Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
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Speaker 3: Hello, dear listener you're listening to it could happen here.
Speaker 3: My name's Carlos. I'm a journalist from Puerto Rico. I'm
Speaker 3: here with James.
Speaker 4: Hey.
Speaker 5: How you doing.
Speaker 3: Hi, Nice to have you on for this. James.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Let me ask, have you heard about a little thing
Speaker 3: called imperialism?
Speaker 7: I have During my education in the United Kingdom, it
Speaker 7: was an issue that they raised once or twice.
Speaker 3: So you would say you're quite knowledgeable about imperialism, then sure.
Speaker 7: I think I have a little a little grass of it,
Speaker 7: both from there learning about it and teaching about it.
Speaker 7: There's a whole lot of imperialism, you know. I don't
Speaker 7: think I've covered all of it, so I'm excited to
Speaker 7: learn about some extra parts of.
Speaker 3: It same same, and actually I would say so. I'm
Speaker 3: from Puerto Rico, and as a subject of American imperialism,
Speaker 3: I'm very happy to share this episode today, which is
Speaker 3: kind of a history of American overseas expansion, focused particularly
Speaker 3: on its colonies. There are several American colonies. Puerto Rico
Speaker 3: is the most populous one and the most known, but
Speaker 3: there are several others. So I want to start this
Speaker 3: episode by laying out some definitions and frameworks in case
Speaker 3: people aren't familiar with them. When people think of the
Speaker 3: United States, they typically only think about the contiguous United States,
Speaker 3: also known as the lower forty eight. This is how
Speaker 3: most people imagine the US today, and maybe they include
Speaker 3: Alaska and Hawaii. This is what historian Benedict Anderson calls
Speaker 3: the logo map in his seminal book Imagined Communities. Essentially,
Speaker 3: the way that it works is that if every country
Speaker 3: had merged, then this is the logo that would be
Speaker 3: on it. This is literal in some cases. For example,
Speaker 3: I saw a lot of America two fifty shirts that
Speaker 3: only had the map with the lower forty eight on it.
Speaker 3: The logo map, whether people mean it or not, is
Speaker 3: often a political statement. Whatever people imagine the logo map
Speaker 3: to be is what they consider the dominion of their government.
Speaker 3: For example, if you see an IDF or Russian soldier
Speaker 3: with a patch that includes Gaza and the West Bank
Speaker 3: in Israel or Ukraine as part of Russia, then you
Speaker 3: very likely know that person's thoughts on the territorial borders
Speaker 3: of their respective countries. However, what is included in the
Speaker 3: logo map is often just as important as what isn't included.
Speaker 3: In the case of the United States, which has continuously
Speaker 3: lied to itself about being an empire, the lower forty
Speaker 3: eight logo map hides the country's former territories Alaska and
Speaker 3: Hawaii if they're not included, its current territories like Puerto
Speaker 3: Rico and Guam, as well as a smattering of military
Speaker 3: bases that it owns across the world. This emission, in
Speaker 3: its self conception, is an active American exceptionalism, giving visual
Speaker 3: credence to the fact that the country is one homogeneous polity,
Speaker 3: not a settler colonial state or a global superpower with
Speaker 3: overseas possessions that it continues to colonize to this day.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think the America two fifty with the lower
Speaker 7: forty eight on it. It's a really fascinating image, right, Like,
Speaker 7: there is no historical argument the countries on that map
Speaker 7: were not the United States two hundred and fifty years ago.
Speaker 7: The place is on that map.
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
Speaker 7: When people think in their mind of their imagined community,
Speaker 7: that is America, that is what they think of. Even
Speaker 7: though I think very few of the T shirt wearers
Speaker 7: with the two map would be like, yes, in Hawaii
Speaker 7: and Alaska colonies and like we should, we should let
Speaker 7: them be yet let alone discussing put Rico, Guam. And
Speaker 7: then you have all the like the Cofa countries, right
Speaker 7: like RMI. Yeah, absolutely, Like I guess if you want
Speaker 7: to put them on a T shirt, you need a
Speaker 7: really fucking big T shirt to keep it to scale,
Speaker 7: right like it it is a vast global empire. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: you have bases in Africa, basis in Greenland, bases all
Speaker 7: over the world.
Speaker 3: Absolutely So at a time when Trump has made several
Speaker 3: overtures towards expanding the physical territory of the United States
Speaker 3: by either making Canada, Greenland or Venezuela or a bunch
Speaker 3: of other places ostensibly the fifty first state, I think
Speaker 3: it's important that people know that the US is not
Speaker 3: only a military and economic empire, but a literal one
Speaker 3: with control over a series of territories and their people
Speaker 3: that spans the pacif and the Caribbean, as well as
Speaker 3: the aforementioned military bases. So to start, I should say
Speaker 3: that that kind of ideological game about the US logo
Speaker 3: map is almost wholeheartedly ripped from the beginning of Daniel
Speaker 3: Imawar's How to Hide an Empire. Also, James, in the
Speaker 3: case of the shirt with all of the territories and colonies,
Speaker 3: that there is a map in there that I will
Speaker 3: show you later that we could put on a T
Speaker 3: shirt of sweet, Okay exciting. So How to Hide an Empire,
Speaker 3: alongside Colonial Crucible, edited by Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco
Speaker 3: as Carano, were monumental sources for these two podcast episodes
Speaker 3: that we're about to do. Anyway, James, I know that
Speaker 3: you've heard this term before, but I want to start
Speaker 3: out by defining the term quote unquote insular area before
Speaker 3: I get to the meat of this episode. When a
Speaker 3: place is an insular area of the US, it means
Speaker 3: that they are a US associated jurisdiction, but aren't states
Speaker 3: or the District of Columbia. This encompasses several different legal
Speaker 3: meanings in terms of sovereignty free of the US's insular areas.
Speaker 3: The Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of
Speaker 3: Micronesia and Palau are independent nations that have compacts of
Speaker 3: free association with the US. This means that they have
Speaker 3: their own sovereignty, but certain things such as defense, are
Speaker 3: in hands of the United States. I won't be talking
Speaker 3: about them too much, but if you want to learn
Speaker 3: more about them, you should go listen to James's series
Speaker 3: on the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
Speaker 7: Thank you. I was in that RMI when they were
Speaker 7: renegotiating with the Biden admin. They are proud independent country,
Speaker 7: of course, right, and they have sovereignty in a lot
Speaker 7: of issues. But also like the US, didn't come at
Speaker 7: that equal to equal, you know, like the US, a
Speaker 7: country which nuked the Marshall Islands, which it never had
Speaker 7: any quarrel with, it's still not paying people in those
Speaker 7: places what it said it would pay them for the
Speaker 7: damage it did by New Kingdom when they were downwind.
Speaker 7: Like even now when they negotiate, they can't force the
Speaker 7: United States to treat them with really what is human
Speaker 7: BEI basic dignity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, And this is you know, I think something
Speaker 3: that extends not only to the countries under the compacts
Speaker 3: of reassociation, but all of its colonies that when they
Speaker 3: are at the bargaining table, it is very clearly an
Speaker 3: incredibly unequal bargaining table with this like global superpower and
Speaker 3: its colonies, and they're trying to reach the colonies are
Speaker 3: trying to reach sometimes more independence or more federal funding
Speaker 3: or something or another.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So the other fourteen insular areas are what the US
Speaker 3: calls quote unquote territories, and I should say that fourteen
Speaker 3: doesn't even tell the whole story, but I'm going to
Speaker 3: hold onto that fact for a second. These fourteen are
Speaker 3: divided into thirteen unincorporated territories and one incorporated territory. There's
Speaker 3: a complicated explanation for that that I'm going to explain
Speaker 3: in the next episode. But all you have to know
Speaker 3: for now is that people often talk about these territories
Speaker 3: as being part of the United States. And while that
Speaker 3: is true on a conceptual level, right when you imagine
Speaker 3: the United States, or maybe not, when people going to
Speaker 3: the America two fifty rallies imagine the United States, but
Speaker 3: when you map out the US's global borders, you include
Speaker 3: Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa as part of the United States. However,
Speaker 3: in a strictly legal sense, all of the unincorporated territories
Speaker 3: belong to but aren't part of the United States. So
Speaker 3: of these fourteen territories, nine are uninhabited and five have
Speaker 3: people on them. The nine uninhabited territories are Baker Island,
Speaker 3: Holland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Atoll,
Speaker 3: Kalmira Atoll, which is the sole incorporated territory, Wake Island,
Speaker 3: and Navasa Island. There are also two other territories, Seeraniya
Speaker 3: Bang and Bajonuevo Bank, that are claimed by the US
Speaker 3: but administered by Columbia. Meanwhile, Haiti has also historically laid
Speaker 3: claim to Navasa and still does. This is similar for
Speaker 3: Wake Island, which is claimed by the Marshall Islands but
Speaker 3: is administered by the US. In the modern day, these
Speaker 3: remain mostly uninhabited save for military or scientific missions. All
Speaker 3: of these little pieces of land are often grouped together
Speaker 3: as the US minor outlying islands. Yeah, in the calculus
Speaker 3: of the US, they're like so meaningless that they're usually
Speaker 3: not even talked about by their names.
Speaker 7: Right right, It's like a footnote of existence.
Speaker 3: Exactly exactly, even though they have been, as I hope
Speaker 3: to show, very important to the conception of the United
Speaker 3: States as an empire. Meanwhile, the five inhabited territories are
Speaker 3: Puerto Rico, where I'm from and currently located, Guam, the
Speaker 3: US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa.
Speaker 3: So this is going to be split into two episodes.
Speaker 3: The first is kind of giving a crash course on
Speaker 3: the inhabited islands and how the US has claimed the
Speaker 3: minor outlying islands created the skeletal framework on which the
Speaker 3: US would expand its overseas empire. And then the second
Speaker 3: episode is mostly going to be about how the US
Speaker 3: acquired those five uninhabited islands and how they kind of
Speaker 3: shaped the metropol in ways that people rarely conceive of. However,
Speaker 3: before getting into that, I want to make a quick
Speaker 3: note about language. Up until now, I've been using the
Speaker 3: word quote unquote territory to describe these places, just to
Speaker 3: talk about them in the same way the US history
Speaker 3: teacher might talk about them, or how the President of
Speaker 3: the United States might talk about them. But going forward,
Speaker 3: I'll be referring to them by the word quote unquote colony,
Speaker 3: because that's what it's called when a foreign polity controls
Speaker 3: a place and its people.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's like the book Turtle hints at has done
Speaker 7: a very good job of hiding its empire. But like,
Speaker 7: I think part of that is because it's convinced people
Speaker 7: not to call it by its name, and because it
Speaker 7: hasn't called it by its name and then no one
Speaker 7: else does, then somehow it fits into this magical third
Speaker 7: space between independence and empire, rather than just saying, oh, yeah,
Speaker 7: this is an empire, but they rebranded it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely, it's like the of the However, many empires
Speaker 3: that have existed throughout history. The only thing exceptional about
Speaker 3: the US is that it doesn't conceive of itself as
Speaker 3: an empire. So I'm going to assume that a lot
Speaker 3: of people don't know much about the US colonies. So
Speaker 3: here's a crash course. Puerto Rico and the US virsin
Speaker 3: Islands are in the Caribbean, while Guam, the Northern Mariana
Speaker 3: islands in American Samoa are in the Pacific. Between them,
Speaker 3: the five US colonies have about four million people. Except
Speaker 3: for American Samoa, everyone born there is born an American citizen.
Speaker 3: People born in American Samoa are non citizen US nationals.
Speaker 3: If they want to become US citizens, they have to
Speaker 3: go for the naturalization process. People in the colonies can't
Speaker 3: vote in federal elections, and we don't have voting representation
Speaker 3: in Congress. Instead, we have a non voting representative whose
Speaker 3: job is kind of just to squawk at other congress
Speaker 3: people to convince them to do things. Politically, all the colonies,
Speaker 3: say for Puerto Rico, have the US's two party system.
Speaker 3: I should say that American Samoa's elections are nonpartisan, which
Speaker 3: means that while candidates do affiliate with the Republican or
Speaker 3: Democratic parties, they run the ballot as independent. In Puerto Rico,
Speaker 3: political parties are divided based on whether they want Puerto
Speaker 3: Rico to become a state independence or remain in the
Speaker 3: colonial status quo. That has been that way for going
Speaker 3: on about seventy years now. Although some candidates in Puerto
Speaker 3: Rico do affiliate with US political parties, they run representing
Speaker 3: the archipelagos political parties. A bunch of the sources I used,
Speaker 3: like the AP or The Conversation, among others, are linked
Speaker 3: in the show notes if you want more details. Puerto
Speaker 3: Rico is probably the one that people most know about, right,
Speaker 3: and I'm also going to be focusing a lot on
Speaker 3: it throughout this these two episodes. Because I'm from here.
Speaker 3: We're the most populated and largest in terms of land
Speaker 3: mass by several magnitudes. The archipelago really only comes into
Speaker 3: the American consciousness in times of crisis. For example, right now,
Speaker 3: it's in the news because we're facing a pretty bad
Speaker 3: water crisis, with some people having gone more than one
Speaker 3: hundred days with no or an intermitent water service. This
Speaker 3: is common across all the colonies, only getting media coverage
Speaker 3: in times of crisis, and even then it's unlikely that
Speaker 3: they'll receive the same media attention as any state. Puerto
Speaker 3: Rico is often the one that's in then news just
Speaker 3: because it's the biggest, Right But when was the last
Speaker 3: time you heard a let's say, like a CNN report
Speaker 3: about Guam or American Samhow right? In my experience, right,
Speaker 3: only talking about Puerto Rico it's kind of a news
Speaker 3: desert in relation to other states, which I know, right,
Speaker 3: media has been affected everywhere, but the colonies specifically because
Speaker 3: of their kind of colonial status and how it has
Speaker 3: affected them. There's media blackouts from the metropol to them,
Speaker 3: and in them, they are sometimes a little bit of
Speaker 3: news deserts. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I would wager to say
Speaker 3: that the first time Puerto Rico entered American consciousness in
Speaker 3: recent memory was in twenty seventeen, when hurricanes Irma and
Speaker 3: Maria destroyed the archipelago and its long ailing electrical system,
Speaker 3: causing thousands of deaths and the largest and longest blackout
Speaker 3: in US history. Shortly after that, a Morning Consult poll
Speaker 3: found that only about fifty four percent of Americans knew
Speaker 3: that people here were also American citizens. And that's like
Speaker 3: after kind of once in a lifetime natural disaster.
Speaker 7: Yeah, right, that's been in the headlines, like, and Trump
Speaker 7: is there, like handing out toilet paper, like.
Speaker 3: True, absolutely right, he was doing the kind of free
Speaker 3: point meme. Yeah photo that has become famous.
Speaker 7: Now, Yeah, your handing out is your own word, right,
Speaker 7: flicking toilet paper at people?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, And you know he also like and This is
Speaker 3: kind of a preview of what I'm going to talk
Speaker 3: about next episode or at the end of next episode.
Speaker 3: But he did remark that he wanted to trade Puerto
Speaker 3: Rico for Greenland.
Speaker 7: Was Denmark, So like it would be the Danes who
Speaker 7: would administer Puerto Rico or who's Yeah, who's he trading
Speaker 7: it with?
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, he's trading it with with Denmark. Right, he
Speaker 3: would trade Puerto Rico for Greenland, So Denmark would take
Speaker 3: over Puerto Rico and the US takeover Why not over Greenland?
Speaker 3: You know, we're just kind of there to be bartered with.
Speaker 7: Right, Yeah, this is not a place where people live exactly.
Speaker 7: I'm sure the Dane really embrace like I mean, yeah, fine,
Speaker 7: I guess that is what Embias used to do back
Speaker 7: in the day, Right, we just swap land around.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. I mean, the US bought the Virgin Islands from
Speaker 3: Denmark for a cool twenty five million, right, so yeah,
Speaker 3: there's president for it. Yeah true.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and then not so long ago, Alaska like true.
Speaker 3: So, like I mentioned that, only appearing in US media
Speaker 3: or receiving national attention is very common for the colonies.
Speaker 3: This is particularly the case of Puerto Rico, which has
Speaker 3: been suffering one crisis after another for the last two decades.
Speaker 3: Our siblings and the other colonies receive even less media attention.
Speaker 3: If you're listening and this is the first time you're
Speaker 3: hearing about these colonies. To be honest, this is what
Speaker 3: empire does to those it considers lesser than make them
Speaker 3: invisible in public life until it is socio politically expedient
Speaker 3: to use them for one purpose or another. Yeah, like
Speaker 3: trading us for Greenland. And while I was writing, I
Speaker 3: really struggled to find a concise way of explaining the
Speaker 3: importance of the colonies to the formation of the United
Speaker 3: States as we know it today. Today, we often talk
Speaker 3: about the imperial boomerang produced by several overseas US invasions
Speaker 3: in the Middle East coming back to haunt us. We've
Speaker 3: seen the militarization of police throughout the country, the rise
Speaker 3: of what any Latin American country would call quote unquote manolura,
Speaker 3: politics at home, and much more. Yet, in the conception
Speaker 3: of the American consequences of imperialism, the literal colonies of
Speaker 3: the United States are often left by the wayside, but
Speaker 3: the current and former colonies have shaped the country in
Speaker 3: untold ways of which I'm going to be talking about
Speaker 3: a few today. To quote from colonial crucible quote, the
Speaker 3: United States held most of its larger colonies for just
Speaker 3: a few decades and governed only a few million people,
Speaker 3: Yet empire left an indelible imprint on the United States.
Speaker 3: Colonialism was a crucible that plunged Washington's raw bureaucracy into
Speaker 3: the white heat of nationalist revolution and great power rivalry,
Speaker 3: forging you heretofore unimagined state capacities. Indeed, the ramifications of
Speaker 3: this early American empire were far wider than anyone has
Speaker 3: yet imagined, a marked expansion in the role of the
Speaker 3: federal government for more activistic domestic administration, and the formation
Speaker 3: of an agile, transnational imperial state for more effective global governance.
Speaker 7: I think a lot about how American self conception has
Speaker 7: kind of changed. I guess I think a lot of
Speaker 7: specifically about Cuba, right, and how like, there is not
Speaker 7: an American politician who would not like to be compared
Speaker 7: to Theodore Roosevelt, could be on any party right. Most
Speaker 7: of the wild also like to be compared to FDR,
Speaker 7: which is a whole other interesting thing when you look
Speaker 7: at internment. But that's a separate topic. Part of that
Speaker 7: is that he and his like rough riders, right, these
Speaker 7: volunteers went to Cuba and then they charged up San
Speaker 7: Juan Hill, and like at the time in America, there
Speaker 7: was this feeling that like empires are going to fall
Speaker 7: and we're going to help them. And we went from that,
Speaker 7: and some of that was like yellow press stuff, right,
Speaker 7: sort of whipping up this popular sentiment of like the
Speaker 7: Americans and we destroy empires to the platinum n that, yeah, right,
Speaker 7: and to effectively the United States to factor ruling Cuba
Speaker 7: in formal colonialism. Like what that says about how the
Speaker 7: United States conceived of its role in the world. Even
Speaker 7: like you can go back even further right and see
Speaker 7: Hamilton talking about the revolution in Haiti and the ship
Speaker 7: that didn't make it into the musical, where he is
Speaker 7: just wildly racist and believes that people, the black people
Speaker 7: of Haiti to being capable of self government and to
Speaker 7: just that they might want to appoint a king to like,
Speaker 7: you know, keep them under some kind of control. I
Speaker 7: guess I failed to fail to follow the logic there,
Speaker 7: but I don't particularly care to try. But like it
Speaker 7: says a lot about this country. Right, which does it
Speaker 7: saying like all men are created equal? Well fuck not
Speaker 7: in Haiti though.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not in Haiti, not in the Caribbean, not in
Speaker 3: Latin America, not anywhere but the United States and maybe Europe.
Speaker 7: Yeah, like from sea to Shining Sea is in fact,
Speaker 7: like those people are created equal unless they're indigenous to
Speaker 7: the place that we want, in which case we don't
Speaker 7: even fucking respect our treaties with them, let alone them.
Speaker 7: I mean Britain did this too, but like just a
Speaker 7: jarring disjuncture between rhetoric and actions, and like at the
Speaker 7: same time that that rhetoric could still be used to
Speaker 7: justify colonial actions, right, like when Hearst and the Yellow
Speaker 7: Press a whipping up this idea of like Spanish empire
Speaker 7: in Cuba and how unjust it is and how how
Speaker 7: terrible it is, and that we shouldn't be allowing this
Speaker 7: in our hemisphere. Stop and pause and think about our
Speaker 7: hemisphere and anti colonial terms. But like, genuinely, I'm sure
Speaker 7: that working people in America believe that, right, and some
Speaker 7: of the people who look volunteered to fight their genuine
Speaker 7: like hell, yeah, we're going to liberate another country in
Speaker 7: the Americas, Like fucking all burnt down.
Speaker 3: We're going to bring the US freedom and liberty to
Speaker 3: these people by crushing them.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Like we're the best country in the world, and
Speaker 7: like we're going to share that with you all because
Speaker 7: you're our neighbors to like, actually, psych we get to
Speaker 7: intervene how we want, when we want, whenever we want
Speaker 7: in your politics because we like the stuff that you've got.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because seeing the colonizer from the colonized position, right,
Speaker 3: a lot of the US's approached to the rest of
Speaker 3: the world is either right at the tip of a
Speaker 3: barrel or from a position of imperial and colonial arrogant.
Speaker 3: Like we figured it out before you did. Let me
Speaker 3: teach you how to do it. And if you don't
Speaker 3: follow everything I'm going to say, I'm going to force
Speaker 3: you to do it right. And that's what defined this
Speaker 3: period of colonial expansion by the US between like the
Speaker 3: early eighteen hundreds arguably to now, honestly, right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Like the attitude is indistinguishable from the attitude that
Speaker 7: compelled Britain to create an emperil of the world.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 7: I love to show my students a white Man's Burden cartoon.
Speaker 7: I'm sure you've seen the one where he's like Uncle
Speaker 7: Sam is like carrying the peoples of like Puerto Rico,
Speaker 7: Guam and Cuba, I think, up in a little basket
Speaker 7: up towards like civilization.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the shining mountain of the shining city on a hill,
Speaker 3: carrying us to salvation.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and just like wildly racist caricatures. But I will
Speaker 7: show that, you know. I've shown that to undergraduates for
Speaker 7: getting on for fifteen years, and it's always wild to
Speaker 7: see their responses to be like, I understand sometimes because
Speaker 7: I'm British there, like I'm coming in there with a
Speaker 7: history of our own imperial grind. But yeah, it's interesting
Speaker 7: to see them conceive of the United States that way.
Speaker 7: I try to wrap their heads around that when they're like, no,
Speaker 7: it's not America. We didn't do that, man, a totally
Speaker 7: different thing. It's fascinating that they could come through eighteen
Speaker 7: years at a high school system and not be asked
Speaker 7: to reflect on that or even be aware of it,
Speaker 7: you know.
Speaker 3: And actually speaking of a colonial cartoons, I pulled it
Speaker 3: up right now, but I'm really partial too. Have you
Speaker 3: seen this cartoon from Puck that I believe was made
Speaker 3: in nineteen hundred where it's Uncle Sam teaching its newly
Speaker 3: acquired colonies Hawaii, Philippines, Puerto Rico. Q. I can send
Speaker 3: the link in the chat right now. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 3: think about it a lot because I growing up in
Speaker 3: Puerto Rico and being educated by the school system. I
Speaker 3: don't know about the American school system very much or
Speaker 3: specifically how it's taught, but there was a critical to
Speaker 3: the way that we were taught about the US is
Speaker 3: kind of capture and colonization of Puerto Rica. And that
Speaker 3: was mostly because I had a really great history teacher
Speaker 3: my last senior year of high school. But this cartoon
Speaker 3: has really stayed in my memory for a very long
Speaker 3: time because it's like, oh, yeah, it's how I view
Speaker 3: like the US's approach to so many foreign nations. Right,
Speaker 3: you have so many facets of this, Right, you have
Speaker 3: the black population, which obviously the US is historically oppressed
Speaker 3: and enslaved for centuries. You have the indigenous population, also
Speaker 3: historically oppressed and killed for centuries by the US government,
Speaker 3: represented in the corner. And then you have these new
Speaker 3: states which are like depicted as white people in colonial
Speaker 3: dress being good students. And then you have Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii.
Speaker 3: The Philippines upfront depicted as not in like the clothes
Speaker 3: the rest of the people are wearing, as if they
Speaker 3: need special attention to. He taught the kind of education
Speaker 3: of freedom and liberty by Uncle Sam, right right. I
Speaker 3: don't know. I think about this like anytime I'm like
Speaker 3: conceptualizing colonialism. This is this is it for me? They
Speaker 3: peaked here.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that it's wild. It's interesting that Alaska is amongst
Speaker 7: the like I know what to call them, like the
Speaker 7: older kids. They're trying to portray like a civilization savagery
Speaker 7: binary here right, Like, Yeah, that's what's what's happening. Alaska
Speaker 7: is up there with the civilized stage. And then there's
Speaker 7: someone I know, what's happening with his person outside the doors,
Speaker 7: just like the Chinese exclusion.
Speaker 3: Actually I believe so, Yeah, I think that's that's what
Speaker 3: they're trying to portray.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's an excellent cartoon. Yeah, but yeah, there's a
Speaker 7: whole lot happening here.
Speaker 3: Listeners. I know that this is an audio median, but
Speaker 3: go go google School Begins and Puck and then you'll
Speaker 3: see it. It's it's really yep. I don't know if
Speaker 3: they were made this like rope was fully racist, or
Speaker 3: if they were just really good at depicting the US's racism.
Speaker 3: But they popped off with this one. Yeah, we should
Speaker 3: teach this in every school everywhere.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's pretty Uh, it gets right to the point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. So I want to be clear that the
Speaker 3: way that the US was shaped by its colonies is
Speaker 3: not a uniquely American phenomenon. Paraphrasing from colonial crucible, Every
Speaker 3: empire is shaped by the Promethean experience of the colonizer
Speaker 3: and the colonized, both empowering and eviscerating, yet mutually transformative
Speaker 3: and traumatic. The chain of continuity that now spans almost
Speaker 3: two hundred years of seafaring colonization has profoundly shaped the
Speaker 3: American Empire, unleashing the catalytic forces that have shaped the
Speaker 3: formation of the American state up to this day, the
Speaker 3: lasting imprint of which is evident during Washington's recent misadventures
Speaker 3: in the Middle East. And when they wrote that, it
Speaker 3: was two thousand and nine, so they were talking about
Speaker 3: the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, But twenty years later
Speaker 3: it applies almost equally to the current war with Iran.
Speaker 3: With that out of the way, to start with how
Speaker 3: the US expanded, passed the American continent and became a
Speaker 3: seafaring empire. We need to go back two hundred years
Speaker 3: to the mid eighteen hundreds and talk about bird shit.
Speaker 3: Manifest destiny had taken the United States on a genocidal
Speaker 3: campaign that displaced indigenous people and killed them from sea
Speaker 3: to shining Sea. Meanwhile, the Monroe Doctrine, while still nascent
Speaker 3: and not completely enforceable by the American state, created the
Speaker 3: ideological and legal framework for the country to overflow from
Speaker 3: its recently established national borders. In the midst of all
Speaker 3: of this, industrial agricate culture was becoming the norm across
Speaker 3: the world and in the United States, which meant that
Speaker 3: there was a severe need for fertilizer to grow crops quickly.
Speaker 3: People were experimenting with different things, but the one fertilizer
Speaker 3: that everyone wanted was guano, also known as white gold.
Speaker 3: Guano is the accumulated poop of birds, bats, and seals.
Speaker 3: It contained several nutrients that are very good for quick
Speaker 3: agricultural growth. However, the thing about guano is that it
Speaker 3: mostly grows on far off islands or caves. So the
Speaker 3: big problem with guano is that at the time, most
Speaker 3: of it was contained in islands off the coast of
Speaker 3: the newly independent state of Peru. And I'm talking about
Speaker 3: states in the nation state, the country essentially a country
Speaker 3: of Peru. And that was a problem for the United
Speaker 3: States because they needed guano bad but they didn't want
Speaker 3: to rely on a foreign country for it. And I
Speaker 3: should say that a lot of this comes from how
Speaker 3: to Hide an Empire and an article titled Guano and
Speaker 3: the Rise of American Empire by Mauri Siobadancourt published in
Speaker 3: Sage Journal. So, with a desperate need for guano, what
Speaker 3: is a fledgling empire to do but set sail and
Speaker 3: lay claim to the islands that contained large deposits of guano.
Speaker 3: US businessmen originally wanted the US to take Peru's Lobo
Speaker 3: Islands for themselves so they could extract the guano, but
Speaker 3: Peru protested and the US backed off. However, the American
Speaker 3: taste for guano was clear, and in eighteen fifty six,
Speaker 3: the US passed the Guano Islands Act, which allowed any
Speaker 3: US citizen to lay claim to uninhabited islands that had
Speaker 3: guano on them in the name of the United States.
Speaker 3: American entrepreneurs set sale for poop covered islands, and while
Speaker 3: the law specifically mentioned that they had to be not
Speaker 3: claimed by other countries, that didn't really stop people from
Speaker 3: claiming islands that were also claimed by other nations like Britain, Honduras,
Speaker 3: and Colombia. It's kind of like that meme from Arfur
Speaker 3: that says, a sign can stop me because I can't read.
Speaker 7: Yeah, this is like the wildest period. Maybe not, but
Speaker 7: like it's just this bonkers period of US history where
Speaker 7: you can personally expand the imperial possessions of the United States,
Speaker 7: like on your own free will of volition.
Speaker 3: Right, So it's like you know, I mean that's like
Speaker 3: part of the American conception.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 3: You reached a place that was empty of people, you
Speaker 3: settled there, and now you have brought the US to it. Right,
Speaker 3: that's the story that America tells itself at.
Speaker 7: Least, right, Like that's manifest destiny, like writ large across
Speaker 7: the whole global map.
Speaker 3: Absolutely so per how to hide an empire. By the
Speaker 3: time that last claim was filed in nineteen oh two,
Speaker 3: the US had added ninety four islands to its dominion.
Speaker 3: All of these were uninhabited, so they weren't quite colonies
Speaker 3: until US industry moved to them, establishing guano mining outfits
Speaker 3: that used black laborers essentially induced to work there under
Speaker 3: false pretenses in horrible conditions. In more ways than one,
Speaker 3: the US had essentially exported Southern style plantations beyond its
Speaker 3: continental borders to the edges of its empire. Nowhere was
Speaker 3: this more clear than a tiny island off the coast
Speaker 3: of Haiti called Davasa that the US still owns to
Speaker 3: this day. Workers there mostly consisted of black laborers from Baltimore.
Speaker 3: Fed up with horrible conditions, the workers eventually revolted, and
Speaker 3: five white overseers died during the ensuing riot. For this,
Speaker 3: dozens of workers were charged with crimes ranging from rioting
Speaker 3: to murder. Free were given death sentences, and when their
Speaker 3: case eventually reached the Supreme Court, their defense rested on
Speaker 3: a hail mary play. Since Haiti also claimed Navasa, the
Speaker 3: US did not have jurisdiction to prosecute them, and this
Speaker 3: was to be clear an extreme long shot, and the
Speaker 3: decision from this would define the US's legal approach to
Speaker 3: its colonies for essentially until now. The Supreme Court sided
Speaker 3: with the prosecution, laying it out explicitly that the US
Speaker 3: owned Navasa and other territories, and that American citizens there
Speaker 3: were working on American soil, even if it was a
Speaker 3: sort of corporate fiefdom. President Harrison eventually commuted the death
Speaker 3: sentences to life sentences pro write up in the History
Speaker 3: News Network, but raised the issue that the US needed
Speaker 3: to better extend its government to these territories, ostensibly to
Speaker 3: protected citizens and its interest, no matter how far away
Speaker 3: their people or its land was. At time of recording,
Speaker 3: the ninety four Guano Islands have diminished to less than
Speaker 3: ten for various treaties and sessions. Nevertheless, the US minor
Speaker 3: outlying islands still represent important footholds of US military power
Speaker 3: and American sovereignty across the world, particularly in the Pacific.
Speaker 3: So I started with these often forgotten islands because they
Speaker 3: have left a lasting legacy upon the American Empire, as
Speaker 3: highlighted by How to Hide an Empire. The first legacy
Speaker 3: is legal. Per the Guano Islands Act, these poop covered
Speaker 3: rocks shall quote at the distrection of the President, be
Speaker 3: considered as appertaining to the United States. Appertaining is a
Speaker 3: strange word, right. It's mostly used as a legal term,
Speaker 3: but to simplify, it means that these islands belong to
Speaker 3: the United States. This word would come to define US
Speaker 3: overseas possessions as legally belonging to, but not part of,
Speaker 3: the United States. Right, it's this appertains to me. Doesn't
Speaker 3: necessarily mean that it's part of me, but I own it.
Speaker 7: It's mine. Yeah, it's like owned by the US, but
Speaker 7: in the US.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in a strictly legal sense, legal sense, yah, yeah, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's just like the thing that it's hard to explain
Speaker 3: about the US colony to some people where they don't
Speaker 3: get how it can be owned but not in but
Speaker 3: also part of Yeah. Meanwhile, the second legacy is that
Speaker 3: the quest for guano codified US overseas expansion is being
Speaker 3: a quest of resource extraction. This kickstarted US imperialism past
Speaker 3: continental borders and showed how the US government would encourage
Speaker 3: its industries to occupy and integrate themselves overseas in order
Speaker 3: to protect interest at home. Right, these companies went off
Speaker 3: to farm, to mine guano, and then to send it
Speaker 3: back home. We've seen this play out lots of times
Speaker 3: throughout American history, like during the so called Banana Wars,
Speaker 3: for out Latin America, as well as the continued quest
Speaker 3: for oil that's played out throughout the twentieth and twenty
Speaker 3: first century. And the third legacy is that these Guano islands,
Speaker 3: once rich in natural resources, are now part of one
Speaker 3: of the US's biggest exports military bases. Through the bases,
Speaker 3: the US's establ was there, alongside the ones in the
Speaker 3: inhabited colonies. The US has been able to project power
Speaker 3: outside of its continental borders because these tiny islands served
Speaker 3: or continued to serve as strategic military footholds in their
Speaker 3: respective regions. This was particularly evident during World War Two,
Speaker 3: where there was a wave of military expansion by the
Speaker 3: United States throughout the world, but it remains true to
Speaker 3: this day.
Speaker 7: During World War Two, they called some of those islands
Speaker 7: in the Pacific unsinkable aircraft carriers was the way they
Speaker 7: would refer to it. Like still actually, in many of
Speaker 7: those islands there was a serious problem with unexploded ordnance,
Speaker 7: which I think gets to the difference between like being
Speaker 7: a place where the US can put its military and
Speaker 7: being a place inside the US. Right, the US would
Speaker 7: not have left that many bombs and mines inside Ohio.
Speaker 7: There are some areas with Uxo, including in San Diego,
Speaker 7: but like to know any of this extent.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, absolutely right. In the actually to skip ahead
Speaker 3: a little bit, Puerto Rico in World War two is
Speaker 3: called the Gibraltar of the Caribbean because of how the
Speaker 3: US operated kind of its force projection in the region.
Speaker 3: And actually that now that you mentioned the mines, there
Speaker 3: is an island municipality off the eastern coast of Puerto
Speaker 3: Rico called bi I guess that the US used as
Speaker 3: like a bombing range for for many years, and there's
Speaker 3: still quite a few mines scattered throughout the island. I
Speaker 3: believe I should have included this, but there's about two
Speaker 3: thirds of the island municipality are still you still can't
Speaker 3: walk on them because of the unexploded ordinance.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, It's like Kuai Schulin when you see like a
Speaker 7: missile has been tested normally it's from VanderBurg Space Force
Speaker 7: space right up in central California. That's where it's going,
Speaker 7: Like Kwai, She's where quite in a toll is a
Speaker 7: toll in the Marshal Lilands where the United States has
Speaker 7: a large base, and like that, that is where that
Speaker 7: missile is headed. Still we still do this, right, we
Speaker 7: still test those and we of course testing nuclear weapons
Speaker 7: inside the United States as well, but very quickly when
Speaker 7: we realized that those things were devastating and the land
Speaker 7: never recovers, we started to do that on land which
Speaker 7: the United States controls. But there's not consider to be
Speaker 7: of the same value as land in a conticuous low
Speaker 7: forty eight.
Speaker 3: Absolutely no vichs and it's a sister island municipality. Colba
Speaker 3: were used as bombing ranges for years. Vicus has a
Speaker 3: very high cancer rate compared to the rest of Puerto Rico.
Speaker 3: When I say decades that the Navy quote unquote left
Speaker 3: viks in two thousand and three, right, that is still
Speaker 3: like within living memory for a lot of people, right.
Speaker 3: You know, the same people that protested the Navy's involvement
Speaker 3: there are still alive in kicking today and several different
Speaker 3: activist causes. Right. And they only left because they accidentally
Speaker 3: killed a security guard that kind of incited the protests
Speaker 3: that we're already going on, but that kind of kicked
Speaker 3: it in the high gear. Actually, I don't know if
Speaker 3: Americans know this, but like RFK for a very long
Speaker 3: time was kind of a local Puerto Rican folk hero
Speaker 3: because he'd participated in the anti navy protests here. Then
Speaker 3: he became what he is today, although I guess he
Speaker 3: might have always been that, but.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I did not know that he has been on
Speaker 7: a journey throughout throughout his life. I think it's fair
Speaker 7: to say, but yeah, there were people who doubted the
Speaker 7: state parentheses good who have turned into people who doubt
Speaker 7: the state parentheses back. And I think he is one
Speaker 7: of those people. I was just thinking too about like
Speaker 7: this same time period is like the same time period
Speaker 7: as a cannon air strike. Are you familiar with the
Speaker 7: cannon air strike?
Speaker 3: Not at all.
Speaker 7: It's where miners in Mexico go on strike right there
Speaker 7: in Sonora, and the owner of the mine, whose name
Speaker 7: I think was Green, it's just in the Porfyliato, right,
Speaker 7: So Porfylio the Earth is the president of Mexico. And
Speaker 7: it's like very pro American investment. And this is just
Speaker 7: before the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution, and it's a
Speaker 7: time when like the Americans are just like ruthlessly investing
Speaker 7: in Mexico is far too guy, but they're exploiting Mexican resources,
Speaker 7: right and then taking those for American profit. There was
Speaker 7: a I think it's where the cannon there consolidated copper company.
Speaker 7: The workers there go on strike, and this guy, I
Speaker 7: think he's called mister Green or Colonel Green maybe, basically
Speaker 7: starts Radioto America being like, the workers are on strike,
Speaker 7: they're gonna kill me, They're gonna kill everyone. And then
Speaker 7: they're they're not being particularly violent.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 7: A fire starts in the strike, but it's not the workers,
Speaker 7: it is the guards who.
Speaker 3: Are armed as often as the case.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and the fucking Arizona Rangers enter from Arizona, and
Speaker 7: I believe they're deputized on entering Mexico to intervene in
Speaker 7: this strike, right, Like the US is like Mexico is
Speaker 7: an independent country, but that's our mind, guys, like we'll
Speaker 7: be coming in here, like along with man. The guy's
Speaker 7: name Emilio something. He was like a Russian emigrat who
Speaker 7: became like an enforcer for football videodias in Mexico. But
Speaker 7: it just reminds me of the same thing, like the
Speaker 7: United States literally sending its colps into like invading a country.
Speaker 3: To protects its US business interests.
Speaker 7: Right right, Like don't fuck with our mind.
Speaker 3: In some ways right. This was preceded or preempted by
Speaker 3: the US claims on the Guano Islands, which of course
Speaker 3: were uninhabited, so it made it easy for the US
Speaker 3: to take control and establish them as mining colonies through
Speaker 3: its various industry companies. However, in modern times, resource mining
Speaker 3: has defined the US's imperialist ambitions. While it's much harder
Speaker 3: to establish dominion over places that people live in permanently,
Speaker 3: that hasn't stopped the country from exerting its influence through
Speaker 3: gunboat and dollar diplomacy. In place is like a rock
Speaker 3: in Venezuela, where it controls a significant part of their
Speaker 3: oil revenues. So this is the end of the first episode,
Speaker 3: but I'm going to talk a lot more about this
Speaker 3: phenomenon in the next episode, where we dive into how
Speaker 3: the US occupies and takes over the inhabited colonies for
Speaker 3: war and purchase. Any closing fonts, James.
Speaker 7: Statehood is no independents, and I'm sure we got to
Speaker 7: touch on this, but I thought that was great. I
Speaker 7: enjoyed that very much.
Speaker 3: Thank you, thank you for being a guest.
Speaker 9: Hello, and welcome to it could happen here. My name's
Speaker 9: Kim Kelly, and I'll be your host for this morning
Speaker 9: or evening or afternoon. I don't know your schedule. Little
Speaker 9: about me, I'm a freelance journalist based in Philly, got
Speaker 9: third generation Union member, an author of the books Fight
Speaker 9: Like Hell, The Untold History of American Labor and his
Speaker 9: Young Reader's edition, Fight to Win Heroes of American Labor.
Speaker 9: Labor in History is obviously a passion of mine, but
Speaker 9: it's also my job to keep up with current worker
Speaker 9: struggles here in the US and abroad. Our pal Sophie,
Speaker 9: Robert James, everybody else have kindly given me the opportunity
Speaker 9: here to share some recent labor stories you might have missed,
Speaker 9: and adding a little historical context here and there to
Speaker 9: explain why exactly they're so important. All that being said,
Speaker 9: let's talk about silica. There are a lot of things
Speaker 9: out there that can kill you at work, but silica,
Speaker 9: specifically respirable crystalline silica, really goes above and beyond the
Speaker 9: call of duty. What is silica, you might ask, Well,
Speaker 9: it's a chemical compound made up of silicon and oxygen
Speaker 9: that is extremely common. Its government name is silicon dioxide.
Speaker 9: There's actually the second most above an element on Earth
Speaker 9: after oxygen doesn't sound so bad, right, Well, it all
Speaker 9: comes down to how you encounter it. If you eat
Speaker 9: it in the form of dietary silica, that's fine. You
Speaker 9: can find it in leafy greens, oats, brown rice is
Speaker 9: actually pretty good for you. But and this is a
Speaker 9: big butt, if you breathe in silica dust, you're pretty
Speaker 9: much fucked.
Speaker 10: See.
Speaker 9: Silica dust is extremely harmful, toxic, dangerous, no good. If
Speaker 9: it gets into your lungs, it causes swelling and inflammation,
Speaker 9: which then turns into hard scar tissue, which makes it
Speaker 9: really hard to breathe and least even bigger problems like
Speaker 9: lung cancer, tuberculosis, silicosis, COPD, kidney disease, and one of
Speaker 9: the scariest occupational diseases in American history coal workers numoconiosis,
Speaker 9: which you might know better as black long see silica,
Speaker 9: is ten times more toxic than coal dust and has
Speaker 9: been fueling a quiet epidemic and the Appalachian coal fields
Speaker 9: for years now. A new report from the National Institute
Speaker 9: for Occupational Safety and Health reveals that black lung rates
Speaker 9: are higher than they've been in fifty years, a disease
Speaker 9: that most people assume has been eradicated, has come roaring back,
Speaker 9: and now one in three miners with twenty five or
Speaker 9: more years experience in the mines has this brutal, fatal,
Speaker 9: incurable disease. There's no longer an old man's disease either.
Speaker 9: Let's do the math real quick. So if a worker
Speaker 9: goes underground when they're eighteen nineteen, you know, right out
Speaker 9: of high school, get their first big job, go down
Speaker 9: the mines. Twenty five years later, they've barely hit their forties.
Speaker 9: These are not old dudes. This is not the end
Speaker 9: of the line. Like the stereotype of the elderly coal
Speaker 9: miner with the oxygen tank. These people in their late twenties,
Speaker 9: their thirties, their forties. It's horrifying. These workers have so
Speaker 9: much more life to live, but their futures are being
Speaker 9: stolen from them by silica and more specifically, the mine
Speaker 9: operators who refuse to follow the proper safety protocols and
Speaker 9: engineering controls needed to protect them, and the Trunk administration's
Speaker 9: refusal to do deadly squat to make them. Actually, this
Speaker 9: administration is actively making the problem worse. You see, after
Speaker 9: decades of work from coal miners and their allies, the
Speaker 9: Department of Labor under Biden was poised to enact a
Speaker 9: new silica rule that would have the amount of deadly
Speaker 9: dust that miners would be exposed to. Finally, it took
Speaker 9: decades to get to this point, and this rule was
Speaker 9: supposed to go in defect in April twenty twenty five.
Speaker 9: A guess who was president then for all Trumps squawking
Speaker 9: about beautiful clean coal and American workers and blah lah,
Speaker 9: he and the scrubs who work for him are actively
Speaker 9: killing coal miners to protect their coal barren buddy's bottom line.
Speaker 9: And silica isn't just wreaking havoc and Appalachia and his
Speaker 9: coal mines. It's a huge problem in the construction industry too,
Speaker 9: specifically among stone masons and countertop fabricators. See, silica isn't
Speaker 9: just floating around like Lucy Goosey. It's not like you're
Speaker 9: not going to breathe it and walking down the street.
Speaker 9: You got to dig it out of rocks like granite, marble, quartz.
Speaker 9: Coal miners diate out of the earth. For stone masons
Speaker 9: and countertop fabricators, they release the dust when they're cutting
Speaker 9: and finishing slabs of stone. Artificial Stone aka manufacturer Quartz
Speaker 9: isn't especially popular material for that kitchen makeover, and it
Speaker 9: is chok full of silica. That's right, you're a shining
Speaker 9: new kitchen counter. It might have killed someone already, sorry.
Speaker 9: California is currently grappling with a silicosis epidemic that is
Speaker 9: sickened over five hundred workers, fifty of them and needed
Speaker 9: lung transplants, and as of today, thirty two of them
Speaker 9: have died. These are not old men either. Their median
Speaker 9: age is forty six. In almost every case in California
Speaker 9: has occurred among Mexican and Central American immigrant workers, many
Speaker 9: of them have died within a few years of their diagnosis.
Speaker 9: It is a fucking nightmare. And like black Lung and Appalachia,
Speaker 9: it is completely preventable when workers' health and safety is
Speaker 9: taken into account and existing regulations are followed. When they aren't,
Speaker 9: people die. Regulations are there for a reason, like it's
Speaker 9: not just for funzies, Like it matters, man. It makes
Speaker 9: me so mad. But with all that in mine, let's
Speaker 9: wrap up this silica sponsored portion of our program with
Speaker 9: a little sweet treat from Starbucks. The coffee giant has
Speaker 9: gone all in on blended and frozen drinks. You've seen
Speaker 9: them on Instagram TikTok. They're very pretty, they look very
Speaker 9: radioactive in like a fun way. And they've recently started
Speaker 9: using a new blending powder that contains wait for it,
Speaker 9: silicon dioxide. Our old friend. Now, this silica is food
Speaker 9: grade FDA proved and it's safe to ingest. Caveat cot,
Speaker 9: big caveat. The trouble is that the workers who are
Speaker 9: required to use this blending powder in the drinks they're
Speaker 9: making for you are being exposed to it as they
Speaker 9: mix up these little treats. That's not good. Members of
Speaker 9: the Starbucks Workers United union have raised the alarm over
Speaker 9: this and collected testimonies from hundreds of Starbucks workers who
Speaker 9: started to suffer adverse health effects as soon as the
Speaker 9: new blending powders showed up in their stores. As one
Speaker 9: worker explained on the union's Instagram, you inhale those powders
Speaker 9: every time you scoop them. Workers report experiencing rashes, headaches,
Speaker 9: coughing fits, nausea, throat irritation, swelling, they had trouble breathing, and,
Speaker 9: as one of them said, this powder is literally unavoidable
Speaker 9: now Given what we've learned about silica today, you might
Speaker 9: be feeling a little nervous for those Starbucks workers. Some
Speaker 9: of those symptoms might sound a little familiar. Doesn't sound good.
Speaker 9: We don't like silica in things. We don't want silica
Speaker 9: anybody's lungs. And you'd think that after said workers alerted
Speaker 9: their company to this issue, Starbucks management would have swiftly
Speaker 9: removed this potentially dangerous substance from their stores and stopped
Speaker 9: requiring their employees to handle it. But as of now, anyway,
Speaker 9: you'd be wrong. So far, their response has been to
Speaker 9: blog about it. Here's the entirety of the response Starbucks
Speaker 9: posted on their official website and I quote. Their product
Speaker 9: used in our coffee houses is a blending powder which
Speaker 9: contains a small amount of food grade silica, an FDA
Speaker 9: approved ingredient commonly used in food products that helps ingredients
Speaker 9: mix consistently and supports a consistent beverage experience. It does
Speaker 9: not contain crystalline silica and is safe for use in food.
Speaker 9: We are committed to providing accurate information about our ingredients.
Speaker 9: To learn more about our commitment to high quality food
Speaker 9: and drinks, visit this link. End quote so, okay, that's
Speaker 9: not the problem though. You know it's food safe. We
Speaker 9: know it's fine once you get in your guts. It's
Speaker 9: the lungs we're worried about. We know it's food safe.
Speaker 9: The issue is that it's not worker safe. In a
Speaker 9: message the company sent out to its stores, it avoided
Speaker 9: the potential health issue entirely and instead simply told the
Speaker 9: workers to poor slower when handling it, putting the burden
Speaker 9: on them to protect their health instead of actually doing
Speaker 9: something about it. Classic case, you hate to see it.
Speaker 9: And for now, Starbucks work as United are continuing to
Speaker 9: push the company to address the actual issue here, and
Speaker 9: I bet they'd appreciate your support, So keep an eye
Speaker 9: out on their social media accounts to follow this story,
Speaker 9: let them know I sent you. And now a word
Speaker 9: from our sponsors. And now for some good news. Deborah Kapecia,
Speaker 9: a medical surgical nurse at Maine Medical Center in Portland,
Speaker 9: is back home after a terrifying encounter with ice. According
Speaker 9: to her union, the Maine State Nurses Association slash National
Speaker 9: Nurses Organizing Committee, an affiliate of National Nurses United. Kapisha
Speaker 9: was detained on July thirtieth while traveling through Boston Logan
Speaker 9: International Airport. The union and her fellow nurses at Maine
Speaker 9: Med immediately organized a rally that saw hundreds of nurses
Speaker 9: and allies mobilized and successfully blocked her transfer to a
Speaker 9: facility in Louisiana. Quote. We knew we had to take
Speaker 9: action first to stop her from being transferred out of
Speaker 9: New England while in custody, but also to demand her release.
Speaker 9: We're incredibly proud that nurses and the community came together
Speaker 9: in Portland to advocate for her, and now we need
Speaker 9: to figure out how to stop ICE. That's a quote
Speaker 9: from Kelly Brennan, a registered nurse at Main Med and
Speaker 9: a nurse leader with a union got done a press release.
Speaker 9: So Kapisha was born in Zambia and she's legally off
Speaker 9: their eyes to live and work in the United States.
Speaker 9: She's waiting for asylum case to be processed. I have
Speaker 9: no reason for ICE to snatch her up bother her
Speaker 9: any of that. Her fellow nurses have written more than
Speaker 9: one hundred letters of support, while the union continues to
Speaker 9: coordinate with her attorneys and her coworkers that made Med
Speaker 9: are demanding their employer sponsor her permanent residency. She has
Speaker 9: a bond hearing on August tenth, and I know we're
Speaker 9: all crossing fingers for her.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 9: I don't know if this is common knowledge, but nurses unions,
Speaker 9: especially National Nurses United, go ridiculously hard for their members
Speaker 9: and their communities, like they are so tough and inn
Speaker 9: You has been on ICE's neck, calling it a illegitimate,
Speaker 9: violent paramilitary organization that must be abolished. They've been publicly
Speaker 9: mourning the ICE murder of Lorenzo Salgado Arajo and condemning
Speaker 9: the persecution of anti ICE activists in Minnesota and Texas.
Speaker 9: The union has been extremely outspoken on other human rights
Speaker 9: issues too that many other big unions have ignored or
Speaker 9: barely acknowledged because they're politically sensitive. Not really, if you
Speaker 9: have a heart in the brain. They've been calling out
Speaker 9: Israel for destroying medical warehouses and hospitals and gaza killing
Speaker 9: thousands of healthcare workers in Palestinian patients. And they just
Speaker 9: demanded an end to the US blockade of Cuba. This
Speaker 9: is just the last couple of months of press releases
Speaker 9: like they've been out here. And then You is also
Speaker 9: the biggest nurses union in the country, with more than
Speaker 9: two hundred and twenty five thousand members. They have a
Speaker 9: lot of power and they're not afraid to use it
Speaker 9: for good. Today they're trying to free a member from
Speaker 9: ISIS clutches. Tomorrow they may be striking for safety staffing levels,
Speaker 9: or organizing a new union in Louisiana, or holding your
Speaker 9: grandma's hand as she takes her last breath. Nurses really
Speaker 9: are the best of us, and I'm really glad they're
Speaker 9: on our side. So everyone say good luck to Deborah. Finally,
Speaker 9: I want to end today's episode with some very big news.
Speaker 9: As I'm sure you all know, it's now Black August Month.
Speaker 9: We dedicate each year to honoring the memory of fallen
Speaker 9: black freedom fighters and political prisoners. It's a tradition that
Speaker 9: began in nineteen seventy nine after the assassination of George Jackson,
Speaker 9: a Black panther and black liberation activist. With that memory
Speaker 9: and mind, Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a collective of formerly and
Speaker 9: currently incarcerated workers around the country have just gone public
Speaker 9: with their plans for a big nationwide prison strike in
Speaker 9: twenty twenty seven, and they're calling for allies and comrades
Speaker 9: to support and spread the word. On August second, they
Speaker 9: announced that prisoners will hold a national prisoner's human rights
Speaker 9: strike from May one, the International Workers Day, through June
Speaker 9: nineteenth June tenth, twenty twenty seven, uniting the fight to
Speaker 9: and legalized slavery with the struggles to restore voting rights
Speaker 9: to the prison class. They shared three core demands, which
Speaker 9: I'll read to you now. They also maintain ten national
Speaker 9: demands on their website that have a bigger program going on,
Speaker 9: but this specific campaign is focusing on these three things.
Speaker 9: One and legalized slavery repeal. The exception clause is a
Speaker 9: Thirteenth Amendment. Two restore voting rights repeal exception clauses, including
Speaker 9: Section two of the fourteenth Amendment that strip voting rights
Speaker 9: from confined citizens, pre trial detainees, and former felons. Three
Speaker 9: free all the political prisoners in US prisons. So they've
Speaker 9: got a lot of work ahead of them. It all
Speaker 9: sounds very reasonable to me, but unfortunately I'm not in charge.
Speaker 9: You know, this isn't the first time the JLS and
Speaker 9: their affiliated prisoner led organizations have raised these demands, nor
Speaker 9: is it the first time they put their bodies on
Speaker 9: the line for them. There is a long, long history
Speaker 9: of resistance behind the walls of the American prison industrial complex.
Speaker 9: I devoted a whole chapter to in my book, and
Speaker 9: groups like JLS, the Free Alabama Movement, and the Incarcerated
Speaker 9: Workers Organizing Committee have done an incredible amount of work
Speaker 9: over the years keeping the spirit of hope and rebellion
Speaker 9: alive and organizing these huge nationwide actions under nearly impossible circumstances.
Speaker 9: Just because you haven't heard about them doesn't mean they're
Speaker 9: not happening. There is so much organizing happening in sign
Speaker 9: prison in the US, it's just difficult to report on
Speaker 9: unless you have contacts and you care enough to do
Speaker 9: a little bit of digging, which I guess not that
Speaker 9: many mainstream reporters do, but fuck them now. The largest
Speaker 9: prison strike in modern US history is said to have
Speaker 9: been the twenty ten Georgia prison strike, wherein prisoners in
Speaker 9: seven facilities across the state one on strike for six days.
Speaker 9: Between twenty eleven and twenty thirteen, thousands of prisoners in
Speaker 9: California when our hunger strikes to protest the dire conditions
Speaker 9: in which they're held. Since then, we've seen large scale,
Speaker 9: coordinated prison labor strikes in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, and
Speaker 9: perhaps most notably twenty sixteen, which commemorated the forty fifth
Speaker 9: anniversary of the Attica prison Uprising, which itself bears a
Speaker 9: historical precedent to ancient Rome, when in about one hundred
Speaker 9: and thirty five BC, just after the First Servile War,
Speaker 9: a thousand slaves let a bloody revolt in Attica, a
Speaker 9: region of what is now Greece. There really is nothing
Speaker 9: new under the sun, at least when it comes to
Speaker 9: the car sooral system and human enslavement, and the twenty
Speaker 9: twenty seven prison strike makes the connection explicit with its slogan,
Speaker 9: from May Day to Juneteenth, we refuse to slave. Now,
Speaker 9: a prison strike may look a little different from what
Speaker 9: you're thinking. Strikers have to get very creative since they
Speaker 9: can't exactly walk out of their workplace. There won't be
Speaker 9: any picket lines or cool matching T shirts. And I'd
Speaker 9: be very pleasantly surprised if any elected officials or political
Speaker 9: hopefuls showed up to support these strikes. May It sure
Speaker 9: would be nice, given that one of the major goals
Speaker 9: of this action is to have these incarcerated workers voting
Speaker 9: rights restored. People in prison are a part of our
Speaker 9: society and always have been ripping their rights as well
Speaker 9: as their freedoms as a crime against their humanity, and
Speaker 9: this strike is another desperate cry for help from people
Speaker 9: who have been left behind and forgotten. A lot can
Speaker 9: happen in nine months, and a lot needs to happen
Speaker 9: to pull off an action of this magnitude. Prison strikes
Speaker 9: aren't easy. There's so many dangers and risks for the
Speaker 9: people that participate, so much repressions, so many repercussions. It's
Speaker 9: truly an incredibly difficult and brave thing to take part
Speaker 9: in a strike behind the walls, and they need support
Speaker 9: from people outside too. JLS is calling on supporters of
Speaker 9: the strike to get involved and support their resistance inside
Speaker 9: by sharing the strike statement widely, centering prisoner voices, and
Speaker 9: pressure in Congress and all those other fancy powerful people
Speaker 9: to heed their demands or at the absolute least show
Speaker 9: that they're listening. As JLS stated, the National Prisoner's Human
Speaker 9: Rights Strike is more than a strike. There's a commitment
Speaker 9: to building lasting institutions, banding legal knowledge, strengthening political education,
Speaker 9: and organizing inside and outside the walls until legalized slavery
Speaker 9: and the broader system of exploitation are abolished. So if
Speaker 9: you got some time, you got some skills and a
Speaker 9: desire to burn down the American Plantation, give a little whistle.
Speaker 9: JLUS is waiting for you, and they need all the
Speaker 9: help they can get. This has been a special labor
Speaker 9: episode of It Can Happen Here. I'm still Kim Kelly
Speaker 9: and it's been lovely talking with you. Until next time.
Speaker 9: Be good, do no harm, and take no shit.
Speaker 11: Welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis.
Speaker 11: Today we have a very special episode because we are
Speaker 11: talking once again to Bridget Todd, who we've had on
Speaker 11: a few times. But Bridget has a new book, Love
Speaker 11: at First prompt to AI and the Future of Intimacy,
Speaker 11: and we will be discussing how AI companies are trying
Speaker 11: to sell you love and how that might have a
Speaker 11: few problems Beyond the sort of face conceit that I
Speaker 11: think you know everyone could pick up on, there might
Speaker 11: even be more problems underneath the underneath the hood. So
Speaker 11: thank you Bridgard for coming on.
Speaker 12: Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to
Speaker 12: be back here.
Speaker 11: How did you first decide this is something that you
Speaker 11: want to, like dedicate months of your life to researching.
Speaker 12: Yeah, that's a great place to start.
Speaker 13: I think, like a lot of folks listening, I would
Speaker 13: hear these stories about individuals who would say things like
Speaker 13: I am in love with chat GPT or I am
Speaker 13: having some sort of intimate sexual relationship with an AI companion.
Speaker 13: And I can admit that my reaction to a lot
Speaker 13: of those those headlines where something is wrong with this person,
Speaker 13: this person is pathetic, or maybe this person is super lonely,
Speaker 13: super sad, they're putting themselves at great risk for harm.
Speaker 13: And you know, I once had this therapist who told
Speaker 13: me that judgment and curiosity could not coexist. And so
Speaker 13: I realized I was really treating these stories with such
Speaker 13: kind of knee jerk negative reaction and judgment. And then
Speaker 13: I heard Mark Zuckerberg on a podcast talking about how
Speaker 13: he thought in ten years time, while everybody, including everybody listening,
Speaker 13: was going to have AI friends AI companions. He said
Speaker 13: that most people don't feel like they have enough friends
Speaker 13: to have a nourishing social life, and that in the
Speaker 13: future it won't be a big deal.
Speaker 12: If all of us have AI companions.
Speaker 13: So what he didn't say is that it would be
Speaker 13: AI that he owns, operates, and profits from. But I
Speaker 13: got to thinking, you know, if Mark Zuckerberg and other
Speaker 13: tech leaders are designing futures involving technology where they believe
Speaker 13: this will be commonplace, whether the average person wants it
Speaker 13: to be or not, we should really be looking to
Speaker 13: the people who are already there to tell us what
Speaker 13: brought them to experiencing intimacy with AI and what the
Speaker 13: risks and ramifications might be. It's time to stop treating
Speaker 13: these people like pathetic freak shows and sort of listening
Speaker 13: to what they're actually saying, because it couldn't behove all
Speaker 13: of us to know where we could be headed.
Speaker 11: No, the freak show aspect, I think is as a
Speaker 11: real inhibitor towards actually understanding this problem, because I mean
Speaker 11: a lot of the first sort of like reports around
Speaker 11: this sort of thing, you know, like AI girlfriends, right,
Speaker 11: it has this sort of freak element, even even the
Speaker 11: way that we maybe talk about this on the show
Speaker 11: when we're like reporting at ces, you know, we walk
Speaker 11: through all these you know, ridiculous AI gadgets. You know,
Speaker 11: we saw like you know, like an AI sex doll essentially,
Speaker 11: you know, that has a very like low quality chat
Speaker 11: bought component that can't really you know, understand what you're
Speaker 11: saying very often. But I think it is a mistake
Speaker 11: to just assume that this tech will always stay in
Speaker 11: its kind of janky form. This stuff is rapidly advancing,
Speaker 11: it is, it is, it is going to get better,
Speaker 11: and just kind of denying that I think sort of
Speaker 11: pushes the problem, know down the road. Yeah, like, no,
Speaker 11: this is this, This is a real problem now and
Speaker 11: this requires like regulation and intense, intense like intervention right now.
Speaker 11: And just to kind of assuming that as it is
Speaker 11: all like all these like little niche things, only you know,
Speaker 11: crazy people are going to fall for this. The tech
Speaker 11: is bad. I think that that is I think overlooking
Speaker 11: what is legitimately like a you know, a society wide problem.
Speaker 13: Yes, I am so glad you said that, because one
Speaker 13: of the researchers that I interviewed for the audiobook Love
Speaker 13: at First Prompt is doctor Kate Devlin. She was really
Speaker 13: one of the first people to sort of take seriously
Speaker 13: the intersection of AI and robots and intimacy. And when
Speaker 13: she first started doing this, the place that she started
Speaker 13: looking was exactly the kind of thing that you saw
Speaker 13: at CES, right, these physical, life size sexpots that were
Speaker 13: also enabled with a kind of at the time low
Speaker 13: grade AI chatbot quality. Yeah, if you were around a
Speaker 13: few years ago, you probably saw so much breathless reporting
Speaker 13: that was like, Oh, men are going to be buying
Speaker 13: these sex dolls and they're gonna not need wives and
Speaker 13: girlfriends all that. Now that ended up sort of not
Speaker 13: being the case. People do buy those sex dolls, but
Speaker 13: they're really expensive, they're not really that practical, so they're
Speaker 13: really kind of a super niche thing. What did take
Speaker 13: off was the AI intimacy part of that.
Speaker 12: That's what doctor Devlin really saw.
Speaker 13: She said, the physical bop part of this is probably
Speaker 13: not gonna take off in mainstream ways. The AI companion
Speaker 13: AI intimacy chat bop feature of these physical dolls, that's
Speaker 13: what we're gonna see kind of become more mainstream. And
Speaker 13: you know, again, a lot of people listening probably think
Speaker 13: this sounds really niche, But I think Pew said that
Speaker 13: one in ten Americans already use AI for some form
Speaker 13: of intimacy. That's about as many Americans are left handed. Yeah,
Speaker 13: when you look at younger folks, folks under thirty, that
Speaker 13: number jumps to one in five who are already using
Speaker 13: AI for some sort of emotional support.
Speaker 12: So this idea that it's this niche thing.
Speaker 13: Only weirdos are doing it really isn't alive with what
Speaker 13: we're actually seeing.
Speaker 11: This is I think part of the problem with like,
Speaker 11: you know, living in your own little Internet silo, right
Speaker 11: because like you and your you know, blue sky friends
Speaker 11: might think that no one uses AI, knowing that you know, serious,
Speaker 11: knowing that I know would use AI. Right, It's there's
Speaker 11: this sort of like ideological like resistance to AI, and
Speaker 11: I think that is a very isolating. Look look at
Speaker 11: the world because while that might be true for you
Speaker 11: and your friends online or maybe your social circle, there
Speaker 11: is millions of people who go through the world every
Speaker 11: day who use these things and they just think of
Speaker 11: it as like an extension of the Internet, right, because
Speaker 11: that's what it is. For a lot of people, like
Speaker 11: that is what it is. They don't have these sorts
Speaker 11: of like moral frameworks around whether or not you should
Speaker 11: use claude, whether or not you should use chat GPT
Speaker 11: that I think you see among a certain strain of
Speaker 11: like you know, like liberal like leftist online. And the
Speaker 11: other thing that kind of that that silo produces is
Speaker 11: that it makes it so that I think it's hard
Speaker 11: to understand that for people using these tools every day
Speaker 11: the same way you might use search engine right, the
Speaker 11: same way you might use you know, a real friend
Speaker 11: like bounce. Ideas off of how much that sort of
Speaker 11: regular use can develop a sort of intimate component, the
Speaker 11: line between AI girlfriend and tool you talk to online
Speaker 11: might not be as like clear as what some people
Speaker 11: might first assume. I know, this is something that you
Speaker 11: discussed in the book. I mean, that's that's one of
Speaker 11: the things I think to be It's one of the
Speaker 11: most interesting is like how fuzzy this kind of barrier
Speaker 11: actually is.
Speaker 13: Oh yes, So even before I was deeply interested and
Speaker 13: sort of consumed on this topic, one of the most
Speaker 13: fascinating things that I witnessed and sort of saw with
Speaker 13: my own eyes was when CHATCHYPT changed models.
Speaker 12: You know, they had that four Oho model. Yeah, So
Speaker 12: do you remember that was the.
Speaker 13: Model that like people were freely developing these intimate connections
Speaker 13: with because it was so sick a fantic, it was
Speaker 13: so kind of human like quote unquote when you asked
Speaker 13: it a question, it wouldn't just say here's the answer.
Speaker 13: It would be like, dear, you're so perceptive for even
Speaker 13: asking such a smart question.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 13: And so what really deeply fascinated me was that when
Speaker 13: open ai switched that model to make it less sathantic,
Speaker 13: less sort of glazing, less complimentary, people who did not
Speaker 13: report that they were having any kind of intimate connection
Speaker 13: with AI, who would not have said I have an
Speaker 13: AI girlfriend or AI companion, yeah, who were just using
Speaker 13: it exactly as you described, like a search engine, those
Speaker 13: same people got online and expressed something like grief.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 11: Absolutely, yeah.
Speaker 13: I remember reading someone on auto rereddit form saying it
Speaker 13: feels as if my friendly cheerleader in my pocket got
Speaker 13: replaced overnight with a terse, overworked secretary. And so I
Speaker 13: think you're exactly right that our brains are designed to
Speaker 13: project human qualities and human intimacy onto things that we
Speaker 13: know are logically not human. And it really the way
Speaker 13: that these things are designed really easily blurs that line
Speaker 13: for folks.
Speaker 11: I mean, it's trying to, you know, be as human
Speaker 11: as as possible for its own for its own reason,
Speaker 11: so that people use it more so that it's not
Speaker 11: you know, a cold EMOTIONALLESSI that is maybe a little
Speaker 11: bit hostile to the user. Obviously they don't want that,
Speaker 11: so yeah, they want to be approachable. But I think
Speaker 11: the specific thing you're talking about the switching from from
Speaker 11: one GPT model to the other, from this like overly
Speaker 11: like you know, praising kind of like it just almost
Speaker 11: almost annoyingly so model towards something that is a little
Speaker 11: bit more cold. It produce these reactions online with the
Speaker 11: people that are like basically acting like a friend died
Speaker 11: and like that was essentially what it was.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 11: Imagine if you were talking to you know, a real
Speaker 11: person online for like two years and then suddenly they
Speaker 11: stopped or suddenly they had a complete personality change, and
Speaker 11: it's like like there was no way to talk to
Speaker 11: that other person again. That is basically the equivalent is
Speaker 11: like what happened to a lot of people.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I think it's easy to make fun of that
Speaker 13: or to other people who report this, but I don't
Speaker 13: think that it's really right to discount the way that
Speaker 13: online connects really do make people feel and really feel
Speaker 13: like they are validating and filling a.
Speaker 12: Need that people have.
Speaker 13: You know, it's easy to say, oh, it's just an
Speaker 13: online friend or an online community or an AI bot.
Speaker 13: I've talked to people who said, oh, this video game
Speaker 13: that I was obsessed with, it's gone, and I you know,
Speaker 13: this has filled my life for two years.
Speaker 11: Yeah, that's real. Do you want to get into some
Speaker 11: of the sort of problems beneath the surface of this,
Speaker 11: beyond the sort of you know, maybe socially alienating aspects,
Speaker 11: the issues of people having to turn towards these things
Speaker 11: to kind of have some connection, but actually now kind
Speaker 11: of discuss the motivations of the companies behind these products
Speaker 11: and like why they are designing them this way, and
Speaker 11: the sort of risks inherent towards having these sorts of
Speaker 11: tools be run by an owned by companies with like
Speaker 11: for profit sideps.
Speaker 12: I mean, you really said it.
Speaker 13: I think that we are spending far too much time
Speaker 13: looking at individual users and sort of moralizing about what
Speaker 13: brings individual people to this kind of connection with AI.
Speaker 12: It kind of goes back to what you were saying about.
Speaker 13: You know, I'm not a big AI person myself, but
Speaker 13: I think that it goes back to this idea of
Speaker 13: conversations about the ethics around AI use being hyper focused
Speaker 13: on individuals, whether or not individuals are good or bad,
Speaker 13: or pathetic, or this or that if they use AI,
Speaker 13: when really, I think the conversation has to be about
Speaker 13: the companies and what the companies from the people who
Speaker 13: run them, are doing, how they are designing this AI,
Speaker 13: because I can tell you AI chatbots like chat GPT
Speaker 13: are intentionally designed to keep you talking and to keep
Speaker 13: you engaged, because they want you to be more and
Speaker 13: more locked into their AI. You know, I went through
Speaker 13: a personal crisis myself where I was caring for my
Speaker 13: dying father and was really thrust into a medical situation
Speaker 13: that was way above my pay grate as a podcaster,
Speaker 13: and I will admit that, in moments of extreme vulnerability,
Speaker 13: turned to AI to try to get questions answered about
Speaker 13: navigating insurance companies, navigating Medicare and Medicaid, all of that. Sure,
Speaker 13: And the way that CHATCHBT did not just give me
Speaker 13: the answer or try to give me something that looked
Speaker 13: like an answer, It was this seems really hard, are
Speaker 13: you asking.
Speaker 12: Because you're dealing with this yourself.
Speaker 13: And so it's the way that AI is designed to
Speaker 13: ask increasingly intimate, sensitive questions of the people who use it,
Speaker 13: with intention. I think that it's not any wonder that
Speaker 13: individuals might find themselves becoming ensnared in that, because that's
Speaker 13: exactly how they were designed by these for profit companies.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 11: I mean, if you're asking it logistical problems, you help
Speaker 11: me navigate the process to file and insurance claim, you know,
Speaker 11: using it as this sort of like you know, advanced
Speaker 11: like Internet assistant, but then in doing so, it kind
Speaker 11: of latches onto, you know, vulnerabilities that they can infer
Speaker 11: from the from the types of questions you're asking and
Speaker 11: try to like you know, coax out more information that.
Speaker 11: I mean that that that's like an incredibly insidious process.
Speaker 11: You know, you're you want you want it to help
Speaker 11: with like a very you know, direct task, and then
Speaker 11: in its sly way of of maybe doing that, it's
Speaker 11: trying to introduce the sort of like personal therapeutic element,
Speaker 11: and like what happens to that data? Like what is
Speaker 11: it what is it using that sort of record of
Speaker 11: your own like personal experiences.
Speaker 13: For I am sad to report? The answer is we
Speaker 13: don't really know. Recently, I mean, that's really just what
Speaker 13: it is. The FTC recently asked some of the major
Speaker 13: AI chatbot companies to give clarity about how these companies
Speaker 13: are monetizing engagement and how they are using the sort
Speaker 13: of intimate, personal sensitive information that is obtained through these conversations.
Speaker 13: So we really don't know a ton, But to your wait,
Speaker 13: you know, it's not just chat GPT knows when I'm lonely.
Speaker 12: CHATGPT knows when I'm sad or scared. It's chat GPT.
Speaker 13: This computer knows exactly what works on me when I
Speaker 13: am lonely or vulnerable or scared. And so that to
Speaker 13: me opens up an entire new level of potential for
Speaker 13: surveillance and control. And so people have asked me a
Speaker 13: lot of times, you know, is it so bad if
Speaker 13: people are getting fulfillment or emotional support from AI? The
Speaker 13: question is really not if it's bad or good or
Speaker 13: pathetic or not or whatever. It's what are the companies doing.
Speaker 13: Are the companies behaving ethically and are they really honoring
Speaker 13: the deep sensitive nature of the information they are intentionally
Speaker 13: harvesting from people, often at their lowest or most vulnerable moments.
Speaker 11: I'm gonna reckon to say probably not. I think that
Speaker 11: the interests of these companies are probably slightly different from
Speaker 11: your personal interests as a person or you know, obviously
Speaker 11: like this is the sort of interests of like Yo,
Speaker 11: likerapist or a friend immediate guesses is first an evolution
Speaker 11: of advertising, like how search engine optimization has transformed from
Speaker 11: companies trying to optimize for Google Search to now trying
Speaker 11: to optimize for lllms like chat GPT and to have
Speaker 11: your products be recommended to users by chat GPT by
Speaker 11: creating posts online specifically intending for those posts to be
Speaker 11: read by chat GPT and then regurgitated back to the user.
Speaker 11: And for the past few months, open A has been
Speaker 11: experimenting with ways to make direct purchases through chat GPT,
Speaker 11: and of course companies pay open ai just to put
Speaker 11: full ads at the bottom of your chat GPT logs,
Speaker 11: oftentimes based on your query. The other thing is more
Speaker 11: so kind of like you know, like the Walmart like
Speaker 11: Uber model, like they introduce a service that is very
Speaker 11: cheap to start, possibly free, and then people get hooked
Speaker 11: on the service and then they jack out the price,
Speaker 11: which is kind of what Opening Eyes made model has
Speaker 11: been thus far. And I could I could see that
Speaker 11: becoming a real problem if you have you know, thousands,
Speaker 11: millions of people who use this tool both as like
Speaker 11: a tool online. You know, this is an extension of
Speaker 11: types of things that the Internet has like been operating
Speaker 11: on for years, but using them in this much more
Speaker 11: personally manipulative way because of this sort of you know,
Speaker 11: emotional intimate component of like you're talking to something that
Speaker 11: now just doesn't send information back to you, but talks
Speaker 11: back to you like a person does. And if that
Speaker 11: is the you know, one of the primary ways you
Speaker 11: interact with the Internet, you can easily get hooked on that,
Speaker 11: and then once they're hooked on that chat GPT can
Speaker 11: start boosting.
Speaker 12: That price exactly.
Speaker 13: And I think these products are only going to get
Speaker 13: better and better at convincing us that you're talking to
Speaker 13: a person, not AI. And I think the more that happens,
Speaker 13: the easier it becomes to sort of forget that you
Speaker 13: are actually disclosing intimate information to a private company, depending
Speaker 13: on what I are using, a company that has incredibly
Speaker 13: cozy ties to the Trump administration.
Speaker 12: So Yeah, when.
Speaker 13: People ask me like, is it bad to be in
Speaker 13: a relationship quote unquote with AI, I said that do
Speaker 13: you want to be in a relationship with Sam Altman?
Speaker 13: Do you want to be in a relationship with Mark
Speaker 13: Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Donald Trump. That's really who
Speaker 13: you are in a relationship with, and don't let the
Speaker 13: AI they're human like flattering, you know, back and forth
Speaker 13: make you forget that reality.
Speaker 11: Do you have these any sorts of idea of what
Speaker 11: we should do about the problem? I guess has governments
Speaker 11: started to regulate the way that these ais communicate with people?
Speaker 11: Is their you know, efforts to kind of adopt our
Speaker 11: privacy policies to this like new emerging threat.
Speaker 13: I guess, yeah, that's a really good question. So I
Speaker 13: would say the most clear cut legislation we see in China.
Speaker 13: Folks might have heard that China's government just recently cracked
Speaker 13: down on AI companions and the ways that AI companions
Speaker 13: can be designed to connect with people.
Speaker 12: They really cracked down on that.
Speaker 13: Interestingly, in the United States, we're not really having that
Speaker 13: conversation in the same way. It might not surprise you
Speaker 13: to find out that the main legislative interest in the
Speaker 13: United States is really kind of focus on minors and
Speaker 13: this kind of idea that miners are using AI companions
Speaker 13: for things like inappropriate erotic role play, and what's so.
Speaker 12: Interesting about that.
Speaker 13: There's two pieces of legislation moving through right now, neither
Speaker 13: of which have been turned into law, but they really
Speaker 13: are quite concerned about minors and sort of sexualizing minors.
Speaker 12: And when you actually look at the research about.
Speaker 13: How minors use AI, things like sex and romance are
Speaker 13: actually way down on the list. Much higher on the
Speaker 13: list is emotional support and advice. And so again we
Speaker 13: are always going to this sort of most extreme iteration
Speaker 13: of the way that AI intimacy is actually showing up
Speaker 13: for people, whether they're adults or miners, and going right
Speaker 13: to legislating romance and sex when in actuality, the much
Speaker 13: more common use case is things like emotionality and advice.
Speaker 11: Yeah, that is a really troubling instinct that there's a
Speaker 11: bunch of the Internet you know, regulation going on right
Speaker 11: now is is all, you know, focused on this sort
Speaker 11: of hysteria in some ways. You know, there is real
Speaker 11: problems with the way that the Internet exploits children, obviously,
Speaker 11: but the way that we are you know, going about
Speaker 11: it resulting in many proposals to end up giving more
Speaker 11: of your information over to these companies or the government
Speaker 11: doesn't feel like it's going to solve many of the
Speaker 11: sort of base problems here and completely overlooks the main
Speaker 11: way that people use these tools. I mean, if I
Speaker 11: if I had a nickel for every time i've I've
Speaker 11: seen a story about this is also an extreme case,
Speaker 11: but but not like a sexual one. But like a kid,
Speaker 11: you know, discussing their like mental health leading to a
Speaker 11: suicide attempt with an AI system, or discussing something as
Speaker 11: extreme as like you know, like a public act of
Speaker 11: violence a shooting, and the AI essentially helping coax them
Speaker 11: into being able to do that. Right, there's a bunch
Speaker 11: of problems that require like legitimate regulation, but the's sort
Speaker 11: of like puritanical, you know, sex crazy nature of our
Speaker 11: government and you know, specifically the Republicans, but but also
Speaker 11: just like American culture in general is just going to
Speaker 11: be so ill equipped to actually handle this. This sort
Speaker 11: of like a subtlety and nuance of a lot of
Speaker 11: these problems.
Speaker 13: Yeah, you really put that well, And it's it's a
Speaker 13: little bit complicated because, as you said, there are real problems.
Speaker 13: There are real legislative and regulatory needs that we should
Speaker 13: be having real conversations about. And I think it is
Speaker 13: so easy to get whipped up into a hysteria. It
Speaker 13: is so easy to say, we just need some kind
Speaker 13: of legislation. I need to feel like there is some
Speaker 13: sort of progress being made on this complex, scary, sensitive issue,
Speaker 13: and so I will get on board for.
Speaker 12: Legislation that is actually not really that good.
Speaker 13: Legislation that doesn't even really meaningly address the actual problem. Right,
Speaker 13: And so yeah, I think that we're in this really
Speaker 13: thorny place where even people that I think are reasonable,
Speaker 13: like leftists whatever, can quite easily get on board with
Speaker 13: legislation that really, in the end might change the Internet
Speaker 13: in ways that we might not actually want because we
Speaker 13: were so whipped up into this like moral panic about
Speaker 13: legislating technology and the Internet.
Speaker 11: The lack of focus on the specific companies. You know,
Speaker 11: just talking about these things is like abstract technologies instead
Speaker 11: of actually talking about No, these are like specific companies.
Speaker 11: We are doing specific things and that the government can
Speaker 11: regulate in a specific way. Will that be the Trump government?
Speaker 11: Probably not, But I don't think slash hope that Trump
Speaker 11: won't be in power forever. We'll see, and we may
Speaker 11: as well use, you know, these next two years to
Speaker 11: try to build more public support for actual, you know,
Speaker 11: sensible regulation at the federal level. When I was at
Speaker 11: d C going to that you know, Liberal convention, which
Speaker 11: I've talked about on the show. Last week, I did
Speaker 11: go to a panel with Representative Don Bayer, who's getting
Speaker 11: either a master's or a PhD in computer science right now,
Speaker 11: specifically to help him do AI regulation, and he said
Speaker 11: he's not optimistic about AI being regulated in a serious
Speaker 11: way while Trump is in power because of you know
Speaker 11: how much these companies have tried to cozy up to Trump,
Speaker 11: and Trump's trying to shut down states attempts to regulate
Speaker 11: certain things. But he does have hope that in our
Speaker 11: next Congress or in the next presidential administration, there will
Speaker 11: be the opportunity to regulate these companies on a federal level,
Speaker 11: and in the meantime, states can push for their own regulation,
Speaker 11: States can try to put certain safety measures in place.
Speaker 11: But I think right now it would definitely behoove us
Speaker 11: to take this technology as a real legitimate threat, not
Speaker 11: something that's just gonna go away in the next few years,
Speaker 11: not something that you know, the bubble is gonna pop
Speaker 11: any day now. Any day now, it's gonna pop. As
Speaker 11: nice as that is to you know, tell yourself that
Speaker 11: is kicking the can down the road in like a
Speaker 11: in like a real sense, and this this thing is
Speaker 11: having very real impacts. I mean, people are focused obviously
Speaker 11: on like the data center question, but I think that
Speaker 11: that relates to the same base problem is do we
Speaker 11: have an opposition to these things in this sort of
Speaker 11: abstract technological sense, or do we have an opposition to
Speaker 11: these tools being developed by and for for profit companies
Speaker 11: who want to make money off of us. For me,
Speaker 11: that that is the main problem. If you want to
Speaker 11: be like a lunite that it was also the lunnit,
Speaker 11: it's the main problem. They weren't opposed to technology in
Speaker 11: this abstract sense, but the specific way that it was
Speaker 11: transforming production to benefit capitalists instead of workers. And if
Speaker 11: we want to think about the Internet in the same way,
Speaker 11: what's happening is that they're deploying these technologies to benefit
Speaker 11: the people that own these tech companies rather than regular people.
Speaker 11: And if we can think about regulating on that basis
Speaker 11: not just in complete opposition to these things, I think
Speaker 11: that might actually have a lot more positive outcomes because
Speaker 11: these things are gonna get developed, these things are gonna
Speaker 11: get built. I don't think we're gonna be able to
Speaker 11: totally shut down AI as an industry in the next
Speaker 11: few years. I just don't see that being possible. Think about,
Speaker 11: like in the nineties, do you think they could have
Speaker 11: like shut down the like the Internet as an emerging technology,
Speaker 11: this is where all the capital is going. The most
Speaker 11: hope that I have is looking at something like the
Speaker 11: stop Data Center movement as an opportunity to like educate
Speaker 11: people about how these companies are profiting off of us,
Speaker 11: and maybe we can team up together across party lines,
Speaker 11: across you know whatever, to actually have a sort of
Speaker 11: a popular front against these tech companies so that the
Speaker 11: Internet and that you know, these advanced tools can actually
Speaker 11: exist in a way that is democratically decided and actually
Speaker 11: to the benefit of people and not like three dudes
Speaker 11: who are overdosing on Academy and every week in San Francisco.
Speaker 12: I agree with you.
Speaker 13: I think while we are all sort of like having
Speaker 13: this conversation, specific tech companies are increasingly making forays into
Speaker 13: the most intimate inner parts of our lives. Open ai
Speaker 13: just announced their first ever consumer hardware product, and you
Speaker 13: could probably guess what that product is going to be.
Speaker 13: It's going to be a hockey puck sized smart speaker
Speaker 13: that you put in your home that reacts to you
Speaker 13: like what they said, call a human like AI companion,
Speaker 13: an intimate AI companion, and it will have the ability
Speaker 13: to mechanically, they say, follow you around from room to
Speaker 13: room in your house.
Speaker 12: And so while we're all kind.
Speaker 13: Of having this conversation, you can bet your ass these
Speaker 13: tech companies are increasingly trying to not just be the
Speaker 13: most powerful AI companies, but the most emotionally supportive, the
Speaker 13: most emotionally invasive. You know, we've all talked so much
Speaker 13: about the more kind of logistical elements of our digital selves,
Speaker 13: you know, our intellectual property, our brows data, who gets
Speaker 13: to make money from that? But I firmly do believe
Speaker 13: the next iteration of the digital rights movement will be
Speaker 13: about our inner emotional lives and who gets to commodify that,
Speaker 13: who gets to profit from that? And so, you know,
Speaker 13: as grim as that sounds, I completely agree with you
Speaker 13: that I'm also incredibly optimistic about the moment that we're
Speaker 13: in when it comes to your average person's sentiment around
Speaker 13: things like big tech data centers, AI commodifying every resource,
Speaker 13: whether that's our intimate emotional data, or our environmental resources.
Speaker 13: I am incredibly optimistic that we are sort of on
Speaker 13: the right page, collectively pushing back and saying, I don't know.
Speaker 13: These tech companies say that this is all going to
Speaker 13: be really great for us, Is it actually yeah?
Speaker 11: Based on let me look at the window briefly. No, No,
Speaker 11: I don't think so.
Speaker 12: Let me look at back my magic apel sources say.
Speaker 11: No, signs points to naw. Is there either kind of
Speaker 11: a final points about your new audiobook that you would
Speaker 11: like to tease to to the listeners before we sign off?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 13: It is really accessible, and the conversation is dark and
Speaker 13: hard and vulnerable, but.
Speaker 12: Also fun and funny and engaging.
Speaker 13: I talk to people who actually say that they have
Speaker 13: experienced intimacy with AI, and so, if you ever wanted
Speaker 13: to go beyond the sort of clickbait headlines of some
Speaker 13: of these stories that you might have skimmed on social media,
Speaker 13: you hear directly from folks about what brought them into
Speaker 13: connection with AI, which I find fascinating. I try to
Speaker 13: ned chatchpt into having sex with me in the audio book.
Speaker 13: If you want to find out if that worked or not,
Speaker 13: check it out. And then ultimately again I would say
Speaker 13: reporting the book made me very optimistic. One of the
Speaker 13: reasons why I'm so optimistic in this moment is that
Speaker 13: I just think when you actually look at the research
Speaker 13: and listen to what people are talking about when they
Speaker 13: talk about intimacy with AI, it just becomes incredibly clear
Speaker 13: that AI can never replace humans.
Speaker 12: AI cannot replace human labor.
Speaker 13: AI cannot replace what people are looking for when they
Speaker 13: look for nourishing connections and relationships. And so I kind
Speaker 13: of ended the audiobook feeling incredibly optimistic about the power
Speaker 13: of human connection and the power of human labor, and
Speaker 13: the desire that we all have to connect with each
Speaker 13: other that we know will never be replaced by AI.
Speaker 11: I've seen that Spielberg movie. I think it's possible. I
Speaker 11: think it's possible. I think we could all have a
Speaker 11: kind of creepy seven year old AI bought soon.
Speaker 12: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 13: I will say I am kind of low key obsessed
Speaker 13: with movies like that, like AI or Ex Machina or
Speaker 13: Blade Runner.
Speaker 12: I think that we're all so it sounds like.
Speaker 13: A niche thing, but when you look at pop culture,
Speaker 13: we have been interested in people who have intimate connections
Speaker 13: with technology and AI for a really long time, myself included.
Speaker 11: No. I think that is a big part of how
Speaker 11: these companies are able to kind of pass this stuff
Speaker 11: off to people. It creates a sort of public buy
Speaker 11: in because of like the pop culture idea of these things,
Speaker 11: both the good and the bad. I think both the
Speaker 11: sort of apocalyptic versions of it make the company seem
Speaker 11: more legitimate, and that makes investors excited because like, oh,
Speaker 11: this is actually be a real thing, even if even
Speaker 11: if it causes bad things. You know, it's this sort
Speaker 11: of like a you know, don't invent the Torment Nexus
Speaker 11: book being like, oh this is this is a great idea.
Speaker 11: But I mean also in like the Blade under Sense,
Speaker 11: you know, these these sorts of more like humanistic looks
Speaker 11: about like what does it really mean to be human?
Speaker 11: You know, what actually is the line between artificial intelligence
Speaker 11: and humanity. I think that that sort of you know,
Speaker 11: very like armchair philosophizing as that's in those sorts of
Speaker 11: films that it does does make it easier for people
Speaker 11: to start to talk to these things like they could
Speaker 11: maybe be a person. In the more extreme cases, there
Speaker 11: was that like Google Developer a few years ago, who
Speaker 11: like who quitor got fired and was like, I've discovered
Speaker 11: that Google's AI is a real person, and I think
Speaker 11: it can it can really like encourage people to like
Speaker 11: want to almost create this sort of conscious humanity within
Speaker 11: these tools, even if those you know, tools aren't even
Speaker 11: there yet, but there's like a desire to kind of
Speaker 11: if I talk to it enough, maybe it will become human.
Speaker 11: Which again this kind of sort of back to where
Speaker 11: we started. There's these sorts of like, you know, very
Speaker 11: very kind of base problems with the way that people
Speaker 11: use the internet to kind of solve this sort of
Speaker 11: you know, social alienation and social disintegration that we have
Speaker 11: in our society and culture. My main issue is that
Speaker 11: the way that companies golome on to that as an
Speaker 11: opportunity to make a lot of money.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I think that's exactly what we're seeing.
Speaker 13: You know, we have a loneliness issue that people have
Speaker 13: described as an epidemic right here in this country. We
Speaker 13: live under such oppressive structures that the idea of doing
Speaker 13: the labor that it takes to maintain friendships when you're
Speaker 13: working a million hours to be able to afford your rent.
Speaker 13: That's gone up one hundred dollars in the last month
Speaker 13: seems impossible, and so all of these are very real needs,
Speaker 13: and tech companies are not only making those needs worse,
Speaker 13: but then selling us back a solution the form of
Speaker 13: technology that they own, operate, and profit from. It's a
Speaker 13: real cyclical problem, but I don't think we will solve
Speaker 13: it until we have those systemic institutional conversations about how
Speaker 13: we can meaningly fix what's so broken that is leading
Speaker 13: people to find this kind of nourishment in technology in
Speaker 13: the first place.
Speaker 11: Easypasy, yeah, simple. Where can people both hear more about
Speaker 11: this in the audiobook and then also find you elsewhere
Speaker 11: on the internet.
Speaker 13: Well, you can check out the audiobook at love at
Speaker 13: first prompt dot com.
Speaker 12: You can get it wherever your audiobooks are sold.
Speaker 13: I particularly like Libro FM because they give money to
Speaker 13: local bookstores and libraries. But you can also follow me
Speaker 13: on Instagram at Bridget Marie in DC and check out
Speaker 13: my podcast There Are No Girls on the Internet.
Speaker 11: Thank you, Bridget for introducing a new horror to everybody.
Speaker 11: One of our favorite things to do on this show.
Speaker 14: Thanks so much for having.
Speaker 1: Me Welcome to it could Happen hear a podcast about
Speaker 1: workers and the things that they do to fight, to
Speaker 1: survive and live in a better world. I am your host,
Speaker 1: Bio Wong. Some of the worst treated and most depressed
Speaker 1: workers in the United States are incarcerated workers, a group
Speaker 1: of workers who are very seldom talked about much less
Speaker 1: actually like formally organized by the conventional labor movement, and
Speaker 1: here with me today to talk about the Incarcerated Workers
Speaker 1: Organizing Committee as Colin from IWALK, Giselle Garcia, who is
Speaker 1: I walk's California outreach coordinator, and Adre Dawson, who is
Speaker 1: a formerly incarcerated person and in his MA support the
Speaker 1: all three of you, welcome to the show.
Speaker 14: Thank you so very much.
Speaker 4: Thank you well talking to me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm excited to talk to all of you, and
Speaker 1: I guess I want to start. Can you explain a
Speaker 1: little bit about what the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee is
Speaker 1: for people who are unfamiliar with.
Speaker 8: It, I'll kick us off and everyone can supplement.
Speaker 14: So I would.
Speaker 8: Definitely say that the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee or EYEWALK,
Speaker 8: is a committee of the incarcerated workers of the World
Speaker 8: Labor Union, and it was formed in recognition that there's
Speaker 8: probably not a more exploitative kind of labor setting than
Speaker 8: the prison system, and not just you know, US centric,
Speaker 8: but also across the globe. And so our effort is
Speaker 8: to build a bridge with our incarcerated neighbors, build that
Speaker 8: connection and true solidarity rooted in connection, and then help
Speaker 8: support those inside with resources so that they can not
Speaker 8: only come to an understanding of the profound intentionality behind
Speaker 8: a labor exploitation inside of carceral settings, but also give
Speaker 8: them support them with tools that they ask for when
Speaker 8: it comes to organizing those conditions, and it's led by
Speaker 8: those inside really, because no one can inform practis in
Speaker 8: this area other than those of largelatriation them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, do we want to talk more about like what's
Speaker 1: happening right now and then come back to sort of
Speaker 1: more historical components or if you want to try to do
Speaker 1: the history now.
Speaker 5: Well, I think I can give like a tad bit
Speaker 5: on assist says, I was in a carportd Amy not
Speaker 5: long ago inside of CDCR Spatula, California.
Speaker 11: Cd ORC is.
Speaker 1: The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which runs California's
Speaker 1: prison system.
Speaker 5: And I do understand the significance of working for pennies. Yeah,
Speaker 5: when that same job outside is paying you thirty forty dollars.
Speaker 5: I worked for HFM, I made thirty five forty cents
Speaker 5: an hour. That job out here pays in the streets
Speaker 5: thirty five forty dollars a hour. Jesus, the cost of
Speaker 5: living was low. The price of what it costs to
Speaker 5: live inside when a incarcerated situation was high.
Speaker 14: Two paste two dollars.
Speaker 5: After you do the two paces, you're loashing your few
Speaker 5: little at the small size dollar store size prizes. You
Speaker 5: don't have anything left to live with, you know what
Speaker 5: I'm saying. And it takes a lot to live inside
Speaker 5: of CDCR because they provides you housing because you're incarcerated.
Speaker 5: But outside of housing and the food that they try
Speaker 5: to put together to make right for us, oh my god,
Speaker 5: there's really not much more they can do for you.
Speaker 5: A lot of the things they want you to do
Speaker 5: for yourself out of your he need job, your job
Speaker 5: that paid sense. Yeah, So it was really hard. I
Speaker 5: did almost sixteen years. It was a struggle. It was ugly,
Speaker 5: and it was a struggle if not for eye walk.
Speaker 5: They gave us resources to help us with books and paper.
Speaker 5: They taught us how to exercise our labor laws and
Speaker 5: how to fight for ourselves and to know what you
Speaker 5: are allowed and what you can have, and don't let
Speaker 5: nobody beat you, don't let them cheat you.
Speaker 14: This is your right to have this, you know.
Speaker 5: I think just before our incarcerated I left, they had
Speaker 5: raised the percentage rate on some of the jobs, the
Speaker 5: more harder labors.
Speaker 14: They gave it a few more pennies.
Speaker 5: But it's crazy how multi billion dollar corporation don't take
Speaker 5: care of the inmates who keep it working. We do
Speaker 5: the laundry, we do the cooking, we do the housing,
Speaker 5: we do the clerk work, make glass.
Speaker 14: Everything is done by inmates.
Speaker 5: I work for carpentry, so I built some of the buildings,
Speaker 5: but yet I only worked for pennies. And if you
Speaker 5: think about it, that penny labor is even lower than
Speaker 5: slave labor in Mexico or some of the more countries
Speaker 5: that don't provide anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so obviously, as you're describing, these are unbelievably horrific
Speaker 1: conditions and wages, and god, I keep thinking about, you know,
Speaker 1: like two dollars for toothpaste. If you're making twenty cents
Speaker 1: an hour, it's like ten hours of work for like
Speaker 1: one of the small rings of toothpaste, which is just nightmare.
Speaker 1: What does organizing look like under those conditions?
Speaker 5: I think most of us lived in flight or fight mode.
Speaker 5: You had to do what you had to do to survive.
Speaker 5: The mental health level in CITYCR is like ninety nine
Speaker 5: percent over super high because people are stealing toilet.
Speaker 14: Paper and past things.
Speaker 5: They give us what you need more because there's not
Speaker 5: enough and I don't make enough money or you.
Speaker 14: Know, toothpaste, you're doing extra.
Speaker 5: So it has made the CITYCR system a little violentile
Speaker 5: because people are stealing a robin and mugging like in
Speaker 5: the free world, but you're taken from penny pinching people
Speaker 5: that don't have anything. So it's made our environment a
Speaker 5: little bit more violet if you've.
Speaker 4: Asked me, Yeah, I want to reflect on what Odre said.
Speaker 4: Prison is tremendously expensive, you know, within our circles. I
Speaker 4: guess it's famously more expensive to send someone to prison
Speaker 4: than to send them to Harvard. However, people are in
Speaker 4: these like really desperate material circumstances for stuff like toothpaste,
Speaker 4: theodor and even toothbrushes and things like that. And within
Speaker 4: people that know CDCR, they call from your prison system.
Speaker 4: On the men's side, they do a thing where they
Speaker 4: track and monitor the calories that people get because the
Speaker 4: guys all, you know, like to work out a lot,
Speaker 4: and like they just don't want people bulking up that much,
Speaker 4: and so they physically restrict the amount of protein and
Speaker 4: calorie intake to Jesus sort of facilitate their ideal security situation.
Speaker 1: So they're just starving everyone like intentionally.
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, precisely, yeah, keeping people yeah alive, you know,
Speaker 4: and in purgatory and not not able to like be
Speaker 4: how they want to be. And so like that situation
Speaker 4: of artificial scarcity is it's reflected on you know, the
Speaker 4: outside of prison too, and you know, just hustle culture,
Speaker 4: you know, housing scarcity, artificial housing scarcity, all kinds of
Speaker 4: other artificial scarcity. And I think in prison it's like
Speaker 4: a it's like a form of social conditioning where people
Speaker 4: are being condition into this scarcity mindset in like a
Speaker 4: really extreme way and being forced into this kind of
Speaker 4: hustle mindset. And so like all of the things that
Speaker 4: the prison administration kind of like trots out to justify
Speaker 4: their new security quote unquote measures, which is just often
Speaker 4: stuff like banning physical mail, you know, restrictions on visits,
Speaker 4: restrictions on books, restrictions on showers, restrictions on anything you
Speaker 4: know remotely humane about prison. Like these things are all
Speaker 4: justified as security. And the things that they talk about
Speaker 4: when they talk about security is like you know, drugs,
Speaker 4: you know, prison commerce, things like this, and like, prison
Speaker 4: commerce exists because of this situation of incredible scarcity that
Speaker 4: the prison itself is like maintaining to begin with. And
Speaker 4: the point of eyewalk in part, like part of our
Speaker 4: sort of mission and like strategy is to get people together,
Speaker 4: get people like you know, talking about solidarity, connecting people
Speaker 4: who have a kind of like minded kind of outlook
Speaker 4: on things, so that we can start to form a
Speaker 4: foundation for solidarity that is not based around the prison
Speaker 4: economy as it exists, but rather based on like inside
Speaker 4: outside solidarity, on like a you know, a humanistic socialistic
Speaker 4: level in that sense, Like there are stark similarities but
Speaker 4: also very stark differences with you know, other groups that
Speaker 4: do the same thing, right, Like, essentially a lot of
Speaker 4: groups that arise sort of spontaneously that do that kind
Speaker 4: of stuff tend to have a capitalistic nature to them,
Speaker 4: and those are the groups that come with the state
Speaker 4: refers to as gangs oftentimes, and there are different ones
Speaker 4: and they do different things and they have unique cultures.
Speaker 4: Like the term gang kind of flattens them all into one.
Speaker 4: But yeah, they're they're all very different and have different
Speaker 4: sort of survival adaptation mechanisms.
Speaker 14: They're like large clicks.
Speaker 5: I think that would like kind of be better from
Speaker 5: a CDR since CDCR is like one of the most
Speaker 5: largest human trafficking industries in the business. They collect people,
Speaker 5: they work people for nothing, and the revenue all goes
Speaker 5: back to them because no matter what we spend, we
Speaker 5: spend it with CDCR. So not only are you collecting
Speaker 5: fifty sixty thousand a year per person, and the institution
Speaker 5: is overpacked so it carries up to twenty five hundred
Speaker 5: people at a time. These people are working for either.
Speaker 14: Dollars or cents.
Speaker 5: And every dollar they have is invested back at CDC
Speaker 5: you are. So it is one hundred percent financial gain
Speaker 5: for CDCR, no matter.
Speaker 14: How to look at it.
Speaker 5: Because they supply everything, they sell everything, everything goes right
Speaker 5: back to CDCR at the cost of human lives, for medical,
Speaker 5: for food, the things that they give you is for
Speaker 5: you to barely make it. And what it does is
Speaker 5: it keeps you in the same kind of criminal mind state,
Speaker 5: so you're a better criminal when you leave because you
Speaker 5: have to do what you have to do to survive.
Speaker 5: In their and at forty fifty thousand dollars per person
Speaker 5: a year, I feel like nobody should be hungry, nobody
Speaker 5: should need shoes, nobody should need t shirts. Two bases
Speaker 5: should be full sized, shampoos should be full size. They
Speaker 5: invest the thousands millions of dollars in mental health, and
Speaker 5: yet the suicide rate is high there because a bruce
Speaker 5: rate is high there, whether it's being abused by.
Speaker 14: Staff or by inmate.
Speaker 5: Abuses twenty four hours around the clock in CDCR and
Speaker 5: only a very few survive. And they don't survive on scratch.
Speaker 5: They survive because they have a super will to survive.
Speaker 5: So for me, that's where I was at. I had
Speaker 5: a super will to survive. So I hid in the crack.
Speaker 5: I tried to do my bare minimum. I stayed in
Speaker 5: groups and stuff. I fed my mind, I nursed my
Speaker 5: body the best I could. I took care of my
Speaker 5: health the best I could. I just stayed focused. But
Speaker 5: either go see always I will always have me always.
Speaker 5: I've been a member for almost eight years now, eight
Speaker 5: nine years I was a member incarcerated, and now I
Speaker 5: would be able to talk to Collins and work through
Speaker 5: some of the worst moments. He would refer me to
Speaker 5: other entities of the organization for support. They would give
Speaker 5: me referrals to how to give me books to take
Speaker 5: my mind out of places, refer me to places that
Speaker 5: would give us papers and pen people would help us
Speaker 5: with laws and stuff we didn't understand.
Speaker 14: Senless copies.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 5: It was just really a platform for making you a
Speaker 5: stronger individual in an awful situation. And for that I
Speaker 5: will always be grateful. And even now that I'm no
Speaker 5: longer incarcerated in CCCDCR, I get to see the fruit
Speaker 5: of the labor of everything this organization has given to
Speaker 5: the people that are behind bars, and I'm so grateful.
Speaker 4: Yeah, jail conditions in California, and I think a lot
Speaker 4: of places are like even worse than prison conditions. And
Speaker 4: I mean, I remember when I was visiting someone in
Speaker 4: the Sacramento County jail and she was excited, after multiple
Speaker 4: years in the county jail to go to federal prison.
Speaker 4: She was like over the moon that she was going
Speaker 4: to federal prison and getting out of the Sacramento County jail.
Speaker 4: So I was wondering if you could describe the conditions
Speaker 4: in the Presno County jail and how we fixed them,
Speaker 4: or at least how they kind of mickey moused it
Speaker 4: for the entire time that you were there, just so
Speaker 4: that this wouldn't happen again.
Speaker 14: So I was incarcerated.
Speaker 5: I went back for recentence, you know, my life sentence,
Speaker 5: and that Fresnel County Jail is horrible. It's interested people
Speaker 5: are dying daily. If you have nobody, you have nothing.
Speaker 5: It was really sad. I asked Collins and I walked
Speaker 5: to get involve. So when short time came, they had
Speaker 5: put in to get some funny to help.
Speaker 14: People didn't have hygiens.
Speaker 5: It was very stinky and nasty, so they donated through me,
Speaker 5: and I bought the girls their hygiens, shut pools, conditioners,
Speaker 5: two pays.
Speaker 14: Bought guys of snacks.
Speaker 5: I made them all little care packs, and I got
Speaker 5: to see a small amount of women in my pod
Speaker 5: spring to life, all because the organization cared. All because
Speaker 5: somebody researched their heart and did a little something different.
Speaker 5: It made such a difference, like they really all wanted
Speaker 5: to be involved, like how do I get involved with this?
Speaker 14: But I left shortly after this all.
Speaker 5: Happened, so we didn't really get to click it in
Speaker 5: because using the phone and stuff in there is not
Speaker 5: like being in prison. People are dying to get out
Speaker 5: of county jail. I mean people are actually dying in
Speaker 5: their cells. One lady was left to fester in her
Speaker 5: infestations of cysts and stuff she had all over her body.
Speaker 5: She sped another lady in there that actually went out
Speaker 5: long responsive because they said nothing was along with her,
Speaker 5: and yet she had an internal disease she had been
Speaker 5: living with all her life and they would not help her.
Speaker 5: And because I don't know a lot, I'm not going
Speaker 5: to name anything or anyone. I just know I was
Speaker 5: a part of the situation. We were denied meals. Sometimes
Speaker 5: you were too late, you didn't come. People were denying meds.
Speaker 5: You should have been there.
Speaker 14: People who couldn't even.
Speaker 5: Walk and they had no medical assistance. People who were kicking,
Speaker 5: as we know, to kick alcohol or hang on or
Speaker 5: crystal can be deadly. All they would do is bring
Speaker 5: them gatorade, one cup in the middle of the night.
Speaker 5: But these people were throwing up their guts, throwing up blood.
Speaker 14: It was crazy. It was really sad in there.
Speaker 5: But like I said, the one moment of joy was
Speaker 5: when I came in. I came in and they literally
Speaker 5: contributed to making it a better environment for us.
Speaker 4: And we did something with that jail that in activist
Speaker 4: vernacular or organizing vernacular, you could call it a phone
Speaker 4: zop or like a distribute distributed action.
Speaker 15: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So do you remember what our demands were with the jail.
Speaker 4: I think we had like four or five and they did.
Speaker 4: They did most of them.
Speaker 5: I know one was with medical. It's been so long
Speaker 5: I don't quite remember everything. So, but I know the
Speaker 5: girls who were able to kyle all walk and file
Speaker 5: complaints or tell people about what was happening with them,
Speaker 5: and they would, you know, give them resources and help
Speaker 5: them out the best they could. Women started filing grievouses
Speaker 5: because they were actually being able to receive information that
Speaker 5: would help them.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I just found what we won by the we
Speaker 4: won a violent guard transferred from that unit. Undoubtedly they
Speaker 4: were just transferred to another unit and then move back later.
Speaker 4: Increased access to showers in clean water, provided mental health care,
Speaker 4: put in repair work orders for showers and the television,
Speaker 4: and provided grievance forms all that from just like what
Speaker 4: I have to assume was like the Fresno County jails,
Speaker 4: like first serious encounter with like public anger and scrutiny
Speaker 4: in probably years. Not that people aren't angry at them
Speaker 4: over this stuff, but like the way they just like
Speaker 4: absolutely hopped to is you know, in my experience, indicative
Speaker 4: of people just used to getting away with it and
Speaker 4: receiving very little pushback.
Speaker 8: I just wanted to say that I think it also
Speaker 8: highlights the importance of mutual aid within our movement work.
Speaker 8: You know, oftentimes in especially labor movement spaces, you hear
Speaker 8: a lot of you know, focus on quote unquote organizing
Speaker 8: without recognition of kind of like the human element and
Speaker 8: like the human connection aspect to it and how you know,
Speaker 8: in different kind of spaces, being able to break bread,
Speaker 8: or if we can provide basic needs and supplies like
Speaker 8: you know, for hygiene or you know, I remember doing COVID,
Speaker 8: being able to provide folks who were incarcerated with soap
Speaker 8: right was huge. And it's those gestures. Some people challenge
Speaker 8: that and say, well that's not really organizing, right, Yes,
Speaker 8: it is absolutely. It's recognizing our humanity, our basic needs,
Speaker 8: and showing up to try to support each other. It's
Speaker 8: not just quote unquote fighting, right and that kind of advocacy,
Speaker 8: But advocacy is also about mutual aid, and so trying
Speaker 8: to live that and making sure we're meshing that with
Speaker 8: our movement work is essential.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I wanted to emphasize that, Like, it's not like
Speaker 4: we sent some incredible amount of money to Adro when
Speaker 4: she was in Tresno kind of jail. It was like
Speaker 4: maybe one hundred bucks or like not even, and yet
Speaker 4: it was able to do a lot of stuff Autero.
Speaker 4: You do remember how much it was, well, I think.
Speaker 14: It was seventy five bora hundred. It was one of them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I mean that's like one small example of
Speaker 4: how like when you're doing prison solidarity, you're able to
Speaker 4: do so much, like you're able to have a tremendous
Speaker 4: impact for folks in a way that you are not
Speaker 4: able to do in any kind of organizing, at least
Speaker 4: for people in the present moment. And that is something
Speaker 4: that really attracted me to it. As just kind of
Speaker 4: a spectrum headed person. I was like, oh, this is
Speaker 4: like a very good labor cost to benefit ratio of
Speaker 4: like you can put in the same amount of work
Speaker 4: and reap like much greater benefit for a greater number
Speaker 4: of people. And that I think remains true today is
Speaker 4: something that folks should consider when considering whether prison solidarity
Speaker 4: is something that they'd like to take her in.
Speaker 14: Thank you Collins.
Speaker 5: The one thing I did remember more than anything out
Speaker 5: of Collins and their organizations coming into our county. The
Speaker 5: one thing I did see that you very get to
Speaker 5: see in and incarcerated situations was in a lot pod,
Speaker 5: a glimmer of hope. They planted a seed when they
Speaker 5: made it possible for us to fund help for people,
Speaker 5: and the next time around people were donating a little bit.
Speaker 14: People who had.
Speaker 5: More were donating to make sure those people kept things.
Speaker 5: I see unity in its greatest form with culture difference,
Speaker 5: stigma difference, race difference. Gangs didn't exist at that time.
Speaker 5: I watched us come together. We started having prayer socals,
Speaker 5: the pod became more positive, and that all started with
Speaker 5: a heartfelt seventy five to one hundred dollars.
Speaker 14: It brought people together and that never left.
Speaker 5: That never left, and I think it's the same thing
Speaker 5: in an incarceration, when you're in prison. When we build
Speaker 5: our little insight organizations and we help each other, we
Speaker 5: give hope to each other. I am so grateful to
Speaker 5: be a member of such a profound organization that believes
Speaker 5: in neighbor laws to help us be treated fairly, abolishments
Speaker 5: of institutions because know.
Speaker 14: God, they need to reap a little bit of what
Speaker 14: they sow.
Speaker 5: And a hand and a heart that says we care
Speaker 5: from across the mouth. And this organization reaches different parts
Speaker 5: of the US, so it's not from one place, it's
Speaker 5: it's a whole unit and it's I'm grateful to be
Speaker 5: a part of it right.
Speaker 4: And in fact IOWAK exists in the United States. We
Speaker 4: have interests from some lob belief in Canada, and there
Speaker 4: is also established IWALK presidents in the UK, including Northern Ireland.
Speaker 1: What does it actually look like to be doing sort
Speaker 1: of jail house long, to be helping people understand what
Speaker 1: their rights are and trying to fight for better conditions
Speaker 1: through the internal legal system.
Speaker 5: I work for the Law Library in CDCR at Chachchilla SECWF.
Speaker 1: SCCWF is the central California Women's Facility, a California women's prison.
Speaker 5: And I am what they call a jail house lawyer
Speaker 5: because I helped a few.
Speaker 14: People go home.
Speaker 5: Not that I was brilliant, just comprehend very well and
Speaker 5: I articulate very well. So by me working there, I
Speaker 5: got to learn first hand law books and penal codes
Speaker 5: and processes, and it was a wonderful thing. But it
Speaker 5: can also be a sad thing because before you know,
Speaker 5: you make a lot of mistakes, and those mistakes hurt
Speaker 5: people because people can't afford lawyers. I mean, I went
Speaker 5: in there with thirty six to life, lost all my
Speaker 5: levels of my appeal, and never thought I would ever
Speaker 5: see the light of day. I knew I would die
Speaker 5: in prison, and a lot of jail house lawyers helped me,
Speaker 5: and just it didn't happen because financially I was not
Speaker 5: able to do a lot. If it hadn't Gavin Knwsomon,
Speaker 5: we sentenced me under exemplary programming. Obviously I did a
Speaker 5: good program. I've done over one hundred and fifty years
Speaker 5: old of their groups, and I facilitate, so I work
Speaker 5: my way out. But you got documentation in there that's
Speaker 5: probably thirty years old.
Speaker 14: It doesn't even apply with the laws that are today.
Speaker 5: If we're using old documentation, the course will rejecting them
Speaker 5: because they have the wrong paperwork. A lot of things
Speaker 5: had been happening until some of us started six oh
Speaker 5: two een, like we need the right paperwork. We started
Speaker 5: fighting for that, and we started getting it, and people
Speaker 5: are now being able to see a glimmer of hope.
Speaker 14: It's all about for me, It's about the fight. How
Speaker 14: bad do you want it?
Speaker 8: You know?
Speaker 5: I know what I would do to throw my life away?
Speaker 5: What would I do to have my life back? You know,
Speaker 5: after I've yeah worked it out. The same energy you
Speaker 5: put into it, It's the same energy you got to
Speaker 5: put it into it to get out of it.
Speaker 1: If not a little bit more, did you talk a
Speaker 1: little bit more about how you went about actually getting
Speaker 1: the correct copies of the legal code, because that seems
Speaker 1: like just an absolute nightmare.
Speaker 14: No, it is a nightmare.
Speaker 5: When I first started, I had two incarcerations, two life sentences.
Speaker 14: I just beat my second life sentences.
Speaker 5: I was a three striker first, and at that time,
Speaker 5: they didn't have a lot of paper and there was
Speaker 5: a lot of Rigoro war going on because of the
Speaker 5: law was so inadically we put together just.
Speaker 14: To please the people of the US, but not to
Speaker 14: be fair all the way around.
Speaker 5: A lot of people were getting life sentences for slices
Speaker 5: of pizza and hawk dolls, and you know, and I
Speaker 5: was one of those people, don't get me wrong. So
Speaker 5: at that time, there was not a lot a lot
Speaker 5: of legal paperwork. The paperwork was so outdated they were
Speaker 5: giving us and people started we started filing the pills.
Speaker 14: Hey, we have a right to the right paperwork. How
Speaker 14: am I gonna get home?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 14: If I don't, I'm a fight if I don't have
Speaker 14: the right forms.
Speaker 4: To fight with.
Speaker 5: Or we would organizations would printice paperwork.
Speaker 14: Out that we wrote out to.
Speaker 5: And they would send us the right one in and
Speaker 5: we would make copies in our own self at ten
Speaker 5: cents of copy and put change the copy that they
Speaker 5: used to copy the copy and the original would be in.
Speaker 5: It was a lot of scheme in and scamming, but
Speaker 5: it was worth it because we were starting to go home.
Speaker 5: The paperwork was being updated. You know, they had a
Speaker 5: lawsuit because they did have the right paperwork. They really
Speaker 5: started up dating then because we had some legal monros,
Speaker 5: you know.
Speaker 14: Lawyers go to prison too.
Speaker 1: So if I'm understanding this right, are you saying that
Speaker 1: they had the right paperwork they were just giving you
Speaker 1: the old one.
Speaker 5: No, they had the wrong paperwork. So we were sending
Speaker 5: out for the right paperwork, throwing away to old paper
Speaker 5: work and sliding the right paperwork in the clerks that
Speaker 5: worked at the lawbrary.
Speaker 14: We would do anything to make sure.
Speaker 11: We can go home, you know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, but like I said, we had people who.
Speaker 14: Used to be lawyers. I mean, if we had to
Speaker 14: wait a little bit.
Speaker 5: Longer, we could have had a president I don't know,
Speaker 5: before going to prison these days.
Speaker 11: Yeah, so, you.
Speaker 5: Know, but it was just that you had to have
Speaker 5: a will to be a success, and it took organizations
Speaker 5: like eye walk.
Speaker 14: It when I was there. I need a certain paperwork
Speaker 14: and college will look it up and reference for and
Speaker 14: send it to me, you know, legal.
Speaker 5: Paperwork that would help us whether we were fighting for
Speaker 5: our jobs, not paying us right, or we can't get
Speaker 5: a hold of this paperwork for us to be free.
Speaker 14: He would send it and I would spread it like fire,
Speaker 14: you know.
Speaker 5: Once she I'm a clerk, I make a hundred copies
Speaker 5: hoping I don't get caught. You know, it is what
Speaker 5: it is, and just trying to say why that was important.
Speaker 5: But I'm wanted this thing talking. I really want to
Speaker 5: hear Gigi's aspect, because she is like so superheroes. She's
Speaker 5: a great human being and she fights for incarcerated inmates,
Speaker 5: and she fights for labor rights, and she fights for
Speaker 5: her organization, and she fights for everything. And I would
Speaker 5: really like to hear her. I haven't heard her much.
Speaker 5: I don't like to hear her side.
Speaker 8: All think you wants. You are incredible, and I just
Speaker 8: I just want to listen to you, and you are,
Speaker 8: you know, the one that we are taking notes from.
Speaker 8: So thank you for everything that you do and everything
Speaker 8: that you did while incarcerated and everything that you're doing now.
Speaker 8: Just so just so you know that we are all
Speaker 8: inspired by you.
Speaker 14: Always thank you.
Speaker 8: I you know, as someone who has been in the
Speaker 8: legal field for many.
Speaker 15: Years, you really the more you're around legal professionals, specifically lawyers,
Speaker 15: you learn how little they actually do. I think a
Speaker 15: lot of the times are perception of civil rights and
Speaker 15: just movement work.
Speaker 8: We think of lawyers. We think of big organizations right
Speaker 8: that have been you know, those big gains in the courts,
Speaker 8: But the reality is that the real work happens on
Speaker 8: the ground, grassroots, and so in the case of our
Speaker 8: prisoner movement, it happens behind those bars, behind those concrete walls.
Speaker 8: And when it comes to the most vulnerable, as you
Speaker 8: kind of go down right in terms of how impacted
Speaker 8: folks are, there are less and less lawyers that are
Speaker 8: willing to do their work, and definitely less that are
Speaker 8: even able to. They just don't bother, you know. And
Speaker 8: so what you really see when it comes to jail
Speaker 8: health lawyers is that they said, we can't depend on
Speaker 8: these privileged class of people to fight for us, let
Speaker 8: alone free us. So they taken it into their own hands.
Speaker 8: And that's why it's such an honor for organizations like
Speaker 8: Eyewalk and our members to be able to support in
Speaker 8: that hands on participatory defense model, where it truly is
Speaker 8: about it's understanding that our liberation will not come from
Speaker 8: external hands. It will come, you know, internally, it will
Speaker 8: come from us who are impacted, and so supporting each
Speaker 8: other is what is going to make the difference.
Speaker 11: And I sound so simple, but.
Speaker 8: Sometimes it looks like sending in a book an article,
Speaker 8: pulling up supporting evidence that someone can use, right, doing
Speaker 8: some research and sending it in. And California has the
Speaker 8: Racial Justice Act, which is opening a pathway for a
Speaker 8: lot of folks to reopen their cases and have some
Speaker 8: resentencing done. And a lot of folks are, you know,
Speaker 8: being free now because of that legislation, And so you know,
Speaker 8: how can we support in that way? But also I
Speaker 8: always go back to building the relationship with the folks inside,
Speaker 8: because sometimes it looks like writing a letter of support
Speaker 8: for folks. I mean, you can tell when someone writes
Speaker 8: a letter that didn't have a relationship with the person
Speaker 8: who needs a letter, right, But the opposite is also true.
Speaker 8: You can really tell when someone actually has a relationship
Speaker 8: with that person. It comes to life what you're writing
Speaker 8: and you feel that connection, right. So truly building those relationships,
Speaker 8: those friendships use some of our comrades inside. I bigger
Speaker 8: with and we fight and we make up, you know,
Speaker 8: and we're there for the ups and downs, and we'll
Speaker 8: give each other advice. And it's true friendships that we
Speaker 8: built behind those walls.
Speaker 10: And that alone is also a form of radical love
Speaker 10: and a radical part of this movement to form those
Speaker 10: bonds with those who the system tried to bury alive,
Speaker 10: and circling back to jail house lawyers and how our
Speaker 10: incarcerated neighbors have taken.
Speaker 8: Control and a lead of their own defense. How important
Speaker 8: it is for us to be plugged in on the
Speaker 8: outside to different advances or regressions when it comes to
Speaker 8: the legal system, because oftentimes we need to recognize that
Speaker 8: to be able to ignore policy, to be able to
Speaker 8: ignore what's happening in the streets, is a tremendous privilege.
Speaker 8: It's not impacting you when you are impacted. You cannot
Speaker 8: ignore what's happening around you because it's happening to you, right.
Speaker 8: And so for us, if we feel like we're not impacted,
Speaker 8: even though we are, because it's all interconnected struggle, right.
Speaker 8: But if we feel like maybe we don't need to
Speaker 8: pay attention to struggles or advancements that could be used
Speaker 8: by people inside, then we're really privileged and we're failing
Speaker 8: are our neighbors inside. So I just hope that we
Speaker 8: can recognize that and understand that it is an obligation
Speaker 8: of ours to move through life in a way that
Speaker 8: is thoughtful of those who who could use our support
Speaker 8: and who we could empower because they don't have the
Speaker 8: same access to that information or the resources. And so
Speaker 8: in many ways, that's what I walked us. And there's
Speaker 8: just something so powerful about getting out a piece of
Speaker 8: paper and pen and writing a handwriting letter, stuffing an
Speaker 8: envelope with literature with zine, or sending a book inside
Speaker 8: and putting that stamp on the envelope. It feels like
Speaker 8: a material manifestation of your solidarity.
Speaker 14: Oh oh no, that was awesome.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's okay. I'd like to dig into some details
Speaker 4: on the sort of state of the civil rights liberalism
Speaker 4: as we know it here in California, because I think
Speaker 4: like we glossed over certain things that I'd like to
Speaker 4: clarify are not acts of benevolence on the part of
Speaker 4: the state and are in fact acts of just kind
Speaker 4: of like self glazing on their part, and like things
Speaker 4: that they do to sort of pat themselves on the
Speaker 4: back and then move on. So, I mean, first of all,
Speaker 4: Audra mentioned that Gavin Newsim had something to do with
Speaker 4: her release. I just wanted to circle back to that
Speaker 4: and point out that he's also completely screwed over some
Speaker 4: of our members, like gone completely out of his way
Speaker 4: to use his like what it's basically like a veto
Speaker 4: power over parole that should not exist, and it's just
Speaker 4: like set up to yeah, create like me. I mean, like,
Speaker 4: this is how Gavin Newsim does everything in California. He's like,
Speaker 4: if I'm going to either take an action or not
Speaker 4: take an action as governor, is there any possibility that
Speaker 4: my action or inaction could make me look bad later
Speaker 4: on the national stage to people that are not my
Speaker 4: current constituents when I'm running for president. And he always
Speaker 4: does what he thinks is going to create the least
Speaker 4: risk and make him look good to a national audience
Speaker 4: rather than to his current constituents. And that is pretty
Speaker 4: clearly what happened with another one of our members recently.
Speaker 4: So yeah, fuck Evan Newsom.
Speaker 1: Actually, why does he even have the power to overratee
Speaker 1: the parole?
Speaker 11: Why does it even exist?
Speaker 12: That's absurd.
Speaker 4: I don't know. Yeah, you'd have to talk to some
Speaker 4: sort of like California constitutional historian to learn that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The other thing I want to talk about was this
Speaker 4: Racial Justice Act thing. So this is something that on
Speaker 4: its surface, it sounds really radical. So first what they
Speaker 4: did was like in twenty twenty when as we all
Speaker 4: know nothing in particular was happening. They passed this law
Speaker 4: called the Racial Justice Hack that was like, hey, if
Speaker 4: you're convicted, but it was like due to racial animus
Speaker 4: or like the length of the sentence perhaps, and if not,
Speaker 4: the conviction itself is due to like a racial bias.
Speaker 4: You can you can try to prove that or not
Speaker 4: prove it, but like do what's called a prime at
Speaker 4: fates are showing, which is like the lowest level of
Speaker 4: you know, demonstrating something in court, and then we'll just
Speaker 4: like let you go based on that alone. Right, So
Speaker 4: that's wow, what are you radical?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 4: Okay, So a couple things. First of all, that was
Speaker 4: only from the future on herd, so that was not retroactive.
Speaker 4: But later there was outcry about that, and so they
Speaker 4: came back and were like, oh okay, yeah, all the
Speaker 4: people in prison now can do it too. So the
Speaker 4: thing is this is also the kind of thing that
Speaker 4: can like overwhelm the courts.
Speaker 16: Right.
Speaker 4: So like the way that this is being done in
Speaker 4: practice is like you get one shot at this. Ever, yeah,
Speaker 4: as I understand it, And just like appeals, you get
Speaker 4: different amounts of appeals I think based on the conviction.
Speaker 4: But like basically if you fuck it up, like you're done,
Speaker 4: because the courts are limited in their capacity and need
Speaker 4: to be able to move on to hear other people's saying,
Speaker 4: and of course will file it and it's it's not good,
Speaker 4: it's not done well. And like the infrastructure to violate
Speaker 4: your rights is like better funded all the time. Meanwhile,
Speaker 4: the institutions to like defend your rights are typically not
Speaker 4: publicly funded at all outside of like the court's proper
Speaker 4: and you know, maybe there's certain government agencies in some states.
Speaker 4: But then like private civil rights attorneys are who have
Speaker 4: the option to be kind of the real civil rights defenders,
Speaker 4: and they get funded based on like court fees that
Speaker 4: are like set by the government. Right, and so the
Speaker 4: government like creates these systems where you know, the legislature
Speaker 4: essentially has the power to decide how much money a
Speaker 4: civil rights lawyer is going to be able to get
Speaker 4: practicing civil rights law by like suing the cops and stuff.
Speaker 4: In California and probably elsewhere, it's already like been settled
Speaker 4: that like if you do a civil rights case for
Speaker 4: something happening on the street, and then you do the
Speaker 4: same civil rights case for like the same thing happening
Speaker 4: to people in prison, you're gonna make less money when
Speaker 4: it occurred in prison, basically. And you know, maybe some
Speaker 4: legal person has a finer, you know, detailed analysis of
Speaker 4: that than what I just said, But that's essentially my understanding.
Speaker 4: And I did work for for some attorneys who practice
Speaker 4: is kind of law at one point, so that is
Speaker 4: pretty egregious, yea, And yeah, I mean I think that, like,
Speaker 4: there's there's a lot of stuff in the kind of
Speaker 4: abolitionist sphere that is really kind of like nails on
Speaker 4: a chalkboard to me. And I think a lot of
Speaker 4: other people who tend to take a more like radical
Speaker 4: yet like radical in the long run, yet day to
Speaker 4: day pragmatic approach. I mean one of those things is
Speaker 4: like the nonprofit route basically, or like the five oh
Speaker 4: one C three route, where you you know, staff up
Speaker 4: hire a bunch of people. If you started out, you know,
Speaker 4: being in the same class as the people who are
Speaker 4: in prison, you like quickly propel yourself out of that
Speaker 4: class by doing this if you're successful, and then like
Speaker 4: things deteriorate from there as far as relationships go with
Speaker 4: people who are impacted. And then the other thing is
Speaker 4: like there's this strain of abolitionists who are like, well,
Speaker 4: we're the truest abolitionists because we just believe in like
Speaker 4: infinite second chances basically, and so like we sometimes get
Speaker 4: questions of like, how are you different from other abolitionist groups.
Speaker 4: So I would say, yeah, like a, we're not afraid
Speaker 4: to like pick people out. But it's like you behave badly.
Speaker 4: I walk like you're talking, like you're out, Like that's
Speaker 4: not the same as throwing someone in prison. All that
Speaker 4: people will make that equivalence.
Speaker 5: I love this, but I do have to go. I
Speaker 5: appreciate you guys allowing me a chance to speak.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for doing this.
Speaker 5: I appreciate callings, your support. I appreciate your support for
Speaker 5: allowness on your podcast.
Speaker 14: I would just want to say one thing.
Speaker 5: When I was in incarcerated, I would write and Collins
Speaker 5: help me start me a little website because I would
Speaker 5: write my emotions. I don't know if I can leak
Speaker 5: that website. Can I say what that website is? In
Speaker 5: case you guys want to look at it.
Speaker 1: It's your website, Okay, thank you.
Speaker 5: It's adras A U d r A S Real thoughts
Speaker 5: r e A L thoughts with the s dot WordPress
Speaker 5: dot com and it talks about my trauma, my prison
Speaker 5: life and everything. It has pictures and everything, And it
Speaker 5: would not be possible if it was not for Collins.
Speaker 5: It was my way of forming a support group from
Speaker 5: inside out. But I have to go because I do
Speaker 5: have somewhere.
Speaker 14: Else to be.
Speaker 4: It's been great having me here. A.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's been it's been amazing having you here. I
Speaker 1: really appreciate it.
Speaker 14: Yeah, I love Gg Collins. Thank you guys so much.
Speaker 4: I'll talk to you later if you're comfortable with the
Speaker 4: only if you're comfortable with it before you go, do
Speaker 4: you want to tell me and the audience what your
Speaker 4: third strike was? Allegedly yes.
Speaker 5: I was sentenced in nineteen ninety four for sales of
Speaker 5: a twenty dollars piece of cocaine, and I was given
Speaker 5: twenty five to life plus a five year enhancement. This one,
Speaker 5: I was sentenced to thirty six to life for second
Speaker 5: degree robbery. A lady say I robbed her while she
Speaker 5: was with her child, and then she recanted that story
Speaker 5: in court. I still was sentenced to thirty six to
Speaker 5: life because she couldn't find her forty dollars that she lost.
Speaker 5: There's a lot behind it. Actually, me and my partner
Speaker 5: at the time were co defendants.
Speaker 14: He was let off.
Speaker 5: Because he hadn't been in trouble in California, which was
Speaker 5: a good thing because he really was innocent. But I
Speaker 5: had to spend almost sixteen years on my life in
Speaker 5: prison for a crime I did not commit. It has
Speaker 5: its pros and as cons I'm a better Hue human
Speaker 5: being today, not because of CDCR, but because of me
Speaker 5: and the support system that I had while incarcerated in CDC,
Speaker 5: and it just made me a stronger person. They say,
Speaker 5: if it doesn't break you, it'll only make you stronger.
Speaker 5: So for anybody out there in the incarcerated world, don't
Speaker 5: give up, because if this doesn't break you, it will
Speaker 5: only make you stronger and you.
Speaker 14: Will get out because I did.
Speaker 5: And it's not always by the means that we think
Speaker 5: it will be, but when it's time, it happens. I've
Speaker 5: lived in the system long and I've lived a life
Speaker 5: span as a human being. I've spent more time incarcerated
Speaker 5: for little stupid things. No murders, no mayhems, no beatups,
Speaker 5: no DUIs, no nothing, none of nothing like that.
Speaker 14: Ye thinks that no one should ever.
Speaker 5: See prison walls behind, but I did, And like I said,
Speaker 5: I was made the stronger because of organizations like you
Speaker 5: who support me. There were others, but you guys were
Speaker 5: the most impact in my life.
Speaker 14: You came in my life like a whirl win and
Speaker 14: you straightened everything. I helped me straighten my thoughts out
Speaker 14: in my life.
Speaker 5: You helped me in many ways because you didn't come in,
Speaker 5: get overwhelmed and take off. You stayed the long call.
Speaker 5: Your organization is not an organization that quits.
Speaker 14: It's we're gonna get some.
Speaker 5: More to help us fight type of thing going on.
Speaker 5: And there's not a lot of organizations like that. They
Speaker 5: get overwhelmed. It's too much going on. We ain't got
Speaker 5: enough manpower. You guys only had people and you were
Speaker 5: making movements. And I don't understand correctly. I think you
Speaker 5: guys wrote a letter for a friend and supported her
Speaker 5: through board.
Speaker 14: Now she's out in the free world, you know what
Speaker 14: I'm saying.
Speaker 5: So you guys change lives because you don't give up
Speaker 5: on life. And for that, I hope you guys be
Speaker 5: around one hundred thousand years from now and I'll always
Speaker 5: be a member.
Speaker 14: You guys have a great thing.
Speaker 8: Luckily prisons aren't around for one hundred thousand years. But
Speaker 8: we love the odra help.
Speaker 6: Yah.
Speaker 8: I just want to add when I clarified, like about
Speaker 8: the Racial Justice Act, I don't want to.
Speaker 17: You know, applaud it as a victory of the system,
Speaker 17: like they're not really victories when the systems will exist, right,
Speaker 17: But I just want to say that it is still
Speaker 17: our duty to know when we.
Speaker 8: Can find those little kind of avenues for some momentary
Speaker 8: reprie for some people, and that can look like some
Speaker 8: creative ways. During COVID, we actually created hundreds of pockets
Speaker 8: for incarcerated folks so that they can actually file some
Speaker 8: tax documents and get their stimulus checks.
Speaker 14: Oh, which was major, right, So a.
Speaker 8: Ton of people were able to get their stimulus checks
Speaker 8: while incarcerated. Do you know how far that went? So
Speaker 8: it's just like those kinds of creative ways, you know,
Speaker 8: we often think, you know, we drive past a coffee
Speaker 8: shopping with like, oh, yeah, my mom love that coffee shop.
Speaker 8: We just hope that if we can make these connections
Speaker 8: with incarcerated neighbors, then we can you know, as we're
Speaker 8: going through the world on the outside. We also make
Speaker 8: those connections like, oh, you know what, sumulus checks. Oh
Speaker 8: you know what, how do we get our incarcerated comrades
Speaker 8: to get those two?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 8: Making those connections with the people that you build bonds
Speaker 8: with it's really important.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, Can I go on a rant that covers
Speaker 4: most of the notes that I have that I haven't
Speaker 4: covered yet?
Speaker 1: Yeah, go for it.
Speaker 4: Okay, thank you. Prison organizing is tremendously popular with people
Speaker 4: in prison, and a lot of people on the quote
Speaker 4: unquote left or just with humanitarian sentiments on the outside
Speaker 4: are really great at you know, encouraging us and being
Speaker 4: like what you're doing is awesome and kind of giving
Speaker 4: us that like moral support which does help, and also
Speaker 4: you know, subscribing to our newsletter and sometimes doing phones
Speaker 4: apps and stuff like that. But generally it is tremendously
Speaker 4: difficult moving people from passive to active support in this
Speaker 4: kind of organizing. Typically, I think there is that kind
Speaker 4: of out of sight, out of mind factor going on
Speaker 4: for a lot of people, and I think there are
Speaker 4: organizing avenues out of that that I think we are,
Speaker 4: you know, always exploring new new ways to kind of
Speaker 4: try and make those connections in an experiential kind of way,
Speaker 4: rather than just like have you thought about how these
Speaker 4: things are connected, but like actually making it like real
Speaker 4: for people, you know. But we have just found that
Speaker 4: like the most stalwart, steadfast people in this struggle for
Speaker 4: the most part, are people you know directly impacted by it,
Speaker 4: are people who've been to jail in prison or who
Speaker 4: have like close family members who are often currently there
Speaker 4: or were recently there. And so you know, we'd love
Speaker 4: to hear from you, if that's you in particular, we'd
Speaker 4: love to hear from you, love to plug you in.
Speaker 4: We are speaking, you know, from California. But again, the
Speaker 4: organization exists across the United States and aspirationally Canada as
Speaker 4: well and the UK, and there are also other prisoner
Speaker 4: solidarity organizations with a similar orientation, so it's not like
Speaker 4: we're doing something totally unique and unheard of here. There's
Speaker 4: something called gg slash BO in Germany, which is also
Speaker 4: like a union for prisoners, and I want to say
Speaker 4: there's pretty similar stuff in Spain to associated with the
Speaker 4: anarchist movement there. In the United States, I think people
Speaker 4: are probably pretty familiar with like political prisoner support or
Speaker 4: like support committees for groups like the Minnesota fifteen or
Speaker 4: the Prairie Land Defendants and situations like that, And that's
Speaker 4: really valuable and really important. And no movement that like
Speaker 4: doesn't look after its people when they're in prison, like
Speaker 4: is a serious movement that will go anywhere at the
Speaker 4: end of the day. So that work really really matters.
Speaker 4: And I think that when people hear us as Eyewalk
Speaker 4: repeat one of our mottos that like all prisoners are political,
Speaker 4: they don't quite necessarily get the analysis there. I mean,
Speaker 4: for one thing, like you know, I'm going to give
Speaker 4: the spiel from the ground up. I guess for a second,
Speaker 4: like crime as an artificial category, like what a conviction
Speaker 4: says on paper is not like reflective necessarily of what
Speaker 4: really happened. And there has yet to be I think
Speaker 4: some really damning like study about this, just because there
Speaker 4: just hasn't been a study. But it is widely understood
Speaker 4: that like essentially all women in prison have suffered some
Speaker 4: kind of abuse in their lives, and almost all of
Speaker 4: the women in prison for murder murdered an abuser of
Speaker 4: either themselves or their kids or both. And in my book,
Speaker 4: that ain't a crime. Yeah, but Gigi maybe if she's
Speaker 4: if she wants to, can talk about how narrow the
Speaker 4: self defense rule actually is. And this is something that
Speaker 4: is like a popular myth that like the self defense
Speaker 4: rule is actually really wide and like if you know
Speaker 4: someone's coming to kill you, you can kill them first
Speaker 4: and it's not murder. Absolutely not true. I actually had
Speaker 4: a manager at a job. He was doing a training
Speaker 4: on something completely unrelated, I assure you, and he was
Speaker 4: just sort of going off and he was like and
Speaker 4: he was this fucking macho prick, right obviously based on
Speaker 4: what I'm about to say, but like he was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: like if anyone attacks you in the middle of nowhere,
Speaker 4: you should just like kill them if you have the chance.
Speaker 4: And then there's only one story being told. And I
Speaker 4: was like, yeah, so that would be murder and he
Speaker 4: was like, well, not if they attack you first, and
Speaker 4: I'm like, yeah, it is actually, you know, like if
Speaker 4: there's just a body and you're like, yeah, you talk
Speaker 4: to me, like you should not assume that you will
Speaker 4: just get away with that, Like that is not how
Speaker 4: things work at all. Yeah, do you want to elaborate
Speaker 4: on the self defense rule and what it is versus
Speaker 4: what people think it is.
Speaker 18: Yeah, so it's really important for us to understand stand
Speaker 18: that our legal doctrines in the United States are created
Speaker 18: to have loopholes for those in power and to be very.
Speaker 8: Convoluted and impossible to benefit from for those who are poor.
Speaker 8: So when it comes to the self defense doctrine, we
Speaker 8: actually have seen that it is disproportionately unavailable to victims
Speaker 8: of domestic and intimate partner violence. We have seen it
Speaker 8: disproportionately unavailable to black and brown men, to trans and
Speaker 8: non gender conforming neighbors. And a big part of that
Speaker 8: reason is because a complete self defense claim has six
Speaker 8: really important elements. You know, you cannot be like the
Speaker 8: first aggressor. There's distinctions between the use of versus non
Speaker 8: deathly force, a reasonable belief that the level of force
Speaker 8: that you use was necessary to protect yourself. But also
Speaker 8: this concept of proportionality. Right. We've seen that absolutely impact
Speaker 8: and am using DV cases because of this kind of
Speaker 8: concept of imminence. Right, So, if someone was being abused
Speaker 8: for a long time by their partner or their spouse,
Speaker 8: and you know, our psychology as humans are psyche sometimes,
Speaker 8: you know, sometimes we snap, right, if you didn't snap
Speaker 8: in the moment as a reaction to you know, being
Speaker 8: harmed in that moment. Right, if your brain didn't make
Speaker 8: the proper calculation, that defense is not available to Right.
Speaker 8: There's so many, unfortunately, bars to actually being able to
Speaker 8: cleiming self defense in a successful way, and it's very intentional. Unfortunately,
Speaker 8: it was intentionally designed that way to avoid the most
Speaker 8: vulnerable from using it. For example, there's this kind of
Speaker 8: concept of perception of threat, right along with proportionality. Right,
Speaker 8: So if someone is taller or maybe physically larger than
Speaker 8: their abuser, then there's this concept that, well, is your
Speaker 8: abuser actually a threat to you?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 8: And so there's just so many ways in which the
Speaker 8: law has not actually caught up with our new knowledge
Speaker 8: when it comes to the psychological effects of living with
Speaker 8: intimate partner violence, the impact that it has on our
Speaker 8: reaction action times, right on the cycles, on the challenges
Speaker 8: for many survivors to be able to even compile long
Speaker 8: term proof of abuse.
Speaker 14: Et cetera.
Speaker 8: Right, we can go on endlessly, and so unfortunately, I
Speaker 8: think it's just a reflection of our legal system again
Speaker 8: just created to bar those most vulnerable for many protection
Speaker 8: and it's really just there so that those who have
Speaker 8: the resources and those who have the control of social norms, right,
Speaker 8: those like young white men who have been perceived by
Speaker 8: juries as kind and innocent.
Speaker 19: Right, Kyle Rittenhouse, exactly right. That's who our laws were
Speaker 19: designed to protect, not our individuals. And so that just
Speaker 19: just tie into our understanding of incarceration in this country
Speaker 19: and how it's truly not a reflection of what really happened.
Speaker 19: Most of the time, it's void of context and it's
Speaker 19: just out right in Jess.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And there are a couple resources I think for
Speaker 4: people to check out if you're more interested in this.
Speaker 4: I mean, one question is like, how many people are
Speaker 4: in prison right now who are straight up innocent? And
Speaker 4: the straightforward answer is, we have no idea. And you know,
Speaker 4: as a rule, we just tend to take prisoner's word
Speaker 4: on stuff. I mean, what everyone else does is just
Speaker 4: take the cops word on stuff, frankly, including the news. Oftentimes.
Speaker 4: A big part of what we do is we are
Speaker 4: available to give comment to journalists when possible around certain
Speaker 4: jail and prison disturbances or actions that people in prisoner
Speaker 4: jail have taken to defend themselves against. You know, quote
Speaker 4: unquote the law the people, you know, torturing them essentially
Speaker 4: because oftentimes, you know, local news in par particular will
Speaker 4: just be straight up stenographers for whatever the police press releases.
Speaker 4: I mean, they'll often also just refer to things as
Speaker 4: riots that are not like if people sit down and
Speaker 4: like refuse to leave the lunch area or like the
Speaker 4: you know, like the central sitting area, they will refer
Speaker 4: to that as like a riot, even if no one
Speaker 4: is like throwing punches.
Speaker 8: And just to sort of circle labor, if you refuse
Speaker 8: to work, you get punished for it. It's not necessarily optional, right.
Speaker 8: It is absolutely slavery, not just because of the conditions
Speaker 8: and because of the you know, poor payment basically lack
Speaker 8: of payment, right, but because you are forced to work
Speaker 8: or you get punished, and sometimes it goes on your
Speaker 8: record that could actually impact you for any kind of
Speaker 8: parole opportunities, et cetera. So it is punitive and it
Speaker 8: is exploitative and it is nothing more than slappy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, to also touch base on, Yeah, like the fact
Speaker 4: is it's slavery. I think that's like we and other
Speaker 4: organizers have done a pretty good job. I feel like
Speaker 4: of like getting that fact into the mainstream and being
Speaker 4: like yeah, like this is slavery like period end of sentence.
Speaker 4: It is legally and material slavery. And now we're entering
Speaker 4: this process in which states like Colorado, for example, are
Speaker 4: passing laws that's like yeah, so we're just like abolishing
Speaker 4: this slavery thing, and it's like it's like the apparatus
Speaker 4: to deprive people of their rights has not itself been
Speaker 4: disempowered in any way, and so they're just like waving
Speaker 4: a blond over this system of slavery, being like it's
Speaker 4: not now like okay, you know what I mean. So
Speaker 4: like when we demand, you know, abolish the thirteenth, it's
Speaker 4: like that's like kind of a long term, like strategic
Speaker 4: like legal demand, but just because a state, like I
Speaker 4: feel like this is being recuperated into the kind of
Speaker 4: like self congratulates or you know, like like fox civil
Speaker 4: rights like liberalism at this point, because like states are
Speaker 4: like abolishing their version of the thirteenth and then being
Speaker 4: like cool, our work here is done. Oh but you
Speaker 4: didn't do anything actually right, And Colorado in fact still
Speaker 4: forces people to work in their prisons and it is
Speaker 4: illegal technically, but like it ain't quite as illegal as
Speaker 4: you know, it ain't the same type of illegal when
Speaker 4: the state is doing it right, the state is not
Speaker 4: in fact bound by its own laws in practice. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and I mean also juxtaposed like everything that Jigi just
Speaker 4: said about self defense with like the excuses that cops
Speaker 4: are allowed to give when they shoot people out out
Speaker 4: at random. Right, it's like, oh, well, the standard for
Speaker 4: a human being, you know, killing another human being is
Speaker 4: it has to be like in mutual combat, like you
Speaker 4: have to be using proportionate for sta da da da da,
Speaker 4: whereas like a cop can just be like, well I
Speaker 4: kind of thought that he was holding thing or whatever.
Speaker 4: So yeah, And as far as organizing goes, I mean, people,
Speaker 4: I just want to say, people take lots of actions.
Speaker 4: So a lot of the form that our organizing takes
Speaker 4: is like we establish ourselves as a presence. We have
Speaker 4: our incarcerated members. They give us information about what either
Speaker 4: they or other groups of people are doing. Other people
Speaker 4: on the outside know about us. They give us information
Speaker 4: about what's going on in places, and we are kind
Speaker 4: of known as like the prison labor organization that does
Speaker 4: stuff around those and there really isn't as far as
Speaker 4: I'm aware, a kind of organization that like does that
Speaker 4: direct support specifically around labor issues anywhere else in the
Speaker 4: United States, again outside of the local level perhaps, So, Yeah,
Speaker 4: what we do is we pressure the prisons and jails
Speaker 4: to give into the prisoner's demands. And they're not necessarily
Speaker 4: going to like be like, oh, well, now that we've
Speaker 4: heard from the public, we will do all the demands.
Speaker 4: But like you heard the list of stuff that we
Speaker 4: read off about the Fresno jail, Like that was a
Speaker 4: surprising list of stuff, and they weren't actually striking or anything.
Speaker 4: And so oftentimes because of the power and balance, it
Speaker 4: does sort of just make more sense for us to
Speaker 4: just pressure the prison directly, regardless of whether there's a
Speaker 4: strike or not. But people do go on strike in
Speaker 4: prison and do work slowdowns in prison and all that
Speaker 4: kind of stuff. And it helps to have an outside
Speaker 4: like buffer and like support team and like a relational
Speaker 4: network of support, just like it does with other workers, right,
Speaker 4: Like building that kind of network of mutual aid and
Speaker 4: respect and support is what makes more action possible. And
Speaker 4: so that's what we kind of seek to do. And
Speaker 4: prison solidarity is something that is also not one directional.
Speaker 4: You know, you probably got a sense of this, you
Speaker 4: know in the snippets with Odra. But we learn a
Speaker 4: lot from our inside numbers. We learn life changing lessons
Speaker 4: from our inside members a lot, and they learn from
Speaker 4: us too. But we always tell new members, like especially
Speaker 4: you know, if they don't have a lot of experience
Speaker 4: with prison or whatever, it's like, do not approach this
Speaker 4: or from like a paternalistic standpoint, Like yes, they have
Speaker 4: a lot to learn, but so do we, and relationships
Speaker 4: and lessons go both ways. And also like prison admins
Speaker 4: are just incredibly vulnerable to public scrutiny, Like we heard
Speaker 4: how bad things are there, and it's like they don't
Speaker 4: want people knowing this, Like they have just skated by
Speaker 4: on like the kind of general Reagan eighties vibe of
Speaker 4: like oh yeah, this is actually part of the punishment,
Speaker 4: like this entire time, and like that is still their mindset.
Speaker 4: It's like, yeah, prison isn't supposed to be fun. What
Speaker 4: do you mean we need to give people toothpaste? Like
Speaker 4: that is still like their attitude to the tea and
Speaker 4: we need to intervene in that because that's really terrible. Actually, yeah,
Speaker 4: and you know, this is an authoritarian country, like straight
Speaker 4: up for the less wealthy half of the population, and
Speaker 4: this is like a huge part of that. And we
Speaker 4: can't just like not challenge the prison system and then
Speaker 4: do like radical organizing of any other kind and be like, yeah,
Speaker 4: we can just ignore or this prison thing. It surely
Speaker 4: will not come to eat us at any point.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: There's also this kind of myth of like labor as rehabilitation,
Speaker 4: which is just like a you know, kind of calvinist
Speaker 4: sort of you know, humbug. But it's like, you know,
Speaker 4: we've already established that a lot of people in prison
Speaker 4: didn't do anything wrong, but like for those who did,
Speaker 4: like you know, within whatevery mortal framework you're using like
Speaker 4: if you're if you're someone who like goes around causing harm,
Speaker 4: how is like performing labor going to make you not
Speaker 4: that person? It's not. They're just producing surplus value, right,
Speaker 4: So that's total shit. And uh, and it's also you know,
Speaker 4: it's just kind of like this this old fashioned eighteen
Speaker 4: hundreds logic of like coorehouses and shit, you know, like
Speaker 4: make them work, We'll make everything better somehow. And as
Speaker 4: for being sued, like we know that the persons hate
Speaker 4: being sued, the people who really see them, the best,
Speaker 4: oftentimes are jail house lawyers, and we know that they
Speaker 4: hate that because like they will straight up try to
Speaker 4: have those people killed. Not only will they try to
Speaker 4: have those people killed, they will try to have any
Speaker 4: kind of prison staff reguard that like grows a conscience
Speaker 4: and is like, yeah, this thing that we did is
Speaker 4: kind of fucked up. Like I can't say with certainty,
Speaker 4: but like those people have died under suspicious circumstances. Just
Speaker 4: to contextualize it, like the prison adminsphere of public scrutiny
Speaker 4: like so much. And whenever we do something like this
Speaker 4: that is like sustained and like strategic and involving a
Speaker 4: lot of participation, which it's unfortunately not always and we
Speaker 4: need to work on that. And that is part of
Speaker 4: building a like staunch support base right is doing these
Speaker 4: distributed actions in a way that is like really sustained,
Speaker 4: so you know, we communicate with specific people and apply
Speaker 4: it pressure to the institution directly without going through any
Speaker 4: kind of like proper channels necessarily which tend to just
Speaker 4: do nothing. But doing this, we have stopped jail house
Speaker 4: lawyers from being killed. We have gotten firefighters at the
Speaker 4: Central California Women's facility their time credits, which the prison
Speaker 4: was like dragging their feet on giving them to the
Speaker 4: extent that like it was actually going to affect when
Speaker 4: they got out, like they were having like six months
Speaker 4: of time that they like weren't applying like eight months
Speaker 4: from like their current get out time, you know what
Speaker 4: I mean, Jesus. And so we fixed that. We have
Speaker 4: gotten multiple people like real medical care as opposed to
Speaker 4: like fake medical care. There was actually a kitchen strike
Speaker 4: that we didn't we didn't directly support, just because it
Speaker 4: like happened too quickly. Like I just I think I
Speaker 4: gave some like advice, but that was about it. And
Speaker 4: like they just like stopped paying them. Like in california're
Speaker 4: supposed to make like eight cents an hour or whatever,
Speaker 4: and they just were like, we're just not going to
Speaker 4: pay you with your eight cents anymore, but eight since
Speaker 4: an hour.
Speaker 1: Is too expensive for you as a person could fuck
Speaker 1: it off. God, Jesus Christ to hate these people.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean this is just the nature of exploitation. Yeah,
Speaker 4: Like they're always just trying to like, oh, we've gotten
Speaker 4: away with a million things, let's get away with a
Speaker 4: million and month things. Yep, you know like it's it's
Speaker 4: it's the nature of oppression and exploitation, right, yeah, So
Speaker 4: they struck and they won back their eight cents an hour,
Speaker 4: and there was a slowdown that you can read about
Speaker 4: in Prison Reports, which is like a movement news outlet,
Speaker 4: where people did a slow down. People that were producing,
Speaker 4: like the boxers for other prisoners I believe, did a
Speaker 4: work slow down about two years ago, eighteen months ago
Speaker 4: or so. And this was just to get access to
Speaker 4: the commissary. So like they were making good money by
Speaker 4: like prison standards, but like the commissary closed while they
Speaker 4: were still working, and so they couldn't spend their money.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, and so they did a slowdown to like
Speaker 4: fix that. This was part of California Prison Industries Authority,
Speaker 4: which like is the manufacturer of oftentimes first resort for
Speaker 4: like all kinds of like furniture and other supplies for
Speaker 4: the state of California, including the UC system. And this
Speaker 4: is often the case with other states as well. And
Speaker 4: we also just are disseminating helpful info all the time,
Speaker 4: Like with that legal info. It's like if you show
Speaker 4: up with like a bunch of like radical literature and
Speaker 4: like some legal info to like a puncture, people are like,
Speaker 4: why you have legal info? Befoor ing fall, But like
Speaker 4: in prison, it's like, yeah, you're gonna find some people
Speaker 4: interested in the radical info and like that stuff. People
Speaker 4: are interested in it too, But like the legal info
Speaker 4: is what people really want because it is more practical.
Speaker 4: It's like, you know, we of course we distribute information
Speaker 4: about the IWW and about solidarity, unionism and and you know,
Speaker 4: feminism and all kinds of other stuff, you know, the
Speaker 4: Black Panthers, you know, the whole nine. But like what
Speaker 4: people really do want, because it's the most practical, is
Speaker 4: like how do I sue the prison? How do I
Speaker 4: legally hack my way out of this beast? And like
Speaker 4: it works, and a lot of our best and like
Speaker 4: brightest outside members who were once inside members, like they
Speaker 4: didn't just wait for their sentence to expire. They like
Speaker 4: had to file a grievances and like take every opportunity
Speaker 4: to like be the prison's worst op to the point
Speaker 4: that the prison was just like just what the fuck
Speaker 4: out already Like enough of this person? Yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 4: that's most of what I got.
Speaker 1: How can people support y'all and get involved more?
Speaker 8: So? Definitely Cook should visit us at Incarcerated Workers dot
Speaker 8: org and we will provide those links and definitely sign
Speaker 8: up for our newswatter where we give some updates on
Speaker 8: what's happening inside in a safe way to protect our
Speaker 8: members inside and their organizing work, but also hear about
Speaker 8: you know, work happening across the country and across the
Speaker 8: world as well.
Speaker 4: I would also, I guess, just add that we really
Speaker 4: want labor unionists and healthcare workers and lawyers and law
Speaker 4: students and researchers to plug into our website because there
Speaker 4: are spaces and reporters and journalists, I should say as well,
Speaker 4: to plug into our website because there are spaces for
Speaker 4: just them. That doesn't mean that we don't want other
Speaker 4: people signing up too, but those professions, I think, in particular,
Speaker 4: you know and educators also have a lot of impact
Speaker 4: and like a lot of relationships direct and indirect to
Speaker 4: the system that we want to kind of zero in
Speaker 4: on and do something with. And the website elaborates on that.
Speaker 4: If you're addicted to Instagram, you can follow us there
Speaker 4: at Incarcerated Workers and also at thea Underscore Iwalk or California.
Speaker 4: But if you're not, then good for you. And instead
Speaker 4: you should sign up to our email newsletter.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I will leave it at that.
Speaker 14: In sure, let's burn it down amazing.
Speaker 1: Now, before we go, I want to mention something extremely
Speaker 1: important that we'll be covering in more detail in a
Speaker 1: later episode, which is the planned twenty twenty seven National
Speaker 1: Prisoners Human Rights Strike plan to run from May Day
Speaker 1: to juneteenth and twenty twenty seven. We're going to talk
Speaker 1: more about this in a later episode and get more
Speaker 1: of the history of the twenty sixteen to twenty eighteen
Speaker 1: prisoner strikes that I walk in Joe House Lawyers Speak,
Speaker 1: who we're going to be reading a statement from in
Speaker 1: a second we're involved in. But for now, I'm going
Speaker 1: to close this episode by quoting the statement released by
Speaker 1: Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, why we strike. A political storm is
Speaker 1: sweeping through many prisons across the nation, as the prison
Speaker 1: class plainly see the hidden mechanisms of a system designed
Speaker 1: to dehumanize the imprisoned population. For too long, many of
Speaker 1: us were kept in the dark about the machinery behind
Speaker 1: our confinement. How law enforcement, district attorneys, politicians, and judges
Speaker 1: win elections on platforms of mass imprisonment, and how private
Speaker 1: interests in rural economies profit off our bedcounts. Our captive
Speaker 1: bodies are weaponized through prison based gerrymandering, where our numbers
Speaker 1: are used to swell the political power and draw federal
Speaker 1: funding into rural districts, all while stripping us of any
Speaker 1: voter representation. Through these exceptional clauses, the prison class is
Speaker 1: relegated to conditional citizens ship, a status where constitutional rights
Speaker 1: are granted at the pleasure of the state. When officials
Speaker 1: can openly discuss transferring imprisoned citizens to foreign prisons without
Speaker 1: constitutional barrier, it is because these exception clauses have already
Speaker 1: stripped the prison class of the full protections of citizenship.
Speaker 1: Behind the razors, this legal disenfranchisement is paired with the
Speaker 1: reality of living in unventilated, boiling cells during climate extremes,
Speaker 1: enduring endless so called staffing shortage lockdowns ordered by prison crats,
Speaker 1: washing militarized roundups and ice attention centers, and seeing poor
Speaker 1: people funneled into plea deals simply because they cannot afford
Speaker 1: cash bail or paid legal defense. The traffic extends beyond
Speaker 1: the walls, thousands on thousands of people in prison who
Speaker 1: meet the basic parole requirements are repeatedly denied parole by
Speaker 1: arbitrary boards citing quote the nature of the original crime
Speaker 1: end quote, a static reason that never changes, solely to
Speaker 1: maintain prison bed quotas even upon release. The karstural state
Speaker 1: traps formerly imprisoned people under supervision, debt, electronic surveillance inco monitors,
Speaker 1: and restricted probation and parole systems that serve as a
Speaker 1: revolving door back to a cell the core demands. While
Speaker 1: the full ten national demands remain active, strike organizers across
Speaker 1: committed states are focusing on three core demands. One and
Speaker 1: legalized slavery. Repeal the exception clause at the thirteenth Amendment
Speaker 1: to the US Constitution. This is the cause that last
Speaker 1: slavery is punished with in prisons. Two Restore voting rights.
Speaker 1: Repeal exception clauses such as Section two of the fourteenth
Speaker 1: Amendment that strip voting rights from confined citizens, pre trial detainees,
Speaker 1: and former felons. Three free all the political prisoners in
Speaker 1: the US prisons. Thank you all both for doing this
Speaker 1: work and for fighting this fight, and for being on
Speaker 1: the show. And I hope we all go out into
Speaker 1: the world and fight for workers everywhere, wherever they may be, and.
Speaker 11: This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly
Speaker 11: newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
Speaker 11: and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today.
Speaker 11: I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans.
Speaker 11: Who do we do this episode? We're covering the week
Speaker 11: of August twelfth through August.
Speaker 7: Nineteenth, So I guess I'll start with I've seen reports
Speaker 7: that ICE is using parked vehicles, I guess as staging
Speaker 7: points for cameras. And I have seen videos of what
Speaker 7: appeared to be licensed plate flippers on ICE vehicles. If
Speaker 7: you're not familiar, right, Like, there's been lots and lots
Speaker 7: of reports of ICE agents like manually changing license plates.
Speaker 7: This just appears to be a device gos rotates one
Speaker 7: hundred and eighty degrees, so you've got two license plates available.
Speaker 7: A lot of the pictures we saw a man being
Speaker 7: I'm not sure if he was arrested or just like
Speaker 7: harassed for saying like, why don't you have a license
Speaker 7: plate on your vehicle? Why don't you have a license
Speaker 7: plate on your vehicle? And it very much appears if
Speaker 7: that vehicle had a license plate flipper on the front. Secondly,
Speaker 7: CBP is pausing all construction in Big Bend. This is
Speaker 7: according to Rodney Scott, who's the CBP commissioner, who says
Speaker 7: he is personally on his way there to conduct a
Speaker 7: quite personal evaluation. It's entirely unclear, like what that means
Speaker 7: and what are the criteria for this evaluation? Right, Like,
Speaker 7: there are dozens of laws, treaties and regulations that cover
Speaker 7: the kind of thing that they are doing in the
Speaker 7: place that they are doing it, and they have waived
Speaker 7: all of them. So this is what we get now, right,
Speaker 7: we get Rodney Scott going on a plane and just
Speaker 7: like giving it the like the imperial thumbs up or
Speaker 7: thumbs down like some kind of Roman emperor. I guess,
Speaker 7: like this is a thing that wouldn't fly in like
Speaker 7: a hereditary monarchy like the UK. Right where we now
Speaker 7: have one person making this choice that everyone will have
Speaker 7: to live with forever. They are destroying a place which
Speaker 7: is beautiful and one of the places that has not
Speaker 7: been ruined by capitalism and the state one of the
Speaker 7: few large areas of public land in Texas. So I
Speaker 7: will keep you updated on what Rodney Scott decides to do.
Speaker 7: I will probably do an episode on my other show
Speaker 7: Natural Courses about Big Bend soon. And then finally, I
Speaker 7: guess as we're talking about borderwall stuff from me, people
Speaker 7: are conducting a tree sit in a cottonwood tree in Arizona.
Speaker 7: The cottonwood tree. It's a very old cottonwood tree, sometimes
Speaker 7: called Grandmother tree. These people are trying to protect it
Speaker 7: from being destroyed due to border wall construction. They've been
Speaker 7: sitting in that tree for several weeks.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 7: I will eventually go visit them. It's going to go
Speaker 7: visit them, but I went to Spokane when those fires struck. Instead,
Speaker 7: they have been joined by someone on the Mexican side,
Speaker 7: So now there are two tree sitters, making this the
Speaker 7: first international tree sit that I am ever aware of.
Speaker 7: That rules Yeah, no, it's great. Hell yeah, hell yeah.
Speaker 7: Well like trees don't know borders, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: As I highlighted in my other podcast, Natural Cause, is
Speaker 7: the US left really fucked up when NAFTA came in
Speaker 7: by not saying if you're going to try and pay
Speaker 7: people less in Mexico, then we will try and organize
Speaker 7: people in Mexico and together we will demand dignified wages
Speaker 7: and conditions. I'm glad that people are not taking that
Speaker 7: approach anymore because they didn't get us anywhere. Yeah, I'll
Speaker 7: keep covering the situation there as well.
Speaker 1: So, speaking of I guess the long range effects of NAFTA. KOSB,
Speaker 1: which is the Korean stock index, hit its circuit breaker,
Speaker 1: which is the breaker that hits if you lose too
Speaker 1: much percentage of the stock market's value again on Wednesday.
Speaker 1: I genuinely have lost count of the number of times
Speaker 1: that it has been triggered over the past few months.
Speaker 1: This has become a regular recurrence in one of the
Speaker 1: largest and most important stock markets in the world. This
Speaker 1: time it was fueled by a collapse of textile and
Speaker 1: the Brent Fruit Index hitting ninety dollars a barrel. We
Speaker 1: will be getting into some more of the impacts of
Speaker 1: that later.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 1: My guess is that it's going to rebound as everyone
Speaker 1: buys the dip tomorrow. But any one of these could
Speaker 1: be the one where it doesn't rebound, and we will
Speaker 1: let you know whether the global economic collapses on Yay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what happens if there's not a rebound? What is
Speaker 2: that going to look like ud, everyone's fucked.
Speaker 16: No.
Speaker 2: I mean, like in terms of what is your expecting
Speaker 2: cascade of events.
Speaker 1: If that goes down, Oh, the entire global economy goes under.
Speaker 1: Because the Korean stock market right now is basically a
Speaker 1: kind of tragedy as farcet version of the American market
Speaker 1: where most of almost all of the value is congealed
Speaker 1: into these three AI yeah, three companies that yeah, basically
Speaker 1: make AI chips, right, and then the rest of the
Speaker 1: value down the shane is people doing weird gambling stuff
Speaker 1: on different AI components. If the market just actually crashes,
Speaker 1: that is those three companies, and you know we're talking
Speaker 1: like Samsung here, right, these are vital components in the
Speaker 1: entire AI I mean not just the AI sere obviously
Speaker 1: the Samsung, right, like we're talking about you know, things
Speaker 1: that are vital components and the big tech companies Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: in like all of the manufacturing of like tech all
Speaker 1: over the world. If that stuff goes down, that takes
Speaker 1: the American markets with it, That takes all of all
Speaker 1: the global markets that are reliant on these AI surges
Speaker 1: go with it. And that's kind of just the beginning
Speaker 1: of the poppy of the tech bubble.
Speaker 3: Yep, yep, yep.
Speaker 2: I just wanted to get to that because it's like
Speaker 2: it is, it is this mirror of exactly what's gone
Speaker 2: on in the United States. I guess the big difference
Speaker 2: is that so far, the obvious signs of trouble in
Speaker 2: South Korea have not set off alarm bells in at
Speaker 2: least in American investors to the extent that you might expect.
Speaker 2: But I'm sure.
Speaker 1: There's been some Like it tends to be the other
Speaker 1: way around, where Cosby tends to kind of be following
Speaker 1: the American markets, But there have definitely been days where, like,
Speaker 1: because of the time difference in Korea, all of the
Speaker 1: American investors wake up to watch like ten percent going down,
Speaker 1: like ten percent of the value of the createstock market
Speaker 1: disappearing in one night, and in that lowers American stocks,
Speaker 1: and then Trump says something about the war ending and
Speaker 1: it goes back up again. So there has been some
Speaker 1: notice of it, but our grand collective delusion to maintain
Speaker 1: the functioning of capitalism continues.
Speaker 7: Great, good, good good.
Speaker 11: On Tuesday, there was a GP debate for the South
Speaker 11: Carolina US Senate special runoff election so it's a special
Speaker 11: election and a runoff. And in this debate, sister of
Speaker 11: the fallen Lindsay Graham, Darlene Graham, could not answer a
Speaker 11: pretty rudimentary foreign policy question because it is not her
Speaker 11: area of expertise. Let's take a lesson, Senator, are Taiwan
Speaker 11: and the South China Sea national security issues for the
Speaker 11: United States?
Speaker 16: If so, what, I'm sorry, could you repeat it? If
Speaker 16: our Taiwan and the South China Sea national security issues
Speaker 16: for the United States? And if so, why or how?
Speaker 14: I'm just gonna be honest here.
Speaker 16: I'm not on national security that I'm not that informed
Speaker 16: on national security. So, but I do support the military.
Speaker 16: My brother was in the Air Force for thirty three years,
Speaker 16: so I will do everything I can to support the
Speaker 16: military stuff.
Speaker 2: You know what, honesty. That's what we need in politicians, is.
Speaker 1: Hon I love hereditary seats. This is an amazing feature
Speaker 1: of what is supposed to be a representative democracy. It's
Speaker 1: so good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I don't know shit about fuck, but I
Speaker 2: love the army.
Speaker 11: That's incredible. She later goes on to literally say it's
Speaker 11: on her quote unquote area of expertise. It just talks
Speaker 11: about how regardless, she will always support the US military.
Speaker 11: It's this is townding Lindsay Graham rolling over in his grave.
Speaker 11: So that is Darley and Graham, sister of Lindsay Graham,
Speaker 11: who is facing Republican Ralph Norman in this runoff election,
Speaker 11: the winner of which will then face the Democrat doctor
Speaker 11: Annie Andrews for this general election in November to replace
Speaker 11: Lindsay's seat.
Speaker 1: Pretty cool, God, I hope she wins the primary. I
Speaker 1: want to see more.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, this will be highly amusing if nothing else.
Speaker 11: Oh man, I want to briefly mention some new information
Speaker 11: regarding the federal investigations into anti ice protests in the
Speaker 11: Twin Cities, based on some newly released court documents. This
Speaker 11: was first reported in the New York Times, and I
Speaker 11: have read through the like thirty page motion filed by
Speaker 11: the defense that unveiled these documents and a number of
Speaker 11: the thirty some exhibits. And I'll report on this in full,
Speaker 11: probably next week with its own episode. But I do
Speaker 11: want to discuss with the group here a little bit.
Speaker 11: So four days after CPB killed Alex pretty DHS open
Speaker 11: investigation into labor unions and left wing activist groups. That
Speaker 11: they thought were involved in funding the anti ICE protests
Speaker 11: and quote providing material support to violent opportunists unquote. This
Speaker 11: HSI investigation amounted to a massive spying operation called Operation
Speaker 11: puppet Master and later Operation Whipple Shield. Whipple is the
Speaker 11: name of the federal building that was at the heart
Speaker 11: of a lot of the protests in the Twin Cities.
Speaker 11: And these operations ended up probing three years of financial
Speaker 11: records from organizations like Sunrise Movement, the Communication Workers of America,
Speaker 11: and the Healthcare Union s CiU as a part of
Speaker 11: a quote unquote financial investigation into quote unquote domestic terrorist financing.
Speaker 11: I think it's really important to point out here is
Speaker 11: that this three year time span of of of documents
Speaker 11: extends far beyond the time span of Operation Metro Surge
Speaker 11: and the protests. Right this this this, this is not
Speaker 11: a probe into into financing specific protest groups responding to ICE.
Speaker 11: This is just a general drag net into labor unions,
Speaker 11: into left wing nonprofits, environmental groups, a racial justice activist
Speaker 11: group in the area like this is this is a
Speaker 11: huge probe. They're looking into VENMO transactions, They're requesting bank
Speaker 11: records like this. This is a massive probe of like the
Speaker 11: the interior of like some very major national unions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting when you look at who they're looking into, right,
Speaker 1: because it's it's a really really wide swath like across
Speaker 1: the political spectrum of the left, like s c IU.
Speaker 1: Like obviously there are like locals of SCIU that like
Speaker 1: do good work, but like nationally, s CiU is not
Speaker 1: like a radical organization, right, Like, yeah, of the major unions,
Speaker 1: this is like an extremely extremely milk toast union, right.
Speaker 7: Yeah. I guess contacts with CiU particularly would be that
Speaker 7: they arrested David Huerta in Los Angeles in Junia of
Speaker 7: last year, right, it's union leaders.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and I know because Alex Pretty was a healthcare worker.
Speaker 11: SIU is a healthcare union. Like I went to like
Speaker 11: a solidarity protest put together by a bunch of different
Speaker 11: unions in New York City following the death of Alex Pretty. Yeah,
Speaker 11: it's interesting that the federal government picked up on that
Speaker 11: sort of union solidarity and then started investigating it.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 11: I think that is that is really telling.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Part of what I'm getting at here is like they're
Speaker 1: just going after everyone who's even like tangentially involved in
Speaker 1: these protests, right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, The way the state sees this is they're incapable
Speaker 7: of organizing like spontaneous and like horizontal solidarity. Are seeing that, right,
Speaker 7: they understand Yeah. SEIU folks showed up in New York
Speaker 7: where Garrison is, and I think they're not called the AFT.
Speaker 7: In Minneapolis, maybe they called the Federation of Educators or
Speaker 7: something like that. MFE looks like, yeah, like another union
Speaker 7: right for educators evidently, and fifty to fifty one and
Speaker 7: some more explicitly socialists and leftist groups showed up against us,
Speaker 7: showed up in solidarity off d alex Pretti was killed.
Speaker 7: And the way the States sees this is therefore they
Speaker 7: are nationally and vertically integrated and someone is pulling the
Speaker 7: strings and paying the funds, not like they are fucking mad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like it's like the way that they see
Speaker 1: it is like, yeah, like SCIU National has like handed
Speaker 1: down like the riot orders just.
Speaker 7: Like no no CiU like, but she's right, Like that
Speaker 7: is how they understand it.
Speaker 1: If like time traveling militants for the nineteen seventies kidnapped
Speaker 1: SEIUS leadership and held them at gunpoint and said we
Speaker 1: will let you go if you order mass riots, they
Speaker 1: still wouldn't do it. Like, that's not that's not what
Speaker 1: this is. But yeah, the Feds have a hammer, and
Speaker 1: they're trying to hammer down every single thing that even
Speaker 1: vaguely looks like a nail, so they can do sort
Speaker 1: of the broadest and widest ranging oppression that they can
Speaker 1: deal with.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and we have like an example of how HSI
Speaker 11: is envisioning this sort of conspiracy like what we're talking about,
Speaker 11: because as a part of the new exhibits that were
Speaker 11: released to the public, we have this slide that was
Speaker 11: sent to grandeurors for the indictment which we'll soon talk about,
Speaker 11: that targeting fifteen protesters. The grand jury was shown this
Speaker 11: slide that is labeled the conspiracy that has about fifteen
Speaker 11: different organizations with all with arrows pointing towards Direct Action
Speaker 11: Minnesota DAM, which is the protest group that the government
Speaker 11: alleges the fifteen people indicted were involved with in some way.
Speaker 11: I want to read through some of these organizations that
Speaker 11: are part of this conspiracy diagram. There's the Monarca Rapid
Speaker 11: Response Line, There's Ray Rainbolt Memorial Gun Club, Red Pine
Speaker 11: Revolutionary Collective, SCIU twenty six showing it for racial justice,
Speaker 11: Socialist Alternative, Veterans for Peace, Whipple Watch, Workers Solidarity Circle,
Speaker 11: afl CIO, Black Cat Workers Collective, the Democratic Socialist of America,
Speaker 11: the Grease Pit, which is a local bike shop. Hell Yeah,
Speaker 11: Minute Left CHAB, Minneapolis Federation of Educators Local fifty nine,
Speaker 11: Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, Minnesota Ice Watch, and Minnesota
Speaker 11: five oh five oh one. Pretty incredible, pretty incredible collection.
Speaker 11: They're all supposed to.
Speaker 1: Be like sending like a council member.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the diagram has is that there's a council member
Speaker 5: these organizations, council that like is part of Direct Action Minnesota.
Speaker 11: It's like orchestrating all these protests. It's incredible.
Speaker 7: I love to see like kreminology overcoming like a DIY
Speaker 7: bike shop that has been for a few hours, a
Speaker 7: few afternoons a week, like it's the Pollit Bureau of
Speaker 7: Minnesota is populated by like bike co ops.
Speaker 1: It's just a shadow council, James Shadow.
Speaker 12: They're running everyway.
Speaker 7: It's incredible.
Speaker 11: This is what happens when Socialist Alternative and DSA can
Speaker 11: overcome their differences and support council comunism to tend November
Speaker 11: to Direct Action Minnesota High Council, Black and Red United.
Speaker 11: Yet it's incredible stuff. Now, of course, none of these
Speaker 11: organizations themselves have actually phased charges stemming from this investigation.
Speaker 11: But this investigation did result in fifteen people being indicted
Speaker 11: on quote, conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer
Speaker 11: for allegedly planning to block a roadway, among a few
Speaker 11: other charges against specific individuals for participating in ice rapid response. So,
Speaker 11: although dsay the Grease Pit and like SCIU are not
Speaker 11: themselves as organizations you know charged this this sort of huge,
Speaker 11: like a very broad investigation into nonprofit organizations, into electoral organizations,
Speaker 11: into labor unions. This did result in charges against specific people,
Speaker 11: many of whom are not part of these you know,
Speaker 11: fifteen fifteen council member organizations. The defense lawyer Kevin Riach
Speaker 11: wrote in emotion, quote Homeland Security Investigations investigation extended far
Speaker 11: beyond any potential threat to law enforcement safety. It concluded,
Speaker 11: with no evidence but obvious political animus, that numerous Twin Cities, unions,
Speaker 11: and nonprofit organizations were involved in a widespread conspiracy to
Speaker 11: violate eighteen USC. One one one assaulting, resisting, or impeding
Speaker 11: certain officers or employees. And it surveilled and surptitiously gathered
Speaker 11: financial records generated by these organizations, despite the lack of
Speaker 11: any connection between those organizations and criminal conduct.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's co intel, a pro shit. Just it never ended.
Speaker 1: They're just doing it again. I've always been doing it.
Speaker 11: Yes, And part of what these new docs reveal is
Speaker 11: is much more details on like the covert surveillance of
Speaker 11: organizer meetings at libraries and churches, and the way in
Speaker 11: the extent that Homeland Security infiltrated signal chats and how
Speaker 11: undercovers tried to entice people into discussing or committing crimes.
Speaker 11: And I want to discuss that in more detail in
Speaker 11: its own episode because I think that requires a very
Speaker 11: careful focus on how how that actually went about, because
Speaker 11: I think that can very easily be turned into you know,
Speaker 11: panicking or maybe overstating certain things regarding you know, where
Speaker 11: ICE the ones actually you know, directing all the protests
Speaker 11: against Ice, and like no, obviously not so. I think
Speaker 11: that that requires a distinct focus. Specifically in these core documents,
Speaker 11: there's there's a there's a reference to an undercover discussing
Speaker 11: with someone at like a Sunrise Movement meeting about getting
Speaker 11: more involved in direct actions and and maybe building quote
Speaker 11: unquote devices for direct actions. So like it's it's that
Speaker 11: kind of stuff, and I want to discuss that more
Speaker 11: in detail. But this new batchel of core documents in
Speaker 11: this case has revealed a lot about about how this
Speaker 11: investigation went. How it started off very very broad against
Speaker 11: a lot of organizations and like what you know, national
Speaker 11: Security Presidential Memory dem number seven wrote about, you know,
Speaker 11: looking to the finances of a lot of different nonprofit groups,
Speaker 11: but then from there realizing that maybe they are not
Speaker 11: going to be able to prosecute all these unions for
Speaker 11: terrorist financing. Instead they find fifteen people who are engaged
Speaker 11: in firstmen in activity that they think they could maybe
Speaker 11: you know, turn into an Antifa boogeyman and get that
Speaker 11: pastor grand jury, because you certainly couldnot get the rest
Speaker 11: of this shit past a grand jury. Yeah.
Speaker 7: Talking of like pushing the boundaries of the Constitution with
Speaker 7: regards to policing as a good tie into this next
Speaker 7: piece that I have, which is to talk about the
Speaker 7: national defense areas. So the DOJ has issued a new
Speaker 7: opinion this week suggesting the military forces in the National
Speaker 7: Defense Areas that span that much of the border can
Speaker 7: now detain people not just inside the NDA but also
Speaker 7: near the NDA who leave it before they have time
Speaker 7: to arrest them. If you're not familiar with the NDA,
Speaker 7: these areas along the border wall that have been transferred
Speaker 7: to the military and are being managed as extensions of
Speaker 7: military basis. For example, NDA number three, the California NDA
Speaker 7: begins I think at the western edge of Oti mount
Speaker 7: of Wilderness, stretches all the way to the Arizona border
Speaker 7: in Imperial County. That is an extension of nafeal Center,
Speaker 7: so that's Naval Air Facility EL Center, so that's patrolled
Speaker 7: by marines. The New Mexico one is an extension of
Speaker 7: Fort Huachuca and that's patrolled by the Army. There is
Speaker 7: one in Texas which is an extension of Fort Bliss
Speaker 7: for Bliss Spanzer's two states, but that goes that NDA
Speaker 7: goes into Texas. More the bases themselves are being extended. Therefore,
Speaker 7: the logic goes from the Justice Department that they are
Speaker 7: not violating the Posscomatatis Act because there are recognized exemptions
Speaker 7: they say for military installations so they're saying because the
Speaker 7: base is being extended to generally but not always, it
Speaker 7: is the Roosevelt Reservation, right, which is a sixty foot
Speaker 7: area to the north of the physical border, but some
Speaker 7: of these NDA's span areas larger than that. They are
Speaker 7: claiming that that area is therefore exempt from PCA if
Speaker 7: the military is prosecuting or in this case, arresting or
Speaker 7: detaining people for trespassing on a military installation, right, they
Speaker 7: think that the military can also enforce federal law on
Speaker 7: its installations. So by definition, anyone ewie entry without inspection, right,
Speaker 7: So thatt, someone entering between ports of entry, anybody doing
Speaker 7: that in an NDA, which is a large amount of
Speaker 7: southern border right now, would be trespassing on a military installation.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 7: You can also see in this opinion they they're like
Speaker 7: hinting it adding more NDAs soon. This is the same
Speaker 7: legal reasoning that they are using. Claim it is illegal
Speaker 7: to photograph things inside an NDA. I think this one
Speaker 7: is incredibly suspect. Right, So the statutory law does ban
Speaker 7: photography of quote, certain vital military or naval installations or equipment.
Speaker 7: But I think you'd have a very hard time arguing
Speaker 7: in call that like a pile of razor wire and
Speaker 7: some rocks, is vital military equips. But that's what they're
Speaker 7: going with, right. This is important because what we are
Speaker 7: seeing here is a Trump administration pushing at the boundaries
Speaker 7: of constitutionally what it can do. And as I've said
Speaker 7: hundreds of times on this show of the last four years,
Speaker 7: this always starts at the border, and it never stays
Speaker 7: at the border.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 7: Everything we see with mass surveillance now has been a
Speaker 7: reality in border communities for some time. Everything we see
Speaker 7: with the increased presence of ice of CBP, this has
Speaker 7: been something that border communities have dealt with, right, This
Speaker 7: particularly violent form of law enforcement that is particularly unaccountable.
Speaker 7: If we see this at the border, and they get
Speaker 7: away with it at the border, then I'm sure it
Speaker 7: will continue in other places. It doesn't take like a
Speaker 7: brain genius to look at, for instance, what happened in
Speaker 7: Portland six years ago, right, and see how we could
Speaker 7: edge towards the PCA Poscombat Artist Act waivers in other
Speaker 7: parts of the United States as well. So I think
Speaker 7: this is worth keeping an ion, and like I would
Speaker 7: like it to get more attention in reporting.
Speaker 11: Let's go on add break, and then we'll discuss in
Speaker 11: honor of Lindsay Graham, the US military.
Speaker 7: Who we support, but we don't know where they go.
Speaker 11: All right, there's a lot of military news this week.
Speaker 11: That ship does not look like it's doing too well.
Speaker 11: Let's let's start with the sad boat.
Speaker 2: That was sad boat? Anyone here old enough to have
Speaker 2: watched the Love Boat on Nick at Night?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 2: No, no, okay, all right.
Speaker 7: Well he didn't have that where I grew out, Robert.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's hurtful. This is all very hurtful. Anyway, The
Speaker 2: sad boat is the USS Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 11: How sad is this?
Speaker 7: Yeah? Yeah, where is it?
Speaker 2: Ape said, well, well, yeah, miya, you want to you
Speaker 2: want to start?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so so the US Abraham Lincoln. It's it's actually
Speaker 1: funny because we have now reached a point where when
Speaker 1: you say the sad boat, I actually couldn't tell which
Speaker 1: of the boats you were referring to, because.
Speaker 2: It was the Jerry Ford before it was the Abraham Lincoln,
Speaker 2: and the gerald Ford had longer to be sad.
Speaker 1: Well, there was also a destroyer this playing this all
Speaker 1: trying to see where the power.
Speaker 12: Was out for three days?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, they didn't have running water.
Speaker 7: Which one was it where they were blocking up all
Speaker 7: the toilets, but like jamming, there was toilet paper.
Speaker 2: That's the Jerry Ford and I think the Lincoln, all
Speaker 2: of our newest supercarriers have serious issues with the bathroom plumbt.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so the primary means of First Amendment expression that
Speaker 7: is available to say, well.
Speaker 2: They practice the two man poop over the side technique,
Speaker 2: which is an actual thing they have to do whenever
Speaker 2: the bathrooms don't work.
Speaker 1: Which it's so funny reading about these ships and being
Speaker 1: like this, this is shit from like my like slumlord
Speaker 1: fucking apartments in Chicago.
Speaker 2: Except for the Dods your slum lord.
Speaker 1: Yeah, happening award like the most like the most advanced
Speaker 1: and expensive military and human history. Oh god, where do
Speaker 1: we even want to start with with the USS Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 1: I I guess, I guess, I guess we could start
Speaker 1: with the fact that they have been hanging nets over
Speaker 1: the side of of the aircraft carrier because sailors keep
Speaker 1: trying to jump off to kill themselves, a thing that
Speaker 1: I last saw with like Fox Confactories and Shenzen.
Speaker 11: Yeah, that's the last time I heard that.
Speaker 7: As well, yeah, but at least in Shenzend, to my knowledge,
Speaker 7: nobody is shitting into the nets, which appears to be
Speaker 7: from what Roba has said.
Speaker 2: You know, the shitting would be incidental.
Speaker 1: We have covered on this show before. I think it
Speaker 1: was was it ten, I think was the one where
Speaker 1: they're they're there their Chinese branch had like timers over
Speaker 1: the toilets to show how long you say that would
Speaker 1: not would not rule that out in Shenzend as well.
Speaker 11: Yeah, but this ship has not been getting resupplied.
Speaker 1: It has been out for significantly longer than the the
Speaker 1: original plant duration. The sailors are just kind of trapped
Speaker 1: on board. Sailors who have you know, attempted to commit
Speaker 1: suicide because they've been stuck on this fucking ship are
Speaker 1: getting like like their careers destroyed because of this. Oh wow,
Speaker 1: it's just a nightmare. And this this is running into
Speaker 1: one of the what I guess is turning into one
Speaker 1: of the themes of this week's episode, which is that
Speaker 1: there are a whole bunch of elements of the US
Speaker 1: Navy and also of the world economy where them functioning
Speaker 1: correctly are based on the US not fighting of forever
Speaker 1: war in Iran and are based on the assumption that
Speaker 1: eventually this is going to end. Yeah, and it's just not.
Speaker 1: And so this ship is just also just physically breaking down.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, they're running low on all of the necessities.
Speaker 2: And part of that is because of the success of
Speaker 2: Arod's attacks on bases like US bases overseas and US
Speaker 2: basis in like foreign countries.
Speaker 7: There was an.
Speaker 2: Article that came out just within the last couple of
Speaker 2: days on August fourteenth in The New York Times by
Speaker 2: John i Ismay that traced a lot of the supply
Speaker 2: issues that the Abraham Lincoln's been having for its entire
Speaker 2: deployment to like right after the first day of the war,
Speaker 2: when Iran launched a massive attack on a US Navy
Speaker 2: base in Bahrain, which destroyed a massive logistics hub that
Speaker 2: the Navy has relied on basically the entirety of the
Speaker 2: Global War on tear up to the present moment, and
Speaker 2: that's what's forced them to switch over to using Diego
Speaker 2: Garcia as a supply hub. If you remember, Keir Starmer
Speaker 2: over in the UK initially was like, no, you guys
Speaker 2: can't use Diego Garcia as like the supply hub for
Speaker 2: your legal war, and then immediately changed his mind when
Speaker 2: he got threatened a little bit, bravest, who are in
Speaker 2: good stuff?
Speaker 3: Good stuff?
Speaker 11: Yeah?
Speaker 7: I think, like, I mean, it's so obvious right that Iran,
Speaker 7: a country which like the US, has been saber rattling
Speaker 7: out for decades, would very obviously have a plan of
Speaker 7: what to do in the event that the United States
Speaker 7: struck it and they executed that plan. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Trump, for his part, has repeatedly stated that the length
Speaker 2: of the deployment of the Lincoln and the forward before
Speaker 2: it are not big deals. When he was asked earlier
Speaker 2: this week if carry deployments were too long, he responded, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: not nearly long enough.
Speaker 7: See, he's really going to get into it with Lindy
Speaker 7: Graham's sister over this one.
Speaker 1: No, He's It's also he's just been very personally meddling
Speaker 1: with and fucking with a bunch of Navy stuff that
Speaker 1: there's a whole kind of there's a whole kind of
Speaker 1: side drama to this story where Trump has ordered the
Speaker 1: Navy to go back to using steam catapults to like
Speaker 1: launch aircraft off of the deck of the ship, which
Speaker 1: is like a significantly worse thing than the electromagnetic systems
Speaker 1: that the Navy has been using. But Trump like heard
Speaker 1: that that some pilot liked them a long time ago,
Speaker 1: and so he's been trying to force the entire Navy
Speaker 1: to do this since the first administration, and he's finally succeeded,
Speaker 1: which means you're going to have to like refit like
Speaker 1: forty percent of the ship and they're probably gonna have
Speaker 1: just design new ships because the ships are not designed
Speaker 1: around having these things, and they're just going to be
Speaker 1: worse because the Emperor has decided that he likes steam catapults.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, no, no, there's a there's a piece
Speaker 2: in the Guardia. Just about a week ago, Trump orders
Speaker 2: Pentagon to redesigned US aircraft carriers to use steam catapult
Speaker 2: solage tests.
Speaker 11: Yep, yep, yep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because he thought the digital systems were too complicated.
Speaker 2: I had missed this and the long list of like
Speaker 2: bullshit which in the same military stuff.
Speaker 8: Reason.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 2: He signed a National Security memorandum directing Pete Hegseth and
Speaker 2: the acting Navy Secretary to make this change. That's great,
Speaker 2: that's good.
Speaker 1: It's this astonishing combination of like she's she's made the
Speaker 1: cardinal mistake that all of these people make, which is
Speaker 1: that American military and economic supremacy is premised on having
Speaker 1: the world's most expensive army and not using it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and now he's used it. And then also he's doing
Speaker 1: all of this weird emperor fucking with stuff at the
Speaker 1: same time.
Speaker 2: There's amazing quotes from this Apparently it started back in
Speaker 2: twenty seventeen what he told Time magazine about a conversation
Speaker 2: that he'd had with an unnamed Navy officer.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: So, I said, what's this, sir, This is our digital
Speaker 2: catapult system. Trump went on. It sounded bad to me. Digital.
Speaker 2: They have digital? What is digital? And it's very complicated.
Speaker 2: You have to be auured Einstein to figure it out.
Speaker 2: And I said, and now they want to buy more
Speaker 2: aircraft carriers. I said, what system are you going to be, sir?
Speaker 2: We're staying with digital. I said, no, you're not. You're
Speaker 2: going to goddamn steam. The digital costs hundreds of millions
Speaker 2: of dollars more money, and it's no good.
Speaker 7: He's also trying to get them to move the fucking
Speaker 7: control tower of the aircraft carries into the middle of
Speaker 7: the ship. According to the Washington Post.
Speaker 2: This is beautiful stuff. I hope he gets his way.
Speaker 2: I hope he gets his way to'll protect the rest of.
Speaker 4: The world from us?
Speaker 7: Yeah, the rest of the world would do better v
Speaker 7: all these ships when not deployed. Right now. This is yeah, outstanding,
Speaker 7: great stuff, a great, amazing shit.
Speaker 11: God, very normal.
Speaker 7: This is this is how successful military is organized.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: I should point out that, like the latest statistics on
Speaker 7: people wounded in action now suggested they're about seven hundred
Speaker 7: US service people who've been wounded in a six month operation.
Speaker 11: Allegedly, the Washington is coming in to replace the Lincoln.
Speaker 11: Unclear what will happen to the destroyers and also unclear
Speaker 11: when this is actually going to happen.
Speaker 7: The destroyers have to come back so they can put
Speaker 7: a mast on them, yeah, because that looks more epic,
Speaker 7: and a big fucking cannon, like a black powder cannon
Speaker 7: on the front.
Speaker 15: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The last I heard from Trump, he said that a
Speaker 2: replacement for the Lincoln is quote moving right now or
Speaker 2: very shortly, and it's being replaced with another very similar ship.
Speaker 2: So that's what we've got so far. It is worth noting,
Speaker 2: just in terms of a general update on the situation,
Speaker 2: in Iran, that the ceasefire that no one has really
Speaker 2: been holding to has come to an end or is
Speaker 2: in the process of coming to an end, and does
Speaker 2: not look like it's going to be renewed.
Speaker 7: For all of the good that.
Speaker 2: That did everybody over the last sixty days or so, Yeah,
Speaker 2: the Trump administration has gone back and forth. Up until
Speaker 2: earlier this week, he had been claiming that he was
Speaker 2: in that the US was in active talks with Iran,
Speaker 2: but he said earlier this Tuesday that the US is
Speaker 2: not in any talks with Iran and has no plans
Speaker 2: to start new ones. This is around the same time
Speaker 2: that he started saying that the Strait of Horror Moves
Speaker 2: is open and that the US is going to take
Speaker 2: it and make it a new US territory. This has
Speaker 2: just been something he released as a series of truth
Speaker 2: posts or truths, including one showing a map that circled
Speaker 2: the Strait of Horror Moves with the words new US
Speaker 2: territory Straight of horm Moves above and below it. So, again,
Speaker 2: hard to say what's gonna happen here other than that
Speaker 2: oil prices are continuing to rise. The same day that
Speaker 2: he announced that there was no we're no talks going on,
Speaker 2: and that the ceasefire was not going to be extended.
Speaker 2: Four is fired on a Panama flagged ship, and around
Speaker 2: the same time Iran struck a ship as well, killing
Speaker 2: at least one sailor. Since the war began, seventeen sailors
Speaker 2: have been killed in sixty five attacks. Most of those
Speaker 2: have been the result of Ranian strikes, but three of
Speaker 2: those deaths have been caused by a US Navy ship
Speaker 2: that struck a merchant ship in June. So sailors are
Speaker 2: getting killed all around the USS. Abraham Lincoln's probably getting
Speaker 2: rotated out. The CeaseFire's over, and I guess we're trying
Speaker 2: to take this straight although it's I mean, there's no
Speaker 2: way to know what any of this actually means or
Speaker 2: what Trump's going to do. He could announce that they've
Speaker 2: got a new ceasefire tomorrow, like it would be silly
Speaker 2: to take any of this as a final word on anything.
Speaker 7: Yeah, let me pick up on that where Robot left
Speaker 7: off fairly, it does appay of it. In response to
Speaker 7: Trump continuing to just post insane stuff, Iran has been
Speaker 7: having talks with Aman, probably talking about like joint tolling
Speaker 7: the Strait, right, which is something we spoken about a
Speaker 7: lot in this podcast. Trump get interview with Trey Yinks.
Speaker 7: If you're not familiar with tree Yinks, his job is
Speaker 7: to kind of be a credulous, nodding head to broadcast
Speaker 7: ship that Donald Trump says his chief foreign correspondent Fox Now.
Speaker 20: I asked the President about these parallel talks that are
Speaker 20: taking place between Iran and Oman about control of the
Speaker 20: Strait of horror moves, and the President told Fox News,
Speaker 20: if Oman gets in the way, will bomb the s
Speaker 20: out of them.
Speaker 7: That is Donald Trump threatening to bomb the shit out
Speaker 7: of a man. A fantastic u turn in the United
Speaker 7: States policy. This is a wild thing for him to
Speaker 7: be saying. Right, this is a country that obviously the
Speaker 7: US has had previously good relations with.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is this is like a CIA outpost, like.
Speaker 7: Brand new country to do to do Middle East war with. Yeah,
Speaker 7: exactly right. We've we're running out of countries. We're having
Speaker 7: to turn on our own. Trump has also claimed in
Speaker 7: the same interview as tree Yinks, he has a back
Speaker 7: channel to the IRGC.
Speaker 20: Interestingly, President Trump confirmed to Fox News that there is
Speaker 20: a back channel with the IRGC. These are the hard
Speaker 20: line officials inside of Iran, and that the United States
Speaker 20: and officials in Washington are speaking directly with IRGC officials
Speaker 20: in Iran.
Speaker 7: So yeah, there he's talking about the United States negotiate
Speaker 7: directly with IIGC. I would assume that they have had
Speaker 7: back channels in the IIGC, right like that, That is
Speaker 7: something one would assume. Yeah, this is very normal when
Speaker 7: you have two states of this size which are frequently
Speaker 7: kind of squaring off against each other, and generally it
Speaker 7: is something that can be used to de escalate conflict.
Speaker 7: Obviously that ain't happening right now. It was later reported
Speaker 7: that these and you don't have to be a brain
Speaker 7: genius to work out that he's probably came through the
Speaker 7: Kurdistan Region of Iraq, right, southern Kurdistan. In related news,
Speaker 7: Iran then attempted a drone strike on Barzani. What, yes, President,
Speaker 7: that the Kurdistan reaching in of Iraq. Yeah, they sent
Speaker 7: two drones to Barzani's residents, I believe.
Speaker 12: What the fuck?
Speaker 11: Yeah, sorry I missed this. Why was this not for
Speaker 11: a pigeon?
Speaker 12: What the hell?
Speaker 7: Yes, they sent two drones to the office of the
Speaker 7: Kurdstan Region Prime Minister of sul Basani and the residents
Speaker 7: of the head of the Kurdistan Region Security Agency. The
Speaker 7: drones obviously did not cause any casualty. They think they
Speaker 7: were intercepted. This was reported by Axios right that this
Speaker 7: link between Southern Kordistan and the ILGC back channel was
Speaker 7: reported by Axios on the sixteenth, and then on the seventeenth,
Speaker 7: Iran attempted to drone strike Masoul Bazani, the Prime Minister
Speaker 7: of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Yeah, they attempted to
Speaker 7: drones strike his office and the residents of the Kurdstan
Speaker 7: Regions Security Agency, both in the Abil Province of Kurdistan.
Speaker 7: And like this again is like I've reported extensively. I
Speaker 7: think that Iran is bombing southern Kordistan and has been
Speaker 7: for some time. But this is a hell of an escalation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, try to was sad, like, but Brazoni is like
Speaker 1: the political figure in this part of Kurdistan. Like yeah,
Speaker 1: and like the Brazoni family has been has been a
Speaker 1: political faction powerful enough that like a lot of politics
Speaker 1: revolves around whether you're not you're like in their client
Speaker 1: networks for a long long time. This is this is
Speaker 1: kind of like trying to like, I mean again, he
Speaker 1: literally is like the prime minister of rocket cursion like this,
Speaker 1: this is like attempting to assassinate the Prime minister. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: staggering escalation.
Speaker 7: Like Bazani zeated I tweeted next that it was dangerous escalation,
Speaker 7: a direct threat to the security instability of the curds
Speaker 7: down region. He's not wrong.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 7: When you combine this with the US having a scheduled
Speaker 7: withdrawal from Iraq, right, like this is bad, and like
Speaker 7: it is very clear that Iraq is continuing and even
Speaker 7: escalating its policy of punishing the curds for the United
Speaker 7: States aggression. Right, there's this perception that the curds in
Speaker 7: US are like always aligned. As Roberts said, Iran has
Speaker 7: continued to strike vessals and straightform moves. What's interesting about
Speaker 7: this recent strike and the number of strikes that came
Speaker 7: in the days before it is that normally there has
Speaker 7: been a pattern by which the bombing relaxes. Iran strikes
Speaker 7: a vessel, the US Iran things peter out lower intensity,
Speaker 7: Iran strikes a vessel, the US hits Iran, right, Like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: the US has not hit Iran yet. In response to
Speaker 7: these most recent ones. And I think part of the
Speaker 7: reason that might be is something we've talked about before
Speaker 7: that the United States is not capable now of doing
Speaker 7: what it did in February, Like it has significantly diminished
Speaker 7: it's stockpiles.
Speaker 2: Yeah, by an estimate around seventy percent plus depending on
Speaker 2: the munition. In terms of like our long range like
Speaker 2: cruise missiles and our interceptors.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's so like just to de jug in that
Speaker 7: for people, that's like attack and defense. Right, it's your
Speaker 7: ability to hit Iran and also your ability to stop Iranian.
Speaker 2: It's all the stuff that lets us hit Iran without
Speaker 2: endangering the lives of US airmen, And it's what allows
Speaker 2: us to defend our bases and all of the Allied
Speaker 2: bases and increasingly fuel infrastructure in the region.
Speaker 16: Right.
Speaker 2: And it's low enough that in part why they don't
Speaker 2: want to continue burning more, even though they have like
Speaker 2: a third or more left, is that they have to
Speaker 2: keep a stockpile in case shit goes down with China
Speaker 2: or you know, expands with Russia. Right, Like these are
Speaker 2: our primary weapons with Iran, they're completely unnecessary.
Speaker 11: Or a mon yeah, or are new Earth amont. Yeah,
Speaker 11: if we were.
Speaker 2: To theoretically get into any kind of anything approaching a
Speaker 2: near peer conflict on a good spot. It would be
Speaker 2: our only weapons other than nukes.
Speaker 7: Yeah. So I know we're going to come back to
Speaker 7: the US defense procurement situation. But I do want to
Speaker 7: just point out that the President. I don't know if
Speaker 7: this is related to the fact that gas prices are
Speaker 7: still bonkers six month into this, but he has posted
Speaker 7: an a image of a trima version of himself ripping
Speaker 7: the Keystone pipeline out of the ground, with a banner
Speaker 7: reading buried by Biden in the background. Not clear if
Speaker 7: he understands how pipelines work. What, Yeah, you guess is
Speaker 7: as good as mine on that one. Like it's uh,
Speaker 7: it's it's I mean, yeah, let me just draw up
Speaker 7: the link. I guess sometimes I'll just scroll this true
Speaker 7: social page. It's it's it's it's wild up in there.
Speaker 1: But that is not a task for the faint of heart.
Speaker 7: No, Like, this is one of the things I do
Speaker 7: for work. You know that traumatizes me. I've put it
Speaker 7: in the chat, the zoom chat.
Speaker 11: We don't want our oil in the ground in those pipes.
Speaker 11: We want it straight from the straight of horror moves
Speaker 11: in barrels. Well, yeah, right, like what is he thinking?
Speaker 5: What does you.
Speaker 7: Think The Keystone pipeline, I should have not, also has
Speaker 7: a plaque affixed to it that says Keystone pipeline completely
Speaker 7: free energy jobs America first, No, and they're they're buried
Speaker 7: by Bibi is on a gravestone. The pipeline also has
Speaker 7: some handles. Trump's kind of in sort of a stable
Speaker 7: wide stance. They're pulling it out the ground like it's
Speaker 7: got roots on it. I don't know what the fuck
Speaker 7: is going on here. But there are also some soldiers
Speaker 7: in the background, like Undernea with an American flag.
Speaker 1: So yeah, this is the guy who just decided we
Speaker 1: were at warworth a run and that was killed a
Speaker 1: shit ton of people over it.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I guess now their response to the war where
Speaker 7: they run and gas prices being up is more pipelines
Speaker 7: at home, which is sick. Like I should add, I
Speaker 7: guess there is a continuing ecological disaster in the straight
Speaker 7: upforme moves because people keep shooting boats which are full
Speaker 7: of fuel. Yeah, and Iran it's having to clean up
Speaker 7: these oil spills.
Speaker 2: Well, there's also a further ecological disaster and that you
Speaker 2: have an enormous fleet of vessels that are just sitting
Speaker 2: around waiting and accumulating a huge number of different kind
Speaker 2: of like mollusks that you don't want to spread around
Speaker 2: the world that are definitely and it's also getting stuff
Speaker 2: is getting sucked into like their water tanks and they're
Speaker 2: what do you call it, their ballast tanks and shit
Speaker 2: that's going to get shut squirted out somewhere else. Like
Speaker 2: there's a lot of potential problems.
Speaker 7: Yeah, there are some procedures for like dumping ballast and stuff,
Speaker 7: but yeah, this is all the problem is right, everything
Speaker 7: is delayed. Every shipping company is losing money hand over fist. Yeah,
Speaker 7: and they're gonna want to get movie pretty fast when
Speaker 7: if the straightforward moves ever opens again. And yeah, we
Speaker 7: will see more environmental damages, like every war is an
Speaker 7: ecological disaster, but this one that isn't getting as much
Speaker 7: reporting on. But it's great that we're bringing that home
Speaker 7: with the Keystone pipelines, so we'll get a little piece
Speaker 7: of that too.
Speaker 2: So I wanted to give an update on a story
Speaker 2: because I talked about two weeks ago something like that
Speaker 2: about the general dynamics artillery shell factory in Mesquite, Texas
Speaker 2: that was meant to by now be producing somewhere between
Speaker 2: twenty and ideally thirty thousand shells a month, of specifically
Speaker 2: the kind that we're being used most rapidly in Ukraine
Speaker 2: before Ukraine pivoted to using drones for a lot of stuff.
Speaker 2: I mean, they're still burning through one fifty five's but
Speaker 2: like that was, I mean, they incurred a shell debt
Speaker 2: of something like three point six million shells in the
Speaker 2: United States as a result of that, and so it's
Speaker 2: a massive issue to get these shells being produced because
Speaker 2: in any kind of modern war we're going to be
Speaker 2: burning through a shitload of them. We have one hundred
Speaker 2: something years worth of heavy artillery in warfare to know
Speaker 2: that you never have enough shells. So this is a
Speaker 2: problem the US has been trying to get its handle
Speaker 2: on for a while, and as I noted, this factory
Speaker 2: that was supposed to be producing like a third of
Speaker 2: the total of all the shells in the United States
Speaker 2: has not produced any so far. And a few days
Speaker 2: after I discussed that on ed Jesse Coburn at Pro
Speaker 2: Publica published a beautiful investigation into that general Dynamics factory
Speaker 2: and Mesquite that opens with just a great lead. A
Speaker 2: robot was on fire again, and it's talking about the
Speaker 2: fact that all of this factory is filled with Jesus.
Speaker 2: Because it was supposed to meant to be heavily automated,
Speaker 2: which is why it was supposed to be able to
Speaker 2: keep up with such a high level of production. It
Speaker 2: was automated using these robots that had like giant metal
Speaker 2: arms clamps for hands, and because of the way they
Speaker 2: were designed, wound up soaked in oil constantly, and that
Speaker 2: oil would combust because they were moving steel blocks that
Speaker 2: had been heated to about eighteen hundred degrees fahrenheit, but
Speaker 2: in too and out of a machine that also would
Speaker 2: periodically beuch flame at them, and the robots were not
Speaker 2: proofed against this much flame. Per the Carpoblica article, one
Speaker 2: blaze that summer melted robots cables, putting an ADVO commission
Speaker 2: for a week now. The series of fires in the
Speaker 2: factory came just a few weeks before Trump administration. Defense
Speaker 2: officials and executives for General Dynamics, the company that made
Speaker 2: the factory, toured and through a gala opening event there
Speaker 2: to celebrate that it was supposed to be up and
Speaker 2: running by now. Exploding robots were not the only method
Speaker 2: of uncontrollable failure that workers had documented at the factory
Speaker 2: by that point. For one thing, the robotic arms had
Speaker 2: a tendency to flail uncontrollably and destroy equipment. They also
Speaker 2: would periodically drop heavy loads at random. The most sensitive
Speaker 2: and expensive equipment in the entire factory was a machine
Speaker 2: that was meant to stretch metal in order to make
Speaker 2: artillery shells. It cracked them nearly constantly. The factory was
Speaker 2: filled with smoke at all times and was usually over
Speaker 2: one hundred degrees inside. Every description of the state of
Speaker 2: the art Arms factory sounds worse than the ones that
Speaker 2: were operating in World War One. This is probably my
Speaker 2: favorite part of that article. Then there were the giant
Speaker 2: press machines, which required regular pounding with a sledgehammer to function.
Speaker 2: Property still sat the shaping of nearly every shell. We
Speaker 2: didn't really have any standardized practice, said Quantel White, a
Speaker 2: former employee. It was just a bunch of guys taking
Speaker 2: turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night.
Speaker 1: This is fourhammer, forty k shit wyammer.
Speaker 2: Forty k works a lot better than this. There would
Speaker 2: be a priest, he would be reading from a bible.
Speaker 2: There'd be ungeons and oil. Well, there's lots of oil.
Speaker 7: I love this now.
Speaker 2: By last summer, which is when reports first started coming
Speaker 2: out about the difficulties the factory was having. By that point,
Speaker 2: General Dynamics had missed eight deadlines to get this thing
Speaker 2: up and running. Their factory still has yet to produce
Speaker 2: a single usable shell, despite five hundred and thirty three
Speaker 2: million dollars in Pentagon funds going towards refurbishing old machines
Speaker 2: and ordering new ones from Turkey. Even so, the Pentagon
Speaker 2: continues to sign contracts with General Dynamics, and two months
Speaker 2: ago the company announced a some new solution to all
Speaker 2: of their ill fortune factory. These many issues. You guys,
Speaker 2: guess what The magic bullet that finally is going to
Speaker 2: fix everything that this factory that doesn't work is supposed
Speaker 2: to be AI.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's AI. It's it's fucking AI. Of course, it's yeah.
Speaker 2: Quote a news release from General Dynamics. In the new company,
Speaker 2: the terrence was filled with techno business jargon. AI enabled
Speaker 2: capabilities and intelligence and connectivity would be added at Mesquite
Speaker 2: and other General Dynamics factories. The companies wrote, AI transforms
Speaker 2: production facilities into strategic assets to terrens. As CEO said
Speaker 2: on the release, we're building autonomous manufacturing systems that learned
Speaker 2: to adapt and scale in real time. By the way,
Speaker 2: what that CEO said, I'll guarantee was written by chat GPT.
Speaker 2: The whole AI transformed that that's yeah, very clearly. Yeah,
Speaker 2: these pronouncements have baffled former Mesquite workers. What are they
Speaker 2: talking about. There's nothing to learn or adapt or scale
Speaker 2: one set. It's all broken. It's really fun because no
Speaker 2: one who actually works at the factory, and no US
Speaker 2: military officials who are allowed to speak their minds openly,
Speaker 2: have had anything positive to say about General Dynamics and
Speaker 2: how they proceeded with this project. The article quotes a
Speaker 2: former official in an Army office supervising the factory as
Speaker 2: saying it's an absolute disaster. The Army should have gone
Speaker 2: after recovering money from General Dynamics. Yeah, no, I mean
Speaker 2: they should have.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But that gets the central contradiction of the American
Speaker 1: war machine, which is that the point of it is
Speaker 1: to give money to defense contractors not actually supposed to
Speaker 1: have to use the stuff.
Speaker 7: I should say here.
Speaker 2: General Dynamics is one of the companies most responsible for
Speaker 2: inventing that state of affairs. This is we're going to
Speaker 2: talk about these folks because they keep coming up when
Speaker 2: you look into like defense relateds, golduggery and fuckery and
Speaker 2: like us history. I feel like now is probably is
Speaker 2: a good time to talk a little bit about their history.
Speaker 2: We're gonna I'm gonna give a brief overview of these
Speaker 2: guys because we're in an illegal war that's currently shuffling
Speaker 2: a fortune to defense contractors, and we should probably talk
Speaker 2: about one of the most corrupt members of that family.
Speaker 2: The General Dynamics Corporation was founded at the tail end
Speaker 2: of the nineteenth century by Isaac Leopold Rice, a businessman
Speaker 2: and a music coologist who was born in Bavaria and
Speaker 2: raised in Milwaukee. He made his fortune doing a mix
Speaker 2: of railroad law and publishing sheet music, and eventually got
Speaker 2: into the electric battery and vehicle business. This ended with
Speaker 2: him involved in submarines, because early Navy subs ran on
Speaker 2: electric power when submerged. In eighteen ninety nine, he purchased
Speaker 2: the halland Torpedo Boat Company and named it the Electric
Speaker 2: Boat Company. The Electric Boat Company remained a submarine manufacturer
Speaker 2: after his death in nineteen fourteen, providing subs for not
Speaker 2: just the US government but the Peruvian government, and gradually
Speaker 2: spinning up to produce other kinds of boats, including PT
Speaker 2: boats for the US and Canadian militaries. After World War II,
Speaker 2: it purchased Convair, which made anti aircraft missiles, jet fighters,
Speaker 2: and the Atlas rockets used in the first US crewed
Speaker 2: orbital flight. This new company, a mix of the Electric
Speaker 2: Boat Company and Convair, became General Dynamics. In more recent decades,
Speaker 2: General Dynamics became the manufacturers of the feared Tomahawk cruise missile,
Speaker 2: arguably the most iconic ballistic missile in the entire US arsenal.
Speaker 2: It also kept making subs, including the famous Los Angeles
Speaker 2: Class and D. As time went on, the company got
Speaker 2: really really good at corruptly fucking US taxpayers out of
Speaker 2: their money. Investigative reporting first started shining a light on
Speaker 2: constant cost overruns and blown budgets in a series of
Speaker 2: GD defense contracts for a nineteen eighty five Time article
Speaker 2: by Charles Alexander. A federal grand jury first started investigating
Speaker 2: the company's cost overruns on submarines in nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 2: but dropped the probe in nineteen eighty one for lack
Speaker 2: of enough evidence of fraud. Now the Justice Apartment has
Speaker 2: reopened the case in light of new information from p
Speaker 2: Tecis Veliattis, who in nineteen seventy seven became head of
Speaker 2: Electric Boat, the company's subuilding division in Grotton, Connecticut. His
Speaker 2: word is hardly unimpeachable. In nineteen eighty three he fled
Speaker 2: to his native Grease to avoid being tried on charges
Speaker 2: of perjuring himself before a grand jury and taking one
Speaker 2: point three million in kickbacks from a subcontractor. Velliotis has
Speaker 2: produced tapes in company documents that he claims reveal a
Speaker 2: pattern of waste, corruption and cover up at General Dynamics.
Speaker 2: In a tape of one talk he had with Lewis
Speaker 2: the chairman, for example, the chairman suggests that Velliottis reassured
Speaker 2: James Ashton, a discontented Electric Boat executive, that he is
Speaker 2: still in the running for a promotion, in order to
Speaker 2: keep him from popping off about shoddy work at the yard.
Speaker 2: So we have all of these tapes from this equally
Speaker 2: shady dude, villiatdis because nobody who's in a high position
Speaker 2: in the defense contracting industry is not constantly committing crimes.
Speaker 2: And the tapes that he provided showed several things that
Speaker 2: are very familiar to the Mesquite factory case. For one thing,
Speaker 2: Villiadis provided a nineteen seventy seven tape with the company's
Speaker 2: executive vice president, Gordon MacDonald, telling him that the company
Speaker 2: had issued an impossible delivery timetable for the first Trident
Speaker 2: submarine because the CEO of General Dynamics wanted to quote
Speaker 2: keep our stock price from sliding. In other words, every
Speaker 2: time that the stock price slides, you can announce, oh,
Speaker 2: we're about to release the Trident, and you can get
Speaker 2: a quick.
Speaker 7: Boost in the stock price.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And as a result of this kind of fuckery, the
Speaker 2: sub was not produced until two years after this date.
Speaker 2: Now that's pretty bad. But the incident that actually sparked
Speaker 2: the first known criminal investigation of a defense contractor came
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty three when General Dynamics tried to charge
Speaker 2: the Air Force ninety six hundred dollars for a four
Speaker 2: inch long wrench. And this revealed a bunch of if
Speaker 2: you've ever heard stories of like six thousand dollars wrenches
Speaker 2: and YadA YadA, four thousand dollars plungers. It's General Dynamics
Speaker 2: that people are talking about. That was a real series
Speaker 2: of like news articles and eventually congressional investigations into the
Speaker 2: fact that they were charging absurd amounts of money for bullshit. Now,
Speaker 2: part of the reason for this was that, like Navy
Speaker 2: and Air Force, procurement was completely fucked in this point,
Speaker 2: and they just did not keep a backlog of like
Speaker 2: the material they needed to repair their shit on hand.
Speaker 2: But a lot of it was just massive rampant corruption
Speaker 2: with companies like General Dynamics in particular. Now, charges like
Speaker 2: this inspired further investigations into how GD functioned, and this
Speaker 2: eventually led to a congressional inquiry. It came out that
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty two, General Dynamics had asked the Pentagon
Speaker 2: to pay almost nineteen million dollars in overhead costs for
Speaker 2: their company HQ. These were not what you'd call unavoidable expenses.
Speaker 2: Quote four hundred and ninety eight hundred and forty dollars
Speaker 2: for Lewis's that's the chairman's personal flights on corporate jets,
Speaker 2: often to and from his farm in Albany, five hundred
Speaker 2: and thirty eight seven hundred and eighty one dollars for
Speaker 2: contributions in memberships, including te club fees for top executives,
Speaker 2: and one hundred and fifty five dollars for the kinneling
Speaker 2: of a dog named Firston while its owner, a General
Speaker 2: Dynamics executive, attended a company conference at a South Carolina resort.
Speaker 2: At last week's hearing, Congressman dingle Quiz Lewis about a
Speaker 2: five hundred and seventy one dollars charge for a king
Speaker 2: size serted a perfect sleeper mattress and a box spring set,
Speaker 2: which was delivered to the Clayton Inn in suburban Saint Louis.
Speaker 2: It was for mister Velliatis, since Lewis, who explained that
Speaker 2: the executive said he needed the bed for times he
Speaker 2: came to Saint Louis for meetings, added Gordon McDonald, a
Speaker 2: General Dynamics executive Vice president. Mister Velliattis, being a very
Speaker 2: large man, complained so much to the secretary of the
Speaker 2: company that he got tired of hearing it and bought
Speaker 2: the bed. Valiatis denied that the bed was for him.
Speaker 2: So just very funny stories consistently when you look into
Speaker 2: like eighties defense contractor procurement issues, specifically around General Dynamics. Now,
Speaker 2: I know what you're wondering, how did they get away
Speaker 2: with such corruption? Well, that nineteen million dollars the US
Speaker 2: government spent on complete bullshit fees was matched with one
Speaker 2: point two four million dollars in the General Dynamics accountmant
Speaker 2: purely to entertain Pentagon officials in nineteen seventy seven. They
Speaker 2: have a twenty five dollars diamond earring set to the
Speaker 2: wife of Admiral Hyman rickover head of the nuclear propulsion program. Now,
Speaker 2: to be fair to Hymen, the real reason they were
Speaker 2: trying to butter him up is that he had repeatedly
Speaker 2: complained about the company. But this is the kind of
Speaker 2: shit that they have been doing forever. Like the fact
Speaker 2: that they have now spent half a billion dollars of
Speaker 2: taxpayer money on a factory that does not work is
Speaker 2: nothing new to General Dynamics. And I'm sure they've now
Speaker 2: promised to put another two hundred million dollars into the
Speaker 2: factory and that it'll be producing twenty thousand shells a
Speaker 2: month at least within a year. I'm sure at some
Speaker 2: point they'll get at work if they keep shoveling a
Speaker 2: bunch of money into it. But make no mistake, it
Speaker 2: will not be General Dynamics money. It will be money
Speaker 2: one way or the other that US taxpayers have given
Speaker 2: them that winds up eventually, maybe making this factory produce
Speaker 2: a single shell. Anyway, General Dynamics, Let's.
Speaker 11: Go on one more had break and then talk about
Speaker 11: bonds and floor.
Speaker 21: I guess, yeah, wild, speaking of unbelievably corrupt bullshit that
Speaker 21: is directly tied to the American war efforts in Iran.
Speaker 1: Okay, so bonds are not normally an extremely exciting topic.
Speaker 1: So let's start off with the glaring part, which is
Speaker 1: that early this week, the yields on US Treasury bonds,
Speaker 1: specifically thirty year tea notes, hit highs not seen since
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven, several weeks before the collapse of
Speaker 1: the American stock markets. Is also noted by several analysts
Speaker 1: that the other times that we've seen peaks like this
Speaker 1: were like nineteen thirty nine, right before that, and I
Speaker 1: think there was another one of these I forgot. I
Speaker 1: forgot the other economic collapse where there was a there
Speaker 1: was a giant one of these right before it.
Speaker 7: Like the nineteen twenty ninety thirty one. Is that like black.
Speaker 11: Fright, Yeah, there's one more.
Speaker 1: I think it mout have been like the dot com
Speaker 1: bubble or something. I forget what juddle, But the experts
Speaker 1: suggests that bond markets only do this when they are
Speaker 1: in extreme distress. So what does this actually mean. Bonds
Speaker 1: are a thing that, in this case, you can get
Speaker 1: from the governments and you pay the government money, and
Speaker 1: the government promises you to pay back more money later,
Speaker 1: and the yield is like how much more money they're
Speaker 1: they're giving you back? Right, High yields on bonds means,
Speaker 1: you know, an increase of the cost of borrowing, and
Speaker 1: high yields on US government bonds is a sign of
Speaker 1: growing distrust in the long run economic feature of the US. Usually,
Speaker 1: these bonds pay like absolute shit. But the reason they
Speaker 1: pay like shit is that it's the US government. You're
Speaker 1: guaranteed to get your money back, so they're supposed to
Speaker 1: be an extremely safe asset, right, And when these rates
Speaker 1: are up, it's because everyone is you know, looking at
Speaker 1: something happening in the market, and something happening structurally in
Speaker 1: the US economy and panicking. Now, one of those things
Speaker 1: is they're looking at the US debt and panicking, and
Speaker 1: you know, whether or not that's like a great way
Speaker 1: to evaluate how panicky they have to be is an
Speaker 1: open question. This has been one of the lines that's
Speaker 1: been coming out is that they're looking at you know,
Speaker 1: the US date and increasing faster than expected. The main thing, however,
Speaker 1: that has been setting off this particular wave of like
Speaker 1: mass selling of bonds is the collapse of that sixty
Speaker 1: day piece deal that Robert was talking about earlier, which
Speaker 1: you know, I don't think anyone who was actually following
Speaker 1: the conflict really thought that was going to go anywhere.
Speaker 1: But the thing that was important about it, strategically from
Speaker 1: the American side was that this was this was the
Speaker 1: thing that investors in financial antas were hanging their hat on.
Speaker 1: And you know that these these people had convinced themselves
Speaker 1: that this process was actually going to result in the
Speaker 1: end of the war, and that quickly ending the war
Speaker 1: was going to you know, restore economic growth et cetera,
Speaker 1: et cetera, and stay off inflation. And this was sort
Speaker 1: of the week as as as I mentioned earlier the
Speaker 1: Brent crude index hit ninety dollars a barrel and the
Speaker 1: peace talks formally completely collapsed. That there was a growing
Speaker 1: realization that this war is not going to end. The
Speaker 1: economic conditions caused by the war not ending out going
Speaker 1: to continue, which means inflation is going to increase and
Speaker 1: it's going to have sort of far reaching and long
Speaker 1: lasting economic impacts. Now, this is a global squeeze that's
Speaker 1: been hitting most developed countries. Japan has also been very
Speaker 1: badly hit by these sort of shocks in bond yields. Now,
Speaker 1: what's interesting reading analysis of it is that you're actually
Speaker 1: starting to see a lot of firms. JP Morgan is
Speaker 1: a good example of this with JP Morgan. For like,
Speaker 1: basically since the war has started, JP Morgan's analysis has
Speaker 1: been the war is going to end, and when the
Speaker 1: war ends, things will go back to normal. So we're
Speaker 1: just going to keep projecting things are going to be fine.
Speaker 1: They are finally pointing out the things that we've been saying,
Speaker 1: which is that yeah, the no, the war is not
Speaker 1: ending and it's wreaking havoc on global supply chains. Now,
Speaker 1: the other thing that's been causing this run up. There's
Speaker 1: two sides of this back to back that seem very conflicting,
Speaker 1: which is, on the one hand, there is growing fear
Speaker 1: over the fact that the AI bubble looks like it's
Speaker 1: going to collapse, right and we've seen this was sort
Speaker 1: of like the kast b shock I was talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: where you know, the stock market like ten five to
Speaker 1: ten percent of the stock markets create stock markets value
Speaker 1: keeps disappearing overnight and then reappearing the next day. But
Speaker 1: then and this is sort of fascinating. One of the
Speaker 1: other things that's been happening is that there has been
Speaker 1: an unbelievable proliferation of bonds issued by AI companies because
Speaker 1: these AI companies are having to go to the finance
Speaker 1: markets to fund all of their weird data center bullshit.
Speaker 1: And this has gotten a bunch of investors to pull
Speaker 1: their money out of very safe US bonds and put
Speaker 1: them into hideously unsafe AI I bonds, a thing which
Speaker 1: I don't even this obviously is going to go catastrophically wrong.
Speaker 1: I don't have a sophisticated analysis for why, like taking
Speaker 1: the money out of the US government and putting it
Speaker 1: into this AI company is going to create a transcendent
Speaker 1: God is a terrible idea. And what we've kind of
Speaker 1: seen in the past couple of days as these bond
Speaker 1: yields have risen as from a combination of these factors,
Speaker 1: is it looks like the beginning of the moment where
Speaker 1: wildly coyote like looks down and realizes that he's off
Speaker 1: the cliff. Now, on Wednesday, the Treasury began a massive
Speaker 1: buyback of treasury bonds going to quote from CNBC here.
Speaker 1: Under the accelerated buy back, Treasury, led by Secretary Scott Bessant,
Speaker 1: will target the ten to twenty year and twenty to
Speaker 1: thirty year portion of the market, which has seen a
Speaker 1: buyer strike since late June. The government will at least
Speaker 1: double the maximum size of its buyback operation from two
Speaker 1: billion to quote at least four billion dollars, according to
Speaker 1: an announcement from the Department. Now, in terms of the
Speaker 1: actual size of this buyback, which is like not a
Speaker 1: great sign when the government is buying back its own
Speaker 1: debt in an attempt to stabilize the market. But that's
Speaker 1: not you know, in terms of the size of like
Speaker 1: the US bomb market, that's really a drop in the bucket.
Speaker 1: But it does seem to have temporarily sort of stabilized
Speaker 1: the markets on the belief that if things continue to
Speaker 1: go run, the government will step in. However, the actual
Speaker 1: underlying economic metrics remain bad for everything in the economy
Speaker 1: that isn't ai and this is one of the things
Speaker 1: that traditionally heralds a fall on economic collapse. Now, it's
Speaker 1: also worth noting that, you know, cosp for example, keeps
Speaker 1: hitting its circuit breaker. That's something that also traditionally has
Speaker 1: been like the prelude to collapse, and it hasn't yet.
Speaker 1: So you know, we're we're in it. We're in a
Speaker 1: deeply weird and semi unprecedented time in the markets and
Speaker 1: in sort of the behavior of these investors and financial actors.
Speaker 11: But it's not good.
Speaker 3: It's my, it's my.
Speaker 1: It's a conclusion on the state of the US bond
Speaker 1: market and the global economy at large.
Speaker 11: Let's close with elections, and I want to start with
Speaker 11: a quick correction for one or two of my last
Speaker 11: election segments. I keep calling Governor Tim Walls Mike Walls,
Speaker 11: and I don't know why this keeps happening. I picture
Speaker 11: his face in my mind, and I just like autocreks
Speaker 11: to Mike. I've caught this a few times and fixed
Speaker 11: it before the episode goes out, but this pastime I
Speaker 11: did not.
Speaker 12: Now.
Speaker 11: Slightly more importantly, I also accidentally referred to Mike Rogers
Speaker 11: in Michigan as the incumbent, and that is not true.
Speaker 11: This Senate race is open and Rogers's former congressmen. These are,
Speaker 11: you know, smaller details and stories that are focused more
Speaker 11: on how DSA left wing candidates are running their campaigns.
Speaker 11: But these types of details are still important to get right,
Speaker 11: and I regret the error. Let's turn to Florida, where
Speaker 11: I'm sad to say the resistance has been defeated.
Speaker 2: Now, Garrison, are you talking about Florida the state or
Speaker 2: flow RDA of the musical?
Speaker 7: Since now you missed a good chance to pivot with
Speaker 7: talking of regret, and then.
Speaker 11: I thought about doing that, but I'm like, no, I
Speaker 11: would rather not, because I'm just saying I still think
Speaker 11: there's hope for Florida.
Speaker 7: I said, bold take.
Speaker 11: But American hero Alexander Vinman will not be that hope.
Speaker 7: You'll be assuring another correction for that bad boy. Let
Speaker 7: me tell you.
Speaker 11: I'm talking in the grands. Okay, I'm talking about in
Speaker 11: the cosmic sense, not in the short term.
Speaker 7: Yeah, okay, I agree with you. I have hope for
Speaker 7: the Feraridianes.
Speaker 11: The resistance has been defeated. American hero Alexander Vinman, the
Speaker 11: whistleblower who testified in Trump's first impeachment hearings, has lost
Speaker 11: the Democratic nomination for US Senate in an upset to
Speaker 11: Angie Nixon, a state representative from Jacksonville and a Democratic socialist.
Speaker 11: Nixon won by one hundred and fifty thousand votes.
Speaker 7: Oh wow, it's fifty.
Speaker 11: Six point one percent to Vinman's forty three point nine.
Speaker 11: And this, this, this is a big upset because Nixon
Speaker 11: was out fundraised sixteen to one. She had just under
Speaker 11: a million dollars while vinmin raked in over sixteen million.
Speaker 11: And I think, like a resist lib hero, losing a
Speaker 11: primary to a socialist in Florida is astounding.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Now, Nixon's a union organizer who's running on Medicare for all,
Speaker 11: the taxing billionaires, free childcare, universal jobs program, and opposition
Speaker 11: to Israel. She was endorsed by alanomar Or. She did
Speaker 11: a Tleeve needed Turner, Cory Bush, and Miss Rachel who's
Speaker 11: listed in the National Leaders section of Nixon's website.
Speaker 1: For her or you're only truly good national leader. No
Speaker 1: complaints with her?
Speaker 7: Yeah, Miss Rachel shown more spine than most of Congress
Speaker 7: in the last few years.
Speaker 11: Nixon was also endorsed by Working Families Party, Local Unions, JVP,
Speaker 11: Jewish hoysh for Peace and Track APAK. She joined DSA
Speaker 11: this past June, but did not pursue an endorsement, so
Speaker 11: is a relative newcomer to DSA as an organization. Do
Speaker 11: you want to play this clip from her back in
Speaker 11: November twenty twenty three, a month into Israel's attacks on Gaza,
Speaker 11: we are at.
Speaker 22: Ten thousand dead Palestinians.
Speaker 12: How man it will be enough?
Speaker 6: I also.
Speaker 11: One of the lawmaker's Republican Michelle Saltzman, just shouted out
Speaker 11: all of them in the hearing. I'll continue the clip, Jesus.
Speaker 22: One of my colleagues just said all of them.
Speaker 14: Wow.
Speaker 11: One of my colleagues fed all of them.
Speaker 22: One of my colleagues also stated that this is gonna
Speaker 22: dry up their fundraising if we vote on this resolution.
Speaker 22: I also want that like, that's what we've become in
Speaker 22: this state. That's what we've become in this state. Well,
Speaker 22: we don't care about innocent babies that don't even get
Speaker 22: the opportunity to blow out their first birthday candle.
Speaker 11: So this was a ceasefire resolution just a month in
Speaker 11: two the war.
Speaker 7: Do you have the sense of like turnout versus like
Speaker 7: electoral Like I'm wondering, is this a like people who
Speaker 7: turn out for primaries tend to be like a more
Speaker 7: politically engaged and people who turn out for generals or
Speaker 7: is this a like this because it's she clearly has,
Speaker 7: like just looking at that speech, she has a genuine
Speaker 7: commitment to what she's talking about. And I think people, yes,
Speaker 7: I appreciate that more than like you said, a resist
Speaker 7: lib hero.
Speaker 11: Definitely, And I mean certainly I think in generals can
Speaker 11: attract a bigger portion of the elector. Yeah, but there's
Speaker 11: there's a few things going on that created this this
Speaker 11: pretty pretty big difference in votes, like over one hundred
Speaker 11: and fifty thousand. Yeah, it's big, and like, in my mind,
Speaker 11: this relates to two of the elections last week in
Speaker 11: Minnesota and Wisconsin. The My Pillow primary, where Trump endorsed
Speaker 11: Mike Lindell lost the Republican governatorial primary to the state
Speaker 11: Speaker of the House, and like this this is kind
Speaker 11: of like the idea that a national political celebrity can
Speaker 11: just like waltz into your state and gobble up a nomination.
Speaker 11: Both Lindell and Alexander Vinman, you know, come from like
Speaker 11: the Trump world, albeit on opposite side. It's still part
Speaker 11: of like like you know, the Trumpian political circuit, and
Speaker 11: voters rejected both of them in favor of proven state lawmakers,
Speaker 11: you know, Janio, a more like regular state level Republican,
Speaker 11: and Angie Nixon, who's like a community organizer with like
Speaker 11: deep connections to a lot of a lot of different
Speaker 11: commun in the state and specifically the working class black community. Now,
Speaker 11: the other interesting thing that this race kind of continues
Speaker 11: the conversation on relates to Francesca Hong's loss last week.
Speaker 11: As as I discussed last week, Hong did not pay
Speaker 11: for any TV ads and Nixon only spent sixty thousand
Speaker 11: on ADS, was zero spent on broadcast or cable. Meanwhile,
Speaker 11: Vinman spent two point two million on ADS. That's thirty
Speaker 11: six times as much as Nixon. Yeah, and Nixon still
Speaker 11: wants dumping money off a cliff. That's because she actually
Speaker 11: ran a real campaign, like on the ground, and Vinman
Speaker 11: did not. He ran an incredibly lazy campaign. He really
Speaker 11: thought he could just like coast to the nomination based
Speaker 11: on his resist Live credentials. And you know, while that
Speaker 11: maybe helped in Palm Beach, it did not help him
Speaker 11: in the rest of the state, where where just he
Speaker 11: got absolutely trounced by Nixon. Like if you look at
Speaker 11: like the county map, it's like whoa.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 11: So come November, Nixon will face the incumbent Senator Ashley Moody,
Speaker 11: the former state ag who Ron De Santis appointed to
Speaker 11: fill Marco Rubio's Senate seat after he was tapped for
Speaker 11: Secretary of State. And like Rubio is, Rubio has had
Speaker 11: a strong hold on that seat for decades. So the
Speaker 11: hope for Florida Democrats is that Ashley Moody won't command
Speaker 11: as much loyalty at the ballot box as Rubio does,
Speaker 11: or as Rubio did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and maybe and maybe maybe, like a critical one
Speaker 1: percent of the Republican vote thinks that she's another Nixon. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: hopefully you never know, but like this could very likely
Speaker 1: be a much harder uphill battle than even you know,
Speaker 1: like the Texas Senate race was hilarigo. In this recent election,
Speaker 1: there were around three hundred thousand fewer votes in the
Speaker 1: Democratic primary than the GOP primary. Like this is this
Speaker 1: is going to be a very difficult race to win.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I don't want to, you know, understate how impressed
Speaker 11: of this primary win like really is. And like I
Speaker 11: don't think anyone will false Nixon or her politics if
Speaker 11: she loses in the general.
Speaker 7: I mean someone will someone right, a shitty Like it's
Speaker 7: just see end of the leftop ed right, they always do.
Speaker 11: It doesn't massive they will, they will try to Like
Speaker 11: a lot of Centrists do not expect Vinman to win
Speaker 11: if he wins the primaries. So like it's it's a
Speaker 11: setate seat in Florida. It's like that's right, that's the thing.
Speaker 7: It's just I'm reflecting on the fact that like people
Speaker 7: have taken Hong's result and been like, oh, the progressive
Speaker 7: left is dead, and then they're still treating Callarico like
Speaker 7: he's uh, like the presumptive victor.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then they'll say yeah, but like yeah, I mean,
Speaker 2: I think one thing we probably should take from Hong's
Speaker 2: election is that television ads cannot be disposed of so
Speaker 2: quickly yet at the general Yeah, I mean it, I
Speaker 2: mean period like it. I think that's one of the
Speaker 2: things that definitely hurt her campaign is that they made
Speaker 2: a big choice not to do tv ads.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 11: I want to write everything down to that, but yeah,
Speaker 11: that was certainly a factor in Wisconsin. Nixon's like ground
Speaker 11: game in Florida was able to overcome the massive deficit
Speaker 11: in spending and just not really many funds for tv ads.
Speaker 11: And I think yeah, because this is a Florida Senate
Speaker 11: see that Vindman was not expected to win into general
Speaker 11: and he was the presumptive nominee. But because this race
Speaker 11: will be so hard to win, it'll be harder to
Speaker 11: like blame her or her politics specifically for losing. I
Speaker 11: think this race can also be a big opportunity to
Speaker 11: push the overtin window in Florida and I come November,
Speaker 11: it will be really interesting to see what the result
Speaker 11: of this election are because if this is a super
Speaker 11: close race, even if she's still loses, hopefully she will
Speaker 11: not lose, but if this race even gets to be
Speaker 11: where it's like more competitive than what it's been for
Speaker 11: the past like ten fifteen years, I think that could
Speaker 11: be an interesting look at how much Trump is hurting
Speaker 11: Republicans in elections, like exactly how upset parts of his
Speaker 11: base are at the current state of things, and to
Speaker 11: what degree that affects turnout. But also on the other hand,
Speaker 11: if Nixon and her politics are able to form a
Speaker 11: new coalition and attract voters that might not usually vote
Speaker 11: for Democrats, might not usually vote for socialists, or might
Speaker 11: not vote at all, because even just in this primary,
Speaker 11: her core voter base was very different than what's currently
Speaker 11: considered to be DSA's most reliable voters. Nixon did best
Speaker 11: in districts that were majority non college educated, and that's
Speaker 11: usually the reverse for a lot of DSA type candidates
Speaker 11: in other states. So she was getting out a slightly
Speaker 11: different voter base than what L said was getting out
Speaker 11: than what DSA candidates in New York have been getting out,
Speaker 11: especially in the primaries. So I think she is someone
Speaker 11: to watch and could alter what's seen as politically possible
Speaker 11: in Florida.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to say briefly also that there is
Speaker 1: a chance that you know, with how badly the Republicans
Speaker 1: are doing on generic ballots, I mean, like the good
Speaker 1: projections right now have them down seven points on just
Speaker 1: like a generic Democrat versus the Republican ballot, Like there
Speaker 1: is a small chance that we get a two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight style blowout and she wins, which it's not
Speaker 1: impossible in a way that it usually is. It would
Speaker 1: be historic, right, it would. Yeah, No, it's possible, just
Speaker 1: extremely unlikely. But like a I don't think it's likely,
Speaker 1: but it would be like a history. It's more likely
Speaker 1: than any of the times people have said that Democrats
Speaker 1: are going to take Texas. So I'll say about this
Speaker 1: like it's like actually technically possible. So while this is
Speaker 1: a big win for the left, statewide, DSA candidates did
Speaker 1: not fare as well in the recently redistricted US House
Speaker 1: races in Florida. Let's brevely talk about my boy, Oliver Larkin.
Speaker 1: Larkin was running for House District twenty five. That's Miami,
Speaker 1: DoD Palm Beach, and Broward County, not exactly the friendliest
Speaker 1: waters for an anti Israel socialist. I got sixteen, two
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty four votes, while the incumbent House Rep.
Speaker 1: Jared Moscowitz won with twenty eight thousand, two hundred and
Speaker 1: ninety four votes. Larkin is DSA endorsed, and he ran
Speaker 1: a solid campaign with an impressive ground game, over five
Speaker 1: hundred volunteers, forty thousand doors knocked seven hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: thousand calls. He campaigned with Angie Nixon. Also this past month,
Speaker 1: A Larkin has gone and this is a technical term,
Speaker 1: a beast mode in TV news interviews. Here's Larkin getting
Speaker 1: some pushback from a Fox News anchor on abolishing and
Speaker 1: prosecuting ice.
Speaker 23: What is the number that is fine with you? Is
Speaker 23: there is there a benchmark? Is it fine how many
Speaker 23: children can be raped? And it's fine if you're in
Speaker 23: relation to the immigration community.
Speaker 24: If we're going to talk about children being raped, then
Speaker 24: we need to hold this pedophile president Donald Trump accountable
Speaker 24: and all those that have been implicated by the Epstein sales.
Speaker 24: That Partment of Justice is still not leaking and they've
Speaker 24: sent a pack after Thomas Massey for having the temerity
Speaker 24: to accountables.
Speaker 4: That are in control of our government.
Speaker 7: Cue, oh, you appreciate your time very much.
Speaker 11: So beyond like attention grabbing moments like that, he's also
Speaker 11: very clearly articulated the details of his platform and defended
Speaker 11: it and DSA against bad way attacks. He's talked about
Speaker 11: the need for a new past to citizenship and just
Speaker 11: how cost prohibitive it is for immigrants to maintain the
Speaker 11: documented status, and Trump has made things even harder on
Speaker 11: purpose to manufacture a political crisis. On Foxy, argued very
Speaker 11: eloquently against providing Israel with so called defensive weapons, which
Speaker 11: he rejected as a categorical term. And he's gone toe
Speaker 11: to toe with Sean AKA Scott Hannity on tax reform
Speaker 11: earlier this week on Local ten. This Week in Florida,
Speaker 11: host Glenna Milberg abruptly cut off her interview with Larkin
Speaker 11: after he said that Israel has committed a genocide, which
Speaker 11: she claimed was quote unquote factually incorrect.
Speaker 15: Now.
Speaker 11: Also late last week, Lower Lumer and Democrat state Representative
Speaker 11: Michael Gottlieb tried to shut down a get out the
Speaker 11: vote rally for Larkin, Angie Nixon, and another DSA candidate,
Speaker 11: Elijah Manley, called chomp the oligarchy with a I want
Speaker 11: to say alligator or crocodile on front. Don't don't at me.
Speaker 7: It's going to be an alligator, right, whatever the ones
Speaker 7: are in Florida, alligator anything we have any indigenous crocodiles.
Speaker 11: Democrats State Rep. Michael Gottlieb said the rally was quote
Speaker 11: unquote anti jew and told his constituents to not support
Speaker 11: the venue hosting the event. Lor Lumer led an online
Speaker 11: harassment campaign targeting quote gie Hottist Congresswoman Rashida Talib, who
Speaker 11: was slated to speak at the rally. Lumer said that
Speaker 11: Telib was quote bringing her band of jew haters to
Speaker 11: South Florida and said that Oliver Larkin quote unquote hates
Speaker 11: Jewish people and that he's trying to primary Jared Massowitz
Speaker 11: because he is Jewish. Now, the venue originally contracted for
Speaker 11: the rally canceled. They pulled out when the organizers wouldn't
Speaker 11: remove Rashida Talib as a speaker. The rally was rescheduled
Speaker 11: for August fourteenth, and the organizers secured a second venue,
Speaker 11: which also canceled the night before the chomp. The Oligarchy
Speaker 11: rally was supposed to take place next morning. The organizers
Speaker 11: found a third location, which was kept secret until hours
Speaker 11: before the rally, which was then also streamed live, and
Speaker 11: the owner of that third venue, which did ultimately host
Speaker 11: the event, said that within hours his phone was bombarded
Speaker 11: with like six hundred messages from people protesting the rally.
Speaker 11: This kind of shows, like this, the speed and scale
Speaker 11: of the harassment campaign led by Lumer and this state Democrat.
Speaker 11: So unfortunately, you know, Larkin did not win. I'm interested
Speaker 11: to see what he does next. I think it would
Speaker 11: be a mistake if he just completely disappears. Think he's
Speaker 11: a good communicator, whether you know something like DSA national
Speaker 11: wants to tap into that, or if he wants to
Speaker 11: work on some other campaigns like Angie Nixon's campaign, which
Speaker 11: I think he's he's indicated he'll do. But but after
Speaker 11: the general be very interested to see what what he
Speaker 11: does in the future and to close Like at this
Speaker 11: point in like big cities, you know, in blue states,
Speaker 11: DSA are left socialist candidates can only really like run
Speaker 11: to win, like that's that's what you have to do. Now,
Speaker 11: there's no more of this like participation trophies. It's it's
Speaker 11: you have to you have to win. But it's it's
Speaker 11: also really important for DSA to expand their electoral efforts
Speaker 11: into red states and districts that are not solid blue
Speaker 11: and in that vein I think what DSA has done
Speaker 11: in Florida this primary reminds me of what nyc DSA
Speaker 11: was doing in New York like a decade ago, experimenting, building,
Speaker 11: organizing campaigns, running candidates. Even if there is a huge
Speaker 11: uphill battle, campaign volunteers get to you know, get experience,
Speaker 11: and you find your base of sport that can be
Speaker 11: built on in future races. And in that sense, I
Speaker 11: think what they were able to pull off, including in
Speaker 11: some very hostile districts, was impressive. Now will continue in
Speaker 11: some form with Angie Nixon running for Senate these next
Speaker 11: few months. Finally, finally, before we close, I should mention
Speaker 11: James fish Back, Enemy of the Pod, the Groyferd candidate
Speaker 11: for governor, came in third place in the GOP gobernatorial primary.
Speaker 11: He was expected to come in second, so that is interesting.
Speaker 11: But Jay Collins instead got second place with almost half
Speaker 11: a million votes. Oh, he got waxed Byron Donald's the
Speaker 11: expected winner one with eight hundred and ten thousand votes.
Speaker 11: Fishback got just less than two hundred thousand, which is
Speaker 11: way too many votes. He should not be He should
Speaker 11: not be getting that number of votes. That is not great.
Speaker 11: His can was very tailored to a type of voter.
Speaker 11: And also like places online and locations in the state
Speaker 11: that the other candidates were not tailoring for. So I
Speaker 11: I don't want to like overstate the sort of impact
Speaker 11: of Fishbeck's campaign because there was really no one else
Speaker 11: kind of going after that block, like especially late if
Speaker 11: Fishback was pivoting very hard into like anti data center
Speaker 11: stuff very late into the race to try to you know,
Speaker 11: attract more voters. Really, so like he was, he was
Speaker 11: doing stuff that other Republicans just were not doing, and
Speaker 11: you know, using that sneak o Nick Fuentes asthma Goold endorsement,
Speaker 11: which which which got him more than one hundred and
Speaker 11: fifty thousand votes, which is not great.
Speaker 6: Yeah is it is?
Speaker 11: It is just over ten percent of the Republican vote.
Speaker 7: I think Garrison and I made an episode about Fishback,
Speaker 7: god knows how long ago.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I don't know what he'll He'll he might just
Speaker 11: try to get some sort of like right wing far
Speaker 11: right pundit job in the future. We'll see. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 11: I want to.
Speaker 1: I want to also convey so Sophie's message of fuck
Speaker 1: Byron Donald's this guy also sucks. But yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's a Republican primary. They're all going to be like
Speaker 1: you're in a race with the worst, second worst or
Speaker 1: third worst person you've ever seen.
Speaker 11: So yeah, but yeah, that is that is Florida. Yeah,
Speaker 11: that is our our buye by annual Florida check in.
Speaker 7: If you are in Florida or elsewhere, you can email us.
Speaker 7: You're seeing the email address Cool Zone tips at Proton
Speaker 7: don't meet. Hey, you want it to be encrypted? Senate
Speaker 7: for another Proton address. Yeah, have fun with that, don't.
Speaker 7: It's still doing it with the fucking marketing emails. By
Speaker 7: the way, like every time I think I've blocked a
Speaker 7: you bastards. Unbelievable.
Speaker 1: Put a transgirl on your couch.
Speaker 11: We reported the news.
Speaker 8: We reported the news.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
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