Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 213

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer,

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Starting point is 00:00:53 If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast. about how freedom is a joke in our lives of the punchline, I am your host, Mia Wong. Long ago, 2013, in a galaxy basically exactly where this one is now, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and now a terminal fascist, purchased the Washington Post.

Starting point is 00:01:24 This was a sign of things to come. The danger of the American free press is, and has always been, that we do not have a free press, we have a capitalist press. Writing, and especially reporting, is a material product. Journalists have to eat, they have to travel, they have to go places, they have to meet people. All of this requires capital. And the problem with all of this requiring capital is that capital is not a neutral entity, and the people who possess capital have interests.

Starting point is 00:02:03 Fast forward to 2020, as protests and uprisings raised across the United States against the police and white supremacy, a battle broke out inside of the New York Times' newsrooms and editorial staff about the newspaper publishing an opinion piece called Send in the Troops, calling for, you guessed it, sending in the troops to attack protesters published by a member of the American governments named Tom Cotton.

Starting point is 00:02:34 Editors resigned in outrage, debates raised across journalist slacks. It was the culmination of decades of battles about the direction of politics and race in the United States, fought simultaneously in the streets and in the newsroom. 2020 was a significant danger to the ruling class. the actual ideology that was so dangerous it had to be destroyed was this. If the premise of 2020 is true, which is that the U.S. is a structurally racist country founded on slavery and genocide, and that reproduces those same violences through the prison system, which, you know, has legal slavery in it from the structure of the 13th Amendment, and reproduces

Starting point is 00:03:19 it again through the police, then the American project was is indefensible. And here there be dragons. The ruling class needed to move to stop it. And so they created what they would call, I guess, a new ideology, but was really a continuation of centuries-old strategies, this time rebranded as anti-woke. One of the avatars of Antioch was Barry Weiss.

Starting point is 00:03:50 Barry Weiss, was at the New York Times at the time, was an ideological diversity hire, which is to say affirmative action for white conservatives, as affirmative action has only existed in the figments of the minds of conservatives. She was given a cozy make-work job at the beginning of the Trump administration as an opinion staff editor and writer for the New York Times.

Starting point is 00:04:14 She was hired specifically to bring in more Trumpian figures into the opinion section. This is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, This is the fever dream of affirmative action in the conservative mind, right? And these are going to be a bunch of people who really hate affirmative action. But again, what they are being given, they are being handed by the most important newspaper, probably in the entire world. You know, she was handed a job because she was a fucking right-winger.

Starting point is 00:04:43 Now, Weiss was part of the, shall we say, conversations at the New York Times about, again, whether or not a newspaper should print a letter from a sitting U.S. representative, calling for the deployment of U.S. soldiers against the American people. And she saw this as an opportunity not to resist a obviously tyrannical program by, again, a sitting member of the United States government. She saw this as her moment to do a grift. Now, in this moment, she resigned from the New York Times in a huff, raving about out to the quote, lack of ideological diversity.

Starting point is 00:05:25 We had a giant rant about how the Twitter is not the masthead of the New York Times, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Which again, I can't emphasize this enough that he was brought in as a right-wing affirmative action hire in order to appease the demand from, like, the ruling class, I guess, for, like, pro-Trump people. They already had a bunch of right-wingers. This is completely unhinged. But, you know, she resigns, and she has this big, to her in the right-wing press trying to talk about how she was canceled.

Starting point is 00:05:56 And of course, none of this ever even happened, right? We can debate the effect to which cancellation ever was even really a thing or did anything at all, but she was not canceled. She literally resigned of her own free will. She was not forced out. She chose to leave in order to pursue a career as a right-wing griff for another fields, namely substack, where she ran a newsletter that was sort of rebranded as like, oh, it's a media outlet called the free press.

Starting point is 00:06:19 It's like, no, this is Barry Weiss's substack. Come on. What are we doing here? What are we doing here? Now, Weiss is not a journalist. She is a right-wing idea log. She's also a hardline Zionist. If you want to go into all of the absolutely unhinged shit that Barry Weiss has said and done over the years, all of the just unbelievably zalmophobic shit, all of the weird racist shit, all of the anti-immigrant shit that she said, there's a very good John Oliver thing about her. She is part of this story, but if we spent this entire episode

Starting point is 00:06:53 just talking about how much she fucking sucks, we would be here for like two decades? Now, in a just world, none of this would matter at all. This would just be a conservative walking off from the free job that she was given by the New York Times, stomping off at a huff and going to start a substack.

Starting point is 00:07:09 Whatever. Who cares? This is not a just world. This is the United States. she now controls one of the most powerful and important news organizations in the United States. The story of how she got there is the story of the future of the American media. Unfortunately for all of us, the story is a stressingly simple. Barry Weiss and her outlet, I'm using that in immense quotations again, this is just a substack, was bought out by one Larry Allison.

Starting point is 00:07:43 Larry Ellison, then appointed Weiss to be the ideological hatchet woman for his takeover of Paramount, which owns CBS. There was no secret plan. There was no weird strategy. There was no Illuminati cabal behind the scenes. It didn't require any effort at all. All you have to do in order to install a right-wing hack as the editor-in-chief of CBS News is by the company. The results have been devastating.

Starting point is 00:08:16 I would call what happened to resegregation. There was a large-scale firing of non-white employees. NBC eliminated the editorial teams for NBC Asian America, NBC Black, NBC Latino, and NBC Out. NBC Out was the queer one. They fired Gail King. They did some stuff that frankly sounds like a joke. I'm just going to read this quote from the root.

Starting point is 00:08:40 and the CBS News Bureau in Johannesburg, South Africa has been shut down, with coverage of Africa shifting to London. That is, again, they closed the South Africa Bureau, the Citizens' CVS Bureau in South Africa, and moved their coverage of Africa from Africa to London. If a hardline Marxist ideologue had written this in 1967, no one would have believed them. And in the process, what they've done here is they've destroyed,

Starting point is 00:09:10 the NBC outlets that were responsible for doing a whole bunch of coverage for different groups of non-white people, right? NBC BLK, it's NBC Black, did a whole bunch of very good coverage of the uprising in 2020, right? NBC Asian America did a bunch of good work. NBC Out was a place where you could occasionally find a trans person who was allowed to write. And all of that is gone because one man, Larry Allison, and his son, David Ellison, bought the fucking media company

Starting point is 00:09:41 and installed this unhinged right-wing hack as their ideological secret police. I don't even know what you would call this position, the ideological purge executor, I guess you could call it, of CBS. Now, obviously, there are multiple aspects to this. We'll talk about Larry Allison himself in a second because he is a very important figure.

Starting point is 00:10:08 But first, before we talk about the consolidation of capital into increasing monopolies, let's go hear from some of those monopolies. Product and services, let's go. We are so back. One of the obvious driving factors behind what has become a right-wing fascist takeover of the media has been the consolidation of capital

Starting point is 00:10:42 into increasing monopolies. Now, it's been a very, very famous thing in the U.S. to say that most of American media is controlled by five companies. But here's the thing. Even those five companies, those can always be consolidated into fewer and fewer companies, right? As the companies start to struggle, as any one of them sees weakness in the other ones,

Starting point is 00:11:04 you get attempts to buy them out. And this is what happens with Paramount, which is, again, the parent company that owns NBC. So the way that it's framed, if you read it in the press, Oh, it was a merger between Skydance, which was Ellison's sort of outlet and Paramount. But that's not really what happened. Really what happened was Paramount, like, was bought by Ellison and Skydance. They were merged together after that.

Starting point is 00:11:31 And this is a problem with the concentration of capital, right? As capital becomes increasingly more and more concentrated, and as there are individual people and also entities that control more and more capital, their ability to simply swallow the rest of their competition and consume it increases. And this is a significant advantage to the companies to get to swallow this capital. They get to absorb all of the intellectual property. So now they have control over the property regimes that allow them to control cultural production. And as a sort of incidental bonus, they can take control of the media.

Starting point is 00:12:08 Now, it's worth getting into the Ellisons themselves. Now, Larry Allison, back in the Halcyon days of 2020, was merely the 11th richest man in the world when he, quote, participated in a call shortly after the 2020 election that focused on strategies for contesting the legitimacy of the vote, according to court documents and a participant. The November 14th call included Lindsay Graham, Fox News host Sean Hannity, Jay Seckleau, an attorney for President Donald Trump, and James Bob Jr., an attorney for True. the vote, a Texas-based nonprofit, true of the vote was a completely unhinged organization dedicated to overturning the 2020 election by doing all these weird voter fraud things, and they had a strategy call, like their attorney in a strategy call with a bunch of Trump supporters, including one Larry Ellison. Now, again, that was back in 2020. Here in 2025, and now fighting with Elon Musk for the title of the richest person in the fucking world, Ellison said,

Starting point is 00:13:09 and I quote, we're going to have supervision. Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on. Now, in that intervening time, Larry Ellison is one of the people behind Oracle.

Starting point is 00:13:34 And Oracle has benefited enormously as a company that got really in on the cloud storage boom, they've benefited enormously from selling a bunch of shit to AI companies. Larry Ellison is also a huge AI supporter, a huge backer of AI, a huge someone who wants to spread AI and someone who wants to spread AI, you know, very specifically, and this is very important, into surveillance technology. He is also one of the people who, as 2020 went on and as the last half decade has come on,

Starting point is 00:14:07 and as the giant sort of backlash against the uprising and as his attempt to reassert racism as the dominant ideology of the United States, and to make sure that capitals hold over this country and that white supremacy's hold over this country would be maintained, he has become one of the large drivers of this entire project. He's not the only one. Jeff Bezos, as we started this program with, already owned the Washington post. In 2025, he went in to very seriously change it. Jeff Bezos on the now fascist Twitter, and we will get to that in a second too, wrote, and this was a letter that he was sent to his staff,

Starting point is 00:14:54 and this is the editorial section, I'm writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars, personal liberties and free markets. We'll cover other topics too, of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. David Shipley, who had been his handpicked editor, resigned rather than lead the effort. It's not like Shipley had been like a leftist, right? But, you know, I'm going to read another part of this letter. Quote, I offered David Shipley, who I admire greatly, because, you know, he was the hampeg guy, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that the answer wasn't hell yes, then it had to be no. After careful

Starting point is 00:15:39 consideration, David decided to step away. So, okay, what was actually happening here? He came in, was like, our board is not fascist enough, and if you're not going to make it more fascist, then get the fuck out of the way. And the guy he had picked to run the editorial board like three years ago went, this is unacceptable, I cannot be involved in this and left. And now, Washington Post publishes pieces with titles like, quote, Pam Bondi's welcome woke rollback. The Justice Department rescinds regulations encouraging racial preferences. You know, and you can in some ways see all of the things are coming together. Obviously, Bezos was a major supporter of the Trump administration, is a major supporter of the Trump administration, put a bunch of money into the unhinged Trump

Starting point is 00:16:27 ballroom. And when he says Justice Department rescinds regulations encouraging racial preferences, they're talking about anti-discrimination ordinances. Right. That's what they're actually talking about. But these people have been so cooked and have stewed so much in the ideology of countering the ideology of 2020 that they're now doing all of this reverse racism stuff where they think that if you're not allowed to discriminate, that's anti-white discrimination. And the Washington Post has been tanking effectively in the wake of a whole bunch of right-wing editorial changes

Starting point is 00:16:59 its audience has significantly declined since this a whole bunch of people who subscribed to the post called it in their subscriber count is just absolutely pitiful now the reach has been contracting the paper is going to shit but that doesn't matter

Starting point is 00:17:14 because the Washington Post is not a money-making outlet the Washington Post is a chance to shape the way that the country thinks It is better that, you know, seven people in Washington, D.C., who are all identically-minded conservatives, read the Washington Post and agree with it, than it is for there to be any sort of independence whatsoever from anything on the shop floor or from any of the people writing for it. We've also seen, in recent months, the elimination of teen folk. Conte Nass, Teen Fogue's parent company,

Starting point is 00:17:48 eliminated Team Vogue as an independent outlet. Teen Vogue had been the furthest left of the even sort of mainstream outlets in the U.S., it had carried a bunch of extremely good and radical work on race and gender. It was also one of the few outlets with consistent trans writing. And of course, the other aspect of all of these purges has been unbelievable on hint transphobia, and this was them just destroying what had been a very, very important outlet on the left for telling the stories of non-white people, telling the stories of workers, and telling the stories of trans people, and they just destroyed it, even though, and this is actually very interesting, ever since Teen Vogue had shifted to doing a bunch of leftist coverage and covering the

Starting point is 00:18:33 protests against Donald Trump in his first administration, and had gone towards actually, you know, talking about labor and talking about struggle, talking about unions and talking about, you know, the experiences of people living under white supremacy. Its readership had exploded, But again, that doesn't matter because it's bad for Donald Trump. And so, we're seeing the ideological tightening consolidation of the media as what had been an outlet that allowed people to talk about shit was just destroyed. Now, speaking about outlets, destroying things ideologically, hey, products and services, please don't destroy us. Now, as we covered on this show a few weeks ago, Condi Nast also fired several union workers legally for, you know, staging a, again, protected workplace action

Starting point is 00:19:35 demanding to know what the fuck was going on with these Dean Vogue firings. And that's another aspect of all of this takeover, which is that these outlets just viciously and radically hate, and this is the ruling classes, people who run these outlets, viciously hate unions.

Starting point is 00:19:53 And this is something that's very important to understand in terms of media unions because media unions were also a very powerful force for encouraging diversity. Because, as it turns out, workers, and this is true, I could say this is someone who's part of a media union, less racist than the bosses, and in fact would like there to be more non-white people

Starting point is 00:20:12 and don't like it when non-white people are discriminated against, and this is one of the things that these media unions and that unions in general do is try to help you not get fucking discriminated against on racial grounds. So of course, a part and parcel of this has been the targeting of the union, and that's what we've been seeing at Conte Nass, where they also fired work who had nothing to do with Teen Vogue, and also one of whom was on the show and is trans, and you should go listen to that episode because it's very good.

Starting point is 00:20:39 But that's another aspect of this right-wing consolidation, is that media unions are able to push back against the untrammeled power of these fascist billionaires to turn news coverage into whatever the fuck they want. And that's what's happened at CBS, where they're now doing giant specials with, like, Kirk's widow, and all of these just absolutely deranged, unbelievably bizarre right-wing pieces

Starting point is 00:21:06 that they're just sort of airing now. And in order to stop that shit, you need powerful media unions, and this is one of the things the ruling class is trying to crush. Now, it's also worth mentioning that these white-wing billionaires are trying to consolidate their hold

Starting point is 00:21:22 on social media as well as the traditional media. And obviously, the largest example of this is Elon Musk, who's purchased Twitter and has effectively termed Twitter into another arm of stormfront. It is a just unhinged stew of racism and conspiracy

Starting point is 00:21:39 that is now effectively unusable if you don't want like the most racist shit you've ever seen in your entire life, just in every single one of your replies. And it's also become a major, you know, vector of targeting for the Trump administration

Starting point is 00:21:53 where what Twitter is used for now instead of being a platform that at one time actually was able to play a role as a thing that does resistance, as a tool of protesters and as a tool of people who opposed, you know, the untrampled rule of billionaires. It's now been converted into just racist slop and a way to track down anyone who's sort of vaguely centered left and just put them in the eyes of the administration so they can be targeted by the state. And it's also worth noting that one of the people who helped bankroll the purchase of Twitter, because Elon Musk

Starting point is 00:22:27 couldn't just purchase it directly, was one Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison is also part of a massive attempt to buy TikTok. Listeners of the show are probably familiar with the whole extremely weird story about how TikTok was banned last year under the Biden administration, sort of bafflingly, and Trump sort of just broke the law and made it still be usable, but has been trying to force TikTok to be sold to American buyers and the conglom. bummer that's supposed to buy it is a Larry Ellison thing, so he's also attempting to buy TikTok. And finally, the story we were to close on is that Larry Ellison has been doing a

Starting point is 00:23:09 hostile takeover bid of Warner Brothers. Now, Warner Brothers currently is set to be bought by Netflix, Larry Ellison kept on submitting bids to them, and his efforts to actually get the purchase to go through were consistently denied. But, comma, in the wake of that, they're attempting to do a hostile takeover bid where they just go to the shareholders directly and try to buy them out at what they claim is a higher share price. I'm not going to go into that whole thing. It's a fiasco. But what is interesting for our purposes is that David Ellison, who's the guy running Paramount, who's the guy who's been directly running the ideological purges, has met several times with Trump. And last time they met Trump has promised that he would change the coverage of CNN in order to make it better for Trump.

Starting point is 00:23:56 Now, it's also worth noting that buying CNN is not part of the deal for the Warner takeover bid by Netflix, right? If Netflix takes over Warner Bros, they don't get CNN. Under Paramount and Larry Ellison's deal, they would get CNN. Now, even though CNN has done a whole bunch of unhand shit, like having Ben Shapiro on to do fucking election coverage, Jesus fucking Christ, okay? Trump has still been mad at them for reporting even a tiny bit critically about his administration? And Trump has been kind of refusing to pick a side directly in terms of the takeover bid for Warner Brothers and the fight between Netflix and Paramount. But he's now said that he wants to make sure that CNN is sold and that it should get new leadership, presumably along the style of what happened with CBS.

Starting point is 00:24:45 And so this is sort of the final phase of all of this, right? Which is Trump administration has the ability to use its quote unquote antitrust power in order to stop. one of these two companies from doing this buyout. And the Trump administration is using the fact that the media is being bought out by his allies in order to try to get people to buy CNN and simply eliminate negative news coverage of him. And I don't really think I need to explain why it's extremely bad that the president of the United States could simply order a news outlet to be bought out and then suddenly it's bought out. I think it's kind of self-explanatory why that's unbelievably bad, but that is the situation that we may rapidly find ourselves in because we don't

Starting point is 00:25:32 live in anything that even sort of looks like a democracy. We live in the dictatorship of capital. And a thing about the press under a dictatorship, even one that's as decentralized as the dictatorship of capital, is that one particularly fascist faction of capital can simply roll in by the media and take control of it. And that's the project that we're seeing now. But these people are not undefeatable. We beat them before, we can't beat them again. And in some ways, their project is kind of self-defeating in that they have spent a significant amount of time hollowing out people's trust in these institutions. And there is an extent to which, as bad as all of this is, they may simply be taking control of a husk that they had already caused a rot from the inside. And meanwhile,

Starting point is 00:26:21 all of this, all of this control of the media that they've been taking has not stopped everyone from fucking hating them. And that's the note that I want to leave everyone here on. It doesn't matter how much of the media these people buy. Everyone still hates them. We can fight them, and we can win. Welcome to Jacob Appet here, a podcast that boldly asked the question, what if a whole bunch of your life wasn't controlled by the bizarre whims of random dictators?

Starting point is 00:27:02 This is your host, Mia Wong. And the last time we saw the Blue Bottle Union, they had staged a walkout treated eclipse. Now they are back again to talk about union shit. And yeah, with me is Alex Pine, who's the president of Blue Bottle Union

Starting point is 00:27:21 and Abby Sado, the secretary treasurer. Yeah, both of you too. Welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks for having us both back on. Yes, thank you so much. Yeah, I'm really excited to talk about this because the last one, I've got to say, that was one of the absolute funniest

Starting point is 00:27:37 you did these I've ever heard. Yeah, I still can't get over how DHS got called on us when we tried to file for our election. So what inch? Like, I feel like this is one of the things about doing the show is like, I'm like about to be five years into this, right? It's like, you think you've seen it all? And then just like, no, just the most unhinged bullshit you've ever heard in your entire life because like just like the capacity for cruelty and inventiveness of bosses is effectively

Starting point is 00:28:02 infinite. So they can always find some bullshit the poll that you've never seen before. And they love to do it too. Yeah. This is one of the reasons why we unionized to begin with is just because bosses can be petty tyrants. Yeah. And sometimes it seems like the only reason that they got into being a boss is because they want to be a petty tyrant but don't have the soul for politics. Anyways, yeah, we unionized last May for anybody that's unaware.

Starting point is 00:28:30 Bluebottle is a so-called specialty coffee chain that is owned entirely by Nestle. Yes, that one. that everyone regards as white as being evil. Yeah. See an extremely long episode that I did, for example, about Nestle, chocolate, child labor. It's great. It's child slave labor.

Starting point is 00:28:48 Good stuff. We love capitalism. And their coffee business is truly no better. Yeah. I mean, this is going to get wildly off topic before we even begin, but if anybody looks up the NGO coffee watch, they do a lot of great reporting and research on the supply chains of coffee, specifically Nestle's and Starbucks's, and it's all very ugly stuff.

Starting point is 00:29:10 But Blue Bottle. Blue Bottle is the specialty coffee chain owned by Nestle. We unionized all six of their Greater Boston locations in May of 2024. And this year, we added four locations in the East Bay area to our union in July. Hell yeah. Yeah. We also just concluded a multi-day strike as an independent union at the end of November, so Black Friday.

Starting point is 00:29:33 Hell yeah, hell yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so let's talk about that strike. Well, actually, I guess, okay, we should probably do the run-up to what has been happening until we got to that strike. I'm getting strike excited.

Starting point is 00:29:46 This is how I've been in my mind since September is just how do we make a strike happen? Hell yeah, hell yeah. Yeah, let's talk about, like, what the sort of lead-up stuff to the action were, and let's talk about, like, yeah, what expanding was like. Yeah, Abby, do you want to talk about the lead-up? Yeah, so, since,

Starting point is 00:30:05 Once we unionized last May, we've had multiple staged walkouts in September of last year. One of our union reps at the Harvard Square location was unjustly fired. So we did a walkout over her termination. We did a walkout in January of this past year after Blue Bottle completely refused to negotiate with us over the renovation of the Prudential Center. And a lot of employees were going to be losing out on almost $8 in tips an hour. which is just hundreds of dollars a month. And the company was like, oh, well, we bargained to an impasse,

Starting point is 00:30:40 so we're just going to do whatever we want. Jesus Christ. We were like, okay, well, that's not how this works. No. Yeah, and then in May of this year, we did another walkout when they made the same argument that we bargained towards impasse when they tried to install security cameras.

Starting point is 00:30:55 For anybody that's wondering, no, the cafes in Boston did not have cameras in them for the entire time that we were organizing or unionized until we began negotiating the installation of cameras as part of our contract. When they felt like they were done talking about cameras with us, they declared impasse, which they can't do because we were negotiating it as part of the contract. So they would have had to get to an impasse on the entire contract before doing it.

Starting point is 00:31:21 And their lawyer basically said, well, we weren't getting anywhere with that. So we're going to do it anyways. Oh, God. Labor law is so fun because it's like, Like every boss breaks like 100 million labor laws a second and then kind of nothing happens unless you force it to. Speaking of breaking weird labor laws, since we unionized one nice thing that has happened was until May of this year, they were negotiating over serious discipline. So final written warnings or terminations with us.

Starting point is 00:31:54 In effect, what this means is that they would sit down with us and just talk about why they felt like terminating someone was just. until they said we're not going to do anything else aside from fire them. But because of an NLRB ruling with Starbucks at the end of April, their lawyer said that they were done with that and they felt that they had no legal obligation to continue doing it. Oh, fun. Yeah, which is a break from past practice. And we have been writing them committing to negotiating over serious discipline with us. So less than a week after they say, we're not going to bargain over discipline with you anymore. They fire one co-worker of ours and our store immediately

Starting point is 00:32:34 walked out over it. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Which, yeah, I continue to be proud of that walkout specifically because it wasn't planned and because it was over something that is pretty technical labor law-wise, just the fact that they didn't negotiate over the termination. That rocked. That's like

Starting point is 00:32:50 girl who's read a bunch of weird labor history. This thing feels like a thing for fucking weird labor history. The thing it reminds me of is there was this thing in, I think it was Zirigora. in Spain, like the 20s and 30s where it was like this hyper-bilative

Starting point is 00:33:03 like union like labor town but they had a whole thing where they refused to strike over like improving economic conditions because they were like this is bourgeois reformism and they would

Starting point is 00:33:13 oddly strike over political stuff hell yeah but if you arrested like one person like the whole fucking city would go out and it's like this rule yeah no we can just call us

Starting point is 00:33:24 we can just fucking instantly get a get a fucking walk out to happen over just like over like them fucking with like kind of technical labor stuff like this rocks we love to see it. Yeah, I was on the floor that day that our co-worker was fired. And I remember I went on my 10 minute break after she was fired.

Starting point is 00:33:42 There's like a pond behind our store. And I was literally throwing rocks into the pond. And I was like, this sucks so bad. And I'm so angry. And then I was like, wait, we're unionized. Hell yeah. I was like, wait a minute. We had a union.

Starting point is 00:33:54 And I go back into the store and I was like, hey, guys, if we don't walk out right now, then what is the point? And everyone was like, yeah, actually, if we don't walk out right now, what is the point? Hell yeah, hell yeah. And then we all walked out. And it was really beautiful, actually. That's so sick. That's so beautiful.

Starting point is 00:34:11 I don't know. There's some kind of metaphor for like you walking in being like the first, the rock hitting the pond and the first ripples going out and the whole thing. Oh, absolutely. Doing the strike. But like, that's, I don't know. That's gorgeous. I love it. That fucking rules.

Starting point is 00:34:26 Congratulations. Hell yeah. One of my favorite things to say is that. union is friendship and friendship is unions. And when your friend gets fired, you should be able to walk out. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck that.

Starting point is 00:34:38 Like, seriously. Yeah. And on the whole, we've had a, I think, pretty successful year, especially because I want to stress this, we're independent. So for all the walkouts that we've done, we've been able to replace the wages of baristas. Oh, that's really sick.

Starting point is 00:34:52 If anybody listening to this wants to help us be able to do more walkouts, you can go to tiny URL.com forward slash barristers. BBIU dash strike. We'll be in the description. Hell yeah. Because at this point, the companies realize that they can't break our solidarity in any meaningful way by resorting to scare tactics or delaying. And so now they've just resorted to straight up firing people because it's kind of like

Starting point is 00:35:17 a break glass here in case of emergency thing where they're like, we're all out of ideas. What do we do? Yeah. It's just trying to fire everyone. And that's what they've done. Yeah. Most recently, all the stories. in both Boston and the East Bay area went on a four-day strike this November because the company

Starting point is 00:35:36 illegally fired Abby executive board member named Nora and an organizer of ours in the East Bay named Ashley for all incredibly petty reasons. I don't know if you want to speak more to why you were fired Abby. Yeah. So on the record, I was fired because I wore green pants. What? I wore green pants. I wore green pants. Like, three weeks prior to me being fired. And let me tell you, there's nothing worse than waking up at 4.30 to go to your opening shift at your stupid cafe job to then clock in and be immediately hit with separation forms because you wore green pants three weeks ago. What? You must understand what a serious infraction it is to wear green pants, of course. I mean, clearly, the green pants that I've

Starting point is 00:36:25 been wearing for the better part of two years. Yeah. Firing Abby was generous, actually. She should been put to death for the crime of wearing green pants, of course. Most likely. This is some, like, this is some, like, fucking medieval. Like, yeah, you pissed off the monarch by, like, you wore a color of pants that was, like, unfavorable to the eye of the king, and now he's, like, having you drawn in corner. Like, what is this bullshit?

Starting point is 00:36:47 Like, yep, I wore green pants in front of my manager, therefore I should not be able to make my rent. Yeah, it's absolute gibberish. That might be the all-time dumbest firing reason I've ever. heard? Like, what is the thing? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's just so egregious because the managers know that I have a great rapport with all my co-workers. I'm friends with all of my coworkers. And they were like, hmm, how can we, you know, make one of our longstanding employees who is good at their job, you know, get fired. So green pants was the reasoning. And just like, the idea of your employer

Starting point is 00:37:26 being able to control what color of pants you wear is, like, is a thing that just on a fundamental level would not be accepted with any other kind of authority. That's, everybody immediately recognizes, wait, what the fuck?

Starting point is 00:37:38 That's completely unhinged. Why should someone have the ability to tell you, like, no, you have to wear this color pants or you can't pay your rent and you can't eat? Oh, yeah. No. And this is kind of the despotism of management

Starting point is 00:37:50 that we were just talking about, isn't it? Yeah. And this is the thing that in bargaining sessions for a contract, their side is very interested in maintaining. We've said multiple times that we want a better just code policy, or at the very least, we don't want to waive our right to be able to wear union memorabilia on the floor. And because he doesn't have any better ideas, their lawyer can only think to shoot that down by talking about how he doesn't, you know, wear his sexuality on his shirt or...

Starting point is 00:38:18 What? Yeah, yeah. Well, because he was like, why don't you want to be able to waive your right to wear union memorabilia on the floor? and we said, we want to be able to show pride that we are unionized and we want to be able to have more freedom for expression. Uh-huh. Because it's despotic to be able to have that level of control over what somebody does. Yeah. And then he said, you know, well, I don't wear my sexuality on my shirt and then realized that it was maybe inappropriate to say that.

Starting point is 00:38:43 So then he talked about how he doesn't wear his daughters on his shirt. Which is a more convoluted point. Yeah. What? Well, because he's proud of his kids, I guess. What are we doing here? Come on. We've got to have better arguments than this.

Starting point is 00:39:01 Like, oh. No, this guy is really full of bad arguments. If you, yeah, if you want to hear bad arguments, you should sit down on the bargaining session where their lawyer goes on kind of incomprehensible tirades about how the free market in the aggregate will make sure that the best person will get promoted over time or that the company will become more profitable or run with the most efficiency as an enterprise

Starting point is 00:39:26 because anything else would be illogical because they wouldn't produce more profit. But what does that have to do with labor? Yeah. There's actually, this is... Okay, so when I know who's a lawyer once told me that, like, the... This is not, like, a leftist. This is just, like, she's just, like, a corporate lawyer once told me that this, like, the actual secret basis that doesn't exist of all corporate law is that there is actually nothing in the law that

Starting point is 00:39:50 says a company has to make more money, or they even have the right to make money? Like, that doesn't exist. Like, that's not a, that's not a thing. Like, there's no, you don't actually have a legal right to make more money. Like, you simply don't. That's just, that's not how this works. The thing it reminds me of is, the anthropologist David Graber wrote about, I think you might have been quoting someone else, but I can't remember who was quoting,

Starting point is 00:40:22 but he writes about how the relationship between sort of eloquence and violence, where the less you have, and this isn't somewhere in the utopia of rules. He writes about how, you know, people who have access to violence to compel people to do something. You don't even have to speak the same language as someone, right? You can just point a gun at them and, you know, they have to obey you because, you know, they have force, right? But the less ability you have to actually use force to get someone to do something, right? So if you're a village chief in, there's actually a lot of indigenous tribes that were like this, but, you know, you're in like sort of the Northeast and you don't actually have the ability to compel people to do things. So if you want people

Starting point is 00:41:06 to go work in the morning, you have to like get up and make a giant show of like, oh, I'm getting up to work in the morning. Everyone follow me. Wow, look at how hard I'm working. And you have to like convince them through oratory. And, you know, this is like why all these people, when Europeans run into them, everyone is like, holy shit, these are like these are the best orders of ever encountered because they have to be. Right. But the more power you have, the less eloquence you have to have, which I think it's like, you know, this is like a Donald Trump thing, right? It's like, yeah, what's, once you've reached this point in the process, you know, you can just compel people to do things through violence. You can just, like, talk like a fourth grader, and it's

Starting point is 00:41:41 fine, and it doesn't matter because you just have violence. And that's what this reminds me of, of like, oh, we're the company. Like, we have, like, we're fucking owned by Nestle. We have all this money. We don't have to make compelling arguments. We just have to, like, have power. Yeah, I mean, pretty much. Personally, it reads to me as, it's like a way to delay actually talking about any of our demands at the table because if you just eat up all the time, then there's no time to talk. Yeah, yeah. But that's also really beautiful to think about from a more abstract sense.

Starting point is 00:42:11 Yeah. Well, also, just companies love fucking with negotiations. It's awful. I should just start asking everyone who does negotiations about this, but on average, how late are you other managers to show up to meetings? I would say that actually both sides are equally late. Um, well, to the negotiations at least. Just because getting around the city is so difficult.

Starting point is 00:42:36 Oh, oh, so that's like a transit thing, not like a, um... Wait, no, no, we're not deliberately showing up, Lee, as far as I know. Yeah, you're just, you're just, like, in traffic. Yeah. But there, shouldn't they already just be there? Oh, yeah, well, because this is something that's actually been a delay tactic for them is they insist that we need to split the cost equally of a, bargaining space.

Starting point is 00:42:59 What? What? And again, we're independent, so they know that we can't on a regular basis commit to that. So if you want to donate to our unions, that way we can pay to sit down in front of these people. That's completely on it. Yeah. Having to have the union pay, I've never heard of that before. That's completely deranged.

Starting point is 00:43:19 That's what? And we've even waived our right to meet in a neutral space. Uh-huh. So we've asked if they would be willing to meet in the office of their legal representation or if they'd be willing to meet in the office of our legal representation. And they've said no to both because supposedly despite being the second largest union avoidance firm in the world, they've said that their office doesn't have adequate space to hold us. But then rental space in the city is so fucking expensive that there's no feasible way to rent a space for eight hours for two days, you know, once a month. Yeah. Which is meant that we've ended up in some strange places.

Starting point is 00:43:59 So college conference rooms, city hall, we work. What? Yeah. We work? I know. This is pretty dark. This is the most deeply unsurious company I have ever encountered. Like, there's all kinds of things like that that they've employed in the past year to attempt us making significant progress with negotiating.

Starting point is 00:44:24 And it wasn't until. November this year that they finally gave us a counter on economics after we told them we would file a bad faith bargaining charge if they didn't. Hell yeah. Do you want to guess what their counter? So for reference, our union's requesting $30 an hour for Bristas because that's a living wage, according to the MIT living wage calculator. Do you want to guess what Blue Bottle said they would give us? 18? No. Well, actually, strangely yes. They said right now we make 18 an hour, but they said they'll keep it the same and they want to retain the rate to change it whenever they want. They're making a floor.

Starting point is 00:45:02 They're committing to a floor that they... I then tried to ask if they've ever, in their history, decreased wages. And they're like, no, I don't see why we would ever do that. And I'm like, oh, so then this floor is bullshit, actually. Their baseline for negotiations is our starting position is nothing. Yeah. And this is a year after negotiating with them so far. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:45:24 It's like a year. It's like, okay. Like, I mean, at that point, it's like, yeah, I don't know. Like, our starting position is we should have your house. Like, this is like, equally, like, come on. Like, you having their house is a more reasonable demand than our basic negotiating position is nothing. Like, what are we doing here? No idea.

Starting point is 00:45:47 Just, God. Yeah, I mean, insert obligatory line here about how after you win an election, the most common way for you need to fail is, bargaining the first contracting companies know this, so they will just do bullshit for several years to attempt to not have you get a contract. It sucks. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck them. It's their whole strategy.

Starting point is 00:46:05 I mean, the whole like union avoidance of it all. Is they're just trying to like wait us out and then fire people who are involved and just like, in their words, like let turnover do its natural work. But it's like, isn't this specialty coffee? Don't you want people who are good at their jobs? I've watched some of my new coworkers pull a shot that I wouldn't feed to a dog. Like, I've seen her manager do the same. Oh, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:46:31 Why? Look, you can't expect managers to know how to do things. That's not their job. My manager, let me tell you. I used to have to open with her like three times a week. And she has this very beautiful habit of as she's dialing espresso. And also she does this while she's counting cash. She will have her phone open on TikTok and then scroll through.

Starting point is 00:46:53 I have this one horrific memory. It was 6 a.m. And she was going through an entire TikTok story time series for 45 minutes. And the whole story time was going on. And every time it was an introduction of like, I don't even remember what it was about. I think it was like, she was like, oh, this is my story of being like a mob boss's wife. And I had to listen to that for 45 minutes while opening. Yeah, I think you should, you should legally be allowed to have her car.

Starting point is 00:47:20 I think I should have her house, probably. Yeah, that too. Yes. It's like our starting demand is to more you, every time you piss us off, we get another one of your houses. For every TikTok watched on the clock, that's a dollar towards me per hour. Yeah. What are we doing here? They're owned by Nestle, but I don't think that there's enough money in the world that would be able to give you that, Abby.

Starting point is 00:47:44 I'm so sorry. I know. I don't think I'll ever receive fair compensation. You'd really piss off the modern monetary theory people because they'd be like, no, even we can't account for this. No one can account for the emotional damage. We ran out of data in our Federal Reserve database. Oh, God. To recap, so in the past year, we've done multiple walkouts,

Starting point is 00:48:09 unionized four locations in the East Bay Area, and then after Abby was fired for bullshit reasons, along with two other organizers, we went on a four-day strike, which included both cities, and we've done this entirely as an independent union. Union against a company that is owned by Nestle. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:48:26 And interestingly, just because I'd be remiss to not mention this, the day that we ended our strike, there was an article published in Reuters, which was the most vibe-based reporting that I've ever seen, where it said, Nestle explores sale of blue bottle coffee sources say, where there's three unnamed sources. Incredible.

Starting point is 00:48:46 That all say that Nestle is considering or looking into selling blue bottle coffee. But interestingly, says here, Quote, one source said Nestle could decide to sell the cafes but retain the brand's intellectual property to continue selling the products. And quote, what are we doing here? This is like... Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:49:05 I mean, it's interesting as a tell because personally I think it's just a scare tactic. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I could consider walking into traffic. I could be looking into my options for how fast a car would hit me. But that doesn't mean anything. Union considering expropriating the mansion. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:49:21 Nestle's CEOs, like, we're in an exploratory committee the sources say? Yeah, I don't think they'd publish that in writers, but it's interesting that they would even say that because, like, the entire value that Blue Bottle offers Nestle is to be able to put the brand

Starting point is 00:49:38 onto, you know, Nespressopods or whatever. And also just very weird timing with the strike ending the same day it comes out. Yep, yep, yep. They are so scared. They really are. scared shitless and they don't know what to do about it and they're breaking glass left and right trying to maintain power. But it's like Alex said earlier, like the solidarity that we have

Starting point is 00:50:02 between our coworkers, it just cannot be broken by management. And even after they fired me and two of our other organizers, people still went out on the picket line. We kept five out of the six cafes closed in Boston and the only reason one of them could stay open is because all of the managers banded together to keep the Prudential Center open. I would hate to know. I was going to say, I don't think a single latte went out correctly that day, but hey, you know, at least they could still collect their $9 per latte. So if you got food poisoning on the dates of the strike for going to this getting served manager coffee.

Starting point is 00:50:44 If you had a bad experience during the strike at the Prudential Center. Just know that that was not union-made coffee, and we would never do that to you. I think it's really beautiful that, yeah, y'all just kept fucking doing this, even though they're just doing this bullshit constantly. And it's like, no, we're just going to keep fighting them. And they're going to get so scared that they're leaking to the press that we're thinking about selling the thing. Like, we're a lot further along than I thought we would ever get. I thought they were going to fire us the day after we did the first walkout last year, which is, you know, I thought all the more reason to try then.

Starting point is 00:51:31 Yeah. But really, it's not tough for people that we work with to realize that they're getting a bad deal. And that the reason that the job sucks is because they don't get paid enough to live in the city. Like, I think most baristas at Blue Bottle see something like 60% of their income going towards rent. Because... Jesus. Yeah, we did a survey on this. Let me double check to make sure that I have the...

Starting point is 00:51:57 Facts right, but yeah, this is from, you know, March, so it's a little bit old data. We'll do another survey soon, but most blue bottle baristas are rent burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on rent. The median rent paid by Blue Bottle employees being $1,0.45, which is the equivalent of 150 Noralane-style ice coffees. It's one of the best-selling drinks they have. Yeah, no, I know. For 150 NOLUS, you too can pay the median rent paid by a barista. Oh my God. And then on average, it's, sorry, 46% of their income going towards rent with roughly a third of baristas paying over 60%.

Starting point is 00:52:34 Oh my God. We told all these facts to their lawyer at a bargaining session, and he just said that maybe the reason that we were all struggling to make ends meet was because we were paying for too many streaming services. Yeah, I know. Like, it's entirely, he knows this bullshit. Did they just get like a right-way shit poster to be their lawyer? Like, is this like, is this like, fucking, like, is this like the fail-sun clone of Rudy Giuliani? Like, is this space going to start melting off? What are we doing here?

Starting point is 00:53:05 Like, come on. I wish I could tell you. I don't know what their strategy with saying obviously false things is, but they love to do it. It's so great. You know, okay, fuck it. I'm going to, I'm going to read this quote. I was going to use this for a different episode and I did it. So, all right.

Starting point is 00:53:25 All right, fuck it. This is, I'm going to read this line from Dan Olson's documentary in search of Flat Earth, which is like probably the best thing that's ever been done about Flat Earth. Because they believe that power belongs to those with the greatest will to take it. And what greater sign of will than the ability to overwrite the truth? Their will is a hammer they are using to beat reality into a shape of their choosing. A simple world where reality is exactly what it looks like through their eyes, devoid of complexity, devoid of change, where they are right and their enemy, are silent. They are trying to build

Starting point is 00:53:57 a flat earth. That's just this shit. They're just like, no, fuck you. We can say whatever the fuck we want because we take the way, because this is the expression of just power. Even though we know that we're lying and you know that you're lying.

Starting point is 00:54:13 I mean, if you want to talk about expression of power, you should read their management's rights clause. Sorry, their so-called management's rights clause. Oh, God. Let me see if I can pull that up. So just to clarify, so management's rights is a clause that can be found in some union contracts because of collaborationists within unions in the 50s deciding that they actually didn't want to go for complete worker control of the means of production.

Starting point is 00:54:40 They just wanted to collaborate with management in order to get a better deal for wages. I'm not going to comment on the history of that, but that's why they feel like they can include this in negotiations right now. We haven't agreed to any management's rights. But, quote, is agreed that the management of the companies, business and the direction of its working forces are vested exclusively in the company and that the company retains all rights that it had before the execution of this agreement unless a rate is clearly contracted away in this agreement by language that is specific and unambiguous.

Starting point is 00:55:06 These retained company rights include, but are not limited to the following examples. The right to direct and supervise the work of its employees. The right to hire, promote, demote, transfer, and to discipline or discharge employees. The right to create or eliminate jobs and to determine wage rates for newly created or materially modified jobs. The right to determine training requirements and provide training to employees. the right to uniform and attire standards, the right to plan, direct, and control operations,

Starting point is 00:55:28 the right to determine products to be sold, services, and products to be procured, used, and or distributed, the right to determine the type and quantity of machines' equipment, location of cafes, the right to determine the amount and quality of work needed, the right to determine schedules of cafe operations, the right to determine the number of employees needed, the right to determine the work schedule of employees, the right to lay off employees or relieve employees from work

Starting point is 00:55:50 because of lack of work, the right to discontinue or introduce new or improved methods, operating practices, and cafes, the right to change the content of jobs and the qualification for such jobs, and the right to establish, modify, and enforce work, rules of conduct or policies, and discipline employees who violate such rules or policies, the right to establish, modify. Oh, Jesus Christ. I'm losing my... Enforce. I haven't read this in a while, and I forgot how bad it is. Wow. Oh, God. Because basically what they're saying is, we want to be able to control everything that you do, and this is our... They never... say where they believe this right comes from, they don't make, like, an argument from naturalism

Starting point is 00:56:27 where, like, we are vested by the universal power of management to be able to do this. They don't make any historical argument for it where, oh, this is, you know, because of the contracts that have been negotiated since the 50s, something that's fairly standard, and we think that we have the right to because of, like, longstanding precedent. They just think that they should be able to control fucking everything. Yeah. Which is not unsurprising for Nestle. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think there's a lot of, a very, very abstract theoretical debate you run into, if you're like, instead of doing shit, you're like in theory circles about like, oh, is like, is capital its own autonomous entity?

Starting point is 00:57:04 Or is it like a thing that's like constantly in like relation to like the actions of workers? And it's like, okay, read something like this. And it's like, oh no, they are so worried that they're going to have to react to what their workers are doing that they and they are already doing this, right? Like this is, you know, you know, this is, this goes back to the whole, like, where it's leaking to the media, we're going to sell the company, ooh, thing that they're doing where it's like, no, actually, like, these people are so not like easily, but if you are organized at all,

Starting point is 00:57:37 it becomes so clear to them that they actually, oh no, wait, hold on, they're responding to us. Like, they're not just purely the only thing they gets to, like, drive history forward and decide literally everything about your life. The moment you, like, try to clove it away from them, they see how fragile it is. And they're like, no, no, no, no. Actually, we got to spell out the fact that we get to fucking dress you

Starting point is 00:57:57 and whatever clothes we want you to wear. And it's like, okay, this is like a thing that only exists if you do not resist them at all. But like, no, if you fucking fight them, they have to fucking write all this shit down that they think they've always been able to do. And it's ridiculous. And to hear it all in a bullet form, like, literally just a bullet list, like every single aspect of my life and everything that I've ever loved or. thought was important to me in a list of what they think they can control. It's just crazy. And then

Starting point is 00:58:26 we have to go back and say, okay, well, do you see how off base you are? Yeah. And then they make us sound like the crazy ones for wanting to live a good life and be able to like, you know, make ends meet. Pay less than 60% of our income towards rent. Yeah. Yeah. Take a vacation maybe. Yeah. One other thing that I think is a great point about how it's actually capital response. to the organization of baristas, people, workers, whatever, is they haven't done it recently, but last summer, they sent a very long-winded and angry email about all the bargaining updates and press that the union was getting.

Starting point is 00:59:06 They're so mad at me that I'm good at my job. And then this past summer, after we did two walkouts in fairly quick succession in response to two different things, they attempted to accuse us of an intermittent striking. just because they were so scared. They didn't know what else to do to try and be like,

Starting point is 00:59:25 you didn't own me, I'm not mad. Please don't put in the news that I'm mad. Their lawyer even said in a bargaining session later on that he had a less than 75% chance of ever winning that argument at the board. Oh my God. But they were just so mad that we walked out twice in May that they tried to claim that it was unprotected,

Starting point is 00:59:45 but that they were being benevolent by not disciplining anyone for it. Oh, my God. and they haven't really given much of a response to our multi-day strike yet, aside from their lawyer emailing us earlier this week to ask us for our entire legal justification for why the terminations of Abby, Nora, and Ashley were illegal, and what legal justification do we have to say that they're negotiating a contract in bad faith? Mm-hmm.

Starting point is 01:00:15 Which is like the NLRA? Yeah. Yeah. Like, what are we doing here? Oh, God. Yeah, so what's coming up next for you all? What's the next stage? If you or anybody that you know,

Starting point is 01:00:29 either works at a blue bottle or wants to apply to a blue bottle to help organize it, please reach out to us by email at bluebottle union at gmail.com. If you want to support our independent unionism and help us remain independent and be able to go on multiple day strikes, which clearly piss off our Nestle overlords, you can donate to us

Starting point is 01:00:48 at tiny URL.com forward slash BBIU dash strike. Unless or until we have a contract or they reinstate Abby, Nora, Ashley, and fingers crossed, hopefully not myself. We're calling on a boycott of all blue bottle coffee products. I have no idea what the overlap between it could happen here. Listeners and blue bottle customers is. You'd be surprised. But, no, I'm sure. There's a lot of them out there.

Starting point is 01:01:15 I don't know. Well, judging by the shit I have heard from our listeners. I love you all. Some of you are on some wild shit and some of you are not the people you would expect to be. So... Yeah, so don't buy BlueBottle.

Starting point is 01:01:30 If some of the things that we've said about the bargaining sessions sounds too absurd to be true to you, then you can go to bluebottle union.org and under the tab for baristas, you can read every bargaining update where we publish all of the proposals that the company has given us so far.

Starting point is 01:01:46 You can read the shit that they make us read. in the bargaining sessions. Yeah, so that's what's next in the next month or so. There's other things that we're working on that we can't talk about yet. Hell yeah, hell yeah. Love this. I'm trying so hard not to just read half the end or speech. Authority is the mask of fear.

Starting point is 01:02:06 Tyranny is brittle. If there ever were a time to read it, there's no time like the present. You know what, fuck it, we're just, we're doing it, we're doing it. The imperial need for control. is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks. It leaks.

Starting point is 01:02:24 Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this. The day will come when all these skirmishes in battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the empire's authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

Starting point is 01:02:41 Remember this. Try. And that's my message to you all. You can fight your own bosses. too and you can beat them and you can watch them running around in terror like fucking chickens with their head cut off and you can get shit from them that they never would have wanted to give you in the first place. So there's a revolution long forgotten that was tucked in a corner of the Caribbean. For those outside of the region, it's probably quite far from mind. You know,

Starting point is 01:03:25 when most people think of Caribbean revolutionaries, they think of Cuba. But at the time, the rise and fall of the Grenada Revolution was everything. Hello and welcome to Icarapenia. I'm Andrew Siege, your Trinadian host of It Could Happen here, and I'm joined by James, your American British co-host. American British? Yeah, I don't really know how to say that. Which order should that hyphen be in? Yeah, I don't know which way I'm supposed to hyphenate because we don't hyphenate white people which is a very American thing.

Starting point is 01:04:07 But yeah, glad to be here. I always enjoy learning more about this part of the world from you. I'm glad. I'm glad. And, you know, as we speak, I'm hearing helicopters overhead. And it's really a reminder of the times that we are living in. Last night, there were quite a few stealth helicopters flying overhead, quite close to the ground. About three of them.

Starting point is 01:04:32 or the lights were off. So it seems to be a ramping up an escalation in some ways or just a continuation of the existing military presence. Yeah, geez. And as we're talking about military presence in the US, which is something that I spoke about on this podcast before, if you go and check it out, we're here to discuss the very recent history,

Starting point is 01:04:57 positive and negative, of my northern neighbor Grenada. So I don't want to bog anyone down with too many facts, but it's important to get an idea of the context. So Grenada is the southernmost in the grouping of Caribbean islands known as the Windward Islands. It's a country composed of Grenada the island and a few smaller islands, including Kariaku and Petit Martinique. It's long been considered the Spice Isle as the hilly mainland was and still is home to a lot of notmeg plantations. They currently have a predominantly African population of just over 117,000, sharing a country merely 344 kilometers squared or 133 square miles. For reference, the five boroughs of New York City collectively make up 778.18 kilometers squared

Starting point is 01:05:50 or 300.46 square miles. So Grenada is small. You know, New York is big, but Grenada is also quite small. You know, for reference, it's slightly larger than Queens, but far less populated and far less dense. Swiz Orkin's small island state par excellence, and yet it has sat at the center of one of the most critical events in Caribbean history. And it might be one of the sites of yet another such incident.

Starting point is 01:06:17 In light of the United States' request to Grenada on October 9th to establish a temporary military radar base at the infamous Maurice Bishop International Airport, a request which has not yet received a conclusive response more than a month later at the time of me recording this. So I thought it apt to finally talk about this moment in history. I went to my library and got a copy of Grenada, Revolution, and Invasion, a compendium of essays from various perspectives on the topic arranged by Patsy Lewis et al that provided the basis of my research,

Starting point is 01:06:50 particularly the essay by Mill Collins, a grenadian poet, a novelist. I also drew some of the radical background lore from Fundy, aka Joseph Edwards. an underappreciated autonomous radical healing from Jamaica, who spoke about the situation, a none shall escape, all linked in the show notes. So I don't want to get too deep into the history prior to what's immediately relevant to today's topic. I'll keep things brief.

Starting point is 01:07:16 A couple hundred Amerindians lived in Grenada prior to the European invasion. Human settlement may have been as early as 3,500 B.C.E., but most definitely by the second century, CE. Spain upon stumbling upon it claimed it but never settled it England attempted to settle it but was driven out by the indigenous inhabitants

Starting point is 01:07:38 and eventually the island was settled and subjugated by the French who engaged in a protracted war against the indigenous between today's Grenada, Dominica and St. Vincent and the Grandines throughout the 17th century there's this narrative that the Europeans came

Starting point is 01:07:54 and they just easily conquered the entirety of the Americas. And it's important to lay that myth to rest. There was, of course, the very tragic great dying that was responsible for a vast majority of the indigenous population losing their lives to the disease. In some cases, intentionally weaponized by the Europeans. But despite differences in their weaponry, the Europeans did not have an easy time conquering the islands or conquering the Americas at all. In many cases, they did not succeed in conquering islands for many decades or centuries of struggle.

Starting point is 01:08:31 But eventually, Grenada was established as a colony of over 15,000 enslaved Africans by 1763. A year prior, in 1762, Britain took over the island from the French as part of the seven years war, and the island was formally ceded to Britain in 1763. By 1807, Britain had brought 114,000 slaves to Grenada. By 1838, slavery was abolished. In 1877, Grenada became a Crown Colony and fast forward a little further under modified Crown Colony status, the wealthiest 4% of Canadians were allowed to vote. Eric Gehry founded the Grenada United Labour Party or Gulp in 1950,

Starting point is 01:09:16 initially as a trade union, which led to the 1951 general strike for better working conditions. Buildings were set on fire in this time, And this is in a broader regional context of radicalism and agitation for independence in the post-World War II reality, which would intensify after many of the islands had already gained their independence. Eventually, Greenina got elections based on universal adult suffrage in 51, and Eric Gary's party, Gulp, won. This is before they got independence, though, in a time when the English-speaking Caribbean was trying to establish a West Indies federation. between 1958 and 1962.

Starting point is 01:09:58 It didn't succeed. Jamaica succeeded and then Churnedad, so it fell apart. And after the fall of the Federation, Grenada became an associated state in 1967, then finally gained full independence from Britain in 1974, again under the leadership of Eric Gehry, who became the first prime minister of Grenada. The late 60s and early 70s were a radical time in general.

Starting point is 01:10:23 So that's setting the stage for what comes next in Grenada. the rise of the new jewel movement led by Maurice Bishop. You see, as Fondy found, in this time we also had quite a few other confrontations going on, across Hispanophone, Francophone, Dutchophone, and Anglophone Caribbean. In 1965, you had the popular revolt in the Dominican Republic against a military coup. It was drowned in blood by the U.S. invasion. In 1967, you had a spontaneous rebellion of agricultural workers in Guadalachian. loop.

Starting point is 01:10:56 1968, black folks in Bermuda rioted against the racist and clonelist control it dominated the island. In 1969, there was a violent confrontation against U.S. soldiers by students and workers protesting the U.S. occupation of the Panama Canal zone. Curacao was shaken by wildcat strikes of workers. Riots were employed and unemployed as well. Labor unrest is breaking out in Suriname leading to a general strike. Antigua had riots strikes and demonstrations over several years.

Starting point is 01:11:24 Jamaica had workers. at the Western meatpackers, established democratic control of their trade union local, taking full control over their union dues and negotiating their employer without official mediators to manage the sugar workers in the local community directly. And of course, infamously, in 1970, Trinidad was shaken up as workers, academics and small farmers linked up against the system led by the government of Prime Minister Eric Williams. and after years of his rule under the slogan mass of Dadee Dun, the people erupted against the neo-colonial system.

Starting point is 01:12:02 Despite being ruled by this black leader, the hundreds of people in the streets championed black power understand that what was needed was a people's politics in which new institutions could emerge. This black power revolution in Shurnda was inspired in part by the black civil rights struggle in the United States, while also seeking to unite the African and Indian politics, populations in Trinidad. After an attempted mutiny by the army and Venezuelan and American

Starting point is 01:12:28 gunboat standing by ready to intervene, the military surrendered. The revolutionary initiative shifted away from the masses and Dr. Eric Williams was safe. By 1973, a few armed guerrillas remained in the hills of Trinidad, but eventually their struggle was snuffed out by 1975. In Guadalupe, you had wildcat strikes taking place. Guyana had wildcat strikes against, the American and Canadian-owned box-side companies. Suriname had another general strike. St. Lucia experienced a wildcat strike. Dominica attempted to seize the British-owned Castle Bruce Estates. In Jamaica, there was a wave of appropriations from banks, warehouses, stores, betting shops, and more, cross Kingston, and demonstrations initiated by students and workers against police brutality

Starting point is 01:13:17 and for the release of prisoners. And in 1979, Nicaragua had their revolution. against the US Allied government. While all of this is going on, Brinida had a population of less than 100,000 people. It had just become independent under Eric Geary. And Eric Geary is an interesting fella because you'll see some aspects of him mirrored later on. He came to power in 1951 with the wave of universal suffrage.

Starting point is 01:13:59 He was 29 years old at the time. He had previously been a worker organiser in Aruba and was expelled from the island for that very reason. He spent decades in politics as a champion of agricultural workers. But younger generations were not as excited about him. They recognize his financial corruption, his pension for rigged elections, and of course his use of secret police that were repressive to the people. So as Grenaders making steps towards becoming independent, the people did not want him to be the leader of independence.

Starting point is 01:14:35 There were strikes against him even before the revolution. But see, Gary was carrying on this tradition that was set up by the British, whether he knew it or not. He may have had this radical start as a worker organiser, but he came to carry on colonial interests. You know, he started off as a union man, but he turned against the workers. And even the British at one point had been scared of his. as an organiser and had trepidations about him as an independent leader, but they still chose him and preferred him at the risk of maybe a more radical version of him leading an independent Grenada. And then came the New Jewel Movement. Now the New Jewel Movement is actually a combination

Starting point is 01:15:21 of two groups. He had the movement for assemblies of the people, which was founded by Maurice Bishop, a lawyer who had studied in Britain, and you had the joint endeavor for welfare, education, and liberation, or jewel, which was founded by Howard University economic student, Unison Whiteman. They were also joined by Bernard Cod, an economics lecturer at U.S. Augustine in Trinandah, so at first, in terms of their politics, they really wanted popular assemblies and that sort of thing. But actually, let me get into the background of the Caribbean left. You see, in the 1950s, there was an upheaval.

Starting point is 01:16:00 You know, radicals had been shifting from the sort of Stalinism that had become popular in the post-War II era towards a more critical sort of Trotskyism or Maoism. Seahler James and George Padmore, both based in London, were already advocating independence for Africa and the Caribbean, rejecting the Stalinist idea that liberation should wait until after World War II. C.L.R. James is an interesting figure politically to me because while he was ostensibly a Trotskyist, he was in many ways unorthodox in his approach to those politics. Yeah. Ceylai James's book, I'm trying to remember it's called Beyond A Boundary or Beyond D boundary. Beyond the boundary. Yeah. It's a great book. It's the only book about cricket that I've ever read. And thus the only one that I've ever enjoyed, not a big cricket appreciate it. but as a sports historian, that that book was foundational to, like, how I, how I approached my dissertation. And, like, as such, I've always had a really, like, a soft spot for him.

Starting point is 01:17:06 As someone who, you know, did sports for a living and academia for a living, I saw, like, a really positive example of the role that both of those can play in, like, liberation struggles in his writing. Yeah. Yeah. It's when I'd encourage everyone to read, if you're looking for a book. It's like his writing is very readable in his historical. writing, like, which I, at the time by my life when I was in grad school, I very much appreciated someone who wrote something that wasn't like self-consciously trying to be dense and impenetrable to make them seem intelligent. Like, his face, his intelligence comes through just fine.

Starting point is 01:17:38 Indeed, indeed. I've had a soft spot for him as well for some time, particularly after reading the Black Yakubans. Yeah, he used to assign that one a lot. And I would say that the Caribbean left at the time also had a bit of a soft spot for him because they were heavily influenced by his writings. You know, in his 1956 pamphlet face in reality, which was about the Hungarian revolution, ended up becoming a profound influence on Western Indian radicals,

Starting point is 01:18:09 as it had revealed the potential of workers' councils and done a lot to expose the authoritarianism of the Soviet model. This is something that Fundy wrote about, and highlighted as he's given his sort of discussion of the origins and trajectory of the Caribbean left. So in the 1960s and 70s, radical thought across the Caribbean was shaped by these more democratic socialist ideals. He had movements like Jamaica's Young Socialist League, Trindad's New Beginning Movement, and Grenada's new jewel movements that were all inspired by James and by grassroots workers' councils

Starting point is 01:18:48 rather than the typical Soviet orthodoxy. Of course, the Caribbean left was not immune to conflict or division. There were conflicts between those who were more loyal to Stalinist or pro-Soviet positions, and that led to some splits within unions and political movements. Now, initially, the neutral movement was leaning in that participatory democratic direction, but eventually they ended up going into studying Marxism-Leneges, modernism more. Now, really at first they mainly wanted Gary out, but later they went into Marxism nationalism and transformed the movement into a proper political party of the vanguard variety

Starting point is 01:19:30 in an effort to unseat Gary. They started building some momentum and immediately faced consequences. In 1973, Bishop, Whiteman and others got beaten up and arrested by Gary's secret police multiple times. Bishop's own father was shot and killed by Gary's forces. And the high schoolers who were also taking a stand against Gary at the time were facing repression and violence. Now with 1974, independence was one, but sadly under Gary and his notorious secret police, which were by the way called the Mungooscan. Now, there was already suspicions of potential election fraud and it wasn't helped by the fact that his mongoose gang was known to intimidate people. But in 1976, despite this fraud political landscape, Bishop won a leadership role as opposition

Starting point is 01:20:28 and became known across the country, in our country as small as Grenada, as someone charismatic, personalable, relatable. The New Jewel movement started to build a reputation for being connected to the people, engage with students, engage with pro bono work in some cases, as I mentioned, some of them were lawyers. And they were youthful. They were bringing a youthful energy to the sort of old guard colonial era politics of Eric Gehry and his ilk. So the story of how the New Jewel movement came into power is actually a bit humorous to me. On the 13th of March 1979, Gary went to the UN meeting in New York that was happening at the time.

Starting point is 01:21:23 And as the saying goes, when the cat's away, the mice will play. In this case, while the cat was away, the New Jersey movement pulled off a coup, a completely bloodless coup. They took control of the army barracks and the radio.

Starting point is 01:21:38 When they went on the radio, and this is the funny part to me, they told people to go to police stations and demand that they put up white flags of surrender. And the population was so anti-Gerry that they did it. They just walked up into the police station. and they were like, yeah, put up these white flags and the police said, yeah, sure.

Starting point is 01:21:57 That was that. That's how the New Jew movement came into power. Yeah. A, this is such a fascinating time in history, right? Like, I used to teach a class about culture and colonialism back in the day. And we would talk a lot about like this time period, like the post-windrush period where like Caribbean political culture was very influential even in the metropole, right, in Britain. specifically, like, this is when we have, like,

Starting point is 01:22:25 scar music and then punk music arriving from that, which is a serious political force in the 20th century. Like, it's easy for people to sniff at that or whatever, but that's the reason I am the way I am. So, like, I guess I have a fondness for it. But also, like, the state's capacity for violence and surveillance hasn't caught up to the capacity for mass. communication yet. And so you have these movements which can mobilize a ton of people and the state

Starting point is 01:22:58 isn't like all up in them with informers and like it can either respond as the Soviet Union did in Hungary, right, with tanks. That's where we get the word tanky from or it can crumble like by people turning up and turning the cops to surrender. Like it's just a fascinating like little two, three-decade period in history before the state, I guess, recovers its advantage in terms of violence and surveillance. Yeah. I'm over this time because, I mean, they didn't have the social media and stuff to connect people and, you know, advertise, they were having this protest or this action or this whatever.

Starting point is 01:23:42 Yeah. But the networks were still there, you know, they were organic and they were motivated by a genuine sense that an alternative was actionable. Yeah. I think we have this sort of 21st century malaise of cynicism.

Starting point is 01:23:59 It's like that was tried before, you know? Yeah. Every time we look at something, we can just say, oh, that was tried before and they failed. When we look back at history, the people who tried those things, they didn't know if it was going to work out or not.

Starting point is 01:24:11 They just tried it. I wouldn't be surprised if I was a fly on the wall on the day of the school. if the new dual movement guys were just like, wait, what? That actually works? Yeah, exactly. Not a takeaway from their plan in an organization and, and, you know, the genuine grassroots support they had.

Starting point is 01:24:32 It's still as a swing. Yeah, totally. At some point, you have to, like, roll the dice, right, and see how it goes. Like, in this case... They rolled a critical success, I'd see. Yeah, yeah. It's a natural 20.

Starting point is 01:24:46 the Dungeons and Dragons turn. So I'd really like to know that out in this period. This is like the heyday of pirate radio, right? Where you have people broadcasting, but like outside of state control. And it's a really interesting time for culture and music. Like, scar music explicitly begins in an anti-racist way, right? Like it calls itself two-tone in music because bands were often look multiracial. And like it's really interesting that we have this whole cultural movement.

Starting point is 01:25:16 which owes a lot to the windrush generation. But like you said, it's questioning both capitalist and also Marxist orthodoxies in a way that I really wish. I mean, a lot of people do today. Don't get me wrong. But I wonder if we could tell those people now that you'd have people who are dedicated vanguard Marxists again. Like, you know, it just seems sad in a way. Yeah, I mean, I think we could say the same thing about a lot of people's current politics. I'm sure if you went back in the past and were like, you know, people are actually trying to be trad wives right now in 2025.

Starting point is 01:25:58 You want to talk to the women who had like no ability to open a bank account and we're trying to escape financial abuse, domestic abuse, all these different things. And they're like, oh, you know, there's actually a whole internet trend of like, yeah, your husband. and should control all your finances, actually. Yeah. I mean, of course, that kind of sentiment never went away, but it's popularization. Definitely debunks, I think, this sort of notion that that progress, quote-unquote,

Starting point is 01:26:26 is something that is inevitable or irreversible. Yeah, definitely. I mean, you can even travel across the world and share that. I can only imagine how that would be received in Rochava, right, to tell the friends in the women's movement that there are Western women who aspire to be tradwives. I mean, I'm sure they're aware.

Starting point is 01:26:44 They have the internet, but yeah, it's certainly, yeah, this idea that we can only progress and move in one direction. Yeah. That's what the New Jew movement came into power. And upon getting to that position, they established the People's Revolutionary Government, or PRG, which is led now by the Prime Minister of Grenada, Maurice Bishop. They were considered legitimate, of course, because they did have the People's mandate. but they opted not to solidify that legitimacy with an election.

Starting point is 01:27:20 And they also went on to ban other parties. So in the next episode, I want to get into what exactly they did when they were in power. In broad strokes, all their hits and misses with the economy and politics over the course of their four years, and how it culminated in an internal split, multiple killings and a U.S. invasion. but if you want the details and how all that played out, you'll have to tune in next time. We'll get into the outcome of the PRG, the flaws, the revolution,

Starting point is 01:27:53 its downfall, and where Grenada stands today. But before we wrap up, any final thoughts, James? Man, if I felt okay, yeah, I just had lots of them. I don't know. Yeah, this is a fascinating period. And, like, now as much as there ever has been, it's a vital time for us to study this, right?

Starting point is 01:28:14 as the person who's taught in American schools and universities, this one doesn't come up very much. It's certainly not like in the required teaching syllabi in any way that I've taught. And I think as we return to like Monroe Doctrine 2.0 or whatever we're doing, the United States is doing in the Western Hemisphere right now, it's vital to understand the role it has played

Starting point is 01:28:38 in suppressing progressive political movements in the last century. Yeah, I think, you know, as you mentioned, it's not really in the typical history and historical accounts that it's taught to students. It's just, I think I marvel sometimes at, you know, that's exactly how empire functions. Yeah. You know, the acts forgets, but the tree remembers is the famous say it. So something like the US's operations in Grenada or anywhere else in the world, in all the many places they have intervened. I may not even muster a passing mention, a sentence even, in a historical class, in a history class, the United States.

Starting point is 01:29:20 And yet it is pivotal to the histories and self-identities up to the present day of entire regions and peoples. You know, it may be a footnote, if so much, in the standard curriculums in the United States. but it's one of the most recent and raw incidents of violence and trauma that take place in the Caribbean. Yeah, absolutely. And in our independent history. Yeah. When Trump was first assuming office this time,

Starting point is 01:29:52 there was a brief moment when they were talking about returning to colonizing Panama, if you can cast your mind that far back. He has flooded the zone quite successfully, but I do recall that. But yeah, I'd been in Panama, two months before that. And I think the United States, a large portion of the population either doesn't know or has forgotten

Starting point is 01:30:11 that, like, independence from American sort of neocolonialism is integral to Panamanian identity. Like, I don't think they'd realize quite how unwilling to accept going back to that Panamanian people were. Yeah. There was a long struggle.

Starting point is 01:30:27 Yes. To, you know, eco-to-independence. I mean, even now there's, you know, U.S. neocleism is alive and well in Panama. in many ways. Yeah. But what gains they have gained is, you know, something they're not willing to lose.

Starting point is 01:30:42 Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I mean, the United States supports people through Panama, the Biden administration sent its secretary of Homeland Security to the inauguration of the Panamanian president. The U.S. funds Panamanian deportations did under the Biden administration, including of people who have no criminal record.

Starting point is 01:31:04 like we have effectively externalized our border regime to Panama in the way that we've also done to the Dominican Republic and Haiti, right? Like I guess what I'm saying is I don't want people to think that this is a one-off that like either the Trump stuff is a massive leap from previous policy. It's a change in scale, not in kind, or that, you know, the United States hasn't done this before and it has some history of doing this in the Western Hemisphere. Indeed. So on that rather depressing note

Starting point is 01:31:37 we'll leave it here for It Could Happen Here But you can join us for the next episode When we'll get into exactly what took place in Grenada And where Grenada stands today Until then, all power to all the people Peace Hello and welcome to It Could Happen here

Starting point is 01:32:15 I'm Andrew Sage, your host And I'm joined by James again. Excited to be here again. I enjoyed a last episode. Yes. Another host of it can happen here. There are two of us.

Starting point is 01:32:26 Mm-hmm. Yep. So James is American, British or British American, depending on how we want to order that. Yeah. And I'm Trinidadian, as you may or be able to tell. But in Trinidad, there are actually a lot of Grenadians and descendants of Grenadians. between our islands has been a lot of population exchange, mostly in one direction.

Starting point is 01:32:54 But we're here to talk about a notable point in the history for my neighbour in Ireland, Grenada. If you missed part one, you should go and give it a listen. The gist is that after drawn out efforts to gain independence, Grenada finally did so in 1974, but unfortunately under the rule of Erica Carey, an oppressive fixture of politics with the people who wanted out. The underdog, the new Jewel movement led by Maurice Bishop, pulled off a bloodless coup while Gary was at a UN meeting in New York. And thus, the People's Revolutionary Government was formed led by Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. They managed to stay in power from 1979 to 1983. So today we're talking about what they did in that time and what happened next, including the infamous U.S. invasion that is so often a footnote of history.

Starting point is 01:33:47 and its aftermath on the people of Grenada that lasts up to this day. Once again, the research for this episode leans on Grenada Revolution and Invasion by Patsy Lewis et al, along with None Shall Escape by Joseph Edwards, aka Fundy. So fresh off the victory of the new Jewel movement, the temperature of the populace was varied, but excited. You had people who had genuine revolutionary aspirations, people who had people who had, who were passionately anti-imperialist, and then the people who just wanted better healthcare and education and didn't really care where or who it came from.

Starting point is 01:34:26 And on that note, I would say that it's something that often flies under the radar or escapes awareness in the discourse because the most passionate, the most invested, the most proud of voices, are all that we tend to hear. The vast majority of people

Starting point is 01:34:42 pretty much go with the flow. Yeah. You know, they keep their heads down. Their focus tends to be on their immediate needs, their immediate interests. And you have the ideologues in every camp and have every persuasion who are aiming to push the country in a particular direction. But at least at this point in time, there was an ambivalence towards the how, the political, how much of the population. They just needed to see the results. and for a lot of people in the present day,

Starting point is 01:35:18 the changed revolution, whatever you want to call it, isn't going to come from an ideological transformation, well-worded argument or arrangement of, you know, prose. It's going to come from a lived experience where their life has improved in some way, in some form of fashion, by action, by a project,

Starting point is 01:35:43 that actually puts the change into practice. And so that's really what the New Jewel movement had been about from the beginning, being part of the community, being part of the people, taking part in, you know, supporting them, which is why they had the popular mandate. And then once they got into power, all other efforts were focused on indeed trying to actually put into place an alternative for all the flaws that it may have had,

Starting point is 01:36:11 and I'll get to that shortly. And that they did. You know, they organized a center for popular education. They organized teacher training and sought to make secondary schools and colleges more accessible to people. They introduced maternity leave for women. Yes. Although notably party members who were women were pressured to come back to work community after having children.

Starting point is 01:36:36 So again, we'll get to those floors. Yeah. There was still inequality in pay between men. and women, but the New Jersey movement did make efforts to mandate equal pay and to engage in some changes toward addressing the inequality between men and women in the country. However, a revolution was still needed within the revolution, as it has tended to be across these revolutions, you know, across these years. Usual stuff, women were still doing the most of the housework and both sexes were expected to take part in political engagement.

Starting point is 01:37:14 So you had women in the party, in the New Jew movement, but it was a sort of an expectation of equality in some respects. Like, yeah, come out to work, even though you just had children, because everybody else is coming out to work. Yeah. And yet, it was like, oh, yeah, you can keep on doing the housework. We're not going to take on our load there. Yep.

Starting point is 01:37:37 It's funny. I finished my book recently, but I have a chapter on gender. And there's this a communist militant in Spain who was fighting at the front line, but also they were saddled with that double burden, right? Because women were expected to be the ones amongst, especially amongst the communists, who cooked and cleaned in addition to fighting. But she has this famous line where she says, I didn't join the military to die with a dishcloth in my hand.

Starting point is 01:38:06 Which I think is great. Yeah, it's a good one. I like it a lot. Yeah, yeah. But flaws with engaging with gender aside, there were, of course, other things the New Jewel movement was doing that was positive. You know, they encouraged agricultural diversification and local food production, moving away from that sort of exclusive or near-exclusive dependence on nutmeg production that had defined the colonial period. You know, they got rid of the old Westminster-style parliamentary system

Starting point is 01:38:36 in favor of a one-party system with some elements of mass democracy. Now, the degree to which that democracy actually empowered people is debatable, but there were, you know, efforts on the record. You know, they organized public meetings to discuss the national budget. They set up workers and youth and women's and farmers' organizations. And unfortunately, even though Bishop was influenced by civil Sealar James, he continued to pursue the sort of hierarchical leadership common in Caribbean politics.

Starting point is 01:39:13 And so even with these alternative organizations, you had that kind of hierarchy. But I think that is to be expected from any movement besides anarchism. So I can't say I'm surprised. They closed the independent newspaper torchlight after an article highlighting a Rastafarian protest against lack of representation in government. So there were efforts to ensure that Grenada moved towards secularism, but freedom of the press was not something that was particularly high in terms of priorities, and there were still prejudices against religious groups and movements,

Starting point is 01:39:56 like the Rastafarians, that had yet to be addressed. You know, these things aren't dealt with overnight. But I think when all you have is a hammer, everything can sort of look like a nail. Yeah. They didn't do anything too drastic in the economics fair. For the most part, they left people's private businesses alone. They implemented some state enterprises and they implemented some cooperative enterprises. So a fairly standard mixed economy, a mixed economy that can to fear and extends be found throughout the Caribbean,

Starting point is 01:40:33 whether they had a revolution or not. But they did establish cooperative and friendly relations with Cuba, which was Ariel Thorne on the side of the United States. Yeah, he didn't like them. And now this is, I would say, from 1979 to 1980, so their first two years in power, people were nervosited. You know, they were hopeful of the genuine decolonization and positive change taken place.

Starting point is 01:41:02 but the excitement part of the NUVA Sightment started to die down by 1981. The People's Revolutionary Government, PRG, became increasingly militaristic as time went on. They organized militias and armed people. They were essentially preparing for a Gary counter coup, but also potential CIA involvement. The police were replaced with military personnel.

Starting point is 01:41:28 And I think this is the trap that a lot of these projects end up fall into. This concern about the enemy within and the enemy without leads these revolutionaries to cannibalize themselves.

Starting point is 01:41:45 You know, the revolutionary potential and excitements gets curtailed because there's so much fear dominating that some enemy is going to attack. Some violence is going to take place that they need to prepare for. And so you

Starting point is 01:42:00 over, you militarize and you militarize and you stare the course of the project away from its original intentions to a point where it's not even recognizable to the people who initiated it. Yeah. You know, I'm not saying that they weren't right to be wary of U.S. intervention. History has demonstrated as much, but it was something that the people of the country were becoming increasingly concerned about because it's a small country. And it's uncommon, you know, it's as strange, it's unusual. It's unnerving to see militias marching down your street.

Starting point is 01:42:41 Now, the neutral movement was starting to become more focused on establishing a vanguard core, the more they oriented themselves toward Marxism-Leninism. So, like I mentioned, before, they were making this shift away from the sort of popular mass democracy that people like Sealar James was talking about, the more they read and they studied the works of Marxism-Lendism. And there were people within the party who became more and more convinced. Again, remember the in positions of power this point in time. So you're in positions of power and you're reading theoretical justifications for why you need to be in power.

Starting point is 01:43:19 You know, you'll stand by those theoretical justifications because it lines up with your interests, your self-interest to, you know, further your position of power. and the continuation of your role as an authority, as a leader. And so this Vanguard Corps that they were pursuing, it ended up creating a hierarchy of in-group and out-group. You had the people who were in the Vanguard, the people who were out of the Vanguard, who didn't get picked, we didn't make the cut,

Starting point is 01:43:50 you know, who felt snubbed. And this was facilitating. It was fostering this an air of secrecy that people in the country would begin to raise. resent and lose trust in. Because imagine you're going from this sort of popular engagement with the people as you, you know, take part in these efforts to push Gary out of power. Then you have this sort of secrecy, you have this sort of militarism that is starting to remind people a bit of the exact Gary government that they wanted out. Then two major events took place in 1981. There was a

Starting point is 01:44:23 bombing under the stage of a rally that killed some youths and there was a car ambushing as well. Both of these incidents were blamed on counter-revolutionaries in the country. That famous buzzword, that famous catchphrase, that famous justification for any and every response. Yeah. So it further pushed the country and really the whole society into this culture of suspicion and repression and also resentment for the New Jewel movement. The New Jewel movement wasn't responsible for the bombings, but you can imagine people were probably saying when they were at the warrants. the parlor, by the grocery, you know, out by the bar, down the street, they're saying, you know, at least they didn't have any bombings under Gary.

Starting point is 01:45:09 You know, at least they didn't have these car ambitions under Gary. Gary wasn't nice, but we didn't have terrorist attacks. And the sort of transparency and engagement people were accustomed to was starting to evaporate. The New Jewel movement was starting to be seen by some as a secret society. and if your society is already small, right, just about 100,000 people. Yeah. Having a secret society within that small society where everybody knows everybody,

Starting point is 01:45:40 that's not good, especially when the revolution is so new, so nascent, you need people's trust. And especially as well, because people were not ideologically for Marxism-Leninism, most of them, that is, they're ideologically for Marxism-Lennism, and they were an ideologically neutral movement advocates. They just wanted Eric Gehry out, and they wanted improvements in their living conditions. They didn't have a particular political ideology they were committed to.

Starting point is 01:46:11 And in this time, you know, the Caribbean is part of the rest of the world. The Caribbean is paying attention, has to pay attention to what's happening in the rest of the world. And especially with the northern neighbor, the United States of America, and it's very infamous at that point in time. We're talking late 70s, early 80s, Cold War rhetoric that people are getting in the media. The American media was still very, and continues to be very prominent

Starting point is 01:46:36 in terms of what Caribbean people consume. Because we are English-speaking, the Americans are English-speaking, and they have far more resources. So their media comes to us, and a lot of the narratives that Caribbean people get come in a decent part from American narratives. So these Cold War era narratives about communism as a scare word was something that had yet to be addressed through actual demonstration of what communism could actually be for people.

Starting point is 01:47:06 You know, people weren't worn over on communism yet. It was still unfamiliar. And in this time, you really needed people who were open, who were accommodating, who were showing people what it meant in practice, who were, you know, sort of disarming these notions that could serve as obstacles towards people's buy-in

Starting point is 01:47:27 into the struggle. I'm saying this as a non-Marxist landist. I'm putting myself in those shoes. If I'm trying to get people invest in this, convinced of this, that sort of secrecy. It doesn't push things in a positive trajectory. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:47:41 It's easy for the population to perceive that you've replaced one elite with another elite, right? Especially in post-colonial movements when we do this. Exactly. So it's a transparent one-for-one, you know? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:47:55 I mean, not to say that people didn't see the differences. No, yes, correct. They went to wear the nuances. They could tell the difference between an Eric Gary and a Maurice Bishop. They can tell the difference between, you know, one form of politics and another. It's not that they were just ready to turn, quote immediately. I mean, some of them still had the fresh wounds of the trauma being inflicted by Eric Gary. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:48:18 But it's because of that trauma, they were also sensitive to the potential of new traumas. Yeah. call it paranoia, call it unist and right-thinking suspicion. But they were wary of what was taking place. Yeah. And you know what didn't help? It didn't help that, okay, so you know how some people, they read like one or two theory books and they start walking around,

Starting point is 01:48:45 like their head is three times bigger than it is? They start walking around this kind of inflated sense of self-importance. Yes, I'm very familiar with that kind of person. Yeah, unfortunately, that's exactly what started taking place among some members of the party. They're reading all these books, all these thick books from Russia and Germany and Marx and Lenin and all these people. And they're starting to carry themselves in a particular way. Yeah. With a level of arrogance and no atollness and, you know, and this is worsening in a society where remember,

Starting point is 01:49:20 we are fresh out of colonialism. You know, none of our independent nations are even 100 years old yet. Much of the population still remember that colonial period. Yeah. And much of the population, like I mentioned before, needed changes to the education system because they didn't have educational opportunities. So you had this vast educational inequality, right? And then you have this new Jew movement and some of its members are talking to you,

Starting point is 01:49:50 like you're stupid. Yeah. Because you didn't get to go to primary school. You didn't read all the thick books that they read. Or you didn't get to go to secondary school or you didn't get to go to university. And so you don't know all the big words and you haven't read all the thick texts that they have read it. And I could rub people the wrong way. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:50:07 Yes. Right? Yeah. There can be too much theory. I think that often is too much theory, especially when it creates this idea, right? Reading is what distinguishes one as a revolutionary, right, as opposed to doing, or just knowing and caring. And it's a downfall of many movements.

Starting point is 01:50:30 Indeed. I think if you're coming from the background that some of these new joint movement members were coming from, you need to put in that extra effort. Not to dumb things down, pussy. You still want to respect people as intelligence, but you have to be aware of the dynamic. It's something that I myself have to work on, you know, because I think there's a sort of of course of knowledge where you read so much that you take for granted what you know. You know, you read to a point where you almost forget that this is not common knowledge

Starting point is 01:51:03 or this word may be unfamiliar to a lot of people. And you really have to be cognizant of it, especially as you're approaching people and make sure you're talking to them in their language. They don't feel as though you're carrying yourself too big for your bridges. Yeah, definitely. Like, the people who write the thick books can't be your, like, milieu, you know, they can't be there. I've used a stupid word. But, like, if those are the people with whom you're sort of conversing in your head, then you begin to speak in that language to people who aren't familiar with it, it just sounds weird. Yeah. Like, it's, yeah, as you say, you get too big for your bridges and you sound pompous if you're not careful. Exactly. Exactly. And so for the, you know, big shot lawyer, again, all the time she can, as I say this,

Starting point is 01:52:01 for big shot lawyers like Maurice Bishop and big shot economics lecturers like Bernard Cod and some of the other folks that had been part of the core of the party, they had to approach people in a particular way. And they were successful in doing so under Eric Gary and as they were part of the opposition. But things were shifted. Also at the turn of the 80s, we had a lot of moves against suspected, counter-revolutionaries, imprisonment without trial. So imagine again, people are thinking, this is what, the Monkous Gang 2.0?

Starting point is 01:52:34 Yeah. The fare was starting to overtake the society. It was starting to become cannibalizing, as I said. So at the time we get to 1983, we find ourselves with the people bereft of the early days of hope, in a house divided, which famously cannot start. Unbeknownst to the public, there were tensions between Maurice Bishop and Bernard Caud, since at least 1982, and Cord wasn't even part of the Central Committee of the Neutral Movement anymore for a while. But within the vanguard, the party members still preferred Cord to Bishop.

Starting point is 01:53:08 Cord was seen as more intellectually equipped to lead with his knowledge of theory. They started calling Bishop egotistic and counter-revolutionary. I have to say, I love the double-edged sword of these kind of willy-nilly thought too many cliches, because they can be used by you and then they could be used against you, you know, snap of your fingers. Yeah, indeed. It goes back to your thing about hammers and nails that you mentioned before. Indeed. So eventually the party decided to bring court on as co-leader with Bishop. Originally, Bishop agreed, but this started to create tensions. Things managed decently, but after a while, Bishop was starting to push back against the co-leadership arrangement,

Starting point is 01:53:52 and the party started seeing it as him favoring his own ascendancy over the collective unity. And then he went to Germany. He left the country on a trip. Do worry, there wasn't another coup this time, at least not yet. But he went to Germany on a trip, came back. There was not a welcome party firm. Womp, womp, womp. Things were coming to her head.

Starting point is 01:54:16 The party did not have his back anymore. He could feel it. But he did know that the people. still had his back. Remember, he knows he's charismatic. He knows people love him. And so all of a sudden, this is in 1983, by the way, a rumor was swirling that Cord wanted to kill Bishop. Yeah. This is a dangerous rumor. You know, it shatters this facade of a United Front that had carried the revolution, they had carried the government for so long. But since most people loved Bishop,

Starting point is 01:54:47 as he rightfully assumed, in fact, they were on a first name basis with him. That's cool. They weren't saying Prime Minister Bishop, your Honourable Prime Minister Bishop. It was, hey, Maurice, like that boy, Maurice. Yeah, that's always a good sign. It's one of the positive marks of the Revolution of Rejava, right? It's everyone is a friend and everyone's referred to generally by their first name. And it's always kind of, I've seen enough, read enough about, you know,

Starting point is 01:55:16 revolution to opposing a revolutionary hierarchy. So that's always a good sign. I feel like. Yeah. So meanwhile, you had Codd who people didn't have the same kind of relationship with. Yeah. You know, as far as they're concerned, he's an enemy now because of that rumor. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:55:36 And the party actually suspected that it was Bishop that started the rumor. In fact, his own personal bodyguards suspected it. But Bishop himself denied it. Whether he did or did not start the rumor. We don't know. But the party was insulted by his movements and put him under house arrest. Oh, damn. What?

Starting point is 01:55:57 What? Gasp. You can't see James right now, but he just, this shocked facial expression. No, like a shocked Pikachu. And that's how the people were feeling it. Like, what? A prime minister arrested, you could do that? That's a thing?

Starting point is 01:56:13 Yeah. So, you see, the vanguard with all that secrecy at this point in time was operating on information that was not made available to the people. And the people were pissed at the party now. Yeah. The cracks in this political arrangement with essentially a secret society on top was starting to show. The people, generally speaking, regardless of what the party wanted wanted Maurice Bishop, they wanted the boy Maurice. But the party was not interested in what people wanted. The day is 19th of October, 1983. The pro-Marice Bishop, New Jersey Movement

Starting point is 01:56:54 leaders, government ministers, and a mass demonstration of people roll up to Bishop's house to set him free. There were guards, of course, assigned to keep him in house arrest, but those guards stood down. They refused to shoot at the people. So the crowd of people walk to Fort Rupert. Now, Fort Rupert wasn't always Fort Rupert. Used to be Fort George. In fact, after the revolution ended, it again became known as Fort George. But Fort Rupert was named Fort Rupert after Maurice Bishop's father, who was killed by Eric Gehry, as you may recall.

Starting point is 01:57:33 So they get there. But the majority of the Neutral Movement, who were, like I said, backers of Bernard Corde, were at another fort nearby. Then boom. Three armored trucks pull up from the fort of Cord to Rupert's Fort, Fort Rupert. They start firing into the crowd. People running all over the place.

Starting point is 01:57:56 Who once people died? Who want people scattered? This event is a trauma for Canadians, even to this day, by the way. So the cord loyalists pull up and line up Bishop, Unison Whiteman, who was the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Norris Bain, who was the Minister of Health, and was actually not part of the... of the mutual movement. And Jacqueline Creft, who was the Minister of Education, they lined them up against the wall and shot them.

Starting point is 01:58:23 Summary execution. Others, including trade unionists, businessmen and high schoolers, were also killed at Fort Rupert. Right after this, the military curfew was announced on radio. Hunigans were told to lock their doors. Violators of curfew were to be shot on site. a couple of days later, as people mourned to they're dead,

Starting point is 01:58:47 the news came that the United States will invade Grenada. If this was a HBO series, I feel like that would be the end of the penultimate episode. Yeah, yeah. So just to give you a bit of context on the US's position, the United States did not like the way that Cuba and the Soviets and Grenada were becoming close, even though Grenada was technically non-aligned, like much of the world was trying to stay out of the hairs

Starting point is 01:59:17 of the US and the USSR in their Cold War. Yeah. But Grenada and the Canadians represented a serious risk. They were black. That's a big risk. They were English-speaking. They were English-speaking black people

Starting point is 01:59:37 close to the border of the United States of America as African Americans were engaged in their own struggle for liberation in the US. As Horace Bishop noted, I mean, that's the threat. There could be communication, collaboration between these groups, a demonstration of an alternative close to United States with ease of communication with the United States.

Starting point is 02:00:04 So the United States invasion was always a potential outcome. But here it was. Flexing power in its sphere, in its backyard. The party rounded up a bunch people to join them in defending the revolution. If most people were traumatized, they ran and they hid wherever they could. Some, regardless of whether they liked the new Jew movement at that point in time or not, stood ready to defend their island from invasion, but many more were hidden and scared. and there were also others who, out of revenge for the revolution, that betrayed them, betrayed the revolution by expressing their support for the invasion. Now, me personally, that's something I would never do.

Starting point is 02:00:48 I don't care how much I disagree with any government that I'm under. I wouldn't co-sign the invasion of my country by an empire, but I can understand the reasoning or the emotional position that some people were in at that point. So the US's claim, by the way, for their invasion, was that they were there to rescue American students who were in Grenada. They said they're there to rescue these students from these commies.

Starting point is 02:01:25 Perfect. American students wouldn't under any actual threat, obviously. Nobody was mining them or threatening them or anything, but they always have to have some kind of story, right? Yeah. So 25th of October, 1983, America's boots land on the ground, joined later by the military personnel of Barbados and Jamaica. There were more deaths, mostly in Grenadians, but also some Cubans who were there working

Starting point is 02:01:55 on the new international airport. an airport that later became known as Maurice Bishop International Airport, an airport that just over a month ago, the United States requested to use for its military operations in the region. The United States kept the media out of the island for two days after the invasion. they were sure to curate an image of the communist threat. They wanted to paint a picture for the media to tell a story back at home about how, yeah, they were actually preparing

Starting point is 02:02:34 to work with the Soviets as a staging ground to attack the United States. So this invasion was the first overt, as opposed to covert, use of force since Vietnam. The party in power at the time needed an easy win. So party members, this is New Jewel movement party members, were imprisoned, an interim government was established by Grenadians living abroad, and the revolution was over.

Starting point is 02:03:15 Let's talk aftermath. The fall of the New Jewel movement and the People's Revolutionary Government of Grenada led to the disintegration of the Workers' Party of Jamaica. It nearly destroyed Caracom, the Caribbean community, as a united bloc. as Jamaica and Trindad sided with the US in the invasion while countries like Trindad stood against the invasion. That was a split in Caracom that took years to recover from. And I think most crucially,

Starting point is 02:03:47 the fall of the New Deal movement led to the death in all with name of the Caribbean left, from distrust, from infighting, and from this resolute enforcement of the new colonial model. for all the flaws that the revolution had, it was a representation of an alternative that something else could be done

Starting point is 02:04:10 besides business as usual. And that alternative first felt in fighting and then its fate was sealed by a belligerent invasion. And so the Caribbean left not say it's actually entirely dead. There are still figures from that era,

Starting point is 02:04:31 there are still people who carry progressive or revolutionary politics. But its heyday, its goal and age is no more. And that is in part as a result of that U.S. invasion. And within Grenada, the bodies of those killed were never found in some cases. The families of those killed or of the party members may even still be divided to this date. you know, you could imagine how they must feel the sort of social and political divisions that came out of that kind of action

Starting point is 02:05:09 who sided with cord, who sided with bishop, who sided with the US, who stood against, who brought, whose actions were responsible for the US coming, if the revolution never happened then the US wouldn't have come. These people wouldn't be dead. Blame game, accusations, political conflicts, all of that.

Starting point is 02:05:29 You know, it's very easy to breeze over the deaths, of people in historical events as just numbers. As just statistics, you know? It doesn't even click, you know, because I don't think our brains can fully handle that much trauma at once, so we compartmentalize it in a way. We package it in something that's a bit more digestible. When you hear figures of, you know, even just two people dead,

Starting point is 02:05:57 that's two people, two entire human beings with lives, interests, passions, relationships, connections, future, snuffed out. And in a country like Grenada, I'm a small country, 100,000 people. And I mean, I'm from Trinidad, right, which has a population of about 1.4 million people. And it still feels like you know somebody who knows somebody. The networks are so tight. And it's even tighter-knit network-wise in a Grenada or Tobago. You know, we're talking neighbors, relatives, split into sides, cousin, blaming cousin, friend, killing friend.

Starting point is 02:06:38 The decolonization never fully began and never fully completed. Their social splits on the perspective on what took place. You had the bishop was good crowd, the bishop was bad crowd. The bishop was bad with the revolution was good crowd. The revolution was bad with bishop was good crowd. you get all sorts of interpretations of these kinds of traumatic historical events and the outcome to this day is you know fair unhealed open wounds the youth the passionate radical youth of yesteryear keeping their heads down and out of politics

Starting point is 02:07:17 today unfortunately very little has been done in Grenada to deal with the traumas of the invasion besides an attempted truth and reconciliation commission which failed miserably due to a couple different obstacles. An unwillingness to reconcile among some they continued out incarceration of certain individuals. Unrecovered remains, anger towards entire sectors of the population at the execution of Bishop and others.

Starting point is 02:07:46 And so in the years that have followed, there has been a subdued political consciousness among the population. They have risen to the charge of the population. risen to the challenge of the US inviting themselves to set up shop in Maurice Bishop International Airport. There were many actions taking place from Grenada to speak up and to stand against that intervention. But for the most part, the populace has been disengaged from the sort of radical passion that you saw in that time period.

Starting point is 02:08:21 And it didn't help, of course, that pretty much right after the revolution, you had a series of natural disasters. In September of 2004, after being Hurricane 3 free for 49 years, the island was hit by Hurricane Ivan, a category 3 hurricane that resulted in 39 deaths and the damage of destruction to 90% of the island's homes. In 2005, which is the following year, Hurricane Emily, a category 1 hurricane hurricane, hurricane, struck the island and killed a person. In 2024, Hurricane Beryl struck the island of Kariaku. And so we're already dealing with the environmental instability of being a Caribbean island,

Starting point is 02:09:05 but now you also have to deal with the political and social instability of such a dramatic incident. Before we close, I do want to get into some of the critiques that I had of this project. You know, I'm not the type of way since you look at these historical moments. no matter my allegiance to the espoused politics of the people in them, and we want to paint them in a narrow or simplistic brush. You know, I see that tendency across all groups.

Starting point is 02:09:34 Yeah, definitely. You know, so the Marxist's Lennoxious will talk about these revolutions in a very fawning and agitating way. Benos of the anarchists who talk about, you know, the Spanish Civil War, they talk about the Paris commune, talk about these different projects as if they were as if they weren't serious flaws in their structure and their analysis and their methodology is worth addressing you know it's very easy for nostalgia to take over yeah definitely like something i think about a lot like i i translated a piece

Starting point is 02:10:05 for the strangers in a tangled wilderness zine a few months ago maybe even a year ago now by an anarchist fighter who'd fought in the uh international group of the derruti column who went by several named Charles Riddle with his first name. But he has his whole thing about how, like, anarchists tend to write hagiographies, which is the life of a saint, right? Like they've tried to make the Spanish Civil War into these, like, exemplary saintly people, as opposed to actually looking at the mistakes people made. And his stances are like his friends died for nothing if we don't learn anything.

Starting point is 02:10:43 And so if we don't acknowledge the very real compromises and mistakes, and failures, then they have been defeated, right? And they all died for nothing. But if at least we can learn from it, then at least as something we can take going forward, which is something I always thought was a great way of phrasing something, kind of like quite an admirable way of looking at something that he himself participated in,

Starting point is 02:11:06 and it was obviously a defining and a very traumatic experience of his life. Yeah. It's something that I rallied again, that sort of great man of brochure history. Yeah. But I suppose that brings me to my first critique, which is something that plagued Grenada both before, during, and after this revolution. When you have a political culture dependent on a maximum leader, a personality cult, or just a grouping around a personality, whether that's bishop or Gary or cord, for one, it's a continuation of the colonial politics of the British, in that sort of governor, position.

Starting point is 02:11:49 And it also, I think, leads to a contempt towards common people. Whether it starts out that way or not, it eventually makes its way in that direction. I still see personality politics rare in its ugly head in Trinidad, even though we've been independent for even longer, you know, 1962 as opposed to the credit as 1974. But the result of that kind of politics is, you know, it's ideological and policy-speople. are either non-existent or secondary to personality loyalties, familial ties, and in some cases, ethnic loyalty. The United National Congress, the UNC, the party in power in Trinidad right now,

Starting point is 02:12:31 party responsible for our current position is a personality cult led by current Prime Minister, Tamop a sub-assar, and she's only one of many examples of this sort of party food. leader first, approach to politics that we see in the region, a baggage that we see in the region. I know with radical politics, it's sad because you expect to do away with that kind of stuff, but the revolution, in my view, had a lack of decolonization away from the authoritarian tendencies of colonial rule. That, I think, is why there was such an appeal in Leninist thought and rules to begin with, because it's a lot easier to approach. You know, it doesn't unpack the psychology of colonialism or unpack how Gary's rule may have

Starting point is 02:13:25 shaped their own approach to politics that another politics might, that another anti-politics might. And so they carried on this elitist authoritarian personality-based politics. You know, despite having a youthful beginning, Bishop was 29 when he started a neutral movement. which is the same age that Gary was when he got into politics. I know one could make a movie of the mirrors and their histories. But despite his useful beginning, the youth carried on the mistakes of their forebearers. They betrayed the excitement of people power that people had for the revolution,

Starting point is 02:14:01 just as they betrayed the excitement of people power that people had for independence. And they continued a consciousness of deference to hierarchy. Again, I don't want to draw one-to-one comparisons between games, Harry and Bishop. I recognize their stark differences in their politics and in their engagement with the people of Grenada. They were not the same, but in some ways they did rhyme. I would wrap up, I suppose, with Bundy's sort of critique of Grenada's revolution, which was what I just echoed, this continued consciousness of a deference to hierarchy. A genuine revolution depends on people taking direct responsibility, not waiting for leaders or

Starting point is 02:14:45 stages of development, not waiting on guidance, being empowered themselves. That sort of tired Leninist gradualism and bureaucratic control gets regular people no closer to actually having a sense of autonomy and control over their lives. And as Fundy emphasizes, especially in small Caribbean societies, participatory, local, self-managed systems are entirely feasible. In closing, fondly suggested that Greeners' Revolution failed because it moved away from this principle of immediate collective self-management and deliberately chose hierarchy. And from that hierarchy came a sense of eroding trust, came a sense of secrecy, became a sense of secreties,

Starting point is 02:15:38 and I created a culture of secrecy, a post-reuthers. transparency that led to its down for. As I mentioned, it was gossip, a rumor of somebody trying to kill Bishop that got this ball rolling. So today, I want to appeal directly to Caribbean radicals of all stripes, to learn, to earnestly learn from the Canadian Revolution. I want to appeal not just the Caribbean radicals, but to radicals all across the world all across our listenership. It is critical in times when the means of intervention and the means of disruption and division and co-optation or more powerful than ever, that you engage in the sort of dissipation of leadership, that you engage in grassroots and dispersed in Parliament, that you maintain

Starting point is 02:16:36 an anti-authoritarian ethos that cannot be co-opted by a charismatic power, which you take an approach to organization that does not lend itself to the vulnerabilities of hierarchy, that you consider moving like mycorrhiz, that you take on networks and free associations rather than the sort of X-Moxyspot, bull's eye, centralized parties, and the power struggles that ensue from them, from that thirst. for power that led so many downfalls for the revolutionary imagination. Before we wrap up, I just want to ask, James, we have any thoughts? No, I think that was very eloquent the way you said it.

Starting point is 02:17:25 Like, we have to build systems and ways of organizing relating to one another that don't allow this to happen, right? We have to be very conscious, like you say, of where it has happened. And I think the only way there will be understand the value of that. It's through studying history, but like studying it from a place, like you were saying, right, like death is a statistic or a number until it's a person. And I think if we can study history from a place of like empathy, I guess, and solidarity rather than this would never happen to me or like you said, like oversimplifying in a way that I think doesn't help. And sometimes I think

Starting point is 02:18:05 we do it to kind of absolve ourselves from similarity to think, like, oh, how close could I be to this? It's one of the things I don't like about academic history. If we are people who are interested in making the world better, then we have to learn from all the other people all over the world who tried to make the world better, and especially from the ones who didn't succeed. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:18:30 Because we don't want to do that again. Exactly. And the times, the R.C. Yes, indeed. we have to approach that with our due diligence you know the strategies that were more relevant or more practical in particular context may not be relevant or practical in your context yeah very much so all right yeah that was great thank you Andrew so all our listeners thank you so much for tuning in I hope that you can look at our region with clearer eyes and

Starting point is 02:19:06 vigilance in the ways that history repeats and rhymes. Until next time, all power to all the people. Peace. All right. Under the intro. What up crackers and crackets? Is that good? Perfect.

Starting point is 02:19:39 Can we say that? I think so. Okay. Do you have a non-binary cracks? Crackams? I think I'm definitely not a cracker. I'm going to say this. The one non-cracker.

Starting point is 02:19:51 I just wanted to use the word crackettes. I understand it's not appropriate. That's reasonable. Welcome to E.D. Yeah. Thanks, Robert. We should just, we should cut off that. Sorry, James.

Starting point is 02:20:04 No, let's just keep doing it. Do the intro. This is it could happen here, executive disorder. Our weekly newscast covering what is happening in the White House, the crumbling of our world, and what this means to you. I am James Stout, and I'm joined today by Robert Evans and Mia Wong. And Sophie. Sophie is also here.

Starting point is 02:20:23 And this episode, we are covering the week of December 11th to December 17th, the week before the week that is Christmas. That's right, baby. So I hope you've done your shopping. I hope you got me a gift because I pay attention to which of our listeners do and do not buy me presents. Yeah, so do I. You will never find me and you shouldn't try. That's right. And it's currently Hanukkah.

Starting point is 02:20:49 Happy Hanukkah. Happy Hanukkah. That's right. Yeah. Happy Hanukkah. All the holidays. Have a, yeah, Quasi Kwanza. Have a solemn, dignified tet. All the holidays. Have a good one of them.

Starting point is 02:21:02 Happy winter solstice, which is. Happy solstice. More unhappy solstice. It's kind of a bittersweet holiday. Yeah. Super Saturnalia. You know? Super Saturnalia is a good one.

Starting point is 02:21:16 So holidays are nice, but we're going to talk about some things. that are less nice today, the government. Yes, the government and specific parts of the government. Let's start with some headlines. Gothamist has obtained information about ICE, being able to enter private parts of New York City shelters without a judicial warrant, or being able to obtain private information about residents,

Starting point is 02:21:39 despite both of these, in theory, being prohibited by sanctuary city laws in New York, right? This happened at least five times. The way Gothamist found this is by, making a public record request for incident reports, which is a clever use of public record law. Nice one. The city has already aware of both jail and police officers violating these laws.

Starting point is 02:22:01 I think this is a good example of how people think of sanctuary city laws as like inassailable, but in fact sanctuary laws, be their city, state, whatever jurisdiction, are very often violated. And it's good to see that being reported on more. Last week we talked about Faustino Pablo Pablo, right, the guy who had been sent to Guatemala despite the fact that he had protections under the Convention Against Torture

Starting point is 02:22:24 for being returned there. The government has returned him to the US which is good. That is a rare good immigration story. Yay. Yay. Yay. Yeah, you love to see it. It did really bum me out to see that

Starting point is 02:22:38 like there were dozens of articles on him being sent there, right? And I couldn't find anything, any reporting on him being returned, which is kind of like we should be happy for these people. We should, uh, yeah. We don't get many wins, and we should take them. Yeah, we should be happy that this guy is not being likely to be tortured.

Starting point is 02:22:55 At least, it is still possible for them to remove him to a third country, right? That is not outside the realm of possibility, but right now he's not in a place where I judge-adjudicated he was likely to be tortured, and that is good. Good. And Trump has designated fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, which is great. What are we doing here? Like, I am trained as a historian, and I probably should remind you that we have been down this road before with the weapons of mass destruction. And I hope this is not leading where it did last time.

Starting point is 02:23:35 But I am very worried that it might. Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those things. I'm both, we'll see, we'll know before this episode ends, whether or not I'm wrong. Tucker Carlson stated recently that a source has told him the presidential announcement coming up is Trump declaring war, right? That like we're doing a war with Venezuela full on, not just some like air strikes and stuff, which is not to minimize illegal airstrikes in the sea or on Venezuela soil. I don't know if I think that that's the likeliest thing.

Starting point is 02:24:08 It just seems like such a huge jump. But also at this point, there's a whole armada blocking on. off Venezuela from the rest of the world, and Trump put out a statement saying that their oil is our oil and belongs rightly to American companies. Oh, wow. Very, very possible. Very possible. We're about to go to war with them. I'm certainly not, I don't know what's going to happen, y'all. I'm white-knuckling it like everybody else. Yeah, that fucking sucks. I didn't know the thing about that oil being R-O. It's amazing. I'll read the exact quote to you, James. This is from a Trump, a truth social post, which has 12.4,000

Starting point is 02:24:45 re-truths and 47,000 likes. Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in the history of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before. Until such time as they return to the United States of America, all of the oil, land, and other assets that they previously stole from us. The illegitimate Muduro regime is using oil from these stolen oil fields to finance themselves, drug terrorism, human trafficking, murder, and kidnapping. For the theft of our assets and many other reasons, including terrorism, drug smuggling and human trafficking, the Venezuelan regime has been designated a

Starting point is 02:25:16 foreign terrorist organization. Therefore, today I'm ordering a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of Venezuela. The illegal aliens and criminals that the Maduro regime has sent to the United States during the week in an Epidon Biden administration are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace, yada, yada, yada. Yeah, all of our oil land and other assets have to be returned to the United States. He's talking about oil that American companies have had at points like contracts to... exploit. But he's phrasing it as like, their land and oil is our land and oil, which...

Starting point is 02:25:47 Yeah, it's a very colonial way of phrasing, like, a contract. 100%. Again, a lot of times, you know, I would be like, okay, well, I don't know if war is the most reasonable thing to expect. When the president's posting shit like that, it's very reasonable to be like, I think we might go to war. I think he might be about to invade Venezuela. I don't know what's going to happen, but you're no longer being like a kooky,

Starting point is 02:26:11 conspiracy theorists to be like, well, maybe he's about to try to take over Venezuela. Maybe that is what's going. Yeah. I don't understand how in that instance they would continue to get Venezuela to accept people. It's the U.S. is removing. That's one of the sticking points that I see. Maybe he's found a third country, right?

Starting point is 02:26:30 They've been very fond of finding third countries. I guess I should explain a little bit about oil leaving Venezuela, just so like, people are aware of that. So, like, Robert read the truth. That's not something someone says in church, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Here we are. So they're talking about, like, blockading sanctioned oil tankers. Not necessarily every tanker that enters Venezuela is sanctioned. Like, I believe Chevron has some contracts. Chevron tankers should be cruising. Yeah. There's a lot of Chevron. Yeah, that should be an issue, right? They should be able to go back and forth if they're not

Starting point is 02:27:06 sanctioned. It's the Venezuelan state oil company, which in English, I guess you would say, PDVSA. Ptovasa. Puttavasas. As I say any English, okay. Yeah. Yeah. What Venezuela has done previously, and this is not by any means unique to Venezuela,

Starting point is 02:27:21 but this is generally how many of these regimes that are kind of in the ambit of Venezuela, I'm talking about Iran and Russia here, have avoided sanctions and sanctioned entities so far as by using what are called ghost ships. I will link to an explainer on this. what they will do is use the names and identifiers of vessels that have been scrapped. They will change the flags of vessels, often to these small island nations for whom allowing ships to use their flag as kind of a source of income, right? And they will often use these to go out into international waters and then offload cargo, in this case, oil rates. So this happens pretty frequently with Venezuelan vessels.

Starting point is 02:28:05 It was that was one such vessel called the skipper that the U.S. Coast Guard boarded, I think, last week as we're recording this. Yeah, sure. That is how Venezuela has previously been evading these sanctions. And Iran does this too. Russia does this too. They also do things like spoof their location or turn off. They have like a locator beacon that ships are supposed to use. The transponder, yeah.

Starting point is 02:28:30 Yeah. So this is fairly common practice. But obviously the way to stop that is a physical blockade. Right, like that's not going to be possible if the U.S. is effectively like inspecting ships leaving Venezuela, right, or sort of keeping a very close eye on them. So that will end, and with that, will end a very important source of income for the Maduro regime if they keep doing this. Yeah. Now, obviously, one of the sort of issues we're trying to work out what is going to happen here,

Starting point is 02:28:58 especially before whatever speech Trump is about to give, is that we're trying to figure out state policy from Trump posting. Right. Yeah, yeah. And there's a lot of this that is enormously incoherent. So, okay, the thing about designating the government of Venezuela as a foreign terrorist organization is one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. And this was

Starting point is 02:29:18 also unhinged. The closest thing we've ever really gotten to that, I guess, was the IRGC. Yeah. And maybe you could go back and say the Khmer Rouge, but like they weren't really a government by that point. So this is not

Starting point is 02:29:34 this is not a designation that has ever been given to a government before. Right. It doesn't make any sense to give it to a government. It doesn't make sense to give it to this government. I mean, you know, even if you're working within the logic of counterterrorism, which is just, you know, unhinged, murderous imperialism to begin with. But all of the reporting on this has been assuming that the blockade will be of, you know, like, of these specifically sanctioned oil tankers. However, the thing about the foreign terrorist organization designation,

Starting point is 02:30:04 is that it does things. And one of the things that foreign terrorist organization designation does, is that if you do business with a foreign terrorist organization, you are now immediately on the line for material support of terrorism charges. Like Chevron. So, yes.

Starting point is 02:30:21 There are lots of countries. Like Facebook does business things. I'm fine with the U.S. military carrying out airstrikes on Chevron. Executives and their property. Let's be clear about that. I would salute the red, white, and blue if we dropped some hellfires on that C-suite.

Starting point is 02:30:39 Yeah, I don't know. This is all very weird. My understanding of the FTO designation process is that how it's supposed to work is that the president proposes it and then the Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasurer, I think, have to approve it. And then there's a seven-day period where Congress has an opportunity to say no. And then it goes up. So right now we should be theoretically in the seven-day window.

Starting point is 02:31:04 but it's also really unclear what the administration has actually been doing because, again, we're being governed by post. Yeah, like, it's... So... It's not announced as an executive action on Whitehouse.gov, and I think normally it goes there, and then the seven-day comment congressional period commences, then it's not in the federal register either.

Starting point is 02:31:27 Right now, all we have is a truth. So, like... Yeah, and like, and this is the problem is that this is sort of the Calvin Ball War. in that they're using the names of actual legal categories and things that have material effects in the world, but they're just posts. And I want to be very clear about this.

Starting point is 02:31:45 Even just doing a blockade on these sanctioned vessels is an act of war. Yeah. That's very deliberately an act of war. It is an act of imperial aggression. It is morally wrong. It is also unbelievably illegal under the War Powers Act.

Starting point is 02:32:03 And this is actually gotten a response. from Democrats in Congress. There's been a few measures. CBS is reporting this. There's been a few measures to stop the president from starting a war here. I'm going to quote CBS.

Starting point is 02:32:17 A second measure from Democratic rep Jim McGovern in Massachusetts would remove the armed forces from hostilities with or against Venezuela that have not been authorized by Congress. McGovern's resolution could face the best chance of potential adoption since it has

Starting point is 02:32:32 three GOP co-sponsors. Reps Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia, Thomas Massey of Kentucky, and Don Bacon of Nebraska. Bacon says he would also vote in favor of Meeks as measure. Bacon is taking a very weird line here of Keynes Congressional Approval and also I support him doing this. So. Surely a procedural objection. Yeah. It's a, I want my war, but I want Congress to have a little shred of power.

Starting point is 02:32:56 Yeah. So I think it's also worth noting what exactly is going on here. I'm someone who's on the record as talking about how political economy in Latin America and American imperialism is usually slightly more complicated than they just want a resource, but they just want a resource here. Yeah, this one really is. No. Like, so like Bolivia, for example, everyone thinks that the whole coup in Bolivia was about lithium and it wasn't. Yeah. I'm very mad about this.

Starting point is 02:33:26 It was not. If you look at the people, if you look at Camacho, if you look at people who were actually running that coup, they were all Bolivia and agro barons. because a huge part of what was going on there was a rebellion by the sort of agro-business, like agricultural elite, who joined parts of like a reactionary or a middle class. Okay, but this is not that. Venezuela

Starting point is 02:33:43 has the world's largest oil reserves, but there are significant problems extracting the oil, right? Many of these problems stem from the 2002-2003 opposition general strike. This is back after Hugo Chavez was elected. So in 2002, there was a coup against Chavez that failed.

Starting point is 02:34:02 and was sort of overturned famously. But later that year, there was also a sort of opposition general strike that lasted from like late 2002 to early 2003. And a huge part of that general strike was oil workers specifically. And it was very specifically, one of the things about the structure of oil production is that there were a bunch of very, very highly paid and highly skilled technical workers who are very, very loyal to the oil companies themselves and who are very loyal to who are sort of tend to be very right wing.

Starting point is 02:34:32 These people went on strike and sort of got fired on mass. Oil production requires both a huge amount of heavy capital and a bunch of highly skilled workers. And if you don't have both of those things, then you can't do oil extraction. And this has sort of been a recurring problem for the entire time both sort of Fugos and Majuro has been in office, is that they haven't had the capacity to actually extract a bunch of the oil. And also, they've refused to turn the oil over to more American companies that have

Starting point is 02:34:59 already been contracted. And it's also worth noting there's a lot of talk about like Venezuela having the world's largest reserves. And a lot of that is like them jinking the numbers by including a lot of like tar sands that would be that no one's going to try to get extract like fuel from because it's too expensive and too much of a pain in the ass. It's just not worth it. Anyway. And also their claims to reserves that are not actually part of Venezuela at this time. Right, right. Like, we're not working with exact, with accurate information. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:35:34 It's messy. And it's also worth noting that, like, the oil numbers, I mean, obviously all oil numbers are political, but the oil numbers here are extraordinarily political because these are numbers that are basically used as a pitch by sort of, like, the opposition to try to get a U.S. backed coup. And it's also sort of worth noting that the other thing that's happening here, and the reason this is all going to probably cause really significant economic problems and probably humanitarian disaster, both in Venezuela and probably also in Cuba, which extensively relies

Starting point is 02:36:03 on Venezuelan oil to have their economy function, is that the Venezuelan economy has been really structured around oil in a way that they failed to transition out of multiple times. The first big one, I've done in a different episode about this in the neoliberalism series a bunch of years ago, but there was a whole bunch of deliberate sabotage by American car companies over in an attempt to build a car industry. There's a long sort of history of this, but it means that both of these countries' economies are desperately relying on oil, and the more of this that is cut off, the more fucked it's going to get for just everyone in Venezuela. Yeah, yeah. And you can already see how much worse it's got from the time.

Starting point is 02:36:44 I went to Venezuela to now. They're very vulnerable to changes in crude oil prices, right? And that has, along with corruption and a government, which doesn't really give a shit about the material. welfare of its people has already made things unsustainably hard for people of Venezuela, and that will only get worse. Yeah. So I want to conclude basically on a couple of things. One, there's that. Two, this is going to cause more waves of migration and refugees fleeing the country, both from potential U.S. military strikes and from the economic damage. There's been some moves in the international stage with China and Mexico expressing support for the Venezuelan government. Shinebom in

Starting point is 02:37:25 Mexico is offered to facilitate negotiations and mediate negotiations between the U.S. and Venezuela. It's also kind of word noting that right before this whole thing, there was a giant Vanity Fair interview with Suzy Wiles, who's Trump's chief of staff, who, oh boy, this is for Reuters. Susie Dubbs this big collar here. God. Said Trump, quote, wants to keep blowing up boats until Maduro cries uncle, which is one of the most hideous things I've ever heard. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:37:54 It's gangster shit. It's literally terrorism. It's a highway. Yeah. It is straight up structurally, unless you reside, we are going to keep killing civilians. Like, it's hot chis-taker shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's hideous.

Starting point is 02:38:08 It's also a fundamental misunderstanding of how the regime operates, if that is the case so, because they don't care of their people kept dying. I have seen Venezuelan people die in the Darien Gap, right? Because, in part, their government is incapable of providing for their material needs. don't care. Like, killing some other people with boats is not going to fundamentally change the way that government works because there's only one way it can work. Yeah, and I think there's the one last thing I want to say about this before we head out

Starting point is 02:38:37 slash before whatever giant update comes after the speech. Yeah, I've got one after you finish here. One of the big problems here is that people in the administration really do believe this. They actually do think that you can knock off the government with airstrikes. And no, you can't. No, you can't. They thought this about the Houthis, too, it's wrong. It's never been right.

Starting point is 02:38:56 It's hideous. We just finished doing like a five-parter on bastards about like the nuclear doomsday device. That also dealt heavily with the work of that Italian Air Force General Du Hay, who was the first guy in 1921 to be like, all you need are bombers. Nothing else is necessary in militaries now. It's nothing but bombers from here. And if you have enough bombers, no one will ever attack you. And this logic has always been wrong. and it's also every new generation of like military leaders,

Starting point is 02:39:25 especially in like the air power field, are like, all we need is air strikes. You don't need to send in ground. You can accomplish all of your goals, all of your power projection, just by bombing people or shooting missiles at them. And they're always wrong. It doesn't work.

Starting point is 02:39:41 It's just not effective. Yeah, like I think the Trump administration is somewhat, I don't want to say high on its own supply. They had success in Syria with removing the territorial caliphate mostly using U.S. air power, right? There wasn't a big U.S. grandpa. But that was the U.S. part.

Starting point is 02:39:58 There was still, as you know, James the shitload of Kurdish fighters. That is the thing, right? In Syrian and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 11, 12,000 Kurdish people died to remove the Islamic State. And more have died since, right? Yeah, and also a shitload of Iraqi soldiers

Starting point is 02:40:14 and mix of Kurds and largely guys from in and around Baghdad. But, like, yeah, like, A lot of. Sure. And a bunch of Arab Syrians. And I don't mean to, like, ethnically gatekeepers at all, a Syrian people, Armenians. No, but like a huge amount of the effort was guys.

Starting point is 02:40:29 I mean, literally, I was in bed with some of these guys. A lot of, like, the fighting tip was like literally dudes with fucking knives and hand grenades, clearing buildings and hand-to-hand combat. Those were the people who faced danger, right? And that's what you need to, unfortunately, you can't do war with computers yet. Yeah. But yeah, I think that that might be where this belief. That and like the Marco Rubio lobby, right, the Florida Cubans who are invested in this kind of Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, right?

Starting point is 02:41:00 And the idea that they can roll back leftist regimes in like South and Central America. Yep. I think that's where a lot of the pressure is coming from. Yeah. Speaking of pressure, we are being pressured to go to ads. That's right. Beautiful. And we're back.

Starting point is 02:41:27 There's an update I just came across as we're doing this. We talked about how Tucker is an inside source saying that Trump's basically going to declare war. There's another article that just came out on Stitches by Gloria Shaw, citing a pro-Trump host on Real America's voice who characterized the upcoming Oval Office address as a PR thing. Basically, as an acknowledgement that a lot of Trump's voters are frustrated that he keeps talking about, like, international issues like Venezuela. Well, everything is more expensive for them and they continue to lose their jobs and the economy is shit. To quote from that article, and this is them quoting a segment from that, a Real America's Voice podcast. The remarks came during a segment on the water cooler with co-host David Brody, who teased the 9 p.m. Eastern address is an elevated effort to regain the narrative on affordability. The president is going to be in the Oval Office tonight.

Starting point is 02:42:19 9 p.m. Eastern, Brody said, big address to the nation. He's elevating this. Clearly, this is to regain the narrative and explain more about the affordability issue in America and what this administration is doing. I think they're trying to seize this right off the top and make sure it doesn't get away from them. And the claims here is basically like this is Trump trying to steal a night march on the 2026 election cycle and reset a lot of what people are talking about around affordability. Like this argument is that now he's basically acknowledging that it's been kind of a mistake to focus so much on his overseas policies. And he really needs to start promising that that golden age is actually going to come for his voters, which the, the, numbers don't bear out, right? Like, almost no jobs have been added in the U.S. since April. There's about 700,000 more people unemployed now than there were in November of 2024. Like, things aren't good. Yeah, inflation is still wild.

Starting point is 02:43:11 Inflation is real bad. Food and, like, the material things that we need are going up in price faster than general inflation. Like, it's not good. And people, like, on his own side, Jessica Tarlov, who's a Fox News host of the five, quote tweeted a post about how like the hiring recession just with the golden age attached, which is like what Trump has been saying, you know, we're going to have a new golden age if you make me president. So like the fact that he hasn't done, he hasn't followed through any of his promises to actually improve life for his voters or the economy is starting to hurt. And I guess I'm hopeful that that's what it is rather than the

Starting point is 02:43:53 Marines are about to be in Caracas, right? But I guess we'll see very soon. Yeah, great stuff. Yeah. Talking of international stuff Trump is doing, let's talk about the new travel ban. So this travel ban dropped yesterday. That was Tuesday.

Starting point is 02:44:10 So it previously had this 19 country travel ban, right? Some of that was a complete bar to entry for citizens of those country or to new visa entries. Some of it was a partial bar to immigrant visas, not to not. not to non-immigrant visas, right? They have now expanded this to 20 more countries. So totally banned now from getting new visas to enter the USA, a citizen of Burkina, Faso, Mali, Nishia, South Sudan, and Syria as well as the Palestinian Authority.

Starting point is 02:44:39 The Syria one is particularly wild because Al-Shaar justice to the White House. There are, like, individual case-by-case exceptions, right? It's not that they wouldn't block Al-Shaarra, I'm sure, but like it's interesting to look at the justifications that they use here what they are basically saying, I'll just read a couple of them here to give you an example, right? Quote, at least one country lacks mechanisms in hospitals to ensure bursts are reported and widespread with a general lack of vecking and poor record keeping result in any non-citizen being able to obtain any civil document from that country,

Starting point is 02:45:14 particularly if that person is willing to pay a fee or engage an individual that specializes in assisting in such fraud. They go on to basically document failures in government bureaucracy. They talk about corruption, right? They talk about places where birth certificates are just written by hand. They talk about places where the government does not control all the territory, prevalence of crime, places which offer citizenship by investment without physical residents. They also talk about some of these countries not being willing to accept their nationals to the U.S.

Starting point is 02:45:49 deport and again, visa overstay rates, right, which is what they spoke about last time. What is getting less reporting, or at least was this morning when I looked, was that they have removed exemptions which existed for the previous 19. These include family member visas, right? So that means that, for instance, someone who could have themselves become a permanent resident or even a citizen now cannot bring a family member, say a spouse, a sibling, etc., across, even though those people were people to see vetted. And it appears some, there is certain categories of SIVs are exempt,

Starting point is 02:46:27 but I believe not all SIVs. So that's a special immigrant visa, right? The vast bulk of SIVs will be Afghan people who worked with the U.S. military in Afghanistan. The 19 countries who are now partially restricted are, I'm just going to read them of, Angola, Antigua, Antigua, Benin, Coutivois, Dominica, Gabon. Bon, the Gambia, Malawi, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Tonga, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. For some reason, the first five of these are underlined on the Whitehouse website.

Starting point is 02:47:00 I don't know if someone were copied and pasted them across with hyperlinks. I don't know. I'm unable to work out why. They're not hyperlinked in the document, but there doesn't seem to be any explanation. There's no special set of sanctions for those, and they're just in alphabetical order. they actually reduced restrictions on Turkmenistan because, quote, the suspension of entry into the United States of nationals of Turkmenistan

Starting point is 02:47:24 as non-immigrants on B1, B2, FM and JVs as this is lifted. Because some concerns remain, the entry into the United States of nationals of Turkmenistan as immigrants remain suspended. The last element of this that I want to cover is it would appear to stop international adoptions from the listed countries, like all of those 39.

Starting point is 02:47:45 countries, which is wild. And, like, particularly unfortunate because I know, like, people who adopts children from outside the United States, like that it's a process that takes years. And I can imagine it being horrifically traumatic to have it suddenly cut off like this. But consciously or unconsciously, that is what this executive action appears to do. So that is not great. It seems that the United States is using this.

Starting point is 02:48:15 as a kind of cudgel, right, to encourage those countries to, it's kind of a quid pro quo. They get what they want. They got from Turkmenistan, apparently, then they will remove some of those restrictions. Otherwise, they will continue them. So, yeah, that's not great. So Judge Hannah Dugan's trial began this week. Dugan, if you're not familiar, she's not the judge in New Mexico, who was accused of providing firearms to somebody who was not a permanent resident or citizen.

Starting point is 02:48:42 She is a judge who is accused of allowing a migrant. man named Mr. Flores-Ru-Louise, to leave her courtroom from a door that is not the usual door. That door led to a private corridor. In that private corridor, there was one exit to a public area and also a door to a fire escape. Mr. Flores-Ruiz took the exit to the public area. He then took a lift down, I think, to the ground floor with an ICE officer. he then attempted to run away when ICE officers attempted to detain him

Starting point is 02:49:16 when he left the lift he was caught and detained. So we learned quite a lot in this and it's just been interesting to follow. First of all, we see that several of the people who were taking part in the apprehension were reassigned FBI agents. This is increasingly common, right?

Starting point is 02:49:34 All branches of the federal law enforcement have had some of their capacity. redirected to doing this, right? To doing, like this guy, I believe, had misdemeanors. The agents were using signal to communicate. They had a group chat called Frozen Water. Jesus Christ. Yeah, really funny.

Starting point is 02:49:59 God, I hate these people. The FBI agent conceded in cross-examination that's not an app approved by the FBI, but according to one... Shocking. The DHS apparently does approve it, according to a CBP agent who was cross-examination. there, which obviously creates an issue for the retention of records, right?

Starting point is 02:50:17 Because signal, if you're not familiar, auto-deletes things after a period of time that users can configure. It also appears that when one of these DHS agents entered the courthouse, court security officers told him that he needed an escort, but then he appears to a preceded without one. In a text to colleagues, this DHS employee said, quote, this is going to be a pain in the dick. Huh. So there's that. Jesus Christ.

Starting point is 02:50:43 Yeah. Do what happens, it seems like, is Judge Dugan sent them to the chief judge because it didn't have a judicial warrant? It's had an administrative warrant, right? Another judge testified against Judge Dugan, a judge called Judge Severa. So Judge Severa was with Judge Dugan when they confronted the agents. Judge Dugan wore her judicial robes when confronting them, which apparently is not usual. It's not usual to wear them. out of the courtroom, and Judge Severa seemed to disapprove of that. And then she said,

Starting point is 02:51:16 quote, Judge Dugan could, quote, have been more diplomatic. And then she said, quote, judges shouldn't be helping defendants evade arrest. At the same time, Judge Dugan's defense lawyer asked her if she had warned her sister of the ice presence, which she had, and it appears to her sister had a hearing at the courthouse the next day, which Judge Severa said she was not aware of. So there's like a lot still to be unpacked here, right? This is just the first day. This could go on past Christmas and into the new year and it probably will. But there's been some pretty good reporting on this from a substack called All Rise Media. And I will keep checking in on this and we'll report it again after the new year.

Starting point is 02:52:03 Hello, this is Garrison Davis reporting from Tokyo. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the regular executive disorder group recording due to being halfway around the globe. So I'm recording my section solo. This past week saw two devastating mass shootings back to back. On Saturday afternoon, a mask shooter entered an economics class at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and opened fire with a concealed handgun, killing two people, injuring nine others, all students. About 30 minutes after the shooting started, the University Police announced a suspect was in custody.

Starting point is 02:52:44 20 minutes later, they retracted that statement. Then, University Police reported shots fired in another section of campus, which they also later retracted. President Trump posted on Truth Social, quote, I've been briefed on the shooting that took place at Brown University in Rhode Island. The FBI is on the scene. The suspect is in custody. God bless the victims and the families of the victims, unquote. This too was untrue, as the university released a statement about an hour later,

Starting point is 02:53:15 clarifying that the shooter was not in custody and that over 400 officers were on the scene to assist in the investigation. The next morning, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley announced that a new person of interest was detained. The Providence police chief told NBC that they were confident that the suspect was the shooter. Major news outlets later named this individual, though later that evening this quote-unquote person of interest was released with the Rhode Island Attorney General saying that the evidence, quote, now points in a different direction, unquote. The shooter currently remains unidentified and at large.

Starting point is 02:53:56 On Sunday night in Sydney, Australia, a father and son, Sijid and Navid Akram, coordinated a targeted attack against Jewish people attending a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach. Fifteen people were killed in the shooting. Victims include a 10-year-old girl and a Holocaust survivor. 24 victims remain hospitalized. A bystander named Ahmed al-Ahmad, a son of Syrian refugees, charged one of the gunmen and wrestled his gun away. Ahmed was later shot multiple times but survived,

Starting point is 02:54:31 and has been labeled a hero by the Australian Prime Minister. Police say that a vehicle used by the gunmen contained homemade Islamic State flags and improvised explosive devices. The men were not part of an official terror cell, though the Prime Minister says that they were motivated by Islamic State extremist ideology. Counterterrorism officials believe the shooters

Starting point is 02:54:53 received, quote-unquote, military-style training in the Philippines a month before the attack. On Tuesday, self-styled online investigators and right-wing social media content mills falsely identified the Brown University shooter as an LGBTQ Palestinian studying at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, citing gate analysis based on surveillance footage of the unidentified suspect released by police. The university removed this queer Palestinian student's online profile in an effort to prevent doxing, though this itself was used by the online smear campaign as evidence of guilt. Brown University later published this statement, quote, In the aftermath of the shooting, we've seen a harmful doxing activity directed towards at least one member of the Brown University community.

Starting point is 02:55:44 It's important to make clear that targeting individuals could do irrevocable harm. accusations, speculation, and conspiracies we're seeing on social media, and in some news reports are irresponsible, harmful, and in some cases dangerous for the safety of individuals in our community. It is not unusual as a safety measure to take steps to protect an individual's safety when this kind of activity happens, including in regard to their online presence. As law enforcement officials stated clearly on Tuesday afternoon, if this individual's name had any relevance to the current investigation, they would be actively looking for the this individual and providing information publicly, unquote.

Starting point is 02:56:22 On a final note, after the holiday break, we will be reporting on the indictment against four alleged members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front in California regarding a New Year's Eve bombing plot. We're back, and we have some news that's going to be really sad for everybody here. It could happen here, and just all of you listening, which is, French, of the pod, Dan Bongino is stepping down from his work as deputy director of the FBI. I think it's been a nice vacation for him, but, you know, America needs him in his much more important role, whatever podcast he was doing before he got brought in to be deputy director

Starting point is 02:57:16 of the FBI. You know, look, if he was podcasting right now, they would have caught the mass shooter at Brown. I think we can all agree on that. Yeah, he'd have podcasted his way through it. that or just him not being at the FBI would have made the FBI do their jobs better. Look, what we're learning from this is that you can never escape the podcasting minds. No matter where else you try to go, they will drag you back down. Oh, look, if you make me director of the FBI, I promise to stop podcasting and start being the most corrupt director of the FBI we've ever had. That's a tough challenge, but I think you're up to the task.

Starting point is 02:57:58 prepared to work at it. Yeah. So, yeah, that's cool. I wanted to talk a little bit about an executive order that our beloved president put out very recently. Some of you may be aware of this, but on December 11th, 20, I mean, this year, 2025, Trump released yet another executive order, this one titled Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence.

Starting point is 02:58:23 And basically in this, and Trump stated that, like, the reason, he's doing this is because it's absolutely critical to the U.S.'s future that we be at the top of the game when it comes to AI, that we be global leaders in this burgeoning new field. He states in the EO, these efforts have already delivered tremendous benefits to the American people and led to trillions of dollars of investments across the country. Certainly haven't. But we remain in the earliest days of the technological revolution and in a race with adversaries for supremacy within it. Trump stated in an interview that he expects AI to be 50 to 60 percent of the U.S. in the near future, which is nuts.

Starting point is 02:59:00 Maybe that's just because everything else will just go to complete shit, you know? The reality is that, like, AI is not even close to being that value in terms of, like, what the economy produces, but nearly all of our growth is related and, like, is tied right now to data center investment. So Trump absolutely needs AI, because without it, the country is very obviously in a recession. Like, this is the only thing propping up the image of the economy as not being in the shitter. Now, what does this EO actually do? Well, the goal of this, the statement is that it is the policy of the United States

Starting point is 02:59:34 to sustain and enhance the United States as global AI dominance through a minimally burdensome national policy framework for AI. This EO will establish an AI litigation task force within 30 days of this order going out. The Attorney General is supposed to establish this task force whose responsibility is to challenge state AI laws that are inconsistent with the policy set forward above, right? that we need to be globally dominant in AI, right? So this task force is supposed to go out and find state laws that it believes are like an onerous burden on the development of this technology.

Starting point is 03:00:07 Going along with this within 90 days of the order, the Secretary of Commerce is supposed to do an evaluation of all state AI laws in order to like point out which ones this task force should go after. And then the stick that this EO establishes is that if this task force decides that like a state AI law is in violation of our need to be dominant in AI, we can restrict state funding to things like the broadband equity access and deployment program, right? Basically, they'll cut off federal funding for like broadband access in order to punish states that try to restrict or in any way, shape, or form govern what people can use, what companies can

Starting point is 03:00:48 use AI for. And the primary thing this is all about, I know we all think about the stuff that like most people have more direct experience with, which is like all the slop, flooding the internet, the disinformation that's continuing to cook the brains of a lot of our peers and elders. And just the fact that, like, it's making certain industries full of hardworking people a lot harder to exist because companies are just trying to replace quality work with absolute, like, slop, trash. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:01:15 But really what this is about and the primary focus of most of these state-level laws regulating AI is the housing market, right? There's a good article in Politico about this written by Cassandra Dumay, but she notes that per a national conference of state legislatures analysis in July, there were more than 40 pending bills across the United States related to just AI in the housing sector. And most of these bills are attempting to stop landlords from using different AI programs to coordinate pricing. Basically, there are a couple of different programs, the most prominent, which is called Real Page. And what they do is landlords join these programs

Starting point is 03:01:54 and they share information on like what their different properties cost. And then the AI knows what everybody is charging and can suggest that they charge higher prices, right? Yeah. Now, the way that this is supposed to work is that you as a landlord look out at what's publicly available about the prices of your competitors

Starting point is 03:02:17 and look at like what your customers are currently willing to bear and then try to set your prices and, you know, future price increases based on that. What Real Page is doing is a legal collusion, right? This is price fixing. It's just the AI is doing the actual active price fixing. The landlords are just sharing their data and paying a fee to the service. And so a bunch of states have tried to stop this because this objectively makes the housing

Starting point is 03:02:43 crisis worse. I know there's some annoying assholes who come out and be like, you shouldn't talk about anything but increasing the supply of housing. And like, that's idiot shit. Yes, we need to increase the supply of housing. This objectively hurts people. These programs objectively increase the price of rent. They do damage.

Starting point is 03:02:59 We should be mitigating or making it impossible for businesses like this to exist. Anyone who disagrees is just being a dummy. New York passed a law in October that banned the use of AI algorithms to allow landlords to do price fixing. There's a similar bill in the Massachusetts legislation that's making its way forward right now. And this is fundamentally, what a lot of the opposition to like state level AI regulation is about, is that the landlords basically think that this is a great way to make a shitload of money. And tech companies are like, and we can continue, we can make a shitload of money selling them the tools to do this.

Starting point is 03:03:35 And states are trying to push back on this. And like, that's fundamentally what a lot of the impetus behind this executive order is, is an attempt to stop people from making this even more harmful. there is some like, in this, that political article, they quote from Kevin Donnelly, who's the executive director of the real estate technology and transformation center. And he talks about like, well, actually, we're currently using AI to identify buildable lots and promote sustainable construction so that we can actually like reduce some of the cost of housing. And all of these bills could, you know, undermine our ability to improve people's like, yeah, it's just fucking go like literally jump off a bridge, man. Fuck you. Yeah. No. We need.

Starting point is 03:04:18 know that's not how it works. We have data on this. No. This isn't theoretical. Yeah. Yeah. Anytime a landlord says anything or a real estate developer that says anything that suggests the thing they want to do is lower rent. They are lying. You can tell because they don't fucking lower rents unless like a global pandemic happens. Yeah. Like, that's not how any of this works. And this has been controversial. Trump before putting out the EO tried to

Starting point is 03:04:48 encourage the passage of a bill through Congress that would have done the same thing as the EO, right, and would have actually had like more force of law behind it, basically making it illegal for states to have their own laws regulating AI. That didn't pass because even Republicans don't really like that idea. For one thing, states' rights is still supposed to be a pretty big part of the party. But for another thing, there's like a lot of things that conservatives are really unhappy with in terms of AI. For example, it keeps exposing children to pornography. and other things that kids shouldn't be exposed to. For another thing, there's a lot of American jobs

Starting point is 03:05:23 that are going to be lost as a result of, or potentially could be lost as a result of AI slop automation of a bunch of industries. And so there's even a significant amount of resistance among Republicans to this, which is why the bill didn't pass, right? And Trump, when he announced this EO, basically sat down with like a chunk of the conservatives

Starting point is 03:05:44 who were more critical of this. And I think basically bullying, them into getting on board and saying, no, he promised us this won't restrict state levels to, like, improve safety for children, right? There's absolutely, like, no guarantee of that. Like, you just have David Sachs, it was Trump's top AI advisor saying, no, no, no, the, none of this is about trying to stop state laws to make kids safer. It's just trying to stop state laws that will make rent less expensive. Yeah, there's Marjorie Taylor Greens come out against this. She's basically said that, you know, this is a violation of states' rights. It's

Starting point is 03:06:18 bullshit. Steve Bannon is in the same place. He had a good quote, I found in an article by the Hill. After two humiliating faceplants on a must-pass legislation, now we attempt an entirely unenforceable EO. Tech Bros. doing utmost to turn POTUS MAGA base away from him while they line their pockets. Which is essentially accurate. Yeah, he's no wrong. Oh, Steve, he ain't wrong about that.

Starting point is 03:06:40 So all this is, like, pretty annoying and fucked up. We'll see what actually becomes of this. I tend to agree with Bannon that it's pretty much. unenforceable, like the lawsuit, the court battles that will come from this is just going to be expensive and time-consuming, but I actually don't think this is going to work the way they want. This is Trump making it very clear that he is bought and paid for by the tax set and that he understands that he is hanging on by a thread in terms of popularity. One of the only things stopping it from getting, stopping the situation from getting worse,

Starting point is 03:07:12 is that AI spending on data centers and shit is propping up the image of the economy, right? that's what this is all about. Yeah, and this, and this is something where he can simultaneously show up his tech base and shore up his landlord base. Yeah. Which are like, yeah, it's great to them. Two kinds of guys to do like Donald Trump. Yeah. I guess there's an end here where I could, I wanted to make a note about something also related to AI,

Starting point is 03:07:36 which is that there's an incredibly stupid article in Vox that came out this week. Like literally the title is like, America, you've made it very clear that you hate AI, but what if it's the only way to restart the idea machine, right? Oh, yeah. And this, this dipshit columnist's argument is that like, well, we're not, we're running out of ideas. And AI, like, human beings can't come up with ideas enough to create growth at the level that the economy needs to be growing. And in order to, like, take humanity into the future, really AI is the only way to generate more new ideas. And I wanted to look at like, what is this based off of?

Starting point is 03:08:15 And I think I figured out what, like, the fundamental source of all of this shit is, which is back in 2017, there was a research paper put out by the National Bureau of Economic Research by Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, John Van Rinen, and Michael Webb. The kind of summary of that article reads as follows, in many growth models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas. And in the long run, growth rate is the product of two terms, the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide range of evidence for various industries, products and firms, showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply, right? So basically, we have more people doing research and we're spending more money on research, but that research is translating into economic gains at a lower level than ever before, right,

Starting point is 03:09:04 to the point where we're not going to be able to continue to make economic gains like we used to be unless something changes. And if you're kind of paying attention to this, you might notice that that study, which is the underpinning of that Vox article and all these claims that we need AI for ideas, really is not actually making an argument that people aren't having more ideas. It's making an argument that it is harder to profit from ideas

Starting point is 03:09:26 than it used to be, right? Now, that is fundamentally different from people not having ideas. For one thing, it's reducing an idea to something that delivers a return for venture capitalists, right? That's all an idea is in this. It's something that makes money.

Starting point is 03:09:42 And a lot of great ideas, like the post office, don't generate a direct profit. Now, obviously, it's a net benefit to the economy that we have a post office, but the post office runs at a loss, right? Which is why you have state funding for certain things, because they're just not going to be the kind of ideas that, like, a bunch of Silicon Valley investors want to throw money into, right? Now, the other part of the issue here is just a very practical one, which is that a lot of the ideas, the great ideas last century, that were, like, most core.

Starting point is 03:10:12 with massive gains in productivity, stuff like the introduction of vaccines on a wide scale, indoor plumbing and electricity on a wide scale. Phones. There's not ideas like that that are like that big and that much of a game changer left. Right. The low hanging fruit has been picked. The low hanging fruit has been picked. There's not another the telephone waiting out there.

Starting point is 03:10:37 We already did that. It was the smartphone. There's not another indoor plumbing, right? there's not something that's going to be as much of a sea change for the economy and for the quality of human life as those ideas because those were really big things. Yeah, like maybe you can put it as something like actually cleaning the air that we breathe. Yes, but again, that's not profitable in a direct way. No. Right?

Starting point is 03:10:58 Like you, that's an idea that would have a change that big, but there's not a profit incentive for it. Don't we privatize the air, Robert? Right. Yeah. So, yeah. So, yeah. So we privatize the fucking air. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:11:09 And there's a lot. Again, I find this whole discussion pattern. It's an example of the fact that, like, people like this fucking Vox article, who I don't feel like deserves to be named to this, have been using ChatGPT so much that they're no longer thinking. They're not really sentient in a meaningful way, right? Like, when you write something like that, it's because your brain has been completely fucking cooked.

Starting point is 03:11:32 I did find a good article, ironically, from 2017, from Vox EU, that is titled Ideas. aren't running out, but they are getting more expensive to find, which is making a lot of the claims that, like, I've made, which is that, or that I've been bringing up so far in this, which is that it's not that there's a lack of ideas, that it costs more money to do stuff like that now. Like, the costs, and because everything's so much more complex, the big ideas we're looking at aren't as simple as indoor plumbing. They require a lot more computing power. They require a lot more people working on them, right? Like, we've plucked the low-hanging fruit, and it ends with a paragraph I find kind of valuable.

Starting point is 03:12:09 here. Returning to the oil metaphor, we are digging deeper into a trickier part of the rock. Of course, we could be wrong, and humanity may have just been chipping away at a particularly a hard point that will soon give way, creating decades of cheap ideas. This is the hope of those who emphasize the revolutionary power of artificial intelligence and the singularity, an accumulation of technology that triggers runaway growth at some point in the future. Although we all enjoy science fiction, history books are usually a safer guide to the future. In this case, history suggests that large increases in research effort are need to offset its declining productivity. And again, if you want to have the big ideas and the Star Trek future that all of

Starting point is 03:12:42 these billionaires like Elon Musk pretend they want, what you actually have to do is be willing to put a lot of money into research and development without any promise of a profit. Your motivation can't be, well, now we have to get a 200% rate of return in our investments, right? It has to be, well, this would improve people's lives and make life more sustainable, right? Like finding solutions to a lot of problems with climate. Cleaning the air, like dealing with like lack of access to clean water, lack of access to basic medical care. These are not things where doing them means that your company gets an immediate profit

Starting point is 03:13:17 and evaluation in the tens of billions of dollars, right? That's just not the way providing life-saving aid to people works. But the net value to the global economy would be massive. If, for example, kids weren't going without food in access to clean water and had better access to education, and thus were able to go into fields where they become researchers and generate ideas

Starting point is 03:13:40 that eventually turn into profit, right? Like, these AI fucks aren't talking about ideas. They're talking about fracking the human mind, right? That's what they want to do. That's a good way to put it, yeah. Yeah. I think that there's another thing we're saying here, too.

Starting point is 03:13:54 There's a David Graber argument about this where he makes an argument that I think is also very compelling that part of the decline in the rate of technological change has been the extent to which everyone who was trying to do this stuff is just increasingly dealing

Starting point is 03:14:11 with more and more layers of bureaucracy instead of actually doing the thing they're trying to do. And this is a huge problem in academia where it's like, okay, so you have, you know, you're teaching in academia, but you're also spending like a quarter of your time trying to get another job. You're spending another quarter of your

Starting point is 03:14:27 time dealing with all of the unhinged whatever like accounting bullshit that your fucking supervisors have like or like like university management has like put upon you. And this is something that's also true for government researchers where there's just like this thing, you know, there's been this incredible increase in sort of the amount of bureaucracy they have to jump through. And a lot like largely because of the right and because of all of the like weird shit they do where it's like they hate government funding. So like, oh, everyone has to like justify their funding literally every 10 seconds. And I think I think like that's like one of the other angles of this. And it's something

Starting point is 03:14:58 that's only going to get worse because this is. administration is just fucking annihilating the entire basis of American science? Yeah. They're just killing it. The damage that they've done to the pipeline of the people that would produce these researchers, right? With the ways that all suddenly like American science postdocs, just there's no money for it, there's no money

Starting point is 03:15:14 for grad students, they're killing all of the pathways that would do this. And then they're going, oh, the only solution is the fucking tech boondoggle we've created to the problems that we created by just annihilating the capacity to do science. It's

Starting point is 03:15:30 sucks. I hate them. If you want to email left, you can do so. It is CoolZone Tips at Proton. Dot Me. If you want it to be encrypted, you should use a Proton mail address as well. They're free. All right, guys. I think that's the podcast, listeners,

Starting point is 03:15:48 haters, lovers. It's our last E.D. of the year, friends. It's our last E.D. of the year. Well, I don't know. We'll see if those pills come in. But, yeah. I hate you. Happy holidays, everybody. Put a trans girl on your couch.

Starting point is 03:16:05 Put a trans girl on your couch. Go love it. Or a bed. I mean, yeah, if you got a bed. Yeah, he's got a bed? A futon. Those are acceptable. Yeah, inflatable mattress.

Starting point is 03:16:14 We love those. One of those, like, chairs that leans back to where it's, like, basically flat. Yeah. Not a lazy boy in this instance. Sure. A lot of options. A neutral lazy chair.

Starting point is 03:16:23 Yeah. An inflatable mattress. Why not? Yeah. A water bed. A water bed. Waterbeds are strong enough because they are heavy. Anyways.

Starting point is 03:16:34 Generally, you're not allowed to have them, but yes. Anyways, we reported the news. Arguably. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Coolzone Media,

Starting point is 03:16:57 visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers,

Starting point is 03:17:18 but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York since the son of Sam available now. Listen for free on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 03:17:43 This is an IHeart podcast, guaranteed human.

Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 213

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