 1: although he like he will insist that he didn't have
Speaker 1: it as bad as like a lot of other people did,
Speaker 1: which is true, but also like they tortured the ship
Speaker 1: out of him and it was fucking horrific. And the
Speaker 1: fact that like every single person, like and the fact
Speaker 1: that every single fucking member of the military dictatorship was
Speaker 1: not fucking like taken out behind a shocking shed shot
Speaker 1: and had their like corpses fed to dogs. Is like
Speaker 1: genuinely one of the reasons why we're here right now.
Speaker 1: The stuff is awful. It is a theme of the podcast. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but what to do with dictated you know, and Lula
Speaker 1: Lula and she's wife eventually able to sort of get
Speaker 1: him released because he's not like a very high like
Speaker 1: he's in the PCB, like he's in the Communist Party
Speaker 1: like his brother like, but he's not like a high
Speaker 1: ranking guy. And you know, the sort of cruel irony
Speaker 1: of it is like they knew that he didn't know
Speaker 1: anything that they didn't already know, but they just tortured
Speaker 1: to share to him. Anyways. Um, but one of the
Speaker 1: important things that happens here is his brother like under torture,
Speaker 1: like insists that Lula is not a communist and like
Speaker 1: continues to insist this because he isn't and you know,
Speaker 1: and like people who are like that and and people
Speaker 1: in the moltitary chairship like believe this right because like
Speaker 1: the like they're you know, they have a really extensive
Speaker 1: sort of intelligence network like at this point that they've
Speaker 1: basically like they've they've basically destroyed the Brazilian Communist Party,
Speaker 1: and they've like captured and killed most of her cadre.
Speaker 1: And because he's not a communist, Lula is able to
Speaker 1: stay in the labor movement even if in the short term,
Speaker 1: after his brother gets the rest of he loses his
Speaker 1: job in the union because and he's able to do
Speaker 1: this because like beyond his brother, who like his brother
Speaker 1: has literally been like saying communist stuff at him for
Speaker 1: decades and he Lula has just been like, I don't
Speaker 1: care um, and like a couple of other people who's
Speaker 1: just quite kind of friends with like Lula, like he
Speaker 1: has no connection to the organized left, like he's he's
Speaker 1: not sort of like like he he's not like a
Speaker 1: leftist right like in in that sort of conventional sense
Speaker 1: like he's he's not tied to one of sort of
Speaker 1: the old left political factions. And this means that he
Speaker 1: can stand in as a kind of sort of labor
Speaker 1: leader that the more moderate fashions the military dictatorship have
Speaker 1: been looking for, which is this sort of like non
Speaker 1: communist like quote unquote genuine trade unionist and okay, so
Speaker 1: like talking about like a moderate faction of a military
Speaker 1: dictatorship is always kind of fraud because you know it's
Speaker 1: a military tatorship, but like, like all these people suck.
Speaker 1: It's also true that there were there were factions within
Speaker 1: the military tatorship who so there's a fashion called like
Speaker 1: the dungeon, which is like the people torturing all these
Speaker 1: people to death. There were other people in the military
Speaker 1: tatorship who are like this is really fucking ghost, Like,
Speaker 1: why are you guys doing this? Like this makes us
Speaker 1: look bad? Also why are you torturing these people? And
Speaker 1: those guys look at Lula and they they're they're willing
Speaker 1: to work with him because like what what what they
Speaker 1: think they're doing is creating this sort of like authentic
Speaker 1: non communist labor movement that will like work with them
Speaker 1: the stop communism like sort of like the a fl
Speaker 1: CIA like specifically talk about this like in the in
Speaker 1: the way that the a f l C i OH
Speaker 1: does in the US work work working is in the
Speaker 1: communist force. They they think that they can get Lula
Speaker 1: to do this, and Lula does a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: that like looks like collaboration to the sort of like
Speaker 1: surviving leftists around him. He develops like literally like personal
Speaker 1: relationships kind of friendship. It's not really friendships, but like
Speaker 1: the personal relationships and professional relationships members of the regime.
Speaker 1: And you know, again it like it looks like he's collaborating,
Speaker 1: but that's not, that's not that's not what's actually happening.
Speaker 1: What's actually happening is that he's holding these negotiations in
Speaker 1: order to sort of increase the power of the union
Speaker 1: and build this like safety network be like that. Because
Speaker 1: he has these personal relationships with people in the regime,
Speaker 1: it is that he's not going to get disappeared and
Speaker 1: his people are going to get disappeared. And this had
Speaker 1: happened to a lot of even a lot of sort
Speaker 1: of other regular union activists who didn't have this kind
Speaker 1: of connection just like get vanished. And the people are
Speaker 1: able to build connections with like keep him from being
Speaker 1: like vanished and keep his trade unis and being slaughtered.
Speaker 1: And you know, like the people in like in the
Speaker 1: military kidership like really think that like Okay, they've they've
Speaker 1: they've gained you know, like they they're they're getting an
Speaker 1: ally and defeating communism. Uh. The thing they are actually doing, uh,
Speaker 1: it's progressing their own grave Diggers UM and okay you
Speaker 1: know before yes, you know who else is creating their
Speaker 1: own g Grave Diggers Garrison U. The advertising industrial complex. Yes,
Speaker 1: they have produced us Weakened dream unbelievable. Well in the meantime,
Speaker 1: So inside inside the New Batman game, you play as
Speaker 1: the four sidekicks after Batman UM allegedly dies. And the
Speaker 1: weirdest thing is that they because three of the side
Speaker 1: Kicks don't usually have capes. They you know, they don't
Speaker 1: do any kind of massive gliding feature for city traversal. Instead,
Speaker 1: you have a really slow, bad cycle and then you
Speaker 1: have an almost spider Man like grappling hook and it's
Speaker 1: it locks onto anything around you. It's really confusing. Are
Speaker 1: we back? Okay? And we're back? We should we should
Speaker 1: leave in like just like two minutes of Batman talking
Speaker 1: was completely bowed. So okay. There's the ever thing about
Speaker 1: Lula just as a person is that fundamentally he's a negotiator.
Speaker 1: Like his style was almost like Biden esque in the
Speaker 1: sense of like Biden sort of beliefs like talking to
Speaker 1: everyone across the political etcetera, etcetera. Except like, okay, the
Speaker 1: key difference here is that Lula is actually charismatic. Um hm, yeah,
Speaker 1: but like you know he will just sit there like
Speaker 1: with people across the aisle and like talk things out
Speaker 1: and negotia with them. He'll talk with employers, will talk
Speaker 1: with members of the military dictatorship. But you know there
Speaker 1: were differences that like, Okay, so Biden is like is
Speaker 1: a concert politician, right, Like when he when he talks
Speaker 1: about like talking with people across the aisle, he means
Speaker 1: like strum Thurman. Right when Lula is talking with people,
Speaker 1: He's talking with everyone, like he like literally everyone who
Speaker 1: runs in the class. He's talking with random people at
Speaker 1: like union halls and meetings, at picket lines, at like
Speaker 1: soccer games, at bars. And because he spends all of
Speaker 1: this time talking people constantly, he gains this just like
Speaker 1: incredible ability to read crowds and like Taylor message messages
Speaker 1: for them and like figure out what sort of like
Speaker 1: like what what sort of things will work with whatever
Speaker 1: person is saying. And he gains this like absolutely incredible
Speaker 1: ability to sort of charm people, and it works with people,
Speaker 1: even on people who fucking hate him. Like there are
Speaker 1: there are like journalists who will spend literally their entire
Speaker 1: careers trying to destroy him and who. But when they
Speaker 1: asked about him, they're like, well, I mean like him
Speaker 1: with a person and he's really charming, like he's a
Speaker 1: nice guy. And but you know, so part part of
Speaker 1: what he's doing in this period this this is this
Speaker 1: is this is the late seventies um going into the earliest.
Speaker 1: He's playing this like this very specific like game of
Speaker 1: respectability politics of like not directly criticizing the government and
Speaker 1: like so that there are these like there are these
Speaker 1: strikes that start happening because okay, so it turns out
Speaker 1: that the military government has been trying to get inflation,
Speaker 1: like the whole sort of economic system they've been doing
Speaker 1: starts to fall apart, and inflation starts to come back,
Speaker 1: and they start doing these like measures of combat inflation.
Speaker 1: And the unions so originally no one believed them, but
Speaker 1: the Union has like has like like they have like
Speaker 1: a think tank kind of right, They have like a
Speaker 1: social sort of like center with a bunch of sort
Speaker 1: of like sociologists and economists, and they figure out that
Speaker 1: the Union has been lying and that's why that the
Speaker 1: government has been lying about inflation, like how bad inflation is.
Speaker 1: And then the I M. F in the late seventies
Speaker 1: confirms is that that that the military tatnership has been
Speaker 1: lying about how bad is inflation is by doing subsistical stuff.
Speaker 1: And this matters because they've been setting costs of living
Speaker 1: adjustments by a lower level of inflation. That that that
Speaker 1: that was actually happening. And this pisses everyone the funk
Speaker 1: off because they're like, literally the government is robbing us,
Speaker 1: like they've been lying behad bad inflation is like like
Speaker 1: third and it's it's this is like this is like
Speaker 1: a thirty percent income drop right for these workers. And
Speaker 1: this pisses everyone the funk off. And suddenly there's these
Speaker 1: massive like protests. There were like hundreds of thousands of people,
Speaker 1: like a hundred thousand people wi show up to a
Speaker 1: soccer stadium as part of a strike. Like but you know,
Speaker 1: Lula has to make sure that everyone doesn't get murdered,
Speaker 1: and so he does these things like he'll like he'll
Speaker 1: avoids directly criticizing the government. He has this whole thing
Speaker 1: about how like he wants togotiate directly with the employers.
Speaker 1: He like kicks out like left to student groups. You
Speaker 1: are like trying to like distribute like communist students, you're
Speaker 1: like trying to distribute pampas at the rallies because he's
Speaker 1: trying to make sure that the strikers aren't seen as
Speaker 1: like communist subversives and instead is sort of like they're
Speaker 1: seen as like good, upstanding, hard working citizens. And yeah,
Speaker 1: here's here's from the book of Given the diverse outlooks.
Speaker 1: Lula represented himself as a thoughtful, righteous man who disparaged
Speaker 1: riotous behavior as unworthy and counterproductive like all honest workers.
Speaker 1: He called for the strikers to be disciplined and counseled
Speaker 1: against classes with the police. He continually frames their fight
Speaker 1: as one with the companies, not the government or the policeman.
Speaker 1: And this like works because any more radical action probably
Speaker 1: is going to get everyone killed. And I mean like
Speaker 1: that when it's actually going on, there's like like they're
Speaker 1: they're getting buzzed by helicopters. There's like fucking army trucks everywhere. Um,
Speaker 1: but you know, he manages not to get everyone killed.
Speaker 1: And the result of this is that Lula immediately becomes
Speaker 1: the most famous worker in Brazil. He's like on TV,
Speaker 1: he's leading strikes everywhere, Like there's these massive rallies, and
Speaker 1: you know, there's some really like there's some really like
Speaker 1: genuinely adorable stuff that's happening, where like when he's giving
Speaker 1: his first speech to one of these rallies, it's like
Speaker 1: it's fucking raining. The soccer stadium is just mud, Like
Speaker 1: his podium is literally sinking into the bodies. He's trying
Speaker 1: to speak, and this is like the first time he's
Speaker 1: that are the crowd this loud? And he's nervous and
Speaker 1: people start leaving and they're doing this. One of every
Speaker 1: things I learned about this is how old, how old
Speaker 1: the crowd mike is. So they're doing this thing that
Speaker 1: becomes own as the crowd mike, where like you don't
Speaker 1: have a microphone or you can't reach every one, so
Speaker 1: each so okay, So some of the speaker says like
Speaker 1: a sentence and then each person in the crowd says
Speaker 1: a sentence and it just sort of moves back through
Speaker 1: the crowd up from everyone repeating it. And she's trying
Speaker 1: to give the speech is not going great, and like
Speaker 1: the workers in the front row start like yelling like, hey,
Speaker 1: you can do this, Lula, don't worry, you got this,
Speaker 1: And then he like and then and then this is
Speaker 1: like absolutely adorable moment and then he sort of like
Speaker 1: like you know, gets better at it, and like by
Speaker 1: like the second one of these like people are just
Speaker 1: like in love with him. He is unbelievably popular, refusing
Speaker 1: an incredible speaker. He's like you know, and it's very easy.
Speaker 1: And you see writing about this at the time that
Speaker 1: are like that look at him and are like, well,
Speaker 1: this guy like this guy is literally like people people
Speaker 1: are like calling him literally the messiah of the working
Speaker 1: class right, Like this is the kind of sort of
Speaker 1: like like a claim that he has. Like there are
Speaker 1: they're after one of his speeches, like the entire crowd
Speaker 1: literally carries him on their shoulders from one end of
Speaker 1: the soccer stadium to the other, Like there are like
Speaker 1: like there there there are people like walking on stage
Speaker 1: and calling him like father and saying him Mary's like
Speaker 1: it's it's fucking wild um, but you know, but like
Speaker 1: and it's and like when when when when like sort
Speaker 1: of rich and educated people look at this, They're like, oh,
Speaker 1: these people are like blindly obedient to him. They're like
Speaker 1: they have this client patient relationship. He's like manipulating the
Speaker 1: masses and that's not what's happening like that, that's just
Speaker 1: just just not what's happening. Like he actually, like the
Speaker 1: union votes against him like a couple of times, like
Speaker 1: because because she's she's trying to do negotiations, right, and
Speaker 1: there's there's a there's this thing where if I'm understanding
Speaker 1: the story right, I think what happened is that he's
Speaker 1: trying to like negotiate like people coming back to works,
Speaker 1: negotiations can continue. It's like a show of good faith
Speaker 1: or whatever, and the unions like, funck no, we're not
Speaker 1: going back to work, and just like votes him down
Speaker 1: and so like like this kind of stuff happens right
Speaker 1: like that, you know, like people respect him enormously and
Speaker 1: he he is like literally in some sense, he's like
Speaker 1: the avatar of the industrial working class. Like working class
Speaker 1: people look at him and like they see themselves in him,
Speaker 1: and they see they see the power that he's able
Speaker 1: to sort of how many people he's around there, and
Speaker 1: they're like, oh, ship, the union is strong, Like we
Speaker 1: are strong. We can actually sort of fight back. But
Speaker 1: it's not like a sort of client patront thing. He's
Speaker 1: it's just like he's at the head of a worker's
Speaker 1: movement that is a force in and of itself and
Speaker 1: has its own agency and capacity to act, and Lula
Speaker 1: has to like negotiate with that and like he has
Speaker 1: to sort of like rebuild their trust after he you know,
Speaker 1: is taking a sort of more moderate line. He he
Speaker 1: eventually gets like arrested in nineteen eighty, although he gets
Speaker 1: released after like a month, and from there he gets
Speaker 1: to work founding like every important leftist organization like the
Speaker 1: last forty years. Um So in aitte eighty he's one
Speaker 1: of the people who found the Workers Party. In eighty three,
Speaker 1: he founds the CUT or to the English translation of it,
Speaker 1: it's a unified Workers Central, which like to this day
Speaker 1: is Brazil's like national trade Union Center. Like it's like
Speaker 1: it's like their big union federation. And this is illegal
Speaker 1: at the time, but you just like fuck it, we're
Speaker 1: doing anyways. Like these people are losing the the the
Speaker 1: tatorship losing control. Um in the CUT like plays a
Speaker 1: huge role in how the dictatorship loses power. Um so
Speaker 1: does the PT did something that Like the PT, the
Speaker 1: PT like as a party are powerful enough that like
Speaker 1: they were involved in drafting the constitution. He's there for
Speaker 1: the founding the land this workers movement, which is a
Speaker 1: social movement that like sees his land that's not being
Speaker 1: used in leadership, is it the workers. He's heavily involved
Speaker 1: in the campaign to start of force the military out
Speaker 1: of power and you know as a military tatorship like
Speaker 1: kind of falls apart in democracy, like kind of like
Speaker 1: fully returns to Brazil and nine he goes like full
Speaker 1: inte electoral politics. But the problem is that like he's
Speaker 1: he's he's kind of too early for his politics. Um.
Speaker 1: He he spends like the entire nineties just like getting
Speaker 1: his ass handed to him in elections over and over again.
Speaker 1: And part of what's happening, you know, part of but
Speaker 1: part of literally what he's doing in the nineties is rebuilt.
Speaker 1: It's like he's like rebuilding the entire Latin American left,
Speaker 1: like from ground zero after the fall of the Berlin
Speaker 1: Wall Wall in the sort of like global defeated left
Speaker 1: in the eighties. Um. He's one of the founders of
Speaker 1: the Foremost of South Paulo, which is the first of
Speaker 1: this series, a sort of like meetings of leftists in
Speaker 1: Latin America and the Caribbean, which is trying to figure
Speaker 1: out like okay, like hey, what what what is socialism
Speaker 1: now that like the Berlin Wall is down and everything
Speaker 1: is sort of going to ship and in that's a
Speaker 1: really bleak prospect. Like neoliberalism is completely ascended. Nationalism has
Speaker 1: destroyed socialism, Like every sort of former social states following apart,
Speaker 1: like capitalist are running rapping across the globe, like literally,
Speaker 1: like entire communist parties are just like disbanding and all
Speaker 1: of the sort of cadre are becoming liberals. But you know,
Speaker 1: as the nineties go on and people actually have to
Speaker 1: sort of like live under this, they increasingly realize say,
Speaker 1: it sucks ass and that I you know what what
Speaker 1: living under Nail Elizabism means is like I m F
Speaker 1: structural adjustments and like like the economy, like there there's
Speaker 1: there's the Asian market collapse. There's a bunch of other
Speaker 1: market collapses. And you know, as after the epetits to
Speaker 1: sort of go on the like the first like part
Speaker 1: of the left to really go on the offensive after
Speaker 1: their uprising in the left kind of starts to put
Speaker 1: usself back together. And this left, like I I think,
Speaker 1: like this version of left it's kind of dead now.
Speaker 1: But like I think there are people who are old
Speaker 1: enough to remember it or like remember sort of like
Speaker 1: what it used to be. Like the slogan of this
Speaker 1: sort of whole like like left, Like one of their
Speaker 1: big slogans is another world as Possible, which is sort
Speaker 1: of like the anti, like the anti it's a response
Speaker 1: to like thatchers there is no alternative. It's like another
Speaker 1: world as possible. Is this is the sort of like
Speaker 1: alter globalization left, Like this is a left that does
Speaker 1: the Battle of Seattle, and Lula is there for like
Speaker 1: all of it, Like after Seattle, he helped after the
Speaker 1: Battle of Seattle, like he helps found the World Social Forum,
Speaker 1: which is just like giant meeting place for like internet
Speaker 1: social movements. Um. And you know, and so you know,
Speaker 1: through through this whole period, like the Left is sort
Speaker 1: of gathering is strength everywhere like well okay in Latin America.
Speaker 1: And also like I mean, it isn't a lot of
Speaker 1: places right like in India. Um, it's like Indonesia, there's
Speaker 1: always in the US, although the US has this problem
Speaker 1: that the lefton happens and yeah that's a ship show. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's amazing how that this movement existed almost everywhere else
Speaker 1: but not to my knowledge is as significantly here. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean we we had we we had Seattle, right,
Speaker 1: but then when that levn't happened, that the unions like
Speaker 1: pulled out of doing any direct action ship and then
Speaker 1: kind everything kind of got eight by the the anti
Speaker 1: war movement, which and then and then the Green Scare. Yeah,
Speaker 1: then that led to ad Busters doing and the stuff
Speaker 1: that occupied Wall Street and then yeah, and that's okay.
Speaker 1: I would say this. I think there's I think there's
Speaker 1: a there's a break here, Like I think I think
Speaker 1: occupy is when that kind of politics died, because when
Speaker 1: when occupies there under And this is the sort of
Speaker 1: iron of this and we'll get you next episode, is that,
Speaker 1: like you could, there's a good argument that the place
Speaker 1: that that politics actually died was in Brazil when the
Speaker 1: Workers Party fucking like tear gas and rubber bulleted the
Speaker 1: absolute ship out of a bunch of protesters who had
Speaker 1: been who were like the Brazilian wave of sort of
Speaker 1: like that series of protests, and they crushed the ship
Speaker 1: out of them. It is horrible, Like this is one
Speaker 1: of this is like one of like my foundationals and
Speaker 1: political memories is like fucking tanks rolling down the street,
Speaker 1: people shooting rubber bullets at people like seven year olds
Speaker 1: getting tear gassed. It is a it is a fucking
Speaker 1: ship show. But and and two thousand too, like you know,
Speaker 1: it's not that we have we haven't gotten there yet.
Speaker 1: Like even the sort of like most cynical trotsky I
Speaker 1: like can't imagine the fucking pig rolling tanks through the favelas,
Speaker 1: which is what they're gonna be doing in twelve years.
Speaker 1: And Britain we had that was when I can't requit
Speaker 1: re member when Tony Black there's nightty seven, But like
Speaker 1: the British Tony Black, right like represented this other vision
Speaker 1: for the last well and everything is like people like
Speaker 1: like one of the thoset everything. That's like people talk
Speaker 1: about Obama as being like the end of the same wave,
Speaker 1: except Obama is sort of like to like even more
Speaker 1: so than any of the other politicians. What we're talking
Speaker 1: about is sort of like recuperation of this right, Like
Speaker 1: he's the guy who takes out energy and is like yeah,
Speaker 1: and and and okay, so we're we're gonna get into
Speaker 1: like the negative side of all of this ship next episode.
Speaker 1: But like in some sense Lula does play a similar
Speaker 1: role in Brazil, and we will get there, but right now,
Speaker 1: you know, Okay, So there's another part of this that
Speaker 1: like doesn't get talked about that much, which is that
Speaker 1: in the nearly two thousand's in Latin America, it's not
Speaker 1: just that like the left is winning elections, Like there
Speaker 1: are open revolutions going on, Like I mean, there's there's
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of them. There's a like like arguably
Speaker 1: like the last communist revolution like ever happens in uh
Speaker 1: like the last sort of like the last gas of
Speaker 1: the classical workers whom that happens in Argentina in twous one,
Speaker 1: there's this huge revolt against the I M F and
Speaker 1: Austarian Like this is this is the last time like
Speaker 1: in world history that like people occupy factories and then
Speaker 1: attempt to like like take them over and use them
Speaker 1: as a way of seizing the metic production. People occupy
Speaker 1: factories in Bosnian has A Go VI and like fourteen.
Speaker 1: But like by that point, like like those guys are
Speaker 1: occupying factories and then having like occupy meetings in them,
Speaker 1: they're not like attempting to sort of like sees production. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know, like like these there's are real revolutions, right,
Speaker 1: Like there's there's there's there's a coup against Hugo Travis
Speaker 1: that gets overturned by another popular revolution. Um there's the
Speaker 1: water and gas wars in Bolivia, which culminate in like
Speaker 1: literally deep like the capital is like entirely blockaded off
Speaker 1: from the rest of the country and surrounded by roadblocks
Speaker 1: and the like five. The government is like fucking imploding.
Speaker 1: The military has fallen apart, like you know, like they
Speaker 1: like and this this is this is this is the
Speaker 1: sort of chain of events that brings even rallies into power,
Speaker 1: but like they very nearly destroyed the entire believing governments.
Speaker 1: The cycle sort of ends with the Wahaka uprising in
Speaker 1: two thousand and six. Were like like the people of
Speaker 1: Wahaka just fucking take the city and hold it for
Speaker 1: like like a few months and like running through the
Speaker 1: democratic assemblies and then like the army shows up and
Speaker 1: they get yeah. But like you know, like like there
Speaker 1: there is a point like that that was like I think,
Speaker 1: like like in my lifetime, like the workers of a
Speaker 1: city fucking just took it over. This this stuff that
Speaker 1: like you know, like I think now we're we kind
Speaker 1: of like we have problems, Like I think most people
Speaker 1: have sort of forgotten about this stuff like this, this
Speaker 1: was a moment in which like, like revolution and the
Speaker 1: destruction of capitalism was on the table. Yeah, and like
Speaker 1: I did a lot of it. I'm not sure I
Speaker 1: lived in Venezuela for some of this time briefly, but
Speaker 1: it felt very possible in a way that like it
Speaker 1: probably hasn't since, right, Like it was fast slating to see, like,
Speaker 1: and the cooperation between those countries was very real, right,
Speaker 1: Like obviously Cuban Cuban Cuban doctors are sucking everywhere, right
Speaker 1: if you travel resource saying there, But it was fascinating
Speaker 1: to see like people from here coming here and they
Speaker 1: think they had that Sal Paolo Forum right where they
Speaker 1: would where these ideas would be exchanged and it Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that was very formative for me. A genuinely felt
Speaker 1: like it was possible for something as a result of this,
Speaker 1: like Google ish I m F policy that we'd had
Speaker 1: for the previous twenty years. People like, no, funk this,
Speaker 1: We're doing it our way and yet didn't tell Okay,
Speaker 1: but this is this is this is what's really weird
Speaker 1: about Lula, because Lula is running into dozen too, and
Speaker 1: he's watching all of this happen, and his strategy, his
Speaker 1: response to this is basically the analysis because okay, so
Speaker 1: she spent the entire nineties lose running letters campaign and
Speaker 1: losing right, and his strategy in two dozen two is
Speaker 1: he's going to move the PT the Workers Party to
Speaker 1: the right, both of hers a messaging end in policy,
Speaker 1: so it's not to sort of like scare voters. And
Speaker 1: he finally convinces the rest of the PT to do
Speaker 1: something he's been advocating for for like decades, which is
Speaker 1: allying with sort of like liberal or conservative like non
Speaker 1: leftist parties, which they do in this election. And we're
Speaker 1: going to see how that goes later because oh boy,
Speaker 1: but you know, okay, so like why why why why
Speaker 1: are they sort of doing this. There's a few reasons.
Speaker 1: Partially it's because Lula has been like losing elections and
Speaker 1: being like, okay, we have to do something different. Partially
Speaker 1: it's because the PC is a product of the collapse
Speaker 1: of like, okay, the PT like in the two thousands,
Speaker 1: like the base that had formed that party is basically collapsed,
Speaker 1: right that the PT is like it it's core constituencies
Speaker 1: are sort of like leftist groups. There's like like left
Speaker 1: wing Catholic groups and the sort of like the giant
Speaker 1: sort of like trade union stuff that, like the giant
Speaker 1: workers troupment that Lula is a part of, but but
Speaker 1: he doesn't too, Like the Catholic Church has swung back
Speaker 1: to the right. Like the sort of the sort of
Speaker 1: left Catholic people are on the retreat. There's very few
Speaker 1: of them left. Um, there's what we're gonna talking about
Speaker 1: this more later. But the sort of giant industrial unions
Speaker 1: that like Lula have been ahead of like and that
Speaker 1: you know, Lula's career and the PT itself comes from,
Speaker 1: have been shattered by sort of like the by by
Speaker 1: the industrialization and the collapse and sort of Brazil's industrial economy.
Speaker 1: And the product of this is that with without its
Speaker 1: sort of social basis, like Lula, KU's losing elections. So
Speaker 1: he goes, okay, so it's solution to this. And the
Speaker 1: PC understands this right, Like they're they're aware of the
Speaker 1: fact that like part of what's happening with them is
Speaker 1: that like they've they've you know, they're they're losing parts
Speaker 1: of their working class base because that that working class
Speaker 1: literally doesn't exist anymore. They're gaining a bunch of sort
Speaker 1: of middle class like leftist activists, but they need to
Speaker 1: find a way to sort of broughten their appeal. And
Speaker 1: so like he promises, like openly gives us like speech
Speaker 1: about how he's not going to do like a rupture
Speaker 1: with the economy, which is what those party of compaigning
Speaker 1: on because you know, the ptr leftist right, the whole
Speaker 1: point of another world is possible is we don't have
Speaker 1: to deliver a capitalist anymore. Lula is like no, no, no, no, no, guys,
Speaker 1: hold on, hold on, I did I didn't mean that, like,
Speaker 1: we're not gonna do a rupture. And instead what Lula
Speaker 1: does is pledges to and like stays in the Brazil's
Speaker 1: commitments to the i m F, including like fucking insane
Speaker 1: ship like maintaining primary budget surpluses, which is nuts, and
Speaker 1: you know, and he instead of like yeah, yeah, he
Speaker 1: stays in the end. And you know, so Argentina famously,
Speaker 1: like in Argentina, solution to the sort of uprisings that
Speaker 1: are happening is that they default on our death in
Speaker 1: the I m F. And they're like fuck, you we're
Speaker 1: not paying, and Lula's like, now we're paying. Like it's fine,
Speaker 1: We'll just keep paying it. And like the PT itself
Speaker 1: is like what the funk is going on? Like what
Speaker 1: what is happening here? Why is this happening here? Like
Speaker 1: why why is he doing this? And you know, Lula
Speaker 1: is just like, well, okay, we need we need to
Speaker 1: take power, we need to do this, take power, and
Speaker 1: so we does. And weirdly, in the middle of this cycle,
Speaker 1: sort of like the resurrection of the left, he's running
Speaker 1: increasingly to the right. And you know, okay. Part of
Speaker 1: what's happening here is that there's an inherent problem that
Speaker 1: leftist governments have when they take over the state, especially
Speaker 1: when they take over a capitalist state by winning an election,
Speaker 1: which is that if you are in control of the government, right,
Speaker 1: if you control the state, your job is now to
Speaker 1: keep the economy running. And in theory this isn't incompatible
Speaker 1: with leftist police. But if you stop, if you stop
Speaker 1: and think about what this actually means for a second,
Speaker 1: keeping the economy running means keeping the economy growing. An
Speaker 1: economic growth right means that capitalists have to keep making
Speaker 1: more money every year than they did last year like that.
Speaker 1: That's what economic growth is, right, And this is a
Speaker 1: real problem if you are a leftist taking power, because
Speaker 1: if you don't do this, you will a lose elections
Speaker 1: because regular people will get piste off because when capitalists
Speaker 1: don't make more money, they start firing people and be
Speaker 1: the bourgeoisie who only ever grudgingly accepts the left is
Speaker 1: sort of like a legitimate power in the first place.
Speaker 1: If you're if you're if they're if they're not getting
Speaker 1: more money every single year, they will overthrow you. And
Speaker 1: you know, Lula knows this, right. But the solution to
Speaker 1: this problem that these they sort of like pink tie
Speaker 1: governments come to is basically to let a faction of
Speaker 1: the sort of national portions either sort of national capitalist
Speaker 1: class of people who are like capitalists domestically like they
Speaker 1: let them into this product of sort of like not
Speaker 1: this nationalist developmental project. And so what this means essentially
Speaker 1: is you are like you are buying you are buying
Speaker 1: a section of the of the ruling class off right.
Speaker 1: You are giving them ass to state contracts. You're doing
Speaker 1: state investments in infrastructure that helps them like expand things
Speaker 1: like mining, so they can you know, take some of
Speaker 1: the profits from it. You're giving them preferential access to
Speaker 1: government contracts and change, we sort of supporting you. And
Speaker 1: there's a lot of ways this can look like the
Speaker 1: m A s and Bolivia, for example, starts bringing these
Speaker 1: elits directly into the party with the sort of developmentalist
Speaker 1: faction UM. In Brazil, it looks like an ally into
Speaker 1: something called the Centro, which is like crow, sorry, my
Speaker 1: Portuguese is not good, um, which is this like this
Speaker 1: sort of like every present force in Brazilian politics, which
Speaker 1: is like the corruption faction. It's like this this series
Speaker 1: of sort of parties that are like kind of loosely knit,
Speaker 1: you kind of vote together, but you don't like they
Speaker 1: don't their parties nominally have ideology, but like their ideology
Speaker 1: is I am I am like a local political like
Speaker 1: powerful political person, and you are going to pay me
Speaker 1: or you will not be able to pass literally any
Speaker 1: bill ever. And okay, so they have to form an
Speaker 1: alliance with sort of these parties. And the other thing
Speaker 1: they start doing is that they are just literally but
Speaker 1: like they just literally start buying people off. And this
Speaker 1: leads to sort of like a bunch of corruption scandals
Speaker 1: that we're gonna get you next episode. Um, but will
Speaker 1: While Lula is in office, this seems like it's working
Speaker 1: really well. Um, He's able to sort of pay off
Speaker 1: the bourgeoisie and fund these social welfare programs for the
Speaker 1: Brazilian working class. And this has a massive impact, right
Speaker 1: Like this list something like twenty million people out of poverty.
Speaker 1: And okay and I, I and other people will argue
Speaker 1: about what it means to like lift people out of
Speaker 1: poverty and how poor they still are, but you know,
Speaker 1: it is true. These people have a massive increase in
Speaker 1: quality of life, like people are getting running water in
Speaker 1: their homes for the first time, like people are having
Speaker 1: electricity for the first time. Um, it's a's also with
Speaker 1: pointing out that Lula, who is white, spends a fucking
Speaker 1: ship ton of time fighting like fighting against racism and
Speaker 1: fighting for educational job opportunities for black people, even though okay,
Speaker 1: there's like an asterisk next to that that has to
Speaker 1: do with the police. That yeah, it's it's fucking oh boy,
Speaker 1: it is worse than you can possibly imagine. Um, who
Speaker 1: you know, like he's trying to end hunger. He has
Speaker 1: this very famous program called the Bosa Familia, which is
Speaker 1: basically like if you're pouring off and you agree to
Speaker 1: send your kids to school and get the vaccinating, like
Speaker 1: the government will just give you money. And you know
Speaker 1: there's also a Mike Roland part of this, which is
Speaker 1: my dot dot dot. Uh, this won't go oh yeah,
Speaker 1: nothing bad will happen from the Brazilian government attempting to
Speaker 1: get a bunch of people to take micro loans. Um, this,
Speaker 1: this does not lead us into fascism at all. But
Speaker 1: you know, okay, like this works, right, Lula is able
Speaker 1: to grow the economy, like Brazil's economic growth this periods
Speaker 1: like seven percent, which is sucking nuts, like year on year.
Speaker 1: Um he leaves office, was I've seen it, ultimately said,
Speaker 1: it's like an eighty five or ninety rating. He's unbelievably
Speaker 1: popular and you know, so every everything like looks good
Speaker 1: right kind of From inside Brazil, it looks like the
Speaker 1: PT has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of everyone. They've
Speaker 1: been like they've been a sucessful social democratic party and
Speaker 1: that they've lifted amongst people out of poverty. There's like
Speaker 1: people who are alive because like who are alive today
Speaker 1: who would not be because the PT was in power,
Speaker 1: right and and you know, like there are people who
Speaker 1: don't starve, there are people who don't go hungry, there
Speaker 1: are people who have opportunities, like educational opportunities to opportunity
Speaker 1: too themsels the first time ever. And it's a successful
Speaker 1: capitalist government too, because again seven percent year round your growth,
Speaker 1: right like this is fucking nuts, like this is this
Speaker 1: is a kind of economic growth that is like unimaginable
Speaker 1: in in most parts of the world. However, Comma, if
Speaker 1: this at all actually worked, we wouldn't be here right
Speaker 1: now with I, you know, the fascist president going into
Speaker 1: like hiding. And so next episodes, you know, Mark, I've
Speaker 1: been to I've been talking about grave diggers sort of
Speaker 1: this episode right there's there's a famous part of the
Speaker 1: Communist manifesto Ory Talks where where Marks talks about like
Speaker 1: capital like capitals abroducing its own grave diggers. And capitalism
Speaker 1: has never done that, right like like to to to
Speaker 1: this day right now, capitalism has as yet to produce
Speaker 1: his own grave diggers. Social democracy has Bruce's own grave diggers.
Speaker 1: And every single fucking country anyone's ever done it. And
Speaker 1: the next episode, in next episode, we're going to watch
Speaker 1: the pt Bruce's own grave diggers, and we're going to
Speaker 1: watch the attempt to bury Louise and Nascia, Lula da
Speaker 1: Silva and the rest of the Brazilian working class of live.
Speaker 1: Oh good, you going to do a Bolsonara update because
Speaker 1: he's apparently left the building. Oh shit, okay, yeah, Bolsonara
Speaker 1: upweate Bolsonara has left the building. Hold on breaking breaking news.
Speaker 1: He left the palace finally, Yeah, in a convoy of
Speaker 1: black SUVs. Ope, he's expected to break the silence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I'm looking at Benjamin Fogel, who's pretty good on this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's expected to break the silence, but not to congratulate
Speaker 1: Lula on winning. Jesus Christ, is I have lost? Good bye? Okay?
Speaker 1: So yeah, there might be a if. I don't know
Speaker 1: what we're gonna do, if there's a coup in between
Speaker 1: in between this episode and the next episode, hopefully not.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, I want one thing that,
Speaker 1: like I will say and that I think we were
Speaker 1: gonn talking a bit about next episode. Is it like
Speaker 1: part of what's happening right now that's very important is
Speaker 1: that Biden is an office in the US. And mean, Okay,
Speaker 1: So the Brazilian military is a long history of doing cous,
Speaker 1: but usually when they're doing coups, they're doing cous with
Speaker 1: the backing of the US government and Biden like just
Speaker 1: on a personal level fucking hates Bulsonaro, and there is
Speaker 1: a there was a very real chance that this is
Speaker 1: a significant factor in why we haven't seen a coup.
Speaker 1: Is literally the president of the United States personally does
Speaker 1: not like the vast president of Brazil. And this is
Speaker 1: a fucking batshit state of affairs, right, Like, the fact
Speaker 1: that like the like personal inclinations of the President of
Speaker 1: the United States has as much of an impact on
Speaker 1: like the politics of an entire country is nuts. And
Speaker 1: this happened in the other direction for a while, right,
Speaker 1: Like it's I guess not personally, just the personal inclination
Speaker 1: of the president in that case. Yeah, well there's weird
Speaker 1: things here too, because like, like Lulu was reirdly friendly
Speaker 1: with it with Bush, which I think is why part
Speaker 1: of why he never liked, never tried to cut him,
Speaker 1: who called him the devil? Yeah because friends, Right, But
Speaker 1: Travis gives the speech about how like everyone has the
Speaker 1: road like at the at the social form gives how
Speaker 1: everyone's existing in their own like conditions. So you can't expect, like,
Speaker 1: you know, you can't expect Lula to be Travis, you
Speaker 1: can't expect Chaves to be Castro like stuff like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's it's weird. Hopefully Willsonarow fucking leaves office. If not,
Speaker 1: I don't know. But either way, I don't know. Things
Speaker 1: are the history of Brazil dream this period is also
Speaker 1: kind of bleak, but after this period is way the
Speaker 1: funk bleaker. So yeah, we're gonna talk about that tomorrow,
Speaker 1: and yeah, we'll update you. If there is a couph
Speaker 1: God is dead and the woke left have killed him,
Speaker 1: Welcome to it could happen here the podcast where we
Speaker 1: celebrate the destruction of JayR Bolsonaro and the concept of
Speaker 1: Christianity and the human soul, both of which happened recently
Speaker 1: in Brazil. As as far as I understand from skimming
Speaker 1: the news on Twitter. Um, how's everybody else doing today?
Speaker 1: Utterly exhausted? But you know, such as such as such
Speaker 1: as such as the world without Christ destroyed. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: what that's what the woke mob did. Speaking of woke mobs,
Speaker 1: what are we what are we doing? Today. What are
Speaker 1: we talking about? We are talking more about the Brazilian elections.
Speaker 1: I guess we should start with our with our perennial
Speaker 1: update of about what seems to be happening there right now.
Speaker 1: So okay, currently is what eleven am specific time recording
Speaker 1: this on? Yeah that sounds right, Yeah, yeah that one.
Speaker 1: So as of right now, Bolson like still so he
Speaker 1: he's appeared, but he still hasn't conceded the election. Um hasn't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And okay, so the other thing that's been going on
Speaker 1: is that there's been Okay, one of the sort of
Speaker 1: perennial Boston Bolson row things is that he has a
Speaker 1: bunch of support among a bunch of sort of like
Speaker 1: like a bunch of different sort of like kinds of truckers.
Speaker 1: And there's been a bunch of this before. He's been
Speaker 1: setting up a bunch of barricades. I okay, from from
Speaker 1: talking to people on the ground and from what I've
Speaker 1: seen from it, I I don't know, it's hard to
Speaker 1: get It's hard to gauge like how serious these like,
Speaker 1: I mean blockades. I've seen videos of some that involve
Speaker 1: several dozen vehicles. Yeah, I mean, they have a lot
Speaker 1: of vehicles, like as as the thing. Okay, so the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court has ordered the police to like clear the barricades,
Speaker 1: and espect I can tell they're kind of just getting
Speaker 1: their asses kicked, like they're not really resisting like particularly hard.
Speaker 1: And so I I don't know if this is like yeah,
Speaker 1: it's I mean, it's the kind of thing that it
Speaker 1: will present perhaps a model for other people in the future,
Speaker 1: if there's any efficacy to it. It certainly could be
Speaker 1: part of an effective coup, like locking down the roads
Speaker 1: in this way. Like this is how like the against
Speaker 1: end started. For example, if both Signaro and his in
Speaker 1: the military don't both go in a dent right now, basically,
Speaker 1: um than than what these trekkers are doing will not
Speaker 1: be it much more than like an annoyance. You know.
Speaker 1: It's the same thing as with with January six. If
Speaker 1: Trump when they breached the capital, if Trump had declared
Speaker 1: I'm remaining president, everybody rise up, well, then a whole
Speaker 1: thing might have happened. Um, but he didn't, and so
Speaker 1: the momentum that might have kind of led into a
Speaker 1: more thorough takeover of the government fizzled out with a
Speaker 1: bunch of guys getting you know, into fist fights with
Speaker 1: the Capitol police and ship. Yeah, and and there's an
Speaker 1: aspect I think to a sort of important of like
Speaker 1: so these are like Bolson Row like this whole sort
Speaker 1: of like Trucker's blockade thing like this has been going
Speaker 1: on in various forms for like the entire time he's
Speaker 1: been in office, and like he sort of turned them
Speaker 1: into these motorcides that he would do. But they're really
Speaker 1: weird in that. Like, Okay, so if they are blocking roads,
Speaker 1: but a lot of it is kind of pure spectacle.
Speaker 1: At there's this whole wave of sort of right wing
Speaker 1: candidates like like basically but there's there's a whole wings
Speaker 1: with the right wing politicians who like got their start
Speaker 1: from like doing Instagram videos from like or like TikTok's
Speaker 1: like ship like whatever, like basically like from these blockades.
Speaker 1: So like, I don't know, they don't they don't seem
Speaker 1: to be like as of right now, I don't think
Speaker 1: they're like an incredibly serious fighting force. But you know,
Speaker 1: I mean it's not good and this is happening. Um,
Speaker 1: it's also not good that the police was like initially
Speaker 1: cooperating with them, and that the police set up their
Speaker 1: own roadblocks to some people voting. So I don't know,
Speaker 1: the situation is not good, but it's not as bad
Speaker 1: as it could be. And yeah, and I you know,
Speaker 1: I want to reiterate that, like the US has recognized
Speaker 1: that Lula has won the election, which I think makes
Speaker 1: it like infinitely harder. Yes, the fact that and this
Speaker 1: is this is one of those things when people on
Speaker 1: the left talk about like is there a harm reduction
Speaker 1: point and voting, Well, this his harm reduction, right, because
Speaker 1: if Trump had been in office, he would have backed
Speaker 1: Bolson Yarrow and Lula would be in prison again, and uh,
Speaker 1: there would be absolutely no hope for stemming the destruction
Speaker 1: of the rainforest. Not that things could still be a nightmare.
Speaker 1: And don't get me wrong, but we've we've at least
Speaker 1: avoided the most obvious way things could have been a disaster. Yeah,
Speaker 1: although I do want to point out that the Obama
Speaker 1: administration had a huge role in like this entire ship.
Speaker 1: It should be fair. The administration I don't think was
Speaker 1: trying to put Bosonari own power. They were trying to
Speaker 1: put the neelible rules in power. But they definitely we'll
Speaker 1: get into that next episode. But they definitely helped get
Speaker 1: us here. No, I mean that's true, and it also
Speaker 1: follows in the continually building story that like Biden's actually
Speaker 1: a much better precedent than Barack Obama. Yeah, low bar,
Speaker 1: but I mean indibly low bar, because is Barack Obama
Speaker 1: led directly to Donald Trump for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 1: There you are, this is this is a weird world
Speaker 1: that we live in. Yeah, and it's it's also like
Speaker 1: people are now starting you know, rightfully, so I know
Speaker 1: we're gonna be talking about a bunch of funked up
Speaker 1: stuff about Lula Um, most recently kind of bringing up
Speaker 1: his very bad takes on Ukraine. But it's also like
Speaker 1: I don't care. Like, obviously, I think I would always
Speaker 1: like for people to have, if they're going to have
Speaker 1: a representative democracy, better leaders. But at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, like the rainforest being destroyed at the rate
Speaker 1: it's being destroyed as an existential, existential threat to all
Speaker 1: life on Earth, and Lula has a proven track record
Speaker 1: of reducing defores station in the Amazon, So like what
Speaker 1: I like, I don't care that he has a bad
Speaker 1: take on you. I just don't like it. It doesn't
Speaker 1: matter really, Yeah, yeah, I like I saw, I saw
Speaker 1: I saw articles that were like Lula like supports democracy
Speaker 1: in Brazil but supports authoritarianism Abra. It's like, I guys,
Speaker 1: shut up, like holy shit, Jesus Christ, like I can
Speaker 1: I if I go back to two tho, like seventeen,
Speaker 1: I can find all of you like writing pulled fucking
Speaker 1: probos and now our articles, so like shut up. So okay,
Speaker 1: So let's get to how everything went to ship. So
Speaker 1: the last episode we sort of left the pt like
Speaker 1: writing high. Lula's out with like a like approve of rating.
Speaker 1: He's done like an economic miracle. He's pulled one of
Speaker 1: people out of poverty. I And you know, if things
Speaker 1: that continued like that, we wouldn't be here right now.
Speaker 1: So obviously something happens. And to understand what happens, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: we have to do some materialism. Um okay, so bear
Speaker 1: with me through the materialism. I promise we're going to
Speaker 1: get to a bunch of like absolutely horrific crimes against humanity.
Speaker 1: But first we needed you a bit of my love.
Speaker 1: Crimes against humanity. Yeah, yeah, there it's there. There are
Speaker 1: lots of criming. They're there. It's oh boy, I'm already hard. Wait,
Speaker 1: maybe I shouldn't have said it that way, moving, moving
Speaker 1: swiftly on. So okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna quote here
Speaker 1: from one of the sort of more famous marks quotes
Speaker 1: for mation through beare uh. That is genuinely a very
Speaker 1: good way of understanding history, which is, men make their
Speaker 1: own history, but they do not make it as they
Speaker 1: please do. They do not make it under self selective circumstances,
Speaker 1: but under circumstances are existing, already given and transmitted from
Speaker 1: the past. So okay, what what what are the circumstances
Speaker 1: that like two thousand two, Lula is inheriting um Lula's
Speaker 1: sort of social democratic plan is able to sort of
Speaker 1: grow the economy and also pay off the ruling class
Speaker 1: to be able to stay in power at the same
Speaker 1: time because of something called the commodity boom um. A
Speaker 1: commodity boom broadly is just like it's a large spike
Speaker 1: across the board in the prices of commodities over a
Speaker 1: sort of period of time. We're we're using this sort
Speaker 1: of like mainstream bourgeois definition of commodity, which is like
Speaker 1: primary commodities and it's stuff you can like pick up
Speaker 1: off the ground, dig up or harvest. So it's things
Speaker 1: like soybeans, like copper, iron, horses, lead, um, condoms. Yes,
Speaker 1: we understand what commodities are. Yes, the look brazil condom tree.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I got nothing. So okay, Lula, Lula
Speaker 1: like takes office and leaves power like almost exactly perfectly
Speaker 1: to take to take advantage of the peak of the
Speaker 1: commodity boom. Right, Lula comes into power. Well, okay, so
Speaker 1: you wouldn't see us in two election he takes obviously
Speaker 1: ausn't three. Um the commodity boom, according to a Cambridge
Speaker 1: to Cambridge is a handbook of primary commodities in the
Speaker 1: global economy, took off a two thousand four and ended
Speaker 1: in about two thousand fourteen. But it's slowing by ten
Speaker 1: just eleven ish and Lula exits office and two doesn't
Speaker 1: tend to the two term limit, which means he never
Speaker 1: has to deal with the consequences of the downturn. And
Speaker 1: let's stop here for a second. How do term limits
Speaker 1: work in the Brazilian system, because it's not the same
Speaker 1: as here here, Like a term limit means you get
Speaker 1: your two as president and then you're done. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: I I Okay, so the way I think it works,
Speaker 1: and I could be wrong about this, but I'm sure
Speaker 1: the way it works. Okay, So you can have two
Speaker 1: terms and then you can't run again in a row.
Speaker 1: But if if like someone else comes in, you can
Speaker 1: then run again after that. It's just that you can
Speaker 1: only do two in a row. I mean, I'm happy
Speaker 1: that he's beaten Bolson Naro, but that is a very
Speaker 1: silly way to do it. Yeah. Well, and I will
Speaker 1: say something about this is something about Lula that like,
Speaker 1: I think kind of infuriates a lot of the people
Speaker 1: who like don't like him politically and want to sort
Speaker 1: of screaming. But his authoritarianism or whatever, like he he
Speaker 1: was always like like mostly really scrupulous about the sort
Speaker 1: of like democratic norm stuff. Like he a lot of
Speaker 1: other sort of like pink tied leaders in the same position.
Speaker 1: Like this is actually how even Morallies originally gets in trouble,
Speaker 1: is that he tries to seek a third term and
Speaker 1: Lula it's just like not I'm out, I'm fuck it, like,
Speaker 1: which is which is good. Yeah, I mean it kind
Speaker 1: of like on the one hand and sore in theoretical terms,
Speaker 1: this is sort of like good for Brazilian democracy, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: In practical terms, it's kind of a disaster. I mean
Speaker 1: it's it's good because I think that it's always good
Speaker 1: when popular leaders acknowledge like absolute limits. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean the timing wasn't ideal. Yeah, and you know it.
Speaker 1: But you know, okay, so like the but the reason
Speaker 1: that he's able to sort of like you know, like
Speaker 1: if he if he if like if the constitution had
Speaker 1: allow him to run for a third term, he would
Speaker 1: have just like like he would have clabbored everyone. There's
Speaker 1: there's just not even like any remote competition to him.
Speaker 1: And the reason is able to do this again, it's
Speaker 1: like boom, guy he got he got like ten percent
Speaker 1: less of the vote this time. I mean, yeah, but
Speaker 1: what was that? Yeah, Okay, like this election was like
Speaker 1: really close. You talk about this most recent one back then? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: lu Lula back then like literally unstoppable political, very very
Speaker 1: popular at this point. Yeah. But but this is because
Speaker 1: of the commodity boom, and we need to in order
Speaker 1: to understand what is going to happen to the PT,
Speaker 1: we need to understand why the commodity will happen in
Speaker 1: the first place, Um, this turns out to be very important.
Speaker 1: There's there's a lot of causes technically that have to
Speaker 1: do with a lot of complicated macroeconomic stuff. The single
Speaker 1: most important cause, UM, for us, and I think generally
Speaker 1: the one that is like is credited with the reason
Speaker 1: that these commodity prices are increasing is the skyrocketing growth
Speaker 1: of the Chinese economy in two thousands, um. And I
Speaker 1: mean when I say is sky rockey and growth like
Speaker 1: we are talking like double digit GDP increases every year.
Speaker 1: This is when they have that Olympics where they have
Speaker 1: all the drummers, and you have that Newsweek article about
Speaker 1: how scary China is. Maybe it's um, yes, and and
Speaker 1: you know, and the sort of the massive increase industrial
Speaker 1: production like they are the CCP is like like Chinese
Speaker 1: industrializing on a scale that is I think like almost
Speaker 1: here that you want imaginable. And this means, you know,
Speaker 1: there's an enormous increase in demand for primary commodities. But
Speaker 1: this boom was only sustainable as long as the Chinese
Speaker 1: economy can maintain something like double digit GDP growth. But
Speaker 1: the problem is after she has in eight the Chinese
Speaker 1: economy starts to slow and sort of in response to this,
Speaker 1: and she does nine, the CCP does like one of
Speaker 1: the largest stimulus projects ever and they spend four trillion
Speaker 1: R and B on like infrastructure and welfare programs to
Speaker 1: stave off a recession. And and it works. But you know,
Speaker 1: like they this is this is like the largest like
Speaker 1: stimulus program ever and it can't really keep the economy
Speaker 1: growing like ever ever since two ten every single year
Speaker 1: well okay, I excluding the weird rebound stuff in one,
Speaker 1: but like like every every single year, like youar on
Speaker 1: your growth or the rate of growth of the Chinese
Speaker 1: economy has been decreasing, right, And okay, well the commodity
Speaker 1: boom you know, is produced by by feeling, you know,
Speaker 1: by by increased Chinese demand. But okay, what happens but
Speaker 1: when that you know isn't true? Um, but but you know, okay,
Speaker 1: so when in the two in the two thousand's like this,
Speaker 1: this is great. These are the sort of material conditions
Speaker 1: that make loopless like politics possible. Right, you have enormous
Speaker 1: economic growth and it bring and this economic growth is
Speaker 1: happening in sectors, like in a very important sectors to
Speaker 1: presuli an economy to the extent that is able to
Speaker 1: provide a revenue, a stable revenue base for the state
Speaker 1: that allows it to fund welfare programs like and pay
Speaker 1: off the bourgeoisie, which is you know, this is sort
Speaker 1: of like like papering over this sort of like fundamental
Speaker 1: contradiction of of of of the pt S base, right,
Speaker 1: which that they have they have to, like, they have
Speaker 1: to keep the economy running, so they have they have
Speaker 1: to pay off a bunch of sort of like incredibly
Speaker 1: corrupt dudes, and also just sort of like Brazilian capitalists,
Speaker 1: they also are trying to sort of dough the welfare programs.
Speaker 1: But you know, the commodity collapses and suddenly there's only
Speaker 1: enough money to either pay the capitalists or pay the
Speaker 1: workers and not both, and the project becomes to collapse.
Speaker 1: And and this this happens across Latin America, um like
Speaker 1: like I would make the argument that like the end
Speaker 1: of the commodity boom, like is the reaper that came
Speaker 1: from the Latin American left, it is at least as important,
Speaker 1: if not more so, in the collapse of the sort
Speaker 1: of the pink tide over over the course of the
Speaker 1: dozen tends. Like then the actual CIA, Like the CIA
Speaker 1: is very heavily involved in this, but the commodity boom
Speaker 1: just sort of like just nuking all of these economies
Speaker 1: like coming to an end like that. That is an
Speaker 1: enormously important, uh sort of like like element of this
Speaker 1: entire story. And there's all there's a there's another thing
Speaker 1: that we should note, which is that there's a problem
Speaker 1: with organizing your economy to be sort of like in
Speaker 1: a way that's reliant on sort of like primary commodity
Speaker 1: like export production. A Handbook of Primary Commodities and the
Speaker 1: Global Economy specifically notes quote Brazil significance and coffee, cotton,
Speaker 1: iron ore, sugar, and tobacco, and Chile has a dominant
Speaker 1: exporter of coffee. So okay, Brazil exports like eleven percent
Speaker 1: of the world's cotton, twenty percent of the world's iron
Speaker 1: oreft of its coffee, it's sugar, and eighteen percent of
Speaker 1: it's tobacco um and also has an enormous cattle industry,
Speaker 1: has got like a bunch of soybean farming, which is
Speaker 1: actually really important because it turns out as trying to
Speaker 1: get it turns people into into into soy boys. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It also makes soy sauce, which is are are very
Speaker 1: important for it. I mean more importantly are reserves of
Speaker 1: of beta coc energy would be disastrously low if if
Speaker 1: we didn't have Brazilian so So thank you JayR. Bolsaaro
Speaker 1: for keeping the soy flowing. Yeah, well, I mean this
Speaker 1: this is sort of like like this is a joke,
Speaker 1: like this is this is sort of the issue with this, right,
Speaker 1: Like okay, so politically this is a there's also a
Speaker 1: massive timber industry which has been literally destroying the entire planet.
Speaker 1: But like, okay, so like you just thinking, if you
Speaker 1: know anything about sugar, coffee, cottinent tobacco, you know those
Speaker 1: are slavery crops, and you know, like these are these
Speaker 1: are like the primary exports of a plantation economy, and
Speaker 1: the people who run those kind of like like economies,
Speaker 1: the people who are like those plantation owners or like
Speaker 1: the scariest people who have ever lived anywhere, like at
Speaker 1: any time on Earth. And you know, in Brazil, these
Speaker 1: people have been in power for five years and unfortunately
Speaker 1: this is like a big part of what sort of
Speaker 1: los economic miracle is resting on and and and this
Speaker 1: this isn't really like a base that produce of socialism,
Speaker 1: like if your economic base is relying on these like
Speaker 1: unbelievably psychotic racist like planter oligarchs, like you're economic based
Speaker 1: something that creates fascism. However, Comma, Robert, do you know
Speaker 1: what else produces fascism? UM? The products and services that
Speaker 1: support this podcast? Ding ding ding ding ding that some
Speaker 1: of them, I guess art fascism just directly so true. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the Gold the Gold people probably would be would be
Speaker 1: the main example of the UM. But we also are
Speaker 1: sponsored by big fascism dot org. Calm, goshh it, I don't,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't just roll the fucking ants. Ah,
Speaker 1: we're back, boy. That was a good ad pivot. I
Speaker 1: hope everybody is happy, Chris. Why don't you continue talking
Speaker 1: about Lula? Yeah, so speaking of fascism, but doo doo,
Speaker 1: doo do do, I was doing a yeah not not
Speaker 1: not well, this is going great. It's hard to hard
Speaker 1: to We'll we'll have Daniel fix that up in post. Yeah. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: so speaking of creating fascism yet, let's talk about that
Speaker 1: time Lulu invaded Haiti. Al Right, well, okay, to be
Speaker 1: fair whoms among us hasn't invaded Haiti. This is true.
Speaker 1: That's true. I've never InVID Haiti. However, the US and
Speaker 1: Canada also and the UK that is more what I
Speaker 1: was saying. Okay, like it's yeah, so okay. So in
Speaker 1: two thousand four, a CIA backed coup, I said, Haiti's
Speaker 1: democratically elected leftist presidents Jane bachid aristide and initially okay,
Speaker 1: So the initial sort of occupation force a sent in
Speaker 1: by the U N is a US is like an American,
Speaker 1: French and Canadian force um. And they're sent in like
Speaker 1: ostensibly under the sort of guys of like restoring stability
Speaker 1: or whatever, um. Because when I think about who can
Speaker 1: make Haiti stable, it's France in the United States. Yeah,
Speaker 1: partners stability and Canada. Now glad you guys, are you know,
Speaker 1: getting getting involved in in your big brothers uh crimes
Speaker 1: against humanity? I'm wondering for the Canadian stuff. How how
Speaker 1: do they ship all all of all of the mounties
Speaker 1: all the way to Haiti? Okay, so they took their
Speaker 1: horses over the water, garrison built the land bridge. Yeah
Speaker 1: you know, okay, So but the thing about this force,
Speaker 1: right is that like okay, so even to like the
Speaker 1: most casual observer, having literally France in the US and
Speaker 1: also Canada, which is like it's just the US, but
Speaker 1: there's also a French part of it, like literally weird
Speaker 1: fucking sausage soup on their damn French fries. Like like
Speaker 1: the optics of these people just militarily occupying Haiti is
Speaker 1: really bad. Um, so okay, you want to trying to
Speaker 1: figure out like a permanent force. And initially Lula like
Speaker 1: opposes Brazil getting involved in this, which is good, but
Speaker 1: that would make sense when I think about change, When
Speaker 1: I think about whether or not Brazil should be involved
Speaker 1: in places, Haiti would not be the top of my list.
Speaker 1: This is always this is always just like a really
Speaker 1: sad thing of sort of like just like the history
Speaker 1: of Latin America of like how many countries like, oh
Speaker 1: their existence to Haiti over and over and over again,
Speaker 1: like sending them troops and ships and weapons, and then
Speaker 1: every single one of these countries are like, ah, fuck
Speaker 1: you Haiti. So Lula like it's basically Lola becomes convinced
Speaker 1: that like this is this is like his big opportunity
Speaker 1: to like build the influence of Brazil and the international
Speaker 1: stage and so Brazil just like takes over the occupation
Speaker 1: or the auspices of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti,
Speaker 1: which has the like utterly impronounceable acronym minished or something.
Speaker 1: God damn it, guys, you know how to do an acronym.
Speaker 1: You have enough money, Jesus, you would think. However, Comma, no,
Speaker 1: it's this bullshit and okay, So apparently this is part
Speaker 1: of a plan to try to get US and French
Speaker 1: support for a bid to get Brazil a permanency in
Speaker 1: the UN Security Council. If you google who is currently
Speaker 1: on the UN Security Council, you will see how this went,
Speaker 1: which is to say, it did not work and ship
Speaker 1: starts going horrifically badly almost immediately. Um basically like at
Speaker 1: the outside of the occupation, Brazilian chiefs and Haiti launched
Speaker 1: an attack on a quote gang leader. And note, by
Speaker 1: the way here the terminology that he's used to describe
Speaker 1: this operation and the people, the people that the fighting
Speaker 1: is exactly the same way as the paramilitary forces in
Speaker 1: Haiti are described like right now by the U S
Speaker 1: and the u N. As the US tries to stage
Speaker 1: another invasion, this time with the backing of Mexico is
Speaker 1: nominally leftist president. A'm low so uh yeah, real sort
Speaker 1: of legacy of people who Americans think are leftists doing
Speaker 1: imperialism and Haiti. Good job, everyone, well everybody does a
Speaker 1: little bit of imperialism and Haiti, you know, okay, as
Speaker 1: a treat I mean, this is the thing, right right,
Speaker 1: every every single country in Latin America is bound and
Speaker 1: determined to prove that you actually cannot do I contrary
Speaker 1: to contrary sort of popular opinion about this, you actually
Speaker 1: can't do social democracy without imperialism. And every single time
Speaker 1: someone tries to do a social democracy they have to
Speaker 1: invade Haiti. It's just sort of like it's it's, it's, it's, it's,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's in the contract here, okay. And so
Speaker 1: they they the the un the sort of light And
Speaker 1: by the way, I should point out that the u
Speaker 1: N Force is commanded by a Brazilian general, like the
Speaker 1: entire basically wants the Brazilians take over the It's commanded
Speaker 1: by Brazilian generals the entire time. Um, and they seem nice, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So they go after this guy and they fired twenty
Speaker 1: two thousand rounds of ammunition into basically just like our
Speaker 1: apartment buildings. UM. To this day, nobody knows how many
Speaker 1: people they killed, but from my winners reports, we know
Speaker 1: they killed babies, they killed children, they killed pregnant women.
Speaker 1: It is it is Vietnam ship. It is absolutely awful. Um.
Speaker 1: Augusta Helano, who I guess the Heleno, I don't know
Speaker 1: how us name. He's the guy who leads this operation.
Speaker 1: Becomes the head of Bolsonnaro's Institutional Security Bureau. Um here here,
Speaker 1: here's a headline from PODA three sixty from last week. Quote.
Speaker 1: It is not possible to admit the return of the
Speaker 1: Red Gang, says Hellano. And by the Red Gang he
Speaker 1: means Lula. He's calling Lula communist. And this is fine
Speaker 1: and good from a guy who again is the head
Speaker 1: of the Institutional Security Bureau. Um. All right, this guy
Speaker 1: like sucks so much. Um. When you were retiring two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven, Helano defended this is from Bruter's And when
Speaker 1: he retired in two thousand eleven, Helano defended Brazil's sixty
Speaker 1: four military dictatorship as a bulwark against the communist quoted
Speaker 1: the communization of the country and Okay, so like we
Speaker 1: we can say that as as much as sort of
Speaker 1: Brazil's like fascism his home grown, and this is absolutely true,
Speaker 1: they're also just like eating the assend if you pose boomerang,
Speaker 1: because all of the fascism that they're about to do
Speaker 1: is exported Dehiti before it comes back. Um, here's some wriuters.
Speaker 1: This is talking about Bolsonaro's cabinet, his proposed his proposed
Speaker 1: defense minister, Former General Fernando Alvarezi Silva, served under Helano
Speaker 1: as a as an operations chief. Bolsonardo's incoming infrastructure minister,
Speaker 1: Tarcisio free TOAs was a senior UN military engineer in Haiti,
Speaker 1: arriving shortly after Hellano left in two thousand five. Retired
Speaker 1: General Carlos Alberto does Santa Cruz, Brazil's next government minister,
Speaker 1: led UN troops in the Caribbean nation two seven. All
Speaker 1: of those guys, by the way that this was written
Speaker 1: before the election, Um, all of those guys took office,
Speaker 1: uh to Fully two of of Bolsonaro's secretaries of government
Speaker 1: were part of this occupation. So yeah, this this obviously
Speaker 1: it went great for Lula, Like yeah, okay, a good job.
Speaker 1: You you you you sent to logic colonial troops to
Speaker 1: occupy Haiti and then all of the generals came home
Speaker 1: and we're like, let's fucking do fascism here too. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in this episode, which we're talking a lot about
Speaker 1: sort of the Brazilian fascism because you know, this is
Speaker 1: a britil episode, but I don't want to minimize like
Speaker 1: what this did to Haiti, where like to this day,
Speaker 1: Lula is like fucking despised um for you know, like
Speaker 1: betraying the Haitian people and fucking you puy in the
Speaker 1: country with troops. Like there's there's this whole thing where
Speaker 1: like he Lula goes to Haiti and he has this
Speaker 1: whole thing about how like he has He's playing like
Speaker 1: a soccer match and he's like, Okay, we're gonna show
Speaker 1: the world there's an alternative to bullets. And meanwhile, this
Speaker 1: soccer stadium is literally surrounded by the by the Brazilian
Speaker 1: army and it's oh boy, um, I love I love
Speaker 1: showing the world there's I mean, there is an alternative
Speaker 1: to bullets. And it's just threatening people with your guns
Speaker 1: because they know you've shot enough people that you'll use
Speaker 1: them if and drones too. By the way, this is
Speaker 1: this is where this is where the UN learns how
Speaker 1: to do drone warfare. Um. The everything is happening here
Speaker 1: is this is this occupation is where the UN starts
Speaker 1: to like fight quote like hybrid wars for the first time,
Speaker 1: you know, the like the wars that they're that they're
Speaker 1: doing these sort of peacekeeping operations quote unquote, Uh, they're
Speaker 1: starting they starting to do kind of insurgency ship where
Speaker 1: like they animate can be mixed in with the population,
Speaker 1: and you know that they kill a ship ton of people.
Speaker 1: There is rampant rape and sexual assault because it turns
Speaker 1: out that when you when you send troops to another
Speaker 1: country to occupy it, this is what happens. Um. And
Speaker 1: when when when when this force eventually pulls out in
Speaker 1: Shent seventeen, they just like leave a ship ton of
Speaker 1: fither of those babies behind because the people who you know,
Speaker 1: did all this ship like fuck it, We're just gonna leave,
Speaker 1: like leave the children behind. Um, I think most famously. Okay,
Speaker 1: so there's there's a giant earthquake in Haiti and justn't
Speaker 1: ten and this leads to this like enormous sort of
Speaker 1: redoubling of the occupation and troops are brought in from
Speaker 1: other parts of the world, including there's a contisition from Nepaul.
Speaker 1: And the results of this is that definitely Haiti seems
Speaker 1: like a place Nepalese soldiers. This is. This is, by
Speaker 1: the way, like this this is like the new revolutionary
Speaker 1: government in Nepal that is like finally defeated the monarchy
Speaker 1: after like god decades. It's like we all looked at
Speaker 1: the British Empire and we're like, well, that's clearly fucked up.
Speaker 1: But what if we did it in a decentralized way, right,
Speaker 1: Like what if what if it wasn't just the British?
Speaker 1: What if every one was sending Nepolie shock troops and
Speaker 1: to crack down on popular insurgencies. Well, and you know,
Speaker 1: and the thing that the thing that particularly goes wrong
Speaker 1: with the Nepolice troops is that the Nepolice troop would
Speaker 1: bring cholerade to Haiti. And okay, well again, who hasn't
Speaker 1: you know? Okay, there's the thing, the defeat of cholerade.
Speaker 1: This is like one of the few genu Wined victories
Speaker 1: we have had over sort of like like the last
Speaker 1: two years over the forces that have caused like human
Speaker 1: misery and suffering for like this time of memorial is
Speaker 1: that we defeated cholera and then we brought it back
Speaker 1: the fucking you had occupation brings like this is the
Speaker 1: this is the first lower scale color outbreak in modern times,
Speaker 1: UM eight hundred thousandations get color results. Christ, Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's not hard to not spread cholera. Yeah, we success,
Speaker 1: Like even if you're looking by the standards of military occupations,
Speaker 1: like the Russians didn't haven't spread cholera in Ukraine. It's
Speaker 1: not hard to not SPA in Vietnam now, like we
Speaker 1: create a cholera epidemic in Afghanistan. Ad Right, it is
Speaker 1: not hard to not create a cholera epidemic to be
Speaker 1: to be fair, the s the Saudis have managed to
Speaker 1: create one and create one in Yemen now too, but
Speaker 1: that's probably worse than this one. But that more just
Speaker 1: reinforces my point that most imperialist occupations are able to
Speaker 1: not cause epidemics. It's hard and okay, you know, and
Speaker 1: and obviously right like, okay, you you've now created your
Speaker 1: colonial army. The colonial army is gonna come home and
Speaker 1: literally these same troops go back to Brazil and launch
Speaker 1: a war in the favelas um like like under under
Speaker 1: under Joba Russo's PT Like the fucking army is literally
Speaker 1: occupying the favillas. And you know this is all part
Speaker 1: of the PATS like massive campaign to sort of buy
Speaker 1: weapons and modernize the army, which is you know, and
Speaker 1: by like, I I think currently they're involved in like okay, okay,
Speaker 1: I I'm not entirely sure about my dates on this.
Speaker 1: I I'm tirely sure if they're if they're currently involved
Speaker 1: in nine UNPC co operations you sixteen, but there are
Speaker 1: like there are there are I Brazilian troops like all
Speaker 1: over the world. I still doing this bullshit. And you know,
Speaker 1: again as we've talked about, like literally the people who
Speaker 1: are in Haiti like are the people who are going
Speaker 1: to help put Lula in prison and put Bulson in power.
Speaker 1: So you know this is some I this is some
Speaker 1: fucking enormous like creating your own grave diggers ship. Okay,
Speaker 1: So okay, well we've now we've now gotten through one
Speaker 1: of the sort of sets of grave diggers the PTS
Speaker 1: building for themselves, um. But also back in back in Brazil,
Speaker 1: things are also like you know, not going great for them,
Speaker 1: which and the way that this is specifically not going
Speaker 1: great is that like even even you know, in the
Speaker 1: hour of triumph, triumph of the Workers Party, right Lula Sendent, etcetera, etcetera,
Speaker 1: there is a massive fissure opening under the feet of
Speaker 1: the Brazilian left. And that fisher is the gig economy. Um.
Speaker 1: We we have talked like literally ad nauseum on this
Speaker 1: show about how the economy is bad for workers, um,
Speaker 1: for for our purposes. The thing that's kind of important
Speaker 1: here is that doing this kind of gig work right,
Speaker 1: like becoming an independent like an independent contractor, um, it
Speaker 1: has a profound social and political effect, and it creates
Speaker 1: a sort of profound social political animization, right. It breaks
Speaker 1: down the sort of social bonds that like built the
Speaker 1: workers who have been in the PT and transport and
Speaker 1: and instead of instead of the sort of like you know, massification, right,
Speaker 1: like the conversion of people into sort of like these
Speaker 1: these these these like like concrete mass social entities who
Speaker 1: can like take collective action. You get these neo liberal
Speaker 1: subjects who are incredibly atomized, incredibly isolated and vulnerable to
Speaker 1: sort of like, you know, fascist projects that promise like
Speaker 1: community and unity, like this new organic hall and you know,
Speaker 1: get for bulcenario draws support from oh wait, it's a
Speaker 1: it's a newly evangelical section of the working class. Um
Speaker 1: And and to to be clear here, the informal sector
Speaker 1: of Brazil has always been massive, but the way the
Speaker 1: PC runs their welfare programs makes everything just exponentially worse.
Speaker 1: Um We talked about this a bit last episode, but
Speaker 1: one of the big things that the PC's welfare programs
Speaker 1: do is they're about getting giving people access to micro credit.
Speaker 1: And Okay, so in the short run this is technically
Speaker 1: incredibly effective at combating poverty. But it had another effect,
Speaker 1: which was to sort of like deeply, infirmly like sort
Speaker 1: of like like ingrained vast sections of Brazilian workers into
Speaker 1: the banking system and tournament to micro entrepreneurs. And okay,
Speaker 1: so being a social democratic party and on purpose constructing
Speaker 1: an entire class of micro entrepreneurs is like maybe the
Speaker 1: single best example of producing your own grave figgures that
Speaker 1: I've seen since like a military dictatorship cooperating with Lulu
Speaker 1: in the first place, this is a terrible idea. But
Speaker 1: you know, okay, so I I think I think I
Speaker 1: think it's worth asking, like, why is the PT doing this?
Speaker 1: Ship right? Like this is this is something that is
Speaker 1: like otherwise absolutely incomprehensible. Um And the answer is that
Speaker 1: the PC was never quite the party that people think
Speaker 1: it is. Um Here here is from a Brazilian anarchist
Speaker 1: writing and crime think. The rulers linked to the realization
Speaker 1: of mega events cheaply re political rewards for FIFA and
Speaker 1: its corporate crony is not coincidentally the same companies that
Speaker 1: finance the electoral campaigns of the PT. The benefits were
Speaker 1: financial profits stretched into the billions, under written by public resources,
Speaker 1: and guaranteed by police oppression. The PC could not have
Speaker 1: done this alone. It was the party that received the
Speaker 1: largest total of private donations in recent years seventy millions
Speaker 1: dozen thirteen. Well other parties like the PSDB, the Social
Speaker 1: Democratic Party and PMDB Party of Democratic Movement, the biggest
Speaker 1: and oldest party in Brazil, mostly center right conservative politicians,
Speaker 1: only managed forty six million dollars altogether. In two thousand fourteen,
Speaker 1: the year of Dilma Russo's re election, the PT received
Speaker 1: forty seven million dollars some contractors facing lawsuits and investigations.
Speaker 1: While the PMDB got thirty eight million, the ps dB
Speaker 1: got twenty eight million. This demonstrates the symbiosis between the
Speaker 1: Workers Party and those who control the flow of capital
Speaker 1: in the country, a connective tissue of economic and political power.
Speaker 1: So this is not good. Um And and you you
Speaker 1: can sort of ask what was the PC really doing here, right,
Speaker 1: like why okay, why are they doing micro loans? Why
Speaker 1: are they taking all of this money? Um? And there's
Speaker 1: a really really good pair of articles from a Brazilian
Speaker 1: group called Bilitants in the Fog that was published at
Speaker 1: ill Will called Work and Revolt in Brazil's dead Ends.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to read from some of it. A
Speaker 1: bank accounts, a smartphone with access to the internet, and
Speaker 1: a profile in an app. The means to collect emergency aid,
Speaker 1: which is emergency aid is um. Part of this is
Speaker 1: talking about Bosonaro stuff. So I Bolsonaro implements this policy
Speaker 1: called emergency A which is like it's it's it's kind
Speaker 1: of the equivalent of like the U S S I
Speaker 1: like the stimulus checks that we got, but slightly difference.
Speaker 1: But the means required to collect emergency aid or are
Speaker 1: the same required to create an account for Uber, a
Speaker 1: sign that we are facing fundamental parts of this quote
Speaker 1: new way of working. Years ago, it was already possible
Speaker 1: to identify the bolsa familiar program, which is that giant
Speaker 1: um PT like workers Party cash transfer program that we
Speaker 1: talked about last episode. Chouse dimensions were small in the
Speaker 1: face of fcial aid program. The the objective of forming
Speaker 1: a unified workplace more deeply subjugated to capitalist relations. The
Speaker 1: quote bank ification promoted by the program contributed to the
Speaker 1: expanding contributed to expanding the reach of micro credit systems,
Speaker 1: a process of financialization of informality, which was deepened in
Speaker 1: re some years with the dissemination of increasingly agile and
Speaker 1: easy payment terminals and electronic payment systems such as picks
Speaker 1: at tax Free, a quicker and tax free money transfer method.
Speaker 1: The phenomenon reached unprecedented intensity due to the Emergency A.
Speaker 1: The state owned bank Taxia Economic and Federal absorbed thirty
Speaker 1: million customers in ten days, and it was what was
Speaker 1: possibly the fastest bankification process of history, thus reaching a
Speaker 1: record profit in two Access to credit is essential for
Speaker 1: the emergence of a precarious workforce to which capital, costs
Speaker 1: and risk are transferred. Well, interest rates introduced a new
Speaker 1: level of productivity to the old. Okay, this is a
Speaker 1: Portuguese word that oh, boy, via carro, which is like
Speaker 1: getting by, which is this sort of like it's a
Speaker 1: sort of slaying term for kind of like doing stuff
Speaker 1: in the informal economy to like survive. Yeah, which is
Speaker 1: now directly connected to global financial markets. Thus, the focus
Speaker 1: of these income policies would be less on expanding consumption
Speaker 1: capacity for the beneficiaries as in the Kinzian distributive model,
Speaker 1: and more on expanding their investment capacity, financing the acquisition
Speaker 1: of work instruments and quote self valuing their human capital.
Speaker 1: Enthusiasts of such programs claim that financeial the financial cushion
Speaker 1: provided by basic income, can represent enough stability for people
Speaker 1: to be able to spend their own savings or other
Speaker 1: capital starting a business. So, okay, what's happening here, um
Speaker 1: and the militants of fog is arguing this after the
Speaker 1: work of a Brazilian academical named Ludmilla Abilio is Okay,
Speaker 1: what's happening here is is the real subsumption of the
Speaker 1: formal economy, which okay, so like what what what does
Speaker 1: that mean? We need to take a step back and
Speaker 1: do like a little bit more marks. So Marx makes
Speaker 1: this distinction between what he calls formal and real subsumption.
Speaker 1: Subsumption is this like the whole philosophy thing I'm not
Speaker 1: going to get into here, but basically what he's talking
Speaker 1: about is stuff getting like subsumed by capitalism, right, like
Speaker 1: becoming a part of the of the sort of capitalist
Speaker 1: like process and system. And this comes in stages, right,
Speaker 1: the first foremost subsumption where okay, so say you have
Speaker 1: a peasant, right, formal subsumption is where the peasant like
Speaker 1: enters the market for the first time and suddenly be
Speaker 1: instead of being a peasant, is not like a wage worker, right,
Speaker 1: And you know, in in in this phase, right, capitalism
Speaker 1: has entered induced fhere, Right, someone who was a peasant
Speaker 1: who was like not doing capital stuff before, right, who
Speaker 1: was going for self production and had like fetal dues
Speaker 1: and obligations, is now a wage worker. But you know,
Speaker 1: and then they're selling the goods of the market, but
Speaker 1: the actual process of production, which is like, okay, so
Speaker 1: like how a peasant is like how how how you
Speaker 1: your former peasant new agriculture worker like grows their crops
Speaker 1: and what crops they grow, and like when they decide
Speaker 1: to work in In this first stage, this is still
Speaker 1: the peasant's choice. Um that ends with real subsumption where
Speaker 1: all control over the workplace that like workers had had
Speaker 1: is completely destroyed. And you're just you know, okay, this
Speaker 1: this is this is what like we think of as
Speaker 1: a regular job, right We're like, okay, the way the
Speaker 1: job works as your boss sells you want to do
Speaker 1: I your your entire labor process has been like fully
Speaker 1: integrated into into into this sort of like broader capitalist
Speaker 1: production processes that you have no control over. And this
Speaker 1: is what's been happening in the informal economy of the
Speaker 1: past few decades in Brazil. It's a real subsumption, right
Speaker 1: like and and you know what like it stuff that
Speaker 1: had formerly been you know, like people taking wage labor,
Speaker 1: but the sort of structure of how people do the
Speaker 1: jobs that they're doing, right, was still up to them. Uh,
Speaker 1: this has been ending. And the way it's been ending
Speaker 1: is through basically the degree of control offered but to
Speaker 1: employers by apps like uber of like yeah, the control
Speaker 1: of these apps give you over the informal economy, and
Speaker 1: the results have been absolutely catastrophic. Um. On the one hand,
Speaker 1: the sort of limited autonomy that the formal economy like
Speaker 1: that the informal economy used to give you has been
Speaker 1: crushed by sort of sorry, has been crushed by algorithmic
Speaker 1: control from gay economy apps that you know, like track
Speaker 1: where you are and tell you where you need to
Speaker 1: go and how how fast you have to get there,
Speaker 1: and like what lights you have to run in order
Speaker 1: to get there, and also increasingly, uh, these big workers
Speaker 1: are being squeezed by a new level of middle management
Speaker 1: who work basically the same way as like gang like
Speaker 1: the old gang bosses that control Chinese labor. In return
Speaker 1: to the twentieth century, where you have these guys who
Speaker 1: act as like private recruiting companies and foremen for workers
Speaker 1: who okay, so you go to this place, right, These
Speaker 1: people are like, okay, I will give you a job,
Speaker 1: and they negotiate. There are the people who negotiate directly
Speaker 1: with the company and take money from the company and
Speaker 1: then use that money to sort of like pay the employer.
Speaker 1: And this this you know, this sucks, right because on
Speaker 1: the one hands, you have all of the bad parts
Speaker 1: of a regular job, which there's a guy who tells
Speaker 1: you what to do, and if you don't do what
Speaker 1: he tells you, like, you get fired. And then you
Speaker 1: have all the bad parts of an informal sector job,
Speaker 1: which is that you don't have any legal protections that
Speaker 1: like workers with formal contracts have. And you know, the
Speaker 1: the the the effect of this has been to create
Speaker 1: super hell for like, vast, vast swaths of the Brazilian
Speaker 1: working class. And this has been a just unbelievably catastrophic
Speaker 1: sort of disaster for for Brazilian politics. But okay, you
Speaker 1: know what else is creating super hell for the Brazilian
Speaker 1: working class? I mean not the products and services that
Speaker 1: support this podcasting the American working class now now yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: here's sucking ads. Ah, we're back. Wow. I for one
Speaker 1: think everything's gonna be fine. The fact that Lula won
Speaker 1: this resounding victory over j R. Bolsonaro by by nearly
Speaker 1: a whole percentage point is going to mean none of
Speaker 1: these problems that you're talking about. Are everything's again yea, nope?
Speaker 1: And you know, okay, so, speaking speaking of reasons why
Speaker 1: this will not be a problem. Again the sort of
Speaker 1: like financialization bullshit. This this this doesn't just like stick
Speaker 1: in sort of labor process like this stuff spreads to
Speaker 1: the like to social movements as well, which are in
Speaker 1: a lot of cases, like very old and powerful Brazilian
Speaker 1: social movements are reduced to these sort of like state
Speaker 1: back financialized husks of them form ourselves where like you know,
Speaker 1: you have like you have social movements that are literally
Speaker 1: like issuing bonds to like fund their their members businesses.
Speaker 1: You have social movements that are like, okay, if if
Speaker 1: you show up to assemblies, you can like earn points
Speaker 1: so that you can get access to like be put
Speaker 1: on a waiting list for like a government rent stabilized
Speaker 1: department or something like it is a ship show. And
Speaker 1: and this whole process sort of leads to the hollowing
Speaker 1: out of the Brazilian left. And you know, and and
Speaker 1: and as as as as the left is sort of
Speaker 1: like being sort of like torn apart from the inside out,
Speaker 1: and and as you get into sort of like two
Speaker 1: eleven and twelve dozen thirteen is the afrezilian E comonomy
Speaker 1: begins to slow. You get Brazil's version of the sort
Speaker 1: of like movement of the squares like two thirteen uprisings,
Speaker 1: which is going to be waged against a hostile all okay,
Speaker 1: a pretty hostile PT governments. Like there there's a sort
Speaker 1: of public show by delmar roussoft like, yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: I support the protests when they're not violent, and we're
Speaker 1: gonna do stuff. But okay, this goes badly very quickly.
Speaker 1: So these protests start over these like raises and public
Speaker 1: trends and in the cost of public transportation, like the
Speaker 1: fair cost raises in a bunch of cities, and very
Speaker 1: quickly there are like three million people in the street. Um.
Speaker 1: The sort of conventional narrative about what happened here is
Speaker 1: that so the protests started off leftists, right, but then
Speaker 1: the leftists get run out as as the protest sort
Speaker 1: of keep going by these sort of like foe a
Speaker 1: political like conservative nationalists that like take them over and
Speaker 1: turn them from this sort of like leftist call for
Speaker 1: like a more egalitarian society and for like the right
Speaker 1: to the city and like stopping evictions and stuff like
Speaker 1: that to this sort of like anti corruption crusade against PT.
Speaker 1: And it's the PT against the LaRussa and against sort
Speaker 1: of like the left itself and okay, this is true,
Speaker 1: like as far as it goes, UM, we'll be talking
Speaker 1: more about the impeachment campaign like next episode. But there's
Speaker 1: more going on here. And the more going on here
Speaker 1: is that she isn't thirteen. There are massive protests, like
Speaker 1: eight hundred thousand people, um protest a Confederation Cup, which
Speaker 1: is which is like the soccer tournament hosted by like
Speaker 1: that that that's present, Like it's one of the things
Speaker 1: that precedes the World Cup. I don't know. I'm not
Speaker 1: a soccer nowher, but yeah, and there's the massive proaests
Speaker 1: against them, and they are just unbelievably brutally suppressed, Like
Speaker 1: fifty thousand cops are sent out to like stop this
Speaker 1: ship and they beat the absolute ship out of everyone.
Speaker 1: And to understand why these movements were crushed and how
Speaker 1: the right was able to take power, we need to
Speaker 1: talk about the Brazilian police. So I think you know
Speaker 1: most of our listeners you to me like we we
Speaker 1: are famili you with the American police, right, Like, if
Speaker 1: you're listening to the show, odds are decently good. You
Speaker 1: have seen them beat your friends, your bloody polpe. You
Speaker 1: have seen them taste the parents of children locked into
Speaker 1: building with the mass shooter. You have seen them slaughter men, women,
Speaker 1: and children in the street for no other reason than
Speaker 1: they can because they're a fascist des squad fused with
Speaker 1: organized crime outfits funded by putting guns to the heads
Speaker 1: of the American working class air descendants of slave catchers,
Speaker 1: working each and every day to keep the American racial
Speaker 1: hierarchy firmly intact. Okay, we can put it that way.
Speaker 1: It sounds bad, but I don't know, Like I like
Speaker 1: Law and Order, so like the TV show, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: know that they have you've never watched Law and Order,
Speaker 1: s VU, you're missing out on all of the good
Speaker 1: law and order. Uh that is that the one with
Speaker 1: chick And I honestly don't know. There's like forty different
Speaker 1: Law and Order shows. It's impossible to keep track of them,
Speaker 1: but there is that. There is that one goth chick
Speaker 1: that they brought in because our grandparents would think she
Speaker 1: was hot. Yeah. I think. I think the power of
Speaker 1: goth chicks to extend the police budgets. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's fun and good and Okay, you know, like we
Speaker 1: we we know how bad the US police are. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna read this from the l A Times quote,
Speaker 1: Brazilian cops kill at nine times the rate of US
Speaker 1: law enforcement. Nine times. That's pretty bad. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: and I think it's worth pointing out here that Brazil
Speaker 1: was the last country in this hemisphere to evolve slavery.
Speaker 1: Like they abolished it like twenty years after the fucking
Speaker 1: US did, right, And so you know, when when you're
Speaker 1: thinking about what the Brazilian police is, take everything you
Speaker 1: know about the American police and understand that the Brazilian police, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: So with the American police, right, the murder dial goes
Speaker 1: up to eleven. With the Brazilian police, that murder dial
Speaker 1: goes up to And that's where they've pranked it to. Here,
Speaker 1: here's some crime think. In two thousand fourteen, Brazil's prison
Speaker 1: population became the third largest in the world, with five
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy thousand prisoners, just like six hundred something
Speaker 1: thousand prisoners today, most of whom are black. During the
Speaker 1: PT administration, this figure increased by six hundred and twenty Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: and this this, this is a part of the PT
Speaker 1: that people really sort of tiptoe around, which is that
Speaker 1: they preside over like a a regime of mass executions
Speaker 1: and mass incarceration that is like utterly atrocious and and
Speaker 1: as an aside here, um okay, so like there are
Speaker 1: probably some of our listeners whose things that they want
Speaker 1: to go into electoral politics. And if you are doing this,
Speaker 1: you have one job, like solely, you have one responsibility,
Speaker 1: and your job is to fucking annihilate the police. Your
Speaker 1: job is to just joy them so utterly and completely
Speaker 1: that their very name is spent as a curse in
Speaker 1: the street by people who make the sign of cross
Speaker 1: for protection every time they think about them. Like by
Speaker 1: the end of your first term, these people need to
Speaker 1: be living in fucking hovels in the woods without access
Speaker 1: to a weapon that even as deadly as at two
Speaker 1: by four, And every time they attempt to enter a town,
Speaker 1: people need to be like chasing them and throwing rocks
Speaker 1: at them. And if you do not do this, you
Speaker 1: will live like Lula has to see literally everything you
Speaker 1: have ever done crumbled beneath the way to way fascism
Speaker 1: that is too terrible to imagine, and you will also
Speaker 1: experience in your lifetime. And instead of doing this, the
Speaker 1: PT is like, fuck it, no, We're going to use
Speaker 1: the police to stamp up protest against the mega events
Speaker 1: that they're they're putting on. The police repression around the
Speaker 1: World Cup is like arguably worse than the stuff for
Speaker 1: the Confederation Cup. In order to prepare for the World Cup.
Speaker 1: The PT stage is just like massive social cleansing campaign.
Speaker 1: We talked about this in our sports episode. Like they
Speaker 1: they carry out mass evictions against both like regular people
Speaker 1: and also against like like there's there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: sort of left is and also sort of just like
Speaker 1: regular people who squat in Brazil right, Like up a
Speaker 1: huge part of the social movements have been about seizing
Speaker 1: property and building like building stuff on its seasoning, evanded
Speaker 1: buildings and yeah, this stuff all gets victs that can
Speaker 1: be replaced the World Cup businesses. It's you know, like
Speaker 1: what what is happening here is it's like all the
Speaker 1: violence gentrification. But in the span of like a year, right,
Speaker 1: the pag are literally rolling German tanks to the favelas
Speaker 1: because like, you know, subtlety is something that happens to
Speaker 1: other people, not like to reality. And you know, as
Speaker 1: we talked about before, they're putting them under literally military
Speaker 1: occupation with colonial troops who were like fighting in Haiti.
Speaker 1: Right evict two hundred and fifty thousand people for this
Speaker 1: fucking tournament. Um here, here's some other ship they did.
Speaker 1: This is from a series of pieces by Brazilian anarchist
Speaker 1: group called Fictional Faction. In twelve, the federal government and
Speaker 1: FIFA signed the General Law of the World Cup to
Speaker 1: ensure that the country would quote uphold FIFA standards of
Speaker 1: organization during the two thirteen Confederation Cup and the two
Speaker 1: dozen fourteen World Cup. This agreement constituted an enormous legal
Speaker 1: offense to the Brazilian people, entailing the suspension of mode
Speaker 1: of many constitutional rights and norms that are already precarious
Speaker 1: for most. For example, a court established to rule within
Speaker 1: fourty eight hours on strikes that occurred within the World Cup.
Speaker 1: Workers lost the right to strike or fight for improvements,
Speaker 1: while FIFA avoided paying taxes on businesses within Brazilian territory.
Speaker 1: A special Secretary to public security for great events was created,
Speaker 1: breaking the laws stipulating that justice may not have special
Speaker 1: sponsors or clients you demand priority. The privatization of public
Speaker 1: space was legitimized by the creation of exclusive streets for
Speaker 1: FIFA and as partners in which even local businesses were
Speaker 1: required to keep your doors closed within the exclusion zone
Speaker 1: around the stadium. The laws allowed FIFA tag intervened directly
Speaker 1: in the market without the oversight of the state. FIFA
Speaker 1: was able to stipulate the price to charge for tickets,
Speaker 1: suspending the usual half price for students and any application
Speaker 1: of consumer protection out. In addition, more than twenty thou
Speaker 1: people were allowed to work as unregulated volunteers during the
Speaker 1: World Cup. These volunteers did not receive the protections of
Speaker 1: basic labor rights and operated outside of constitutional norms in
Speaker 1: a situation in situations analogous to slavery. According to Brazilian law,
Speaker 1: these exceptions to safety and labor the Labor and City
Speaker 1: law are supposed to be limited to volunteer work for
Speaker 1: nonprofit institutions that have a quote civic, cultural, education, recreational
Speaker 1: and social assistance purposes, which hardly described FIFA. The state
Speaker 1: even overlooked the use of child labor and activities related
Speaker 1: to the games, such as the role of ball boy,
Speaker 1: which had been banned in Brazil since two thousand four.
Speaker 1: So this goes great um and and the thing, you know,
Speaker 1: so this happens, he doesn't fourteen under del Marissof. But
Speaker 1: it's worth noting like this is Lula's project fund the beginning, right,
Speaker 1: like he he has been fighting to get Brazil the
Speaker 1: World Cup, like sense sent sense, like the opening for
Speaker 1: applications to get this World Cup obriginal to happen. And
Speaker 1: what you know, this, this, this campaign to get the
Speaker 1: World Cup takes the form of a literally all out
Speaker 1: war against leftist protesters, squatters, workers, people living in favelas,
Speaker 1: people who are literally all those at the same time.
Speaker 1: Who are you know, supposed to be the PT space
Speaker 1: And this is what the PT spends literally the rest
Speaker 1: of its time and power doing, right, like Dilma Roussef
Speaker 1: implements much of mousterity measures like this, the spending police
Speaker 1: powers like this is the ship that the PT is doing,
Speaker 1: like literally as the Grim Reaper was coming to their door,
Speaker 1: like two months before delmar Roussef is impeached, she passed
Speaker 1: a pair of a pair of anti terrorism laws targeted
Speaker 1: at protesters. And Okay, we're gonna we'll go into the
Speaker 1: impeachment next episode, but I want to close on this
Speaker 1: was preventing this from happening, right, preventing the Party of
Speaker 1: workers from fucking rolling tanks through the streets in in, in, in,
Speaker 1: in fucking working class neighborhoods, like this is the actual
Speaker 1: sort of beating of of and this is this is
Speaker 1: the actual sort of principal politics of anti capitalism like that.
Speaker 1: This this is why there is a sort of rigid
Speaker 1: anarchist opposition to the state. Right. This isn't just ideological purity,
Speaker 1: is the concrete knowledge that any other path is death,
Speaker 1: because we literally cannot continue to do as the PT
Speaker 1: has been doing for the past twenty years to produce
Speaker 1: her own grave diggers. Literally, the ecosystems we draw our
Speaker 1: life from will not survive if we keep doing this.
Speaker 1: It does not matter how many people you live you
Speaker 1: lift out of poverty. If you do not actually destroy
Speaker 1: the class system, capitalism and fascism will force them back
Speaker 1: into poverty. All of the poverty, like almost all the
Speaker 1: poverty games that Lula gained during this entire time and
Speaker 1: officers were destroyed in four years of will scenarrow. Every
Speaker 1: day that the state is allowed to exist, every day
Speaker 1: the class system is allowed to exist, it creates a
Speaker 1: thousand more bull scenarrows. It creates a thousand bol scenarrows
Speaker 1: and the police, that creates them, of the armies, it
Speaker 1: creates them in corporations, it creates them on the streets,
Speaker 1: and they have to be destroyed or this world will
Speaker 1: fucking burn. And in the next episode we are going
Speaker 1: to watch a thousand person of pull and aros burned
Speaker 1: the entire country. And that that is my incredibly angry
Speaker 1: response to this absolute fucking bullshit. That is the reason,
Speaker 1: like our are are a lot of the reasons why
Speaker 1: everything is completely fucked cool. Well, everybody, have a happy
Speaker 1: start of November, and hopefully Brazil isn't in a state
Speaker 1: of civil war by the time you listen to this episode. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I update at the end of the episode. I don't
Speaker 1: think there's been any chance. Remember, remember, folks, if you
Speaker 1: somehow take control of the political apparatus in Brazil, dismantled
Speaker 1: the police in the military, Um, that's that that should be.
Speaker 1: That should be a lesson for you. I know a
Speaker 1: lot of you are on the verge of taking power
Speaker 1: in Brazil, So hopefully hopefully that message will get out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I mean in general, don't fund them, like, don't
Speaker 1: give them more money, don't spend a bunch of money
Speaker 1: buying them German tanks, Like, well what do you do? Okay,
Speaker 1: like why what? Why are we focusing on German tanks?
Speaker 1: They make fine tanks. Okay, here we have here. Can
Speaker 1: you name a single good thing a German tank has
Speaker 1: ever been used for? Yeah, I'm guessing. Yeah, they did
Speaker 1: some communists, probably, I don't. I don't know. Um, let's
Speaker 1: live anyway, killed a lot of Englishmen anyway and Canadians.
Speaker 1: It could happen here. It's it's it could happen here.
Speaker 1: It's the podcast that's happening right now. Um yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's about things that you know about. It's there are
Speaker 1: our third and final episode about the Brazilian elections. It's me, Chris,
Speaker 1: It's it's I'm here with James Stout. Hello, Hi, Chris.
Speaker 1: So we have we have an update on on this situation,
Speaker 1: which is that j R. Bosonaro Okay, he's still he's still.
Speaker 1: I don't think has publicly announced defeats, but he apparently
Speaker 1: told the Supreme Court quote it's over, So he seems
Speaker 1: to have committed defeat, which has not stopped a bunch
Speaker 1: of his followers from calling for a military coup. Yeah,
Speaker 1: from the people I still seem to be blocking roads, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's happening. I don't know. I yeah, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: sort of unclear to me to what extent his followers
Speaker 1: are going to back down. I don't think there's really
Speaker 1: much chance for a military coup at this point, like
Speaker 1: they seem to have just lost. I read something earlier
Speaker 1: about Bolsonaro making plans to like so it's like there's
Speaker 1: like a like a sash thing you're supposed to hand
Speaker 1: over to the next president, and he was making plans
Speaker 1: to not be in the country when Lula took office.
Speaker 1: I was gonna have his vice president ended over instead,
Speaker 1: which is like this is like the most whiny baby
Speaker 1: ship I've ever seen, which is like, god, I want
Speaker 1: what a loser? Holy fuck, like first as a tragedy,
Speaker 1: and then as fast and then as fast yea, and
Speaker 1: continually as fast, like that's that's how the right operates, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: I actually almost had that, Like I I actually almost
Speaker 1: started the Lula episode with that quote, and then I
Speaker 1: was like, well, his return. I was like that, that's
Speaker 1: that's too mean to say about Lula, Like it hasn't
Speaker 1: been first yet, Like yeah, but Bulsonaro is oh boy, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's going to go and spend more time with a
Speaker 1: novel coronavirus. It's withdrawing from politics. You know. I heard
Speaker 1: that there's a great line in one of the things
Speaker 1: I was talking about that Milton's in the fog piece
Speaker 1: from Ilbow yesterday where they they talked about like I
Speaker 1: forget the exact quote, it was something like but Bolso
Speaker 1: it wasn't It's not just that Bolsonaro failed the like
Speaker 1: failed to respond to coronavirus, is that he was a
Speaker 1: vector for the for coronavirus. And I was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is both literally and metaphorically true, Like
Speaker 1: several of the outbreaks are just from Bolsonaro. Absolutely amazing. Yeah, real,
Speaker 1: real piece of shit. Um yeah yeah, So today we're
Speaker 1: gonna talking about the very specific so we we We've
Speaker 1: been last episode talking about sort of like the the
Speaker 1: enormous army of grave diggers that the PT had sort
Speaker 1: of built around them, and this episode is going to
Speaker 1: be about like how their grave was actually sort of
Speaker 1: built and then filled in. Um so I talked about
Speaker 1: in episode one. Um there was in twousd five. I
Speaker 1: think I might have actually accidentally said six in the
Speaker 1: original episode, but it dealsn't five. There's just a giant
Speaker 1: corruption scandal involving the Workers Party that like shakes all
Speaker 1: up Brazil and basically the the short version of it
Speaker 1: is that a bunch of senior members of the PC
Speaker 1: were accused of bribing members of the Central Centrow, who
Speaker 1: is like Brazil sort of like perennial elite corruption faction,
Speaker 1: to like buy their votes to get bills passed, which honestly,
Speaker 1: like I'm okay with this, like that We're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about some corruption later that like does suck. Uh, This
Speaker 1: I think is fine, Like I'm I am, I am okay,
Speaker 1: Like I I'm gonna put this on the record at me,
Speaker 1: Christopher Wong, I am okay with literally just buying the
Speaker 1: votes of like weird corrupt right wingers to get them
Speaker 1: to vote for legislation that's actually good. Like whatever, I
Speaker 1: don't care about this, like this is bullshit, Like who cares? Um?
Speaker 1: But that that said, I I okay. So this entire episode,
Speaker 1: like well look at the first like three quarters episode,
Speaker 1: this is this is this episode is like a lot
Speaker 1: about corruption, and before we need to go any for
Speaker 1: other like we need to talk about like what corruption
Speaker 1: actually is and about the politics of it. So Okay,
Speaker 1: I want to say this as someone who lives in Okay.
Speaker 1: So I think most our listeners understand that Chicago is
Speaker 1: notoriously corrupt. I didn't grow up in Chicago. I grew
Speaker 1: up in Chicago's even more corrupt suburbs. Like I I
Speaker 1: literally watched a mayor sell physically sell city Hall to
Speaker 1: the highest bidder, Like she actually literally physically sold city
Speaker 1: Hall like this. This is the kind of ship you
Speaker 1: get out in the suburbs, Like it is fucking mind boggling, right,
Speaker 1: like that that that that that wasn't my town, but
Speaker 1: like I have seen some ship, right And Okay. The
Speaker 1: thing that the thing I can say about government corruption
Speaker 1: is that there are two kinds of people in the world.
Speaker 1: There are people like Chicagoans who understand that every single politician,
Speaker 1: no matter, like, every single politician whatsoever, is going to
Speaker 1: Robbie blind because they're all corrupt. And you know, there's
Speaker 1: a sort of like a more analytical cularreya to this,
Speaker 1: which is that like corruption, corruption is just a structural
Speaker 1: tendency of the state, right, It's it's a product of
Speaker 1: state officials like having access to the state's enormous supply
Speaker 1: of resources. It's a product of the kind of structural
Speaker 1: incentives that like being in a state produces, and it's
Speaker 1: a it's a product of the fact of the state,
Speaker 1: you know, acquires resources to violence and you know. Okay,
Speaker 1: so there's people who understand this on various levels, right,
Speaker 1: Like I mean, this is a genuinely thing about of cocos,
Speaker 1: Like everyone gets it, Like you don't have to convince people.
Speaker 1: And then there's a bunch of people like like the
Speaker 1: other category of people and people who genuinely think that
Speaker 1: like politics is about people debating political principles and that
Speaker 1: like if we just make slightly better arguments and like
Speaker 1: have slightly better land use policies of politicians who literally
Speaker 1: spends all day taking bribes and developers or like somehow
Speaker 1: end homelessness or something or that like somehow like like
Speaker 1: like a corruption a matter of political princess. Like no, no,
Speaker 1: they're all that they're all doing this to you, Like
Speaker 1: you guys, you kind of understand that. Yeah, It's it's
Speaker 1: very funny. And it's like we don't get enough credit
Speaker 1: for our cruption in San Diego, like right, yeah, and
Speaker 1: run by the Sea as it's very funny to see
Speaker 1: people being like, oh, there can't be corruption because identity
Speaker 1: politics this or because not Donald Trump. Right then, like
Speaker 1: this is the nature of the state, especially the state
Speaker 1: under capitalism, especially stated a capitalism in the United States.
Speaker 1: Is that like you don't get funk all unless you
Speaker 1: pay for it. Yeah, although I will say this corruption
Speaker 1: as a policy of the state is essentially trans ideological.
Speaker 1: Like the reddest communist, the brownest fascist, and the most
Speaker 1: bleeding heart red, white and blue capitalists all take bribes,
Speaker 1: they all give contracts with their family, and they all
Speaker 1: steal money from the government. Like you can tell this
Speaker 1: by the fact that the US is literally like the
Speaker 1: US just made it legal to give like they made
Speaker 1: it legal for a corporation to give money to a
Speaker 1: candidate in order to have the vote a certain way.
Speaker 1: This is legal. Nazi Germany corrupt as ship, the USS
Speaker 1: are famously insanely corrupt like this. This is not this
Speaker 1: is not actually a product of ideology. It's it's it's
Speaker 1: it's it's just it's just a sort of structural like
Speaker 1: tendency of the state. And it doesn't meant like the
Speaker 1: military kaderships are corrupt like the fun like the like
Speaker 1: the parliamentic democracies are corrupted, like this is this is
Speaker 1: just this is just like how the state works, right,
Speaker 1: um and and the like. So political corruption genuinely isn't
Speaker 1: that interesting, right, Like the actual politics of it, like
Speaker 1: it's not that interesting. Like it's just people just corrupt, right,
Speaker 1: What is interesting is anti corruption politics. And we need
Speaker 1: to get this out of the way immediately. It is
Speaker 1: simultaneously true that like almost no one openly supports corruption,
Speaker 1: like it's it's it's it's like almost impossible to find
Speaker 1: anyone who will come out on the record and say
Speaker 1: they're pro corruption, like like you can't do it right,
Speaker 1: And it's and it's also true that like every single
Speaker 1: one of these people on the across the entire political
Speaker 1: spectrum is corrupt and you know, and and and and
Speaker 1: the you know and and no, no politician is actually
Speaker 1: anti corruption. This. This is something that's very very important
Speaker 1: to understand. None of these people are sucking anti corruption this.
Speaker 1: This is sort of this is one of lessons of Chicago,
Speaker 1: which is that all of the sort of anti corruption
Speaker 1: crusaders are like just as corrupt as people they're replacing.
Speaker 1: But this is part of the way. Like, uh, I
Speaker 1: don't want to go to extreme marcusa, but like the
Speaker 1: like this idea, this false choice, right the corruption and
Speaker 1: in itself creates a means for another person who is
Speaker 1: equally corrupt to enter simply by claiming to be anti corrupt,
Speaker 1: right like, and then this weekend just kind of continually
Speaker 1: wad up each other and claiming to be different and
Speaker 1: doing the same ship and people will embrace his fucking
Speaker 1: false choice. Yeah, and you know we're gonna see this
Speaker 1: in this story later on, I will give you a
Speaker 1: preview of where this is going. So Sergio Morrow, who
Speaker 1: is this judge who's like like Brazil's like great anti
Speaker 1: corruption crusader, uh, turns out to have been funding is
Speaker 1: quote unquote anti corruption investigations by selling illegally selling information
Speaker 1: to the FBI and then getting paid and find uh
Speaker 1: find money collected by the US and successful corruption prosecutions.
Speaker 1: He also is going to like very blatantly and pretty
Speaker 1: openly take a job as the as Brazil's Justice minister
Speaker 1: in exchange for putting Bolton's political opponents in prison. Magnificent. Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and you know, so okay, what's the thing that's
Speaker 1: important about this, right is that anti corruption is not
Speaker 1: a real politics, right, Like it's not it's not an
Speaker 1: actual real sense of political political positions. Right. What it
Speaker 1: is is the set of politics you can rooms with.
Speaker 1: But it turns out is really really good at conning
Speaker 1: routs because people really fucking hate corruption, and and that
Speaker 1: the thing, the thing, the thing that being like an
Speaker 1: an anti corruption quote unquote candidate does is it lets
Speaker 1: anyone like appear to be the sort of like populous
Speaker 1: champion of the people against the corrupt elite. And this
Speaker 1: is really useful to the right into sort of mean,
Speaker 1: not just to the rime, it's really useful to sort
Speaker 1: of like bourgeois like capitalist politicians in general, because there
Speaker 1: are a lot of times where in order to sort
Speaker 1: of protect their interests, you know, or protect the interests
Speaker 1: of like their specific faction of the ruling class, they
Speaker 1: need to win an election, and they need to win
Speaker 1: the sort of hearts of mines of the people who
Speaker 1: see that the world sucks and like reflectively hate quote
Speaker 1: unquote the establishment because they know they're getting screwed. And
Speaker 1: the easiest way to sort of con these people is
Speaker 1: to take up the politics of antique ruption it's it's, it's, it's, it's. It's.
Speaker 1: It's like the the absolute picture perfect neoliberal politics, right,
Speaker 1: Like Rudy Giuliani, for example, Um, god is start going
Speaker 1: after the mob in New York and you know, and
Speaker 1: what what either, right? Really because he goes after the
Speaker 1: mob is the interruption guy and then he replaces them
Speaker 1: with like even more efficient and extractive neoliberal bureacratic parasites. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's perfect, like yeah, in terms of near liiberalism, right,
Speaker 1: in terms of completely avoiding a class analysis, because you
Speaker 1: can you can appeal to people who are genuinely oppressed
Speaker 1: and marginalized by the system, right by saying I'll go
Speaker 1: against this corrupt system which is oppressing in marginalized and you,
Speaker 1: but also to the bourgeois because you can say, oh,
Speaker 1: the reason you're sucking business is not a successful as
Speaker 1: the one is corruption. So to just vote for me
Speaker 1: and we'll sort that out and you can continue exploiting
Speaker 1: the workers who am also appealing to. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: you know, like Giuliani is specifically like he is his
Speaker 1: name is just literally a punchline now, right, Like it's
Speaker 1: it's not it's not even worth talking about him. Fucking
Speaker 1: like trumping on a cigar doing an ad first a
Speaker 1: guard company in the middle melodio right like like but
Speaker 1: but but you know if they're selling flip flops now,
Speaker 1: isn't that something like that? But but that's the thing,
Speaker 1: Like the anti corruption stuff was really really good for
Speaker 1: his career, and you know, this is the poll does
Speaker 1: anti corruption is the politics at the Brazilian right finally
Speaker 1: figures out as like the only thing that got out
Speaker 1: the workers partty drug or not now like insan five,
Speaker 1: the corruption case brings down a whole bunch of sort
Speaker 1: of like high profile PT party members, but it doesn't
Speaker 1: touch Lula himself, who is like he has this rep
Speaker 1: like he basically similar to Reagan, is just like the
Speaker 1: teflon president. Everything just bounce off of him. But you know,
Speaker 1: the Rights and five really thinks that they've got him
Speaker 1: and they're like, Okay, we're gonna crush him this next election.
Speaker 1: Everything's gonna go back to normal. And then you know,
Speaker 1: and it is true that from two compared to two
Speaker 1: thou too Lula does have less support than two six.
Speaker 1: He goes from of the vote to a whopping sixty
Speaker 1: percent of the vote. So okay, so this dude work, right,
Speaker 1: but the right still sees it like this is the
Speaker 1: only thing they've been able to come up with. It
Speaker 1: like actually damages the PT at all. And and she's
Speaker 1: also in fourteen a judge named Sergio Morrow, who have
Speaker 1: we've our Morrow? Who again we have given you the
Speaker 1: spoiler This is like this is one of the most
Speaker 1: corrupt dudes, and like the history of Brazilian politics. But
Speaker 1: he he goes after he finds like a different corruption
Speaker 1: ring to go after that he's not a part of.
Speaker 1: And and I think it's it's important to understand sort
Speaker 1: of from the outside of this right that like this
Speaker 1: anti corruption stuff is essentially like a newer faction or
Speaker 1: like a slightly different faction of the Brazilian ruling class
Speaker 1: going after another faction of the Brazilian ruling class. So
Speaker 1: he finds he starts this thing that it becomes known
Speaker 1: as Lava Jatto or Operation car Wash UM. And what
Speaker 1: moral is going after is this little legitimately genuinely enormous
Speaker 1: corruption ring surrounding Petro Boss, which is brazili state owned
Speaker 1: oil company UM. And the investigation leads to the arrests
Speaker 1: of an enormous number of government officials, Like there's like
Speaker 1: some of the richest people in Brazil go to jail,
Speaker 1: like and it is true that like like there is
Speaker 1: an enormous amount of coruption, Like there are billions and
Speaker 1: billions of dollars that that are being sort of stolen
Speaker 1: from this oil company right through sort of like contracts
Speaker 1: and like payoffs and stuff. Um, but we also get
Speaker 1: to some real like lepers eating people's faces. Party ship
Speaker 1: here as well, where Okay, so Chils in thirteen deal
Speaker 1: with russef signs a law that massively expands police powers
Speaker 1: that includes, in particular, allowing them with no strings attached,
Speaker 1: to offer plea bargains of people to get that they
Speaker 1: confess the stuff and like give the cops information they
Speaker 1: want to hear, which is, like Jenny Winely, really unethical
Speaker 1: because for a lot of reasons, right, like the whole
Speaker 1: plea bargaining system is like the reason like one of
Speaker 1: the reasons the whole USS system is completely sucked up
Speaker 1: because everyone just fucking please out instead of going to
Speaker 1: trial because they know they know they're like every everyone
Speaker 1: is pretty sure they're gonna lose, and so people, you know,
Speaker 1: people will just pleader ship that they didn't do because
Speaker 1: they have no chance of winning the case. It's completely
Speaker 1: fucked up. And den Lar Russo's like, nah, yeah, fuck it,
Speaker 1: like we're gonna sign this, like you know, and I
Speaker 1: like I get that, like she she was responding to
Speaker 1: like the protests, and I get that she thought it
Speaker 1: would mostly be used against like fucking protesters or some ship.
Speaker 1: But like, who did you think this was gonna be
Speaker 1: used against? Yet? Wait? Why, like come on, like seriously,
Speaker 1: just It's like, it is simultaneously true that there was
Speaker 1: like an incredibly coordinated, sophisticated like like a joint American
Speaker 1: Brazilian like intelligence and like just the state operation to
Speaker 1: bring down the PT. It's also true that the PT,
Speaker 1: like like the reason they were able to be decapped
Speaker 1: so like so easily is that like they'd spent the
Speaker 1: last like six years like firing rounds over and over
Speaker 1: again into their own knees. So like, Okay, these things
Speaker 1: are both through at the same time. But okay, and
Speaker 1: so loveto like evisceerates an enormous part sort of a
Speaker 1: section of the Brazilian ruling class, but it very quickly
Speaker 1: becomes clear that it's being used as a political weapon
Speaker 1: against Delmar Russef and the PT, despite the fact that
Speaker 1: like literally every Brazilian paul like party is involved with this.
Speaker 1: Like I think the pso L might be like the
Speaker 1: only major Blurzilian political party who wasn't involved in this,
Speaker 1: and like that's because I don't think they had anyone
Speaker 1: who was senior enough to do it. So like you know,
Speaker 1: but but but you know everyone instead like just is
Speaker 1: using this to go is like very clearly using this
Speaker 1: to go after the PT. The problem is that like
Speaker 1: and this is this is gonna be a perennial problem
Speaker 1: with these investigations is that they can't actually directly dale
Speaker 1: Delmo Russef or Lulu with doing anything that they have
Speaker 1: real problems with this. Um. You know, Delma wins re
Speaker 1: election to US in fourteen, but he also fifteen there
Speaker 1: are these as Lavata was like going and there's this
Speaker 1: enormous fucking press fury around it. Um, there are these
Speaker 1: massive sort of anti corruption protests demanding that like she resigned.
Speaker 1: That's ripped up by like again, like the right wing
Speaker 1: media goes just completely batshit in this period. Um, and
Speaker 1: you know, okay, so again morals running into this problem
Speaker 1: that he can't find anything that Dylan Russof did that
Speaker 1: was illegal, so he starts relying on political theater instead.
Speaker 1: He and and uh, he starts stages these this like
Speaker 1: enormous series of raids on like Lula's house as nonprofit,
Speaker 1: like he's like like his brother's business, and you know,
Speaker 1: with the entire press court like they're right like with
Speaker 1: the stage for all these raids. They drag him off
Speaker 1: to like jail for questioning, but again, like they don't
Speaker 1: really have anything. They kind of like invent this case
Speaker 1: about Lula based on some convoluted ship about a property
Speaker 1: that he didn't own. It's like, you know, the the
Speaker 1: thing here basically is that, like as with all corruption scandals,
Speaker 1: right this this is a fight between parts of the
Speaker 1: ruling class. Right, Like the actual details of who's taking
Speaker 1: money from who are essentially irrelevant because that's not what
Speaker 1: actually matters, right, What matters here is that like the
Speaker 1: sort of rooting prosecutors have decided they're going to destroy
Speaker 1: the PT, and you know they're the PT has helped
Speaker 1: them do it at every step. Um, it's just the
Speaker 1: prosecutors right there. It's like there's there's like press plus prosecutors,
Speaker 1: plus plus a bunch of political parties too. It's so
Speaker 1: not to like draw a comparison where it's not necessarily
Speaker 1: entirely valid, but like, look at the United Kingdom, right,
Speaker 1: we have Boris Johnson like monumentally fucking up the COVID response,
Speaker 1: tons of people die, and it's not that that brings
Speaker 1: him down. It's that he had a suitcase of wine
Speaker 1: in a karaoke party, like because at some point, but
Speaker 1: it's the appearance, right, It's this political theater of accountability, like,
Speaker 1: but you're not actually accountable to the people who you
Speaker 1: let down on the people who you lied to your
Speaker 1: accountable to, like seventeen media editors Murdoch, right, and every
Speaker 1: Brazil has its own versions of Murdoch who are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I can only imagine like people people to who if
Speaker 1: I if I said my actual opinions on them, Like
Speaker 1: the the the FCC would specifically start regulating podcasts because like,
Speaker 1: oh boy, all these people should redacted parody, etcetera, etcetera,
Speaker 1: just like a five minute bleap here. So okay, but
Speaker 1: but again so okay. They have this problem again which
Speaker 1: that they can't really get delmar Roussa for anything, and
Speaker 1: so what happens instead is that the Brazilian Senate is
Speaker 1: sort of like scrambling for something they can use, and
Speaker 1: what they eventually impeached Delmar Roussa for is this like
Speaker 1: accounting procedure thing basically that like everyone does. And when
Speaker 1: I say everyone does, like almost every previous president like
Speaker 1: every every like every single like like uh, what's it called?
Speaker 1: Like every single like uh, why am I blink? Governor
Speaker 1: is at the right word? Yeah, like the people who
Speaker 1: are like the heads of states. Yeah, I think like
Speaker 1: all the governors do this, like fucking literally everyone in
Speaker 1: Brazilian politics does is including some of the people who
Speaker 1: are signing like the fucking uh uh impeachment thing. But
Speaker 1: they remove her from this and okay, so like a
Speaker 1: part of the like the sort of sort of like
Speaker 1: like decrepit and despise neoliberal right takes power. But the
Speaker 1: normal part thing here is that she's Delia Russof is
Speaker 1: impeached by her own allies, right, she is impeached like
Speaker 1: Michael Timer, the guy who replaces Russf like winds up
Speaker 1: as presidents because Dilma Russof bade him her VP. Like
Speaker 1: it's just like you know and this this is this
Speaker 1: is dating back to like this this is like really
Speaker 1: old sort of pet political maneuver stuff dat dating back
Speaker 1: to like Lula finally winning out over the sort of
Speaker 1: PC basis in two thousand two, right where he's able
Speaker 1: to convince them to like have a sort of like
Speaker 1: conservative guy like be his running mate. And here this
Speaker 1: this is this is where this finally goes to ship
Speaker 1: because the PT is making alliances with sort of like
Speaker 1: set the Right parties and all these corruption parties, and
Speaker 1: it's like, okay, you allied yourself, Like I I understand
Speaker 1: the reason they were doing this was that the sort
Speaker 1: of central which is like the sort of corruption parties
Speaker 1: have enough votes that you kind of have to work
Speaker 1: with them. But also like what did you expect was
Speaker 1: gonna happen? Like did you did you really not expect
Speaker 1: that the leoparage, We're gonna eat your face? Like okay,
Speaker 1: it's you know, like it's really like okay, like you
Speaker 1: let a mosquito into your house and you are now
Speaker 1: like fucking Pikachu facing because they because the mosquito bait you.
Speaker 1: It's like really like you know, and this all comes
Speaker 1: back to sort of like the things I've been talking
Speaker 1: about in last two episodes about like the inherent contradiction
Speaker 1: of being a leftist and happy to having to keep
Speaker 1: the state and having to run a state. We have
Speaker 1: to keep the economy going, right, which again it means
Speaker 1: that you have to make sure the capitalists get money.
Speaker 1: And Lulu could just pay these people off, like literally
Speaker 1: or figuratively, because he was used benefiting from the commodity boom, right,
Speaker 1: But then when the Chinese economy goes under and suddenly
Speaker 1: the money dries up because the quality boom is over,
Speaker 1: and the Brazilian economy starts to collapse, like you know,
Speaker 1: there's nothing to pay off the boozie with, and you know,
Speaker 1: Deli results like she's trying to pay them off, but
Speaker 1: you know, in order to fund it. Now, now she's
Speaker 1: doing austerity and that's sapping her, and that's sapping her
Speaker 1: base because you know, okay, you have to choose one
Speaker 1: or the other. But she's not been again. But she's
Speaker 1: also not able to pay off enough of the bored
Speaker 1: to stop this from coming, and so they off her
Speaker 1: and you know, okay, so the pt PC supporters will
Speaker 1: describe what happens like that this impeachment is a coup,
Speaker 1: which is like true, like as far as it goes like,
Speaker 1: it is true that like a bunch of absolute like
Speaker 1: psychopaths like just like overthrew the democratically elected president on
Speaker 1: for bullshit. I actually think it's less of a coup
Speaker 1: than the next the next thing we're gonna get to. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so okay, so the product of this is
Speaker 1: that Michael Timer, who was like just an unfathomable neoliberal coool,
Speaker 1: like I really like, oh god, like it's really one
Speaker 1: of the worst people ever. Um who again russef picked
Speaker 1: us her VP, becomes President Intel spent the next two
Speaker 1: years like so if Draco Malfoy grew up, this is
Speaker 1: what he would look like. Yeah, no, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: really incredible. Yeah you you you you do owe it
Speaker 1: to yourself to look up. Yeah, it's man is yeah,
Speaker 1: very streamlined. But otherwise yeah, he just like he just
Speaker 1: looks like like exactly who he is. Yeah. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: cannot believe this guy succeeded in politics when he looks like, yeah,
Speaker 1: an evil snake. Yeah. I think he also got arrested
Speaker 1: for being even more like ok so, like like there
Speaker 1: is corruption going on in the PT timer is the
Speaker 1: corruption party, right, Like he actually goes down eventually, he
Speaker 1: is like unfathomably corrupt. Like he goes down for like
Speaker 1: what he took, Like it's a bribe from a meat packer,
Speaker 1: right that guy, Yeah, that was one of these. He
Speaker 1: funneled like a hundred and eighty million dollars into like
Speaker 1: his politically like into like his friends. And it's like
Speaker 1: like unfat like okay, and this stuff genuinely sucks, right,
Speaker 1: Like it actually does suck that literally hundreds of millions
Speaker 1: of dollars are being just like fucking stolen by these goals, right, Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: especially in a country where like people genuinely struggled to
Speaker 1: get by every single yeah, and and and and I
Speaker 1: think it's worth mentioning, like like the level of poverty
Speaker 1: that we're talking about here is like like again like
Speaker 1: the people who don't have running water, people who live
Speaker 1: in deserts and like don't have water at all, Like
Speaker 1: it is really really bad. And you and and then
Speaker 1: you know you're you're you are watching just this bullshit
Speaker 1: happening right like this fucking like guy who God, just
Speaker 1: this is like absolute fucking demon just stealing a hundred
Speaker 1: like fifty billion dollars, right, yeah, it's like rich people
Speaker 1: playing monopoly with your fucking future and your children's future. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know, but but it again like tempered. Nobody,
Speaker 1: nobody fucking voted for this guy, right like, and he's
Speaker 1: just immediately starts implementing like unfathomable just atrocious austerity, and
Speaker 1: he like he has a seven percent of rating. Everyone
Speaker 1: is calling, yea, this is this is the second lowest.
Speaker 1: This is the second lowest group of ready I've ever
Speaker 1: seen for for a ruling politician, after Kim Jung Pill,
Speaker 1: who I think got down to three percent one day.
Speaker 1: I'm going to do an actual Kim junk Pill episode.
Speaker 1: I feel like you're within the error margin of any polling.
Speaker 1: Once you get into the single digits, no one likes you,
Speaker 1: like literally, like like remember like people like people from
Speaker 1: his own party want him to resign, right and he
Speaker 1: just doesn't. Just days in power because there's no one,
Speaker 1: no one can do anything about it. Because but you
Speaker 1: always get that right when you when you engage in
Speaker 1: this politics of corruption, the like sort of palace cups
Speaker 1: and interronicing, backstabbing will necessarily happen because like that is
Speaker 1: how you further your own career and therefore benefit more
Speaker 1: from the corruption. Right, Like again, see the clusterfuck that
Speaker 1: is the United Kingdom. Now do you know who else
Speaker 1: doesn't benefit from corruption like the rest of us. I
Speaker 1: don't think we can say that with any degree of
Speaker 1: certainty decrease it shall it's the products and services that
Speaker 1: support this podcast. Okay, and and we're back, um and Okay,
Speaker 1: this I think is a good at a time as
Speaker 1: any to mention that, like, okay, so lava Jotto is
Speaker 1: going on this entire time, right, this, this thing is
Speaker 1: going on for years and years and years and years,
Speaker 1: and it's reiterating that Lava Jotto is being illegally backed
Speaker 1: by the American Just Department, Justice Department, the SEC, the
Speaker 1: FBI probably all, I think, also the CIA, although weirdly
Speaker 1: this is okay, And and this is where things get
Speaker 1: very strange, because this, like from the documents that we've seen,
Speaker 1: there is some evidence the CIA handed them ship. The
Speaker 1: thing we have the most evidence for is actually the
Speaker 1: FBI running this coup. Weird. Yeah, it's very weird. What
Speaker 1: was happening basically is that Okay, so, the way American
Speaker 1: corruption laws work is that like if any money passes
Speaker 1: through like an American bank account, the FBI has the
Speaker 1: authority to go after them. And the FBI and the
Speaker 1: Justice Department fucking hate the PT and they're they're they're
Speaker 1: looking at Petro Boss and they're going like, this is
Speaker 1: so much fucking money we can get if we go
Speaker 1: after these people, and also we hate them, and and
Speaker 1: it's also worth nothing. Okay, So, uh, Sergio Morrow is
Speaker 1: like he's a Harvard guy, right, He's a Harvard guy.
Speaker 1: He was trained by a bunch of American police people,
Speaker 1: like he he is like he's like one of these
Speaker 1: sort of like he's he's a Nazi cool basically, right,
Speaker 1: but like he's like the the law version of a
Speaker 1: Nastic cool and so the the entire like and again
Speaker 1: it's it's funny like the FBI, in theory, is not
Speaker 1: supposed to be Like the FBI is supposed to be
Speaker 1: a domestic agency, which does not make them any better,
Speaker 1: by the way, but like they're they're not supposed to
Speaker 1: be going after like they're not supposed to be trying
Speaker 1: to overthrow the president of Brazil, but you know they are.
Speaker 1: And again, like they are taking down the Black panthers,
Speaker 1: increasing anti semitism, just the normal standard domestics. Yeah, shooting anarchists,
Speaker 1: shooting like possibly assassinating MLK. Um, yeah them, yeah not
Speaker 1: they're not supposed to be doing the four in cruise.
Speaker 1: That's the CIA job. But they're they're muscling into the
Speaker 1: CIA's territory here. Um. It's it's it's worth mentioning as
Speaker 1: well that like the Obama administration is heavily involved in this, right. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know, it turns out that by the time
Speaker 1: you get toy sixteen Trump ministrate tries amteen trusmistrations of power.
Speaker 1: They love this ship because it's Trump. It's like, wow, damn,
Speaker 1: who could have guessed? Yeah, yeah, yeah, and and as
Speaker 1: and this is gonna come out. It's gonna come out later. Um.
Speaker 1: By this okay, this is the second time that Glenn
Speaker 1: Greenwald is just handed like one of the biggest news
Speaker 1: stories of the decade, like literally dropped on his lap
Speaker 1: and he gets to like, right about it is that Yeah,
Speaker 1: it comes out that like this stuff is being politically
Speaker 1: like very obviously politically motivated, like sorry Morrows, like openly
Speaker 1: cutting deals with Bolsonaro to the political persecutions. There's again
Speaker 1: again the stuff about how he's being paid by he's
Speaker 1: literally getting like the task Force is being funded by
Speaker 1: the FBI through these slush funds of fine money collected
Speaker 1: from Petro Boss. Like it's unbelievably shady ship. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: the entire time this is going on, Sergeo Morrow has
Speaker 1: been like illegally wire tapping Lula's conversations and leading them
Speaker 1: to the press to like destroy La. And politically it's
Speaker 1: and you know and like like operation car Washed, Like
Speaker 1: prosecutors are just like going on TV and telling the
Speaker 1: entire Brazilian public like, no, Lula is guilty, there's no
Speaker 1: doubt about it, and then she doesn't. Seventeen Morrow has
Speaker 1: Lula convicted. Now Lula appeals as on the grounds that
Speaker 1: like this is incredibly obviously a show trial, like but
Speaker 1: by the because there's a lot of you will read
Speaker 1: a lot of like the sort of liberal press in
Speaker 1: the US like fucking loves this ship and like she
Speaker 1: doesn't fourteen doesn't. He's the sixtees, somebody say seventeen, but like,
Speaker 1: but she doesn't seventeen. Even the sort of American liberal
Speaker 1: press is like, hey, you're running these trials too fast,
Speaker 1: Like these don't look like real trials anymore. Like he's
Speaker 1: like they're there's there's like it really is, like they
Speaker 1: stopped having even the pretense that it's not being show
Speaker 1: trials are just like committing people, convicting people, convicting people,
Speaker 1: convincing people. And like you know, in the Lula case,
Speaker 1: there's some interesting stuff which is that like, Okay, Morow
Speaker 1: doesn't have the legal jurisdiction to prosecute Lula here, like
Speaker 1: the crimes that were supposedly committed aren't committed in a
Speaker 1: place where where Barrow has any jurisdiction at all, like
Speaker 1: it's another state, and he just doesn't anyways, because he's
Speaker 1: just like fuck it, like whatever. And so it's more
Speaker 1: of a vibe when you oral city government. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and and again like this is the thing, like people
Speaker 1: people get really really really hung up about legal technicalities
Speaker 1: and that ship and as we're about to see in
Speaker 1: that in in this case, right like that ship does
Speaker 1: not matter, right this this is entirely about sort of power,
Speaker 1: about power brokering and sort of like where where where
Speaker 1: the Brazilian elite is in a particular time, who's backing
Speaker 1: what Lula puts in a petition if he puts in
Speaker 1: a rid of habeas corpus that's like, hey, there's stuff
Speaker 1: in the constitution that's like, I shouldn't be put in
Speaker 1: prison until my appeals are done. And this goes to
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court, at which point a fucking Brazilian general
Speaker 1: who apparently be this this this apparently was planned by
Speaker 1: fifteen other generals. Uh who I I got a guy
Speaker 1: named Edward edwardo Vilas Bolas like literally sorts threatening the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court on Twitter like she's like he starts employing
Speaker 1: And this tweet is read on Globo, which is like
Speaker 1: the fucking like like big, big, biggest news network in Brazil.
Speaker 1: They like read out this tweet, like the subtext of
Speaker 1: which is, if you don't put Lulie in jail, we
Speaker 1: are going to do a coup. So they dragged Lula
Speaker 1: off to prison and they put him in solitary for
Speaker 1: five and eighty days, which is like yeah, yeah, they
Speaker 1: they they are like they are torturing the shot out
Speaker 1: of him. Um Jesus, yeah yeah yeah, living out there
Speaker 1: like fucking like you know, like previous generation of coups
Speaker 1: against Latin America, like chopping Victor Halla's hands off fantasy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and like like I said, you know, I would say,
Speaker 1: it's like Lula Lula has was arrested by the military
Speaker 1: dictatorship in the eighties, right, but even though the military
Speaker 1: dictatorship only held him for thirty days and then let
Speaker 1: him go, and they're they're like they're trying to put
Speaker 1: him in prison the fourth things like it's originally seven
Speaker 1: years and then i s extended to twelve years um,
Speaker 1: and then there's this whole thing. But like she's also
Speaker 1: like not allowed to speak to the press during this time.
Speaker 1: And the reason this is happening is that, uh, if
Speaker 1: you're in prison, you can't run for president. And in
Speaker 1: jail's an eighteen. If Lula's run allowed to run for president,
Speaker 1: even with all the press ship, he is going to
Speaker 1: fucking stop literally anyone in the field. Yeah and yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is going up. But before we talk about
Speaker 1: the election a little bit and then sort of wind down,
Speaker 1: there's one more thing I want to talk about, which
Speaker 1: is that four days before Lula is arrested, Mariella Franco,
Speaker 1: who is a incredibly radical City City councilor and real
Speaker 1: dejan Narrow, is assassinated by death squad um. There there's
Speaker 1: a lot of coverage of like who she was sort
Speaker 1: of like there's lot of coverage of her story about
Speaker 1: how she's a black, lesbian woman who came who like
Speaker 1: was from an incredibly for poor family and the favelas
Speaker 1: and how she sort of like worked a way out
Speaker 1: to you politicians, but like they don't talk about you know,
Speaker 1: people will sort of obliquely mentioned her human rights work,
Speaker 1: or they'll talk a bit about how she's part of
Speaker 1: the PSOL, which is is leftist party that like, Okay,
Speaker 1: so I'm still I suppose it. I'm looking I'm so
Speaker 1: kind of hazy about their exactory. I think what happened
Speaker 1: was there was a group of PT of of PT
Speaker 1: like uh politicians who refused to vote for an austerity
Speaker 1: package the PT was trying to push through, and they
Speaker 1: got kicked out of the party for it, and they
Speaker 1: found at the ps O l um and you know,
Speaker 1: they they'll talk about sort of this stuff. What what
Speaker 1: they won't cover really is what she was actually doing.
Speaker 1: And I think this is like this is incredibly important
Speaker 1: because the thing she was actually doing was a bunch
Speaker 1: of very radical and unbelievably dangerous anti police activism, um so,
Speaker 1: and she doesn't. Eight. This is this again. Under Lula's
Speaker 1: Pizza government, that there was a re orientation of police
Speaker 1: strategy and the favelas tours this new program called Pacifying
Speaker 1: Police Units UPPs, and the idea was that instead of
Speaker 1: doing constant raids in the favelas and then leaving them,
Speaker 1: they were just gonna put them under like constant police occupation.
Speaker 1: And you know, like there's something like four hundred thousand
Speaker 1: people at a time are just living under these occupations.
Speaker 1: And in the beginning, it's supposed to be tied to
Speaker 1: like so like there's supposed to be like an expansion
Speaker 1: of like social services into the favelas and just supposed
Speaker 1: to be like community policing, and that just doesn't happen.
Speaker 1: And but he hasn't. Thirteen. They just like give up
Speaker 1: the pretense of doing any social work. And they found
Speaker 1: this thing called had the Good Groups of Proximity Police,
Speaker 1: which very quickly turned into just like fucking desk squads.
Speaker 1: But they're but they're they're they're both desk squads and
Speaker 1: they're also doing like stopping frisk ship and just like
Speaker 1: carassing random black people. There's they were just murdering people
Speaker 1: on the streets, um on a scale that is like
Speaker 1: it's worse than has been before, like that there were
Speaker 1: individual police unit. There's an individ to a police unit
Speaker 1: because a hundred and seventeen people in a year, like
Speaker 1: it is, it is horrible, right, And this is what
Speaker 1: I was talking about about the Brazilian police killing killing
Speaker 1: at a rate that's a eleven time tire in the
Speaker 1: American police, like it is. It is fucking atrocious, um.
Speaker 1: And there are some incredible videos of yeah, like it's
Speaker 1: fucked um and they're war with parts of their own population. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I say this like this is this is
Speaker 1: one of those things about fascism, right, where like fascism
Speaker 1: like always kind of has works on the system of
Speaker 1: alliances between sort of like the police paramilitaries who are
Speaker 1: sort of tied to the police, and organized crime, and
Speaker 1: you know, like that there is an extent to which
Speaker 1: there are a bunch of gangs and the police are
Speaker 1: finding them. There's also an extent to which like everyone
Speaker 1: involved is just shaking down all of these fucking like
Speaker 1: unbelievably poor uh largely black, like working class people who
Speaker 1: are just getting fucking robbed every day it's horrible. Um yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's that where it might be a bit of
Speaker 1: a side by that we don't like need to fit
Speaker 1: in here, but in this case we can distribute it.
Speaker 1: But there's a I know that one of the big
Speaker 1: Brazilian prison gangs is like ostensibly leftist. They're like they
Speaker 1: called Red Command, right, yeah, I think I think is
Speaker 1: it really command anti? Yeah? So they they used to
Speaker 1: be Yeah, so okay, Red Command used to be like
Speaker 1: an m L group that was like a sort of
Speaker 1: like alliance between like regular people in prison and like
Speaker 1: left just people who've been put in prison command of Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it it does a similar thing to like like
Speaker 1: there are parts of the farc that go like this.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of there's a thing that happens when
Speaker 1: you're dealing with sort of armed groups like this, which
Speaker 1: is that Okay, So like a lot of the things
Speaker 1: that you do to get money as an armed group
Speaker 1: are things that are away to get money. So things
Speaker 1: like kidnapping is like entering the drug trade. And there's
Speaker 1: a lot of groups to start out ideological that just
Speaker 1: ceased to be ideological and the people well, which is
Speaker 1: in the drug right now, and this is kind of
Speaker 1: what happens here with these people. But okay, there's actually
Speaker 1: this actually does tie into this because so Marilla Franco
Speaker 1: like spends her entire life like fighting these people. She
Speaker 1: she she gets she has she gets a sociology degree,
Speaker 1: and like what she's doing and like while she's doing
Speaker 1: sociology stuff is she's like making reports and like like
Speaker 1: telling everyone like what these people are doing, like what
Speaker 1: what what the funding police are doing? And when she dies,
Speaker 1: like there's a fucking judge who's like, actually, uh, what
Speaker 1: happened was that? Uh? She was she was she was
Speaker 1: working with Red Command and she got behind her debt
Speaker 1: payments and they killed her. And it's like this is
Speaker 1: some fucking bullshit, like like she so we stick is
Speaker 1: we actually still don't really know much about like who
Speaker 1: killed her, right, we know that one of the one
Speaker 1: of the people who's being tried for the getaway driver
Speaker 1: was like pictured with Bolsonaro and he's there's a bunch
Speaker 1: of weird ties to like Bolsonaro's brother, because Bosonaro was very,
Speaker 1: very heavily tied into a bunch of arm paramilitary groups.
Speaker 1: It works well for everyone to have these groups that
Speaker 1: they can paign as like the Great Satan, right, Like
Speaker 1: the police can be like ware com back to the gangs,
Speaker 1: and gangs can be like, well, you all hate the
Speaker 1: fucking police, right like, and then they yeah, they could
Speaker 1: just blame anyone else whenever there is and and it's
Speaker 1: like the self supporting structure. Yeah. But then but every
Speaker 1: once in a while, you get someone and that that's
Speaker 1: like verylar frank, like, she's a very very rare kind
Speaker 1: of person, like she she winds up as a city council, right,
Speaker 1: She's she's a very very rare kind of politician who
Speaker 1: like everyone likes like, like everyone on the left likes
Speaker 1: like you're even you're sort of like like most hardcore
Speaker 1: like fucking guy in like like it was your almost
Speaker 1: like hardcore guy like a tiny mL sect and like
Speaker 1: your most hardline anarchists. Like everyone likes her because she's
Speaker 1: doing she's doing, like she's every day putting her life
Speaker 1: in danger trying to stop the police. And you know,
Speaker 1: and when when you get someone like that who is
Speaker 1: not part of the sort of like it's not part
Speaker 1: of either of these factions, right and who was a
Speaker 1: genuine threat to both of them, because she is unbelievably popular.
Speaker 1: She she gets the fifth most votes of anyone. Like
Speaker 1: who's who's running for city counselor and she's doing it
Speaker 1: again running for the PSOL. Who's like they have like
Speaker 1: five seats I think in in the Senate or something
Speaker 1: like that. Like like they're not like they're not like that.
Speaker 1: They are a kind of large party, but they're not
Speaker 1: like one of the parties that ever gonna like win
Speaker 1: a national election, right like, and but you know, but
Speaker 1: she she is an incredible threat to them, and so
Speaker 1: they have her killed. We know that the bullets that
Speaker 1: were at that that she was killed by were part
Speaker 1: of a batch that was sold by the police. We
Speaker 1: know that from from another one of the batches that
Speaker 1: was in that sequence. Uh, there's a bunch of other
Speaker 1: people who were killed by the police. And this is
Speaker 1: also like wait, sold to the police, are sold by
Speaker 1: the police, sold by the police. Magnificent. Yeah, yeah there,
Speaker 1: you know. And there's a lot of stuff going on
Speaker 1: here too, which is like there are a lot of
Speaker 1: activists in Brazil who get killed, like this is this
Speaker 1: happens all the time. There are a lot of digits activists,
Speaker 1: you get killed. There a lot of black activists to
Speaker 1: get killed. They are just like if you piss off
Speaker 1: the wrong person, like you can just get executed. And
Speaker 1: this assassination is one of the symbols of it because
Speaker 1: like she was a city councilwoman, right, Like she was
Speaker 1: part of a major political party, and they just fucking
Speaker 1: shot her, yeah and held accountable. Yeah, it's it's fucking horrible.
Speaker 1: Um I I yeah, I don't really have I don't
Speaker 1: have any sort of like clever thing to say here.
Speaker 1: It's just it's just fucking awful. There's one more thing
Speaker 1: I need to mention, which is that Okay, So the
Speaker 1: thing she was doing like like literally literally she was
Speaker 1: at a conference, like she she was killed, like driving
Speaker 1: home from a conference, right, And the thing she was
Speaker 1: doing like literally in the days leading up, like leading
Speaker 1: up to her assassination was um so, Michael Timmer has
Speaker 1: this thing called the Cote, the call the quote unquote
Speaker 1: federal intervention, which was apparently like extremely popular in Brazil,
Speaker 1: which is like a sign of how fucked up everything is,
Speaker 1: which is that he just like was like, fuck it,
Speaker 1: We're gonna hand control of quote unquote security and real
Speaker 1: Dejannarrow to the army and let them like go to
Speaker 1: warward the gangs. Yeah, fuck, unbelievably fucked. And she she
Speaker 1: is too, takes an incredibly bold chance against us, is
Speaker 1: trying it, is trying to fight it, and then she
Speaker 1: is mysteriously assassinated. Yeah, it's a bit like you know
Speaker 1: how like you obviously people will say that fascism is
Speaker 1: like the return of colonials into domestic policy, right, colonial
Speaker 1: colonial methods in the metropal instead of in the colonies,
Speaker 1: and like this is similar here, right, Like what you're
Speaker 1: seeing is just they're doing a colonialism, but just to
Speaker 1: poor people. Yeah, although I should mention a lot of
Speaker 1: us and that that analysis is developed in like like
Speaker 1: it's developed for Europe and the Brazilian context is not
Speaker 1: the same thing as that, because like Brazil was also
Speaker 1: doing all of this stuff to its own population, because
Speaker 1: again Brazil has a mass like like like Brazil's styled
Speaker 1: colony that was also a slave state. Right, so all
Speaker 1: of this violence is just it's the same thing that
Speaker 1: they've been doing since they got there. Like, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: and this is something actually Lula talks about a lot,
Speaker 1: which is like the people who have been in power
Speaker 1: for five years are still in power. But I think
Speaker 1: it's important to understand, like part of how Bollsonaro is
Speaker 1: able to do what he does is that everyone is
Speaker 1: already like everyone is already so primed to just like
Speaker 1: back the fucking army coming in, and like right, like
Speaker 1: there there's so much racism. There's so much just like
Speaker 1: like there there, there's this whole set of law and
Speaker 1: ordership thing that's going on. And the sort of product
Speaker 1: of all of this is in the n eighteen election,
Speaker 1: the PT put in basically some right. I mean, he's
Speaker 1: not some random guy like he he was like like
Speaker 1: he was like a kind of prominent politician, but they
Speaker 1: basically run like some guy and he gets club every Bullsonaro.
Speaker 1: And part of this is there's a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: that happens here that's like very similar to sort of
Speaker 1: US this information campaigns, Like there's all these like telegram
Speaker 1: groups going around where like yeah, his name is Fernando Haddad.
Speaker 1: There's this whole thing about how he's gonna like turn
Speaker 1: your kids gay and like he's a Satanist. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: so and then things interesting, right because I think people, um,
Speaker 1: there's this analysis, so like we have to see everything
Speaker 1: through the length of American politics like the Boston aro
Speaker 1: is the American the Brazilian Trump but like it's and
Speaker 1: my anority. This is not deep, but like it strikes
Speaker 1: me that he embraces Catholicism to a degree that is
Speaker 1: like much greater than like like Trump did religion. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's interesting. So like the London American contexts has you know,
Speaker 1: it has this like thing I think you think you
Speaker 1: know about, which is like it's there. There's this sort
Speaker 1: of right wing Catholicy evangelical alliance. Yeah that is happening here.
Speaker 1: And you know because like a whole bunch of of
Speaker 1: of Bolson Arrow's base is a ship ton of humangelicals.
Speaker 1: But he he's like there's this sort of shared language
Speaker 1: around ESPEC, specifically like around eddy abortion stuff, around opposing
Speaker 1: gender ideology and like feminism and stuff like that, where
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, you can you can do this sort
Speaker 1: of dog like not even dog wasn't you can just
Speaker 1: sort of like whistle at them and you know, like
Speaker 1: it works. And this is sort of like you know
Speaker 1: I and like okay, like if if I had any
Speaker 1: energy left in me, I would probably do another episode
Speaker 1: that was like like two three I could do like
Speaker 1: a fucking year of episodes. But everything that happened to
Speaker 1: their Billsonaro, Um, yeah, I'm just gonna sort of hit
Speaker 1: some of the like low lights, you know what you
Speaker 1: call it, like Bolsonaro Okay, but Bolsonaro managed to kill
Speaker 1: less people than Trump did. But and also then Biden did.
Speaker 1: But Comma, he also killed a fucking unfathomable number of
Speaker 1: people with COVID, Like he refused to buy vaccines. He
Speaker 1: like it was like really into the classic Cory clean
Speaker 1: stuff like tart and stuff like he like personally spread
Speaker 1: COVID to a bunch of people. Like there's like one
Speaker 1: of one of I think one of the one of
Speaker 1: the most famous things that people know about like the
Speaker 1: sort of bullstion our regime is that the Amazon was
Speaker 1: fucking burnt because they're a huge part of his base,
Speaker 1: like basically legal loggers and bulson just like yeah, fuck it,
Speaker 1: go like destroy all destroy all this indigenous land, fucking
Speaker 1: kill the people on it, and they've been just like
Speaker 1: annihilating the Amazon. Didn't he also and I may again
Speaker 1: be completely off based on this, didn't he break down
Speaker 1: a lot of the like from fun I it's the
Speaker 1: Brazilian National Organization that, among other things, does some sometimes
Speaker 1: problematic but protection of indigenous people's didn't he like a
Speaker 1: dismantle a lot of the structure of that and trying
Speaker 1: to defend Yeah, and it did, like Trump right, like
Speaker 1: it will take years to want to do this bullshit.
Speaker 1: It might never be not like that. That's like we're
Speaker 1: running out of sucking time, right we didn't have Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: and this this is one of the things where like
Speaker 1: we have to hope Lula actually fucking hold up this
Speaker 1: word here because like, Okay, so the PACs record on
Speaker 1: deforestation is way, way and obviously better than Bollsonaro. But
Speaker 1: it's also true that a lot of the sort of
Speaker 1: legal framework that Bosonaro has been using to push this
Speaker 1: stuff like is stuff from the PT And you know,
Speaker 1: I Lula has pledged to stop deforestation, like I hope
Speaker 1: he does, or fucking everyone is going to die. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there there's you know, like everything that was
Speaker 1: like that I've talked about that was bad before, got
Speaker 1: enormously worse Bosonaro. The police violence got worse, the military
Speaker 1: violence got worse. Um, there's just like he's able to
Speaker 1: sort of like do this like enormous anti communist fervor um.
Speaker 1: But the problem is that he kills like he kills
Speaker 1: too many people. That's that's what she's killing hiselfvers he is.
Speaker 1: But like the thing is like he really just destroys
Speaker 1: the entire Brazilian economy, like his nukes it. And this
Speaker 1: costs him the support of a bunch of the ruling class.
Speaker 1: And this is actually the thing that this is. Like Ultimately,
Speaker 1: what defeated both to morrow is m like in as
Speaker 1: far as we could even talk about a being it,
Speaker 1: what if he did Bolsonaro personally is the fact that
Speaker 1: like he like he loses it off with the ruling
Speaker 1: class that when Lula appeals, like Lulula's actual case appeal
Speaker 1: goes to the Freme Court, they throw it out and
Speaker 1: say Morrow like turns on him for a bit, although
Speaker 1: Morrow and it comes back and endorses Bolsonaro in the
Speaker 1: election because he's a piece of ship. But like, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's he he loses a bunch of sort of the
Speaker 1: support of the ruling class, and there's this kind of
Speaker 1: this is the thing I think is kind of disturbing
Speaker 1: about this election, even the Lula one, is that Lula
Speaker 1: did this like giant United French strategy. Right like, he
Speaker 1: pulled together, like he was recognized by sort of everyone
Speaker 1: who posts boson arrows, like he's the only person who
Speaker 1: could stop him. But this means that he's drawing a
Speaker 1: bunch of support from the right. His his running mate
Speaker 1: in this election is a guy named Gerald. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a guy that Lula beat by twenty points
Speaker 1: in an election or thirty points something like that. Like
Speaker 1: this is literally like a right wing guy. Hulula fucking
Speaker 1: destroyed an election and he had and Lula brings him
Speaker 1: on as a running mate because he's trying to sort
Speaker 1: of appeal to like disaffected Like he's he's running the
Speaker 1: sort of like Biden suburban strategy, right like, he's doing
Speaker 1: the like an appeal to sort of moderate voters thing.
Speaker 1: And like, I mean like, and this is going on
Speaker 1: to the point where like he's telling people like not
Speaker 1: to like bring PT flags or like where PT colors
Speaker 1: to rallies because they're trying to down yeah, because they're
Speaker 1: trying to downplay the sort of like communism thing. And
Speaker 1: it doesn't really work because like Bolson Haro's just calling him,
Speaker 1: everyone's just calling him a communist anyways, right, and and
Speaker 1: he like squeaks by this fucking election, right, Like, I
Speaker 1: mean he probably wanted by he probably would have wanted
Speaker 1: by a couple more percent than the actual vote total.
Speaker 1: Shoulder han't been voter suppression, but like it was close.
Speaker 1: And the other thing that's really really bad about this
Speaker 1: is that I like the right, like Bilsonaro's party like
Speaker 1: controls the Senate. So and and this is everything right
Speaker 1: if Bolsono's party can cut it off deals and like
Speaker 1: jettison Bilsonaro like bilson is um like as a force
Speaker 1: is still there, right like this this this this sort
Speaker 1: of like fascist right has consolidated as his own political force.
Speaker 1: And you know there's a non zero chance that they
Speaker 1: just impeach Lula, right and this we literally watched this
Speaker 1: entire fucking cycle that has happened again, like right, like
Speaker 1: that this kind of ship like this could happen. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so things are still not great, and yeah, Lula's actual
Speaker 1: hand to do stuff here is very contract. I should
Speaker 1: also mention that like I don't know, like there was
Speaker 1: literally like partying in the streets in like like they
Speaker 1: were like they were parties in the streets of cities
Speaker 1: that like he didn't even win like like this this
Speaker 1: is like he I don't know, like the fact that
Speaker 1: he won is genuine leave very good, Um I have
Speaker 1: I don't know what can be done to actually sort
Speaker 1: of defeat boll snaros am as a structural force because again,
Speaker 1: like he won like of the vote, right, like that's
Speaker 1: still there killing like like tens of thousands of his
Speaker 1: population and being a general ship head. Yeah so yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're not I don't know. That's the like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: like the like actual structural things have to change about
Speaker 1: both the Brazilian political system, like the Brazilan political system,
Speaker 1: the police, the military, and the economy have to structurally
Speaker 1: change or we're or like we're gonna get gonna get
Speaker 1: another both SNAr. Like this is what's happening in the US, right,
Speaker 1: Like there hasn't actually been a sort of structural shift
Speaker 1: in like in the American political systems that we're just
Speaker 1: gonna get another Trump. Maybe it'll be actual Trump. Who knows,
Speaker 1: like like like maybe this thing like until until fascism
Speaker 1: is sort of like class base and base in the
Speaker 1: state is destroyed, like and and it's it's sort of
Speaker 1: ideological basins in sort of like righting constructions of the family.
Speaker 1: It's religious based, like a particular like we're just we're
Speaker 1: gonna be back here and we're gonna be sort of
Speaker 1: like continuously teetering between fascism and something that's not fascism
Speaker 1: but has no way to oppose it, and yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that fucking sucks. Um yeah, but we keep doing it,
Speaker 1: like we keep trying to defeat fascism by running like
Speaker 1: closer and closer to fascism to pull away like the
Speaker 1: marginal fascist. Okay, so here here's the thing. I one thing,
Speaker 1: one thing I will give to Lula is that like, okay,
Speaker 1: his way of doing this was that a bunch of
Speaker 1: people found pictures of Bolsaaro and illuminate like like with
Speaker 1: a bunch of a lout, like a bunch of like
Speaker 1: in Freemason rooms with a bunch of Freemasons. And this
Speaker 1: I think genuinely may have cost Bolsonaro, Like like there's
Speaker 1: an argument this cost bulson Arrow like a bunch of
Speaker 1: election points with their own base because people found this people.
Speaker 1: There's another thing like like the day, like a couple
Speaker 1: of days before the election, like an old TV clip
Speaker 1: turned up a Bulson arms out of nowhere, saying quote,
Speaker 1: I would eat an Indian. Yes, yes, this started to acountabism.
Speaker 1: I mean this is like like this is really about
Speaker 1: his racism, right, but you're starting to a whole cannibalism thing.
Speaker 1: The Supreme Court ruled, like I think incredibly cowardly because
Speaker 1: he did say this is ruled that he couldn't run,
Speaker 1: ad that that Lula couldn't run, as calling him a cannibal.
Speaker 1: But you know, like like there was something like this
Speaker 1: like we're like like suddenly that like there were like
Speaker 1: I don't know, like this is and I will applau
Speaker 1: Loula for this, like he hasn't really like he could
Speaker 1: have run an election where he just fucking threw his
Speaker 1: entire base under the bus and was like insanely racist
Speaker 1: and was like no, I hate queer people and I
Speaker 1: hate women, and like he could have he could have
Speaker 1: run a camp, he could have run a Boson companion.
Speaker 1: He didn't, right, And and in so far as he
Speaker 1: was tapping into right wing ship, he was tapping into hey,
Speaker 1: this guy is a fucking this guy's in Freemason robes.
Speaker 1: It was sort it was sort of funny ship that
Speaker 1: like it's probably not great that this is where the
Speaker 1: political sphere is, but like you know, okay, Bossonaro literally
Speaker 1: saying he would eat a human being is like I
Speaker 1: would rather that be the kind of insane right wing
Speaker 1: thing that's going around than like, I don't know, cueer
Speaker 1: people are going to murder your children or something, which
Speaker 1: is like the normal ship that Yeah you hear. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's in sixteen, it's not like he said it
Speaker 1: when he was eighteen six years ago. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: he said it's like a journalist as well, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a fucking terrible guy. You can imagine Donald Trump
Speaker 1: saying he'd eat someone probably, I think I think Donald Trump,
Speaker 1: you'd have to prompt Bosaro just unprompted. There's no connection here.
Speaker 1: He was just like, fuck it, No, I am so racist.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna say this. I don't know. I wish,
Speaker 1: I yeah, I wish. I wish good luck and good
Speaker 1: fortune and yeah, like Vick to reach it. Everyone in
Speaker 1: Brazil who is fighting. Yeah, fu Bolsonaro, I help all
Speaker 1: these I hope he fucking dies of COVID finally. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: and I hope, I hope, but I really do hope
Speaker 1: the bulls narrows can be defeated. Um, yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 1: like make better choices, pt please God, we can't do
Speaker 1: this again. Yeah, I have both. The people in Brazil
Speaker 1: would continue to be impacted by this this bullshit. Can yeah,
Speaker 1: have better meaningful improvements to their lives yea. And the
Speaker 1: selection and I mean I will say, like, like this
Speaker 1: is proof that like bullsonaroism isn't isn't undefeatable, right, Like
Speaker 1: it's like the fact that he wasn't able to pull
Speaker 1: off the military qu right, like it is beatable. It's
Speaker 1: just it's very very hard. And yeah, I mean then
Speaker 1: that this is true or fascist and everywhere. Right, it's
Speaker 1: hard to beat, but it can be stopped. And we
Speaker 1: are going to because the alternative is the fucking annihilation
Speaker 1: of the earth. So yeah, fuck them, We're gonna win. Uh,
Speaker 1: it could happen. Here is a podcast that you're listening
Speaker 1: to right now. If this is a surprise to you,
Speaker 1: if you if you thought this was the Joe Rogan experience,
Speaker 1: let me assure you everyone here does eat a diet
Speaker 1: of nothing but elk meat. Uh. And to talk to
Speaker 1: me about the health value of elk meat, uh is UM, no,
Speaker 1: uh so about I don't know, a week or so ago. Um,
Speaker 1: we're talking with Sarah Young. Sarah, how are you doing good?
Speaker 1: How are you? I'm I'm pretty good. Sarah. You're a
Speaker 1: deputy features editor at The Verge. You are a lawyer
Speaker 1: and a journalist. So you have embraced the two commos
Speaker 1: cursed vocations in two um, and you you've number one
Speaker 1: most recently written an incredible piece UM about the Portland's
Speaker 1: Van abductions, which is like brutal and um, very important
Speaker 1: for the Verge. People ought to check it out. It is. Uh.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I've had trouble getting through all of
Speaker 1: it because it is very good and because I was there.
Speaker 1: But everyone needs to read it. It's an important piece.
Speaker 1: We're not talking about that today. We're talking about a
Speaker 1: post that you made on the Twitter dot com about
Speaker 1: a week or so ago that I I messaged you
Speaker 1: about wanting to to chat about you want to kind
Speaker 1: of talk about what that post was and what you
Speaker 1: were trying to get across. Yeah, the audience. So if
Speaker 1: you live in Portland right now, it's um, it's absolutely
Speaker 1: fucking rancid. Like I think the discourse, well, sometimes sometimes
Speaker 1: a city, but the discourse is rancid. Uh. It's like
Speaker 1: this in a lot of other cities as well. Um,
Speaker 1: but you know Portland is like it's the discourse around
Speaker 1: homeless people, right yeah. Yeah. Every every conversation you have
Speaker 1: with any random person, it's like eventually goes to oh,
Speaker 1: it's gotten so bad here lately, and it's always about
Speaker 1: homeless people. Um. And they it always goes to this
Speaker 1: place where they're like, oh, we should start rounding people
Speaker 1: up into camps and getting rid of them. And it's
Speaker 1: like people are a little too excited to literally murder
Speaker 1: homeless people. You get just saying the most insane things
Speaker 1: like oh, I'm not going to break my car if
Speaker 1: I see one of those homeless people. It's it's awful
Speaker 1: and like, yeah, it's really really awful and like and
Speaker 1: then you get people going like, oh, well you know
Speaker 1: how things are, and like pulling out murders that have
Speaker 1: happened in like New York, um of Asian women at
Speaker 1: me to like just a by why it is that
Speaker 1: I need to start supporting the cops and so on
Speaker 1: and so forth. Um, And it's just there's this thing
Speaker 1: where I think that they're well meaning leftists really want
Speaker 1: to sort of pull out, like let's humanize almost people,
Speaker 1: which like, yes, but the people you're talking to they
Speaker 1: don't deal with empathy actually, right, they already don't see
Speaker 1: most of the population as people. So what you're doing
Speaker 1: is you're not even speaking the language that they speak.
Speaker 1: The issue for me is that what they're what people
Speaker 1: are doing when they dehumanize the homeless or like turn
Speaker 1: them into like a problem that you can just sweep
Speaker 1: away or like kill or put in danger or drop
Speaker 1: into a camp where they're more likely to die or
Speaker 1: get sick or be harmed. Um. It's it's that you're
Speaker 1: making a vast class of people bowl based on like
Speaker 1: superficial characteristics. Right. Um, they might be dirty, they're intense, whatever,
Speaker 1: you felt threatened by one of them once, So now
Speaker 1: everyone who's ever been homeless deserves to have a worse
Speaker 1: off life because you didn't feel great about it this
Speaker 1: one time and or two times. And it's it's really
Speaker 1: absurd to me because like, yeah, I I've had many
Speaker 1: instances in my life where I haven't felt very safe,
Speaker 1: um because of someone who was homeless, because of someone
Speaker 1: who is an addict. Um, I mean I'm a small
Speaker 1: Asian woman. I take public transitu It is, the vibes
Speaker 1: are off in every fucking city right now for people
Speaker 1: who look like me. Um, But that doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: everyone who looks like the person who's making me uncomfortable
Speaker 1: deserves to be swept up into a fucking camp. And
Speaker 1: in fact, like if I like, roll the hat back
Speaker 1: and look at sort of, oh, let's look at people
Speaker 1: who have made me feel threatened, afraid whatever. I've gone
Speaker 1: through big old sprints in my life where I'm getting
Speaker 1: a lot of death threats from white supremacists. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm sure you've life too. I can see I see it.
Speaker 1: But like you, I don't know, because you're a woman
Speaker 1: writing on the internet, like you'll get more in a
Speaker 1: couple of months than I do in an average like year.
Speaker 1: I mean it depends, right, Like it depends. I was
Speaker 1: just looking at your mentions. Yeah, I don't know. I
Speaker 1: don't really like to carefully, so I don't even know
Speaker 1: what the numbers are. Like this is, I did have
Speaker 1: an incredible, like six month period where it was really
Speaker 1: intense because Tucker Carlson was like putting me on his
Speaker 1: show for a while, so it was it was really bad,
Speaker 1: like people like some guy called into my office and
Speaker 1: threatened to fire bomb it, and the people who got
Speaker 1: the phone call like, we're stressed out enough that they
Speaker 1: called the cops and there's like a police report and like, um,
Speaker 1: there was a bunch of stuff that happened during this
Speaker 1: period that was pretty scary and uh. And it was
Speaker 1: always like guys who all sort of looked the same, Right,
Speaker 1: It's like all the you know, the Oakley sunglasses, like
Speaker 1: taking a selfie of themselves in the car, like that
Speaker 1: sort of stereotype. Right, And you know, I gotta say,
Speaker 1: for a while, i'd see that, like that little profile picture,
Speaker 1: I'd see someone in person, and like my heart would
Speaker 1: start beating faster. Right. Took a while for me to
Speaker 1: like be able to dial that back. Um, during that
Speaker 1: six month period, I'd hear someone yellow racial slur and
Speaker 1: I would almost have a panic attack because I f like,
Speaker 1: oh no, like like someone's gonna come and make good
Speaker 1: on these threats, and I don't, like, I don't want
Speaker 1: to round people up into camps for looking like a
Speaker 1: shitty racist, suburban nite white cut. Yeah, It's like that's
Speaker 1: that's because I'm not a fucking Nazi. Like it's like
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter what you've experienced. You're like what legitimate
Speaker 1: harm you faced from people who look a certain way,
Speaker 1: Like you don't round them up into camps or like
Speaker 1: talk about like how you're not going to break on
Speaker 1: the straw on the street in your car. I'm glad
Speaker 1: I was happy for kind of your perspective on the matter,
Speaker 1: because I do try Like whenever people talk about how
Speaker 1: scary Portland is are how scary the homeless camps are, Like,
Speaker 1: the thing I want to say is like, like I
Speaker 1: have like five or six different running routes in the city,
Speaker 1: and most of them have homeless encampments on them, and
Speaker 1: I run through them at night. I went through them
Speaker 1: at the day, never had a problem. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: sometimes there's like trash, and I would like it if
Speaker 1: it were cleaner, But also primarily the people cleaning up
Speaker 1: are usually like autonomously organized groups of formerly houseless folks,
Speaker 1: which is the thing that happens in a couple of
Speaker 1: the neighborhoods that I go to, um and like, But
Speaker 1: at the same time, I don't want to bring that
Speaker 1: in when there's an argument about it, because like I'm
Speaker 1: a six ft three pound white guy, right, Like, of
Speaker 1: course I'm as a general rule, in a lot of situations,
Speaker 1: I don't feel worried what other people do because I'm
Speaker 1: a big white dude and that's um. But what I
Speaker 1: will say, I had an experience a couple of months back.
Speaker 1: A person that I live near, like a neighbor of mine,
Speaker 1: is a young woman within like a six month old infant,
Speaker 1: and she was out jogging on one of the trails
Speaker 1: near our house, and two guys uh in new Kawasaki
Speaker 1: like motorcycles, dirt bikes, whatever you want to call them.
Speaker 1: I assume rich kids because these were very new bikes
Speaker 1: drove up and shot at her and her baby with
Speaker 1: BB guns, hit her in the face, nearly hit her baby. Um.
Speaker 1: And it was like homeless folks and people at an
Speaker 1: illegal skate park who came to her aid and like
Speaker 1: made sure she was okay. And when I got out there,
Speaker 1: because I I rolled out there with a fucking beat
Speaker 1: stick and a handgun just to be like, if I
Speaker 1: see these motherfucker's, we're gonna have words. And I started
Speaker 1: talking to homeless folks that I knew on the route
Speaker 1: who were all like, yeah, those people like they come
Speaker 1: by to shoot at us and it's and I have
Speaker 1: heard this in multiple encampments, of heard this at Laura
Speaker 1: Durst a number of places that like kids from the
Speaker 1: suburbs will come in to shoot homeless people with baby
Speaker 1: guns and mace them, and um, I have I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna say again. I have also been in a situation
Speaker 1: where like an agitated houseless woman was like swinging a
Speaker 1: machette at some folks, and you know, everything was de escalated.
Speaker 1: But like, I get it. The fact that there are
Speaker 1: people out there who are having like mental health difficulty
Speaker 1: means that people are going to have encounters that can
Speaker 1: be frightening. Um. But by and large, the people that
Speaker 1: I find myself most threatened by are like kids, people
Speaker 1: like those assholes rolling by and shooting people with BB
Speaker 1: guns and of course folks draw having gigantic trucks in
Speaker 1: tiny streets like assholes often while wasted. Um, Like, those
Speaker 1: are the things that scare me in Portland's not the encampments. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And honestly, like there there are some increasing safety issues
Speaker 1: in Portland, but like a lot of it is also
Speaker 1: just like from cars, right, like it is a it's
Speaker 1: more there's more of a car culture than there used
Speaker 1: to be. UM, and people get hit and uh, they
Speaker 1: go to the hospital or they die, Like it's it.
Speaker 1: There's like they're they're big changes in the city for sure,
Speaker 1: but like it's there's so much focus on homelessness as
Speaker 1: being like the root of all of that, and like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, they'll say, oh, Portland has gotten so bad,
Speaker 1: and the same breath as like talking about how high
Speaker 1: rents are or like how expensive houses have gotten just
Speaker 1: not even connecting those two things, right, Like why is
Speaker 1: it that housing is so expensive now? Like clearly people
Speaker 1: are placing bets on realist state either that or just
Speaker 1: we haven't built out enough. Could that be something? Um?
Speaker 1: Or maybe things aren't as bad as you think, and
Speaker 1: it's it's a desirable place to live. Um it's really
Speaker 1: like it is. It's extremely frustrating. UM. I. I also
Speaker 1: think that there's this weird thing where you just don't
Speaker 1: really think about the fact that you might have one
Speaker 1: or two encounters where it's upsetting you feel scared, and
Speaker 1: then like the vast majority of people who are unhoused
Speaker 1: are just trying to stay the funk out of your way,
Speaker 1: right And like there, you're not going to see them,
Speaker 1: you're not going to talk to them unless you go
Speaker 1: out of your way to talk to them and reach out,
Speaker 1: and like they're probably scared of you because they don't
Speaker 1: know who you are, Like you're a stranger. You might
Speaker 1: be one of those assholes on Kawasaki's like out to
Speaker 1: to shoot you, out to shoot them, And it's it's
Speaker 1: really frustrating, Like it's halfway. I don't know. Some some
Speaker 1: of the people who buy into this kind of discourse
Speaker 1: are just outright terrible human beings, right, Yeah, they're they're
Speaker 1: just fashion, they're just they're just fast. This is useful.
Speaker 1: But then there's like it's really frustrating how many people
Speaker 1: in the city right now are just useful idiots for
Speaker 1: the fascists have just like gone down that gone down
Speaker 1: that rabbit hole and aren't thinking past like what it
Speaker 1: means to quote unquote take care of the homeless problem,
Speaker 1: Like what do you what do you want to do here?
Speaker 1: What do you actually want to do? Um? Where are
Speaker 1: these people going to go? Like what's going to happen
Speaker 1: to them? And it's it's super frustrating. We're focusing on
Speaker 1: Portland because it's where we live. But all of these
Speaker 1: things are evidence of like broader trends. You can see
Speaker 1: a lot of the same tactics being used in Los
Speaker 1: Angeles and Austin, um in Minneapolis, and and one of
Speaker 1: the things is kind of this conflation of like disorder,
Speaker 1: drug use, homelessness with like deadly violence and a number
Speaker 1: of things like we've talked about kind of jailing and
Speaker 1: putting into camps the homeless is is one thing people
Speaker 1: suggest There's also a lot of like suggestions around massively
Speaker 1: increasing the number of police. And this all also goes
Speaker 1: into you know, you've got this kind of series of
Speaker 1: of right wing UH coups against elected leaders who have
Speaker 1: any kind of other suggestions. We saw this in San
Speaker 1: Francisco with the DHS abode and the police like just
Speaker 1: refusing to enforce like the law when they were when
Speaker 1: CESSA was attempting to carry things out in a different way.
Speaker 1: And like what we're seeing in Portland right now, we've
Speaker 1: got um a city Commissioner Joan Hardesty, who UH number
Speaker 1: one is the only black woman in the city council UM,
Speaker 1: the only person on the city council who rents UH
Speaker 1: and the only person in the city council, who is
Speaker 1: in debt and who is endured. And I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: say she's a perfect counselor a perfect politician. There's plenty
Speaker 1: of things to criticize Hardesty over um, but there has been,
Speaker 1: like number one, this kind of unhinged campaign of attacking
Speaker 1: her because of the fact that, like, her financial situation
Speaker 1: isn't great, which I see actually as a plus, um,
Speaker 1: because a lot of people in Portland are in rough
Speaker 1: financial condition. Maybe it's nice if they're represented on the
Speaker 1: fucking city council. But also she's instituted as people keep
Speaker 1: fetching about, you know, violence and gun violence, which are
Speaker 1: problems that have gotten worse in Portland. Although it is
Speaker 1: important to not Portland is one of the safest cities
Speaker 1: in the entire United States, even after the quote unquote
Speaker 1: surge and violent crime. I don't think that mitigates that.
Speaker 1: I just think it's important to keep like things in perspective.
Speaker 1: But Hardesty has instituted the only effective program that has
Speaker 1: reduced gun violence in the city of Portland in the
Speaker 1: recent past, which was essentially a series of traffic calming measures. Right,
Speaker 1: Like think that's probably a fair way to say it.
Speaker 1: It was sort of altering the way in which UM
Speaker 1: traffic worked in a neighborhood to kind of try and
Speaker 1: reduce some of the situations that were like leading to violence.
Speaker 1: And Um, she's undergoing this massive attack right now by
Speaker 1: a candidate, a right wing candidate. I mean he, like
Speaker 1: everyone who runs importantly, he claims to be a Democrat. Um,
Speaker 1: he's donated to Republicans. He is called named Rene Gonzalez,
Speaker 1: who's being backed by a lot of the same business
Speaker 1: interests that are pushing this anti homeless agenda, pushing the
Speaker 1: mayor's proposal to put homeless people in encampments. And UM,
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's just I feel like I can
Speaker 1: see it all coming together, and that I hate how
Speaker 1: many people are, as you said, kind of useful idiots
Speaker 1: about it, where they're like, you know, look it clearly
Speaker 1: these people who are talking about rehabilitation or who are
Speaker 1: trying to like actually, who are not suggesting a car
Speaker 1: serrale solution to the fact that it's unpleasant to see
Speaker 1: people suffering on the street, Um are wrong because look
Speaker 1: at what the news tells me about how much worse
Speaker 1: violence has gotten and stuff like I it's very frustrating.
Speaker 1: Don't vote for Renigans Hollace, but yeah, please please don't
Speaker 1: vote for a man who donated to a Republican pack
Speaker 1: six months after January six Lets please please let's not
Speaker 1: do that. But god, it's it's I think, like really
Speaker 1: sad that. I mean, like people I think really just
Speaker 1: don't want to think about how damaged all of society
Speaker 1: is right now. Yeah, my wait, like we lived through
Speaker 1: you know, I currently had one of the worst responses
Speaker 1: to COVID. Uh, millions of people are dead. Um, our
Speaker 1: mental health is fucking shot through un people who didn't
Speaker 1: experience sort of federal jack boots on the ground, Um,
Speaker 1: we're not well right like it. It's any number of
Speaker 1: housed perfectly like financially stable people turned to substance abuse
Speaker 1: during this period. Um, and uh are are still you know, recovering. Um.
Speaker 1: People who are unhoused also turned to substance abuse if
Speaker 1: they weren't um already there, and their mental health is
Speaker 1: also shot there and uh sort of the upshot of
Speaker 1: this is everyone is fucking sick and taking it out
Speaker 1: on each other, and it really sucks to see It
Speaker 1: really sucks to see people be their worst selves increasingly
Speaker 1: and increasingly. Yeah. And I first off, I want to
Speaker 1: try to provide people with some objective numbers. And this
Speaker 1: is just on the City of Portland's So Portland's number one,
Speaker 1: never defunded its police. There are police currently get the
Speaker 1: most money they've ever gotten. Um. But we do have
Speaker 1: one thing that is accurate to say is we have
Speaker 1: fewer police per capita than any major city in the
Speaker 1: United States, and we have the fewest number of police
Speaker 1: on the force in living memory. I'm fairly certain right
Speaker 1: now there's like seven hundred Portland police officers, which is
Speaker 1: significantly down from because it's not a pleasant job, because
Speaker 1: people hate the cops here in Portland, so they keep
Speaker 1: quitting and moving to other cities. UM. And it is
Speaker 1: true that when the pandemic hit, violent crime in Portland
Speaker 1: raised by about two hundred and seven percent from January
Speaker 1: nine through June, which is the largest increase compared to
Speaker 1: five comparable cities. This is from an article in the
Speaker 1: Oregon Capital Chronicle, Minneapolis, Atlanta, San Francisco, Denver, and Nashville. UM. However,
Speaker 1: it's also worth noting that over the course of the
Speaker 1: last year, we're at seven a fewer homicides than we
Speaker 1: were the year before. UM. Overall, the number of homicides
Speaker 1: in two has fallen two percent from one, even as
Speaker 1: we continue to have fewer and fewer police, almost as
Speaker 1: if the surgeon violent crime was not a result in policing,
Speaker 1: but as you said, the result of a lot of
Speaker 1: other factors around the pandemic and around the economic situation,
Speaker 1: and like the rate of violence has been continuing to decrease.
Speaker 1: It's also worth noting that while we're talking about homicides
Speaker 1: here in Portland did see a surgeon homicides during the pandemic,
Speaker 1: that's not the only kind of crime or the only
Speaker 1: kind of violent crime. UM. And I want to quote
Speaker 1: here from Travel Oregon. In February one, the Major Cities
Speaker 1: Chiefs Association issue to report noting that sixty three of
Speaker 1: sixty six major cities saw at least one violent crime
Speaker 1: category grow in. Among cities of comparable size, Portland's generally
Speaker 1: experiences violent crime at somewhat lower rates. Like the a
Speaker 1: lot of this is media driven, and it's specifically the
Speaker 1: thing that you highlighted in the post that that made
Speaker 1: me reach out to you was was talking about how
Speaker 1: particularly white suburbanite homeowners are driving this panic in our
Speaker 1: driving these kind of surge and very like fascist solutions
Speaker 1: to the fears that they have about homelessness and about crime.
Speaker 1: And one of the reasons why this ship works is
Speaker 1: is people don't go into the city. They live in
Speaker 1: the suburbs. They see the scary news. And that's the
Speaker 1: thing I don't know how to actually combat because it
Speaker 1: is a nationwide problem. Shootings and deaths due to shootings.
Speaker 1: They have increased since the pandemic. But if you look
Speaker 1: at them on like a twenty year graph, fairly flat nationwide,
Speaker 1: um but has right, like the statistics of gun crimes
Speaker 1: like what in like the last couple of years. And
Speaker 1: then now they're saying that gun violence has increased, like
Speaker 1: it's it's yeah, yeah, anyway, what had What we know
Speaker 1: what has increased vastly more than gun crime is reporting
Speaker 1: on gun crime, which has surged it like and and
Speaker 1: that's because you know, if it bleeds, it leads in whatever.
Speaker 1: But it is this thing of like that's the stuff
Speaker 1: that gets people to pay attention, and it's the stuff
Speaker 1: that spreads on social media, just like pictures of like
Speaker 1: poop on the streets of San Francisco can spread on
Speaker 1: social media and it it all exists to keep these
Speaker 1: kind of suburban voters at a constant state of agitation,
Speaker 1: which makes them easy to manipulate. And like that's the
Speaker 1: thing that scares me the most. Yeah, I mean things
Speaker 1: are almost shittier with Portland because well, like, okay, the
Speaker 1: same Randisco poop situation. So I used to live in
Speaker 1: the Bay Area. That was a real situation. Francis is
Speaker 1: just human. There's just human ship everywhere. Um, it's you know,
Speaker 1: you you live with it. It's it just is what
Speaker 1: it is. And you know someone's from New York when
Speaker 1: they start complaining about it, right, like, it's uh and
Speaker 1: it I think New York which smells like p everywhere,
Speaker 1: but I mean it's it's most like hot garbage because
Speaker 1: they don't they don't take their garbage. They like just
Speaker 1: put their garbage out on the curb and when it's summertime,
Speaker 1: it just smells fucking terrible. Um. But uh so everyone's
Speaker 1: got their problems. But it's it's this like weird thing
Speaker 1: where just because of the way that we're drawn up geographically,
Speaker 1: we've got all of these people, like like you said,
Speaker 1: like out in the burbs who vote who have control
Speaker 1: over the way the wind blows, who just never come
Speaker 1: out here. Ever in this they never come out here
Speaker 1: and uh in San Francisco, Like yeah, they've got outlying
Speaker 1: areas as well, but it's it's not drawn up exactly
Speaker 1: the way that we are quite right, Like like the
Speaker 1: people who are going to be the most alarmist about
Speaker 1: San Francisco are like not going to be in the
Speaker 1: area where they're voting about the things that happened to
Speaker 1: San Francisco. The way that Chazi stuff went down, Like
Speaker 1: I mean, that's complicated, right, Like I mean it was
Speaker 1: it was a witch hunt and it made me really
Speaker 1: in San Francis and made me really want to never
Speaker 1: move back. But it it was like we've we've just
Speaker 1: got a different sort of set up here where the
Speaker 1: people who are the most upset about all of the
Speaker 1: crime in Portland, like they don't come out to where
Speaker 1: they think the crime is happening at all, Like they
Speaker 1: like they just don't really interact with the city. They're
Speaker 1: off somewhere else. And it's it is truly strange, really annoying.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, and it is this is like I don't know,
Speaker 1: this is part of why this is part of why
Speaker 1: politically I tend to align myself with like libertarian municipalism. Um.
Speaker 1: I think one of the problems we have is that
Speaker 1: places that have very little to do with each other
Speaker 1: get to pass laws that impact how people live in
Speaker 1: those those places, Like which is a problem, um as
Speaker 1: we all just got overseeing with fucking Donald Trump, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's a that's a version of the problem in
Speaker 1: a version. Another version of the problem is that like
Speaker 1: people in Los Angeles can pass a gas tax that
Speaker 1: makes total sense for cities in California, but fox over
Speaker 1: people who live in the middle of nowhere. Um. And
Speaker 1: all of these things are like, I don't know, it's
Speaker 1: the you get the it's too simultaneous issues. Like one
Speaker 1: of them is you've got these liberals in Portland, who
Speaker 1: the rest of the state resents for dominating politics in
Speaker 1: the entire state, even in areas that are very little
Speaker 1: to do with like western Oregon. And then you have
Speaker 1: these these outlying like you have these folks who don't
Speaker 1: live in Portland, who you know, are pushing for like
Speaker 1: you know, who are responsible with the fact that we
Speaker 1: might get a Republican governor in the state, right, who
Speaker 1: are reacting to like what they hear about Portland, even
Speaker 1: though it's not accurate, and I don't know. I I
Speaker 1: this is we're getting past like what people can do
Speaker 1: in terms of like voting on local elections. But I
Speaker 1: wish we had a system and which like folks weren't
Speaker 1: constantly pitted against each other in this way, because I
Speaker 1: don't think it's very productive. Well, we're chopped up in
Speaker 1: a really by the way, I vote to charter reform, etcetera.
Speaker 1: If you live in Portland. Uh, like we've we've got
Speaker 1: some some other other things going on with our our
Speaker 1: city government that makes things additionally weird and um, suboptimal.
Speaker 1: There's a bunch of things that I'm kind of dreading
Speaker 1: in the near future or from the midterm elections, including
Speaker 1: you know, Renee Gonzalez. Um, you know, I I have
Speaker 1: strong feelings on the proposed gun control measure, but um,
Speaker 1: I'm broadly optimistic about charter reform. That actually seems like
Speaker 1: something good that we're likely to do. Yeah, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: let's talk about that a little bit, because Portland would
Speaker 1: be the first city in the United States to reform
Speaker 1: its city council along these lines. If I'm not mistaken,
Speaker 1: along which lines like the way they try to reform
Speaker 1: is like set up um. So basically Portland's currently has
Speaker 1: a commission form of government in which we have a
Speaker 1: very powerful mayor and for city council people who are
Speaker 1: handed portfolios by the mayor and they basically run the
Speaker 1: city government. Um. Which is it's a pretty dysfunctional system. UM.
Speaker 1: It leads to a a small number of people running
Speaker 1: very large bureaucracies that they usually don't know how to handle,
Speaker 1: which is one of the reasons why the city is
Speaker 1: so dysfunctional, in addition to the fact that our Mayor
Speaker 1: Ted Wheeler is uh politely speaking dogshit. Under the new
Speaker 1: form of government that's that's being voted on right now,
Speaker 1: the charter, the commission structure will be jettisoned. City council
Speaker 1: members will not directly manage bureaus. Instead, they'll pass laws
Speaker 1: and meet with constituents. The mayor will no longer be
Speaker 1: part of the city council. Instead, he'll lead the executive branch.
Speaker 1: I'm not wild about the amount of power that the
Speaker 1: mayor will still have, UM, but I think broadly speaking, uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's a much better system and there will be
Speaker 1: like a larger group of people involved in actually like
Speaker 1: managing the city's affairs. UM. I don't know. What we
Speaker 1: have currently certainly is not particularly effective. Um. And I
Speaker 1: would like to see a more democratic system put into place. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and obscenely outdated. Right, it's like, Yeah, I don't know
Speaker 1: who else does things like Portland's currently does, but the
Speaker 1: charter reform is greatly needed. Yeah, and it's going to
Speaker 1: bring in rank choice voting as well, when people vote
Speaker 1: on yeah, on their on their like city like, which
Speaker 1: is uh. Like. One of the issues that we've had
Speaker 1: here is that like that we're having right now with
Speaker 1: like the gubernatorial race is that, um, you've got three
Speaker 1: candidates running, one of whom is kind of positioning themselves
Speaker 1: as an independent Betsey Johnson, who does not really have
Speaker 1: a chance to win um, and seems to be being
Speaker 1: funded by people like the Nike guy in order to
Speaker 1: take voids away from Tina co Tech, who's the Democratic candidate,
Speaker 1: so that Christine Drayson, who's the Republican candidate, will be
Speaker 1: more likely to win. I don't know, Like, UM, I
Speaker 1: still don't know how much I believe Drayson actually has
Speaker 1: a shot, but the polls show them neck and neck
Speaker 1: soos are pretty terrifying. Um, yeah, we're we're kind of
Speaker 1: like covering on the cusp of of the governor seat
Speaker 1: going red to Yeah, it's yeah, I don't know. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the election that scares me, Like I really do.
Speaker 1: I really don't want to see Renee Gonzala's win. But
Speaker 1: the if charter reform passes, like the the arm that
Speaker 1: he can inflict on the city becomes limited, just because
Speaker 1: right now, city council seats just have outsized power in
Speaker 1: a very dysfunctional way. And uh, it's and that that
Speaker 1: changes with stry to reform, like we just get a
Speaker 1: little bit more of a normal city. Um and uh.
Speaker 1: But the state, the state election though, that is that's
Speaker 1: pretty scary stuff. Yeah, the state, especially since if the
Speaker 1: Democrats stay in power at the state level, then there's
Speaker 1: a good chance that I mean as far as like
Speaker 1: what people are talking about, then we're going to actually
Speaker 1: see like Portland become or Oregon become a sanctuary for
Speaker 1: reproductive health. Right Like that's one of the things that's
Speaker 1: that's on the ballot. Um. So if you uh, like
Speaker 1: if you care about that, that's kind of the whole game, right,
Speaker 1: Like regardless of the fact that co Tech has a
Speaker 1: history with our current governor that's not entirely positive. Our
Speaker 1: current Democratic governor has been a ship governor and handled
Speaker 1: the pandemic terribly. Like, at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: it's it kind of has to be all about um uh,
Speaker 1: all about reproductive health, right because like the Republicans would
Speaker 1: not have handled the pandemic any better. Um, but they
Speaker 1: will also support a crackdown against people having access to abortion.
Speaker 1: We also have the craziest Republicans out here like it,
Speaker 1: And I mean part of that is the areas are
Speaker 1: representing or whatever, but part of it is also just
Speaker 1: we've been under Democratic control for so long that like
Speaker 1: the minority party gets weirder and weirder and weirder, like
Speaker 1: we've got we've got the guys who, like what, ran
Speaker 1: away from the legislative session rather than vote on a
Speaker 1: climate change bill. Al Right, Like it's it's not it's
Speaker 1: not good. It's really bad. Like handing ending them the
Speaker 1: keys of the king him is a terrible move. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know what else to say, Uh you get
Speaker 1: anything else to say? As we as we head into
Speaker 1: the midterm elections here in Oregon, I felt like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, this is broadly speaking, I really want to
Speaker 1: hear about your your your feelings on that gun control measure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we've got Measure one fourteen coming up, which is
Speaker 1: um gun control. So for people who don't know, uh,
Speaker 1: and this may surprise folks even how blue it is,
Speaker 1: Oregon basically does not have any kind of like gun
Speaker 1: control laws. Um. This is a This is a state
Speaker 1: in which any kind of gun that's legal to own
Speaker 1: in the United States and any kind of magazine you
Speaker 1: can own in the state of Oregon. Um, we are
Speaker 1: a shall issue state, which means if you are a
Speaker 1: law abiding citizen and you apply for concealed cary permit,
Speaker 1: they have to give it to you. Um. Gun owners
Speaker 1: have quite a few protections at present. Uh. The first
Speaker 1: major there was a gun control law passed in most
Speaker 1: reasonable gun owners had no issue with it because all
Speaker 1: it did was say you have to get a background
Speaker 1: check to you. So there's this thing called face to
Speaker 1: face sales, whereby in a lot of states like Texas,
Speaker 1: you can just hand somebody a gun for cash as
Speaker 1: long as you're not a professional gun dealer. That's that's legal,
Speaker 1: and that's that's bad generally, it's how a lot of
Speaker 1: guns get across the border that was removed as a
Speaker 1: legal possibility in Oregon back in But other than that,
Speaker 1: we haven't had a whole lot of gun control UM
Speaker 1: in the wake of the Vivaldi shooting, a an organization
Speaker 1: I think Lift Every Voice is what they're called, led
Speaker 1: by some church leaders, pushed for what a ballot measure.
Speaker 1: So this is not something where and I do think
Speaker 1: this is interesting, there's not a situation where democratic politicians
Speaker 1: in the state of Oregon are trying to pass gun control.
Speaker 1: This is a situation in which a ballot measure was
Speaker 1: proposed and enough people voted that the entire state is
Speaker 1: voting on whether or not to have gun control UM, which,
Speaker 1: regardless of my opinions on the measure itself, I think
Speaker 1: is a better way for stuff like this to work
Speaker 1: than a bunch of legislators just like making a law.
Speaker 1: But anyway, the measure itself is, in my opinion, deeply
Speaker 1: flawed in the way that it's written. It does a
Speaker 1: couple of things. For one thing, it requires that every
Speaker 1: person who buy a gun pass a background check, which
Speaker 1: is already the law that's in the bill, and it
Speaker 1: shouldn't be because it's already the law. I think one
Speaker 1: of the things that reasons I think that's dishonest is
Speaker 1: because it always gets summarized and like, this is what
Speaker 1: the bill will do. It will require that everybody pass
Speaker 1: a backgroundch of well, they're all they're already required. It
Speaker 1: does not actually do anything there. Um. It adds in
Speaker 1: a magazine capacity restrictions, and you won't be able to
Speaker 1: buy or take out in public magazines that have a
Speaker 1: higher capacity than ten rounds. We can talk about that
Speaker 1: in a second. And then the primary thing it does
Speaker 1: is it requires people pass a series of tests in
Speaker 1: order to purchase firearms, and the people who will be
Speaker 1: a ministering those tests and running the whole program are
Speaker 1: the police. So the police essentially get control over who
Speaker 1: gets to own firearms. UM. I do consider that that
Speaker 1: is particularly the thing that I find problematic. Um. For
Speaker 1: one thing, regardless of your opinions on gun control, the
Speaker 1: right to bear arms is similar to the right to
Speaker 1: freedom of speech and guaranteed in the same way, and
Speaker 1: so the fact that the police are being made the
Speaker 1: arbiters of who gets to exercise that right is deeply problematic.
Speaker 1: To me, UM, I think, given what we know about
Speaker 1: how often police in Oregon work with far right groups,
Speaker 1: work with organizations like the Proud Boys, UM, it is
Speaker 1: very likely that we will see uneven enforcement and uneven um.
Speaker 1: Uh like the police granting the ability to bear arms
Speaker 1: very unevenly, which concerns me greatly. We had a mass
Speaker 1: shooting earlier this year at a protest in which a
Speaker 1: right winger killed a woman, UH, sixty one year old
Speaker 1: woman and injured five other people. That person was stopped
Speaker 1: by a left wing demonstrator with an a R fifteen
Speaker 1: style rifle. UM. What was actually technically a handgun, but
Speaker 1: that's anyway. Whatever, it was an a R fifteen style weapon. UM.
Speaker 1: I'm concerned that under this new law, the right winger
Speaker 1: would have still had the ability to acquire firearms, but
Speaker 1: the person who stopped and would not. UM. So that's
Speaker 1: why I have an issue with it. I also think,
Speaker 1: if you're going to I'm not. I don't personally advocate
Speaker 1: magazine capacity restrictions, but also I don't speak out against them.
Speaker 1: Washington recently passed a law restricting magazine capacity. I didn't
Speaker 1: say anything about that. I think maybe I I think
Speaker 1: if it like, if it works, I will be happy. Um.
Speaker 1: I think the way the Washington law was written was
Speaker 1: a lot more sensible than the Oregon law because it
Speaker 1: was written in such a way that it stops the
Speaker 1: additional sale of expand of standard capacity magazines of thirty
Speaker 1: round magazines and higher without giving the police an opportunity
Speaker 1: to harass and arrest people over what they own, um,
Speaker 1: which I think is important. The way the law is written,
Speaker 1: if you had, like whatever you had prior to the
Speaker 1: band taking effect, you can keep and continue to use
Speaker 1: as normal, um, just no more it can be sold.
Speaker 1: And so the thing that the thing you're trying to
Speaker 1: stop with a magazine capacity band at this point is
Speaker 1: someone doing what the Valdi shooter did right, where a
Speaker 1: kid goes out and buys a weapon and a bunch
Speaker 1: of thirty round magazines and then goes on a mass shooting. Right,
Speaker 1: you want them to not be able to go and
Speaker 1: immediately acquire those magazines. Um it is I think by
Speaker 1: making it illegal to take them out in the world
Speaker 1: if you already own them, what you're doing is giving
Speaker 1: police pretext to stop and search people, um, to like
Speaker 1: search people going out and shooting in the woods like
Speaker 1: folks do in Oregon, um, without having an impact on
Speaker 1: mass shooters, because they're not going to care about violating
Speaker 1: that particular law. If you want to stop more of
Speaker 1: those things from being sold, I think a law written
Speaker 1: the way the Washington law is written does the maximum
Speaker 1: in order to restrict people from purchasing the thing you
Speaker 1: don't want them to purchase without giving police the ability
Speaker 1: to like harass and arrest people. Um. Anyway, that's that's
Speaker 1: my thinking on one fourteen. Yeah, yeah, I think that's
Speaker 1: that's like an important as an important series of distinctions
Speaker 1: to get out there. Yeah, um, anyway, I I voted
Speaker 1: against it. I try, really, I actually do try, despite
Speaker 1: my opinions not to talk about gun control too much
Speaker 1: on this show. But like that's my my thinking on
Speaker 1: the matter. Folks can do whatever they want. Will know
Speaker 1: when on January or November eight how they voted. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, like it's hardly the most disturbing things on
Speaker 1: the Balett right now. Yeah, no, no, no, And I
Speaker 1: am like, like I there's there's so much going on
Speaker 1: right now, and it's one of those things I guess
Speaker 1: we'll all learn in the near future, like we're gonna
Speaker 1: learn a lot from this election in Oregon, Like, if
Speaker 1: hardesty stays on, if we get charter reform, and if
Speaker 1: co Tech wins, then kind of regardless of what happens
Speaker 1: with one fourteen, I will be broadly optimistic heading into
Speaker 1: because it will show that the campaign of fear didn't
Speaker 1: work entirely. Yeah. Um, and if Gonzales and and Drayson
Speaker 1: win and shatter reform gets defeated, I will be really
Speaker 1: pessimistic heading in. Yeah. Yeah, if if drays and wins,
Speaker 1: like that's yeah, it's ah yeah, it's it's bad. It's
Speaker 1: really bad. It's bad news for a lot of fucking reasons.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, I mean row, that's huge. Um yeah. But yeah,
Speaker 1: like it's the sky's the limit for a a state
Speaker 1: that has been under democratic control for this long, right,
Speaker 1: Like it's it's they've just gotten so complacent, is all
Speaker 1: I can think. Um oh, I mean the spoiler candidate
Speaker 1: obviously that that did change a lot. Um, but it's
Speaker 1: the complacency was is alarming. Yeah. Um, well, is there
Speaker 1: anything else you wanted to say about what we're heading into? Uh? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, don't let your fear control you. Um, don't
Speaker 1: be a useful idiot for Nazis, and uh, don't put
Speaker 1: people into camps. I guess yeah, that's that's my thinking.
Speaker 1: Don't Like, if somebody is trying to make you scared
Speaker 1: about a group of people who are the most powerless
Speaker 1: people in your community, you might want to assume that
Speaker 1: the person doing that is trying to take advantage of you. Um,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's kind of where I land on this
Speaker 1: sort of stuff. Um, yeah, don't put people into camps.
Speaker 1: We really shouldn't have to say that anymore, but yeah,
Speaker 1: we should have to tell people to not be Patrick
Speaker 1: Bateman from fucking American right, Like it's like we should
Speaker 1: people should like but no, it's yeah, we've we should
Speaker 1: not be regressing this hard in terms of our moral compasses.
Speaker 1: But that's where we are. That's where we are. Well
Speaker 1: do you want to plug your plug? Double Sarah? Yeah? So, uh,
Speaker 1: Rerobert mentioned that I just put out a big feature
Speaker 1: about the Portland van abductions published on the Verge. Um.
Speaker 1: It's part of a longer series, uh that we did
Speaker 1: this year about the Department of Homeland Security, which is
Speaker 1: twenty years old this year. Um, So we did a
Speaker 1: bunch of features, some about Puerto Rico and FEMA. Uh,
Speaker 1: some about the t s A. Of course I did
Speaker 1: a short little thing about how Chad Wolfe was illegally
Speaker 1: ahead of the DHS for a hot minute. Um, and
Speaker 1: so there's some fun stuff in there. Um. We've still
Speaker 1: got another feature that will go up by the end
Speaker 1: of this year. I think your your listeners would enjoy
Speaker 1: going through some of those excellent. All right, well, that
Speaker 1: has been the episode. This has been It Could Happen Here?
Speaker 1: Um bye, Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes
Speaker 1: every week from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 1: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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