Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who
Speaker 1: Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast that doesn't always devolve
Speaker 1: into laughing about the strange news, because usually.
Speaker 2: It has nothing to do with news. But as I
Speaker 2: mentioned before, we're recording this on the day that Trump
Speaker 2: got convicted.
Speaker 3: I'm already cynical.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're already over it.
Speaker 3: I was excited because it happened four seconds before we
Speaker 3: recorded part one, and by the time we got to
Speaker 3: recording part two, I was like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the reality sets in that.
Speaker 2: Hear me out. Here's the reason I find interesting because
Speaker 2: it's not boring. Like I don't think it's like good
Speaker 2: or bad or is going to save anything or make
Speaker 2: anything worse. It just it's not boring. It is making
Speaker 2: this the plot of this book we're trapped in more interesting.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I'm already just like, well, that was fun for five minutes.
Speaker 4: It was a sugar rush. Was definitely a sugar rush.
Speaker 3: I was like, I got I got my I got
Speaker 3: my flashy tweets out and immediately regret all of them.
Speaker 2: And Twitter's regret machine.
Speaker 3: I normally don't tweet right after something happened, but it
Speaker 3: was so funny watching his little speech after he got
Speaker 3: he got a convicted of thirty four felony counts that I, uh,
Speaker 3: thirty four felony counts, sorry a Shaquille O'Neill amount of
Speaker 3: felony accounts.
Speaker 4: That the number makes it funny.
Speaker 3: The shack daddy counts. Yeah, but now I'm like, you
Speaker 3: know what, that thirty four shack daddy a felony counts
Speaker 3: is probably gonna get elected because are gonna.
Speaker 4: Be and is going to earn him votes.
Speaker 3: It's and I already and I was, I was telling
Speaker 3: prop and Magpie was like I already got like a
Speaker 3: like a donate I am a I am a political prisoner,
Speaker 3: donate to my to my campaign and absolutely not, sir,
Speaker 3: but please keep just targeting me your your obvious target audience.
Speaker 5: It's just so unhinged and it's like photos amazing, it's
Speaker 5: so funny.
Speaker 4: I think, I think that's what it is to me.
Speaker 5: It's like, you're right, yeah, I wish I could see it.
Speaker 5: The photos have served out here looking like you know,
Speaker 5: Leonard Peltier, like come on, like it's just so that's
Speaker 5: to be.
Speaker 4: It's it. It's just funny, like.
Speaker 2: This is exactly it's funny.
Speaker 5: You know, Yeah, and just completely unhinged, absolute nasty work.
Speaker 5: Just it don't matter, Like, yeah, nothing matters.
Speaker 2: This is the fact that it doesn't matter is what's
Speaker 2: so interesting. And I think it's gonna have knock on
Speaker 2: effects that someone listening to the same Someone's gonna be
Speaker 2: listening to this like four years from now because they
Speaker 2: have love searched podcast about Argentinian Uprising two thousand and one,
Speaker 2: and they're gonna be like, what the fuck that's the
Speaker 2: thing that started World War three?
Speaker 4: Like why are they laughing about it? Yeah? Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: Well, the other voices on this call is prop the
Speaker 2: host of Good Politics of Propy, Sophie, the producer of
Speaker 2: every show, all other shows, yeah, pretty much podcasts in general,
Speaker 2: all things. Sophie is in charge of podcasts. I was
Speaker 2: thinking about how like in Catholic church, like you have
Speaker 2: the saint of everything, you know, like there's like the
Speaker 2: Saint of political prisoners, who's also the saint of amateur radio. Ye, Sophie,
Speaker 2: you're the saint of podcasting.
Speaker 3: See see. I can't be the producer of everything because
Speaker 3: I would have canceled so many shows, so many shows.
Speaker 4: But that's part of your that would be part of
Speaker 4: your duty. As a saint.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, canceled, Saint.
Speaker 4: Man, you canceled this Saint of canceled podcast.
Speaker 3: We found it calan after I was like, you're gone,
Speaker 3: You're gone, You're gone, You're gone doing this for the world.
Speaker 3: Seventeen more history podcasts.
Speaker 2: Would you say that it would be they all must go? Yeah,
Speaker 2: where we last left our heroes. Yes, the working in
Speaker 2: middle classes of Argentina. They just ousted a whole ass government.
Speaker 2: Sounds fun, and I know, I know I would. I'd
Speaker 2: be riding that high for a long time. Like it's
Speaker 2: like one of those things where it's like, yeah, Argentina
Speaker 2: not run by popular assemblies, the existing cooperatives forced to
Speaker 2: compete in the capitalist marketplace. I still be riding that
Speaker 2: fucking high.
Speaker 4: I really.
Speaker 5: I like as you file that under the like wait, wait,
Speaker 5: that's an option we could just we could just get
Speaker 5: rid of the like we could do that, we could just.
Speaker 2: Get's like the burning of the precinct. Yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 2: that the Overton window has shifted for what counts. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: the act that was more popular than either presidential candidate
Speaker 2: or whatever. Yes, the burning of that fucking precinct. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so they've aused a whole ask government. Thousands of people
Speaker 2: are organized in neighborhood assemblies and they're reopening medical facilities themselves,
Speaker 2: are occupying their factories. And I don't want to talk
Speaker 2: about how they did it because it's actually interestingly like legal,
Speaker 2: the way they did it. I just assumed they were like,
Speaker 2: we stormed it and it's ours and fuck you, and
Speaker 2: there's a part of that, but they also they found
Speaker 2: a loophole. Squatting gets a bad rap. Like I've talked
Speaker 2: about a ton on this show. It's almost never I'm
Speaker 2: going to run into this house that people are living
Speaker 2: in and start living there instead of them. Instead, it's
Speaker 2: shit like this. The factory owners abandoned factories by the
Speaker 2: hundreds or thousands because the factories were no longer profitable
Speaker 2: due to shifting economics. They would abandon them overnights, sometimes
Speaker 2: often owing millions of pesos to their employees. And whenever
Speaker 2: I say paeso in this particular episode, I'm basically saying
Speaker 2: dollar because for most of this period the peso was
Speaker 2: tied to the dollar, and actually the fact that it
Speaker 2: got distied is part of how it all fell apart,
Speaker 2: And honestly, that's the level of economics that goes above
Speaker 2: my head. Yeah, But whenever I read about like nineteenth
Speaker 2: century American politics and we're like the gold standard, the
Speaker 2: silver standard, the papers that I'm like, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I've read so many books about this fucking period in
Speaker 2: history and I still don't fucking know. That's how I
Speaker 2: feel about all that.
Speaker 5: I taught high school history, and you have to pass
Speaker 5: in California. Part of the credentialing program is you have
Speaker 5: to do like a three part government like you have
Speaker 5: to do world history, US history, California history. Then you
Speaker 5: have to do like civics, geography, and economics. I flew
Speaker 5: through five of the six of those.
Speaker 3: Yea.
Speaker 5: When it got to economics, I was like, I don't
Speaker 5: understand kind of what you're asking, yeah, because I'm like
Speaker 5: the premise doesn't make sense. I'm like, so a dollar
Speaker 5: is worth gold because but I'm like, that's a rock.
Speaker 5: It just come out the ground. Why does why is
Speaker 5: the gold worth that?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 5: Is it the amount of effort it took to get out?
Speaker 5: But the thing is that takes the same amount of
Speaker 5: effort to get that out as every other rock, Like
Speaker 5: why is this one? Just all of it? And then like,
Speaker 5: it seems pretty simple to me. You don't spend money,
Speaker 5: you don't have make more, Yeah, make more than you
Speaker 5: spend much. No, but that's not even Yeah, and I'm
Speaker 5: just like I don't necessarily yeah this is chart me
Speaker 5: like yeah, yeah, yeah, you're the same. I'm like, I
Speaker 5: can explain it to you, but I don't mean I
Speaker 5: understand it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And honestly, that's a lot of what's happening
Speaker 2: is that they rely on people. They're like, neoliberalism works,
Speaker 2: and they pull out these charts and people are like,
Speaker 2: we don't understand. I guess it does work, and then
Speaker 2: it doesn't work, and then they were like, I guess
Speaker 2: we were wrong, and like.
Speaker 5: And you're like, so I kind of felt like y'all
Speaker 5: was bullshit in us, but I wasn't smart enough, which
Speaker 5: is it. Look, I love this because that's the central
Speaker 5: premise of her politics, and like, in my brain, I
Speaker 5: feel like what you're saying is bullshit. But you present
Speaker 5: yourself like you're smarter than me. So maybe and prop
Speaker 5: comes in and say, no, they're not smarter than you.
Speaker 5: You're right, Yeah that's that's what they're saying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, they're they make up a premise, and then
Speaker 2: they're like, we're going to sell you on this premise.
Speaker 2: And yeah, sometimes they know what they're talking about, and
Speaker 2: sometimes they don't. And and so in this case, you know,
Speaker 2: they just hoodwinked everyone. Oh God, that probably is a
Speaker 2: terrible origin, doesn't it. No, probably not good. Winked, Yeah,
Speaker 2: not bad when that comes from I don't know, I don't.
Speaker 4: Know right now.
Speaker 5: In my brain it goes to Malcolm X, you've been hoodwinked, bamboozled,
Speaker 5: run a muck.
Speaker 2: I love how people use to say bamboozled.
Speaker 4: Yeah, shit's so good, so great.
Speaker 2: So Argentina have been bamboozled. Yeah, and the factory owners
Speaker 2: abandon these factories and abandoning their debts, it means they've
Speaker 2: robbed their workers. See the aforementioned chart. Unpaid wages are
Speaker 2: the largest theft, at least in America. They've extracted all
Speaker 2: the wealth that has been produced by these people and
Speaker 2: then they cut and run and never pay. God damn it.
Speaker 2: I'm trying not to bring up Trump, but that's the
Speaker 2: other thing he fucking does famously.
Speaker 4: He's so good at it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I know, which, in a very indirect way, is
Speaker 5: part of why he was convicted okay because like nobody
Speaker 5: none of them was tripping like this is I mean,
Speaker 5: we're way off the rails. But like the National acquired
Speaker 5: Nan Pecker and then was like listen, I'm not buying
Speaker 5: no more stories until you pay us back for the
Speaker 5: last other ones. Yeah, and it was like that why
Speaker 5: that's why uh Cohen had to pay the thing anyway,
Speaker 5: because this nigga wouldn't pay.
Speaker 4: I'm like, that's what you do, bro, anyway, I'm sorry, No,
Speaker 4: this is this.
Speaker 2: Is literally why I listened to your podcast to explain
Speaker 2: this kind of thing too. Okay, you are the person
Speaker 2: I listened to explain this kind of thing about modern politics.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Oh man, it feels like a heavyweight on my shoulders.
Speaker 4: I like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you better get it right now, better get right
Speaker 2: Like yeah, I'm like, So these factories are built with
Speaker 2: public dollars buy and large And this is one of
Speaker 2: the things that people don't tell you when they talk
Speaker 2: about capitalism. Yeah, capitalism is often a system by which
Speaker 2: public money goes to private enterprise. So it's not like
Speaker 2: your tax dollars go to these giant corporations directly. So
Speaker 2: these factories were built on public land with public subsidies.
Speaker 2: A factory owner will have built a subsidized factory, extracted
Speaker 2: the value of hundreds of employees, not bothered to pay them,
Speaker 2: and then split as soon as it's financially advisable to
Speaker 2: do so. And we know that the factory could have
Speaker 2: continued to be productive and profitable because as soon as
Speaker 2: the workers take it over it is because it was Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: this put the factories into bankruptcy since there's just abandoned, right,
Speaker 2: and by law, this should be sold off to pay
Speaker 2: the company's debts, including the debts to the workers. But illegally,
Speaker 2: factory owners were liquidating their assets ahead of time, selling
Speaker 2: all the assets out of the factory on the side.
Speaker 2: So of course the cops stopped them. I'm just kid,
Speaker 2: The cops didn't stop them. Yeah, I was like what
Speaker 2: and yeah, no, no, the cops stopped the people, stopping
Speaker 2: the people breaking the law. Instead, factory workers were able
Speaker 2: to prove that liquidation was happening. They had a case
Speaker 2: in court that they should just be given the factory
Speaker 2: in lieu of the debts that are owed to them.
Speaker 2: So hundreds of factories did exactly that. But like all
Speaker 2: legal systems I've ever run across. This legal system was
Speaker 2: built to support the rich, so it is an uphill
Speaker 2: battle for them in court. And so while they're fighting
Speaker 2: in court, the cops would come and try and evict them,
Speaker 2: and they'd have to physically fight off the police. They
Speaker 2: would break into their own workplace and occupy it, saying
Speaker 2: this should legally be ours. We are owed money by
Speaker 2: the person who abandoned this. They formed a federation to
Speaker 2: coordinate all these what they were called Recovered Factories, the
Speaker 2: National Movement of Recovered.
Speaker 4: Factories, Burst of Creativity.
Speaker 2: Their slogan was occupy, resist, produce.
Speaker 4: Oh that's better.
Speaker 5: I was like at first, I was like, in a
Speaker 5: burst of creativity, but then that one's actually creative.
Speaker 2: Their urgentities are fucking good at slogan aaring is what
Speaker 2: I'm learning.
Speaker 4: Pretty good slogan. It is something to be said about how.
Speaker 5: When I was when I was going through like this,
Speaker 5: uh sitting on the board if it's nonprofit. We was
Speaker 5: trying to figure out like how to like cut ties
Speaker 5: with the founder and all that stuff like, and one
Speaker 5: of the one of the people we brought in was like,
Speaker 5: usually the simple and most elegant is probably the best
Speaker 5: and it's probably the best way. Like it's simple and elegant.
Speaker 5: We'll get to it. And so when I think of
Speaker 5: like you just explained that, like really the easiest thing
Speaker 5: is to say how much y'all owe these workers? Oh word, okay,
Speaker 5: how much is that factory worth?
Speaker 4: Cool? It's a wash easy. Next, Like how easy that
Speaker 4: would be?
Speaker 5: Like you owed him that money anyway, and they already there,
Speaker 5: so you're gonna sell stuff to pay them back about
Speaker 5: the thing that they actually make him profitable? Just give
Speaker 5: them the what do we Why are y'all wasting my time?
Speaker 5: It's just it's such an easy solution, but it doesn't
Speaker 5: benefit the rich.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there were judges who made those decisions, and
Speaker 2: a lot of people won in court, but a lot
Speaker 2: of it was also super uphill because there were you know,
Speaker 2: when I'm like, oh, the system is rigged against the poor,
Speaker 2: it is, But that doesn't mean that every individual within
Speaker 2: that system, within the system is like trying to fuck
Speaker 2: over the poor. A lot of people are specifically trying
Speaker 2: to help them. The Brookman factory, those seam sources. This
Speaker 2: is one of the first factories that did this. Another one,
Speaker 2: which is another one of the most famous ones used
Speaker 2: to be called zenon ceramics, it's still around two. Now
Speaker 2: it's called fasten pot for fabricus and patronas or factory
Speaker 2: without bosses. Yeah yeah, yeah, scene, yeah yeah.
Speaker 4: I'm not correcting your Spanish. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2: Oh no, no, no, it's okay. My Spanish is bad,
Speaker 2: so I like, you're probably right. I think I've said
Speaker 2: before on the show. The main use that my Spanish
Speaker 2: ever gets is what I'm in countries that were more
Speaker 2: people have Spanish as a second language. I get by
Speaker 2: with my Spanish. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, like France
Speaker 2: and Italy, I get by with spac.
Speaker 4: Your Spanish is great, yeah, Spain Spanish is not very
Speaker 4: so much.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean in your defense, in your defense, my
Speaker 5: Spanish isn't good in Spain either.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you don't wanna you don't wanna lisp all your take? Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I and what's funny? And then there they're like,
Speaker 2: we don't even fucking speak Spanish. Fuck you this if
Speaker 2: we speak Catalonian basically, and uh, I'm like fuck, I've
Speaker 2: like trying to learn him anyway. Whatever. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 2: can't win. I mean, I'm proud and glad that they
Speaker 2: are trying to resist Spain whatever. So Zanan was founded
Speaker 2: on public land with public funding in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2: The ceramics factory, its owner, Luigi Zanon, was friends with
Speaker 2: that neoliberal asshole men I personally. But it's workers were unionized,
Speaker 2: so they were like, oh cool, we'll totally be able
Speaker 2: to do this now. They was a problem earlier when
Speaker 2: that manifesto was listing out all the people that they
Speaker 2: didn't care about, one of them was union leaders. And
Speaker 2: you're like, well, why, Well before the workers could get
Speaker 2: around to fighting their boss, they had to fight their union.
Speaker 4: What.
Speaker 2: Okay, I am. I'm totally pro union. Whenever you create
Speaker 2: power structures, you create spaces where corruption can sometimes slip into. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the union at Zanon had been taken over by organized
Speaker 2: crime that was coordinating with the owners.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and this is.
Speaker 2: Actually kind I mean it, I don't know if it
Speaker 2: reached the same level. But in the US there's this
Speaker 2: you know, you've got this golden age era of unionism
Speaker 2: up until like nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, and then
Speaker 2: you've got this era that like like my dad grew
Speaker 2: up working class and he was like he didn't grow
Speaker 2: up super pro union because he was like.
Speaker 5: No, they're just corrupt ran by mobs. Yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 5: that's true. That's real, like that reality. Like you said,
Speaker 5: like you just you inevitably find you create a crevice
Speaker 5: for a hustle to happen. And one thing that like
Speaker 5: organized crime is and like street level stuff is, is
Speaker 5: it's finding the hustle. And it's like once we found it,
Speaker 5: it's like, dude, this is an easy leg you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, and then why would you leave?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's simple, you know, clean, It's like it's already laundry.
Speaker 5: It's like it launders itself, the union hustle. Like from
Speaker 5: a from a street like gang life perspective, it was
Speaker 5: the that and like getting the getting the contra the
Speaker 5: construction contracts. Yeah, from a pure economic perspective, brilliant.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And again yeah, most unions, even the even the
Speaker 2: more corrupt ones in the US, you're still better off
Speaker 2: at a union drive You're still better off, like.
Speaker 4: And they can make that argument. It's like, dude, you're
Speaker 4: better with us anyway. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, I've got to work for the organized
Speaker 2: crime than the other organized.
Speaker 4: Care basically the state organized crime.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the workers, this is a non retook their union,
Speaker 2: and I only found like the one sentence version of that,
Speaker 2: And I'm annoyed because I would watch a whole ass
Speaker 2: movie about Argentinan factory workers fighting a corrupt mafia union.
Speaker 2: Absolutely damn After they won that, the boss is suddenly
Speaker 2: didn't like the union anymore, so they started firing union organizers.
Speaker 2: And then when that didn't work, because you know, everyone
Speaker 2: is a potential union organizer. Yeah, in autumn two thousand
Speaker 2: and one, so before all the pots and Pans riots,
Speaker 2: the owners went for what's called a lockout, which is
Speaker 2: like a reverse strike where you're like, fine, we'll lock
Speaker 2: up the factory, so no jobs for anyone. Fuck you.
Speaker 2: Until you break the union, you can't come back to work,
Speaker 2: which is you know, a strike is until you accept
Speaker 2: the union, we won't go back to work. On October second,
Speaker 2: two thousand and one, the workers voted to occupy the factory.
Speaker 2: I think against this lockout, and I think the only
Speaker 2: reason that they're not called one of the first occupied
Speaker 2: factories is because it wasn't until March second, two thousand
Speaker 2: and two, after they've been occupying it for months, that
Speaker 2: they were able to get the place back to work.
Speaker 2: I think the owner abandoned the place kind of. In
Speaker 2: the meantime, soon enough, they turned the place profitable. It
Speaker 2: turns out it's sometimes easy to be profitable when you
Speaker 2: don't have an ownership class life off the extra money backs.
Speaker 2: And people talk all the time about democracy as like
Speaker 2: a compromise, like in order to have liberty, we have
Speaker 2: to give up efficiency, like the Mussolini thing, the trains
Speaker 2: ran on time. Yeah, I want to shit talk that
Speaker 2: for a second. Okay, study after study shows that workplace
Speaker 2: democracy aka worker ownership is more productive and more efficient.
Speaker 2: And as for the Mussolini and the trains thing, I've
Speaker 2: heard a few versions of that about that from Italian friends,
Speaker 2: and none of them are that, yes, the trains ran
Speaker 2: on time because of fascism, you know, because people will
Speaker 2: be like, well, I don't want I don't care if
Speaker 2: the trains run on time. I don't want fascism. That
Speaker 2: is a good position to have, even if the trains
Speaker 2: ran on time because of fascism. Fuck fascism. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: it's not even true.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The two versions of the story I've heard, One was
Speaker 2: that the train industry was heavily unionized under anarchist unions
Speaker 2: before Mussolini's takeover, and so it was a decentralized organized
Speaker 2: labor union that got the trains running on time.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The second version I've heard from a different Italian friend.
Speaker 2: So the trains did not run on time, and Mussolini
Speaker 2: just had the trains run on time while foreign journalists
Speaker 2: were there. Wow, wow, any of those three reasons. Yeah,
Speaker 2: still fuck Mussolini, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Fucking Sini.
Speaker 5: Yeah, But to your point, it's like, if we have
Speaker 5: a shared invested interest and a mutual benefit, we're all
Speaker 5: taken care of, we're all fulfilled, we're all satisfied, and
Speaker 5: we all feel ownership on this project. It's gonna work,
Speaker 5: Like I just I don't it's gonna work. Like whether
Speaker 5: it's care for each other or just simple pragmatism, it's
Speaker 5: gonna work if we're all invested. If I know, it's
Speaker 5: just it just seems so like I know, it's not
Speaker 5: that simple. Obviously, it's obviously not that simple, but it's
Speaker 5: also pretty simple.
Speaker 4: Like that's why it works.
Speaker 2: It is one of those things, yeah, where it's both
Speaker 2: simple and not simple, Like, yeah, when I worked at
Speaker 2: I'll talk a little bit more about it at the end.
Speaker 2: To see commons in the place that I worked, But
Speaker 2: you know, we ran during the pandemic, and a lot
Speaker 2: of the co ops in the US are like restaurants, right,
Speaker 2: And for some weird reason, restaurants didn't do very well
Speaker 2: during twenty twenty. Can't quite put my finger on the
Speaker 2: wife that none of the co ops that we've supported
Speaker 2: closed their doors for good in twenty twenty. And for
Speaker 2: the restaurant industry, that was like unheard of that we
Speaker 2: had one hundred percent success rate of all of these restaurants.
Speaker 2: And it's because the worker owners were able to be like, Okay,
Speaker 2: bad things are happening, and they were very nimble because
Speaker 2: they could pivot, which is the jargon that we had
Speaker 2: to use constantly. It annoyed me. It's nonprofit world still
Speaker 2: has all the same jargon as everywhere else. Yeah. But
Speaker 2: then even like when it came to like layoffs, they
Speaker 2: made those decisions together. They were like, who here can
Speaker 2: survive not working.
Speaker 4: For the niceties?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and like they survived, you know. Yeah. So
Speaker 2: there's a reason that the most part powerful informational organizational
Speaker 2: system in human history, the Internet, is a decentralized network
Speaker 2: that shares protocols, but not central control. You know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Xenon is up and running soon enough, and Xenon and
Speaker 2: Brookman are sort of the flagship of the flagships of
Speaker 2: the occupied Factories movement. Zenon immediately goes out of the
Speaker 2: way to prove that they care about the community, and
Speaker 2: vice versa. The community goes out of its way to
Speaker 2: prove that it cares about it. So it's not just
Speaker 2: like capitalism, but more efficient and more democratic. They're donating
Speaker 2: tiles to community centers and hospitals, they're organizing cultural events.
Speaker 2: And then for two decades in this poor community that
Speaker 2: they're near, or maybe in I'm not sure, people have
Speaker 2: been like, we wish we had a fucking community health clinic,
Speaker 2: and for two decades, activists, we're trying to get one.
Speaker 2: So the workers that Xenon just built it in three months, sesh,
Speaker 2: they're like ceramics workers. But they're like, all right, we'll
Speaker 2: make a medical center, we'll organize it, we'll make it happen.
Speaker 3: Damn.
Speaker 2: As an another aside, because it's a good chance to
Speaker 2: use one of my favorite quotes. During the Spanish Civil War,
Speaker 2: this anarchist general named General Derudi, and he's asked by
Speaker 2: a journalist. They say, well, even if you win, you'll
Speaker 2: be sitting on a pile of ruins. And De Rudy says,
Speaker 2: we have always lived in slums and holes in the wall.
Speaker 2: We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a time.
Speaker 2: For you must not forget. We can also build. It
Speaker 2: is we the workers who built the palaces and cities
Speaker 2: here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We the workers,
Speaker 2: can build others to take their place and better ones.
Speaker 2: We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We
Speaker 2: are going to inherit the earth. There is not the
Speaker 2: slightest doubt about that. The bourgeois may blast and ruin
Speaker 2: its own world before it leaves this stage of history.
Speaker 2: We carry a new world here in our hearts. That
Speaker 2: world is growing this minute. And the reason I give
Speaker 2: this quote it's not unrelated culturally. The quote the slogan
Speaker 2: a new world in our hearts from De Rudy, and
Speaker 2: they all must go from the Argentinian uprising or two
Speaker 2: of the most common slogans of the anti globalization era,
Speaker 2: like hey, we can do this. Yeah, oh yeah, that's
Speaker 2: another one, that's a yeah, I guess we can yeah,
Speaker 2: and then the other slogan from the time from the
Speaker 2: Zapatistas was that we were fighting for a world in
Speaker 2: which many worlds are possible.
Speaker 4: Beautiful.
Speaker 2: So these workers they know how to build shit and
Speaker 2: they inspired solidarity from across the country. One of the
Speaker 2: most iconic moves that they did that like just like
Speaker 2: put a fire under a ton of people. They all
Speaker 2: got these slingshots right to fight the cops. They just
Speaker 2: like made slingshots and just like cheap kids, Dennis the
Speaker 2: Menace slingshots And I was like trying to figure out
Speaker 2: exactly why. It's because they're seramesists. They made their own marbles, brilliant.
Speaker 2: There's like footage of just like crates of marbles, like
Speaker 2: white mar beautiful.
Speaker 4: Yeah, amazing.
Speaker 2: They fought off six eviction orders by two thousand and four.
Speaker 2: Every time that the police would come to evict them,
Speaker 2: thousands of people would show up from the nearby community
Speaker 2: and drive back the police every single time. As soon
Speaker 2: as the place was profitable the owner wanted it back
Speaker 2: of course.
Speaker 6: There.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are these smug interviews with him from the
Speaker 2: documentary of the Take where he's like, well, it's because
Speaker 2: all the slogans are like Xenon is a Zenon belongs
Speaker 2: to the people, and Zanon himself he's a guy, so
Speaker 2: he's like, no, that's my factory, it's not the people's yea.
Speaker 2: The interviewer is like, well, how are you gonna how
Speaker 2: are you gonna get it? And he's like, well, government's
Speaker 2: gonna give it to me.
Speaker 5: I'm like, I like, it's like, you know, cut to
Speaker 5: the government actually giving it to him, and you're like.
Speaker 2: But they didn't. Oh, word, Okay, that's the thing. Xenon
Speaker 2: still exists as a cooperative. That's amazing that they want. Yeah.
Speaker 4: They were like, they were like, sir, you walked away
Speaker 4: from it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And I mean, you know, a couple times the
Speaker 2: five or six times or whatever that they had to
Speaker 2: fight off of diction orders, the government was trying to
Speaker 2: clear out the occupiers, you know, while the but in
Speaker 2: the end, I think it's two thousand and nine or
Speaker 2: something that they finally won in court. I think it
Speaker 2: might be later in the script. The local government fucking
Speaker 2: hates this cooperative and still does. And they're like, like,
Speaker 2: they ship tiles all over Argentina and like the one
Speaker 2: place that doesn't buy from them is the local government
Speaker 2: of course, in two thousand and five, one of the
Speaker 2: workers or a wife of one of the workers, either way,
Speaker 2: a woman who's associated with this place, I've read both,
Speaker 2: was kidnapped and tortured, like she was disappeared into a
Speaker 2: green Falcon We might be fell Colantum, not sure the
Speaker 2: kind of car that was specifically and intentionally emblematic of
Speaker 2: dictatorship era, like this is the car that the dictators
Speaker 2: of the seventy would disappear leftist in two tonver, like.
Speaker 4: The like the black van, white van.
Speaker 2: Yeah, white van, yeah, like the black suv or what
Speaker 2: black yeah? Okay yeah. And so they get one of
Speaker 2: these and four people, three men and a woman, kidnap her,
Speaker 2: take her into the car, h cut her and leave
Speaker 2: her bleeding and say like, if you all don't stop,
Speaker 2: this is going to happen to following leaders of your
Speaker 2: movement or whatever. They she gets out, they call the cops.
Speaker 2: The cops come and protect her house. Then that night
Speaker 2: all the cops leave but one, and then the people
Speaker 2: break back in. She survives, and I try not to
Speaker 2: go into detail about abuse and stuff on the show.
Speaker 2: They break back in and they hurt her again, and
Speaker 2: the one cop on guard was like, oh and see
Speaker 2: her here anything.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: So no one knows who did this. Everyone suspects it
Speaker 2: seems like open secret that the local government did this. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and that the cop was in on it. But you
Speaker 2: know what the local government isn't in on is these deals.
Speaker 2: They're only for AKP.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 4: Yeah, all right, well we're doing deals.
Speaker 3: Someone emailed emailed us. So we've been running a we've
Speaker 3: been running like promo to help get donations for the
Speaker 3: Portland Diaper Bank.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: His diapers are so unreasonably expensive with some behind the bastards.
Speaker 3: And the next ad after we said that was for Huggies.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, it's amazing.
Speaker 3: And like obviously we have no idea what what ads are.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we can never know.
Speaker 2: We never know.
Speaker 3: But anytime it lines up that perfectly, I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 3: you know what, I'm.
Speaker 4: Getting a lot of chumb of casinos.
Speaker 3: I was like, Don Draper would be like, you did it, kid.
Speaker 3: I appreciate that.
Speaker 2: I like back when it was go to the forest,
Speaker 2: do you remember those?
Speaker 4: It was like a local were dope too.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So even if they aren't a paid sponsor, go
Speaker 2: to a forest, to go to a forest, touch ground,
Speaker 2: don't get.
Speaker 6: Lost and we're back.
Speaker 2: People all over Argentina supported Xenon, not just the three.
Speaker 2: The thousands of people would show up every time that
Speaker 2: they were being evicted. But there's like huge rock concerts,
Speaker 2: like the biggest rock bands in Argentina at stadium shows
Speaker 2: and shit have like banners saying like Zenon belongs to
Speaker 2: the people. In two thousand and nine, I wonder if
Speaker 2: there was like a supporter like the like the people
Speaker 2: who get mad about rage against the machine, you know,
Speaker 2: oh yeah, the right wing people are like wait what yeah.
Speaker 2: In two thousand and nine, they finally won in court
Speaker 2: and it was expropriated legally to the workers and the
Speaker 2: state paid off the loans from when Luigi Zanon was
Speaker 2: in charge. The workers were actually mad about the state
Speaker 2: paying off the loans. They wanted Uigi imselfd have to
Speaker 2: pay them. But so it goes. And the most important
Speaker 2: way that people showed up to support them, though, was
Speaker 2: to just join the movement themselves. More and more places
Speaker 2: were taken over and cooperativized. At least one private health
Speaker 2: clinic was abandoned by its owners and so it was
Speaker 2: staffed by its own workers. Two hundred and fifty doctors
Speaker 2: offering healthcare at this place, which when I hear medical clinic,
Speaker 2: I don't think two hundred and fifty doctors, no hospital. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the court battles were not as dramatic as the physical
Speaker 2: defense of the space, but they were important and they
Speaker 2: were harrowing. Take a four Husts and Martin. It's a
Speaker 2: foundry and they make gears and shit for like tractors.
Speaker 2: Their story is sort of typical. It's the one that
Speaker 2: the documentary The Take focuses on the factory.
Speaker 3: Es Owe.
Speaker 2: Factory owners started laying everyone off for a few years,
Speaker 2: and then one day they up and abandoned the place.
Speaker 2: By March two thousand and three, the workers went back
Speaker 2: in and started inventorying in the place. They had to
Speaker 2: prove exactly what had been stolen and liquidated by the owner.
Speaker 2: The raw materials had been sold off, which later they
Speaker 2: just not the government. The company just denied that. They
Speaker 2: were like, no, it was just over there in the
Speaker 2: first place, and that's like how they lost at their
Speaker 2: lower level court things, as the judge believed the person
Speaker 2: who was like, what, no, it's just nothing there. But
Speaker 2: the legal justification for their occupation was basically we're going
Speaker 2: to sleep here and guard the place from whatever thieves
Speaker 2: are stealing all these raw materials. This is how they
Speaker 2: can legally break in and stay there. Is that they're like, well,
Speaker 2: someone's stealing the raw materials, so we have to stop them.
Speaker 2: And so for months they occupy the factory and they
Speaker 2: clean the place up and preparation for opening it again,
Speaker 2: but they can't run it apparently until the court's okay it.
Speaker 2: I don't really understand the ins and outs of this
Speaker 2: particular part. So they're working there and living there unpaid.
Speaker 2: They're all organizing all the while their families are living
Speaker 2: off of mutual aid, trying not to starve. As far
Speaker 2: as I can tell, prior to the downturn of the economy,
Speaker 2: being a factory worker was skilled labor, and it was
Speaker 2: essentially a middle class income, or at least it was
Speaker 2: a working class income that provided like dignity savings and
Speaker 2: vacation time and shit like that. So they're gambling everything
Speaker 2: on getting the place running instead of going out and
Speaker 2: looking for other work. It helps that there's not really
Speaker 2: other work for them. But and they're not political types.
Speaker 2: They're folks trying to feed their families and keep it
Speaker 2: the skilled labor that they know. They're across the political
Speaker 2: spectrum in their ranks, including MENEM supporters. The more I
Speaker 2: read history, the more I understand that these radical social
Speaker 2: movements are often fought for and organized by people who
Speaker 2: just aren't political, Like that shopkeeper guy we were talking
Speaker 2: about earlier. So they're occupying the factory. They cleaned the
Speaker 2: place out, they paint Fabrica occupata and co op on
Speaker 2: the gate to the property and they start fighting in court.
Speaker 2: Starts off badly. The judge is like at the bankruptcy
Speaker 2: court is basically like, look, you're getting in the way.
Speaker 2: You want to get paid. We want to pay you leave,
Speaker 2: We'll sell off the place and give you some money.
Speaker 2: But they refuse to budge, and it takes months, but
Speaker 2: eventually they won in legislature and the factory was legally
Speaker 2: expropriated to its workers and the gate went from occupied
Speaker 2: factory to cooperative. So meanwhile, the seamstresses over at Brookman,
Speaker 2: the seamstress factory, the sewing factory, they keep getting evicted
Speaker 2: in ship by the federal police because they haven't won
Speaker 2: in court yet. On April eighteenth, two thousand and three,
Speaker 2: three hundred federal cops evicted the workers in the middle
Speaker 2: of the night. They show up with like machine guns
Speaker 2: and attack dogs. I think machine guns. I think that
Speaker 2: they just mean like assault rifles or whatever, not like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it tanks with whatever. It's still not nice. They fence
Speaker 2: off the entire block with tall black riot fences, and
Speaker 2: they like weld the doors shut to the fucking factory.
Speaker 2: Although I've read that, but then I've also seen footage
Speaker 2: where it's like, you lock some shit, I don't know whatever,
Speaker 2: They locked the place down. Yeah, before dawn. This happens
Speaker 2: a mil. The night before dawn, three thousand people show
Speaker 2: up to gather these workers. Protesters start camping out in
Speaker 2: front of the place. The city government was like, all right,
Speaker 2: we can't let you in until we've contacted the Ministry
Speaker 2: of Labor, and we're waiting for that meeting to conclude,
Speaker 2: and then we'll decide what to do. We'll decide whether
Speaker 2: or not you get to go back in. And there's
Speaker 2: like middle aged woman on the megaphone. It's like, all right,
Speaker 2: for now, we're waiting, but when the moment is right,
Speaker 2: we're fucking going in.
Speaker 4: Period.
Speaker 2: By April nineteenth, the's a non ceramics factory blockaded a
Speaker 2: road in solidarity on April twenty first, so like day
Speaker 2: three to quote Naomi Klein quote. Unable to get into
Speaker 2: the factory and complete an outstanding order for three thousand
Speaker 2: pairs of dressed trousers, the workers gathered a huge crowd
Speaker 2: of supporters and announced that it was time to go
Speaker 2: back to work. At five pm, fifty middle aged seamstresses
Speaker 2: and no nonsense haircuts, sensible shoes and blue work smocks
Speaker 2: walked up to the black police fence. Someone pushed, the
Speaker 2: fence fell, and the Brookman women, unarmed and arm in arm,
Speaker 2: slowly walked through, and then the police attacked.
Speaker 5: Oh damn, he said, with sensible haircuts. Such a such
Speaker 5: an interesting note of specificity, I know.
Speaker 2: And it's like I think it's like this like very painting,
Speaker 2: Like look, these aren't the wild eyed protesters, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I love that.
Speaker 2: It's like we are fighting the cops because we owe
Speaker 2: a client three thousand pairs of pants.
Speaker 5: You know, it just seems again simple and elegant, where
Speaker 5: it's like we just have a we just have orders
Speaker 5: to fulfill.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're trying to do like normal ass life here.
Speaker 5: This is normal shit, Like, look the owners left, Yeah,
Speaker 5: we're continuing the business. I don't see what the problem is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we like living in an economy. Do you like
Speaker 2: living in an economy?
Speaker 5: You remember when you went to the bank and they
Speaker 5: wouldn't open and you couldn't get your money out?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Remember that.
Speaker 2: Imagine if we went to the store you couldn't buy pants,
Speaker 2: remember that?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I bet you I sold dimp pts you wear it?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Fuck yeah. And so the police attacked the demonstrators with
Speaker 2: water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets, and I think eventually
Speaker 2: live ammunition. Twenty people were wounded and one hundred people
Speaker 2: were arrested. And meanwhile, during all this shit, like April
Speaker 2: two thousand and three, there's a presidential election going on,
Speaker 2: and this is like the we swear it'll stick this
Speaker 2: time election.
Speaker 4: I think, yeah, yeah, yeah, I was like, there's forty
Speaker 4: fifth election.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think a lot of those previous presidents were selected,
Speaker 2: not elected. I think when you have five presidents in
Speaker 2: three weeks.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, no somebody, yeah I chose The.
Speaker 2: Four erunners of this presidential election is carlos Menhim, the
Speaker 2: guy who sold the country out in the first place.
Speaker 2: And this guy named Nestra Kirscher, who he's sort of
Speaker 2: a He's a lackluster center left guy who promises change
Speaker 2: but is making deals with the eye, so it's unfamiliar
Speaker 2: to the American Aunty.
Speaker 4: He is a large cheese pizza.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he probably likes ice cream. Yeah in malarkey, yeah
Speaker 2: may Yeah, No one's gonna be bamboozled on his watch. Nope,
Speaker 2: Menim starts winning initially, After all, the country was stronger
Speaker 2: under him than it was currently, even though he's the
Speaker 2: one who made it fall apart. But there's still like
Speaker 2: this golden shine too.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: This man, God, the comparisons are going to keep going.
Speaker 2: Compared himself to Jesus openly during his campaigning Lord and
Speaker 2: his billboards are like, I will bring back the rule
Speaker 2: of law. During the first round of elections with candidates
Speaker 2: from every party, he actually wins, but it goes to
Speaker 2: a second round with only the top two candidates because
Speaker 2: every other country in the world has figured out a
Speaker 2: better way to do democracy than the US.
Speaker 5: Everyone. Yeah, we were like the iPhone one. Yeah, democracies
Speaker 5: and we never upgraded. We swear we still have the
Speaker 5: best version.
Speaker 2: No, totally because yeah, like the modern the modern republics
Speaker 2: around the world like mostly modeled themselves after US, but
Speaker 2: figured out a better way to do it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they all upgraded.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like a multi party system that then goes to
Speaker 2: run off. Yeah, and you know, and so menhim. He
Speaker 2: looks at the odds of the second election and he's
Speaker 2: chicken shit. He just fucking drops out. He's like, I
Speaker 2: don't want to lose. That be embarrassing or whatever. The fuck.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't know his motivation. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: just like Jesus. He no, no, he really has nothing
Speaker 2: to like Jesus at all. He compared himself to Jesus
Speaker 2: earlier and I'm pointing out these.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I don't know, brother Jesus actually got up
Speaker 5: on that cross fam Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like that's a that's a love the band, hate
Speaker 2: the fans kind of thing for me. Yeah. Absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 2: and not here I hate the band and the fans
Speaker 2: with many this is different.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So Kertcher wins and he like doesn't make things way worse,
Speaker 2: and he doesn't make things way better. He's he's the
Speaker 2: fucking ratchet mechanism of representative democracy. The right pulls to
Speaker 2: the right and then the center keeps it from going
Speaker 2: to the left. He's fine whatever, Yeah, But soon enough
Speaker 2: Brookman won in court and its workers were given the factory. Rather,
Speaker 2: they were given the equipment of the factory, but the
Speaker 2: building itself remained in state hands as of twenty ten,
Speaker 2: as the last article I found specifically on the Brookman factory, okay,
Speaker 2: leaving them at least at that point of some percrity,
Speaker 2: but they are still there, is there?
Speaker 4: So okay?
Speaker 2: Even more than most topics of what I've covered on
Speaker 2: this show, most of the books and documentaries and articles
Speaker 2: about all this were written like during the moment, and
Speaker 2: the retrospective pieces are much less in depth. So like
Speaker 2: when you read the book about this, it came out
Speaker 2: in two thousand and four, with an update in two
Speaker 2: thousand and eight.
Speaker 4: You know word Soday was there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Actually that's that's who was writing the books.
Speaker 2: Is the you who were there. And if you want
Speaker 2: to be there, you can be at wherever the next
Speaker 2: ad tells you to go, and we're back. So after
Speaker 2: the crisis of two thousand and one, most of the
Speaker 2: forms of social organizing, the street protests and the assemblies,
Speaker 2: most of them fade away or absorbed into existing structures.
Speaker 2: They existed because everything was in chaos and crisis. The
Speaker 2: co ops, however, overall, remain but without the larger social
Speaker 2: movement for them to tie into. Look, I think they're
Speaker 2: fucking amazing and I want them to continue to exist,
Speaker 2: but they no longer represent a break from the old
Speaker 2: order so completely. This is a common It's this thing
Speaker 2: that comes up in like when people talk about co ops,
Speaker 2: We're like, co ops are the answer, and you're like,
Speaker 2: co ops are part of the answer. Yeah, but if
Speaker 2: when co ops are tied into a larger struggle, they're
Speaker 2: an amazing source of power or counterpower, if you want
Speaker 2: to use jargon that I have to understand. When they're
Speaker 2: not tied into these larger movements, they they exist within capitalism,
Speaker 2: they compete within They're doing what they can.
Speaker 4: It's just one of many options inside of the same system.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is I mean familiar to all of us
Speaker 2: who run small businesses, And I mean I'm actually I
Speaker 2: actually do both. I'm part of a worker cooperative publisher,
Speaker 2: but I also, like, for years and years ran my
Speaker 2: own small business, making and selling bullshit on Etsy and
Speaker 2: things like that. It's like I don't want to have
Speaker 2: a boss, and I want to survive.
Speaker 5: That's listen, it's a salt water ocean, man. Yeah, you
Speaker 5: just gotta swim.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But viewed correctly, even when they're not currently tied into
Speaker 2: a larger struggle, they can be seeds beneath the snow,
Speaker 2: waiting to germinate the next time that the spring comes around.
Speaker 2: That's what I hope for them and see in them,
Speaker 2: you know, very poetic. Well, I got the idea of
Speaker 2: them being seeds partly from seed comments. The idea of
Speaker 2: cooperativism spread. The idea of cooperatism has been around forever.
Speaker 2: It's like stronger in every country that except the US.
Speaker 2: You wanted to do a like complicated dive. Mandragon is
Speaker 2: the largest cooperative corporation in the world, and it's in
Speaker 2: the Bosque region of Spain, and it like is a
Speaker 2: huge trunk of the Bosque economy. But it also like
Speaker 2: started making more compromises during the neoliberal era. And like,
Speaker 2: of course, you know, like like a lot of these
Speaker 2: co ops, even in even these occupied factories, a lot
Speaker 2: of them do like a one to one pay thing
Speaker 2: where everyone gets the exact same pay, and then other
Speaker 2: ones that I actually think are still just as radical.
Speaker 2: Well sometimes have like some pay discrepancy, like hey, yeah,
Speaker 2: your first year, you don't make as much money as
Speaker 2: the person who's been your twenty years, like whatever, you know, yeah,
Speaker 2: and then you get to like I think Mandragon has
Speaker 2: like a six to one ratio, and there's like interviews
Speaker 2: with the workers who are like, when they find out
Speaker 2: how bad it is everywhere else, they were like, man,
Speaker 2: I thought six to one was kind of fucked up.
Speaker 2: But in the like I think the average CEO to
Speaker 2: median salary of an employee, not lowest salary of a
Speaker 2: employee in the US, it's like two hundred and seventy
Speaker 2: to one or something like that. Good God, Like.
Speaker 4: I don't think he always says, man America, America is
Speaker 4: a scam, y'all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it really is. It really founded by grifters.
Speaker 4: What a hustle?
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, But cooperativism is spreading. Some folks went down
Speaker 2: to learn in what was going on in Argentina, and
Speaker 2: they came back to the US and they started an
Speaker 2: organization called the Working World, and it started to put
Speaker 2: investment capital non extractively into the hands of these recovered businesses.
Speaker 2: In Argentina is what it first started to do. It's
Speaker 2: sort of a reverse of the globalization process. You get
Speaker 2: money from the well far country into the less wealthy
Speaker 2: country and reverse the extractive process. But in this way
Speaker 2: that like encourages growth instead of I mean, don't get
Speaker 2: me wrong, I think that like the US pain reparations
Speaker 2: still the part countries of the world that it's fucked over.
Speaker 2: It makes total sense to me. But this way that
Speaker 2: like helps grow an economy, you know, very specifically indirectly.
Speaker 5: So when you say non extractively, meaning like they're not
Speaker 5: going to get no return on that investment, Like.
Speaker 2: Okay, so here's it's kind of interesting. There is a
Speaker 2: return on this investment, but the return on investment that
Speaker 2: they ask for only can come from the profits generated
Speaker 2: from the capital put in. So it's like if you
Speaker 2: come to see Commons and you get alone because see
Speaker 2: Common is now the larger US version of this, right, yeah,
Speaker 2: or is not larger, but it's the version of the US.
Speaker 2: You come to see comments for a loan, you don't
Speaker 2: put your house up at all. Yeah, if see Commons
Speaker 2: buys your restaurant equipment, the worst thing that can happen
Speaker 2: and I think hasn't happened in the history of c commons,
Speaker 2: but I'm not sure. Is that that restaurant equipment is
Speaker 2: sold as the collateral for the loan. So no individual
Speaker 2: person loses any money through this process. You cannot end
Speaker 2: up worse off than you started financially by working with
Speaker 2: a non extractive loan. They also don't look at your
Speaker 2: credit record or any of that. Instead, they're locally embedded,
Speaker 2: so they know who's a good loan because they know
Speaker 2: that that person's part of a community. Right yeah, And
Speaker 2: so they centralize getting the money and decentralize spreading the
Speaker 2: money out. It's really interesting. And then the money that
Speaker 2: people pay back goes then into the commons to then
Speaker 2: spread out to other places, so like real people. So
Speaker 2: it's instead of and so sometimes companies will be a
Speaker 2: little bit confused. They'd be like, well, I want a grant,
Speaker 2: and we'd be like, well, we don't do grants, you know,
Speaker 2: we do loans. When you pay back your loan, the
Speaker 2: money the interest on that loan, which is like negotiated
Speaker 2: with everyone all along, pays for the ability to then
Speaker 2: go around and turn and do do it for someone else.
Speaker 2: And so see Commas does all this shit, like like
Speaker 2: one of their groups is called Poda Emma, just power Emma.
Speaker 2: Emma's a neighborhood in Ashville, North Carolina, which is one
Speaker 2: of the fastest gentrifying cities in the country.
Speaker 4: Bonkers.
Speaker 2: Yeah and yeah, and the LATINX community that lives there
Speaker 2: is pretty fucking fucked by this gentrification. So Poter Emma
Speaker 2: is is you know, run by them and buys trailer
Speaker 2: parks and puts them into cooperative ownership so that everyone
Speaker 2: who lives there now is part of a housing cooperative
Speaker 2: and can't lose their land, you know, can't be gentrified out. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I went totally off script here. Actually, what I did
Speaker 2: is I went onto a different script. I went onto
Speaker 2: the script that was my job for two years, which
Speaker 2: is explained comments to people.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but no, that's that's important because like it's it's
Speaker 5: it's brings the history you're talking about too now, and
Speaker 5: like that if you drill down, if you have the
Speaker 5: will and the desire to make something work, you can.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And that's to me one the beauty of your
Speaker 4: whole show.
Speaker 5: And to like what you're explaining is like and even
Speaker 5: this episode, it's like dude, if you got the will, yeah,
Speaker 5: you can make it work. And like, newsflash, you could
Speaker 5: make money.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Like that's and that's what I like. I'm hoping, Yeah,
Speaker 5: I'm hoping listeners is hearing that these factories are profitable.
Speaker 4: They're making they are making money. What do you like
Speaker 4: they making money y'all? Yeah.
Speaker 2: One of the like, one of the people that I
Speaker 2: worked with, this guy, Ed Whitfield, who like there's a
Speaker 2: photo of him from nineteen sixty nine as an armed
Speaker 2: black man coming out of a Stanford building that he
Speaker 2: had just occupied, you know, as part of a student
Speaker 2: occupation in the sixties or whatever. Changed my thinking about
Speaker 2: economics more than anyone else that I've ever met. When,
Speaker 2: through his work with the Southern Reparations Loan Fund, which
Speaker 2: is now part of the Commons Network, he talks about
Speaker 2: how he's like, no, we we want as a as
Speaker 2: a leftist, I don't know exactly what ideology he would
Speaker 2: identify with as a leftist, we want profitable businesses in
Speaker 2: these black communities that are not. This is how we
Speaker 2: reverse the extractive process that white capitalism has done to us,
Speaker 2: is by like, because we make money and then they
Speaker 2: take it from us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's what happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we just don't let them take it from us,
Speaker 2: you know, And it's just like it really it really
Speaker 2: blew my mind. Anyone who wants you should He has
Speaker 2: a couple of videos up on YouTube, but he's on
Speaker 2: Panels or something talking about this shit, and he's just
Speaker 2: this like fucking brilliant economic thinker. Anyway, and if you're
Speaker 2: listening and misworking with you. Sometimes I don't know if
Speaker 2: anyone from my old job is going to listen to this.
Speaker 5: This is a big talk around like killing Mike and
Speaker 5: jay Z them being like very much capitalists, you know
Speaker 5: what I'm saying in a lot of ways, but you know,
Speaker 5: black capitalism and like even the argument that like for
Speaker 5: a time drug money was our VC, Like you know
Speaker 5: what I'm saying, And it's like this is this is
Speaker 5: generated by us. And now, of course obviously that's nothing
Speaker 5: to be proud.
Speaker 4: Of, Yo'm saying.
Speaker 5: But for the example of what you're saying is like, no,
Speaker 5: we generated funds right invested in ourselves that way, like
Speaker 5: you said, we don't owe to white people like we
Speaker 5: did this ourselves. The money stays here and a lot
Speaker 5: of those guys think to themselves, Well, we clean our
Speaker 5: conscious for how we raise the VC by investing in
Speaker 5: neighborhoods and communities and businesses within our neighborhood, even though
Speaker 5: it was built off drug anyway, all that to say
Speaker 5: that is one of their things about black banks and
Speaker 5: black businesses and then and that's being critique because it's like, yeah,
Speaker 5: mean still you know, but to your point, Yeah, I
Speaker 5: mean I I kind of tend to fall in the
Speaker 5: position that you you articulated, which is like yeah, like
Speaker 5: you I mean, I'm on, I'm on this spinning rock.
Speaker 5: You know what I'm saying, Like it's you can't. You
Speaker 5: can't unplug, Like it's like it's not possible, so you can't.
Speaker 5: I have to try to do this in the less
Speaker 5: extractive way as possible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so this model, like it's so interesting to
Speaker 2: me because this model, to me in the US seems
Speaker 2: to be like a synchronization of coming from these occupied
Speaker 2: factories in Argentina and the methods that they developed a
Speaker 2: financing and then a lot of stuff specifically coming out
Speaker 2: of like a Southern reparation loan fund and like other
Speaker 2: black anti capitalist market ways of thinking. And I'm using
Speaker 2: words that I'm not entirely certain that everyone involved would
Speaker 2: use I want to describe it this way, but it's
Speaker 2: it's real fucking interesting to me about how people are
Speaker 2: trying to work about. And they started in the US. Well,
Speaker 2: they started in Argentina, and then they moved to Nicaragua,
Speaker 2: and then they came to the US and they started
Speaker 2: with a factory that had been abandoned by its owner.
Speaker 2: So this exact thing that has happened in Argentina has
Speaker 2: happened in the US in the same way. Republic Windows
Speaker 2: and Doors in Chicago shut down in two thousand and
Speaker 2: eight during our collapse of our economy. Everyone was fired
Speaker 2: without being paid the money they were owed, both backpayan severance.
Speaker 2: So the workers occupied the factory and they won in courts,
Speaker 2: big social movement around it, and they won what they
Speaker 2: were owed. They didn't get the factory, but they won
Speaker 2: what they were owed. But then the people who bought
Speaker 2: the factory had like a shit business plan and it
Speaker 2: didn't work out. So the workers of the factory teamed
Speaker 2: up with the United Electrical Workers Union, the Working World
Speaker 2: the organization was just talking about, and the Center for
Speaker 2: Workplace Democracy, and they bought the factory from its owners.
Speaker 2: It's now called New Era Windows Cooperative. It is financially successful.
Speaker 2: It grows and expands every year. I know this intimately
Speaker 2: because I my last job was to write grants that
Speaker 2: included spreadsheets and graphs of all the successes of all
Speaker 2: the worker cooperatives. Wow. And I've been pondering more and
Speaker 2: more about how to make sure the stories they tell
Speaker 2: in the show tie into things that are happening now
Speaker 2: so people don't see it as like, oh, it's history,
Speaker 2: it's dead and gone or whatever. And this one's easy
Speaker 2: because the through line's so direct. The working world realizing
Speaker 2: that non extractive finance should be locally directed, decided instead
Speaker 2: of like growing to conquer the world, it federated into
Speaker 2: a decentralized cooperative of these non extractive loan funds. They're
Speaker 2: about thirty five of them currently around the country, and
Speaker 2: they work together under the name Seed Commons. But they
Speaker 2: all have their own total unique identities and things like that,
Speaker 2: like Poe Deer Emma is not the same as Yeah
Speaker 2: Cooperation New Orleans or anything like that idea, And the
Speaker 2: leadership comes from the actual communities. The money is going
Speaker 2: into reversing the extractive process. So it's not just helping
Speaker 2: communities enrich themselves. It's literally just coordinating between various communities
Speaker 2: that are all enriching themselves.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: And I quit my job with Seed Comments to focus
Speaker 2: on cool people who did cool stuff, and so I
Speaker 2: constantly challenged myself to do as much good with the
Speaker 2: show as I was able to writing grants for this.
Speaker 2: That's dope because I consider See Comments to be genuinely
Speaker 2: one of the most transformative projects, uh in the current
Speaker 2: modern economic world.
Speaker 5: So it's really encouraging to hear someone gush about a
Speaker 5: financial institution, you.
Speaker 4: Know, like when when the last time you heard that?
Speaker 5: Like yeah, and Magpias, like I I have the exact.
Speaker 4: Opposite feeling I have at the end of a Bastard's episode.
Speaker 2: It's all great succeeding.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the show. We did it, We did the concept.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yes, exactly, Yeah, you know, mission mission accomplished. And
Speaker 5: what I love about this one is that it's not
Speaker 5: about a cool person. Yeah you know what I mean,
Speaker 5: like this hero character. This is about a bunch of
Speaker 5: people who don't need their names on T shirts that
Speaker 5: are like, we got bigger stuff to do. Total, that's
Speaker 5: another thing America could learn. Yeah, wow, how.
Speaker 4: Many of those factories are still owned? None of them?
Speaker 4: You said?
Speaker 2: No, So a lot of them are still cooperative, A
Speaker 2: lot of them still I think hundreds of them. But
Speaker 2: I'm not sure. I like, I really struggled. Like even
Speaker 2: the piece that I found, like following up on the
Speaker 2: old cooperatives was like from like twenty ten, you know,
Speaker 2: because the media cycle sucks and it's like recent enough
Speaker 2: that it's like most of the stuff I cover, I'm
Speaker 2: reading history books about where is this case, I'm reading
Speaker 2: current event books from twenty years ago about you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And then the window company because I am also a
Speaker 5: homeowner and I'm like, so if I'm gonna upgrade my windows,
Speaker 5: I need to order from them, right.
Speaker 2: I think that they might be Chicago market only, but
Speaker 2: I'm not sure.
Speaker 4: But uh, it makes sense, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but there is let's see, in LA, there's a
Speaker 2: network of cooperatives. I'm not sure whether they're doing much
Speaker 2: industrial stuff. I can't remember what the LA cooperatives are
Speaker 2: up to off the top of my head. I used
Speaker 2: to know this stuff inside and out.
Speaker 4: That's fine, I'll go, I'll look them up. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh, but there was also like Downtown Crenshaw Rising. Did
Speaker 2: you catch that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was tied into
Speaker 2: all of this, But I think that one didn't I
Speaker 2: think we didn't win that one. There was a mall
Speaker 2: that went out of business and was abandoned is in
Speaker 2: a primarily black neighborhood, and some people were like, oh,
Speaker 2: let's gentrify the shit out of it. And then a
Speaker 2: whole bunch of people were like, what if you didn't,
Speaker 2: What if we built a giant, beautiful cooperative community center instead?
Speaker 2: And they raised funck tons like hundreds of millions of
Speaker 2: dollars to buy this building. And now I am not
Speaker 2: speaking for my former employer here, this is Margaret's opinion time.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think the company that sold it for the company
Speaker 2: that bought it didn't bid as high as the community.
Speaker 2: I think the community bid higher and was like, we
Speaker 2: will pay more for this, And I thought we lived
Speaker 2: in fucking capitalism wherever pays the most wins the bid.
Speaker 4: That's what I thought, But in.
Speaker 2: This case they were like, but we don't want it
Speaker 2: to turn into like, yeah, a black community center, and
Speaker 2: this most important cooperatiation we.
Speaker 4: Have been holding on Nick Crenshaw. I mean it's been
Speaker 4: at least a century.
Speaker 5: Like, yeah, I've been holding Crenshaw Is like Black Renaissance
Speaker 5: for so long and fought them off for so long
Speaker 5: that like I could see them just being like, no,
Speaker 5: we don't even want your money because it's so central,
Speaker 5: like the location of Crenshaw is perfect.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well I haven't. I haven't kept up with it
Speaker 2: in the PASTA is about two years ago that this
Speaker 2: last time I have an update for it.
Speaker 4: But what a beautiful story, Margaret.
Speaker 2: Thank you. And if people want to hear more current
Speaker 2: events and other stuff, where can they do that?
Speaker 4: Yeah, hit me at her politics will prop.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna help you navigate all kinds of things going
Speaker 5: on in this unbelievably odd timeline that we're in, with
Speaker 5: a few glimpses of joy, like you know, bleach blonde,
Speaker 5: butch built, bad body, Like just just a great moment.
Speaker 5: Y'all know what I'm talking about?
Speaker 3: Right, I.
Speaker 2: Never know anything. I haven't heard that episode yet.
Speaker 4: No, that's not Senator.
Speaker 5: Our congress Woman Jasmine Crockett just absolutely eviscerated Margie Taylor Green.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it was great.
Speaker 3: Anyway, she photoshopped that photo because the sun the Sun's
Speaker 3: not that shape.
Speaker 2: I like prop that. This means that your podcast sometimes
Speaker 2: reaches kind of the opposite of your necessarily intended market,
Speaker 2: where if you live in the hills and you only
Speaker 2: read history books, yeah and hang out with your dog
Speaker 2: with politics is prop is a great way to learn
Speaker 2: about what's going on. It's a great way.
Speaker 5: It's I never knew, man. I assumed I was talking
Speaker 5: to my city. But apparently keep it y'all up, you know, yeah,
Speaker 5: which is great.
Speaker 2: He's part of the holler listens to.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but yeah, Hill of Politics with prop please.
Speaker 5: You know, we're doing Hill of Politics for eyeballs too,
Speaker 5: where it's you know, I remove all the things that
Speaker 5: need to be bleeped and they're a little shorter and
Speaker 5: they're for eyeballs, you know, so you can show your classrooms.
Speaker 2: Hell I am. There's a new cool Zone media podcast
Speaker 2: called sixteenth Minute of Fame. I made that pause because
Speaker 2: there's a parenthesis there. Thank you. It's by Jamie Loftus.
Speaker 2: Today I listened to Jamie Loftis talk about a cop
Speaker 2: falling down a slide and it was hilarious, so so
Speaker 2: much joy I know. And I have a book that's
Speaker 2: coming out in September. It's called The Sapling Cage. It's
Speaker 2: it's a crossover book, which means it's a young adult
Speaker 2: book that knows that's mostly adults who are going to
Speaker 2: read it. And it's about a young trans girl who
Speaker 2: becomes a witch. And it is being kickstarted probably next week.
Speaker 2: If you're listening to this episode when it comes out
Speaker 2: it starts. I think June tenth is the kickstarter and
Speaker 2: you should read it. And that's it. We'll talk to
Speaker 2: you all next week. Hi, this is a special message
Speaker 2: from me, Margaret. It's not an ad message. It's just
Speaker 2: not related to what we're going to talk about today
Speaker 2: on the podcast. And I'm recording this separately. I'm recording
Speaker 2: this separately because on June tenth, twenty twenty four, Leonard
Speaker 2: Peltier is going to have a parole hearing and I
Speaker 2: want to talk about that. One of the guests that
Speaker 2: we have a lot on this podcast, but also just
Speaker 2: like Cool Zone Media podcasts in general, is my friend
Speaker 2: Moira Meltzer Cohen, who is a lawyer, a defense lawyer
Speaker 2: who is on Leonard Peltier's court case. And Moira asked
Speaker 2: us to read this statement and I just want to
Speaker 2: say I co signed this statement. I've done a lot
Speaker 2: of research about Leonard Peltier for this podcast and also
Speaker 2: on my own as an activist. Some of the first
Speaker 2: protests I ever went to were related to free Lanard Peltier,
Speaker 2: and so this is the statement. On June tenth, twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four, Leonard Peltier, enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain
Speaker 2: Band of Chippewa of Lakota and Ajibwa Ancestry and the
Speaker 2: longest serving political prisoner in the United States, will be
Speaker 2: appearing before the US Parole Commission for the first time
Speaker 2: since two thousand and nine. He faces staunch opposition from
Speaker 2: the FBI and other law enforcement due to having allegedly
Speaker 2: killed two FBI agents and a firefight on June twenty six,
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy five, after the agents appeared on reservation land
Speaker 2: to execute a pretextual warrant. The initial firefight occurred during
Speaker 2: the quote reign of Terror on Pine Ridge in the
Speaker 2: wake of the occupation of Wounded Knee, a time of
Speaker 2: extreme violence when federal law enforcement installed a puppet tribal
Speaker 2: chair and was arming vigilantes who targeted Indigenous traditionalists. Everything
Speaker 2: leading up to these events, as well as the subsequent
Speaker 2: investigation and mister Peltier's extradition, trial, conviction, and sentencing were
Speaker 2: characterized by gross misconduct on the part of law enforcement,
Speaker 2: the prosecution, and the courts. Mister Peltier's co defendants were
Speaker 2: separately tried and acquitted on grounds of self defense. Mister
Speaker 2: Peltier was railroaded, and his case is tainted by discrimination
Speaker 2: at every level, ranging from the withholding of exculpatory evidence
Speaker 2: to the torture and coercion of extradition and trial witnesses,
Speaker 2: and from the refusal of the trial judge to dismiss
Speaker 2: in avowedly racist juror to the apologetic gymnastics of courts
Speaker 2: affirming his conviction in the face of meritorious legal challenges
Speaker 2: and admitted evidence of outrageous government misdeeds. Mister Peltier has
Speaker 2: been in prison for more than forty eight years and
Speaker 2: is almost eighty years old. He suffers from chronic and
Speaker 2: potentially lethal conditions for which he receives insufficient and substandard
Speaker 2: medical care. If you want to take action to free
Speaker 2: Leonard Peltier, you can call the US Parole Commission at
Speaker 2: two zero, two three, four six seven thousand. Again, that's
Speaker 2: two zero, two three, four six seven thousand. Or you
Speaker 2: can sign the petition and this is a string of
Speaker 2: This is a URL, so I'm going to read it
Speaker 2: out nd NCO dot c c slash us PC dash
Speaker 2: free Leonard Peltier. Again, that's NDNC dot c c slash
Speaker 2: us PC dash free Leonard Peltier. Leonard Peltier is spelled
Speaker 2: l e O n A R d p e l
Speaker 2: t i e R. Or you can follow Indian Collective
Speaker 2: on social media, which is n d N Collective for
Speaker 2: more information on Leonard Peltier. Listen to Margaret's podcast on
Speaker 2: the Low Coda Nation. Oh thanks Maira, and read In
Speaker 2: the Spirit of Crazy Horse by Peter Matheson. And again,
Speaker 2: just want to reiterate, I co sign all of this.
Speaker 2: I've done a lot of my own research into this.
Speaker 2: You can and should too, and free Leonard Peltier.
Speaker 3: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 3: cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
Speaker 3: visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us
Speaker 3: out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 3: get your podcasts.