Speaker 1: Al Zone 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
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Speaker 3: Welcome to it could happen here, a podcast about how
Speaker 3: freedom is a joke in our lives are the punchline,
Speaker 3: I am your host, Mio Wong. Long ago, twenty thirteen,
Speaker 3: in a galaxy basically exactly where this one is now.
Speaker 3: Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and now a terminal fascist,
Speaker 3: purchased the Washington Post. This was a sign of things
Speaker 3: to come. The danger of the American free press is
Speaker 3: and has always been, that we do not have a
Speaker 3: free press. We have a capitalist press. Writing and especially reporting,
Speaker 3: is a material product. Journalists have to eat, they have
Speaker 3: to travel, they have to go places, they have to
Speaker 3: meet people. All of this requires capital. And the problem
Speaker 3: with all of this requiring capital is that capital is
Speaker 3: not a neutral entity and the people who possess capital
Speaker 3: have interests. Fast forward to twenty twenty, as protests and
Speaker 3: uprisings raised across the United States against the police and
Speaker 3: white supremacy. A battle broke out inside of the New
Speaker 3: York Times newsrooms and editorial staff about the newspaper publishing
Speaker 3: an opinion piece called send in the Troops calling for
Speaker 3: You've Guessed It, Sending in the troops to attack protesters,
Speaker 3: published by a member of the American governments named Tom Cotton.
Speaker 3: Editors resigned in outrage. Debates raised a class journalist slacks.
Speaker 3: It was the culmination of decades of battles about the
Speaker 3: direction of politics in race in the United States, fought
Speaker 3: simultaneously in the streets and in the newsroom. Twenty twenty
Speaker 3: was a significant danger to the ruling class. The actual
Speaker 3: ideology that was so dangerous it had to be destroyed
Speaker 3: was this if the premise of twenty twenty is true,
Speaker 3: which is that the US is a structurally racist country
Speaker 3: founded on slavery and genocide, and that reproduces those same
Speaker 3: violences through the prison system, which has legal slavery in it.
Speaker 3: From the structure of the Thirteenth Amendment and reproduces it
Speaker 3: again through the police. Then the American project is indefensible,
Speaker 3: and here there be dragons. The ruling class needed to
Speaker 3: move to stop it, and so they created what they
Speaker 3: would call, I guess, a new ideology, but was really
Speaker 3: a continuation of centuries old strategies. This time we branded
Speaker 3: as anti woke. One of the avatars of anti woke
Speaker 3: was Barry Weiss. Barry Weiss was that the New York
Speaker 3: Times at the time was an ideological diversity hire, which
Speaker 3: is to say, affirmative action for white conservatives, as affirmative
Speaker 3: action has only existed in the figments of the minds
Speaker 3: of conservatives. She was given a cozy make work job
Speaker 3: at the beginning of the Trump administration as an opinion
Speaker 3: staff editor and writer for The New York Times. She
Speaker 3: was hired specifically to bring in more Trumpian figures into
Speaker 3: the opinion section. This is, and I cannot emphasize this enough,
Speaker 3: this is the fever dream of affirmative action in the
Speaker 3: conservative mind right. And these are going to be about
Speaker 3: to people who really hate affirmative action. But again, what
Speaker 3: they are being given. They are being handled by the
Speaker 3: most important newspaper probably in the entire world. You know,
Speaker 3: she was handed a job because she was a fucking
Speaker 3: right winger. Now, Weiss was part of the shall we say,
Speaker 3: conversations at the New York Times about again whether or
Speaker 3: not a newspaper should print a letter from a sitting
Speaker 3: US representative calling for the deployment of US soldiers against
Speaker 3: the American people. And she saw this as an opportunity
Speaker 3: not to resist a obviously tyrannical program by again, a
Speaker 3: sitting member of the United States government. She saw this
Speaker 3: as her moment to do a grift. Now, in this moment,
Speaker 3: she resigned from The New York Times in a huff
Speaker 3: raving about the quote lack of ideological diversity. Who had
Speaker 3: a giant rant about how the Twitter is not the
Speaker 3: masthead of the New York Times blah blah blah blah
Speaker 3: blah blah blah, which again I kind of emphasize this enough.
Speaker 3: Like the she was brought in as a right wing
Speaker 3: affirmative action higher in order to appease the demand from
Speaker 3: the ruling class. I guess for like pro Trump people,
Speaker 3: they already had electra right wingers. This is completely unhinged.
Speaker 3: But you know, she resigns and she has this big
Speaker 3: press to her in the right wing press trying to
Speaker 3: talk about how she was canceled, and of course none
Speaker 3: of this ever even happened. Right. We can debate the
Speaker 3: effect to which cancelation ever was even really a thing
Speaker 3: or did anything at all, But she was not canceled.
Speaker 3: She literally resigned of her own free will. She was
Speaker 3: not forced out. She chose to leave in order to
Speaker 3: pursue a career as a right wing griff for another fields,
Speaker 3: namely Substack, where she ran a newsletter that was sort
Speaker 3: of rebranded as like, oh, it's a media outlet called
Speaker 3: the Free Press. It's like, no, this is Barry Weiss's Substack.
Speaker 3: Come on, what are we doing here? What are we
Speaker 3: doing here? Now? Weiss is not a journalist. She is
Speaker 3: a right wing idea logue. She's also a hardline Zionist.
Speaker 3: If you want to go into all of the absolutely
Speaker 3: unhidded shit that Barry Weiss has said and done over
Speaker 3: the years, all of the just unbelievably somophobic shit, all
Speaker 3: of the weird racist shit, all of the anti immigrant
Speaker 3: shit that she said, there's a very good John Oliver
Speaker 3: thing about her. She is part of this story. But
Speaker 3: if we spent this entire episode just talking about how
Speaker 3: much he fucking sucks. We would be here for like
Speaker 3: two decades now. In a just world, none of this
Speaker 3: would matter at all. This would just be a conservative
Speaker 3: walking off from the free job that she was given
Speaker 3: by The New York Times, stomping off at a huff
Speaker 3: and going to start a sub stack whatever. Who kicks.
Speaker 3: This is not a just world. This is the United States.
Speaker 3: She now controls one of the most powerful and important
Speaker 3: news organizations in the United States. The story of how
Speaker 3: she got there is the story of the future of
Speaker 3: the American media. Unfortunately, for all of us, the story
Speaker 3: is a stressingly simple Barry Weiss and her outlet. I'm
Speaker 3: using that in immense quotations. Again, this is just a
Speaker 3: sub stack was bought out by one Larry Ellison. Larry
Speaker 3: Ellison that appointed Weiss to be the ideological hatchet woman
Speaker 3: for his takeover of Paramount, which owns CBS. There was
Speaker 3: no secret plan, there was no weird strategy, there was
Speaker 3: no Illuminati cabal behind the scenes. It didn't require any
Speaker 3: effort at all. All you have to do in order
Speaker 3: to install a right wing hack as the editor in
Speaker 3: chief of CBS News is by the company. The results
Speaker 3: have been devastating. I would call what happened to resegregation.
Speaker 3: There was a large scale firing of non white employees.
Speaker 3: NBC eliminated the editorial teams for NBC Asian America, NBC Black,
Speaker 3: NBC Latino, and NBC Out. NBC Out was the queer one.
Speaker 3: They fired kal King. They did some stuff that frankly
Speaker 3: sounds like a joke. I'm just going to read this
Speaker 3: quote from the Root and the CBS News bureau in Johannesburg,
Speaker 3: South Africa has been shut down with coverage of Africa
Speaker 3: shifting to London. That is again, they closed the South
Speaker 3: Africa Bureau. This is a CBS bureau in South Africa
Speaker 3: and moved their coverage of Africa from Africa to London.
Speaker 3: If a hardline Marxist ideologue had written this in nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty seven, no one would have believed them. And in
Speaker 3: the process, what they've done here is they've destroyed the
Speaker 3: NBC outlets that were responsible for doing a whole bunch
Speaker 3: of coverage for different groups of not white people. Right,
Speaker 3: nbcblkh's MC Black did a whole bunch of very good
Speaker 3: coverage of the uprising in twenty twenty right, NBC Asian
Speaker 3: America did a bunch of good work. NBC out was
Speaker 3: a place where you could occasionally find a transperson who
Speaker 3: was allowed to write. And all of that is gone
Speaker 3: because one man, Larry Allison and his son David Allison,
Speaker 3: bought the fucking media company and installed this unhinged right
Speaker 3: wing hack as their ideological secret police. I don't even
Speaker 3: know what you would call this position, the ideological purge executor.
Speaker 3: I guess you could call it of CBS. Now, obviously
Speaker 3: there are multiple aspects to this. We'll talk about Larry
Speaker 3: Ellison himself in a second, because he is a very
Speaker 3: important figure. But first, before we talk about the consolidation
Speaker 3: of capital into increasing monopolies. Let's go here from some
Speaker 3: of those monopolies, product services. Let's go we are so back.
Speaker 3: Obvious driving factors behind what has become a right wing
Speaker 3: fascist takeover of the media has been the consolidation of
Speaker 3: capital into increasing monopolies. Now, it's been a very, very
Speaker 3: famous thing in the US to say that most of
Speaker 3: American media is controlled by five companies. But here's the thing.
Speaker 3: Even those five companies, those can always be consolidated into
Speaker 3: fewer and fewer companies. Right as the company start to struggle,
Speaker 3: as any one of them sees weakness in the other ones,
Speaker 3: you get attempts to buy them out. And this is
Speaker 3: what happens with Paramount, which is again the parent company
Speaker 3: that owns NBC. So the way that it's framed, if
Speaker 3: you read it in the presss oh, it was a
Speaker 3: merger between Skydance, which was Ellison's sort of outlet, and Paramount.
Speaker 3: But that's not really what happened. Really, what happened was
Speaker 3: Paramount was bought by Ellison and sky Dance and they
Speaker 3: were merged together after that. And this is a problem
Speaker 3: with the concentration of capital. Right as capital becomes increasingly
Speaker 3: more and more concentration, as there are individual people and
Speaker 3: also entities that control more and more capital, their ability
Speaker 3: to simply swallow the rest of their competition and consume
Speaker 3: it increases. And this is a significant advantage to the companies.
Speaker 3: To get the swallow of this capital, they get to
Speaker 3: absorb all of the intellectual property, and so now they
Speaker 3: have control over the property regimes that allow them to
Speaker 3: control cultural production, and as a sort of incidental bonus,
Speaker 3: they can take control of the media. Now it's worth
Speaker 3: getting into the Ellisons themselves. Now, Larry Allison, back in
Speaker 3: the halcyon days of twenty twenty, was merely the eleventh
Speaker 3: richest man in the world when he quote participated in
Speaker 3: a call shortly after the twenty twenty election that focus
Speaker 3: on strategies for contesting the legitimacy of the vote. According
Speaker 3: to court documents and a participant, the November fourteenth call
Speaker 3: included Lindsey Graham, Fox News host Sean Hannity, Jay Seklau,
Speaker 3: an attorney for President Donald Trump, and James Bob Junior,
Speaker 3: an eternity for True the Vote, a Texas based nonprofit.
Speaker 3: True the Vote was a completely unhanged organization dedicated to
Speaker 3: overturning the twenty twenty election by doing all these weird
Speaker 3: voter fraud things. And they had a strategy call, like
Speaker 3: the attorney in a strategy call with a bunch of
Speaker 3: Trump supporters, including one Larry Ellison. Now again that was
Speaker 3: back in twenty twenty. Here in twenty twenty five and
Speaker 3: now fighting with Elon Musk for the title of the
Speaker 3: richest person in the fucking world. Ellison said, and I quote,
Speaker 3: We're going to have supervision. Every police officer is going
Speaker 3: to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem,
Speaker 3: AI will report that problem and report it to the
Speaker 3: appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because
Speaker 3: we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on
Speaker 3: now in that intervening time. Larry Ellison is one of
Speaker 3: the people behind Oracle, and Oracle has benefited enormously as
Speaker 3: a company that got really in on the cloud storage boom.
Speaker 3: They even benefited enormously from selling a bunch of shit
Speaker 3: to AI companies. Lara. Ellison is also a huge AI supporter,
Speaker 3: a huge back of AI, a huge someone who wants
Speaker 3: to spread AI, and someone who wants to spread AI,
Speaker 3: you know, very specifically, and this is very important into
Speaker 3: surveillance technology. He is also one of the people who
Speaker 3: as twenty twenty went on and as the last half
Speaker 3: decade has come on and as the giant sort of
Speaker 3: backlash against against the uprising, and as his attempt to
Speaker 3: reassert racism as the dominant ideology of the United States
Speaker 3: and to make sure that capitals hold over this country
Speaker 3: and that white supremacies hold over this country would be maintained,
Speaker 3: he has become one of the large drivers of this
Speaker 3: entire project He's not the only one. Jeff Bezos, as
Speaker 3: we started this program with, already owned the Washington Post
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty five, he went in to very seriously
Speaker 3: change it. Jeff Bezos on the now fascist Twitter and
Speaker 3: we will get to that in a second. Two wrote
Speaker 3: and this was a This was a letter that he
Speaker 3: sent to his staff, and this is this is the
Speaker 3: editorial section. I'm writing to let you know about a
Speaker 3: change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to
Speaker 3: be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars,
Speaker 3: personal liberties and free markets. Will cover other topics too,
Speaker 3: of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left
Speaker 3: to be published by others. David Shipley, who had been
Speaker 3: his handpicked editor, resigned rather than lead the effort. It's
Speaker 3: not like Shipley had been like a leftist, right but
Speaker 3: you know, I'm going to read another part of this letter.
Speaker 3: Quote I offered David Shipley, who I admire greatly because
Speaker 3: you know he was the Hambick guy, the opportunity to
Speaker 3: lead this new chapter I suggest. I said to him
Speaker 3: that the answer wasn't hell yes, that it had to
Speaker 3: be no. After careful consideration, David decided to step away.
Speaker 3: So okay, what was actually happening here he came in
Speaker 3: was like, our board is not fascist enough, and if
Speaker 3: you're not going to make it more fascist, then get
Speaker 3: the fuck out of the way. And the guy he
Speaker 3: had picked to run the editorial board like three years ago,
Speaker 3: when this is unacceptable. I cannot be involved in this.
Speaker 3: And left and now Washington Post publishes pieces with titles
Speaker 3: like quote Pam Bondi's welcome woke rollback. The Justice Department
Speaker 3: rescinds regulations encouraging racial preferences, you know, and you can
Speaker 3: in some ways see all of the things that are
Speaker 3: coming together. Obviously, Bezos was a major supporter of the
Speaker 3: Trump administration, is a major support of the Trump administration.
Speaker 3: Put a bunch of money into the unhinged Trump ballroom.
Speaker 3: And when he says Justice resins regulations encouraging racial preferences,
Speaker 3: they're talking about anti scrim nation ordinances, right, That's what
Speaker 3: they're actually talking about. But these people have been so
Speaker 3: cooked and have stewed so much in the ideology of
Speaker 3: countering the ideology of twenty twenty that they're they're now
Speaker 3: doing all of this reversed racism stuff where they think
Speaker 3: that if you're not allowed to discriminate. That's anti white discrimination.
Speaker 3: And the Washington Post has been tanking effectively in the
Speaker 3: wake of a whole bunch of a whole bunch of
Speaker 3: writ wing editorial changes. Its audience has significantly declined since this.
Speaker 3: A whole bunch of people who subscribed to the Post
Speaker 3: called it in their subscriber count is just absolutely pitiful.
Speaker 3: Now the reach has been contracting. The paper is going
Speaker 3: to shit. But that doesn't matter because the Washington Post
Speaker 3: is not a money making outlet. The Washington Post is
Speaker 3: a chance to shape the way that the country thinks.
Speaker 3: And it is better that you know seven people in Washington, DC,
Speaker 3: who are all identically minded conservatives read the Washington Posts
Speaker 3: and agree with it than it is for there to
Speaker 3: be any sort of independence whatsoever from anything on the
Speaker 3: shop floor from any of the people writing for it.
Speaker 3: We've also seen in recent months the elimination of teen
Speaker 3: Folgue Conte Nasty. Teenvogue's parent company eliminated Team Vogue as
Speaker 3: an independent outlet. Teen Vogue had been the furthest left
Speaker 3: of the even sort of mainstream outlets in the US.
Speaker 3: It had carried a bunch of extremely good and radical
Speaker 3: work on race and gender. It was also one of
Speaker 3: the few outlets with consistent trans writing. And of course,
Speaker 3: the other aspect of all of these purges has been
Speaker 3: unbelievable on hinge transphobia. And this was them just destroying
Speaker 3: what had been a very very important outlet on the
Speaker 3: left for telling the stories of non white people, telling
Speaker 3: the stories of workers, and telling the stories of trans people.
Speaker 3: And they just destroyed it. Even though, and this is
Speaker 3: actually very interesting, ever since teen Vogue had shifted to
Speaker 3: doing a bunch of leftist coverage and covering the protests
Speaker 3: against Donald Trump in his first administration and had gone
Speaker 3: towards actually, you know, talking about labor and talking about
Speaker 3: struggle and talking about unions and talking about you know,
Speaker 3: the like, the experiences of people living under white supremacy.
Speaker 3: Its readership had exploded. But again that doesn't matter because
Speaker 3: it's bad for Donald Trump. And so we're seeing the
Speaker 3: ideological tightening consolidation to the media as what had been
Speaker 3: an outlet that allowed people to talk about shit was
Speaker 3: just destroyed. Now, speaking about outlets destroying things ideologically, Hey,
Speaker 3: product and services, please don't destroy USOO. Now, as we
Speaker 3: covered on this show a few weeks ago. Conde Nasts
Speaker 3: also fired several union workers legally for you know, staging
Speaker 3: a again protected workplace action, demanding to know what the
Speaker 3: fuck was going on with these teen Vogue firings. And
Speaker 3: that's another aspect of all of his takeover, which is
Speaker 3: that these outlets just viciously and radically hates and this
Speaker 3: is the ruling classes people who run these outlets viciously
Speaker 3: hate unions. And this is something that's very important to
Speaker 3: understand in terms of media unions, because media unions were
Speaker 3: also a very powerful force for encouraging diversity because, as
Speaker 3: it turns out, workers and this is true, I could
Speaker 3: say that someone who's part of a media union less
Speaker 3: racist than the bosses, and in fact would like there
Speaker 3: to be more non white people and don't like it
Speaker 3: when non white people are discriminated against. And this is
Speaker 3: one of the things that these media unions and that
Speaker 3: unions in general do is try to help you not
Speaker 3: get fucking discriminated against on racial grounds. So of course
Speaker 3: a part and partial of this has been the targeting
Speaker 3: of the union and that's what we've been seeing at
Speaker 3: conte Nast, where they also fired workers who had nothing
Speaker 3: to do with teen Vogue and also of whom was
Speaker 3: on the show and is trans and you should go
Speaker 3: listen to that episode because it's very good. But that's
Speaker 3: another aspect of this right wing consolidation is that media
Speaker 3: unions are able to push back against the untrammeled power
Speaker 3: of these fascist billionaires to turn news coverage into whatever
Speaker 3: the fuck they want. And that's what's happened at CBS,
Speaker 3: where they're now doing giant specials with like Kirk's Widow
Speaker 3: and all of these just absolutely deranged, unbelievably bizarre right
Speaker 3: wing pieces that they're just sort of airing now. And
Speaker 3: in order to you know, stop that shit, you need
Speaker 3: powerful media unions, and this is one of the things
Speaker 3: the ruling class is trying to crush. Now. It's also
Speaker 3: worth mentioning that these right wing billionaires are trying to
Speaker 3: consolidate their hold on social media as well as the
Speaker 3: traditional media. And obviously the largest example of this is
Speaker 3: Elon Musk, who's purchased Twitter and has you know, effectively
Speaker 3: turned Twitter into another arm of Stormfront. It is a
Speaker 3: just unhinged stew of racism and conspiracy that is now
Speaker 3: effectively unusable if you don't want like the most racist
Speaker 3: shit you've ever seen in your entire life, just in
Speaker 3: every single one of your replies. And it's also become
Speaker 3: a major, you know, vector of targeting for the Trump administration,
Speaker 3: where what Twitter is used for now, instead of being
Speaker 3: a platform that at one time actually was able to
Speaker 3: play a role as a thing that does resistance, as
Speaker 3: a tool of protesters, and as a tool of people
Speaker 3: who opposed, you know, the untraveled rule of billionaires, it's
Speaker 3: now been converted into just racist slop and a way
Speaker 3: to track down anyone who's sort of vaguely centered left
Speaker 3: and just put them in the eyes of the administration
Speaker 3: so they can be targeted by the state. And it's
Speaker 3: also worth noting that one of the people who helped
Speaker 3: bankroll the purchase of Twitter because Elon Musk couldn't just
Speaker 3: purchase it directly, was one Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison is
Speaker 3: also part of a massive attempt to buy TikTok. Listeners
Speaker 3: of the show are probably familiar with the whole extremely
Speaker 3: weird story about how TikTok was banned last year under
Speaker 3: the Biden administration sort of bafflingly and Trump sort of
Speaker 3: just broke the law and made it still be usable,
Speaker 3: but has been trying to force TikTok to be sold
Speaker 3: to American buyers. And the conglomerate that's supposed to buy
Speaker 3: it is a Larry Ellison thing, so he's also attempting
Speaker 3: to buy TikTok. And finally, the story we're were to
Speaker 3: close on is that Larry Ellison has been doing a
Speaker 3: hostile takeover bid of Warner Brothers. Now Warner Brothers currently
Speaker 3: is set to be bought by Netflix. Larry Ellison kept
Speaker 3: on submitting bids to them, and his efforts to actually
Speaker 3: get the purchase to go through were consistently denied. But
Speaker 3: in the wake of that, they're attempting to do a
Speaker 3: hostile takeover bid where they just go to the shareholders
Speaker 3: directly and try to buy them out at what they
Speaker 3: claim is a higher share price. I'm not going to
Speaker 3: go into that whole thing as a fiasco, but what
Speaker 3: is interesting for our purposes is that David Allison, who's
Speaker 3: the guy running Paramount, who's the guy who's been directly
Speaker 3: running the ideological purges, has met several times with Trump,
Speaker 3: and last time they met, Trump has promised that he
Speaker 3: would change the coverage of CNN in order to make
Speaker 3: it better for Trump.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: It's also worth noting that buying CNN is not part
Speaker 3: of the deal for the Warner takeover bid by Netflix.
Speaker 3: Right if Netflix takes over Warner Bros. They don't get CNN.
Speaker 3: Under Paramount and Larry Ellison's deal, they would get CNN now,
Speaker 3: even though CNN has done a whole bunch of unhandshit
Speaker 3: like having Ben Shapiro on to do fucking Electron coverage.
Speaker 3: Jesus fucking Christ. Okay, Trump has still been mad at
Speaker 3: them for reporting even a tiny bit critically about his administration.
Speaker 3: And Trump has been kind of refusing to pick a
Speaker 3: side directly in terms of the takeover bid for Warner
Speaker 3: Brothers in the fight between Netflix and Paramount, but he's
Speaker 3: now said that he wants to make sure that CNN
Speaker 3: is sold and that it should get new leadership, presumably
Speaker 3: along the style of what happened with CBS. And so
Speaker 3: this is sort of the final phase of all of this, right,
Speaker 3: which is trumpministration has the ability to use is quote
Speaker 3: unquote anti trust power in order to stop one of
Speaker 3: these two companies from doing this buyout, and Trump administration
Speaker 3: is using the fact that the media is being bought
Speaker 3: out by his allies in order to try to get
Speaker 3: people to buy CNN and simply eliminate negative news coverage
Speaker 3: of him. And I don't really think I need to
Speaker 3: explain why it's extremely bad that the president of the
Speaker 3: United States could simply order a news outlet to be
Speaker 3: bought out, and then suddenly it's bought out. I think
Speaker 3: it's kind of self explanatory why that's unbelievably bad. But
Speaker 3: that is the situation that we may rapidly find ourselves
Speaker 3: in because we don't live in anything that even sort
Speaker 3: of looks like a democracy. We live in the dictatorship
Speaker 3: of capital. And a thing about the press under a dictatorship,
Speaker 3: even one that's as decentralized as the dictatorship of capital,
Speaker 3: is that one particularly fascist faction of capital can simply
Speaker 3: roll in by the media and take control of it.
Speaker 3: And that's the project that we're seeing now. But these
Speaker 3: people are not undefeatable. We beat them before, we can't
Speaker 3: beat them again. And in some ways their project is
Speaker 3: kind of self defeating in that they have spent a
Speaker 3: significant amount of time hollowing out people's trust in these institutions,
Speaker 3: and there is an extent to which as bad as
Speaker 3: all of this is, they may simply be taking control
Speaker 3: of a husk that they had already caused a rot
Speaker 3: from the inside. And meanwhile, all of these, all of
Speaker 3: his control of the media that they've been taking has
Speaker 3: not stopped everyone from fucking hating them. And that's the
Speaker 3: note that I want to leave everyone here on. It
Speaker 3: doesn't matter how much of the media these people buy,
Speaker 3: everyone still hates them. We can fight them and we
Speaker 3: can win. Welcome, take it up at here a podcast
Speaker 3: boldly asked the question what if a whole bunch of
Speaker 3: your life wasn't controlled by the bizarre whims of random dictators.
Speaker 3: This is your host, Mia Wung And the last time
Speaker 3: we saw the Blue Bottle Union they had stage to
Speaker 3: walk out treated Eclipse. Now they are back again to
Speaker 3: talk about union shit and Yeah with me is Alex Pine,
Speaker 3: who's the president of Blue Bottle Union, and Abby Sadow,
Speaker 3: the secretary treasurer. Yet both of you two, Welcome to
Speaker 3: the show. Hi, thanks for having us both back on. Guys,
Speaker 3: thank you so much. Yeah, I'm really really, I'm really
Speaker 3: excited to talk about this because the last one, I
Speaker 3: gotta say that was one of the absolute funniest things
Speaker 3: I've ever heard.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I still can't get over how DHS got called
Speaker 5: on us when we tried to file for our election.
Speaker 3: So uninche like, I feel like this is this is
Speaker 3: one of the things about doing the show is like
Speaker 3: I'm like about to be five years into this, right,
Speaker 3: It's like you think you've seen it all and then
Speaker 3: just like no, just just the most unhinged bullshit you've
Speaker 3: ever heard in your entire life, because like, just like,
Speaker 3: the capacity for cruelty and inventiveness of bosses is effectively infinite,
Speaker 3: So they can always find some bullshit the pull that
Speaker 3: you've never seen before, and they love to do it too. Yeah.
Speaker 5: This is one of the reasons why we unionized to
Speaker 5: begin with, is just because bosses can be petty tyrants. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and sometimes it seems like the only reason that they
Speaker 5: got into being a boss is because they want to
Speaker 5: be a petty tyrant but don't have the soul for
Speaker 5: politics anyways.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we unionized last May.
Speaker 5: For anybody that's unaware, Blue Bottle is a so called
Speaker 5: specialty cough that is owned entirely by Nesslie. Yes, that
Speaker 5: one that everyone regards as widely being evil.
Speaker 3: Yeah. See an extremely logged episode that I did, for example,
Speaker 3: about Niceleie chocolate and child labor is great. This child
Speaker 3: slave labor good stuff. We love capitalism, and.
Speaker 4: Their coffee business is truly no better.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean, this is going to get wildly off topic
Speaker 5: before we even begin. But if anybody looks up the
Speaker 5: NGO Coffee Watch, they do a lot of great reporting
Speaker 5: and research on the supply chains of coffee, specifically Nestli's
Speaker 5: and Starbucks's, and it's all very ugly stuff. But Blue Bottle,
Speaker 5: Blue Bottles, especially the coffee chain owned by Neslei. We
Speaker 5: unionized all six of their Greater Boston locations in May
Speaker 5: of twenty twenty four, and this year we.
Speaker 3: Added four locations in the East Bay area to our
Speaker 3: union in July. Hell yeah yeah.
Speaker 5: We also just concluded a multi day strike as an
Speaker 5: independent union at the end of November, so Black Friday.
Speaker 3: Hell yeah yeah, yeah yeah. So let's talk about that strike. Well, actually,
Speaker 3: I guess okay, we should. We should probably do the
Speaker 3: run up to what has been happening until we go
Speaker 3: after that strike. I'm getting I'm getting strike excited. This
Speaker 3: is how I've been in my mind since September. It
Speaker 3: is just how do we make a strike happen? Yeah, hell, yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 3: let's talk about like what the sort of lead up
Speaker 3: stuff to the action war and let's talk about like.
Speaker 5: Yeah, what expanding was, Like, yeah, Abby, do you want
Speaker 5: to talk about the lead up?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So since we unionized last May, we've had multiple stage walkouts.
Speaker 4: In September of last year, yeah, one of our union
Speaker 4: wraps at the Harvard Square location, well unjustly fires, we
Speaker 4: did a walk out over her termination. We did a
Speaker 4: walkout in January of this past year after Blue Bottle
Speaker 4: completely refused to negotiate with us over the renovation of
Speaker 4: the Poudential Center and a lot of employees were going
Speaker 4: to be losing out on almost eight dollars in tips
Speaker 4: and is just fright hundreds of dollars a month. And
Speaker 4: the company was like, oh, well, we bargained to an impasse,
Speaker 4: so we're just going to do whatever we want. We
Speaker 4: were like, okay, well that's not that's not all this works. No, yeah,
Speaker 4: And then in May of this year, we did another
Speaker 4: walkout when they made the same argument that we bargained
Speaker 4: towards impass when they tried to install security cameras.
Speaker 3: For anybody that's wondering.
Speaker 5: No, the cafes in Boston did not have cameras in
Speaker 5: them for the entire time that we were organizing or unionized,
Speaker 5: until we began negotiating the installation of cameras as part
Speaker 5: of our contract. When they felt like they were done
Speaker 5: talking about cameras with us, they declared impass, which they
Speaker 5: can't do because we were negotiating it as part of
Speaker 5: the contract, so they would have had to get to
Speaker 5: an impass on the entire contract before doing it. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and their lawyer basically said, well, we weren't getting anywhere
Speaker 5: with that, so we're going to do anyways.
Speaker 3: God, labor law is so fun because it's like like
Speaker 3: every boss breaks like one hundred million labor laws a second,
Speaker 3: and then kind of nothing happens unless you force it to.
Speaker 5: Speaking of breaking weird labor laws, since we unionized, one
Speaker 5: nice thing that has happened was until May of this year,
Speaker 5: they were negotiating over serious discipline, so final written warnings
Speaker 5: or terminations with us. In effect, what this means is
Speaker 5: that they would sit down with us and just talk
Speaker 5: about why they felt like terminating someone was justified until
Speaker 5: they said we're not going to do anything else aside
Speaker 5: from fire them. But because of an NLRB ruling with
Speaker 5: Starbucks at the end of April, their lawyer said that
Speaker 5: they were done with that and they felt that they
Speaker 5: had no legal obligation to continue doing it. Oh fun yeah,
Speaker 5: which a break from past practice. And we have been
Speaker 5: writing them committing to negotiating over serious discipline with us.
Speaker 5: So less than a week after they say we're not
Speaker 5: going to bargain over discipline with you anymore, they fire
Speaker 5: one coworker of ours, and our store immediately walked out
Speaker 5: over it.
Speaker 6: Hell yeah.
Speaker 3: Which yeah.
Speaker 5: I continue to be proud of that walkout, specifically because
Speaker 5: it wasn't planned and because it was over something that
Speaker 5: is pretty technical labor law wise.
Speaker 3: Just the fact that they didn't negotiate over the termination.
Speaker 3: That fun. That wrong. Yes, that's like girl who's read
Speaker 3: a bunch of weird labor history. This thing feels like
Speaker 3: a thing for a fucking weird labor history. The thing
Speaker 3: it reminds me of is that there was this thing
Speaker 3: in I think it was sibber Gora in Spain. She
Speaker 3: like the twenties and thirties where it was like this
Speaker 3: hyperbilitant labor like union like labor Town, but they had
Speaker 3: a whole thing where they refused to strike over like
Speaker 3: improving economic conditions because they were like, this is bourgeois
Speaker 3: reformism and they would only strike over political stuff. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: but if you arrested like one person, like the whole
Speaker 3: fucking city would go out. It's like this lot like yeah, no,
Speaker 3: we could just call. We could just fucking instantly get
Speaker 3: get a fucking walk out to happen over just like
Speaker 3: over like them fucking with like kind of technical labor
Speaker 3: stuff like this rocks. We love to see it. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I was on the floor that day that our coworker
Speaker 4: was fired, and I remember I went on my ten
Speaker 4: minute break after she was fired, and there's like a
Speaker 4: pond behind our store, and I was literally throwing rocks
Speaker 4: into the pond and I was like this sucks so
Speaker 4: bad and I'm so angry. And then I was like, wait,
Speaker 4: we're a unionized. I was like, wait a minute, we
Speaker 4: have a union. And I go back into the store
Speaker 4: and I was like, hey, guys, if we don't walk
Speaker 4: out right now, then what is the point?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: And everyone was like yeah, actually, if we don't walk
Speaker 4: out right now, what is the point?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Hell yeah.
Speaker 4: And then we all walked out and it was it
Speaker 4: was really beautiful.
Speaker 3: Actually, that's so sick. That's so beautiful. I don't know
Speaker 3: there's some kind of metaphor for like you walking in
Speaker 3: being like the first rip the rock hitting the pond
Speaker 3: in the first ripples going out and the whole thing.
Speaker 3: Oh absolutely, that's I don't know, that's gorgeous. I love it.
Speaker 3: That fucking rules. Congratulations. Tell yeah.
Speaker 4: One of my favorite things to say is that union
Speaker 4: is friendship, and friendship is unions, and when your friend
Speaker 4: gets fired, you should be able to walk out.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fucked that, like seriously here.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And on the whole, we've had a I think
Speaker 5: pretty successful year, especially because I want to stress this,
Speaker 5: we're independent, So for all the walkouts that we've done,
Speaker 5: we've been able to replace the wages of baristas.
Speaker 3: Oh that's really sick.
Speaker 5: If anybody listening to this wants to help us be
Speaker 5: able to do more walkouts, you can go yes tinywurl
Speaker 5: dot com forward slash bbu dash strike will be in
Speaker 5: the description.
Speaker 3: Hell yeah.
Speaker 5: Because at this point, the companies realize that they can't
Speaker 5: break our solidarity in any meaningful way by resorting to
Speaker 5: skear tactics or delaying, and so now they've just resorted
Speaker 5: to straight up firing people because yeah, like it's kind
Speaker 5: of like a break glass here in case of emergency
Speaker 5: thing where.
Speaker 3: They're like, we're all out of ideas. What do we do? Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's just start trying to fire everyone.
Speaker 4: And that's what they've done.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Most recently, all the stores in both Boston and the
Speaker 5: East Bay area went on a four day straight it's
Speaker 5: November because the company illegally fired Abby executive board member
Speaker 5: named Nora and an organizer of ours in the East
Speaker 5: Bay named Ashley for all incredibly petty reasons. I don't
Speaker 5: know if you want to speak more to why you
Speaker 5: were fired Abby.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so on the record, I was fired because I
Speaker 4: wore green pants. What I wore green pants like three
Speaker 4: weeks prior to me being fired. And let me tell you,
Speaker 4: there's nothing worse than waking up at four point thirty
Speaker 4: to go to your opening shift at your stupid cafe job,
Speaker 4: to then clock in and be immediately hit with separation
Speaker 4: forms because you wore green pants three weeks ago.
Speaker 3: What you must.
Speaker 5: Understand what a serious infraction it is to wear green pants.
Speaker 4: Of course, I mean clearly the green pants that I've
Speaker 4: been wearing for the better part of two years.
Speaker 5: Yeah, firing Abby was generous. Actually she should have been
Speaker 5: put to death for the crime of wearing green pants.
Speaker 4: Of course, most likely this is.
Speaker 3: Some like fucking medieval like, yeah, you pissed off the
Speaker 3: monarch by like you wore a color of pants that
Speaker 3: was like unfavorable to the eye of the king, and
Speaker 3: now he's drawn and quarter Like what is this bullshit?
Speaker 4: Like, yep, I wore green pants in front of my manager,
Speaker 4: therefore I should not be able to make my rent.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's absolutely gibberish that that might be the all
Speaker 3: time dubbest fiery reason I've ever heard, Like what is.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, it's just so egregious because the managers know
Speaker 4: that I have a great rapport with all my coworkers.
Speaker 4: I'm front all of my coworkers, and they were like, hmm,
Speaker 4: how can we, you know, make one of our long
Speaker 4: standing employees who is good at their job, you know,
Speaker 4: get fired? So green pants was the reasoning, which.
Speaker 3: And just like the idea of your employer being able
Speaker 3: to control what color of pants you wear is like
Speaker 3: is a thing that just on a foot of mental
Speaker 3: level would not be accepted with any other kind of
Speaker 3: authority that everyone immediately recognizes. Wait, what the fuck that's
Speaker 3: completely unhinged. Why should someone have the ability to tell
Speaker 3: you like, no, you have to wear this color pants,
Speaker 3: or you can't pay your rents and you can't eat
Speaker 3: oh yeah no.
Speaker 5: And this is kind of the despotism of management that
Speaker 5: we're just talking about.
Speaker 7: Isn't it.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And this is the thing that in.
Speaker 5: Bargaining sessions for a contract, their site is very interested
Speaker 5: in maintaining. We've said multiple times that we want a
Speaker 5: better just code policy, or at the very least, we
Speaker 5: don't want to wave our right to be able to
Speaker 5: wear a union memorabilia on the floor.
Speaker 6: Uh huh.
Speaker 5: And because he doesn't have any better ideas, their lawyer
Speaker 5: can only think to shoot that down by talking about
Speaker 5: how he doesn't, you know, wear his sexuality on his
Speaker 5: shirt or what.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Well, because he was like, why don't you want
Speaker 5: to be able to wave your right to wear a
Speaker 5: union memorabilia on the floor, and we said, we want
Speaker 5: to be able to show pride that we are unionized,
Speaker 5: and we want to be able to have more freedom
Speaker 5: for expression.
Speaker 3: Uh huh.
Speaker 5: Because it's despotic to be able to have that level
Speaker 5: of control over what somebody does. Yeah, and then he said,
Speaker 5: you know, well, I don't wear my sexuality on my shirt,
Speaker 5: and then realize that it was maybe inappropriate to say that,
Speaker 5: So then he talked about how he doesn't wear his
Speaker 5: daughters on.
Speaker 3: His shirt, which it's a more convoluted point.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, because he's proud of his kids.
Speaker 3: I guess what are we doing here? Just come on,
Speaker 3: we gotta have better arguments than.
Speaker 4: This, Like, no, this guy is really full of bad arguments.
Speaker 5: Yeah, if you want to hear bad arguments, you should
Speaker 5: sit down on the bargaining session where their lawyer goes
Speaker 5: on kind of incomprehensible tie rades about how the free
Speaker 5: market in the aggregate will make sure that the best
Speaker 5: person will get promoted over time, or that the company
Speaker 5: will become more profitable or run with the most efficiency
Speaker 5: as an enterprise, because anything else would be illogical because
Speaker 5: they wouldn't produce more profit.
Speaker 3: But what does that have to do with labor? Yes,
Speaker 3: there's actually this is okay, So when I know who's
Speaker 3: a lawyer once told me that, like the this is
Speaker 3: this is not like a leftist this is just like
Speaker 3: she's just like a corporate lawyer once told me that
Speaker 3: this is like the actual secret basis that doesn't exist
Speaker 3: of all corporate laws, that there is actually nothing in
Speaker 3: the law that says a company has to make more
Speaker 3: money or that they even have the right to make money.
Speaker 3: Like that's that that doesn't exist, Like that's not it.
Speaker 3: That's not a thing, Like there's no, you don't actually
Speaker 3: have a legal right to make more money, like you
Speaker 3: simply don't. That's just that's not how this works. The
Speaker 3: thing that reminds me of is the other pollet is
Speaker 3: David Graeber wrote about. I think you might have been
Speaker 3: quoting someone else, but I can't remember who was quoting.
Speaker 3: But he writes about how the relationship between sort of
Speaker 3: eloquence and violence where the less you have and this
Speaker 3: isn't somewhere in the hope of rules. He writes about
Speaker 3: how you know people who have a access to violence
Speaker 3: to compel people to do something, you don't even have
Speaker 3: to speak the same language as someone. Right, you can
Speaker 3: just point a gun at them and you know they
Speaker 3: have to obey you because you know they have force, right,
Speaker 3: But the less ability you have to actually use force
Speaker 3: to get someone to do something right. So if you're
Speaker 3: a village chief in there's actually a lot of conditionous
Speaker 3: tribes that were like this, but you know you're you're
Speaker 3: in like sort of the Northeast, and you don't actually
Speaker 3: have the ability to compel people to do things. So
Speaker 3: if you want people to go work in the morning,
Speaker 3: you have to like get up and make a giant
Speaker 3: show of like, oh, I'm getting up to work in
Speaker 3: the morning. Everyone follow me. Wow, look at how hard
Speaker 3: I working. And you have to like convince them through oratory.
Speaker 3: And you know this, this is like why all these
Speaker 3: people when when Europeans run into them, everyone is like,
Speaker 3: holy shit, these are like the these are the best
Speaker 3: orders of every encountered because they have to be right.
Speaker 3: But the more power you have, the less eloquence you
Speaker 3: have to have, which I think is like, you know,
Speaker 3: this is like a Donald Trump thing, right, It's like, yeah,
Speaker 3: what what you've what you've reached disappoint in the process.
Speaker 3: You know, you can just compel people do things through violence.
Speaker 3: You can just like talk like a fourth grader and
Speaker 3: it's fine and it doesn't matter because you just have violence.
Speaker 3: And that's what this reminds me of it, like, oh,
Speaker 3: we're the company like we have like we're fucking owned
Speaker 3: by nasty We have all this money. We don't have
Speaker 3: to make compelling arguments. We just have to like have power. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean pretty much. Personally, it reads to me as.
Speaker 5: Like a way to delay actually talking about any of
Speaker 5: our demands at the table, because if you just eat
Speaker 5: up all the time, then there's.
Speaker 3: No time to talk. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but that's also really beautiful to think about from
Speaker 5: a more abstract sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, also, just companies love fucking with negotiations. It's awful.
Speaker 3: I how okay, I should just start asking everyone who
Speaker 3: does negotiations about this. But on average, how late should
Speaker 3: their manages to show up to meetings?
Speaker 5: I would say that actually both sides are equally late
Speaker 5: well to the negotiations, at least just because getting around
Speaker 5: the city is so difficult. Oh oh, so that's it's.
Speaker 3: Like a transit thing, not like a no, no, we're
Speaker 3: not deliberately showing up ly as far as I know. Yeah,
Speaker 3: we just can't get in traffic. Yeah, but there should
Speaker 3: they already just be there?
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, Well, because this is something that's actually been
Speaker 5: a delay tactic for them, is they insist that we
Speaker 5: need to split the cost equally of a bargaining space.
Speaker 3: What what?
Speaker 5: And again, we're independent, so they know that we can't
Speaker 5: on a regular basis commit to that. So if you
Speaker 5: want to donate to our unions that way, we can
Speaker 5: hate to sit down in front of these people.
Speaker 3: That's completely on it. Yeah, having to have the union
Speaker 3: pave I've never heard of that before. That's completely deranged,
Speaker 3: that's what.
Speaker 5: And we we've even waived our right to meet in
Speaker 5: a neutral space.
Speaker 3: Uh huh.
Speaker 5: So we've asked if they would be willing to meet
Speaker 5: in the office of their legal representation or if they'd
Speaker 5: be willing to meet in the office of our legal representation,
Speaker 5: and they've said no to both because supposedly, despite being
Speaker 5: the second largest union avoidance firm in the world, they've
Speaker 5: said that their office doesn't have adequate space to hold us.
Speaker 5: But then rental space in the city is so fucking
Speaker 5: expensive that there's no feasible way to rent a space
Speaker 5: for eight hours for two days.
Speaker 3: You know, once a month.
Speaker 5: Yeah, which is meant that we've ended up in some
Speaker 5: strange places, so college conference rooms, city hall, we work
Speaker 5: what Yeah.
Speaker 3: Really know, this is the most deeply unserious company I
Speaker 3: have ever encountered, Like, there's all.
Speaker 5: Kinds of things like that that they've employed in the
Speaker 5: past year to attempt us making significant progress with negotiating.
Speaker 5: And it wasn't until November this year that they finally
Speaker 5: gave us a counter on economics after we told them
Speaker 5: we would file a bad faith bargaining charge if they didn't. Hell, yeah,
Speaker 5: do you want to guess what they're counter So, for reference,
Speaker 5: our union's requesting thirty dollars an hour for bristas because
Speaker 5: that's a living wage according to the MIT living wage calculator.
Speaker 5: Do you want to guess what Bluebottle said they would
Speaker 5: give us eighteen?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 5: Well, actually, strangely yes, they said, right now we make
Speaker 5: eighteen an hour. But they said they'll keep it the
Speaker 5: same and they want to retain the rate to change
Speaker 5: it whenever they want. They're they're making a floor. They're
Speaker 5: they're committing to a floor that I then tried to
Speaker 5: ask if they've ever in their history decreased wages. Uh huh,
Speaker 5: and they're like, no, I don't see why we would
Speaker 5: ever do that, And like, oh, so then this floor
Speaker 5: is bullshit.
Speaker 3: Actually, their baseline for negotiations is our starting position is nothing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and this is a year after negotiating with them
Speaker 5: so far.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a year. It it's like okay, like I mean
Speaker 3: at that that point, it's like, yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 3: like fucking are our starting position is we should have
Speaker 3: your house? Like this is like this is like equally
Speaker 3: come on, like you having their house is a more
Speaker 3: reasonable demand than our basic negotiating position is nothing, Like
Speaker 3: what are we doing here?
Speaker 8: Oh?
Speaker 6: No idea?
Speaker 3: Just god? Yeah, I mean it answered obligatory line here
Speaker 3: about how after you win an election. The most common
Speaker 3: way for UNI to fail is bargaining the first contract.
Speaker 3: And companies know this. They will just do bullshit for
Speaker 3: several years to attempt to not have you get a contract.
Speaker 3: It sucks. Yeah, yeah, fuck them.
Speaker 4: It's their whole strategy. I mean, the whole like union
Speaker 4: avoidance of it all is they're just trying to like
Speaker 4: wait us out and then fire people who are involved
Speaker 4: and just like in their words, like let turnover do
Speaker 4: its natural work. It's like, isn't this specialty coffee? Don't
Speaker 4: you want people who are good at their jobs. I've
Speaker 4: watched some of my new coworkers pull a shot that
Speaker 4: I wouldn't feed to a dog like the same.
Speaker 3: Oh absolutely, why Look, you can't expect managers to know
Speaker 3: how to do things that's not their job.
Speaker 4: My manager, let me tell you. I used to have
Speaker 4: to open with her like three times a week. And
Speaker 4: she has this very beautiful habit of as she's dialing
Speaker 4: espresso and also she does as well, she's counting cash,
Speaker 4: she will have her phone open on TikTok and then
Speaker 4: scroll through. I have this one horrific memory. It was
Speaker 4: six am and she was going through an entire TikTok
Speaker 4: storytime series for forty five minutes. And the whole story
Speaker 4: time was going on, and every time it was an
Speaker 4: introduction of like I don't even remember what it was about.
Speaker 4: I think it was like She's like, oh, this is
Speaker 4: my story of being like a mob boss's wife. And
Speaker 4: I had to listen to that for forty five minutes
Speaker 4: while opening.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I think you should you should legally be
Speaker 3: allowed to have her car. I think I should have
Speaker 3: her house probably yeah too. Yes, it's like our starting
Speaker 3: our starting demand is the boy. Every time you pissed
Speaker 3: offs off, we get another one of your houses.
Speaker 4: Look for every TikTok watched on the clock. That's a
Speaker 4: doll towards me per hour.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what are we doing here?
Speaker 5: They're owned by Nestli, But I don't think that there's
Speaker 5: enough money in the world that would be able to
Speaker 5: give you that, Abbey.
Speaker 3: I'm so sorry.
Speaker 4: No, I don't think I'll ever receive fair compensation.
Speaker 5: You can really piss off the modern monetary theory people
Speaker 5: because they'd be like, no, even we can't account for this.
Speaker 4: No one can account for the emotional damage.
Speaker 3: We ran out of data in our federal reserve god
Speaker 3: to recap.
Speaker 5: So in the past year, we've done multiple walkouts, unionized
Speaker 5: four locations in the East Bay area, and then, after
Speaker 5: Abbey was fired for bullshit reasons, along with two other organizers,
Speaker 5: we went on a four day strike which included both cities.
Speaker 5: And we've done this entirely as an independent union against
Speaker 5: a company that is owned by Nesli.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and interestingly, just.
Speaker 5: Because I'd be remiss to not mention this, the day
Speaker 5: that we ended our strike, there was an article published
Speaker 5: in Writers which was the most vibe based reporting that
Speaker 5: I've ever seen, where it said Nesli explores sale of
Speaker 5: blue bottle coffee. Sources say where there's three unnamed sources
Speaker 5: incredible that all say that Neslie is considering or looking
Speaker 5: into selling Blue Bottle coffee, but interestingly says here quote
Speaker 5: once source said Neslie could decide to sell the cafes
Speaker 5: but retain the brand's intellectual property to continue selling the products.
Speaker 3: End quote, what are we doing here this?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean it's interesting as a tell because personally,
Speaker 5: I think it's just a scare tactic.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Like I could consider walking into traffic. I could
Speaker 5: be looking into my options for how fast a car
Speaker 5: would hit me, But that doesn't mean anything.
Speaker 3: You didn't considering appropriating the mansion, like we're an exploratory committee.
Speaker 3: Sources say, yeah, I don't think they'd publish that in writers,
Speaker 3: but uh, it's.
Speaker 5: Interesting that they would even say that, because is like
Speaker 5: the entire value that Blue Bottle offers Nestlie is to
Speaker 5: be able to put the brand onto you know, nespressopods
Speaker 5: or whatever. And also just very weird timing with the
Speaker 5: strike ending the same day comes out.
Speaker 4: They are so scared, they are scared shitless and they
Speaker 4: don't know what to do about it, and they're breaking
Speaker 4: last left and right, trying to maintain power. But it's
Speaker 4: like Alex said earlier, like the solidarity that we have
Speaker 4: between our coworkers, it just cannot be broken by management.
Speaker 4: And even after they fired me and two of our
Speaker 4: other organizers, people still went out on the picket line.
Speaker 3: We kept totally.
Speaker 4: Five out of the six cafes closed in Boston and
Speaker 4: the only reason one of them could stay open is
Speaker 4: because all of the managers banded together to keep the
Speaker 4: Credential Center open.
Speaker 3: I hate to go.
Speaker 4: Say I don't think a single latte went out correctly
Speaker 4: that day, but hey, you knowast at least they can
Speaker 4: still collect their nine dollars per latte.
Speaker 3: So if you got food poisoning and the the strike
Speaker 3: for good getting certain manager coffee.
Speaker 4: If you had a bad experience during the strike at
Speaker 4: the Podential Center, just know that that was not union
Speaker 4: made coffee, and we would never do that to you.
Speaker 3: I think it's really beautiful that, yeah, y'all just kept
Speaker 3: fucking doing this even though they're just doing this bullshit constantly,
Speaker 3: and it's like, no, we're just going to keep fighting them,
Speaker 3: and they're going to get so scared that they're leaking
Speaker 3: to the press that we're thinking about selling the thing,
Speaker 3: like it.
Speaker 5: We're a lot further along than I thought we would
Speaker 5: ever get. I thought they were going to fire us
Speaker 5: the day after we did the first walkout last year,
Speaker 5: which is you know, I thought all the more reason
Speaker 5: to try then.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but really, it's not.
Speaker 5: Tough for people that we work with to realize that
Speaker 5: they're getting a bad deal and that the reason that
Speaker 5: the job sucks is because they don't get paid enough
Speaker 5: to live in the city. Like I think most baristas
Speaker 5: at Blue Bottle see something like sixty percent of their
Speaker 5: income going towards rent. Because Jesus, Yeah, we did a
Speaker 5: survey on this. Let me double check to make sure
Speaker 5: that I have the.
Speaker 3: Facts right.
Speaker 5: But yeah, this this is from you know, March, so
Speaker 5: it's a little bit old data. We'll do another survey soon.
Speaker 5: But most Blue Bottle barista is a rent burden, spending
Speaker 5: more than thirty percent of their income on rent, the
Speaker 5: median rent paid by Blue Bottle employees being one thousand,
Speaker 5: forty five dollars, which is the equivalent of one hundred
Speaker 5: and fifty Nora Lean style iced coffees. That it's one
Speaker 5: of the best selling drinks they have. Yeah, no, I know,
Speaker 5: for one hundred and fifty Nola, So you two can
Speaker 5: pay the median rent by paid by Barista and then
Speaker 5: on average it's sorry forty six percent of their income
Speaker 5: going towards rent, with roughly a third of Barristas paying
Speaker 5: over sixty percent.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 5: When we told all these facts to their lawyer at
Speaker 5: a bargaining session and he just said that maybe the
Speaker 5: reason that we were all struggling to make ends meet
Speaker 5: was because we were paying for too many streaming services. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I know, Like it's an entirely he knows this bullshit?
Speaker 3: Did they just get like a right wing ship post
Speaker 3: to their lawyer?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 3: Is this just like? Is this like fucking like? Is
Speaker 3: this like the fail Sun clone of Rudy Giuliani? Like
Speaker 3: is this gonna start melting off? What are we doing here?
Speaker 3: Come on? I wish I could tell you.
Speaker 5: I don't know what their strategy with saying obviously false
Speaker 5: things is, but they love to do it.
Speaker 3: It's so great, you know. Okay, fuck it, I'm gonna
Speaker 3: I'm gonna I'm gonna read this quote. I was gonna
Speaker 3: use this for a different episode and I didn't, so
Speaker 3: all right, fuck it, this is I'm gonna read this
Speaker 3: line from Dan Olson's documentary In Search of Flat Earth,
Speaker 3: which is like probably the best thing that's ever been
Speaker 3: done about flat Earth, because they believe that power belongs
Speaker 3: to those with the greatest will to take it. And
Speaker 3: what greater sign of will than the ability to overwrite
Speaker 3: the truth. Their will is a hammer they are using
Speaker 3: to beat reality into a shape of their choosing a
Speaker 3: simple world where reality is exactly what it looks like
Speaker 3: through their eyes, devoid of complexity, devoid of change, where
Speaker 3: they are right and their enemies are silent. They are
Speaker 3: trying to build a flat Earth.
Speaker 8: That's just the shit.
Speaker 3: They're just like, no, fuck you, we can say whatever
Speaker 3: the fuck we want because we think the week is
Speaker 3: this is an expression of just power, even though we
Speaker 3: know that we're lying, and you know that you're lying.
Speaker 3: Is I mean, if you.
Speaker 5: Want to talk about expression of power, you should read
Speaker 5: their management's rights clause. Sorry, they're so called management's rights clause.
Speaker 5: Oh god, let me see if I can pull that up.
Speaker 5: So just to clarify, So, management's rates is a clause
Speaker 5: that can be found in some union contracts because of
Speaker 5: collaborationanists within unions in the fifties deciding that they actually
Speaker 5: didn't want to go for complete worker control of the
Speaker 5: means of production. They just wanted to collaborate with management
Speaker 5: in order to get a better deal for wages.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to comment on the.
Speaker 5: History of that, but that's why they feel like they
Speaker 5: can include this in negotiations. Right now, we haven't agreed
Speaker 5: to any management rates, but quote, it is agreed that
Speaker 5: the management of the company's business and the direction of
Speaker 5: its working forces are vested exclusively in the company, and
Speaker 5: the company retains all rights that had before the execution
Speaker 5: of this agreement unless a rate is clearly contracted away
Speaker 5: in this agreement by language that is specific and unambiguous.
Speaker 5: These retained company rates include, but are not limited to,
Speaker 5: the following examples. The right to direct and supervise the
Speaker 5: work of its employees. The right to hire, promote, demote, transfer,
Speaker 5: and too discipline or discharge employees. The right to create
Speaker 5: or eliminate jobs, and to determine wage rates for newly
Speaker 5: created or materially modify jobs. The right to determine training
Speaker 5: requirements and provide training to employees. The right to uniform
Speaker 5: and higher standards, the right to plan, direct, and control operations,
Speaker 5: the right to determine products to be sold, services and
Speaker 5: products to be.
Speaker 3: Procured, used, and or distributed.
Speaker 5: The right to determine the type and quantity of machines, equipment,
Speaker 5: location of cafes. The right to determine the amount and
Speaker 5: quality of work needed. The right to determine schedules of
Speaker 5: cafe operations. The right to determine the number of employees needed.
Speaker 5: The right to determine the work schedule of employees. The
Speaker 5: right to lay off employees or relieve employees from work
Speaker 5: because of lack of work. The right to discontinue or
Speaker 5: introduce new or improved methods operating practices and cafes. The
Speaker 5: right to change the content of jobs and the qualification
Speaker 5: for such jobs. And the right to establish, modify, and
Speaker 5: enforce work rules of conduct or policies, and discipline employees
Speaker 5: who violate such rules or policies. The right to establish, modify, Oh,
Speaker 5: Jesus Christ and force.
Speaker 4: And I forgot how bad it is.
Speaker 5: Wow, Because basically what they're saying is we want to
Speaker 5: be able to control everything that you do, and this
Speaker 5: is our They never say where they believe this right
Speaker 5: comes from. They on make like an argument for naturalism,
Speaker 5: where like we are vested by the universal power of
Speaker 5: management to be able to do this. They don't make
Speaker 5: any historical argument for it, where oh, this is you know,
Speaker 5: because of the contracts that have been negotiated since the fifties,
Speaker 5: something that's fairly standard, and we think that we have
Speaker 5: the right too because of like long standing president. They
Speaker 5: just think that they should be able to control fucking everything. Yeah,
Speaker 5: which is not unsurprising for Nesley.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, Well, and I think there's a lot of
Speaker 3: very very abstract theoretical debate you run into if you're like,
Speaker 3: instead of doing shit, you're like in theory circles about
Speaker 3: like oh is like is capital its own autonomous entity
Speaker 3: or is it like a thing that's like costantly in
Speaker 3: like relation to like the actions and workers. And it's like, okay,
Speaker 3: read something like this and it's like, oh no, they
Speaker 3: are so worried that they're going to have to react
Speaker 3: to what their workers are doing that they and they
Speaker 3: are already doing this right like this is you know,
Speaker 3: this is this goes back to the whole like worre's
Speaker 3: leaking to the media, We're going to sell the company
Speaker 3: thing that they're doing. Where it's like no, actually, like
Speaker 3: these people are so not like easily, but if you
Speaker 3: were organized at all, it becomes so clear to them
Speaker 3: that they actually, oh no, wait, hold on, they're responding
Speaker 3: to us like they're not just purely the only thing
Speaker 3: that gets to like drive history for and decide literally
Speaker 3: everything about your life. The moment you like try to
Speaker 3: claw it away from them, they see how fragile it is,
Speaker 3: and they're like, no, no, no, no, Actually, we got to spell
Speaker 3: out the fact that we got to fucking dress you
Speaker 3: and whatever clothes we want you to wear. And it's like, okay,
Speaker 3: this is like a thing that only exists if you
Speaker 3: do not resist them at all, but like, no, if
Speaker 3: you fucking fight them, they have to fucking write all
Speaker 3: this shit down that they think they've always been able
Speaker 3: to do, and it's ridiculous.
Speaker 4: And to hear it all in a bullet form, like
Speaker 4: in literally just a bullet list, like every single aspect
Speaker 4: of my life and everything that I've ever loved or
Speaker 4: thought was important to me in a list of what
Speaker 4: they think they can control. It's just crazy. And then
Speaker 4: we have to go back and say, okay, well, do
Speaker 4: you see how off base you are? Yeah, And then
Speaker 4: they make us sound like the crazy ones for wanting
Speaker 4: to live a good life and be able to, like,
Speaker 4: you know, make ends.
Speaker 3: Meet, pay less than sixty percent over and come towards rent.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's take a vacation maybe.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: One other thing that I think is a great point
Speaker 5: about how it's actually capital responding to the organization of
Speaker 5: Barista's people workers whatever is. They haven't done it recently,
Speaker 5: but last summer they sent a very long winded and
Speaker 5: angry email about all the bargaining updates and press that
Speaker 5: the union was getting.
Speaker 4: They're so mad at me that I'm good at my job.
Speaker 5: And then this past summer, after we did two walkouts
Speaker 5: in fairly quick succession and response to two different things,
Speaker 5: they attempted to accuse us of an intermittent striking, just
Speaker 5: because they were so scared they didn't know what else.
Speaker 3: To do, to try and be like, you didn't own me,
Speaker 3: I'm not mad please some pot in the news that
Speaker 3: I met.
Speaker 5: Their lawyer even said in a bargaining session later on
Speaker 5: that he had a less than seventy five percent chance
Speaker 5: of ever winning that argument at the board.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 5: But they were just so mad that we walked out
Speaker 5: twice in May that they tried to claim that it
Speaker 5: was unprotected, but that they're being benevolent by not disciplining
Speaker 5: anyone for it.
Speaker 3: God, And they.
Speaker 5: Haven't really given much of a response to our multi
Speaker 5: day strike yet, aside from their lawyer emailing us earlier
Speaker 5: this week to ask us for our entire legal justification
Speaker 5: for why the terminations of Abby, Nora and Ashley were
Speaker 5: illegal and what legal justification we have to say that
Speaker 5: they're negotiating a contract in bad faith, which is like
Speaker 5: the NLRA.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, Like what are we doing here? God? Yeah?
Speaker 3: So what's coming up next for y'all? What's the next stage?
Speaker 5: If you or anybody that you know either works at
Speaker 5: a Blue Bottle or wants to apply to a Blue
Speaker 5: Bottle to help organize it, please reach out to us
Speaker 5: by email at Blue Bottle Union at gmail dot com.
Speaker 5: If you want to support our independent unionism and help
Speaker 5: us remain independent and be able to go on multiple
Speaker 5: day strikes which clearly piss off our NESTLEI overlords, you
Speaker 5: can donate to us at TinyURL dot com forward slash
Speaker 5: BBIU dash strike unless we're until we have a contract
Speaker 5: or they reinstate, Abby, Nora, Ashley, and fingers crossed, hopefully
Speaker 5: not myself.
Speaker 3: We're calling on a boycott of all Blue Bottle coffee products.
Speaker 5: Helly, I have no idea what the overlap between it
Speaker 5: could happen here listeners and.
Speaker 3: Customers, you'd be surprised. But I'm sure there's a lot
Speaker 3: of about there. I don't know. Look, judging by the
Speaker 3: shit I have heard from our listeners, I love you all.
Speaker 3: Some of you are on some wild shit if some
Speaker 3: of you are not the people you would expect to be,
Speaker 3: so yeah, So don't buy Blue Bottle.
Speaker 5: If some of the things that we've said about the
Speaker 5: bargaining sessions sounds two absurd to be true to you,
Speaker 5: then you can go to Bluebottle Union dot org and
Speaker 5: under the tab for Buristas you can read every bargaining update,
Speaker 5: where we publish all of the proposals that the company
Speaker 5: has given us so far. You can read the shit
Speaker 5: that they make us read in the bargaining sessions. Yeah,
Speaker 5: so that's what's next in like the next month or so.
Speaker 5: There's other things that we're working on that we can't
Speaker 5: talk about yet.
Speaker 6: Hell yeah, hell.
Speaker 3: Yeah, love this. I'm trying so hard not to just
Speaker 3: read half the end or speech Authority is the massive
Speaker 3: Tyranny is brittle.
Speaker 4: If there ever were a time to read it, there's
Speaker 4: no time like the present.
Speaker 3: You know what, Fuck it, We're just we're doing it.
Speaker 3: We're doing it. The imperial need for control is so
Speaker 3: desperate because it is so unnatural. Terity requires constant effort.
Speaker 3: It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the
Speaker 3: mask of fear. Remember that, and know this. The day
Speaker 3: will come when all these skirmishes, in battles, these moments
Speaker 3: of defiance, will have flooded the banks of the empire's authority,
Speaker 3: and then there will be one too many, one single
Speaker 3: thing will break the siege. Remember this, try and that's
Speaker 3: my message to you.
Speaker 8: Wall.
Speaker 3: You can fight your own bosses too, and you can
Speaker 3: beat them, and you can watch them running around in
Speaker 3: terror like fucking chickens with their head cut off, and
Speaker 3: you can get shited from them that they never would
Speaker 3: have wanted to give you in the first place.
Speaker 7: So there's a revolution long forgotten that was tucked in
Speaker 7: a corner of the Caribbean. Those outside of the region,
Speaker 7: it's probably quite far from mind. You know. When most
Speaker 7: people think of Caribbean revolutionaries, they think of Cuba, but
Speaker 7: at the time the rise and fall of the need
Speaker 7: a revolution. What's everything? Hello, and welcome to ikea happen Here.
Speaker 7: I'm Andrew Siege. You're a Trinadian host of ikapen here,
Speaker 7: and I'm joined by.
Speaker 6: James, your American British co host.
Speaker 7: American British.
Speaker 6: But yeah, I don't really know how to say that, Like.
Speaker 7: Which order should that hyphene been?
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, yeah, I don't know which way which way
Speaker 6: I'm supposed to hyphenate, because we don't hyphenate white people, uh,
Speaker 6: which is a very American thing. But yeah, glad to
Speaker 6: be here. I always enjoy learning more about this part
Speaker 6: of the world from you.
Speaker 7: I'm glad. I'm glad. And you know, as we speak,
Speaker 7: I'm hearing helicopters overhead. And no, it's really a reminder
Speaker 7: of the times that we are living in. Last night
Speaker 7: there were quite a few stealth helicopters flying overhead, quite
Speaker 7: close to the ground, about three of them. Wow, all
Speaker 7: the lights are off. So it's it seems to be
Speaker 7: a ramping up and escalation in some ways, or just
Speaker 7: a continuation of the existing military presence.
Speaker 3: Jeez.
Speaker 7: And as we're talking about military presence, in the US,
Speaker 7: which is something that I spoke about on this podcast
Speaker 7: before you go and check it out. We're here to
Speaker 7: discuss the very recent history, positive and negative, of my
Speaker 7: northern neighbor, Grenada. So I don't want to bog anyone
Speaker 7: down with too many facts, but it's important to get
Speaker 7: an idea of the context. So Grenada is the southernmost
Speaker 7: in the grouping of Caribbean islands known as the Windward Islands.
Speaker 7: It's a country composed of Grenada, the island, and a
Speaker 7: few smaller islands, including Kariaku and Petimasnet. It's long been
Speaker 7: considered the Spice Isle, as the hilly mainland was and
Speaker 7: still is home to a lot of nutmeg plantations. They
Speaker 7: currently have a predominantly African population of just over one
Speaker 7: hundred and seventeen thousand, sharing a country merely three hundred
Speaker 7: and forty four kilometers squared or one hundred and thirty
Speaker 7: three square miles. For reference, the five boroughs of New
Speaker 7: York City collectively make up seven hundred and seventy eight
Speaker 7: point eighteen kilometers squared or three hundred point four to
Speaker 7: six square miles. So Grenada is small, you know, New
Speaker 7: York is big. But Grenada is also quite small, you know.
Speaker 7: For reference, It's slightly larger than Queen's but far less
Speaker 7: populated and far less dense. So we's talking small island
Speaker 7: state par excellence. And yet it has sat at the
Speaker 7: center of one of the most critical events in Caribbean history,
Speaker 7: and it might be one of the sites of yet
Speaker 7: another such incident in light of the United States request
Speaker 7: to Grenada on October ninth to establish a temporary military
Speaker 7: radar base at the infamous Maurice Bishop International Airport, a
Speaker 7: request which has not yet received a conclusive response more
Speaker 7: than a month later at the time of me recording this,
Speaker 7: so I thought it apps to finally talk about this
Speaker 7: moment in history. I went to my library and got
Speaker 7: a copy of Grenada Revolution and Invasion, a companium of
Speaker 7: essays from various perspectives on the topic arranged by Patty
Speaker 7: Lewis at al that provided the basis of my research,
Speaker 7: particularly the essay by Miil Collins, a Grenadian poet and novelist.
Speaker 7: I also drew some of the radical background law from
Speaker 7: Fundy aka Joseph Edwards, an underappreciated autonomous radical healing from
Speaker 7: Jamaica who spoke about the situation in non shall escape
Speaker 7: or linked in the show notes. So I don't want
Speaker 7: to get too deep into the history prior to what's
Speaker 7: immediately relevant today's topic. Oh keep thinks brief A couple
Speaker 7: hundred Ammerindians lived in Grenada prior to the European invasion.
Speaker 7: Human settlement may have been as early as thirty five
Speaker 7: hundred BCEE, but most definitely by the second century CE. Spain,
Speaker 7: upon stumbling upon it, claimed it but never settled it.
Speaker 7: England attempted to settle it, but was driven out by
Speaker 7: the indigenous inhabitants, and eventually the island was settled and
Speaker 7: subjugated by the French, who were engaged in a protracted
Speaker 7: war against the indigenous between today's Grenada, Dominica and Saint
Speaker 7: Vincent of the Grandians throughout the seventeenth century. You know,
Speaker 7: there's this narrative that the Europeans came and they just
Speaker 7: easily conquered the entirety of the Americas, and it's important
Speaker 7: to lay that myth to rest. There was, of course,
Speaker 7: a very tragic great dyeing that was responsible for a
Speaker 7: vast majority of the indigenous population losing their lives to
Speaker 7: the disease in some cases intentionally weaponized by the Europeans,
Speaker 7: but despite differences in their weaponry, the Europeans didn't have
Speaker 7: an easy time conquering the islands, or conquering the Americas
Speaker 7: at all. In many cases they did not succeed in
Speaker 7: concrete islands for many decades or centuries or struggle, but
Speaker 7: eventually Crenado was established as a colony of over fifteen
Speaker 7: thousand slaved Africans by seventeen sixty three. A year prior,
Speaker 7: in seventeen sixty two, Britain took over the island from
Speaker 7: the French as part of the Seven Years' War, and
Speaker 7: the island was formally ceded to Britain in seventeen sixty three.
Speaker 7: By eighteen oh seven, Britain had brought one hundred and
Speaker 7: fourteen thousand slaves to Grenada. By eighteen thirty eight, slavery
Speaker 7: was abolished. In eighteen seventy seven, Grenada became a Crown colony,
Speaker 7: and fast forward a little further. Under modified Crown colony status,
Speaker 7: the wealthiest four percent of Canadians were allowed to vote.
Speaker 7: Eric Geary founded the Grenader United Labor Party or GULP
Speaker 7: in nineteen fifty, initially as a trade union, which led
Speaker 7: to the nineteen fifty one General Strike for better work
Speaker 7: than conditions. Buildings were set on fire in this time,
Speaker 7: and this is in a broader regional context of radicalism
Speaker 7: and agitation for independence in the post World War II reality,
Speaker 7: which would intensify after many of the islands had already
Speaker 7: gained the independence. Eventually, Grenada got elections based on universal
Speaker 7: adult suffrage in nineteen fifty one and Eric Gary's party
Speaker 7: gulp on. This is before they got independence, though, in
Speaker 7: a time when the English speaking Caribbean was trying to
Speaker 7: establish a West Indies Federation between nineteen fifty eight and
Speaker 7: nineteen sixty two. It didn't succeed. Jamaica succeeded, and then
Speaker 7: chernad so it fell apart, and after the fall of
Speaker 7: the federation, Grenada became an associated state in nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 7: then finally gained full independence from Britain in nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 7: again under the leadership of Eric Gary, who became the
Speaker 7: first Prime Minister of Grenada. The late sixties and early
Speaker 7: seventies were a radical time in general, so that's set
Speaker 7: in the stage for what comes next in Grenada. The
Speaker 7: rise of the New Jewel movement led by Maurice Bishop.
Speaker 7: You see, as FUNDI found. In this time, we also
Speaker 7: had quite a few other confrontations going on across the Spanaphone, Francophone,
Speaker 7: Dutch of Phone and Anglophone Caribbeans. In nineteen sixty five
Speaker 7: you had the popular revolt in the Dominican Republic against
Speaker 7: the military coup that was drowned in blood by the
Speaker 7: US invasion. In nineteen sixty seven, you had a spontaneous
Speaker 7: rebellion of agricultural workers in Guadelup. Nineteen sixty eight, black
Speaker 7: folks in Bermuda rioted against the racist and clueless control
Speaker 7: it dominated the island. In nineteen sixty nine, there was
Speaker 7: a violent confrontation against US soldiers by students and workers
Speaker 7: protesting the US occupation of the Panama Canal Zone. Kurisau
Speaker 7: was shaken by wildcatch, strikes of workers, riots by employed
Speaker 7: and unemployed as well. Labor unrest is breaking out in Surinam,
Speaker 7: leading to general strike. Antiga had riots, strikes and demonstrations
Speaker 7: over several years. Jamaica had workers at the Western Meatpackers
Speaker 7: established democratic control of their trade union local, taking full
Speaker 7: control over their union dues and negotiating the employer without
Speaker 7: official mediators to manage the sugar workers and the local
Speaker 7: community directly, and of course infamously. In nineteen seventy Triniad
Speaker 7: was shaken up as workers, academics and small farmers linked
Speaker 7: up against the system led by the government of Prime
Speaker 7: Minister Eric Williams, and after years of his rule under
Speaker 7: the Sloga and Master Day Done, the people erupted against
Speaker 7: the new or colonial system. Despite being ruled by this
Speaker 7: black leader, the hundreds of people in the streets championed
Speaker 7: black power, understanding what was needed was a people's politics
Speaker 7: in which new institutions could emerge. This black power revolution
Speaker 7: in Trindad was inspired in part by the black civil
Speaker 7: rights struggle in the United States, while also seeking into
Speaker 7: unite the African and Indian populations in Trinad. After an
Speaker 7: attempted mutiny by the army and Venezuela and American gun
Speaker 7: boats standing by ready to intervene, the military surrendered. The
Speaker 7: revolutionary initiative shifted away from the man and doctor Derk
Speaker 7: Williams was saved. By nineteen seventy three, a few armed
Speaker 7: gorillas remained in the hills of Trinidad, but Eventually, their
Speaker 7: struggle was snuffed out. By nineteen seventy five, in Guadeloupe
Speaker 7: had wildcat strikes taking place. Guyana had wildcat strikes against
Speaker 7: the American and Canadian owned Boux Side companies. Surinam had
Speaker 7: another general strike. Saint Lucia experience with wildcat strike. Dominica
Speaker 7: attempted to seize the British owned Castle Bruce Estates. In Jamaica,
Speaker 7: there was a wave of appropriations from banks, warehouses, stores,
Speaker 7: batting shops and more cross Kingston and demonstrations initiated by
Speaker 7: students and workers against police brutality and for the release
Speaker 7: of prisoners. And in nineteen seventy nine Nicaragua had their
Speaker 7: revolution against the US Allied government. While all of this
Speaker 7: is going on, Grenada had a population of less than
Speaker 7: one hundred thousand people. It had just become independent under
Speaker 7: Eric Geary and are Gary's an interesting fella because you'll
Speaker 7: see some aspects of him mirrored later on. He came
Speaker 7: to power in nineteen fifty one with the wave of
Speaker 7: universal suffrage. He was twenty nine years all at the time.
Speaker 7: He had previously been a worker organizer in Aruba and
Speaker 7: was expelled from the island for that very reason. He
Speaker 7: spent decades in politics as a champion of agricultural workers.
Speaker 7: But younger generations were not as excited about him. They
Speaker 7: recognized his financial corruption, his pensiont for rigged elections, and
Speaker 7: of course his use of secret police that were repressive
Speaker 7: to the people. So as greators making steps towards becoming independent,
Speaker 7: the people did not want him to be the leader
Speaker 7: of independence. There were strikes against him even before the ravation.
Speaker 7: But see Gary was karen on this tradition that was
Speaker 7: set up by the British. Whether he knew it or not,
Speaker 7: he and may have had this radical start as a
Speaker 7: worker organizer, but he came to carry on colonial interests.
Speaker 7: You know. He started off as a union man, but
Speaker 7: he turned against the workers, and even the British at
Speaker 7: one point had been scared of him as an organizer
Speaker 7: and had trepidations about him as an independent leader. But
Speaker 7: they still chose him and preferred him at the risk
Speaker 7: of maybe a more radical version of him leading an
Speaker 7: independent grenader. And then came the New Dual Movement. Now
Speaker 7: the New Jewel movement is actually a combination of two groups.
Speaker 7: You had the movement for assemblies of the People, which
Speaker 7: was founded by Maurice Bishop, a lawyer who had studied
Speaker 7: in Britain. And you had the joint endeavor for welfare
Speaker 7: education and the or a Jewel which is founded by
Speaker 7: Howard University economic student Unison Whitman. They were also joined
Speaker 7: by Bernard Cord, an economics lecturer at UIs in Augustin
Speaker 7: in Trinando, Tobago. So at first, in terms of their politics,
Speaker 7: they really wanted popular assemblies and that sort of thing.
Speaker 7: But actually, let me get into the background of the
Speaker 7: Caribbean left. I see in the nineteen fifties there was
Speaker 7: an upheaval. You know, radicals had been shifting from the
Speaker 7: sort of Stalinism that had become popular in the post
Speaker 7: War two era towards a more critical sort of Trotskyism
Speaker 7: or Maoism see lar James and George Patmore, both based
Speaker 7: in London, were already advocating independence for Africa and the Caribbean,
Speaker 7: rejecting the Stalinist idea that liberation should wait until after
Speaker 7: World War Two see. R. James is an interesting figure
Speaker 7: politically to me because while he was ostensibly a Trotskyist,
Speaker 7: he was in many ways unorthodox in his approach to
Speaker 7: those politics.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Cela James's book Trying to Remember. It's called Beyond
Speaker 6: a Boundary or Beyond the Boundary.
Speaker 7: Beyond the Boundary.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's a great books. The only book about cricket
Speaker 6: that I've ever read, and that's the only one that
Speaker 6: I've ever enjoyed. Not a big cricket appreciate it, but
Speaker 6: as a sports historian that that book was foundational to
Speaker 6: like how I how I approached my dissertation, and like
Speaker 6: as such, I've always had a really like a soft
Speaker 6: spot for him as someone who you know, did sports
Speaker 6: for a living in academia for a living. I saw
Speaker 6: like a really positive example of the role that both
Speaker 6: of those can play in like liberation struggles in his writing. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 6: it's when I'd encourage everyone to read if you're looking
Speaker 6: for a book. It's like his writing is very readable,
Speaker 6: in his historical writing, like which I at the time
Speaker 6: of my life, when I was in grad school, I
Speaker 6: very much appreciated someone who wrote something that wasn't like
Speaker 6: self consciously trying to be dense and impenetrable to make
Speaker 6: them seem intelligent faced. His intelligence comes through just fine.
Speaker 7: Indeed, Indeed, I've had a soft spot for him as
Speaker 7: well for some time, particularly after reading The Black Yakabins.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he used to assign that one a lot.
Speaker 7: And I would say that the Caribbean left at the
Speaker 7: time also had a bit of a soft spot for him,
Speaker 7: because they were heavily influenced by his writings, you know,
Speaker 7: in his nineteen fifty six pamphlet Face and Reality, which
Speaker 7: was about the Hungarian Revolution, ended up becoming a profound
Speaker 7: influence on Westerndian radicals as it had revealed the potential
Speaker 7: of workers' counsils and done a lot to expose the
Speaker 7: authoritarianism of the Soviet model. This is something that Bundy
Speaker 7: wrote about and highlighted as he's given his sort of
Speaker 7: discussion of the origins and trajectory of the Caribbean Left.
Speaker 7: So in the nineteen sixties and seventies, radical thought across
Speaker 7: the Caribbean was shaped by the more democratic socialist ideals.
Speaker 7: They had movements like Jamaica's Young Socialist League, Trindad's New
Speaker 7: Beginning Movement, and Creator's New Duel Movements. They were all
Speaker 7: inspired by James and by grassroots workers' councils rather than
Speaker 7: the typical Soviet orthodoxy. Of course, the Caribbean left was
Speaker 7: not immune to conflict or division. There were conflicts between
Speaker 7: those who were more loyal to stylists or pro Soviet positions,
Speaker 7: and that led to some splits within unions and political movements. Now,
Speaker 7: initially the New Dual Movement was leaning in that participatory
Speaker 7: democratic direction, but eventually they ended up going in to
Speaker 7: studying Marxism Leninism more not really at first they mainly
Speaker 7: wanted Gary out, but later they went into Marxism Leninism
Speaker 7: and transformed the movement into a proper political party of
Speaker 7: the vanguard variety. In an effort to unseat Gary. They
Speaker 7: started building some momentum and immediately based consequences. In nineteen
Speaker 7: seventy three, Bishop Whiteman and others got beaten up and
Speaker 7: arrested by Gary's secret police multiple times. Bishop's own father
Speaker 7: was shot and killed by Gary's forces. Wow and the
Speaker 7: high schoolers were also taking a stand against Gary at
Speaker 7: the time, were facing repression and violence. Now, in nineteen
Speaker 7: seventy four, independence was one, but sadly under Gary and
Speaker 7: his notorious secret police, which were by the way, called
Speaker 7: the Mongoose Gang. Now, there was already suspicions of potential
Speaker 7: election fraud, and it wasn't helped by the fact that
Speaker 7: his mongoose gang was known to intimidate people. But in
Speaker 7: nineteen seventy six, despite this for a political landscape, Bishop
Speaker 7: won a leadership role as opposition and became known across
Speaker 7: the country in our country as small as as grenader,
Speaker 7: as someone charismatic, personable, relatable. The New Jeal movement started
Speaker 7: to build a reputation for being connected to the people,
Speaker 7: engage with students, engage with pro bono work. In some cases,
Speaker 7: as I mentioned, some of them are lawyers, and they
Speaker 7: were youthful. They're bringing a youthful energy to the sort
Speaker 7: of old god colonial era politics of Eric Gary and
Speaker 7: his ILK. So the story of how the New jew
Speaker 7: Movement came into power is actually a bit humorous to me.
Speaker 7: On the thirteenth of March nineteen seventy nine, Gary went
Speaker 7: to the UN meeting in New York that was happening
Speaker 7: at the time, and as the saying goes, when the
Speaker 7: cat's away, the mice will play. In this case, while
Speaker 7: the cat was away, the New Dual Movement pulled off
Speaker 7: a coup, a completely bloodless coup. They to control of
Speaker 7: the army, barracks and the radio. When they went on
Speaker 7: the radio, and this is the funny part to me,
Speaker 7: they told people to go to police stations and demand
Speaker 7: that they put up white flags of surrender. And the
Speaker 7: population was so anti geary that they did it. Wow,
Speaker 7: they just walked up in civilize stations and they're like, yeah,
Speaker 7: put up these white flags, and the police shid. Yeah,
Speaker 7: sure that was that. That's how the neudeal movement came
Speaker 7: into power.
Speaker 6: Yeah, a, this is such a fascinating time in history, right,
Speaker 6: Like I used to teach a class about culturing colonialism
Speaker 6: back in the day, and we would talk a lot
Speaker 6: about like this time period, like the post wind Rush
Speaker 6: period where like Caribbean political culture was very influential even
Speaker 6: in the metropoli, right in Britain specifically, Like this is
Speaker 6: when we have like scar music and then punk music
Speaker 6: arriving from that, which is a serious political force in
Speaker 6: the twentieth century. Like it's easy for people to let
Speaker 6: sniff at that whatever. But and that's the reason I
Speaker 6: am the way I am so like, I guess I
Speaker 6: have a fondness for it. But also like the state's
Speaker 6: capacity for violence and surveillance hasn't caught up to the
Speaker 6: capacity for mass communication yet. And so you have these
Speaker 6: movements which can mobilize a ton of people and the
Speaker 6: state isn't like all up in them with informers and like.
Speaker 6: It can either respond as a Soviet Union did in
Speaker 6: Hungry right, with tanks that's where we get the word
Speaker 6: tanky from, or it can crumble like by people turning
Speaker 6: up of the cops to surrender.
Speaker 7: Like.
Speaker 6: It's just a fascinating, like little to three decade period
Speaker 6: in history before the state I guess recovers its advantage
Speaker 6: in terms of violence and surveillance.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm of that this time because I mean they
Speaker 7: didn't have the social media and stuff to connect people
Speaker 7: and you know, advertise they were having this this proof
Speaker 7: test or this action or this whatever. Yeah, but the
Speaker 7: networks were still there. You know, they were organic and
Speaker 7: they were motivated by a genuine sense that seriative was actionable.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: You know, I think we have this sort of twenty
Speaker 7: first century malays of cynicism. It's like that was tried before,
Speaker 7: you know. Yeah, every time we look at something, we
Speaker 7: could just say, oh, that was tried before, and they failed.
Speaker 7: When we look back at history, people who tried those things.
Speaker 7: They didn't know if it was going to work out
Speaker 7: or not. They just tried it. I wouldn't be surprised
Speaker 7: if I was a fly on the wall on the
Speaker 7: day of the school if the neudual movement guys were
Speaker 7: just like, wait, what that actually worked? Yeah, exactly, Like
Speaker 7: not to take away from their plan and an organization
Speaker 7: and you know, the genuine grassroots support that they had.
Speaker 7: It's still a swing.
Speaker 6: Yeah, totally. At some point you have to roll the
Speaker 6: dice right and see how it goes, Like in this case.
Speaker 7: The role of critical success, I'd see, yeah, yeah, it's.
Speaker 6: A natural twenty the dragon's term. So I'd really like
Speaker 6: to ned out in this period. This is like the
Speaker 6: heyday of pirate radio, right where you have people broadcasting
Speaker 6: but like outside of state control. And it's a really
Speaker 6: interesting time for culture and music. Like scar music explicitly
Speaker 6: explicitly begins in an anti racist way, right, Like it
Speaker 6: calls itself two tone of music because bands were often
Speaker 6: look multi racial, and like, it's really interesting that we
Speaker 6: have this whole cultural movement which owes a lot to
Speaker 6: the wind Rush generation. But like you said, it's questioning
Speaker 6: the both capitalist and also Marxist orthodoxies in a way
Speaker 6: that I know I really wish. I mean a lot
Speaker 6: of people do today, don't get me wrong, but I
Speaker 6: wonder if we could all those people now, that you'd
Speaker 6: have people who were like dedicated vanguard mark shifts again,
Speaker 6: like you know, it just seems say sad noise.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean I think we could say the same
Speaker 7: thing about a lot of people's current politics. I'm sure
Speaker 7: if you went back in the past and were like,
Speaker 7: you know, people are actually trying to be trod wives
Speaker 7: right now in twenty five you want to talk to
Speaker 7: the woman who had like no ability to open a
Speaker 7: bank account, and we're trying to escape financial abuse, to
Speaker 7: rest abuse, all these different things, and they're like, oh,
Speaker 7: you know, there's actually a whole internet a trend of like, yeah,
Speaker 7: your husband should control all your finances. Actually yeah, I mean,
Speaker 7: of course that kind of sentiment never went away, but
Speaker 7: it's popularization definitely debunks. I think this sort of notion
Speaker 7: that that progress quote unquote is something that is inevitable
Speaker 7: or irreversible.
Speaker 6: Yeah, definitely, Yeah, that's right. I mean you can even
Speaker 6: travel across the world and I can only imagine how
Speaker 6: that would be received in Russia ava right to tell
Speaker 6: their friends in the women's movement that there are Western
Speaker 6: women who aspire to be tradwife. I mean, I'm sure
Speaker 6: they're aware they have the Internet, but yeah, it's certainly yeah,
Speaker 6: this idea that we can only progress or move in
Speaker 6: one duration.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's how the New Droal movement came into power,
Speaker 7: and upon getting to that position, they established the People's
Speaker 7: Revolutionary Government or PRG, which is led now by the
Speaker 7: Prime Minister of Grenader Maurice Bishop. They were considered legitimate,
Speaker 7: of course, because they did have the people's mandate, but
Speaker 7: they opted not to solidify that legitimacy with an election,
Speaker 7: and they also went on to ban other parties. So
Speaker 7: in the next episode, I want to get into what
Speaker 7: exactly they did when they were in power in broad strokes,
Speaker 7: all they hit and miss with the economy and politics
Speaker 7: over the course of their four years, and how it
Speaker 7: culminated in an internal split, multiple killings, and a US
Speaker 7: in vision. But if you want the details and how
Speaker 7: all that played out, you'll have to tune in next time.
Speaker 7: We'll get into the outcome of the PRG, the flaws,
Speaker 7: the revolution, it's downfall, and where Grenia stands today. But
Speaker 7: before we wrap up, any final thoughts, James.
Speaker 6: I feel okay, Yeah, I just had lots of them.
Speaker 6: I don't know. Yeah, this is a fascinating period and
Speaker 6: like now, as much as there ever has been, it's
Speaker 6: a vital time for us to study this rightly. As
Speaker 6: the person who's taught in American schools and universities, this
Speaker 6: one doesn't come up very much. It's certainly not like
Speaker 6: in the required teaching syllabi in anywhere that I've taught.
Speaker 6: And I think as we return to like Monroe Doctrine
Speaker 6: two point zero or whatever, whatever we're doing the United States,
Speaker 6: it's doing in the Western hemisphe right now, it's vital
Speaker 6: to understand the role it has played in suppressing progressive
Speaker 6: political movements in the last century.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think, you know, as you mentioned, it's already
Speaker 7: in the typical history and historical accounts that it's taught
Speaker 7: to students. It's just I think I'm marveled sometimes at
Speaker 7: you know, that's that's exactly how empire functions. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 7: the acts forgets what the tree remembers is the famous
Speaker 7: say it so something like the US's operations and Grenada
Speaker 7: or anywhere else in the world, in all the many
Speaker 7: places they've intervened, I may not even muster a passing
Speaker 7: mention and a sentenence even in a historical class, in
Speaker 7: a history class the United States, And yet it is
Speaker 7: pivotal to the histories and self identities up to the
Speaker 7: present day of entire regions and people's You know, it
Speaker 7: may be a footnote, if so much, in these curriculums
Speaker 7: in the United States, but it's one of the most
Speaker 7: recent and raw incidents of violence and trauma thats take
Speaker 7: place in the Caribbean.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, and they're not independent history.
Speaker 6: Yeah. When Trump was first assuming office this time, there
Speaker 6: was a brief moment when they were talking about returning
Speaker 6: to colonizing Panama. If you can cast your mind that
Speaker 6: far back, he has flood.
Speaker 7: The zone quite successfully. But I do recall that.
Speaker 6: But yeah, I had been in Panama two months before that.
Speaker 6: And I think the United States, a large portion of
Speaker 6: the population either doesn't know or is forgotten that, like
Speaker 6: independence from American sort of neo colonialism, is integral to
Speaker 6: Panamanian identity. Like I don't think they'd realized quite how
Speaker 6: unwilling to accept going back to that Panamanian people.
Speaker 7: Were, Yeah, there's a long struggle, yes, to eke out independence.
Speaker 7: I mean even now there's you know, US New Kleans,
Speaker 7: Somemos alive and well in Panama in many ways. Yeah,
Speaker 7: but what gains they have yain is you know, something
Speaker 7: they're not well then to lose.
Speaker 6: Yeah, absolutely, And yeah, I mean the United States supports
Speaker 6: people through Panama. The Biden administration sent its Secretary of
Speaker 6: Homeland Security to the inauguration of the Panamanian president. The
Speaker 6: US funds Panamanian deportations did under the Biden administration, including
Speaker 6: of people who have no criminal record, Like, we have
Speaker 6: effectively externalized our border regime to Panama in the way
Speaker 6: that we've also done to the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Right, Like,
Speaker 6: I guess what I'm saying is I don't want people
Speaker 6: to think that this is a one off that like
Speaker 6: either the Trump stuff is a massive leap from previous policy.
Speaker 6: It's a change in scale, not in kind, or that
Speaker 6: that you know, the United States hasn't done this before,
Speaker 6: and it has some history of doing this in the
Speaker 6: Western hemisphere.
Speaker 7: Indeed, so on that rather depressing note, Yeah, well we'll
Speaker 7: leave it here for it could happen here, but you
Speaker 7: can join us for the next episode, when we will
Speaker 7: get into exactly what took place in Grenada and where
Speaker 7: Grenada stands today. Till then we'll power to all the
Speaker 7: people peace. Hello, and welcome to it could happen here.
Speaker 7: I'm Andrew Sage, your host, and I'm joined by James again.
Speaker 6: Excited to be here again. I enjoyed the last episode.
Speaker 7: Yes, another host of it could happen here. There are
Speaker 7: two of us, so James's American and British or British
Speaker 7: America and how we want to order that? And I'm Trinidadian,
Speaker 7: as you may or may not be able to tell,
Speaker 7: but in Trinidad there are actually a lot of Grenadians
Speaker 7: and descendants of Grenadians. Between our islands. It has been
Speaker 7: a lot of population exchange, mostly in one direction. But
Speaker 7: we're here to talk about a notable point in the
Speaker 7: history for my neighbor in Ireland, Grenada. If you missed
Speaker 7: part one, you should go and give it a listen.
Speaker 7: The gist is that, after drawn out efforts to gain independence,
Speaker 7: Grenada finally did so in nineteen seventy four, but unfortunately,
Speaker 7: under the rule of Eric Geary, an oppressive fixture of
Speaker 7: politics that the people want it out. The underdog, the
Speaker 7: New Jewel Movement, led by Maurice Bishop, pulled off a
Speaker 7: blood less coup while Gary was at a UN meeting
Speaker 7: in New York, and thus the People's Revolutionary Government was formed,
Speaker 7: led by Prime Minister Marie Bishop. The managed to stay
Speaker 7: in power from nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 7: So today we're talking about what they did in that
Speaker 7: time and what happened next, including the infamous US invasion
Speaker 7: that is so often a footnote of history and its
Speaker 7: aftermath on the people of Grenada that lasts up to
Speaker 7: this day. Once again, the research for this episode leans
Speaker 7: on Grenada Revolution and invasion by Pati Lewis at Al
Speaker 7: along with None Should Escape by Joseph Edwards aka fundly So.
Speaker 7: Fresh off the victory of the New Jewel Movement, the
Speaker 7: temperature of the populace was varied but excited. You had
Speaker 7: people who had genuine revolutionary aspirations, people who were passionately
Speaker 7: anti imperialists, and then the people who just wanted better
Speaker 7: health care and education and didn't really care where who
Speaker 7: it came from.
Speaker 3: And on that note, I.
Speaker 7: Would say that It's something that often flies under the
Speaker 7: radar or escapes awareness in the discourse because the most passionate,
Speaker 7: the most invested, the most prominent voices, allthough we tend
Speaker 7: to hear, the vast majority of people pretty much go
Speaker 7: with the flow. You know, they keep their heads down,
Speaker 7: their focus tends to be on their immediate needs, their
Speaker 7: immediate interests. And you have the idea logues in every camp,
Speaker 7: but of every persuasion who are aiming to push the
Speaker 7: country in a particular direction. But at least at this
Speaker 7: point in time, there was an ambivalence towards the how,
Speaker 7: the political how much of the population they just needed
Speaker 7: to see the results. And for a lot of people
Speaker 7: in the present day, the change, the revolution, or whatever
Speaker 7: you want to call it, isn't going to come from
Speaker 7: an ideological transformation, well worded argument or arrangement of you know, prose.
Speaker 7: It's going to come from a lived experience where their
Speaker 7: life has improved in some way, in some form or fashion,
Speaker 7: by action by a project that actually puts the change
Speaker 7: into practice. And so that's really what the New Dual
Speaker 7: Movement had been about from the beginning. Being part of
Speaker 7: the community, being part of the people, taking part in,
Speaker 7: you know, supporting them, which is why they had the
Speaker 7: popular mandate. And then once they got into power, a
Speaker 7: lot of their efforts were focused on, indeed, trying to
Speaker 7: actually put into place and alternatives for all the flaws
Speaker 7: that it may have had and not get to that shortly,
Speaker 7: and that they did, you know, they organized the Center
Speaker 7: for Popular Education, they organized teacher training, and sought to
Speaker 7: make secondary schools and colleges more accessible to people. They
Speaker 7: introduced maternity leave for women, yes, although notably party members
Speaker 7: who were women were pressured to come back to work
Speaker 7: maybe after having children. So again we'll get to those flaws.
Speaker 7: There was still an equality in pay between men and women,
Speaker 7: but the New Dual Movement did make efforts to mandate
Speaker 7: equal pay and to engage in some changes toward addressing
Speaker 7: the inequality between men and women in the country. However,
Speaker 7: a revolution was still needed within the revolution, as it
Speaker 7: has tended to be across these revolutions, you know, across
Speaker 7: these years usual stuff. Women were still doing the most
Speaker 7: of the housework and both sexes were expected to take
Speaker 7: part in political engagement. So you had women in the
Speaker 7: party in the New Dual Movement, but it was a
Speaker 7: sort of an expectation of equality in some respects, like yeah,
Speaker 7: come out to work even though you just had STrenD
Speaker 7: because everybody else is coming on to work. And yet
Speaker 7: it was like, oh, yeah, you can keep on doing
Speaker 7: the housework. We're not gonna take on our load there.
Speaker 6: Yep, it's funny. I finished my book recently, but they
Speaker 6: have a chapter on gender, and there's this a communist
Speaker 6: militant in Spain who was fighting at the front line.
Speaker 6: But also they would saddled with that double burden, right
Speaker 6: because women were expected to be the ones amongst, especially
Speaker 6: amongst the communists, who cooked and cleaned in addition to fighting.
Speaker 6: But she has this famous line where she says, so
Speaker 6: I didn't join the military to die with a dish
Speaker 6: cloth in my hand, which that's great. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 6: good one.
Speaker 3: I like it a lot.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, But flaws with engaging with gender aside. There
Speaker 7: will of course, other things the usual movement was doing
Speaker 7: that was positive. You know, they encouraged agricultural diversification and
Speaker 7: local food production, moving away from that sort of exclusive
Speaker 7: or ne exclusive dependence on nutneg production. Then I defined
Speaker 7: the colonial period. You know, they got rid of the
Speaker 7: old Westminster style parliamentary system in favor of a one
Speaker 7: party system with some elements of mass democracy. Now, the
Speaker 7: degree to which that democracy actually empowered people is debatable,
Speaker 7: but there were, you know, efforts on the record. You know,
Speaker 7: they organized public meetings to discuss the national budget. They
Speaker 7: set up workers and youth and women's and farmers organizations,
Speaker 7: and unfortunately, even though Bishop was influenced by Celar James,
Speaker 7: he continued to pursue the sort of hierarchical leadership common
Speaker 7: in Caribbean politics. And so even with these alternative organizations,
Speaker 7: you had that kind of hierarchy. But I think that
Speaker 7: is to be expected from any movement besides anarchism. Yeah,
Speaker 7: so I can't say I'm surprised. They closed the independent
Speaker 7: newspaper Torchlights after an article highlighting Erastoferian protest and lack
Speaker 7: of representation in government. So there were efforts to ensure
Speaker 7: that Brener moved towards secularism, but freedom of the press
Speaker 7: was not something that was particularly high in the priorities,
Speaker 7: and there were still prejudices against religious groups and movements
Speaker 7: like the Rastiferians that had yet to be addressed. You know,
Speaker 7: these things aren't dealt with overnight. But right, I think
Speaker 7: when all you have is a hammer, everything can sort
Speaker 7: of look like a nail. Yeah, they didn't do anything
Speaker 7: too drastic in the economic scale. For the most part.
Speaker 7: They left people's private businesses alone. They implemented some state enterprises,
Speaker 7: and they implemented some cooperative enterprises, So a fairly standard
Speaker 7: mixed economy, a mixed economy that Canterverian extents be found
Speaker 7: throughout the Caribbean weather they had a revolution or not.
Speaker 7: But they did establish cooperative and friendly relations with Cuba,
Speaker 7: which was a real thorn on the side of the
Speaker 7: United States.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he didn't like them.
Speaker 7: And now this is I would say from nineteen seventy
Speaker 7: nine to nineteen eighty so their first two years in power,
Speaker 7: people were nerva sited, you know, they were hopeful of
Speaker 7: the genuine decolonization and positive change taking place. But the excitement,
Speaker 7: part of the NEUVA sitement started to die down by
Speaker 7: nineteen eighty one. The People's Revolutionary Government PRG became increasingly
Speaker 7: militaristic as time went on. They organized militias and armed people.
Speaker 7: They were essentially preparing for a Geary counter coup, but
Speaker 7: also potential CIA involvement. The police were replaced with military personnel.
Speaker 7: And I think this is the trap that a lot
Speaker 7: of these projects end up falling into. This concer about
Speaker 7: the enemy within the enemy without leads these revolutionaries to
Speaker 7: cannibalize themselves, you know, the revolutionary potential and excite ones
Speaker 7: that's curtailed because there's so much fear dominating that some
Speaker 7: enemy is going to attack, some violence is going to
Speaker 7: take place that they need to prepare for. And so
Speaker 7: you over your miilitarize, ru militarize, and you stare the
Speaker 7: course of the project away from its original intentions to
Speaker 7: a point where it's not even recognizable to the people
Speaker 7: who initiated it. Yeah, you know, I'm not saying that
Speaker 7: they weren't right to be wary of US intervention. History
Speaker 7: has demonstrated as much. But it was something that the
Speaker 7: people of the country were becoming increasingly concerned about because
Speaker 7: it's a small country and it's uncommon, you know, just unusual.
Speaker 7: It's unnerving to see militia's marching on your street. Now,
Speaker 7: the Mutual movement was starting to become more focused on
Speaker 7: establishing a vanguard core, the more they oriented themselves toward
Speaker 7: Marxism lenders, so like I mentioned before, they were making
Speaker 7: this shift away from the sort of popular mass democracy
Speaker 7: that people like see Lar James was talking about. The
Speaker 7: more they read and they studied the works of Marxism lenders,
Speaker 7: and there were people within the party who became more
Speaker 7: and more convinced. Again, remember the end positions of power
Speaker 7: this point in time, so in positions of power, and
Speaker 7: you're reading theoretical justifications for why you need to be
Speaker 7: in power. You know you will stand by those theoretical
Speaker 7: justifications because it lines up with your interests, your self
Speaker 7: interests to you know, further your position of power, and
Speaker 7: the continuation of your role as an authority, as a leader.
Speaker 7: And so this vanguard call that they were pursuing, it
Speaker 7: ended up creating a hierarchy of in group and outgroup.
Speaker 7: You had the people who were in the vanguard the
Speaker 7: people who were out of the vanguard who didn't get picked,
Speaker 7: We didn't make the cut. You know, it felt snubbed.
Speaker 7: And this was facilities and it was fostering this an
Speaker 7: air of secrecy that people in the country were beginning
Speaker 7: to resent and lose trust in. Because imagine you going
Speaker 7: from this sort of popular engagement with the people as
Speaker 7: you you know, take part in these efforts to push
Speaker 7: Gary out of power. Then you have this sort of secrecy,
Speaker 7: you have this sort of militarism. They're started to remind
Speaker 7: people a bit of the exact Geary government that they
Speaker 7: wanted out. Then two major events took place in nineteen
Speaker 7: eighty one. There was a bombing under the stage of
Speaker 7: a rally that killed some mutes, and there was a
Speaker 7: car ambustion as well. Both of these incidents were blamed
Speaker 7: on counter revolutionaries in the country. That famous buzzworth, that
Speaker 7: famous catchphrase, that famous justification for any and every response. Yeah.
Speaker 7: So it further pushed the country and really the whole
Speaker 7: society into this culture of suspicion and repression and also
Speaker 7: resentment for the New Dual movement. The New Jeal movement
Speaker 7: wasn't responsible for the bombans, but you can imagine people
Speaker 7: were probably saying when they were at the parlor by
Speaker 7: the grocery, you know, out by the bar down the street,
Speaker 7: they're saying, you know, at least they didn't have any
Speaker 7: bombits under Gary. You know, at least didn't have these
Speaker 7: combitions under Gary. Gary wasn't nice, but we didn't have
Speaker 7: terrorist attacks. And the sort of transparency and engagement people
Speaker 7: were accustomed to were starting to evaporate. The New Dual
Speaker 7: movement was starting to be seen by some as a
Speaker 7: secret society. And if your society is already small, right,
Speaker 7: just about one hundred thousand people, Yeah, having a secret
Speaker 7: society within that small society where everybody knows everybody, that's
Speaker 7: not good, especially when the revolution is so new, so nationed.
Speaker 7: You need people's trust, and especially as well because people
Speaker 7: were not ideologically for Marxism Leninism, most of them, that is,
Speaker 7: they were't ideologically for Marxism Leniness and they were ideologically
Speaker 7: neutral movement advocates. They just wanted Eric Garry out and
Speaker 7: they wanted improve once their living conditions. They didn't have
Speaker 7: a particular political ideology. They were committed too. And in
Speaker 7: this time, you know, the Caribbean is part of the
Speaker 7: rest of the world. The Cribbean is paying attention, has
Speaker 7: to pay attention to what's happening in the rest of
Speaker 7: the world, and especially within northern neighbor the United States
Speaker 7: of America, and it's very influenced at that point in time.
Speaker 7: We're talking the late seventies early eighties Cold War rhetoric
Speaker 7: that people are getting in the media. The American media
Speaker 7: was still very and continue to be very prominent in
Speaker 7: terms of what Cribbean people consume because we are English speaking.
Speaker 7: The Americans and English speaking, and they have far more resources,
Speaker 7: so their media comes to us, and a lot of
Speaker 7: the narratives that Caribbean people get come in a recent
Speaker 7: part from American narratives. So these Cold War era narratives
Speaker 7: about communism as a scare word was something that had
Speaker 7: yet to be addressed through actual demonstration of what communism
Speaker 7: could actually be for people. You know, people weren't worn
Speaker 7: over on communism yet, it was still unfamiliar, and in
Speaker 7: this time you really needed people who were open, who
Speaker 7: were accommodating, who were showing people what it meant in practice,
Speaker 7: who were, you know, sort of disarming these notions that
Speaker 7: could serve as obstacles towards people's buying into the struggle.
Speaker 7: I'm saying this as a non Marxist Lendness. I'm putting
Speaker 7: myself in those shoes. If I'm trying to get people
Speaker 7: invested in as convinced of this, that sort of secrecy
Speaker 7: it doesn't push things in a post the trajectory.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's easy for the population to perceive that you've
Speaker 6: replaced one elite with another elite, right, especially in post
Speaker 6: colonial movements, when when we do this exactly so it's
Speaker 6: a transparent word for one, you know.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean not to say that people didn't see
Speaker 7: the differences. Yes, correct, they went away the nuances. They
Speaker 7: could tell the difference between an Eric Gary and a
Speaker 7: more respecial They can tell the difference between you know,
Speaker 7: one form of politics and another. It's not that they
Speaker 7: were just ready to court immediately. I mean some of
Speaker 7: them still had the fresh wounds of the trauma being
Speaker 7: inflicted by Eric Garry. Yeah, but it's because of that
Speaker 7: trauma they were also sensitive to the potential of new traumas.
Speaker 7: Ye call it paranoia, call it unesst and and right
Speaker 7: thinking suspicion. But they were they were wary of what
Speaker 7: was taking place. Yeah, and you know it didn't help.
Speaker 7: It didn't help that. Okay. So you know some people
Speaker 7: they read like one or two theory books and they
Speaker 7: start walking around like their head is three times bigger
Speaker 7: than it is. They start walking around this kind of
Speaker 7: inflated sense of self importance.
Speaker 6: Yes, I'm very familiar with that kind of person.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Unfortunately, that's exactly what started taking place among some
Speaker 7: members of the party. They're reading all these books, all
Speaker 7: these thick books from Russia and June and Marx and
Speaker 7: Lenin and all these people's and they're starting to carry
Speaker 7: themselves in a particular way. Yeah, with a level of
Speaker 7: arrogance and nowhere to illness. And you know, and this
Speaker 7: is we're in a society. We remember, we are fresh
Speaker 7: out of colonialism. You know, none of our independent nations
Speaker 7: or even one hundred years old. Yet much of the
Speaker 7: population still remember that colonial period. Yeah, and much of
Speaker 7: the popular, like I mentioned before, needed changes the education
Speaker 7: system because they didn't have educational opportunities. So you had
Speaker 7: this vast educational inequality, right, and then you have this
Speaker 7: new jeal movement and some of its members are talking
Speaker 7: to you like you're stupid. Yeah, because you didn't get
Speaker 7: to go to primary school, you didn't read all the
Speaker 7: thick books that they were, or you didn't get to
Speaker 7: go to secondary school, or you didn't get to go
Speaker 7: to university, and so you don't know all the big
Speaker 7: words and you haven't read all the thick texts that
Speaker 7: they have read. And it could rub people the wrong way.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yes, right, Yeah, there can be too much theory.
Speaker 6: I think that often is too much theory, especially when
Speaker 6: it creates this idea right that reading is what distinguishes
Speaker 6: one as a revolutionary right as opposed to doing or
Speaker 6: just knowing and caring, and it did a downfall of
Speaker 6: many movements.
Speaker 7: Indeed, I think if you're coming from the background that
Speaker 7: some of the this neutual movement members were coming from,
Speaker 7: you need to put in that extra effort not to
Speaker 7: dumb things down per se. You still want to respect
Speaker 7: people's intelligence, but you have to be away of the dynamic.
Speaker 7: It's something that I myself have to work on, you know,
Speaker 7: because I think it's a sort of curse of knowledge
Speaker 7: where you read so much that you take for granted
Speaker 7: what you know. You know, you read to a point
Speaker 7: where you almost forget that this is not common knowledge
Speaker 7: or this word may be unfamiliar to a lot of people,
Speaker 7: and you really have to be cognizant of it, especially
Speaker 7: as you approaching people and make sure you're talking to
Speaker 7: them in their language. They don't feel as though they're
Speaker 7: carrying yourself too big fabriages.
Speaker 6: Yeah, definitely, like the people who write the thick books
Speaker 6: can't be your like milieu. You know, they can't be there.
Speaker 6: I've used a stupid word. But like, if those are
Speaker 6: the people with whom you're sort of conversing in your head,
Speaker 6: and then you begin to speak in that language to
Speaker 6: people who aren't familiar with it, just sounds weird. Yeah,
Speaker 6: like it's yeah, as you said, you get too big
Speaker 6: for your bridges, and you some pompous if you're not.
Speaker 7: Careful exactly exactly, and so for the you know, big
Speaker 7: shot lawyer again all the time, and she kind of
Speaker 7: as I say this, for big shot lawyers like Marie
Speaker 7: Bishop and a big shot economics lecturers like Bernard Cord
Speaker 7: and some of the other folks that had been part
Speaker 7: of the core of the party, they had to approach
Speaker 7: to people in a particular way, and they were successful
Speaker 7: in doing so under Eric Garry and as they were
Speaker 7: part of you opposition. But things were shifted also the
Speaker 7: two in the of the eighties, we had a lot
Speaker 7: of moves again suspected counter revolutionaries, imprisonment without trial. To
Speaker 7: imagine again, people are thinking, this is what the monk
Speaker 7: who's gang two point zero? Yeah, the fair was starting
Speaker 7: to overtake, the society was starting to become cannibalizing. As
Speaker 7: I said, so by the time we get to nineteen
Speaker 7: eighty three, we find ourselves with the people bereft of
Speaker 7: the early days of hope, in a house divided, which
Speaker 7: famously cannot stand unbeknowns to the public, there were tensions
Speaker 7: between Maurice Bishop and Bernard Cord since at least nineteen
Speaker 7: eighty two, and Chord wasn't even part of the central
Speaker 7: Committee of the Neutral Movement anymore for a while, but
Speaker 7: within the vanguard the party members still preferred Cord to Bishop.
Speaker 7: Cord was seen as more intellectually equipped to lead with
Speaker 7: his knowledge of theory. They started calling Bishop egotistics and
Speaker 7: counter revolutionary. And I have to say, I love the
Speaker 7: double edged sword of these kind of willingly thought to
Speaker 7: meet and cliches, because they can be used by you
Speaker 7: and then they could be used against you. In a
Speaker 7: staple of his fingers.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I did. It goes back to your finger, hammers
Speaker 6: and nails that you mentioned before.
Speaker 7: Indeed, so eventually the party decided to bring Court on
Speaker 7: as co leader with Bishop. Originally Bishop agreed, but this
Speaker 7: started great tensions. Things managed recently, but after a while
Speaker 7: Bishop was turned to push back against the co leadership arrangement,
Speaker 7: and the party started seeing it as him favoring his
Speaker 7: own ascendancy over the collective of unity and son. He
Speaker 7: went to Germany. He left the country on a trip.
Speaker 7: Don't worry. There was none of the coole this time,
Speaker 7: at least not yet. When he went to Germany on
Speaker 7: a trip, came back, there was not a welcome party
Speaker 7: for him. Things were coming to her head. The party
Speaker 7: did not have his back anymore. He could feel it.
Speaker 7: But he did know that the people still had his back.
Speaker 7: But he knows he's charismatic, he knows people love him,
Speaker 7: and so all of a sudden, this is in nineteen
Speaker 7: eighty three, by the way, a rumor was swollen that
Speaker 7: Cord wanted to kill Bishop. Yeah. It's a dangerous rumor,
Speaker 7: you know. It shatters this facade of a united front
Speaker 7: that had carried the revolution. They had carried the government
Speaker 7: for so long. But since most people loved Bishop, as
Speaker 7: he rightfully assumed, in fact, they were not for this
Speaker 7: name basis with him.
Speaker 6: That's cool.
Speaker 7: They weren't seeing Prime Minister Bishop, your honorable Prime Minister Bishop.
Speaker 7: It was hey, Maurice, like that boy, Maurice.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's always a good sign. Like, it's one of
Speaker 6: the positive marks of the of the Revolutionarjava, right, is
Speaker 6: that everyone is a friend and everyone's preferred to germanly
Speaker 6: by their first name, and it's always kind of yeah,
Speaker 6: I've seen enough read enough about you know, revolutions supposing
Speaker 6: a revolutionary hierarchy. So that's always a good sign, I
Speaker 6: feel like.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: So, meanwhile, you had Cord who people didn't have the
Speaker 7: same kind of relationship with. Yeah, you know, as far
Speaker 7: as they're concerned, he's an anemino because of that rumor. Yeah,
Speaker 7: and the party actually suspected that it was Bishop that
Speaker 7: started the rumor. In fact, his own personal bodyguards suspected it,
Speaker 7: but Bishop himself denied it. Whether he did or did
Speaker 7: not start the rumor, we don't know. But the party
Speaker 7: was insulted by his movements and put him under house arrest.
Speaker 6: What what.
Speaker 7: Right now? But he did this shocked.
Speaker 6: Like a shot, And that's that's that's.
Speaker 7: How the people were feeling it, Like what prime minister arrested?
Speaker 7: You could do that, That's the thing. So you see,
Speaker 7: the Vanguard, with all that secrecy at this point in time,
Speaker 7: was operating on information that was not made available to
Speaker 7: the people. And the people who were pissed at the party.
Speaker 7: You know, the cracks in this political arrangement with essentially
Speaker 7: a secret society on top, were starting to show. The people,
Speaker 7: generally speaking, regardless of what the party wanted, wanted Maurice Bishop.
Speaker 7: They wanted the boy Maurice, but the party was not
Speaker 7: interested in what people wanted. The day is nineteenth of
Speaker 7: October nineteen eighty three. The pro Maurice Bishop usual movement, leaders,
Speaker 7: government ministers, and a mass demonstration of people rolled up
Speaker 7: to Bishop's house to set him free. There were gods,
Speaker 7: of course, assigned to keep him in house arrest, but
Speaker 7: those gods stood down. They refused to shoot at the people.
Speaker 7: To the crowd of people walked to Fort Rupert. Now
Speaker 7: Fort Rupert wasn't always Fort Rupert used to be Fort George. Fact,
Speaker 7: after the revolution ended it again became known as Fort George.
Speaker 7: But Fort Rupert was named Fort Rupert after Maurice Bishop's father,
Speaker 7: who was killed by Eric Garry, as you may recall.
Speaker 7: So they get there, but the majority of the Neudual movement,
Speaker 7: who were, like I said, backers of Thenard Cord, were
Speaker 7: at another fort nearby, then Boom three, armored trucks pull
Speaker 7: up from the Fort of Cord to Rupert's Fort Rupert Rat.
Speaker 7: They start firing into the crowd, people running all over
Speaker 7: the place.
Speaker 3: Hoo.
Speaker 7: One people died, who one people scattered. This event as
Speaker 7: a trauma for Grenadians even to this day. By the way,
Speaker 7: So the Cord loyalists pull up and line up Bishop
Speaker 7: Unison Whiteman, who was the Minister of Foreign Affairs, nor Spain,
Speaker 7: who is the Minister of Health and was actually not
Speaker 7: part of the NEU dual movement, and Jacqueline Kreft, who
Speaker 7: is the Minister of Education, then line them up against
Speaker 7: the wall and shot them summary execution. Others including trade unionists, businessmen,
Speaker 7: and high schoolers were also killed at Fort Rupert. Right
Speaker 7: after this, the militaryvery curfew was announced on radio. Grenadians
Speaker 7: were told to lock their doors. Violators of curfew were
Speaker 7: to be shot on site. A couple of days later,
Speaker 7: as people more wanted their dead, the news came that
Speaker 7: the United States will invade Grenada. If this was a
Speaker 7: HBO series, I feel like that would be the end
Speaker 7: of the pronouncement episode. So just to give you a
Speaker 7: bit of context on the US's position, the United States
Speaker 7: did not like the way that Cuba and the Soviets
Speaker 7: and Grenada were becoming close, even though Grenada was technically
Speaker 7: non aligned. Like much of the world, was trying to
Speaker 7: stay out of the hairs of the US and the
Speaker 7: USSR in their cold wor Yeah, but Grenada and Grenadians
Speaker 7: represented a serious risk. They were black, That's a big risk.
Speaker 7: They were English speaking. There were English speaking black people
Speaker 7: close to the border of the United States of America
Speaker 7: as African Americans were engaged in their own struggle for
Speaker 7: liberation in the US. As rich Bishop noted, I mean
Speaker 7: that's the threat that there could be communication, collaboration between
Speaker 7: these groups, a demonstration of an alternative close to the
Speaker 7: United States with ease of communication with the United States.
Speaker 7: So the United States invasion was always a potential outcome,
Speaker 7: but here it was flexing power in its fair in
Speaker 7: its backyard. The Party rounded up a bunch of people
Speaker 7: to join them in defending the revolution. Most people were traumatized.
Speaker 7: They ran and they hid wherever they could. Some, regardless
Speaker 7: of whether they liked the Nu jeal movement at that
Speaker 7: point in time or not, stood ready to defend their
Speaker 7: island from invasion, but any more were hidden and scared.
Speaker 7: And they were also others who, out of revenge for
Speaker 7: the revolution that betrayed them, betrayed the revolution by expressing
Speaker 7: their support for the invasion. Now, me personally, not something
Speaker 7: I would never do. I don't care how much I
Speaker 7: disagree with any any government that I'm under, I wouldn't
Speaker 7: co sign the invasion of my country by an empire.
Speaker 7: But I can understand the reasoning or the emotional position
Speaker 7: that some people were in at that point. So the
Speaker 7: US's claim, by the way, for the invasion was that
Speaker 7: they were there to rescue American students who were in Grenada,
Speaker 7: so that they are to rescue these students from these
Speaker 7: these communes. Perfect American students wouldn't ender any actual threat. Obviously,
Speaker 7: nobody was mining them or threatening them or anything. But
Speaker 7: they always have to have some kind of story, right, Yeah,
Speaker 7: So twenty fifth of October nineteen eighty three, America's boots
Speaker 7: land on the ground, joined later by the military personnel
Speaker 7: of Barbados and Jamaica. There were more deaths, mostly in Grenadians,
Speaker 7: but also some Cubans who were there working on the
Speaker 7: new International Airport, an airport that later became known as
Speaker 7: Maurice Bishop International Airport, an airport that just over a
Speaker 7: month ago the United States requested to use for its
Speaker 7: military operations in the region. The United States kept the
Speaker 7: media out of the island for two days after the invasion.
Speaker 7: They were sure to curate an image of the communist threat.
Speaker 7: They wanted to pay into picture for the media to
Speaker 7: tell us story back at home about how yeah, they
Speaker 7: were actually repairing to work with the Soviets as a
Speaker 7: stage in ground to attack the United States. So this
Speaker 7: invasion was the first overt as opposed to covert use
Speaker 7: of force since Vietnam. The party in power at the
Speaker 7: time needed an easy win, so party members this says
Speaker 7: Neudual Movement party members were imprisoned. An interim government was
Speaker 7: established by Grenadians living abroad, and the revolution was over
Speaker 7: a stock aftermath, the fall of the Usual Movement and
Speaker 7: the People's Revolutionary Government of Grenada led to the disintegration
Speaker 7: of the Workers Party of Jamaica. It now destroyed Cara
Speaker 7: com the Caribbean community as a united block as Jamaica
Speaker 7: I'm sure and Dad decided with the US in the invasion,
Speaker 7: while countries I trainedad stood against the invasion. That was
Speaker 7: a split in Cara com that took years to recover from,
Speaker 7: and I think most crucially, the fall of the utual
Speaker 7: movement led to the death in all but name of
Speaker 7: the Caribbean Left, from distrust, from infighting, and from this
Speaker 7: resolute enforcement of the new colonial model. For all the
Speaker 7: flaws of the revolution had it was a representation of
Speaker 7: an alternative that something else could be done besides business
Speaker 7: as usual. And that alternative first felt in fighting, and
Speaker 7: then its fate was sealed by a belligerent invasion. Yeah,
Speaker 7: and so the Caribbean Left not say it's actually entirely dead.
Speaker 7: There are still figures from that era. There are still
Speaker 7: people who carry progressive or revolutionary politics, but it's Haiti
Speaker 7: it's goal and age is no more. And that is
Speaker 7: in part as a result of that US invasion. And
Speaker 7: within Grenader the bodies of those killed were never found.
Speaker 7: In some cases, the families of those killed or of
Speaker 7: department members may even still be divided to this day.
Speaker 7: You know, you can imagine how they must feel, these
Speaker 7: sort of social and political divisions that came out of
Speaker 7: that kind of action. Who sided with Cord, who sided
Speaker 7: with Bishop, who sided with the US? Who stood against
Speaker 7: who brought whose actions were responsible for the US come in.
Speaker 7: If the revolution never happened, then US wouldn't have come
Speaker 7: they seople wouldn't be dead. Blame game, accusations, political conflicts,
Speaker 7: all of that. You know, it's very easy to breeze
Speaker 7: over the deaths of people in historical events as just numbers.
Speaker 7: That's just statistics. You know, it doesn't even click, you know,
Speaker 7: because I think, I don't think our brains can fully
Speaker 7: handle that much trauma at once. So we we could
Speaker 7: partmentalize it in a way, we package it in something
Speaker 7: that's a bit more digestible. When you hear figures of
Speaker 7: you know, even just two people, that that's two people,
Speaker 7: two entire human beings with lives, interests, passions, relationships, connections,
Speaker 7: future snuffed out. And in a country like Grenada, from
Speaker 7: a small country, one hundred thousand people, and I mean
Speaker 7: I'm from Trinad, right, which has a population of about
Speaker 7: one point four million people, and it still feels like
Speaker 7: you know somebody who knows somebody. The networks are so tight.
Speaker 7: It's even tighter net network wise in a Grenader or
Speaker 7: a Tobago. You know, we're talking neighbors, relatives split into sides, cousin,
Speaker 7: blaming cousin, friend killing friend, a decolonization never fully began
Speaker 7: and never fully completed. Their social splits on the perspective
Speaker 7: on what took place, you had the Bishop was good crowd,
Speaker 7: the Bishop was bad crowd. The Bishop was bad, but
Speaker 7: the revolution was good crowd. The revolution was bad, but
Speaker 7: Bishop was good crowd. You get all sorts of interpretations
Speaker 7: of these kinds of traumatic historical events. Yeah, and the
Speaker 7: outcome to this day is, you know, fair, unhealed, open wounds,
Speaker 7: the youth, the passionate radical youth of yesteryear, keeping their
Speaker 7: heads down on auto politics. Today. Unfortunately, very little has
Speaker 7: been done in Grenada to deal with the traumas of
Speaker 7: the invasion, besides an attempted truth and Reconciliation commission, which
Speaker 7: failed miserably due to a couple of different obstacles, an
Speaker 7: unwillingness to reconcile, amongst they continued incarceration of certain individuals,
Speaker 7: unrecovered remains, anger towards entire sectors the population at the
Speaker 7: execution of Bishop and others, and so in the years
Speaker 7: that have followed, there's been a subdued political consciousness among
Speaker 7: much of the population. They have risen to the challenge
Speaker 7: of the US inviting themselves to set up shop in
Speaker 7: marich Bishop International Airport. There were many actions taking place
Speaker 7: in Grenada to speak up understand against that intervention. But
Speaker 7: for the most part, the property of this has been
Speaker 7: disengaged from the sort of radical passion that you saw
Speaker 7: in that time period. And it didn't help, of course
Speaker 7: that pretty much right after the revolution you had a
Speaker 7: series of natural disasters. In September two thousand and four,
Speaker 7: after being hurricane three for forty nine years, the island
Speaker 7: was hit by Hurricane Ivan, a Category three hurricane that
Speaker 7: resulted in three nine deaths and the damage or destruction
Speaker 7: to ninety percent of the island's homes. In two thousand
Speaker 7: and five, which is the following year, Hurricane Emily, a
Speaker 7: Category one hurricane, struck the island and killed a person.
Speaker 7: In twenty twenty four, Hurricane Beryl struck the island of Kararaku.
Speaker 7: And so we're already to know the environmental instability of
Speaker 7: being a Caribbean island, but now I also have to
Speaker 7: be with the political and social instability of such a
Speaker 7: traumatic incident. Before we close, I do want to get
Speaker 7: into some of the critiques that I had of this project.
Speaker 7: You know, I'm not the type of weekson to look
Speaker 7: at these historical moments, no matter by allegiance to the
Speaker 7: esposed politics of the people in them, and we want
Speaker 7: to paint them in a narrow, simplistic brush. You know,
Speaker 7: I think I see that tendency across all groups. Yeah,
Speaker 7: you know, so the Marx Slenness. We'll talk about these
Speaker 7: revolutions in a very fawning and agulating way. Then you
Speaker 7: sell the anarchists who talk about, you know, the Spanish
Speaker 7: Civil War, they talk about the Paris community. They talk
Speaker 7: about these different projects as if they were and as
Speaker 7: if they weren't serious flaws in their structure and the
Speaker 7: analysis and their methodology. It's worth addressing.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 7: It's very easy for nostalgia to take over.
Speaker 6: Yeah, definitely, like something I think about a lot. Like
Speaker 6: I translated a piece for the Strangers in the Tangled
Speaker 6: Wilderness zine a few months ago, maybe even a year
Speaker 6: ago now by an anarchist fighterhood fought in the International
Speaker 6: Group of the Darruti column who went by several names,
Speaker 6: Charles Riddle with his birth name, but he has this
Speaker 6: whole thing about how anarchists tend to write hagiographies like
Speaker 6: which is the life of a saint? Right, Like they've
Speaker 6: tried to make the Spanish Civil War into these like
Speaker 6: exemplaries saintly people as a opposed to actually looking at
Speaker 6: the mistakes people made and his stances are like his
Speaker 6: friends died for nothing if we don't learn anything, and
Speaker 6: so if we don't acknowledge the very real compromises and
Speaker 6: mistakes and failures, then they have been defeated, right, and
Speaker 6: they all died for nothing. But at at least we
Speaker 6: can learn from it, then at least is something we
Speaker 6: can take going forward, which is something I always thought
Speaker 6: was a great way of phrasing something and quite an
Speaker 6: admirable way of looking at something that he himself participated
Speaker 6: in and that was obviously a defining and a very
Speaker 6: traumatic experience of his life.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's something that I rallied again, that sort of
Speaker 7: great man of Bruce's history. Yeah, right, I suppose that
Speaker 7: brings mean some of my first critique, which is something
Speaker 7: that plays greater both before, during and after this revolution
Speaker 7: when you have a political culture dependent on a maximum
Speaker 7: leader that puts now cult or just a grouping around
Speaker 7: her personality, whether that's bishop or Gaary or Cord. For one,
Speaker 7: it's a continuation of the colonial politics of the British
Speaker 7: in that sort of governor position. And it also, I
Speaker 7: think leads to a contempt towards common people. Whether it
Speaker 7: starts out that way or not, it eventually makes its
Speaker 7: way into that direction. I still see personality politics rear
Speaker 7: and it's ugly headed in Trinidad, even though we've been
Speaker 7: independent for even longer. You know, nineteen sixty two are
Speaker 7: opposed to create as nineteen seventy four. But the result
Speaker 7: of that kind of politics is, you know, it's ideological
Speaker 7: and policy splits either nonexistent or secondary to personality loyalties,
Speaker 7: familiar ties, and in some cases ethnic loyalty. The United
Speaker 7: National Congress UN see the Party in Power Internet right now,
Speaker 7: party responsible for our current position, is a personality cult
Speaker 7: led by a current prime minister talent subrossessor. And she's
Speaker 7: only one of many examples of this sort of party first,
Speaker 7: leader first approach to politics that we see in the region,
Speaker 7: a baggage that we see in the region. I know,
Speaker 7: with radical politics, it's sad because you expect to do
Speaker 7: away with that kind of stuff. But the Revolution, in
Speaker 7: my view, had a lack of decolonization away from the
Speaker 7: authority and tendencies of colonial rule. That I think is
Speaker 7: why there was such an appeal in Leninists thought and
Speaker 7: rule to begin with, because it's a lot easier to approach,
Speaker 7: you know, it doesn't unpack the psychology of clonialism or
Speaker 7: unpack how Gary's rule may have shaped their own approach
Speaker 7: to politics, that another politics might, that another anti politics might,
Speaker 7: And so they carried on this elita, authoritaria, and personality
Speaker 7: based politics despite having a youthful beginning. Bishop was twenty
Speaker 7: nine when he started a neutral movement, which is the
Speaker 7: same age that Gary was when he got into politics.
Speaker 7: I know one could make a movie of the mirrors
Speaker 7: in their histories. But despite his youthful beginning, the youth
Speaker 7: carried on the mistakes of their forebears. They betrayed the
Speaker 7: excitement of people power that people had for the revolution,
Speaker 7: just as they betrayed the excitement of people power that
Speaker 7: people had for independence, and they continue the consciousness of
Speaker 7: deference to hierarchy. Again, I don't want to draw one
Speaker 7: to one comparisons between Gary and Bishop. I recognize their
Speaker 7: stark differences and their politics and in their engagement with
Speaker 7: the people of Grenado. They were not the same, but
Speaker 7: in some ways they did rhyme. I would wrap up,
Speaker 7: I suppose with Bundy's sort of critique of Grenado's revolution,
Speaker 7: which I just echo this continued consciousness of a deference
Speaker 7: to hierarchy. A genuine revolution depends on people taking direct responsibility,
Speaker 7: not waiting for leaders or stages of development, not waiting
Speaker 7: on guidance, being empowered themselves. That sort of tired Leninist
Speaker 7: gradualism and bureaucratic control gets regular people no closer to
Speaker 7: actually having a sense of autonomy and control over their lives.
Speaker 7: And as Fundy emphasizers, especially in small Caribbean societies, participatory
Speaker 7: local self managed systems are entirely feasible. Inclosing, Fundy suggested
Speaker 7: that Gredino's revolution failed because it moved away from this
Speaker 7: principle of immediate collective self management and deliberately chose hierarchy.
Speaker 7: And from that hierarchy came a sense of erodent trust, came,
Speaker 7: a sense of secrecy, became a sense of secret societies,
Speaker 7: and I created a culture of secrecy, a post transparency
Speaker 7: that led to its downfall. As I mentioned, it was
Speaker 7: gossip a rumor of somebody trying to kill Bishop but
Speaker 7: got this ball roller. So today I want to appeal
Speaker 7: directly to Cribean radicals of all stripes to learn, to learnlessly,
Speaker 7: learn from the Grenadian Revolution. I on't appeal not just
Speaker 7: to Cribian radicals, but to radicals all across. They will
Speaker 7: all across our listenership. It is critical in times when
Speaker 7: the means of intervention and the means of disruption and
Speaker 7: division and co optation are more powerful than ever, that
Speaker 7: you engage in the sort of dissipation of leadership, that
Speaker 7: you engage in grassroots and disposed in powerment, That you
Speaker 7: maintain an anti authoritarian ethos that cannot be co opted
Speaker 7: by a charismatic power. But you've take an approach to
Speaker 7: organization does not lend itself to the vulnerabilities of hierarchy
Speaker 7: that you consider moving like my coruser, that you take
Speaker 7: on networks and free associations rather than the sort of
Speaker 7: X Marxist spot Bullsey centralized parties and the power struggles
Speaker 7: that ensue from them from that thirst for power that
Speaker 7: led so many downfalls for the revolutionary imagination. Before I
Speaker 7: wrap up, I just want to ask James, we have
Speaker 7: any thoughts.
Speaker 6: No, I think that's very eloquent the way you said it,
Speaker 6: Like we have to build systems and ways of organizing
Speaker 6: relating to one another that don't allow this to happen. Right,
Speaker 6: we have to be very conscious, like you say, of
Speaker 6: where it has happened. And I think the only way
Speaker 6: there'll we understand the value of that is through studying history,
Speaker 6: but like studying it from a place like you were saying, right,
Speaker 6: like I get death is a statistic or a number
Speaker 6: until it's a person. And I think if we can
Speaker 6: study history from a place of like empathy, I guess,
Speaker 6: and solidarity rather than this would never happen to me,
Speaker 6: or like you said, like oversimplifying in a way that
Speaker 6: I think doesn't help. And sometimes I think we do
Speaker 6: it to kind of absolve ourselves from similarity, to think like, oh,
Speaker 6: how close could I be to this? It's one of
Speaker 6: the things I don't like about academic history. But if
Speaker 6: we are people who are interested in making the world better,
Speaker 6: than we have to learn from all the other people
Speaker 6: all over the world who tried to make the world better,
Speaker 6: and especially from the ones who didn't succeed. Yeah, because
Speaker 6: we don't want to do that again.
Speaker 7: Exactly, and the times they are a change in Yes, indeed,
Speaker 7: we have to approach that with our due diligence. You know,
Speaker 7: the strategies that were more relevant or more more practical
Speaker 7: in particular context may be relevant or practical in your context.
Speaker 6: Yeah, very much too. All right, Yeah, that was great,
Speaker 6: Thank you Andrew.
Speaker 7: To all our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in.
Speaker 7: I hope that you can look at our region with
Speaker 7: clearer eyes and vigilance in the ways that history repeats
Speaker 7: and rhymes. Until next time or power to all the
Speaker 7: people peace?
Speaker 3: All right?
Speaker 6: What are crackers and crack ats? Is that good? Perfect?
Speaker 6: Do we say that?
Speaker 3: I think? So?
Speaker 6: Okay, do you have a non binary cracks crack thems?
Speaker 3: I think I'm definitionly not a cracker.
Speaker 2: I just wanted to use the word crack ats. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I understand it's not appropriate.
Speaker 3: That's reasonable.
Speaker 6: Welcome to ed. Yeah, weich is just we should that, sorry, James,
Speaker 6: So let's just keep doing it. Do the intro. This
Speaker 6: is it could happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast
Speaker 6: covering what is happening in the White House, the crumbling
Speaker 6: of our world, and what this means to you. I
Speaker 6: am James Stout and I'm joined today by Robert Evans
Speaker 6: and Mia Wong and Sophie. Sophie is also here, and
Speaker 6: this episode we are covering the week of December eleventh
Speaker 6: to December seventeenth, the week before the week that is Christmas.
Speaker 2: That's right, baby, So I hope you've done your shopping.
Speaker 2: I hope you've got me a gift because I pay
Speaker 2: attention to which of our listeners do and do not
Speaker 2: buy me presents.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so do I you will never find me and
Speaker 6: you shouldn't try. That's right.
Speaker 1: And it's currently Honkah, Happy honkah.
Speaker 8: Happy hone right, yes, yeah, happy honekah. All the holidays
Speaker 8: have a yeah, quasi Kwanza, have a solemn, dignified tet.
Speaker 6: All the holidays have a good one of them.
Speaker 1: Happy Winter Solstice, which.
Speaker 2: Is happy Solstice more unhappy Solstice. It's kind of a
Speaker 2: bittersweet holiday. Yeah, Super Saturnalia.
Speaker 6: You know, it's a good one.
Speaker 8: So holidays are nice, but we're going to talk about
Speaker 8: some things that are less nice today.
Speaker 6: The government, Yes, the government and specific parts of the government.
Speaker 6: Let's start with some headlines. Gothamist has obtained information about
Speaker 6: ice being able to enter private parts of New York
Speaker 6: City shelter without a judicial warrant, or being able to
Speaker 6: obtain private information about residents, despite both of these in
Speaker 6: theory being prohibited by sanctuary city laws in New York. Right,
Speaker 6: it's happened at least five times. The way Gotham has
Speaker 6: found this is by making a public records request for
Speaker 6: incident reports, which is a clever use of public record
Speaker 6: law nice one. The city has already aware of both
Speaker 6: jail and police officers violating these laws, and I think
Speaker 6: this is a good example of how people think of
Speaker 6: sanctuary city laws as inassailable, but in fact sanctuary laws
Speaker 6: be the city's state whatever jurisdiction, are very often violated,
Speaker 6: and it's good to see that being reported on more.
Speaker 6: Last week, we talked about Faustino Pablo Pablo, right, the
Speaker 6: guy who had been sent to Guatemala despite the fact
Speaker 6: that he had protections under the Convention against Torture for
Speaker 6: being returned there. The government has returned him to the US,
Speaker 6: which is good. That is a rare, good immigration story.
Speaker 6: It did really bum me out to see that, Like
Speaker 6: there were dozens of articles on him being sent there, right,
Speaker 6: and I couldn't find anything any reporting on him being returned,
Speaker 6: which is kind of like, we should be happy for
Speaker 6: these people. We should. Yeah, we don't get many wins
Speaker 6: and we should take them. Yeah, we should be happy
Speaker 6: that this guy is not being likely to be tortured.
Speaker 6: At least it is still possible for them to remove
Speaker 6: him to a third country, right, that is not outside
Speaker 6: the realm of possibility. But right now he's not in
Speaker 6: a place where a gig judicated he was likely to
Speaker 6: be tortured, and that is good good. And Trump has
Speaker 6: designated fentanel as a weapon of mass destruction, which is great.
Speaker 3: What are we doing here?
Speaker 6: Like, I am trained as a historian, and I probably
Speaker 6: should remind you that we have been down this road
Speaker 6: before with the weapons of mass destruction, and I hope
Speaker 6: this is not leading where it did lost time, but
Speaker 6: I am very worried that it might. Yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 6: it's one of those things.
Speaker 2: I'm both we'll see, we'll know before this episode ends
Speaker 2: whether or not I'm wrong. Tucker Carlson stated recently that
Speaker 2: a source has told him the presidential announcement coming up
Speaker 2: is Trump declaring war, right that, like, we're doing a
Speaker 2: war with Venezuela full on, not just some like air
Speaker 2: strikes and stuff, just not to minimize a legal air
Speaker 2: strike in the sea or on Venezuela or soil.
Speaker 6: I don't know if I.
Speaker 2: Think that that's the likeliest thing. It just seems like
Speaker 2: such a huge jump. But also, at this point there's
Speaker 2: a whole armada blocking off Venezuela from the rest of
Speaker 2: the world, and Trump put out a statement saying that
Speaker 2: their oil is our oil and belongs rightly to American companies.
Speaker 8: So very very possible, very possible when we're about to
Speaker 8: go to war with them. I'm certainly not a I
Speaker 8: don't know what's going to happen, y'all. I'm white knuckling
Speaker 8: it like everybody else.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that fucking sucks. I didn't know the thing about
Speaker 6: that oil.
Speaker 3: It's amazing.
Speaker 2: I'll read the exact quote to you, James. This is
Speaker 2: from Trump a truth social post which has twelve point
Speaker 2: four thousand retruths and forty seven thousand likes. Venezuela is
Speaker 2: completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in the
Speaker 2: history of South America. It will only get bigger, and
Speaker 2: the shock to them will be like nothing they have
Speaker 2: ever seen before until such time as they returned to
Speaker 2: the United States of America all of the oil, land
Speaker 2: and other assets that they previously stole from US. The
Speaker 2: illegitimate Maduro regime is using oil from these stolen oil
Speaker 2: fields to finance themselves, drug terrorism, human trafficking, murder and kidnapping.
Speaker 2: For the theft of our assets, and many other reasons
Speaker 2: including terrorism, drug smuggling, and human trafficking, the Venezuelan regime
Speaker 2: has been designated a foreign terrorist organization. Therefore, today I'm
Speaker 2: ordering a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil
Speaker 2: tankers going into and out of Venezuela. The illegal aliens
Speaker 2: and criminals that the Madeira regime has sent to the
Speaker 2: United States during the weekend and Biden administration are being
Speaker 2: returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace. YadA, YadA, YadA. Yeah,
Speaker 2: all of our oil, land and other assets have to
Speaker 2: be returned to the United States.
Speaker 6: Which, like he's talking.
Speaker 2: About oil that American companies have had at points like
Speaker 2: contracts to exploit. But he's phrasing it is like their
Speaker 2: land and oil is our land and oil, which yeah,
Speaker 2: I think that's a very colonial way of phrasing like
Speaker 2: a contract.
Speaker 3: Again.
Speaker 2: A lot of times, you know, I would be like, Okay, well,
Speaker 2: I don't know if war is the most reasonable thing
Speaker 2: to expect. When the president's posting shit like that, it's
Speaker 2: very reasonable to be like, I think we might.
Speaker 4: Go to war.
Speaker 8: I think he might be about to invade Venezuela. I
Speaker 8: don't know what's going to happen, but it's you're no
Speaker 8: longer being like a kooky conspiracy theorist to be like, well,
Speaker 8: maybe he's about to try to take over Venezuela, and maybe.
Speaker 6: That is what's coming. Yeah, I don't understand how in
Speaker 6: that instance they would continue to get Venezuela to accept people.
Speaker 6: It's the US is removing. That's what the sticking points
Speaker 6: that I see. Maybe he's found at that country right
Speaker 6: that they've they've been very fond of finding the countries.
Speaker 6: I guess I should explain a little bit about oil
Speaker 6: leaving Venezuela, just so like people are aware of that.
Speaker 6: So like Robert read the truth, someone says in church,
Speaker 6: doesn't it? Yeah, yeah, here we are. So they're talking
Speaker 6: about like blockading sanctioned oil tankers, not necessarily every tanker
Speaker 6: that enters Venezuela. Is sanctioned, like I believe Chevron has
Speaker 6: some contracts with Chevron. Tankers should be cruising, Yeah, there's
Speaker 6: a lot of Chevron. Yeah, that shouldn't be an issue, right,
Speaker 6: they should be able to go back and forth. They're
Speaker 6: not sanctioned.
Speaker 8: It's the Venezuelan State Oil Company, which in English, I
Speaker 8: guess you would say Pdvsavasa Divasa's yeah, yeah, yeah, what
Speaker 8: Venezuela has done previously, and this is not by any
Speaker 8: means unique to Venezuela, but this is generally how many
Speaker 8: of these regimes that are kind of in the ambit
Speaker 8: of Venezuela I'm talking about Iran and Russia here have
Speaker 8: avoided sanctions and sanctioned entities so far as by using
Speaker 8: what A called ghost ships.
Speaker 6: I will link to an explainer on this. What they
Speaker 6: will do is use the names and identify as the
Speaker 6: vessels that have been scrapped. They will change the flags
Speaker 6: of vessels, often to these small island nations for whom
Speaker 6: allowing ships to use their flag as kind of a
Speaker 6: source of income, right, And they will often use these
Speaker 6: to go out into international waters and then offload cargo,
Speaker 6: in this case oil.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 6: So it just happens pretty frequently with Venezuelan vessels. That
Speaker 6: was one It was one such vessel called the Skipper
Speaker 6: that the US Coast Guard boarded I think last week
Speaker 6: as we're recording this. Yeah, sure, that is how Venezuela
Speaker 6: has previously been evading these sanctions, right, And Iran does
Speaker 6: this too, Russia does this too. They also do things
Speaker 6: like spoof their location or turn off their They have
Speaker 6: like a locator beacon that ships are supposed to use
Speaker 6: a transpond area. Yeah, so this is fairly common practice.
Speaker 6: But obviously the way to stop that a physical blockade, right, Like,
Speaker 6: that's not going to be possible if these if the
Speaker 6: US is effectively like inspecting ships leaving Venezuela, right or
Speaker 6: sort of keeping a very close eye on them, so
Speaker 6: that will end and with that will end a very
Speaker 6: important source of income for the Maduta regime if they
Speaker 6: keep doing this.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, obviously one of the sort of issues we're trying
Speaker 3: to work out what is going to happen here, especially
Speaker 3: before whatever speech Trump is about to give, is that
Speaker 3: we're trying to figure out state policy from Trump posting, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: and there's a lot of this that is enormously incoherent.
Speaker 3: So okay, the thing about designating the government of Venezuela
Speaker 3: as a foreign terrorist organization is one of the weirdest
Speaker 3: things I've ever seen. And this was also unhinged. The
Speaker 3: closest thing we've ever really gotten to that I guess
Speaker 3: was the IERGC. Yeah, and maybe you could go back
Speaker 3: and say the Khmer Rouge, but like, they weren't really
Speaker 3: a government by that point. So this is this is
Speaker 3: not a designation that has ever been given to a
Speaker 3: government before. Right, it doesn't make any sense to give
Speaker 3: it to a government. It doesn't make sense to give
Speaker 3: to this government. I mean, you know, even if you're
Speaker 3: working with in the logic of counter terrorism, which is
Speaker 3: just you know, unhinged murderous imperialism to begin with. But
Speaker 3: all of the reporting on this has been assuming that
Speaker 3: the blockade will be of you know, like of these
Speaker 3: specifically sanctioned oil tankers. However, come the thing about the
Speaker 3: foreign terrorist organization designation is that it does things. And
Speaker 3: one of the things that that foreign terrorist organization designation
Speaker 3: does is that if you do business with a with
Speaker 3: a foreign terrorist organization, you are now immediately on the
Speaker 3: line from material support of terrorism charges like Chevron. So yes,
Speaker 3: there are lots of countries like Facebook, does.
Speaker 2: This fine with the US military carrying out air strikes
Speaker 2: on Chevron executives and there and their property.
Speaker 6: Let's be clear about that.
Speaker 8: I would I would salute the had, white and blue
Speaker 8: if we dropped some hell fires on that C suite.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know. This is all very weird. My
Speaker 3: understanding of the FTO designation process is that, well, how
Speaker 3: it's supposed to work is that the President proposes it,
Speaker 3: and then the Secretary of State and Secretary of the
Speaker 3: Treasurer I think, have to improve it, and then there's
Speaker 3: a seven day period where Congress has it an opportunity
Speaker 3: to say no, and then it goes up. So right
Speaker 3: now we should be theoretically in the seven day window,
Speaker 3: but it's also really unclear what the administration has actually
Speaker 3: been doing because again we're being governed by post. Yeah.
Speaker 8: Like it's so it's not announced as an executive action
Speaker 8: on White House dot gov, and I think normally it
Speaker 8: goes there and then the seven day congressional period commences.
Speaker 6: Then it's not an a federal rights to either. Right now,
Speaker 6: all we have is a truth, so.
Speaker 3: Like yeah, like and this is this is the problem
Speaker 3: is that this is this is sort of the Calvin
Speaker 3: War in that they're using they're using the names of
Speaker 3: actual legal categories and things that have material effects in
Speaker 3: the world, but they're just posts. And I want to
Speaker 3: be very clear about this. Even just doing a blockade
Speaker 3: on these sanctioned vessels is an active war. Yeah, like
Speaker 3: that's an act that's very deliberately an active war. It
Speaker 3: is an active imperial aggression. It is morally wrong. It
Speaker 3: is also unbelievably illegal under the War Powers Act. And this,
Speaker 3: this is, this has actually gotten a response from Democrats
Speaker 3: in Congress. There's been a few measures. CBS is reporting
Speaker 3: this has been if there's been a few measures to
Speaker 3: stop the president from starting a war. Here, I'm going
Speaker 3: to quote CBS. A second measure from Democratic Rep. Jim
Speaker 3: mcgovernor in Massachusetts would remove the armed forces quote from
Speaker 3: hostilities with or against Venezuela that have not been authorized
Speaker 3: by Congress. McGovern's resolution could face the best chance of
Speaker 3: potential adoption since it has three gop CO sponsors. Rep's
Speaker 3: Marjory Taylor Green of Georgia, Thomas Massey of Kentucky, and
Speaker 3: Don Bacon of Nebraska. Bacon says, you would also vote
Speaker 3: and vi here Meeks's measure. Bacon's taking a very weird
Speaker 3: line here of Keene's in congressional approval. And also I
Speaker 3: support him doing this.
Speaker 6: So surely a procedural objection.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a I want my boar, but I want
Speaker 3: Congress to have a little shred of power. Yeah, so
Speaker 3: I think it's alcial work noting what exactly is going
Speaker 3: on here. I'm someone who's on the record as talking
Speaker 3: about how political economy in Latin America and American imperialism
Speaker 3: is usually slightly more complicated than they just want to resource,
Speaker 3: but they just want to resource here. Yeah, this one,
Speaker 3: this one really is Yeah, no, like so it's only
Speaker 3: like like like Bolivia, for example, every everyone thinks that
Speaker 3: that the whole coup Oblivia was about lithium and it yest. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm very mad about this.
Speaker 7: It was not.
Speaker 3: If you look at the people of you look at Camato,
Speaker 3: if you look at people who were actually running that coup,
Speaker 3: they were all Bolivia agrobarons. Because a huge part of
Speaker 3: what was going on there was a rebellion by the
Speaker 3: sort of agrobusiness like agricultural elite who like joined with
Speaker 3: parts of like a reactionary every middle class. Okay, but
Speaker 3: this is not that Venezuela has the world's largest oil preserves,
Speaker 3: but there were significant problems extracting the oil right. Many
Speaker 3: of these problems stem from the two thousand and two
Speaker 3: to two thousand and three opposition general strike. This is
Speaker 3: back after Hugo Chaves was elected. So in two thousand
Speaker 3: and two there was a coup against Chaves that failed
Speaker 3: and was sort of overturned famously. But later that year
Speaker 3: there was also a sort of opposition general strike that
Speaker 3: lasted from late two thousand and two to early two
Speaker 3: thousand and three, and a huge part of that general
Speaker 3: strike was oil workers specifically, and it was very specifically.
Speaker 3: One of the things about the structure of oil production
Speaker 3: is that there were a bunch of very very highly
Speaker 3: paid and highly skilled technical workers who are very very
Speaker 3: loyal to the oil companies themselves and who are very
Speaker 3: loyal to who are sort of tend to be very
Speaker 3: right wing. These people went on strike and sort have
Speaker 3: got fired on mass. Oil production requires both a huge
Speaker 3: amount of heavy capital and a bunch of highly skilled workers,
Speaker 3: and if you don't have both of those things, then
Speaker 3: you can't do oil extraction. And this has sort of
Speaker 3: been a recurring problem for the entire time most sort
Speaker 3: of fugual Trofas and Majuro has been in office is
Speaker 3: that they haven't had the capacity to actually extract a
Speaker 3: bunch of the oil. And also they've refused to turn
Speaker 3: the oil over to more American companies that have already
Speaker 3: been contracted.
Speaker 2: And it's also worth noting there's a lot of talk
Speaker 2: about like Venezuela having the world's largest reserves, and a
Speaker 2: lot of that is like them jinking the numbers by
Speaker 2: including a lot of like tire sands, that would be
Speaker 2: that no one's going to try to get extract like
Speaker 2: fuel from because it's too expensive and too much of
Speaker 2: a pain in the ass.
Speaker 6: It's just not worth it anyway. And also that claims
Speaker 6: to reserves that are not actually part of Venezuela at
Speaker 6: this time.
Speaker 2: Right right, Like we're not working with exact with accurate information.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's messy. And it's also worth noting that like
Speaker 3: the oil numbers, I mean, obviously all oil numbers are political,
Speaker 3: but the oil numbers here are extraordinarily political because these
Speaker 3: are numbers that are basically used as a pitch by
Speaker 3: sort of like the opposition to try to get a
Speaker 3: US backed too. And it's also sort of word noting
Speaker 3: that the other thing that's happening here, and the reason
Speaker 3: this is all going to probably cause really significant economic
Speaker 3: problems and probably humanitarian disaster, both in Venezuela and probably
Speaker 3: also in Cuba, which extensively relies on Venezuelan oil to
Speaker 3: have their economy function, is that the Venezuelan economy has
Speaker 3: been really structured around oil in a way that they
Speaker 3: fail to transition out of multiple times. The first big
Speaker 3: one I've done in a different episode about this in
Speaker 3: the neolipicalis my series a bunch of years ago. But
Speaker 3: you know, there was a whole bunch of delivery sabotage
Speaker 3: by American car companies over then attempt to build a
Speaker 3: car industry. There's a long sort of history of this,
Speaker 3: but it means that both of these countries economies are
Speaker 3: desperately reliant on oil, and the more of this is
Speaker 3: just that is cut off, the more fuck it's going
Speaker 3: to get for just everyone in Venezuela.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, and you can already see how much worse
Speaker 6: it's got from the time I went to Venezuela to
Speaker 6: to now, like, they're very vulnerable to changes in crude
Speaker 6: oil prices, right, and that has, along with corruption in
Speaker 6: a government which doesn't really give a shit about the
Speaker 6: material welfare of its people, has already made things unsustainably
Speaker 6: hard for people in Venezuela. And that will only get worse.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I want to conclude, basically on a couple
Speaker 3: of things. Wonders that too, this is going to cause
Speaker 3: more waves of migration and refugees fleeing the country, both
Speaker 3: from potential realist military strikes and form the economic damage.
Speaker 3: There's been some moves in the international stage, with China
Speaker 3: and Mexico expressing support for the Venezuelan government. Shine Bomber
Speaker 3: in Mexico has offered to facilitate negotiations and media negotiations
Speaker 3: from the US and Venezuela. It's also kind of worth
Speaker 3: noting that right before the whole thing, there is a
Speaker 3: giant Vanity Fair interview with Susie Wiles, who's Trump's chief
Speaker 3: of staff. Who oh boy, this is for Roiderry Dubbs.
Speaker 3: This week Coller here God said, Trump quote wants to
Speaker 3: keep blowing up boats until Maduro christ Uncle, which is
Speaker 3: one of the most hideous things I've ever heard. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's gangsters, it's literally terrorism. It's it's a highway.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is in Australia structurally, unless you resign, we
Speaker 3: are going to keep killing civilians. But it's hartshest taker ship. Yeah.
Speaker 8: It's also a fundamental misunderstanding of how the regime operates
Speaker 8: if that is the case.
Speaker 6: So because they don't care if their people kept dying.
Speaker 8: I have seen Venezuela and people die in the Darian Gap, right,
Speaker 8: because in part the government is incapable of providing for
Speaker 8: their material needs.
Speaker 6: They don't care. Killing some other people with boats is
Speaker 6: not going to fundamentally change the way that government works,
Speaker 6: because there's only one way it can work.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think I think there's the one lat
Speaker 3: thing I want to say about this before we head
Speaker 3: out slash, before whatever giant update comes after the speech.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I've got one after you finish here.
Speaker 3: One of the big problems here is if people in
Speaker 3: the administration really do believe this, they actually do think
Speaker 3: that you can knock off the governments with air strikes,
Speaker 3: and no you can't, No you can't. I thought this
Speaker 3: about the Huthies too. It's wrong, it's never been right.
Speaker 7: It's hideous.
Speaker 2: We just finished doing like a five parter on bastards
Speaker 2: about like the nuclear doom state device that also dealt
Speaker 2: heavily with the work of that Italian Air Force General Duhey,
Speaker 2: who was the first guy in nineteen twenty one to
Speaker 2: be like, all you need are bombers, nothing else is
Speaker 2: necessary in militaries now it's nothing but bombers from here,
Speaker 2: and if you have enough bombers, no one will ever
Speaker 2: attack you. And this logic has always been wrong. And
Speaker 2: it's also every new generation of like military leaders, especially
Speaker 2: in the air power field, are like, all we need
Speaker 2: is air strikes. You don't need to send in ground.
Speaker 2: You could accomplish all of your goals, all of your
Speaker 2: our projection, just by bombing people or shooting missiles at them.
Speaker 2: And they're always wrong. It doesn't work. It's just not effective.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Like I think the Trump administration is somewhat I
Speaker 6: don't want to say high on its own supply. They
Speaker 6: had success in Syria with removing the territorial Caliphate, mostly
Speaker 6: using US air power.
Speaker 8: Right, it wasn't a big US that was the US part.
Speaker 8: There was still a this shitload of Kurdish.
Speaker 3: But it's the thing.
Speaker 6: And yeah, eleven twelve thousand Kurdish people died to remove
Speaker 6: the Islamic more have died since, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: And also a shitload of Iraqi soldiers, a mix of
Speaker 2: Kurds and largely guys from in and around Baghdad, but like, yeah,
Speaker 2: like a lot.
Speaker 6: Of and a bunch of Arab Syrians. And I don't
Speaker 6: miss it like ethnically geeky this at all Assyrian people Armenian.
Speaker 8: No, But like a huge amount of the effort was guys.
Speaker 8: I mean literally I was in bed with some of
Speaker 8: these guys a lot of Like the fighting tip was
Speaker 8: like literally really dudes with fucking knives and hand grenade.
Speaker 6: It's clearing buildings in hand to hand com Yeah, those
Speaker 6: were the people who faced danger, right, like, and that's
Speaker 6: what you need to Unfortunately you can't do war with
Speaker 6: computers yet. Yeah, but yeah, I think that that might
Speaker 6: be where this this belief that and like the Marca
Speaker 6: Rubio lobby, right, the Florida Cubans who are invested in
Speaker 6: this kind of Trump corrollary to the Monroe doctrine, right,
Speaker 6: and the idea that they can roll back leftist regimes
Speaker 6: in uh like South and Central America. Yep. I think
Speaker 6: that's where a lot of the pressure is coming from.
Speaker 8: Yeah, speaking of pressure, we are being pressured to go
Speaker 8: to ads. That's right, beautiful, and we're back. There's an
Speaker 8: update I just came across as we're doing this. We
Speaker 8: talked about how Tucker is an inside source saying that
Speaker 8: Trump's basically gonna clare war. There's another article that just
Speaker 8: came out on Stitch Snitches by Gloria Shaw, citing a
Speaker 8: pro Trump host on Real America's Voice who characterized the
Speaker 8: upcoming Oval Office address as a pr thing meant basically
Speaker 8: as an acknowledgment that a lot of Trump's voters are
Speaker 8: frustrated that he keeps talking about like international issues like Venezuela,
Speaker 8: while everything is more expensive for them and they continue
Speaker 8: to lose their jobs and the economy is shit. To
Speaker 8: quote from that article, and this is them quoting a
Speaker 8: segment from that Real America's Voice podcast. The remarks came
Speaker 8: during a segment on The water Cooler with co host
Speaker 8: David Brody, who teas the nine pm Eastern address as
Speaker 8: an elevated effort to regain the narrative on affordability. The
Speaker 8: President is going to be in the Oval Office tonight
Speaker 8: nine pm Eastern, Brody said, big address to the nation.
Speaker 8: He's elevating this clearly, this is to regain the narrative
Speaker 8: and explain more about the affordability issue in America and
Speaker 8: what this administration is doing. I think they're trying to
Speaker 8: seize this right off the top and make sure it
Speaker 8: doesn't get away from them and the Claims Series.
Speaker 2: Basically, like this is Trump trying to steal an night
Speaker 2: March on the twenty twenty six election cycle and reset
Speaker 2: a lot of what people are talking about around affordability.
Speaker 2: Like this argument is that now he's basically acknowledging that
Speaker 2: it's been kind of a mistake to focus so much
Speaker 2: on his overseas policies, and he really needs to start
Speaker 2: promising that that Golden Age is actually going to come
Speaker 2: for his voters, which the numbers don't bear out right,
Speaker 2: Like almost no jobs have been added in the US
Speaker 2: since April. There's about seven hundred thousand more people unemployed
Speaker 2: now than there were in November of twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: Like things aren't yeah good, Inflation is still wild, Inflation
Speaker 2: is real bad. Look food and like the material things
Speaker 2: that we need are going up in price faster than inflation,
Speaker 2: Like it's no good, and people like on his own
Speaker 2: side the thought. Jessica Tarlov, who's a Fox News host
Speaker 2: of The Five Quote, tweeted a post about how like
Speaker 2: the hiring recession just with the golden age attached with
Speaker 2: which is like what Trump has been saying. You know,
Speaker 2: we're going to have a new Golden age if you
Speaker 2: make me president. So like the fact that he hasn't
Speaker 2: done he hasn't followed through in any of his promises
Speaker 2: to actually improve life for his voters, or the economy
Speaker 2: is starting to hurt. And I guess I'm hopeful that
Speaker 2: that's what it is, rather than the Marines are about
Speaker 2: to be in Caracas, right, but I guess we'll see
Speaker 2: very soon.
Speaker 6: Yeah, great stuff. Yeah, talking of international stuff Trump is doing,
Speaker 6: let's talk about the new travel ban. So this this
Speaker 6: travel band dropped yesterday, that was Tuesday. So it previously
Speaker 6: had this nineteen country travel ban, right. Some of that
Speaker 6: was a complete bar to entry if for citizens of
Speaker 6: those countries or to new these entries. Some of it
Speaker 6: was a partial bar to immigrant visas, not to not
Speaker 6: to non immigrant visas.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 6: They have now expanded this to twenty more countries, so
Speaker 6: totally banned now from getting new visas to enter the USA.
Speaker 6: A citizens of Bokina, Fosso, Maalini share South Studan, and
Speaker 6: Syria as well as a Palestinian authority. The Syrian one
Speaker 6: is particularly wild because I'll share it justice to the
Speaker 6: White House. There are like individual case by case exceptions, right. Like,
Speaker 6: It's not that they wouldn't block al Shara, I'm sure,
Speaker 6: but like it's interesting to look at the justifications that
Speaker 6: they use here. What they are basically saying, I'll just
Speaker 6: read a couple of them here to give you an example, right. Quote,
Speaker 6: at least one country lacks mechanisms in hospitals to ensure
Speaker 6: bursts are reported, and widespread corruption, combined with a general
Speaker 6: lack of vecking and poor record keeping, result in any
Speaker 6: non citizen being able to obtain any civil document from
Speaker 6: that country, particularly if that person is willing to pay
Speaker 6: a fee or engage an individual that specializes in assisting
Speaker 6: in such fraud. They go on to basically document failures
Speaker 6: in government bureaucracy that they talk about corruption. Right, They
Speaker 6: talk about places where birth CTIF forgets are just written
Speaker 6: by hand. They talk about places where they government does
Speaker 6: not control all the territory, prevalence of crime, places which
Speaker 6: offer citizenship by investment without physical residents. They also talk
Speaker 6: about some of these countries not being willing to accept
Speaker 6: their nationals to the US deports and again visa overstair rates, right,
Speaker 6: which is what they spoke about last time. What is
Speaker 6: getting less reporting, or at least was this morning when
Speaker 6: I looked, was that they have removed exemptions which existed
Speaker 6: for the previous nineteen. These include family member visas right.
Speaker 6: So that means that, for instance, someone who could themselves
Speaker 6: become a permanent resident or even a citizen, now cannot
Speaker 6: bring a family member, say a spouse, a sibling, etc.
Speaker 6: Across even though those people were people see vetied. And
Speaker 6: it appears some there is certain categories of SIVs are exempt,
Speaker 6: but I believe not all SIVs, so that's especially immigrant
Speaker 6: visa right. The vast bulk of SIVs will be Afghan
Speaker 6: people who worked with the US military in Afghanistan. The
Speaker 6: nineteen countries who are now partially restricted are I'm just
Speaker 6: going to read them of Angola, Antigram, Barbuda, Benin Kuttivois, Dominica, Gabon,
Speaker 6: the Gambia, Malawi, Mauritanian, Nigeria, senegauld Tanzania, Tonga, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Speaker 6: For some reason, the first five of these are underlined
Speaker 6: on the White House website. I don't know if some
Speaker 6: well copied and pisted them across with hyperlinks.
Speaker 3: Like I don't know.
Speaker 6: I'm unable to work out why that they're not hyperlinked
Speaker 6: in the document, but there doesn't seem to be any
Speaker 6: any explanation like this. There's no special set of sanctions
Speaker 6: for those and they're just in alphabetical order. They actually
Speaker 6: reduced restrictions on Turkmenistan because quote suspension of entry into
Speaker 6: the United States of Nationals of Turkmenistan as non immigrants
Speaker 6: on B one, B two FM and jvs as is
Speaker 6: lifted because some concerns remain. The entry into the United
Speaker 6: States of Nationals of Turkmenistan is immigrants remain suspended. The
Speaker 6: last element of this that I want to cover is
Speaker 6: that it would appear to stop international adoptions from the
Speaker 6: listed countries, like all of those thirty nine listed countries,
Speaker 6: which is wild and like particularly unfortunate because I know,
Speaker 6: like people who who adopt children from outside the United
Speaker 6: States like that is a process that takes years and
Speaker 6: I can imagine it being horrifically traumatic to have it
Speaker 6: suddenly cut off like this. But consciously, unconsciously, that is
Speaker 6: what this UH executive action appears to do. So that
Speaker 6: is not great. It seems that the United States is
Speaker 6: using this as a kind of cudgel, right to encourage
Speaker 6: those countries to It's kind of a quid pro quote.
Speaker 6: They get what they want they got from Turkmenistan apparently
Speaker 6: then that they will remove some of those restrictions otherwise
Speaker 6: they will continue them. So yeah, that's not great. So
Speaker 6: Judge Hannah Dugan's trial began this week. Do you know,
Speaker 6: if you're not familiar, she's not the judge in New
Speaker 6: Mexico who was accused of providing firearms to somebody who
Speaker 6: was not a permanent resident or citizen. She is a
Speaker 6: judge who is accused of allowing a migrant man named
Speaker 6: mister Flores Luise to leave her court room from a
Speaker 6: door that is not the usual door. That door led
Speaker 6: to a private corridor. In that private corridor, there was
Speaker 6: one exit to a public area and also a door
Speaker 6: to a fire escape mister Flora's ruiz took the exit
Speaker 6: to the public area. He then took a lift down
Speaker 6: I think to the ground floor with an ICE officer.
Speaker 6: He then attempted to run away when ICE officers attempted
Speaker 6: to detain him. When he left the lift, he was
Speaker 6: caught and detained. So we learned quite a lot in
Speaker 6: this and it's just been interesting to follow. First of all,
Speaker 6: we see that several of the people who were taking
Speaker 6: part in the apprehension were reassigned FBI agents. This is
Speaker 6: increasingly right, like all branches of the federal law enforcement
Speaker 6: have had some of their capacity redirected to doing this, right,
Speaker 6: to doing like this. This guy, I believe had misdemeanors
Speaker 6: the agents for using signal to communicate. They had a
Speaker 6: group chat called frozen water obviously Jesus Christ. Yeah, really funny.
Speaker 6: The FBI agent conceded in crust examination that's not a
Speaker 6: NAP approved by the FBI, but according to one the
Speaker 6: DHS apparently does approve it, according to a CBP agent
Speaker 6: who is crossic damon there, which obviously creates an issue
Speaker 6: for the retention of records. Right biggut signal. If you're
Speaker 6: not familiar auto deletes things after a period of time
Speaker 6: that users can configure. It also appears that when one
Speaker 6: of these DHS agents entered the courthouse, court security officers
Speaker 6: told him that he needed an escort, but then he
Speaker 6: appears to have proceeded without one. Text to colleagues, as
Speaker 6: DHS employees said, quote, this is gonna be a pain
Speaker 6: in the dick. H So that's that. Yeah, what happens,
Speaker 6: it seems like is Judge Dougan sent them to the
Speaker 6: chief judge because they didn't have a judicial warrant. It's
Speaker 6: had an administrative warrant.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 6: Another judge testified against Judge Dugan, a judge called Judge Severa.
Speaker 6: So Judge Severa was with Judge Dugan when they confronted
Speaker 6: the agents. Judge Jugan wore her judicial robes when confronting them,
Speaker 6: which apparently is not usual. It's not usual to wear
Speaker 6: them out of the courtroom, and Judge Severa seemed to
Speaker 6: disapprove of that, and then she said, quote, Judge Dugan
Speaker 6: could quote have been more diplomatic, And then she said,
Speaker 6: quote judges shouldn't be helping defendants evade arrest. At the
Speaker 6: same time, Judge Dugan's defense lawyer asked her if she
Speaker 6: had warned her sister of the ice presence, which she had,
Speaker 6: and it appears to her sister had a hearing at
Speaker 6: the courthouse the next day, which Judge Severa said she
Speaker 6: was not aware of. So there's like a lot still
Speaker 6: to be unpacked here, right, This is just the first day.
Speaker 6: This could go on path Christmas and into the new year,
Speaker 6: and it probably will. But there's been some pretty good
Speaker 6: reporting on this from a substack called all Rise Media,
Speaker 6: and I will keep checking it on this and we'll
Speaker 6: report it on it again after the new year.
Speaker 9: Hello, this is Garrison Davis reporting from Tokyo. Unfortunately, I
Speaker 9: was unable to attend the regular Executive Disorder Group recording
Speaker 9: due to being halfway around the globe, so I'm recording
Speaker 9: my section solo. This past week saw two devastating mass
Speaker 9: shootings back to back. On Saturday afternoon, a mask shooter
Speaker 9: entered an economics class at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island,
Speaker 9: and opened fire with a concealed handgun, killing two people
Speaker 9: injuring nine others, all students. About thirty minutes after the
Speaker 9: shooting started, the university police announced a suspect was in custody.
Speaker 9: Twenty minutes later, they retracted that statement. Then university police
Speaker 9: reported shots fired in another section of campus, which they
Speaker 9: also later retracted. President Trump posted on truth social quote,
Speaker 9: I've been briefed on the shooting that took place at
Speaker 9: Brown University in Rhode Island. The FBI is on the scene.
Speaker 9: The suspect is in custody. God bless the victims and
Speaker 9: the families of the victims. This too was untrue, as
Speaker 9: the university released a statement about an hour later clarifying
Speaker 9: that the shooter was not in custody and that over
Speaker 9: four hundred officers were on the scene to assist in
Speaker 9: the investigation. The next morning, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley announced
Speaker 9: that a new person of interest was detained. The Providence
Speaker 9: police chief told NBC that they were confident that the
Speaker 9: suspect was the shooter. Major news outlets later named this individual,
Speaker 9: though later that evening this quote unquote person of interest
Speaker 9: was released, with the Rhode Island Attorney General saying that
Speaker 9: the evidence quote now points in a different direction. The
Speaker 9: shooter currently remains unidentified and at large. On Sunday night,
Speaker 9: in Sydney, Australia, a father and son Sajid and Navid
Speaker 9: Akram coordinated a targeted attack against Jewish people attending a
Speaker 9: Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach. Fifteen people were killed in
Speaker 9: the shooting. Victims include a ten year old girl and
Speaker 9: a Holocaust survivor. Twenty four victims remain hospitalized. A bystander
Speaker 9: named Ahmed al Ahmed, a son of Syrian refugees, charged
Speaker 9: one of the gunmen and wrestled his gun away. Ahmed
Speaker 9: was later shot multiple times, but survived and has been
Speaker 9: labeled a hero by the Austria Prime Minister. Police say
Speaker 9: that a vehicle used by the gunman contained homemade Islamic
Speaker 9: state flags and improvised explosive devices. The men were not
Speaker 9: part of an official terror cell, though the Prime Minister
Speaker 9: says that they were motivated by Islamic state extremist ideology.
Speaker 9: Counter Terrorism officials believed the shooters received quote unquote military
Speaker 9: style training in the Philippines a month before the attack.
Speaker 9: On Tuesday, self styled online investigators in right wing social
Speaker 9: media content Mills falsely identified the Brown University shooter as
Speaker 9: an LGBTQ Palestinian studying at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies,
Speaker 9: citing gate analysis based on surveillance footage of the unidentified
Speaker 9: suspect released by police. The university removed this Queer Palestinian
Speaker 9: student's online profile in an effort to prevent doxing, though
Speaker 9: this itself was used by the online smear campaign as
Speaker 9: evidence of guilt. Brown University later published this statement quote
Speaker 9: in the aftermath of the shooting, We've seen a harmful
Speaker 9: doxing activity directed towards at least one member of the
Speaker 9: Brown University community. It's important to make clear that targeting
Speaker 9: individuals could do a revocable harm. Accusations, speculation, and conspiracies
Speaker 9: were seeing on social media and in some news reports
Speaker 9: are irresponsible, harmful, and in some cases dangerous for the
Speaker 9: safety of individuals.
Speaker 3: In our community.
Speaker 9: It is not unusual as a safety measure to take
Speaker 9: steps to protect an individual's safety when this kind of
Speaker 9: activity happens, including in regard to their online presence. As
Speaker 9: law enforcement officials stated clearly on Tuesday afternoon, if this
Speaker 9: individual's name had any relevance to the current investigation, they
Speaker 9: would be actively looking for this individual and providing information publicly.
Speaker 9: On a final note, after the holiday break, we will
Speaker 9: be reporting on the indictment against four alleged members of
Speaker 9: the Turtle Island Liberation Front in California regarding a New
Speaker 9: Year's Eve bombing plot.
Speaker 2: We're back and we have some news that's going to
Speaker 2: be really sad for everybody here, and it could happen
Speaker 2: here and just all of you listening, which is friend
Speaker 2: of the pod. Dan Bongino is stepping down from his
Speaker 2: work as Deputy.
Speaker 6: Director of the FBI.
Speaker 2: I think it's been a nice vacation for him, but
Speaker 2: you know, American needs him in his much more important role.
Speaker 8: Whatever podcast he was doing before he got brought in
Speaker 8: to the deputy director of the FBI.
Speaker 2: You know, look, if he was podcasting right now, they
Speaker 2: would have caught the mass shooter at Brown. I think
Speaker 2: we can all agree on that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he did a put costing his way through it.
Speaker 6: Either that or just him not being at the FBI
Speaker 6: would have made the do their job.
Speaker 3: Look, what we're learning from this is that you can
Speaker 3: never escape the podcasting minds. No matter where else you
Speaker 3: try to go, they will drag you back down.
Speaker 2: Oh look, if you make me director of the FBI,
Speaker 2: I promise to stop podcasting and start being the most
Speaker 2: corrupt director of the FBI.
Speaker 6: We've ever had.
Speaker 3: That's a tough challenge.
Speaker 8: I think, you know, I think I'm I'm in the task,
Speaker 8: prepared to work at it.
Speaker 6: Yeah. So, yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 2: I wanted to talk a little bit about an executive
Speaker 2: order that our beloved President put out very recently. Some
Speaker 2: of you may be aware of this, but on December eleventh,
Speaker 2: twenty I mean this year, twenty twenty five, Trump released
Speaker 2: he had another executive order, this one titled Ensuring a
Speaker 2: National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence. And basically in this
Speaker 2: and Trump stated that like, the reason he's doing this
Speaker 2: is because it's absolutely critical to the US's future that
Speaker 2: we be at the top of the game when it
Speaker 2: comes to AI, that we be global leaders in this
Speaker 2: burgeoning new field. He states in the EO, these efforts
Speaker 2: have already delivered tremendous benefits to the American people and
Speaker 2: led to trillions of dollars of investments across the country.
Speaker 2: Certainly haven't, but we were made in the earliest days
Speaker 2: of the technological revolution and in a race with adversaries
Speaker 2: for supremacy within it. Trump stated in an interview that
Speaker 2: he expects AI to be fifty to sixty percent of
Speaker 2: the US economy in the near future, which is nuts.
Speaker 2: Maybe that's just because everything else will just go to
Speaker 2: complete shit.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: The reality is that like AI is not even close
Speaker 2: to being that value in terms of like what the
Speaker 2: economy produces, but nearly all of our growth is related
Speaker 2: and like it is tied right now to data center investments.
Speaker 2: So Trump absolutely needs AI because without it the country
Speaker 2: is very obviously in a recession. Like this is the
Speaker 2: only thing propping up the image of the economy as
Speaker 2: not being in the shitter. Now, what does this EO
Speaker 2: actually do well? The goal of this the statement is
Speaker 2: that it is the policy of the United State is
Speaker 2: to sustain and enhance the United States is global AI
Speaker 2: dominance through a minimally burdened some national policy framework for AI.
Speaker 2: This EO will establish an AI Litigation Task Force within
Speaker 2: thirty days of this order going out. The Attorney General
Speaker 2: is supposed to establish this task force, whose responsibility is
Speaker 2: to challenge state AI laws that are inconsistent with the
Speaker 2: policy set forward above. Right, that we need to be
Speaker 2: globally dominant in AI. Right, So this task force is
Speaker 2: supposed to go out and find state laws that it
Speaker 2: believes are like an onerous burden on the development of
Speaker 2: this technology. Going along with this, within ninety days of
Speaker 2: the order, the Secretary of Commerce is supposed to do
Speaker 2: an evaluation of all state AI laws in order to
Speaker 2: point out which ones this task force should go after.
Speaker 2: And then the stick that this EO establishes is that
Speaker 2: if this task force decides that like a state AI
Speaker 2: law is in violation of our need to be dominant
Speaker 2: in AI, we can restrict state funding to things like
Speaker 2: the broadband Equity Access and Ployment program. Right Basically, they'll
Speaker 2: cut off federal funding for like broadband access in order
Speaker 2: to punish states that try to restrict or in any
Speaker 2: way shape or form govern what people can use what
Speaker 2: companies can use AI for. And the primary thing this
Speaker 2: is all about, I know, we all think about the
Speaker 2: stuff that like most people have more direct experience with,
Speaker 2: which is like all the slop flooding the Internet, the
Speaker 2: disinformation that's continuing to cook the brains of a lot
Speaker 2: of our peers and elders, and just the fact that
Speaker 2: like it's making certain industries full of hardworking people a
Speaker 2: lot harder to exist because companies are just trying to
Speaker 2: replace quality work with absolute like slop trash yeah, But really,
Speaker 2: what this is about, and the primary focus of most
Speaker 2: of these state level laws regulating AI is the housing market.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: There's a good article in Politico about this, written by
Speaker 2: Cassandra Dumay, but she notes that per a National Conference
Speaker 2: of State Legislatures analysis in July, there were more than
Speaker 2: forty pennings across the United States related to just AI
Speaker 2: in the housing sector. And most of these bills are
Speaker 2: attempting to stop landlords from using different AI programs to
Speaker 2: coordinate pricing. Basically, there are a couple of different programs,
Speaker 2: the most prominent which is called Real Page, and what
Speaker 2: they do is landlords join these programs and they share
Speaker 2: information on like what their different properties cost, and then
Speaker 2: the AI knows what everybody is charging and can suggest
Speaker 2: that they charge higher prices.
Speaker 6: Right now.
Speaker 8: The way that this is supposed to work is that you,
Speaker 8: as a landlord, look out at what's publicly available about
Speaker 8: the prices of your competitors and look at like what
Speaker 8: your customers are currently willing to bear, and then try
Speaker 8: to set your prices and you know future price increases
Speaker 8: based on that. What Real Page is doing is a
Speaker 8: legal collusion, right, This is price fixing it's just the
Speaker 8: AI is doing the actual active price fixing. The landlords
Speaker 8: are just sharing their data and paying a fee to
Speaker 8: the service. And so a bunch of states have tried
Speaker 8: to stop this because this objectively makes the housing crisis worse.
Speaker 8: I know there's some annoying assholes who come out and
Speaker 8: be like, you shouldn't talk about anything but in increasing
Speaker 8: the supply of housing, and like that that's idiot shit, Yes,
Speaker 8: we need to increase the supply of housing.
Speaker 6: This objectively hurts people.
Speaker 2: These programs subjectively increase the price of print. They do damage.
Speaker 2: We should be mitigating or making it impossible for businesses
Speaker 2: like this to exist. Anyone who disagrees is just being
Speaker 2: a dummy. New York passed a law in October that
Speaker 2: banned the use of AI algorithms to allow landlords to
Speaker 2: do price fixing. There's a similar bill of the Massachusetts
Speaker 2: legislation that's making its way forward right now. And this
Speaker 2: is fundamentally what a lot of the opposition to like
Speaker 2: state level AI regulation is about. Is that the landlords
Speaker 2: basically think that this is a great way to make
Speaker 2: a shitload of money, and tech companies like and we
Speaker 2: can continue. We got to make a shitload of money
Speaker 2: selling them the tool to do this, and states are
Speaker 2: trying to push back on this, and like that's fundamentally
Speaker 2: what a lot of the impetus buying this executive order
Speaker 2: is is an attempt to stop people from making this
Speaker 2: even more harmful. There is some like in this that
Speaker 2: political article they quote from Kevin Donnelly, who's the executive
Speaker 2: director of the Real Estate Technology and Transformation Center, and
Speaker 2: he talks about like, well, actually, we're currently using AI
Speaker 2: to identify buildable lots and promote sustainable constructions so that
Speaker 2: we can actually like reduce some of the cost of housing.
Speaker 2: And all of these bills, could you know, undermine our
Speaker 2: ability to impress people's Like yeah, it's just fucking go
Speaker 2: like literally jump off a bridge, man, Fuck you. Yeah, no,
Speaker 2: we know that's not how it works. We have data
Speaker 2: on this, yo, This isn't theoretical.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Anytime a landlord, anytime a landlord says anything or
Speaker 3: to real estate developer that says anything that suggests the
Speaker 3: thing they want to do is lower rent, they are
Speaker 3: lying and tell because they don't fucking lower rents unless
Speaker 3: like a global pandemic happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like that's a how any of this works, and
Speaker 2: this has been controversial. Trump, before putting out the EO,
Speaker 2: tried to encourage the passage of a bill through Congress
Speaker 2: that would have done the same thing as the EO
Speaker 2: right and would have actually had like more force of
Speaker 2: law behind it, basically making it illegal for states to
Speaker 2: have their own laws regulating AI. That didn't pass because
Speaker 2: even Republicans don't really like that idea. For one thing,
Speaker 2: states rights is still supposed to be a pretty big.
Speaker 3: Part of the party.
Speaker 2: But for another thing, there's like a lot of things
Speaker 2: that conservatives are really unhappy with in terms of AI.
Speaker 2: For example, it keeps exposing children to pornography and other
Speaker 2: things that kids shouldn't be exposed to.
Speaker 6: For another thing, there's a lot of.
Speaker 2: American jobs that are going to be lost as a
Speaker 2: result of or potentially could be lost as a result
Speaker 2: of the AI slop automation of a bunch of industries.
Speaker 2: And so there's there's even significant amount of resistance among
Speaker 2: Republicans this, which is why the bill didn't pass right,
Speaker 2: and Trump, when he announced this EO basically sat down
Speaker 2: with like a chunk of the conservatives who are more
Speaker 2: critical of this and I think basically bullied them into
Speaker 2: getting on board and saying no, he promised us this
Speaker 2: won't restrict state levels to like improve safety for children. Right,
Speaker 2: there's absolutely like no guarantee of that, Like you just
Speaker 2: have David Sacks. It was Trump's top AI advisor saying no, no,
Speaker 2: none of this is about trying to stop state laws
Speaker 2: to make kids savor. It's just trying to stop state
Speaker 2: laws that will make rent less expensive. Yeah, there's Marjorie
Speaker 2: Taylor Green's come out against this. She's basically said that,
Speaker 2: you know, this is a violation of states. Right, it's bullshit.
Speaker 2: Steve Bannon is in the same place. He had a
Speaker 2: good quote I found in an article by The Hill.
Speaker 2: After two humiliating face plants on a must pass legislation,
Speaker 2: Now we attempt an entirely unenforceable EO tech bros doing
Speaker 2: utmost to turn Potus magabase away from him while they
Speaker 2: line their pockets, which is essentially accurate. Yeah, he's wrong,
Speaker 2: ain't wrong about that. So all this is like pretty
Speaker 2: annoying and fucked up. We'll see what actually becomes of this.
Speaker 2: I tend to agree with Bannon that it's pretty much unenforceable,
Speaker 2: like the lawsuit, the court battles that will come from
Speaker 2: this is just going to be expensive and time consuming.
Speaker 2: But I actually don't think this is going to work
Speaker 2: the way they want. This is this is Trump making
Speaker 2: it very clear that he has bought and paid for
Speaker 2: by the tax end, that he understands that he is
Speaker 2: hanging on by a thread in terms of popularity. One
Speaker 2: of the only things stopping it from getting stopping the
Speaker 2: situation from getting worse is that AI spending on data
Speaker 2: centers and ship is propping up the image of the economy. Right,
Speaker 2: that's what this is all about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this and this is something where he can
Speaker 3: simultaneously shore up is tech based and shore up his
Speaker 3: landlord base.
Speaker 8: Yeah, which are like, yeah, it's great, two kinds of
Speaker 8: guys to like Donald Trump.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess there's an end here where I could.
Speaker 2: I wanted to make a note about something also related
Speaker 2: to AI, which is that there's an incredibly stupid article
Speaker 2: in Vox that came out this week. Case like literally
Speaker 2: the title is like, America, you've made it very clear
Speaker 2: that you hate AI, But what if it's the only
Speaker 2: way to restart the idea machine?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: And this dipshit. Columnist's argument is that.
Speaker 8: Like, well, we're we're not running out of ideas and AI,
Speaker 8: like human beings can't come up with ideas enough to
Speaker 8: create growth at the level that the economy needs to
Speaker 8: be growing, and in order to take humanity into the future, really,
Speaker 8: AI is the only way to generate.
Speaker 6: More new ideas.
Speaker 2: And I wanted to look at, like, what is this
Speaker 2: based off of? And I think I figured out what,
Speaker 2: like the fundamental source of all of this shit is,
Speaker 2: which is Back in twenty seventeen, there was a research
Speaker 2: paper put out by the National Bureau of Economic Research
Speaker 2: by Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, John Van Reenan, and Michael Webb.
Speaker 2: The kind summary of that article reads as follows. In
Speaker 2: many growth models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas,
Speaker 2: and then the long run growth rate is the product
Speaker 2: of two terms, the effective number of researchers and their
Speaker 2: research productivity. We present a wide range of evidence for
Speaker 2: various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is
Speaker 2: rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. Right, So basically,
Speaker 2: we're we have more people doing research and we're spending
Speaker 2: more money on research, but that research is translating into
Speaker 2: economic gains at a lower level than ever before, right
Speaker 2: to the point where we're not going to be able
Speaker 2: to continue to make economic gains like we used to
Speaker 2: be unless something changes. And if you're kind of paying
Speaker 2: attention to this, you might notice that that study, which
Speaker 2: is the underpinning of that Vox article and all of
Speaker 2: these claims that we need AI for ideas, really it
Speaker 2: is not actually making an argument that people aren't having
Speaker 2: more ideas. It's making an argument that it is harder
Speaker 2: to profit from ideas than it used to be right now.
Speaker 2: That is fundamentally different from people not having ideas. For
Speaker 2: one thing, it's reduce using an idea to something that
Speaker 2: delivers a return for venture capitalists. Yeah right, that's all
Speaker 2: an idea is in. This is something that makes money,
Speaker 2: and a lot of great ideas like the post office,
Speaker 2: don't generate a direct profit. And obviously it's a net
Speaker 2: benefit to the economy that we have a post office,
Speaker 2: but the post office runs at a loss, right, which
Speaker 2: is why you have state funding for certain things, because
Speaker 2: they're just not going to be the kind of ideas
Speaker 2: that like a bunch of Silicon Valley investors want to
Speaker 2: throw money into right now. The other part of the
Speaker 2: issue here is just a very practical one, which is
Speaker 2: that a lot of the ideas, the great ideas last
Speaker 2: century that were like most correlated with massive gains and productivity,
Speaker 2: stuff like the introduction of vaccines on a wide scale,
Speaker 2: indoor plumbing.
Speaker 6: And electricity on a wide scale phones.
Speaker 8: There's not ideas like that that are like that big
Speaker 8: and that much of a game changer left, right, the
Speaker 8: low hanging fruit has been It's the.
Speaker 2: Low hanging fruit has been picked. There's not another the
Speaker 2: telephone waiting out there. We already did that. It was
Speaker 2: the smartphone. There's not another indoor plumbing, right. There's not
Speaker 2: something that's going to be as much of a sea
Speaker 2: change for the economy and for the quality of human
Speaker 2: life as those ideas, because those were really big things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like like maybe maybe you could put us something
Speaker 3: like actually cleaning the air that we breathe.
Speaker 8: Yes, but again that's not profitable in a direct way, no, right,
Speaker 8: like you, Yeah, that's an idea that would have a
Speaker 8: change that big, but there's not a profit incentive for it.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 6: We privatize the air of.
Speaker 2: It, right, fucking air? Yeah, and there's a lot I again,
Speaker 2: I find this, this whole discussion pattern, like it's an
Speaker 2: example of the fact that like people like this fucking
Speaker 2: vox article who I don't feel like deserves to be
Speaker 2: named to this, have been using chat GPT so much
Speaker 2: that they're no longer thinking. They're not really sentient in
Speaker 2: a meaningful way. Right, Like when you when you write
Speaker 2: something like that, it's because your brain has been completely
Speaker 2: fucking cooked. I did find a good article, ironically, from
Speaker 2: twenty seventeen from Vox EU that is titled Ideas aren't
Speaker 2: running out, but they are getting more expensive to find,
Speaker 2: which is making a lot of the claims that like
Speaker 2: I've made, which is that or that I've been bringing
Speaker 2: up so far in this which is that it's not
Speaker 2: that there's a lack of ideas, that it costs more
Speaker 2: money to do stuff like that now, like the costs
Speaker 2: because everything's so much more complex. The big ideas we're
Speaker 2: looking at, artist simple is indoor plumbing. They require a
Speaker 2: lot more computing power, they require a lot more people
Speaker 2: working on them, right, Like we've plucked the low hanging fruit,
Speaker 2: and it ends with a paragraph I find kind of
Speaker 2: valuable here, returning to the oil metaphor, we are digging
Speaker 2: deeper into a trickier part of the rock. Of course,
Speaker 2: we could be wrong, and humanity may have just been
Speaker 2: shipping away to particularly hard point that will soon give way,
Speaker 2: creating decades of cheap ideas. This is the hope of
Speaker 2: those who emphasize the revolutionary power of artificial intelligence and
Speaker 2: the singularity and accumulation of technology that triggers runaway growth
Speaker 2: at some point in the future. Although we all enjoy
Speaker 2: science fiction, history books are usually a safer guide to
Speaker 2: the future. In this case, history suggests that large increases
Speaker 2: in research effort are need to offset its declining productivity.
Speaker 6: And again, if you want to have.
Speaker 2: The big ideas and the star Trek feature that all
Speaker 2: of these billionaires like Elon Musk pretend they want, what
Speaker 2: you actually have to do is be willing to put
Speaker 2: a lot of money into research and development without any
Speaker 2: promise of a profit. Your motivation can't be well, now,
Speaker 2: we have to get a two hundred percent rate of
Speaker 2: return in our investments. Right, it has to be well.
Speaker 2: This would improve people's lives and make life more sustainable. Right,
Speaker 2: like finding solutions to a lot of problems with climate
Speaker 2: and cleaning the air, like dealing with like lack of
Speaker 2: access to clean water, lack of access to basic basic
Speaker 2: medical care. These are not things where doing them means
Speaker 2: that your company gets an immediate profit and evaluation in
Speaker 2: the tens of billions of dollars. Right, That's just not
Speaker 2: the way providing life saving aid to people works. But
Speaker 2: the net value to the global economy would be massive if,
Speaker 2: for example, kids weren't going without food and access to
Speaker 2: clean water, and had better access to education, and thus
Speaker 2: we're able to go into fields where they become researchers
Speaker 2: and generate ideas that eventually turn into profit. Right, Like,
Speaker 2: these AI fucks aren't talking about ideas, They're talking about
Speaker 2: cracking the human mind, Right, that's what they want to do.
Speaker 3: It's a good way to Yeah, yeah, I think that
Speaker 3: there's another thing we're saying here too. On there's a different,
Speaker 3: greater argument about this where he makes an argument that
Speaker 3: I think is also very compelling that part of the
Speaker 3: decline in the rate of technological change has been the
Speaker 3: extent to which everyone who was trying to do this
Speaker 3: stuff is just increasingly dealing with more and more layers
Speaker 3: of bureaucracy instead of actually doing the thing they're trying
Speaker 3: to do. And then you know, this is a huge
Speaker 3: problem in academia where it's like, okay, so you have
Speaker 3: you know, you're teaching in academia, but you're also spending
Speaker 3: like a quarter of your time trying to get another job.
Speaker 3: You're spending another quarter of your time dealing with all
Speaker 3: of the unhinged whatever, like accounting bullshit that your fucking
Speaker 3: supervisors have, like like like university management has like put
Speaker 3: upon you. And this is and this is something that's
Speaker 3: also true for government researchers, where there's just like this,
Speaker 3: you know, there's been this incredible increase in sort of
Speaker 3: the amount of bureaucracy they have to jump through it
Speaker 3: like largely because of the right and because of all
Speaker 3: of the like weird shit they do, where like they
Speaker 3: hate government fundings, so like ah, everyone has to like
Speaker 3: justify their funding literally every ten seconds. And I think,
Speaker 3: I think, like that's that's one of the other angles
Speaker 3: of this, and it's something that's only gonna get worse
Speaker 3: because this administration is just fucking annihilating the entire basis
Speaker 3: of American science. Yeah, they're killing it. The damage that
Speaker 3: they've done to the pipeline of people that will produce
Speaker 3: these researchers, right with with ways that all suddenly like
Speaker 3: American science post docs. Just there's no money for it.
Speaker 3: There's no money for grad students. They're killing all of
Speaker 3: the pathways that would do this, and then they're going, oh,
Speaker 3: the only solution is the fucking tech boondoggle we've created
Speaker 3: to the problems that we created by just annihilating the
Speaker 3: capacity to do science.
Speaker 1: M h.
Speaker 6: It sucks.
Speaker 3: I hate them.
Speaker 6: If you want to email list you can do so.
Speaker 6: It is cool zwn tips at proton dot me. If
Speaker 6: you want it to be encrypted, you should use a
Speaker 6: proton matadress as well. They're free.
Speaker 8: All right, guys, I think that's that's the podcast listeners, haters, lovers.
Speaker 3: It's our last e D of the year.
Speaker 6: It's our last D.
Speaker 3: Of the year.
Speaker 6: Well, I don't know. We'll see if those pills come in,
Speaker 6: but yeah, but I hate you.
Speaker 8: Happy holidays, Holidays, everybody, put a trans girl on your couch.
Speaker 1: Put a trans girl on your couch, love it?
Speaker 6: Or a bed I mean yeah, if you.
Speaker 8: Yeahble mattress one of those like chairs that leans back
Speaker 8: to where it's like basically flat. Yeah, not a lazy
Speaker 8: in sure, a lot of options in neutral lazy each year.
Speaker 6: Yeah. An inflatable mattress why not? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Why not?
Speaker 6: Water bed? A water bed is strong enough. Because they
Speaker 6: are heavy, you're not allowed.
Speaker 4: To have them.
Speaker 1: But yes, Anyways, we reported the news.
Speaker 6: Arguably, 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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