Speaker 1: Episode three, the climate Apartheid. By the time the heat
Speaker 1: waves subsided, at least a thousand people were dead. Those
Speaker 1: are the official numbers, at least the numbers no one trusts.
Speaker 1: The city government and the police denied breaking up homeless
Speaker 1: encampments during the disaster and only acknowledged a handful of
Speaker 1: outdoor exposure deaths. On Twitter, someone shares a video of
Speaker 1: what might be a mass grave. You're not sure if
Speaker 1: it's real, and you don't really have time to find out.
Speaker 1: After the grid overloads, it takes weeks for the power
Speaker 1: situation to normalize. Bottled water, abundant at the start of
Speaker 1: the disaster becomes scarce. In conversations with friends and snippets
Speaker 1: of time online, you learn that much of the Midwest
Speaker 1: has been subject to titanic mudslides and flooding. Hurricanes hit
Speaker 1: the Southeast, driving up demand for disaster supplies even further
Speaker 1: than putting more stress on interstate commerce. Work is basically
Speaker 1: impossible for days. You're not even really sure if your
Speaker 1: job's going to exist much longer anyway. Outside of a
Speaker 1: few high end shopping districts, life just hasn't gone back
Speaker 1: to normal for most people, So you've settled into a
Speaker 1: new normal using your car, and you're now copious free
Speaker 1: time to ferry supplies to and from a handful of
Speaker 1: collection points and new encampments. You felt bad for days
Speaker 1: after fleeing when the cops broke up the first camp. Aaron,
Speaker 1: your community organizer friend, told you not to worry about it.
Speaker 1: Not everyone's ready to go face to face with riot cops.
Speaker 1: Tom the former marine, said the same thing, but then
Speaker 1: offered to give you some self defense training if you
Speaker 1: wanted it. He and a couple of other combat vets
Speaker 1: had started organizing regular self defense sessions at one of
Speaker 1: the camps, based out of an old apartment complex abandoned
Speaker 1: when it's holding company went bankrupt. For a couple of weeks,
Speaker 1: you lose yourself in the work. Gradually you realize that
Speaker 1: the network of encampments you and your new friends have
Speaker 1: been working to support have become something more than just
Speaker 1: a stop gap. For one thing, the number of folks
Speaker 1: without housing just keeps on rising. All the added stress
Speaker 1: on the power grid and the questionable ways some people
Speaker 1: dealt with it led to a spate of urban fires,
Speaker 1: which forced hundreds of people out of their homes. The
Speaker 1: local economy is in free fall too. You're not the
Speaker 1: only one whose work just disappeared. And while you've got
Speaker 1: enough saved for a little while, you're ever aware that
Speaker 1: you won't be able to pay rent forever. That possibility
Speaker 1: doesn't scare you as much as it did before. It
Speaker 1: helps that you're spending half your time in one camp
Speaker 1: or another. Anyway, you decide your best bet at any
Speaker 1: kind of comfort in the future is to make sure
Speaker 1: life in the camps is as comfortable for every one
Speaker 1: as possible. To that end, you and Tom scrounge up
Speaker 1: a crew and spend days flitting in and out of
Speaker 1: abandoned buildings, scrounging solar panels, batteries, and wiring. None of
Speaker 1: you know much about how to use that ship, but
Speaker 1: a collective of electricians and engineers put together a list
Speaker 1: of the parts they needed and how to safely get them.
Speaker 1: By the time summer comes to an end, almost three
Speaker 1: thousand people are living in camps with regular power and
Speaker 1: cooling stations. Other collectives have spent the weeks building solar
Speaker 1: stills to filter waste water and deal with the drinking
Speaker 1: water shortage that still in dim it across the southern
Speaker 1: half of the country. Life is by almost any measure,
Speaker 1: harder than it was a year ago, but the stories
Speaker 1: of wild fires in the northwest and massive police crackdowns
Speaker 1: across the Great Lakes region make it clear that you're
Speaker 1: not struggling alone. You feel lucky that it's been weak
Speaker 1: since you've so much as seen a police patrol. There's
Speaker 1: been a lot more property crime in the parts of
Speaker 1: town where the economy is still functioning somewhat close to normal.
Speaker 1: You've heard shoot out several nights, and you've grown increasingly
Speaker 1: glad to be off on the margins with a good
Speaker 1: community of people who take care of each other and
Speaker 1: don't have much worth stealing. And then in late September
Speaker 1: things take a turn. Some right wing live streamer visited
Speaker 1: the largest of the three camps, now almost fifteen hundred strong.
Speaker 1: He stitched together in narrative blaming a series of downtown
Speaker 1: arsons and burglaries on organized Antifa extremists in their war camp.
Speaker 1: One of Tom's friends, who's been doing armed security at night,
Speaker 1: shows you a handful of posts from far right extremists
Speaker 1: threatening to raid the camp. You hear rumors the police
Speaker 1: might finally be planning a crackdown too, ever, fired a gun,
Speaker 1: tom asks you shake your head no, and he nods, well,
Speaker 1: that's probably about time you learn. In two thousand eighteen,
Speaker 1: the Camp and Woolsey fires raged across California, burning hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of acres and wiping out whole towns. The
Speaker 1: Camp wildfire is so far the deadliest and most destructive
Speaker 1: wildfire in California history, although that may have changed by
Speaker 1: the time this episode drops. It was the most expensive
Speaker 1: natural disaster in the world in two thousand eighteen. It
Speaker 1: killed more than eighty people, destroyed fourteen thousand homes, and
Speaker 1: displaced fifty thousand people. Not included among the ranks of
Speaker 1: the displaced where Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, who hired
Speaker 1: a team of private firefighters to protect their sixty million
Speaker 1: dollar mansion and hidden hills. Private firefighting has become a
Speaker 1: popular boutiques service in the era of climate change induced disaster.
Speaker 1: Large insurance companies like chub and a I G offered
Speaker 1: their wealthy clients private firefighters to help prevent property damage.
Speaker 1: Wildfire defense systems based in Montana sent fifty three engines
Speaker 1: to California during the fires. They protected people like Kanye
Speaker 1: and Kim, while lower income individuals in the nearby town
Speaker 1: of Paradise lost their homes and loved ones to the blaze.
Speaker 1: On July one, Jeff Bezos, occasionally the world's wealthiest man,
Speaker 1: became the second billionaire in space, or at least he
Speaker 1: got pretty close to space. That same day, news broke
Speaker 1: of massive flooding in China's Henan province, eclipsing even the
Speaker 1: apocalyptic floods that left more than a thousand Germans missing
Speaker 1: just a few days earlier in Germany. Whole villages were destroyed.
Speaker 1: In China, more than a hundred thousand people were forced
Speaker 1: to relocate. While Jeff Bezos took his first look into
Speaker 1: outer space, passengers drowned on a flooded subway in zhang Zau.
Speaker 1: At almost the same time, authorities in Oregon announced that
Speaker 1: the Bootleg Fire, the largest in the state's history, had
Speaker 1: grown big enough to generate its own weather patterns. Officials
Speaker 1: admitted that the blaze could not be extinguished until the
Speaker 1: rains returned in the fall. Many of the Oregonians caught
Speaker 1: in the smoke from the Bootleg Fire are transplanted Californians.
Speaker 1: Men and women who fled Los Angeles or the Bay
Speaker 1: Area to escape the increasingly brutal fire season and retreat
Speaker 1: to Oregon's famously moist climate. Most of these transplants were
Speaker 1: upper middle class, well paid employees in the tech or
Speaker 1: entertainment sector. I'm sure some of them felt betrayed when
Speaker 1: their affluence proved insufficient to shield them from the seasoned climate.
Speaker 1: That mindset was most clearly embodied by a middle aged
Speaker 1: German woman interviewed by Deutsche Well News in the wake
Speaker 1: of apocalyptic flooding and so many people dead. You don't
Speaker 1: expect people to die in a flood in Germany. You
Speaker 1: expected maybe in four countries, but you don't expect to hear.
Speaker 1: But it was all too fast to click. It is
Speaker 1: undeniable that as extreme weather events grow more common, the
Speaker 1: victims of such catastrophes will include ever greater numbers of
Speaker 1: what was formerly the global one percent. The truth is
Speaker 1: that we have all of us spent our entire lives
Speaker 1: in climate apartheid. Western nations, through extracting resources and outsourcing
Speaker 1: industrial processes to the rest of the world, have avoided
Speaker 1: the worst early consequences of industrialization. Until wildfires changed the calculus.
Speaker 1: We had no cities with air as dirty as New
Speaker 1: Delhi or Shinzhen, China. Even when climate disasters hit cities
Speaker 1: and affluent countries, the level of suffering experienced within that
Speaker 1: city still breaks down on class lines. I'm not just
Speaker 1: talking about something as obvious as who has enough money
Speaker 1: for a c or who can afford a car that
Speaker 1: drives well in the snow. When the Pacific Northwest Heat
Speaker 1: Dome briefly made Portland, Oregon, one of the hottest cities
Speaker 1: on the planet, the actual heat experienced in different neighborhoods
Speaker 1: varied bay Ston income. This is because wealthy neighborhoods had
Speaker 1: lower building density in much more trees, which provided enough
Speaker 1: shade that so called A grade neighborhoods were eight degrees
Speaker 1: fahrenheit cooler on average than poor neighborhoods. But as the
Speaker 1: consequences of industrial society hit harder, the wealth line necessary
Speaker 1: to avoid them rises. It is no longer simply sufficient
Speaker 1: to live in a rich country. If you aren't wealthy
Speaker 1: enough for a second or a third home, for your
Speaker 1: own private firefighters, for a bunker in New Zealand, or
Speaker 1: a space shuttle. Sorry, but you're getting left behind. Welcome
Speaker 1: to the wrong side of climate apartheid. If you want
Speaker 1: an idea of what climate apartheid will look like for
Speaker 1: tens of millions of Americans, including a sizeable chunk of
Speaker 1: you listening right now, there's probably no story more important
Speaker 1: than the tale of Paradise, California. When the camp fire
Speaker 1: blazed through eighteen thousand homes, it created a flood of
Speaker 1: climate refugees. Chico, the nearest city, gained twenty thousand residents
Speaker 1: almost overnight. For a city of just a hundred thousand.
Speaker 1: That men a significant strain, and the people of Chico
Speaker 1: responded beautifully with a flood of charity and mutual aid.
Speaker 1: People donated tents, sleeping bags, Volunteers cooked hot food, local
Speaker 1: kids organized team sports for the kids who just lost
Speaker 1: their town. Many and Chico opened their homes to strangers
Speaker 1: who just lost theirs. Mark Stemmen, a geography professor at
Speaker 1: California State University, described it this way to Intercept reporter
Speaker 1: Naomi Klein. A tsunami of fire and terror rolled down
Speaker 1: the hill from Paradise, but that tsunami was buffeted by
Speaker 1: a blanket of love and comfort. Unfortunately, the reaction of
Speaker 1: Chico was by enlarge a feat of charity, not of
Speaker 1: mutual aid. This is a problem because charity is something
Speaker 1: you give two less fortunate people. And when news coverage
Speaker 1: of the disaster faded, so too did sympathy and willingness
Speaker 1: to help the victims of the camp fire. Six months
Speaker 1: after the camp fire destroyed Paradise, California, more than a
Speaker 1: thousand families were still without even secondary housing. Before the
Speaker 1: fire hit, there was already a massive housing shortage in
Speaker 1: northern California. Rates of homelessness had been on the rise
Speaker 1: for years now. The campfire inspired the city of Chico
Speaker 1: to create a climate plan, which included more affordable housing
Speaker 1: in order to make the community more resistant to displacement
Speaker 1: caused by climate disruption. But this is not what happened
Speaker 1: from the intercept quote. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, throwing
Speaker 1: many more people in Butte County as elsewhere into various
Speaker 1: states of economic and social distress. Stimmon told me local
Speaker 1: activists were all geared up to hold a big rally
Speaker 1: calling for a green new decade. He said, we had
Speaker 1: banners and sunflowers and were ready to rock. Then lockdown happened,
Speaker 1: and the signs just sat in his yard for months.
Speaker 1: Brown recalled that once the pandemic was declared, there wasn't
Speaker 1: much room for a conversation about planning for the future
Speaker 1: when we were dealing with these immediate crises. In late
Speaker 1: August and early September, another wildfire struck the region, incinerating
Speaker 1: two towns and displacing yet more people in the county.
Speaker 1: The city opened up some hotel rooms to older people
Speaker 1: who were particularly vulnerable to COVID nineteen, but there were
Speaker 1: not nearly enough rooms for everyone who needed shelter. Through
Speaker 1: this two and a half year period of shock after shock,
Speaker 1: housing costs and Chico have continued to soar. First, it
Speaker 1: was in response to the uptick and demand from Paradise
Speaker 1: evacuees and people working on post disaster reconstruction, which saw
Speaker 1: a spike and rents and made Chico among the hottest
Speaker 1: housing markets in the country. Today, the boom continues, but
Speaker 1: now it is in response to a pandemic fueled influx
Speaker 1: of Bay Area professionals and retirees looking to telecommute or
Speaker 1: chill out in a more affordable, low key community. According
Speaker 1: to the California Association of Realtors, the price of a
Speaker 1: single family house in Butte County increased by a staggering
Speaker 1: sixteen point one percent last year, with Chico at the
Speaker 1: center of the frenzy. A headline at a local ABC
Speaker 1: affiliate summed up the market's current trajectory, up, up, up,
Speaker 1: so real estate and Chico became much more valuable very quickly,
Speaker 1: which killed an motive to create more affordable housing. Every
Speaker 1: low income apartment building is one less set of luxury
Speaker 1: condos for Bay Area transplants. After all. Now by twenty
Speaker 1: most of the middle and upper middle class Paradise refugees
Speaker 1: had either bought or built new homes, but those had
Speaker 1: been renters or living in mobile homes got nothing. In
Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, MPR talked to Dominica Sprague, who moved
Speaker 1: to Paradise because she had been priced out of the
Speaker 1: Bay Area. In the six months since the campfire, she
Speaker 1: and her family had been forced to move to six
Speaker 1: different camps. They were interviewed outside of a camper on
Speaker 1: a fair ground in Eubis City. They were not being
Speaker 1: hosted there by the city, nor had they been placed
Speaker 1: there by the state. The Sprague family paid seven hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty dollars a month for the privilege of camping out.
Speaker 1: Many who were displaced by the campfire simply never recovered.
Speaker 1: Chico county is homeless population surged by sixteen percent after
Speaker 1: the fire, and it has not gone back down in
Speaker 1: the years since. Twenty three percent of Chico's homeless a
Speaker 1: refugees from the Paradise Fire, and when these people became
Speaker 1: permanent fixtures of the town, getting in the way of
Speaker 1: a profitable real estate boom, the warm welcome and charity
Speaker 1: that had greeted them in two thousand eighteen evaporated. In
Speaker 1: two thousand and twenty, the Chico City Council elected a
Speaker 1: slate of right wing candidates, primarily on a platform of
Speaker 1: using the cops to brutalize and break up homeless encampments
Speaker 1: for the good of local businesses. Citizens for a Safe
Speaker 1: Chico put two hundred and fifty thousand dollars into a
Speaker 1: sweeping ad campaign that painted these people as vagrance and transience,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that most had resided in the county
Speaker 1: for years. In many cases, Chico police confiscated and threw
Speaker 1: away donated clothing, tints, and sleeping bags that had been
Speaker 1: given to Paradise refugees just a few years earlier. During
Speaker 1: her reporting for the Intercept, Naomi Klein talked to Alexander Hall,
Speaker 1: a twenty three year old camp fire survivor who had
Speaker 1: subsequently lost his new home in police sweeps of encampments.
Speaker 1: He told her, we're homeless, We're not a disease. You
Speaker 1: can't just get rid of us and then expect us
Speaker 1: to be gone. That's not the way it works. Were
Speaker 1: people were trying to survive. Were like anybody else. Everybody
Speaker 1: is one paycheck away. And the reality of the situation
Speaker 1: is that, thanks to climate change, we are all considerably
Speaker 1: less than one paycheck away from calamity. Wildfires and other
Speaker 1: natural disasters aren't the only thing that's growing more common.
Speaker 1: A less stable world means a less stable economy. We're
Speaker 1: already seeing inflation on the rise, and everyone listening remembers
Speaker 1: how calamitous the first weeks of the pandemic were for
Speaker 1: tens of millions of people. A bad economy makes members
Speaker 1: of a community less resilient. It means they have less
Speaker 1: to donate to their neighbors in the wake of a disaster.
Speaker 1: It also means their community, their city or town, or state,
Speaker 1: will have fewer resources to put into things like protecting
Speaker 1: infrastructure from natural disasters, paying emergency workers, and providing affordable
Speaker 1: housing to prepare for the inevitable. The story of Chico
Speaker 1: has told us what happens when affluent liberal enclaves find
Speaker 1: themselves forced into this position. They cut funding to everything
Speaker 1: but cops and use those cops to do violence marginalized
Speaker 1: communities from the intercept quote the combination of factors that
Speaker 1: has created this crisis, and Chico is far from unique
Speaker 1: to Northern California. After decades of defunding social programs coupled
Speaker 1: with wild overfunding of police, a great many communities across
Speaker 1: the country find themselves stretched too thin to absorb a
Speaker 1: major shock, particularly when it comes to housing and mental
Speaker 1: health supports. And without these other tools, every challenge quickly
Speaker 1: turns into a matter of public safety. I think Chico
Speaker 1: provides a fairly realistic expectation for how most climate disaster
Speaker 1: related scenarios will be handled by most municipal governments. In
Speaker 1: the immediate future. The rich will buy new homes, invest
Speaker 1: private and public resources into protecting their neighborhoods. The communities
Speaker 1: that suffer the worst from climate change will experience a
Speaker 1: wealth drain as residents with the funds to do so,
Speaker 1: leave drinking the tax base and leaving everyone with fewer
Speaker 1: resources to dedicate to rebuilding and resiliency. In two thousand seventeen,
Speaker 1: Scientific American published an outstanding article titled Natural Disasters by Location.
Speaker 1: It analyzed ninety years of data and found that every
Speaker 1: major environmental catastrophe like a huge tornado, hurricane, or wildfire,
Speaker 1: increases a US county's poverty rate by one percent quote.
Speaker 1: We found that if a county experienced two natural disasters,
Speaker 1: migration out of that county increased by one percentage point.
Speaker 1: With the strongest reactions happening in response to hurricanes, this
Speaker 1: translates into a loss of around six hundred residents from
Speaker 1: a typical county. The effect of one very large disaster
Speaker 1: responsible for a hundred or more deaths was twice as big.
Speaker 1: Poverty rates also increased by one percentage point in areas
Speaker 1: hit by super severe disasters. This suggests that people who
Speaker 1: aren't poor are migrating out, or that people who are
Speaker 1: poor are migrating in. It might also mean that the
Speaker 1: existing population transitioned into poverty. The researchers were particularly interested
Speaker 1: in seeing how the creation of FEMA in ninety eight
Speaker 1: impacted things. FEMA exists in the theory to coordinate federal
Speaker 1: response to natural disasters and help communities rebuild. With that
Speaker 1: in mind, if FEMA does its job, you would expect
Speaker 1: residents of stricken areas to be less likely to move
Speaker 1: after the date FEMA started responding to disasters with federal
Speaker 1: relief checks. If you happen to live in New Orleans
Speaker 1: during Hurricane Katrina, you already know where I'm leading you quote.
Speaker 1: We found that, if anything, residents were more likely to
Speaker 1: migrate out of counties struck by natural disasters after FEMA
Speaker 1: was created. This pattern is consistent with recent research documenting
Speaker 1: that the federal funds that flow to victims of disasters
Speaker 1: come mainly in the form of nonplace based programs like
Speaker 1: unemployment insurance and food stamps. It appears that many people
Speaker 1: in disaster affected areas take the money and move to
Speaker 1: another county, and so the study concluded. Our research suggests
Speaker 1: that the rich may have the resources to move away
Speaker 1: from areas facing natural disasters, leaving behind a population that
Speaker 1: is disproportionately poor. But of course, that study focused primarily
Speaker 1: on coastal areas and the sort of disasters suffered by
Speaker 1: people who live in those communities. Two thousand seventeen was
Speaker 1: an age in which the Pacific Northwest and many other
Speaker 1: mountainous parts of the West didn't suffer from wildfires in
Speaker 1: the way they do now. In other words, it was
Speaker 1: a time in which coastal elites had real choices on
Speaker 1: where to flee. Those days appear to be coming to
Speaker 1: an end. The super wealthy will, of course continue to
Speaker 1: run to safe places, but the number of places they
Speaker 1: consider safe will shrink, the amount of available bunker properties
Speaker 1: will decrease, and the wealthy will eventually split into two
Speaker 1: separate groups, those with the funds to flee to truly
Speaker 1: safe locations and those who will use their money and
Speaker 1: power to try and build islands of security within endangered communities.
Speaker 1: The people who will do this are the middle class, rich,
Speaker 1: millionaires and multi millionaires, the kind of people who sit
Speaker 1: on local business association boards, the kind of people who
Speaker 1: run towns like Chico but can't afford or don't want
Speaker 1: to flee. We've seen tie meantime again that these local
Speaker 1: elites tend to use the police as a cudgel to
Speaker 1: beat down any marginalized people who disrupt the look or profitability,
Speaker 1: or whatever isolated parts of the city they care about.
Speaker 1: In Portland, that's downtown and the members of the Portland
Speaker 1: Business Alliance have spent much of the last year lobbying
Speaker 1: the mayor form more brutal crackdowns on both anti capitalist
Speaker 1: protesters and houseless people. The goal is never to actually
Speaker 1: help struggling people. Portland has a street Response unit dedicated
Speaker 1: to providing unarmed responders for people in mental health crises.
Speaker 1: Such units have proven to work extremely well, saving lives
Speaker 1: and cities like Denver, but in Portland the unit has
Speaker 1: continually struggled with a lack of funding. In twenty the
Speaker 1: city Council voted to move four point eight million dollars
Speaker 1: from the police budget into a reserve fund for the
Speaker 1: street Response unit. This would have expanded it from a
Speaker 1: test program in one neighborhood Lents into a citywide program
Speaker 1: with six teams. In may one, Ted Wheeler and two
Speaker 1: council members allied with the Business Alliance voted against this amendment.
Speaker 1: Mayor Wheeler claimed that the reason was the program needed
Speaker 1: better performance metrics in order to judge its efficacy. The
Speaker 1: fact that no such metrics exist for measuring how police
Speaker 1: handle mental health crises does not seem to have bothered him.
Speaker 1: The money went back to the cops, and days later,
Speaker 1: a Portland police officer responding to a mental health crisis
Speaker 1: in Lynce Park killed an unarmed man. Wealthy business owners
Speaker 1: in Portland, like wealthy business owners in Chico, have no
Speaker 1: interest in improving services to marginalized people. Those folks don't
Speaker 1: shop at their stores, and they don't look good in
Speaker 1: glossy magazine spreads about downtown restaurants. The number of homeless
Speaker 1: people in America has increased for the last four consecutive years.
Speaker 1: As we saw with Chico, climate change will only increase
Speaker 1: the number of desperate people sleeping rough the nice liberal
Speaker 1: mayors of nice liberal cities like Portland will hymn in
Speaker 1: hall about metrics while they send jack booted thugs out
Speaker 1: to clear these people away from good neighborhoods using violence.
Speaker 1: In Chico, where the local government is shifted a hard
Speaker 1: right due to the influx of homeless people, the justification
Speaker 1: was commensurately harsher. From the intercept, One of Safe Chico's
Speaker 1: talking points is that the city's unsheltered population has suffered
Speaker 1: from something they call toxic compassion The idea is that
Speaker 1: by attempting to help, a culture of drug dependence and
Speaker 1: camping by choice is being enabled. According to this logic,
Speaker 1: if camping as banned and clean needles aren't available, then
Speaker 1: people will find shelter beds and get the mental health
Speaker 1: and addiction treatments they need. It's a domestic version of
Speaker 1: the discourse of deterrence at the southern border, the idea
Speaker 1: that treating people with some modicum of humanity encourages them
Speaker 1: to take risky journeys. Cruelty, therefore, is the greater compassion.
Speaker 1: Today we see the compassion of cruelty preached by politicians
Speaker 1: on the left and the right. They just use different
Speaker 1: terms for it. And as protests against police violence continue
Speaker 1: to go viral, local elites will increasingly contract out for
Speaker 1: their violence. The most intense version of this has happened
Speaker 1: in Minneapolis, where a mercenary outfit named Conflict as Alution
Speaker 1: Group or cr G, has been hired by its city
Speaker 1: to provide armed security in the wake of protests over
Speaker 1: police violence. CRG guards started showing up with guns, conveniently
Speaker 1: at the same time as the federal government started an
Speaker 1: investigation into the Minneapolis police they've been accused of the
Speaker 1: same sorts of physical violence as well as the questionably
Speaker 1: legal practice of detaining citizens. But the more unsettling and
Speaker 1: much mercurier story is that these guys at least brag
Speaker 1: about possessing a significant surveillance capacity. They have drones and
Speaker 1: advertise that they can use them to spy on local dissidents. Seriously,
Speaker 1: I'm want to play you an excerpt from one of
Speaker 1: their ads, and you should know that the video playing
Speaker 1: during this excerpt shows a group of armed insurgents, as
Speaker 1: viewed through a drone camera, marching down a desert road. Well,
Speaker 1: it's very law enforcement personnel as well as utilizing specialist
Speaker 1: equipment such as also known as unmanned aerial vehicles used
Speaker 1: to such specialized equipment gives Conflict Resolution Group and its
Speaker 1: clients the clear advantage for binding a better security model,
Speaker 1: thus insurance success. It's important to remember than a world
Speaker 1: of uncertainty your securities paramount, Conflict Resolution Group provides the tools, resources, experience,
Speaker 1: and highly trained personnel to make that uncertainty go away.
Speaker 1: Prior to c r G, the most intense example of
Speaker 1: a private security firm being used to surveill dissidence was
Speaker 1: probably Tiger Swan. During the Standing Rock occupation, they are
Speaker 1: alleged to have used technology called a dirt box mounted
Speaker 1: on aircraft to spy on the cell phone data of activists.
Speaker 1: This kind of ship is growing more normalized every day,
Speaker 1: and you're fooling yourself if you don't think it's because
Speaker 1: large corporations and local business associations want cops and even
Speaker 1: militaries of their own. The Portland Business Alliance has contracted
Speaker 1: armed and unarmed guards with Portland Patrol Incorporated for years.
Speaker 1: Most of these guards operate in what the city calls
Speaker 1: an Enhanced Services District. This is just a quirky Portland
Speaker 1: term for a nationwide trend. E s d s are
Speaker 1: more often called business improvement districts. B i d s
Speaker 1: are increasingly common all over the United States. In a
Speaker 1: legal sense, they are urban areas where private organizations are
Speaker 1: given the power to do things normally relegated to the
Speaker 1: local government. This includes security. B i d s were
Speaker 1: developed in the nineteen seventies is a way to fight
Speaker 1: the economic stagnation that had settled on many U. S cities.
Speaker 1: There are more than a thousand b i d s nationwide,
Speaker 1: and the one in Downtown Portland, founded in nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 1: is particularly large and influential. When the Portland Business Alliance
Speaker 1: was formed in two thousand two, they took control of
Speaker 1: the downtown b I D called Downtown Clean and Safe.
Speaker 1: The district expanded to more than five hundred blocks, and
Speaker 1: there has been talk of expanding it to include residential areas.
Speaker 1: From teen Vogue quote the formation of e s d
Speaker 1: s is patently undemocratic To institute one in Portland. Interested
Speaker 1: parties form a business nonprofit and campaigned to have the
Speaker 1: city's Revenue Division levy fees on in district. Property owners
Speaker 1: in accordance with the city code. Then unelected e S
Speaker 1: d overseers, often some of the wealthiest enterprises in the city,
Speaker 1: use the proceeds to hire security and police, contract cleaning companies,
Speaker 1: make infrastructural improvements, and fund their lobbying and marketing efforts.
Speaker 1: Portland alternative weekly will Emette Week recently reported that some
Speaker 1: funds collected from property owners for Clean and Safe are
Speaker 1: actually channeled to the Portland Business Alliance for staffing and
Speaker 1: administrative costs. In response, the p b A issued a
Speaker 1: statement defending its sharing of resources there are a few
Speaker 1: exemptions to the fees. Private public and nonprofit properties are
Speaker 1: liable via this arrangement, along with revenue from parking fees
Speaker 1: and special appropriations from the city's general fund. Portland's three
Speaker 1: e s d s together taken over eight million dollars
Speaker 1: per year, and no point is the public permittive voice
Speaker 1: in this process. The imposition of an E s D
Speaker 1: is a decision made exclusively by a business in collaboration
Speaker 1: with local governance. So already in dozens of American cities,
Speaker 1: local elites wealthy business owners are permitted to tax the
Speaker 1: public and deploy security forces without any accountability to voters.
Speaker 1: In twenty the Western Regional Advocacy Project or WRAP, a
Speaker 1: social justice organization, audited Portland's b I d s. They
Speaker 1: found that the city carried out almost no oversight, failing
Speaker 1: to review the annual budget, monitor the use of funds,
Speaker 1: or investigate complaints about violence by security officers. Quote cleanan
Speaker 1: safe pays the full salaries of four dedicated police officers.
Speaker 1: These are public employees invested with the power to carry
Speaker 1: out the full spectrum of policing actions while on the
Speaker 1: corporate payroll. An internal police memo reviewed by teen Vogue
Speaker 1: lays out the function of Clean and Safe officers. Clearly,
Speaker 1: the offers do make arrests to be responsive to businesses
Speaker 1: needs to conduct successful commerce in the downtown core area
Speaker 1: or allow people to use the sidewalk. These officers act
Speaker 1: in concert with the numerous security guards, some of whom
Speaker 1: are armed in a sty employ like those of Portland
Speaker 1: Patrol Inc. The largest Clean and Safe contractor. Private security
Speaker 1: guards surveil and rouse the unhoused right exclusion orders call
Speaker 1: in Clean and Safe police officers to issue citations and
Speaker 1: make arrests. City officials have argued that guard conduct is
Speaker 1: wholly unaccountable to the public, wrote the City Auditor. A
Speaker 1: district contract with a private security provider says that the
Speaker 1: city Police Commissioner currently the mayor, will obtain and review
Speaker 1: reports on security officers activities, including complaints against officers and
Speaker 1: the resulting investigations. We did not find evidence that this
Speaker 1: was done now. The impact of all this on marginalized
Speaker 1: people is startlingly clear. In parts of Portland outside downtown
Speaker 1: cleanan Safe, the average number of unhoused people arrested per
Speaker 1: square mile is six point one. Inside Clean and Safe,
Speaker 1: that number jumps to more than a hundred and thirty seven.
Speaker 1: This is because things that are often not in four
Speaker 1: wors to even treated as crimes elsewhere in Portland, are
Speaker 1: crimes in the b I D. These places can literally
Speaker 1: have their own justice systems. Up until one of these
Speaker 1: districts even had its own assistant district attorney whose salary
Speaker 1: was paid by private interests. This sort of anti democratic
Speaker 1: structure is exploding in popularity. In February of one, the
Speaker 1: governor of Nevada announced a plan to launch innovation zones
Speaker 1: to rejuvenate the state economy. From the A P quote,
Speaker 1: the zones would permit companies with large areas of land
Speaker 1: to form governments carrying the same authority as counties, including
Speaker 1: the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and courts,
Speaker 1: and provide government services. And of course, government services includes security.
Speaker 1: As the crumbles accelerate and more people slipped through the
Speaker 1: cracks and wind up desperate, the task of policing them
Speaker 1: will increasingly fall to private interests, empowered to act as
Speaker 1: unelected governments in the name of economic revitalization. It is
Speaker 1: a vicious cycle. The economy at contractions caused by environmental
Speaker 1: disaster and unrest reduce the capacity of local governments to
Speaker 1: serve citizens. This makes the case for innovation zones or
Speaker 1: business improvement districts easier to make over and over again.
Speaker 1: From California and Oregon to Nevada and beyond, we see
Speaker 1: the same story. Disasters are used to justify power grabs
Speaker 1: by the same kinds of people who for decades lobbied
Speaker 1: against action on climate change. Now that the consequences are here,
Speaker 1: they will divert their resources towards establishing their own boutique
Speaker 1: legal systems with their own boutique security forces to protect
Speaker 1: their comfort and keep you out. I haven't devoted nearly
Speaker 1: enough of this episode to the international situation by necessity,
Speaker 1: but we can and should draw a direct line to
Speaker 1: the climate refugees at the US border, facing tear gas
Speaker 1: and beatings and internment and concentration camps, and the violence
Speaker 1: being increasingly enacted by domestic political elites against US citizens.
Speaker 1: In June of one, news broke that South Dakota Governor
Speaker 1: Christie Nome had used a private donation to send fifty
Speaker 1: National Guard soldiers to the Texan border. The decision caused
Speaker 1: tremendous debate, but legal experts seemed to agree that it
Speaker 1: was in fact legal, although it had never been done before.
Speaker 1: Back in two thousand nineteen and the first season of
Speaker 1: It could happen Here I talked about Fucau's boomerang, the
Speaker 1: idea that tactics and weapons used to police imperial possessions
Speaker 1: inevitably rebound to police the subjects of the Imperial interior.
Speaker 1: I will tell you here and now that this will
Speaker 1: not be the last time private money sends National Guardsmen
Speaker 1: on a domestic mission, and the next time it happens,
Speaker 1: it may be considerably closer to your home.