Speaker 1: Cool zone media picture.
Speaker 2: Going to the grocery store a few years from now.
Speaker 2: You push your car, grab your staples, scan and head
Speaker 2: out the door, not much to it, but unlocking your car,
Speaker 2: you hear a faint buzzing sound. Looking around, you don't
Speaker 2: see anything yet it gets louder. Then you look up.
Speaker 2: A drone shoots out toward the street, where you spot
Speaker 2: a man running down the sidewalk with a full backpack.
Speaker 2: They both slip out a view behind some overgrown hedges.
Speaker 2: Then come the sirens. As you drive away, you see
Speaker 2: multiple cops on top of a man, one pulling objects
Speaker 2: out of his backpack. Tags still dangling off a shoplifter.
Speaker 2: Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Kevin Foster, an
Speaker 2: independent journalist and your host for this two part series
Speaker 2: on retail crime, ice, and some deeply concerning policy making
Speaker 2: its way through Congress. In this image of a shoplifter,
Speaker 2: it isn't really from the future. In late June of
Speaker 2: this year, police in Redmond, Washington, used the drone to
Speaker 2: track down an alleged shoplifter who had left a store.
Speaker 2: If you live in a major city, you've probably already
Speaker 2: witnessed the bolstering of security in retail stores, the ungodly
Speaker 2: number of items locked up behind glass, security guards, block
Speaker 2: cameras in the parking lot. This is an industry in
Speaker 2: its own right, commonly referred to as loss prevention, and
Speaker 2: it's surged after the pandemic. The National Retail Federation or
Speaker 2: NRF for short, who I'll be talking a lot about today,
Speaker 2: puts on a yearly conference known as NRF Protect where
Speaker 2: they bring together all the loss prevention slash asset protection
Speaker 2: bigwigs to show off new tech and security strategies. Here's
Speaker 2: the clip of a senior product manager for Amazon at
Speaker 2: the twenty twenty six event, part in the awful corporate
Speaker 2: background music.
Speaker 1: Gotta say, the most unique thing that I saw in
Speaker 1: the expo hall was the robot.
Speaker 3: Seen it on TV, and this was the first time
Speaker 3: I saw it in personal The Oh, he's exactly real.
Speaker 2: To paint you a picture. The video features retail lobbyists,
Speaker 2: tech giants, and police investigators. They show off drones, cameras,
Speaker 2: people aiming uns, others shooting some type of paintballs at
Speaker 2: hanging targets, and of course multiple robots, including one that
Speaker 2: looks like a mini tank called Romeo, but spelled like
Speaker 2: roaming around. Don't worry though this quote. Physical AI on
Speaker 2: patrol can only go ten miles per hour, and it
Speaker 2: has a big led smile across the front. If you
Speaker 2: haven't got the drift. NRF protect is like a National
Speaker 2: Rifle Association convention, but for people obsessed with supply chains
Speaker 2: and storefront scanners. While our little tank Romeo likely invokes
Speaker 2: the strongest image of a sci fi dystopia, it's probably
Speaker 2: the least of our worries. An October twenty twenty four
Speaker 2: article in Loss Prevention Magazine states that multiple top ten
Speaker 2: retailers rely on facial recognition for loss prevention, many working
Speaker 2: with Face First, a company that provides AI facial recognition
Speaker 2: tech with the goal of preventing retail crime. In July
Speaker 2: of this year, Mission Local reported on grocery outlets in
Speaker 2: the Bay Area using facial recognition tech from the AI company.
Speaker 2: Safer worried about your privacy, well, say First President says
Speaker 2: that your photo is immediately deleted if it doesn't match
Speaker 2: a watch list of shoplifters. However, stores can manually create
Speaker 2: their own watch list and pool data with other retailers.
Speaker 2: Surely nothing could go wrong there. Even excluding AI, retail
Speaker 2: stores have become a massive surveillance black box. Your photo
Speaker 2: is taken as you go in and out. Video cameras
Speaker 2: are at checkout. They know the time you come in,
Speaker 2: they know what days you shop, what you're buying, they
Speaker 2: know who you are. Retailers will justify this invasion of
Speaker 2: our privacy through AI robots and large scale data collection
Speaker 2: as necessary for marketing and to protect their capital and employees. Still,
Speaker 2: I wouldn't blame you for worrying about where that data
Speaker 2: is going. After all, if police investigators are already attending
Speaker 2: NRF conventions and the retailers are happy to work with them,
Speaker 2: why not other law enforcement? Why not ICE? As it
Speaker 2: turns out, Congress is having similar thoughts. The House of
Speaker 2: Representatives just pushed a bill forward that could give ICE
Speaker 2: access to this massive surveillance dragnet, and there's a bipartisan
Speaker 2: effort in the Senate to include it any National Defense
Speaker 2: Authorization Act. Why would they do this? To answer that question,
Speaker 2: we need to look at a recently hyped phenomenon known
Speaker 2: as organized retail crime. You may have heard the term
Speaker 2: organized retail crime in the past few years, probably on
Speaker 2: the news or from a politician hinting at a hidden
Speaker 2: crisis in our stores. A basic Google Trends report shows
Speaker 2: use of the term is up two hundred percent in
Speaker 2: the past five years versus the five years before. Organized
Speaker 2: retail crime, sometimes referred to as just ORC, is defined
Speaker 2: by the FBI as the large scale theft of retail
Speaker 2: merchandise with the intent to resell the stolen items for
Speaker 2: financial gain. If you've seen the movie I Love Boosters,
Speaker 2: that's a good satirical example, although the definition is actually
Speaker 2: quite vague, which can cause a lot of problems. The
Speaker 2: outlet Retail Dive says the definition is quote neither legal
Speaker 2: nor precise, contributing to uneven reporting on the part of
Speaker 2: store workers, loss prevention staff, and police, which results in
Speaker 2: it often being lumped in with more ban all forms
Speaker 2: of theft such as shoplifting, and this begs the question
Speaker 2: is organized retail crime actually a thing? It is, but
Speaker 2: the threat to businesses, prices, and even national security have
Speaker 2: largely been blown out of proportion. To get a sense
Speaker 2: of those proportions, here's Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley at a
Speaker 2: Senate hearing on organized retail theft. He's the chief sponsor
Speaker 2: of the bill I mentioned earlier, known as the Combating
Speaker 2: Organized Retail Crime Act or CORKA for short.
Speaker 4: The reality is some of the worst criminal organizations, including cartels, terrorists,
Speaker 4: and human traffickers, use this type of crime, funding their
Speaker 4: misdeeds or launder ill gotten proceeds.
Speaker 2: Side note, After hearing how this guy talks, I had
Speaker 2: to look up how old he is. He's ninety two
Speaker 2: fucking years old. This old bat that was born in
Speaker 2: the Great Depression is probably being lobbied till his heart fails.
Speaker 2: And we're going to get into the issues with painting
Speaker 2: this all as a national security crisis later. But speaking
Speaker 2: of lobbying, the notoriety of organized retail crime is due
Speaker 2: in no small part to the National Retail Federation, the
Speaker 2: host of the aforementioned Loss Prevention conference and the largest
Speaker 2: retail lobbying group in the nation. The NRF has spent
Speaker 2: about fifty million dollars on lobbying since just twenty twenty,
Speaker 2: according to Open Secrets, and they've been the driving force
Speaker 2: behind the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act, which passed the
Speaker 2: House of Representatives on May twelfth with bipartisan support including
Speaker 2: one hundred and forty four Democrats and it may well
Speaker 2: get lumped in with our defense spending this year. CORKA
Speaker 2: has a slew of problems, but the general picture is
Speaker 2: a prosecution and police cracked down around this idea of
Speaker 2: organized crime in the retail theft world. Despite what the
Speaker 2: NRF would like you to believe, there doesn't appear to
Speaker 2: be an organized retail theft crisis in the US, or
Speaker 2: really even a show uplifting crisis in general. With the
Speaker 2: exception of some large cities, particularly New York City, shoplifting
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty three was actually lower than pre pandemic
Speaker 2: levels according to the Council on Criminal Justice. In twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two, the Council found retail shrink, the term for
Speaker 2: lost merchandise from theft or operational errors, was about one
Speaker 2: point six percent, the same as in twenty nineteen according
Speaker 2: to the nrf's own data. Before we get too deep,
Speaker 2: I think it's worth noting measures of shrink are also
Speaker 2: somewhat imprecise, and a lot of the accessible data surrounding
Speaker 2: all of this comes directly from the retail lobby, who
Speaker 2: have an incentive to make problems look worse to justify
Speaker 2: security policing, price increases and cutting corners in inventory management.
Speaker 2: As you'll see, they have some credibility issues as well.
Speaker 2: You know who else may or may not have credibility
Speaker 2: issues the products and services that support this podcast, and
Speaker 2: we're back. In October of twenty twenty three, the NRF
Speaker 2: claimed to Congress that organized retail crime accounted for nearly
Speaker 2: half of the ninety four point five billion dollars in
Speaker 2: SHRINK in twenty twenty one. In reality, Retail Dive found
Speaker 2: that organized theft accounted for about five percent of SHRINK,
Speaker 2: meaning the NRF was off by a literal order of magnitude.
Speaker 2: How did they arrive at such a conclusion, Well, they
Speaker 2: essentially just took some guy's word for it, specifically Ben Dugan,
Speaker 2: the former president of the Coalition of Law Enforcement in Retail,
Speaker 2: a nonprofit whose website currently features a giant, low resolution
Speaker 2: banner saying Vegas Baby, the nation's largest arc investigative conference.
Speaker 2: An NRF spokesperson specifically said their fifty percent claim was
Speaker 2: an inference made by an analyst based on Dugan's Congressional testimony,
Speaker 2: not actual statistics or data. The NRF retracted the claim
Speaker 2: about two months later, but the damage was already done.
Speaker 2: According to the Vera Institute, a nonprofit advocacy group and
Speaker 2: think tank focused on criminal justice reform. The NRF leveraged
Speaker 2: its inaccurate data point in a press release, testified to
Speaker 2: it in congressional hearings, and even spoke about it at
Speaker 2: a press conference with Senator Grassley. The figure, of course,
Speaker 2: stirred panic across the country, fueled by viral social media
Speaker 2: videos showing high profile thefts and retail companies pushing the
Speaker 2: narrative that they are under attack. In some cases, retailers
Speaker 2: either closed or threatened to close stores. For example, in
Speaker 2: San Francisco in twenty twenty one, Walgreens blamed organized retail
Speaker 2: crime for the anticipated closure of five locations. The closures
Speaker 2: made it into the national spotlight, but in reality, the
Speaker 2: locations faced less than two reported shoplifting incidents per month
Speaker 2: on average over the previous five years. Target had a
Speaker 2: similar story in New York, Seattle, and San Francisco blamed
Speaker 2: retail theft for store closures when nearby locations actually had
Speaker 2: higher incidences of shoplifting. What actually happened to these stores?
Speaker 2: My best guess is the shift to online shopping during
Speaker 2: the pandemic drove down the sales of many brick and
Speaker 2: mortar locations, but rather than project something that could lower
Speaker 2: their stock valuation, retailers blamed it on organized theft. Many
Speaker 2: took up controversial practices such as locking up merchandise, which
Speaker 2: decreased sales and customers satisfaction. Even Walgreen's chief financial officer,
Speaker 2: James Cahoe would later say they quote cried too much
Speaker 2: unquote about shoplifting when the issue was really overblown. But
Speaker 2: even with a lack of evidence, the NRF and Senator
Speaker 2: Grassley refused to back down from their messaging and legislation,
Speaker 2: and in a lot of ways it worked. Let me
Speaker 2: play you a clip of Gavin Newsom at a press
Speaker 2: conference in twenty twenty four signing legislation intended to combat
Speaker 2: organize retail crime. Here he's surrounded by a number of
Speaker 2: elected officials, law enforcement leaders, and report presentatives of retail associations.
Speaker 5: The issue of organized retail theft, the issue of serial theft,
Speaker 5: the issue that is front and center in the consciousness
Speaker 5: of so many Californians. You see it online social media,
Speaker 5: you see it on the nightly news. This is the
Speaker 5: real deal. Grocers and the retailers understand.
Speaker 2: That after the NRF retracted its inflated claim. Nearly a
Speaker 2: year prior, organized retail crime was still making headlines and
Speaker 2: considered a very serious issue, serious enough that Newsome included
Speaker 2: three hundred and seventy four million dollars in his twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four budget proposal to combat retail theft. And that bill,
Speaker 2: which he happened to sign atop a table covered in
Speaker 2: orange home depot buckets, it stiffened both enforcement and penalties
Speaker 2: for retail crime. It allowed for the aggregation of theft
Speaker 2: value from different shoplifting incidents, meaning the value of items
Speaker 2: can be added up to turn what would be minor
Speaker 2: charges into grand theft. It also allow WOWS police to
Speaker 2: arrest shoplifters solely based on a witness's sworn statement or
Speaker 2: video footage of a crime. Again, surely nothing could go
Speaker 2: wrong with that, but the crackdown didn't stop there. In
Speaker 2: the twenty twenty four general election, California voters overwhelmingly approved
Speaker 2: Prop thirty six, which made key changes to how thefts
Speaker 2: are prosecuted. To Newsom's credit, he did not support the proposition.
Speaker 2: Prior to Prop thirty six, thefts of items worth less
Speaker 2: than nine hundred and fifty dollars were considered misdemeanors, but
Speaker 2: now if the individual has two or more past convictions
Speaker 2: for certain theft crimes such as shoplifting, it could be
Speaker 2: considered a felony with a sentence of up to three
Speaker 2: years in jail or prison. San Diego's District Attorney Summer
Speaker 2: Stephen really hyped up Prop thirty six as an advancement
Speaker 2: in fighting organized retail crime. She actually went on the
Speaker 2: nrf's podcast talk about this. Yes, they have a podcast.
Speaker 2: It's called Retail Gets Real. It's bad, don't check it out.
Speaker 2: But here she is with the host having a little
Speaker 2: laugh about locking people up.
Speaker 3: So we used to have people with like twenty four
Speaker 3: theft cases. They're all misdemeanors. Some thieves bring a calculator
Speaker 3: and they're just under nine hundred and fifty dollars. Literally,
Speaker 3: it's madness.
Speaker 2: Right, set a gun or a calculator.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's joke about mistaking someone for being armed in
Speaker 2: a store. It's not like that's ever gone poorly before anyways.
Speaker 2: What's missing from the analysis here is how these laws
Speaker 2: harm people who aren't necessarily the intended target. A particularly
Speaker 2: striking example of how this could really fuck someone's life
Speaker 2: up comes from Pennsylvania. In twenty twenty one, Joseph Sobuleuski
Speaker 2: reportedly misunderstood a discount at an Exxon gas station and
Speaker 2: accidentally underpaid forty three cents for a bottle of mountain dew.
Speaker 2: Sobuluski had two theft charges in the past ten years,
Speaker 2: one for a tank of gas and another for a
Speaker 2: pair of shoes. After the mountain dew incident, state police
Speaker 2: arrested him on a fell charge because of a three
Speaker 2: strikes law in Pennsylvania similar to what could happen with Prop.
Speaker 2: Thirty six. A judge ordered Sobeluski beheld on a fifty
Speaker 2: thousand dollars cash only bond, and he faced up to
Speaker 2: seven years in prison. Fortunately, his public defender successfully argued
Speaker 2: for his release after seven days, and prosecutors ultimately dismissed
Speaker 2: the charge. But it's easy to see how this could
Speaker 2: go wrong for another individual, particularly minorities, who faced disproportionate
Speaker 2: punishment in our legal system. This style of legislation, intended
Speaker 2: to target retail crimes, spread like wildfire across the country.
Speaker 2: According to the text of the twenty twenty five Combating
Speaker 2: Organized Retail Crime Act. More than thirty state laws have
Speaker 2: been enacted since twenty twenty two to address organized theft.
Speaker 2: Common theme stricter penalties and policing. Here's how New York
Speaker 2: Governor Kathy Hokel put it in her twenty twenty four
Speaker 2: State of the State address.
Speaker 6: Let's back our businesses, back our businesses and the workers
Speaker 6: with the full force of the law, and punish those
Speaker 6: who think they can break the rules with impunity.
Speaker 2: After all, policing and aggressive enforcement are the American way
Speaker 2: to deal with crime rather than I don't know addressing
Speaker 2: the root causes, notably poverty and inequality. The pervasive tough
Speaker 2: on crime mentality doesn't have much evidence backing it up,
Speaker 2: but of course there is a wealth of research indicating flaws.
Speaker 2: For one, enforcement is heavily racialized, with black and brown
Speaker 2: people facing retail theft charges at significantly higher rates than whites.
Speaker 2: The Very Institute also highlights how increasing sentences as a
Speaker 2: deterrent doesn't actually work. A twenty eighteen article from Pew
Speaker 2: Research says states can safely raise their value threshold for
Speaker 2: what counts as a felony theft without risking more crime.
Speaker 2: The thirty states that did so between twenty and twenty
Speaker 2: twelve saw no meaningful increase in property crime or larceny rates.
Speaker 2: In South Carolina, Pew found that when they doubled the
Speaker 2: felony threshold from one thousand dollars to two dollars twenty ten,
Speaker 2: property crime continued to fall by fifteen percent in the
Speaker 2: next three years. Pew also found that the value of
Speaker 2: stolen goods remained steady, and when adjusted for inflation, the
Speaker 2: median value actually decreased. In essence, the state level push
Speaker 2: for these three strikes, shoplifting laws and the aggregation of
Speaker 2: theft value won't meaningfully decrease crime. Rather, it will result
Speaker 2: in more people, particularly minorities, being locked up for longer
Speaker 2: sentences than being saddled with felony convictions that hurt their
Speaker 2: ability to get a job and obtain housing, ultimately increasing
Speaker 2: the likelihood of committing crimes in the future. The nonprofit
Speaker 2: think tank Prison Policy Initiative estimates twenty seven point seven
Speaker 2: billion dollars in annual direct costs of incarceration on individuals
Speaker 2: and families across the US. Families pay in on bail,
Speaker 2: legal fees, civil asset forfeiture, commissary for loved ones and
Speaker 2: more often going straight to private prison operators. This also
Speaker 2: does begin to factor in the impacts on children and
Speaker 2: local communities. The cost of incarceration on the state also
Speaker 2: needs to be factored in. The California Legislative Analyst Office
Speaker 2: estimates the annual cost of incarcerating one person in state
Speaker 2: prison at one hundred twenty seven thousand, seven hundred eighty
Speaker 2: eight dollars. With massive spending to bolster retail theft enforcement,
Speaker 2: this could create a compounding problem, costing hundreds of millions.
Speaker 2: In July of twenty twenty five, Di Stefan wrote in
Speaker 2: congressional testimonies supporting Korka that her office had prosecuted over
Speaker 2: two hundred eighteen cases of organized retail crime in just
Speaker 2: two years. She says these cases involved theft losses of
Speaker 2: more than two point six million dollars. Putting this into perspective,
Speaker 2: if even half of those prosecutions resulted in one year
Speaker 2: sentences in California state prisons, you're looking at an estimate
Speaker 2: of nearly fourteen million dollars in incarceration costs, over five
Speaker 2: times the reported theft value. But these thoughts don't really
Speaker 2: seem to across the mind of people like Da Stepan
Speaker 2: or our pals at the NRF.
Speaker 5: This is an argument that drives me crazy, the idea
Speaker 5: that they're stealing because they can't afford the food to
Speaker 5: put on the table to feed their children.
Speaker 3: This is their sole job is to rip off your business.
Speaker 3: That's their blop. That's how they wake up in the morning,
Speaker 3: and so we didn't want them to wake up as
Speaker 3: comfortably as the.
Speaker 2: Report with their calculator. Yes, they paint this image of
Speaker 2: people almost getting off on doing crime rather than any
Speaker 2: number of more charitable explanations. At face value, it may
Speaker 2: just sound like typical high minded bs from an aggressive
Speaker 2: DA and lobbyist, But obviously, when you think about the
Speaker 2: position of power someone like Stephan is in, it's pretty sickening.
Speaker 2: In another section of the NRF podcast episode, they discuss
Speaker 2: people switching from drug dealing to selling stolen merchandise because
Speaker 2: of lower penalties, generally glossing over the circumstances that might
Speaker 2: lead an individual into crime. Stefan even mentions the need
Speaker 2: to go after quote frontline boosters, the people who are
Speaker 2: being hired to go into stores and steal, who she
Speaker 2: admits are often homeless or poor. It's honestly maddening the
Speaker 2: listening to this. So that's the last quote I'm going
Speaker 2: to bring from that. Anyways, here's some mads. So in
Speaker 2: the next episode we're going to dive into the specifics
Speaker 2: of the Corka bill and how Ice has become a
Speaker 2: key player. But for now, I want to end on
Speaker 2: a note that ties together some of the broader consequences
Speaker 2: of all this retail theft propaganda. Lobbyists for the bill
Speaker 2: have a common refrain, quote, organized retail crime is not
Speaker 2: a victimless crime. Unquote. I think the same goes for
Speaker 2: their lobbying. Corka hasn't even passed the Senate yet, there
Speaker 2: may already be some downstream tragedies because of the intensified
Speaker 2: rhetoric around retail crime. In recent years and months, there
Speaker 2: have been a number of high profile killings of individuals
Speaker 2: accused the shop by both shop owners and police. In
Speaker 2: June of this year, police shot and killed Cohen Wiley,
Speaker 2: a one year old boy, while responding to a shoplifting
Speaker 2: call in Senatobia, Mississippi, over allegedly stolen diapers. Police also
Speaker 2: shot his mother while her friend was driving their car
Speaker 2: authorities claim they tried to stop the vehicle, but the
Speaker 2: driver nearly hit an officer, a story we've unfortunately become
Speaker 2: far too familiar with. At this point, Wiley's mother disputes
Speaker 2: that the diapers were even stolen in the first place,
Speaker 2: and denies that her friend drove towards the officers. Obviously,
Speaker 2: it didn't matter to the trigger happy cops on the scene,
Speaker 2: who never should have pointed firearms at the vehicle in
Speaker 2: the first place. Other similar cases include the killing of
Speaker 2: Banco Brown, a black twenty four year old trans organizer
Speaker 2: in San Francisco, by a Walgreen security guard, and the
Speaker 2: killing of black fourteen year old Cyrus Carmack Belton by
Speaker 2: a shop owner in South Carolina. In Brown's case, Cisco
Speaker 2: Da Brooke Jenkins, who ran on a tough on crime agenda,
Speaker 2: did not pursue charges against security guard Michael Arlwaine Anthony,
Speaker 2: saying he acted in self defense based on video footage.
Speaker 2: The video shows Brown and Anthony fighting as Brown apparently
Speaker 2: tried to leave the Walgreens without paying. They grapple on
Speaker 2: the ground for a minute, then Anthony releases Brown but
Speaker 2: follows him to the door. Brown stops just outside the store,
Speaker 2: possibly talking back to the guard. Then the guard pulls
Speaker 2: his gun and shoots Brown as he turns to run.
Speaker 2: Brown was unarmed, and in interviews following the shooting, Anthony
Speaker 2: repeatedly misgendered him for Carmack Belton. His killers. Shop owner
Speaker 2: Chee k Rick Chow face trial for murder but was
Speaker 2: found not guilty. The thing is Carmack Belton, ever actually
Speaker 2: stole anything, not even the water bottles Chow wrongly accused
Speaker 2: him of. Prosecutors say Chow chase the teenager one hundred
Speaker 2: and thirty yards outside the store before shooting him in
Speaker 2: the back. Prosecutor acknowledged that Carmack Belton had a pistol
Speaker 2: but said that it fell on the ground in the chase.
Speaker 2: It seems, based on the reporting, that the only person
Speaker 2: who claims to have seen the pistol or had it
Speaker 2: pointed at him was Chow's son. I think all this
Speaker 2: just goes to show where we place property, even just
Speaker 2: a few water bottles, snacks, or diapers, relative to human life,
Speaker 2: especially those in black communities. There's a very clear irony
Speaker 2: that may reflect the types of enforcement we could see
Speaker 2: from CORCA tough on crime. For the marginalized, not for
Speaker 2: those pulling the trigger. There's no easy way to determine
Speaker 2: whether political statements about retail crime have an effect on
Speaker 2: police or shop owners, but it's not hard to imagine
Speaker 2: how a constant bombardment of propaganda could embolden someone to
Speaker 2: take matters into their own hands. The retail companies are
Speaker 2: complicit in this. Somehow they've managed to turn a manufacturer's
Speaker 2: story into a national security crisis where states grant hundreds
Speaker 2: of millions of dollars to protect corporations. Taylors, blame consumers
Speaker 2: when they failed to hit desired profits, then they raise prices.
Speaker 2: When that fails, they demonize the poor and rattle on
Speaker 2: about crime. Then they pilfer our general funds and team
Speaker 2: up with the police to crack down. It's never enough.
Speaker 2: Now they've sucked in the federal government and we could
Speaker 2: be on the verge of the next upgrade to ice terror.
Speaker 2: But that'll have to wait for the next episode. We'll
Speaker 2: see you tomorrow. It could happen.
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