Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 58

Episode Date: November 5, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of It Could Happen Here. I'm your guest host of this episode, where I'm hoping to take a moment to discuss the Commons, the principles of successful Commons management, and why certain attempts to establish the Commons have failed. My name, by the way, is Andrew of the YouTube channel, Andrewism. You can follow me on youtube.com slash Andrewism. I'm joined here with my two cool hosts.

That will be Garrison Davis. Hello. And James Stout. Hi. Awesome. But before I get into exactly what makes the Commons work, I first want to discuss where exactly the Commons are. Because despite being, you know, common throughout human history, a lot of people can't imagine how they might have worked, what they are. Of course, the Commons is a very specific definition, a particular context of feudalism and whatnot. But even outside of that, the idea of the Commons is essentially the resources accessible to all members of society.

The totality of the material riches of that community, or even of the world, regardless their whole inheritance, rather than being subject to enclosure and to privatization. Even today, despite the process of enclosure, which is where they have its own podcast episode, or series of podcast episodes, or book even, even today they are still, you know, viable, existing Commons institutions. And they've, in some cases, endured for well over a thousand years. Most famously, Eleanor Ostrom, the Economist who explored the concept in depth and debunked the tragedy of the Commons, wrote in her book,

Governing the Commons, that from, you know, the alpine meadows of Tobel, Switzerland, to the three million hectares of Japanese forests to the irrigation systems of Spain and the Philippines, the possibility of community of popular rather than public or state or private or corporate ownership exists. The possibility of communal ownership as opposed to capitalist or state ownership exists. There's also the communal land of Chiapas in Mexico after the successful Zapatista Revolution. And of course, as I discussed in the previous episode, there are the Commons of Barbuda, where the entire island of the Twin Island nation of Antigone Barbuda is owned collectively by all Barbudans, and regarded as their collective heritage.

These projects, of course, are not static. The Commons of Barbuda, for example, existed for about a hundred years, but had some precedence prior to that, and are now honestly being encroached upon after the sole shock doctrine of the hurricane that ravaged the island has opened up an opportunity for Antigone Barbuda's government to sort of swoop in and privatize the land for the benefit of foreign companies and foreign resorts. So the Commons is not this timeless, eternal institution that can't be interrupted, doesn't ever change. In the case in Chiapas, they had similar projects, similar institutions prior to colonization, colonization rolled in and interrupted all that.

But still, thanks to the Zaptista Revolution, they were able to institute some semblance of that sort of Commons institution, of that communal land for their collective benefit. They respond to experience, to conditions, to circumstance, to serve, or in some cases, to eventually not serve the people. But of course, not all Commons are able to work. All Commons institutions operate effectively, and she talks about why, using various case studies to illustrate her point. In the course of governing the Commons, she used, of course, the existence case studies to develop certain principles that she believed make the Commons work,

principles that she found in Commons between Switzerland and Japan, the Philippines, and Spain, and she then used those principles to examine the Commons institutions that didn't work and identify which principles were missing from the equation. But I'm talking a lot about what these principles, about these principles of successful Commons management, and I haven't broken down what they are exactly. So to get into that, the principles of successful Commons management are as follows. Number one, clearly defined boundaries. Boundaries in the sense of having of those involved, the appropriators of the Commons, the people who are directly accessing the Commons,

having a clear sense of structure and characteristics of the resource system itself, whether it be through a scientific study or through generationally preserved folk knowledge, as well as knowledge and a clear sense of who is involved and withdrawn from and sustaining it. Even in the case where the entire world has been common, where all land has been returned to common land, to the ownership of none and everyone simultaneously. In such a case, in individual instances of common pool resources, whether it be a forest or a fishery or a lake or groundwater basin, the people most directly accessing those, that segment of the Commons,

that system, that common pool resource, need to have a clear sense of exactly what that resource entails. The limits of that resource, the renewability of that resource, and who is involved in withdrawing from and sustaining that resource so that they're able to collaborate. As in the case with the tragedy of the Commons, everybody's just this isolated actor, not communicating at all, not collaborating. There's no collective institution in place to help them work it out. You're basically going to end up in a case like the tragedy of the Commons where the system is depleted because nobody has a sense of what anybody else is doing. There's no open channel of communication, which brings us, of course, to collective decision-making power.

That's the third principle, so I'm jumping ahead slightly, but it flows better this way. Having collective decision-making power over the Commons, meaning there's an institution in place that those who are drawn from the Commons are able to come together and discuss the rules of the Commons, how they're going to draw from the Commons, how they're going to deal with the Commons, how they're going to deal with each other as they deal with the Commons, and so on and so forth. The idea of rules is not anti-anarchist as a concept, just the idea that there is not popular inputs and collective inputs and free association in place. And so with consensus, with this institution of collective decision-making power,

people will be able to come up with and modify the rules as it suits their situations, as it suits their shifting circumstances. And, of course, and this is the second principle, that their appropriation and provision rules of the Commons are compatible with local conditions. The idea is that they're not relying on any external authorities to come up with these rules, to commit to these rules, to bind themselves to these rules, even when the temptations to violate those rules apply. So as a practice of developing community, you need to have some sense of shared norms and developing those shared norms over time regarding behaviour.

And, of course, as in the case in almost all societies, of course, reputation and one's reputation would play a role. If you are known to be consistently violating the Commons rules, of course, there are going to be social consequences to that. That's just a natural consequence. Just because the Commons exist doesn't mean that people are free of the consequences of how they use those Commons. Just like in the case of the environment, you know, just because you can cut down all the trees in the forest doesn't mean you're free of the consequences from cutting down the trees in that forest. Your actions are still going to have consequences, whether it be environmental or social.

There are, of course, limits as there are in any other aspect of life. But, of course, simple norms regarding behaviour or concerns about reputation may help, but you're also going to need the fourth and fifth principles established in some form to effectively maintain social harmony. The fourth principle is, of course, monitoring, which is the process of continuously evaluating the conditions of the common pool resource itself, as well as the behaviour of the appropriators. Now, to monitoring is kind of spooky, right? It sounds a little bit 1984, like big brothers watching you kind of fight, but that's not really the intention.

It's just the idea that it's just this constant informal process of looking at and observing and collecting data on the conditions of the Commons. The conditions including how people behave with the Commons, as well as the Commons themselves, the resources themselves, how much of them we have, how quickly they're being renewed, that sort of thing. And through that process of each person, each appropriator of the Commons institutions monitoring the system continuously, you begin to learn what rules work and what rules don't. And so you can adapt your rules to suit the circumstances, to suit how people actually behave, which is something that centralised and hierarchical institutions have a bit of trouble doing, because when you have this horizontal Commons institution, you're able to look at,

okay, this is how things are going so far, and let me, we can now talk about it, we're constantly in this dialogue, we're all able to contribute our information in this horizontal system and adapt our rules and our behaviour to suit, whereas in the pyramid structure of a hierarchical and centralised organisation, the further up the pyramid you go, yes, the more power there is as centralised institutions tend to have, but also less information, because the narrowing of the pyramid leads to less and less information from the bottom, and then filtering up to the top. And so when you have the centralised institutions, rules are a lot more rigid because they're not able to respond quickly and effectively and as informed, as informally to the situations as they arise.

That's also why 80% of the planet's biodiversity is being protected by a very small percentage of Indigenous people, because they are on the ground, because they're interacting with the systems in real time, they're able to respond directly and quickly to changes in that biodiversity, to changes in behaviour, in order to maintain and sustain that system, whereas you'd find that a lot of conservation projects, a lot of restoration projects, environmental restoration projects are failing. I recently read an article about how a lot of these tree planting initiatives that governments have been doing these days, while it gets them good publicity, it gets them good social, political, international clout. When you go back one year, two years, three years down the line, almost all, if not all, the trees are dead.

The communities living by these reforestation projects were not involved in the process. They don't have any say in the selection of the trees. In fact, the trees aren't always even chosen in accordance with local conditions. There often isn't enough biodiversity in terms of the trees. I mean, when it comes to a forest, and that's what people don't understand, a forest is a living organism. It has multiple layers, it has multiple parts. You just pop a set of trees down and expect things to work out okay. You know, James C. Scott talks about this in seeing like a state. You can't just, in these states, they start these sort of forestry projects.

They try to legible, legibleize these forests, these simple roads and organisations, and you cut out all the fluff, all the shrubbery, all the other plans that are competing, quote, unquote. You end up with a dead system. You end up with a system that is very fragile, that's not able to respond to changes in the environments that arise because it does not have the buffers of a complex web of life in place. Indigenous groups and really anybody who is grounded in the local context is able to most effectively engage and respond because they have access to that information, because they're able to see the sharks in the system, the buffers, what works, what doesn't. Humiculturists are able to, you know, to have these intensive systems because they are constantly monitoring, come in full circle here, constantly monitoring the feedback that they're getting from their systems.

And of course, there's a fifth principle, you know, in these sort of situations, you're still going to have a couple opportunistic people who may be tempted to take advantage of the trust present in the group. And when I say opportunistic people, I don't mean to create this other, this outgroup. I just mean it's in the sense of, you know, you have, like we all do, moments of weakness, right? And in those moments of weakness, it can be easy for some to falter, and in that falter and jeopardize the security of the system as a whole. And so the fifth principle of successful comments management is the practice of accountability and systems of accountability through graduated sanctions. Of course, empathy needs to be maintained throughout the process, and I don't think that every infraction must automatically responded to with sanctions, like, again, I'm not trying to do something in 1984. It's just obviously when you have a system that has, and I know I'm referencing 1984 like a right finger, but yeah, I think it's fine to reference 1984 correctly as opposed to like someone who hasn't read it or read anything else that he wrote. Yeah, yeah.

We can take it. But you know, you obviously not every situation can respond to its sanctions, obviously, empathy is maintained throughout the process. But when you have a system in which a lot of people are dependent on the sustainability, not just people living right now, but generations to come and that's not something we are accustomed to thinking about. But generations to come you have to think about with these sort of common institutions. You can't do as the capitalist do and just let people do whatever with minimal if any environmental protections with minimal if any like standards in place. Yes, infractions vary in severity and stuff, but when the livelihood of the entire community is at stake, you know, things can be so easy. When infractions are just, you know, temporary deviations or unthreatening to the overall survival of the CPR, then you know, tolerance can be high, but it depends on the circumstance and that's why it really is important that the prior four principles are in place. You know, you have the clear defined boundaries, you have the rules of the commons established by collective decision making power over the comments with a constant process of monitoring in place, because again, the responsiveness of the people on the ground is a lot more in tune with the conditions of the

commons and with the needs of the people themselves because they are the people and the fifth principle and the fourth principle and all the other principles would be nothing without the sixth principle, which is the presence of conflict resolution mechanism. Humans are going to human, you know, we make mistakes, we have disagreements, and it needs to be some sort of means of discussing and resolving conflict in a healthy and effective way. There are a lot of processes in place. A lot of communities, egalitarian communities throughout history have used some sort of system of mediation. There's also arbitration, which tends to be more common in state societies, and there are also new models and methods of justice being established and drawn from from the past as well, that we can look into but they are conflict resolution mechanisms, they have to be in place, with successful comments management. We live in a society and society includes conflict. Conflict is not always necessarily a bad thing, but it's a thing and you can't ignore it and expect it to go away. The seventh principle is the freedom to organize and this principle is, you know, the basis upon which the other principles rest. In some places people have a lot of autonomy to self organize free of state control. In other places, they don't. In other places, there's a lot of state encroachment on the commons because that has been the mission of the state to further their tendrils in every sphere of life and existence.

So, obviously, the end goal, or one of the end goals is the complete abolition of the state. And obviously, the process upon which we reach those end goals would require prefigurative politics in the sense of establishing the institutions that we want in a future society in the here now and building that dual power capacity to provide a competitive excuse the capitalist terminology, but a competitive model that can, you know, compete with rise from and separately from and eventually replace the existing system. So that's the process of social revolution. I have a video coming up on that in December. Lastly, and this does not apply to every instance of commons management. But in some cases, you'll need the eighth and final principle for successful comments management that is nested enterprises, which is, you know, basically the same principle as an anarchist confederation. You know, if a particular community is accessing a commons institution that other communities are accessing, or if the commons that a group of communities are accessing are part of a larger regional commons or archipelagic commons or continental commons, then he wants to have means of collaboration, bottom up, of course, bottom up organizations, but you know, maintain the power to local level while coordinating these larger scaled commons and ensuring that there's a smooth running and smooth communication between the appropriators, you know, the people involved. These principles very clearly differentiate between success and the failure cases to reiterate the commons.

The principles successful commons management as follows clearly defined boundaries, rules compatible with local conditions, collective decision making power to establish those rules, monitoring to ensure those rules are compatible with people and conditions, graduated sanctions to ensure that rules are kept up with and the commons are protected from potential threats, conflict resolution mechanisms because humans are going to human, freedom to organize, particularly in the fragile early stages of establishing these projects and nested enterprises, confederation from the bottom up. In certain failure cases, we see that, you know, none of the principles apply. For example, in the book, Eleanor Ostrom references these two Turkish fisheries, the Bay of Izmir and Bodrum, where there was severe rent dissipation, continuing unabated. Of course, the book was written a while ago, so I'm not sure how the situation has evolved since then. But rent dissipation is basically a circumstance in which the commons, common pool resources are being depleted severely, and the sustainability of those commons are at stake. And so without those principles in place to ensure that it doesn't happen, you get a situation like what's going on, or what was going on in the Bay of Izmir and Bodrum. In the Kirindi Oil Irrigation Project in Sri Lanka, they did have clear boundaries that one principle in place, but the other principles were not.

In Mojave, California, they did have the institution of collective choice. They did have conflict resolution mechanisms, and it did have the recognized right to organize. But the other principles were not in place, and so that institution was also a failure. Or we could look at the case in the Mawala fishery, also in Sri Lanka, where rent dissipation had become a very severe problem, particularly after 1938. Now they did have rules in place. They did have a monitoring system. But unfortunately, you know, despite having those rules, despite having, you know, regulating the access to the beach and the use of the beach sands and the control of the number of nets to be used. I mean, they really did try. It wasn't a problem of ignorance. The issue was that although they were aware of the consequences of adding too many nets and drawing too much from the fishery, the issue became that the appropriators, the fishermen themselves, they don't have the autonomy to make and enforce the rules of the fishery that was deprived of them.

And so the institution was not able to sustain itself in the long term. So in all these cases, you know, no more of the three design principles actually characterized any of these cases. And so they were unable to solve the problems that they faced. There, of course, also issues where they are viable but fragile common systems where, you know, they have more of the principles in place, but they still lack all of them. So also in Sri Lanka, there was the gal oil, where boundaries and membership were clearly designated, where rules have been devised and monitored, where collective choice arenas have been set up. But they, you know, did not have the autonomy and they did not have conflict resolution mechanisms in place. And so the institution is not as robust as it could be. Of course, when it comes to the commons and existing institutions, existing fragile institutions, existing successful institutions, existing failures of institutions, that does not necessarily need to limit our imagination of possibilities.

But it's good to be informed as to what has worked in the past and what hasn't. We can still imagine future scenarios and experiments and how they might play out. But the point is, if we're trying to reinstate the commons, we need to understand what makes them work. At least what has made them work in the past and in the present. For more information on the commons and also the potential of a library economy, you can check out my videos on the commons and the library economy on my channel, youtube.com slash angirism. You can also check out Eleanor Ostrom's book, Governing the Commons, as well as a book called Eleanor Ostrom's Rules for Radicals, which I haven't read yet, but I feel it was pretty good. If you like what I do, and you'd like to support me, you can follow me on Patreon.com slash St. Drew, and on Twitter.com slash underscore St. Drew. That's all I have for today. It could happen here. Peace. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to They Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and then maybe kind of putting them back together again, sort of. This is a special episode about things that happened, where things that happened is the Brazilian election. And with me to talk about this is Garrison. Hello. And James. Hello. So I think I think people probably know by now. Luis Anasio Lula de Silva, better known as Lula, has defeated JR Bolsonaro in a absolutely terrifying squeaker of a presidential election. This is, like, by far the closest election that Lula, a former two-term president of Brazil has ever won.

Part of this is a campaign of last-minute voter suppression that Bolsonaro and his supporters did, where, like, basically, like, the Brazilian federal police started setting up, like, they set up, like, 550 roadblocks to stop people in Lula Strongholds from voting. There's, like, they assaulted people. It wound up not mattering. And right now, as of time of recording, which is 1 p.m., 130 p.m. Pacific on Halloween, Bolsonaro is missing in action. There's no, like, no one's seen him. The only sign of life that there has been from him is he unfollowed his wife. Amazing stuff. It sounds like he just locked himself in the presidential palace and turned all of the lights off. Yeah, he's missing in it. Nobody's seen or heard from him. So by the time this episode comes out, there's, like, a small chance there's been a coup. There's, like, a small chance he's died from COVID. I don't know. Probably neither of those have happened.

But, you know, so Lula won his election, like, he won, like, 50.8% of the vote, roughly. And, okay, so there's a lot of voter suppression, but even voter suppression cannot explain why Lula, who won his last elections with, respectively, 61 in 60% of the vote, was reduced to, like, 50.8% this time. And, okay, so this begs two questions. Who is Luisa Nassia Lula da Silva, and how did we get to this election? So the first episode of this is going to be answering the first question, and the second episode is largely the second question. Okay, so who actually is Lula? Lula is born in 1945, actually, his birthday is a few days ago, to a desperately poor family in Brazil's northeast. And this family moves from the northeast to what became known as the ABC region of Brazil, which is Santo André Sal Bernardo... Jesus. Who can't say names in Brazil now? Okay, here's the thing. This is not a famous name. This is Sal Bernardo.

Wait, are you conflating Brazil and Argentina, which are famously not the same country? Different languages. Here's the thing. If this was in Spanish, I could do this. I'm going to make this disclaimer here. All of my pronunciations of this are based on my terrible knowledge of Spanish. The problem is Brazil famously speaks Portuguese, a language that is not Spanish, so... Yeah, but okay, so there's a thing called the ABC region because there's three cities there that are ABC. Got it. As part of this mass migration, which is popularly remembered as this mass migration of people from the northeast to Sao Paulo, but... That's the popular memory of it. The actualities of millions of people flow into Sao Paulo from all across Brazil. The ABC region becomes Brazil's industrial heartland. Every story you read about this will call it Brazil's Detroit, and that's kind of true and kind of not true.

I don't know. Everyone who writes about Brazil is like, how can we make this the US? God forbid other countries have their own realities. Yeah, and okay, there is an extent to which Brazil is also the ex-slave colony thing, right? But no, Brazil is its own country. However, comma, the ABC region becomes the core of Brazil's massive metalworking industry. And this industry is just like, from the 50s to the 80s, just like purely expanding. The historian JD French knows that the ABC's population increased by 800% from 1950s to 1980, so Lula arrives in the middle of a veritable industrial revolution. This is going to end in one of history's sort of great built industrial working classes, but he's there that's kind of not what's happening. The other thing I should mention about this region is that when I say metalworking, the reason there's so many Detroit comparisons is that this is a region that is massively involved in Brazil's auto industry,

which in this period is expanding and is very large. I think I've actually talked about this in the neoliberalism episodes a little bit. Yeah, so Lula leaves school in fifth grade to basically find whatever work he can in the street. And this is another sort of very famous thing that everyone talks about about Lula, about he has a great school education, and that's sort of true. It is true that he never went to school past fifth grade mostly. I thought we'll get to some other stuff that he did later. What happens basically is that his mom's able to get him into this government metalworking apprenticeship program that is teaching young people how to basically become skilled metalworkers. And this also is an education.

There's a lot of very interesting theory stuff about this, about how these people are also kind of worker intellectuals because in order to be a metalworker and to do all this stuff, you have to know a shit ton of stuff. You have to know a bunch of tactical stuff about how metal works. It's very highly skilled and very high degree of knowledge you have to have. So he gets this kind of education. And he becomes a very, very good metalworker and he's part of a highly skilled and the academic literature will call it highly paid. This is highly paid compared to someone who's a worker but who's not one of the skilled metalworkers. These people aren't lawyers. They're so closer to the actual working class than people who are auxiliary parts of the ruling class. He enters this sort of manufacturing boom as part of what's called the Brazilian miracle.

He's there a bit before the sort of Brazilian miracle starts but there's this period under the military dictatorship which takes power in 1965 where they kind of like luck into a functioning economy. Although I should mention this now. In this period in Brazil, inflation being good and under control is inflation is at 20%. When inflation is at 20%, everything is considered fine and when it goes up from 20%, it's like oh no, we've lost control of inflation. And this kind of like, this is a survivable thing because people's wages are sort of indexed to their index to cost of living increases to some extent. Which is the thing that like... Yeah, it will never happen here. Yeah, well I mean, I guess if you do the kind of stuff these guys do, you can probably get some of this.

But yeah, the sort of interesting thing about what's happening here is you have a very large industrial working class but it's not really very militant for most of the time Lula's in it. Except for sort of right around the military like coup in 1965. Lula sees some of kind of like the old radicalism. Like he talks about like watching people like storming factories because they're on strike. The Brazilian working class does a lot of fun stuff that they do. They do things like, okay, so everyone will show up to a protest with like a bunch of pockets full of marbles. And when a counter recharge starts, they'll just roll the marbles down the street and the horse will step on the marbles and fall. That's an OG battle of cable street maneuver.

Yeah, yeah. My absolute favorite one. This is just like pure Looney Tunes shit. They do this thing where... Okay, so they'll string piano wire up like between light posts and then they'll bait Calvary Ennis to the charging at them. And then they'll run under the thing and the guys will just get fucking clothes lined. That's so good. Yeah, that's pretty great. Horse cops.

You don't see horse cops in America, but... Well, you see them sometimes. I have seen some horse cops. Portland's horse cops only like stopped existing a few years ago. Yeah, in the UK up until very recently, they used them to police protest. Yeah, there was footage from 2020 of people getting run over by horses in the States. Yeah, they still do this. Yeah, it fucking sucks. I think the most famous police horse related story in the US is a Philly sports fan.

I think it was like 2014 punching a police horse. What a city. The most famous British police horse thing is the horse humping the cop. Critical support to the horse? Yeah, it's gonna quickly copy the image into the chat so you can all enjoy it. Okay, all right. I'm glad that we've taken this episode in this direction. Oh my fucking... Holy shit, that... Oh my god, okay.

That is much more graphic than I thought it was going to be. Well, do you know what else will take a cop and bend it over and... Nope. All right, well, here's some... We can't promise that, Garrison. Here is some advertisements. And we're back with other things that will scar my soul forever. Oh, boy. Up until sort of 1965, there had been a kind of left-wing government in Brazil

and then the military coup just overthrows it. And the left is kind of just like annihilated from this. And it's not just from the pure political repression, which is like all the communist parties are forced underground. But one of the real things that sort of like really shatters the Brazilian left is that the coup happens and the left sort of knows there's a coup coming, right? But they expect that when the coup happens, there's gonna be strikes and like the working class is gonna fight them and they're gonna beat it.

And everyone kind of just like in the factories kind of just shrugs and nothing happens and they just get rolled over. And this is the start of this period of sort of like, you know, this kind of like the workers movement, like nothing is happening again. There's some sort of radical student groups are trying to do stuff, but like, I don't know, there's a Brazilian version of May 68, but mostly what happens there is like one factory gets occupied and then the army shows up with guns and they get owned and it's really grim.

You know, you have these sort of like tiny like, actually, okay, you have these tiny Catholic Maoist groups who release Maoist student groups. Wait. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. We just go straight through that. All right. It's nuts.

Normal. Totally normal. Yeah. And then, you know, they're trying to do like guerrilla and certainty stuff and the army just sort of like kills them all. They're horribly destroyed. So for almost a decade and a half, like you have a very deep politicized industrial proletariat and Lula's part of this, right?

Like from, from like when he enters the workforce until like the late 70s, he is not political at all. Are they doing the thing under the dictatorship where they have like pet unions, I guess, when it's like one mandated union for the industry? Actually, I was about to talk about this. Yeah. So the Brazilian labor system and the thing is, okay, so this wasn't set up under this military dictatorship.

It was kind of set up under like a previous one. But this, yeah, it's still sort of a thing. All of the unions have to register with the state. And when they're doing contract negotiations, right, they're not negotiating with the corporations or negotiating with the state. And so this means that like the state is setting wage rates. It's going to become important later. But yeah, there's a really interesting sort of problem here because there's this

entire class of basically sort of like government union guy who's like basically a bureaucrat and is like really corrupt. We love unions. Yeah. Well, and this is like, and like a lot of people just hate them because like that, like, you know, because they like literally what these people are are like, they're a guy who's doing this job to get ahead. And then their job is to sort of like, like, you know, technically it's like

mediate the class struggle, right? But like what that actually means is like make sure that like, there isn't actually sort of like, like make sure the union isn't actually sort of a source of class conflict. And you know, this, this is the whole sort of thing behind this because before like the 1940s, Brazil had this really, really built in like labor movement. They had a bunch of anarchists like the anarchists tried to overthrow the government a couple of times.

They have these huge general strikes. There's a communist party is like a real thing. And then the government tries to like bring all of like, you know, okay, fuck it, we're going to bring all the unions under our control. And it's still also true that these are like, they're still technically unions. So there are people who are sort of doing union organizing in them, right? Like they still do some regular union stuff. And yeah, we're going to talk about this a bit more later, but there's,

I don't know, these unions are fucking weird. Like they're not like unions anywhere else I've ever seen. Yeah. But so because if you are thinking like Lula, in this point, like is a political, right? And people keep trying to talk to him about politics. And he's like, I just want to play soccer and like chase girls. And he talks about this like drinking like in speeches a lot.

But his brother, who's known as Fray Chico is a Brazilian communist party militant for like his entire life and being a PCB militant in like the 60s and 70s. This is like life-threatening. The party is outlawed. Everyone is so clandestine that like Fray Chico's own wife doesn't know that he's a communist and finds out that he's a communist when he gets arrested. Like it's, this is like the level of like clandestine shit that everyone, that like, you know, the sort of communist parties are working on under here.

But Fray Chico is also like an open union activist. And everyone knows he's like, he's a leftist basically, because you know, even the sort of like, the unions are sort of like split between like there's sort of left factions that are like trying to actually do union stuff. But like for sort of leftist goals, there are like more moderate people who are like bread and butter trade unionists. And then there's also just like a bunch of people who are like just the corruption fashion. But yeah, like Lula doesn't care about the union at all.

Like he's not even in the union until Fray Chico, like his brother just like literally just like drags him kicking and screaming into running for an elected position in the union, because like he needed a guy to run on a slate, but he couldn't run himself because everyone knew he was a leftist. So he was like, okay, I'm going to your brother, you run. You're not like openly a leftist. You can actually win this.

And this is, you know, and then this works and he has elected and this is where Lula like learns politics from the book Lula and his politics of cunning quote. Lula would have to master the mundane aspects of union life, including bureaucratic routines, budgets, services and preparing union assemblies. Lula would also undergo a gradual politicization through relationships with fellow directors, union lawyers and staff and activists central to the union's turbulent internal politics. Finally, Lula would need to learn about the repressive dimension of working class life under military rule, including close supervision and surveillance by police,

employers and labor ministry officials. And what's interesting about this story is like everyone around him we joins this union, including basically his boss in the union is a guy named Vidal, who's a very powerful union leader. Like, you know, his brother to like everyone thinks he's going to be this sort of like compliance, like obedient finger head. And instead what they have done is they have created arguably the greatest politician of the 21st century. What are the things that's important to note here?

Is it like, okay, so like the unions are like fucked up, right? And everyone kind of understands they're fucked up. These are still probably the most like, like these are probably still the most competitive democratic elections that are happening in Brazil. Like Brazil technically has elections. There's these sort of like two official parties. So, okay, so it's kind of weird that the military like is in power, but like they have this sort of veneer that they're not. And they technically they technically sometimes have a civilian president.

They have these sort of like parties that are kind of real. But you know, the union actually has like, there are like leftist slates, there are conservative slates. Like there's this actual sort of politics going on. And Lula is actually able to sort of like make his mark through his ability to just like make friends with people on both the sort of like radical and moderate side of the union. Union sort of political aisle. And this is because Lula like Lula is just funny. He loves playing soccer. He loves just like dancing and hanging out.

And this lets him like win his election slate like pretty easily because you know, she's just she's just very popular. So these are things that like, I don't know, like the other workers in the factory a lot of times don't care that much about union politics, but they do care about like that you care about soccer a lot. And so Lula was able to build a bunch of support. And this lets him sort of easily take a position in a union system that like I it's basically a miniature state. Like the unions have their own welfare programs. They have they have their own education system. And you know, this is part of the thing about people talking like Lula is like completely uneducated.

It's like, no, it's not like he spends a bunch of time like in classes that like the union like puts on basically like university and academic classes right for for its workers and for other people sort of affiliated with them. So he spends a bunch and this is like, you know, part of where he learned sort of politics and where he learns political economy is like is through the through these classes the union has. And he sorry, he the union also like, you know, I talked about like they run welfare programs, right? So he's like he's like a social worker. Right. Trying trying to sort of like help workers and pensioners with this job. He gets this position that like everyone hates like he has this position basically like running running their sort of like like welfare program and like nobody wants it. But he like does it.

And he does it really well. And this makes him really popular because he's the guy that like, you know, if you're like a pensioner, right? Like he's the guy you go to to figure out pension bullshit. And he's the guy you just go to in order to sort of get stuff done. And yeah, you know, and this means he's spending a bunch of time doing paperwork and like negotiating with government bureaucracy. And this makes him a very, very effective politician. Um, here's from Lula's politics of cutting again, but Lula also gained access to an even larger constituency at the union headquarters, a working class public sphere. Do you know how many people passed by the union daily?

He asked a journalist in 1979 at minimum 1500. Those frequenting the union did so for many reasons, often for various sorts of assistance or assistencia, which I think is yeah, like government like union assistance stuff. Yeah. But also to complain about work, shoot the breeze or catch up with friends. Some union directors often arrived late to the headquarters and were off always busy when they did. The gregarious Lula, by contrast, maintained an open door policy and his office became a gathering point for rank and file workers, factory activists and fellow directors still linked to production. And this is another thing that's sort of important about this is that like, okay, like once you reach like a certain position in the union, like you're just a full time a union guy. And so there's a lot of people who like, join the union and become like union people because it means like it takes you off the shop floor.

And they're this, you know, the government does this deliberately, right? Because it means it, you know, you're created, the thing they're trying to do is create a certain bureaucratic layer between the working class and like their union. But Lula's like, still really connected to what's going on on the shop floor because he's just like talking to everyone all the time. And the product of this is that Lula is becomes a very, very, like he comes to trade union, becomes a very, very powerful one. He rapidly becomes the president of his union after some like Vidal, who's like his boss. There's this whole thing where he's trying to stay in power, but he doesn't run for president of the union because of some complicated political maneuvering. And so Lula ends up as the head of the union. Vidal's like, it's fine. I'm still going to be in control here. And that is not what happens. You have just given the presidency to like a genuinely, truly singular like political figure.

But there's something that's very, very important about Lula that you need to understand to figure it, to like to understand anything that's about to happen here and basically says Lula is not a communist. This is very important. He could not have done what he's about to do, which is, you know, become literally like a living symbol of one of the largest strike waves in Brazilian history. He could not have done this if he was a communist. The military, if he was a communist, the military would have, you know, tortured and possibly executed him like they'd done with thousands of other communists. His brother, Frejiko, was kidnapped and tortured horribly by the military, although he will insist that he didn't have it as bad as like a lot of other people did, which is true. But also like they tortured the shit out of him and it was fucking horrific. And the fact that like every single like person like the fact that every single fucking member of the military dictatorship was not fucking like taken out behind a fucking shed shot and had their like corpses fed to dogs is like genuinely one of the reasons why we're here right now. This stuff is awful. It is a theme of the podcast. Yeah, yeah, but what to do and think that is, you know, Lula and his wife are eventually able to sort of get him released because he's not like a very high like he's in the PCB.

Like he's in the Communist Party, like French, his brother, like, but he's not like a high ranking guy. And, you know, the sort of cruel irony of it is like they knew that he didn't know anything that they didn't already know, but they just tortured the shit out of him in many ways. But one of the important things that happens here is his brother, like under torture, like insists that Lula is not a communist and like continues to insist this because he isn't. And, you know, and like people who are like that and people in the military leadership like believe this, right? Because like that, like they're, you know, they have a really extensive sort of intelligence network. Like at this point, they basically like they've basically destroyed the Brazilian Communist Party and they've like captured and killed most of their cadre. And because he's not a communist, Lula is able to stay in the labor movement, even if in the short term after his brother gets arrested, he loses his job in the Union. Because and he's able to do this because like beyond his brother who like his brother has literally been like saying communist stuff at him for decades and Lula has just been like, I don't care.

And like a couple of other people who he's just kind of kind of friends with like Lula, like he has no connection to the organized left. Like he's not sort of like, like he's not like a leftist, right? Like in that sort of conventional sense, like he's not tied to one of sort of the old left political factions. And this means that he can stand in as a kind of sort of labor leader that the more moderate fashions the military dictatorship have been looking for, which is this sort of like non-communist, like quote unquote, genuine trade unionist. And okay, so like talking about like a moderate faction of a military dictatorship is always kind of fraught because you know it's a military dictatorship. But like, like all these people suck. It's also true that there were there were factions within the military dictatorship who, so there was a faction called like the dungeon, which is like the people torturing all these people to death.

There were other people in the military dictatorship who are like, this is really fucking gauche. Like, why are you guys doing this? Like this makes us look bad. Also, why are you torturing these people? And those guys look at Lula and they they're willing to work with him because like what they think they're doing is creating this sort of like authentic non-communist labor movement that will like work with them to stop communism. Like sort of like the AFL-CIO, like specifically to talk about this like in the in the way that the AFL-CIO does in the U.S. working as an anti-communist force, they think that they can get Lula to do this. And Lula does a lot of stuff that like looks like collaboration to the sort of like surviving leftist around him. He develops like literally like personal relationships, kind of friendship.

It's not really friendships, but like develops personal relationships and professional relationships with members of the regime. And, you know, again, it looks like he's collaborating, but that's not what's actually happening. What's actually happening is that he's holding these negotiations in order to sort of increase the power of the union and build this like safety network. Because he has these personal relationships with people in the regime, it means that he's not going to get fucking disappeared and his people aren't going to get disappeared. And this has happened to a lot of even a lot of sort of other regular union activists who didn't have this kind of connections just like get vanished. And the people he's able to build connections with like keep him from being like vanished and keep his trade unions from being slaughtered. And, you know, like the people in like in the military kidtership like really think that like, OK, they've gained that, you know, they're gaining an ally and defeating communism. The thing they are actually doing is progressing their own grave diggers.

OK, you know who else? Yes, there we go. You know who else is creating their own grave diggers, Garrison? The Advertisement Industrial Complex. Yes. They have produced us. We can dream. Unbelievable.

Well, in the meantime, so inside inside the new Batman game, you play as the four sidekicks after Batman allegedly dies. And the weirdest thing is that they because three of the sidekicks don't usually have capes, they don't do any kind of mass gliding feature for city traversal. Instead, you have a really slow bat cycle and then you have an almost Spider-Man like grappling hook and it's it locks on to anything around you. It's really confusing. Are we back? OK. Yeah. And we're back.

We should we should leave in like just like two minutes of Batman talk. It was completely baffled. So OK, the other thing about Lula just as a person is that fundamentally he's a negotiator. Like his style is almost like Biden-esque in the sense of like Biden sort of believes like talking to everyone across the political eye, etc. Except like, OK, the key difference here is that Lula is actually charismatic. Yeah. But like, you know, he will just sit there like with people across the aisle and like talk things out and negotiate with them. He'll talk with employers.

We'll talk with members in the military dictatorship. But, you know, the other difference is that like, OK, so Biden is like is a concert politician. Right. Like when he talks about like talking with people across the aisle, he means like strum Thurman. Right. When Lula is talking with people, he's talking with everyone like he like literally everyone. He runs the classes talking with random people like Union halls and meetings at picket lines at like soccer games at bars. And because he spends all of this time talking to people constantly, he gains this just like incredible ability to read crowds and like tailor message messages for them

and like figure out what sort of like like what sort of things will work with whatever person is saying. And he gains this like absolutely incredible ability to sort of charm people. And it works on people even on people who fucking hate him. Like there are there are like journalists who will spend literally their entire careers trying to destroy him. And when they're asked about him, they're like, well, I mean, like he was a person. He's really charming. Like he's a nice guy. And but, you know, so part of what he's doing in this period, this is this is this is the late 70s.

Going into the early 60s playing this like this very specific like game of respectability politics of like not directly criticizing the government. And like there are these like there are these strikes that start happening because. Okay, so it turns out that the military government has been trying to get inflation like the whole sort of economic system they've been doing starts to fall apart. And inflation starts to come back and they start doing these like measures to combat inflation. And the unions. Okay, so originally no one believed them, but the union has like has like a like. They have like a think tank kind of right they have like a social sort of like center with a bunch of sort of like sociologists and economists and. They figure out that the union has been lying about the government's been lying about like how bad inflation is.

And then the IMF in the late 70s confirms this that that that the military leadership has been lying about how bad its inflation is by doing some statistical stuff. And this matters because they've been setting costs of living adjustments by a lower level of inflation that's that that was actually happening. And this pisses everyone the fuck off because they're like literally the government is robbing us like they've been lying about how bad inflation is like. And this is like this is like a 30% income drop right for these workers and this pisses everyone the fuck off. And suddenly there's these massive like protests there were like hundreds of thousands of people like 100,000 people will show up to a soccer stadium as part of a strike like. But you know Lula has to make sure that everyone doesn't get murdered and so he does these things like he'll like he avoids directly criticizing the government he has this whole thing about how like he wants to negotiate directly with the employers. He like kicks out like leftist student groups who are like trying to like distribute like common to students who are like trying to distribute pamphlets at the rallies because he's trying to make sure that the strikers aren't seen as like communist subversives and instead is sort of like they're seen as like good upstanding hardworking citizens and yeah here's from that book again. Given the diverse outlooks Lula represented himself as a thoughtful righteous man who disparaged riotous behavior as unworthy and counterproductive like all honest workers.

He called for the strikers to be disciplined and counseled against classes with the police. He continually frames their fight as one with the companies not the government or the policemen. And this like works because any more radical action probably is going to get everyone killed. And I mean like when the strikes are going on there's like like they're getting buzzed by helicopters. There's like fucking army trucks everywhere. But you know he manages not to get everyone killed. And the result of this is that Lula immediately becomes the most famous worker in Brazil. He's like on TV.

He's leading strikes everywhere like there's these massive rallies. And you know there's some really like there's some really like genuinely adorable stuff that's happening. We're like when he's giving his first speech to one of these rallies it's like it's fucking raining. The soccer stadium is just mud like his podium is literally sinking into the body. He's trying to speak and this is like the first time he's addressed a crowd this loud and he's nervous and people start leaving. And they're doing one of the other things I learned about this is how old the how old the crowd mic is. So they're doing this thing that becomes known as the crowd mic where like you don't have a microphone or you can't reach everyone. So the speaker says like a sentence and then each person in the crowd says a sentence and it just sort of moves back through the crowd from everyone repeating it.

And he's trying to give the speech is not going great. And like the workers in the front row start like yelling like hey you can do this Lula don't worry you got this. And then he like and then this is like absolutely adorable moment and then he sort of like gets better at it. And like by like the second one of these like people are just like in love with him. He is unbelievably popular. He's an incredible speaker. He's like it's very easy to and you see writing about this at the time that are like that look at him and are like well this guy like this guy is literally like people people are like calling him literally the Messiah of the working class. Like this is the kind of sort of like like a claim that he has like there are after one of his speeches like the entire crowd literally carries him on their shoulders from one end of the soccer stadium to the other.

Like there are like like there are people like walking on stage and calling him like father in saying Hail Mary's like it's it's fucking wild. But you know but like and like when when when like sort of rich and educated people look at this they're like oh these people are like blindly obedient to him. They're like they had this client-patern relationship. He's like manipulating the masses and that's not what's happening. Like that's just not what's happening. Like he actually like the union votes against him like a couple of times like because because he's trying to do negotiations right. And there's a thing if I'm understanding the story right. I think what happened is that he's trying to like negotiate like people coming back to work negotiations continues like a show of good faith or whatever.

And the unions like fuck no we're not going back to work and just like votes him down. And so like this kind of stuff happens right like that you know like people respect him enormously and he is like literally in some sense he is like the avatar of the industrial working class like working class people look at him and like and they see themselves in him. And they see they see the power that he's able to sort of how many people he's around them they're like oh shit the union is strong like we are strong we can actually sort of fight back. But it's not like a sort of client-patern thing. He he's it's just like he's at the head of a workers movement that is a force in and of itself and has its own agency and capacity to act and Lula has to like negotiate with that. And like he has to sort of like rebuild their trust after he you know is taking a sort of more moderate line. He he eventually gets like arrested in 1980. So he gets released after like a month.

And from there he gets to work founding like every important leftist organization like the last 40 years. So in 1980 he's one of the people who founds the workers party in 1983 he founds the CUT or the English translation of its unified workers central which like to this day is Brazil's like National Trade Union Center. Like it's like it's like their big union federation and this is illegal at the time. But you just like fuck it we're doing anyways like these people are losing the the the the the the dictatorship losing control. And the CUT like plays a huge role in how the dictatorship loses power. So does the PT to some extent like the PT the PT like as a party are powerful enough that like they were involved in drafting the Constitution. He's there for the founding the landless workers movement which is a social movement that like ceases land that's not being used in leadership as a worker. She's heavily involved in the campaigns to sort of force the military out of power.

And you know as a military dictatorship like kind of falls apart in democracy like kind of like fully returns to Brazil in 1989. He goes like full intellectual politics. But the problem is that like he's kind of too early for his politics. He spends like the entire 90s just like getting his ass handed to him in elections over and over again. And part of what's happening you know by part of literally what he's doing in the 90s is rebuilt. He's like rebuilding the entire Latin American left like from ground zero after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the sort of like global defeat of left in the 80s. He's one of the founders of the form of Sao Paulo which is the first of this series of sort of like meetings of leftists from Latin America and the Caribbean which is trying to figure out like. Okay like hey what is socialism now that like the Berlin Wall is down.

And everything sort of going to shit. And in 1990 that's a really bleak prospect like neoliberalism is completely ascendant nationalism has destroyed socialism like every sort of former social states falling apart like capitalist are running rampant across the globe like. Literally in like entire communist parties are just like disbanding and all of their sort of cadre are becoming liberals. But you know as the 90s go on and people actually have to sort of like live under this they increasingly realize it sucks ass. And that I you know what living under neoliberalism means is like I am a structural adjustments and like the economy like there's there's the Asian market collapse there's a bunch of other market collapses. And you know as after the Zapatista sort of go on the take like the first like part of the left to really go on the offensive after their uprising in 1994 the left kind of starts to put itself back together. And this left like I think like this version left it's kind of dead now but. Like I think there are people who are old enough to remember it or like remember sort of like what it used to be like the slogan of this sort of whole like like left like one of their big slogans is another world is possible.

Which is sort of like the anti like the anti it's a response to like thatchers there is no alternative is like another world is possible is this is the sort of like alter globalization left like this is the left that does the battle of Seattle in 1999. And Lula is there for like all of it like after Seattle he helps after the battle Seattle like he helps found the world social forum which is just like giant meeting place for like international social movements. And you know and so you know through through this whole period like the left is sort of gathering a strength everywhere. Like well okay in Latin America and also like I mean it is in a lot of places right like in India. Like Indonesia to some extent the US although the US has this problem that 11 happens and yeah that's a shit show. Yeah it's amazing how that this movement existed almost everywhere else but not to my knowledge is as significantly here. Yeah well I mean we had we had Seattle right but then when that 11 happened the big unions like pulled out of doing any direct action shit and then it kind of everything kind of got ate by the anti war movement which. Yeah and then the and then the Greenscare. Yeah and then that led to add busters doing and stuff at Occupy Wall Street and then. Yeah that's the last 20.

Okay I would say this I think there's a break here like I think I think Occupy is when that kind of politics died because when Occupy under and this is the sort of irony of this and we'll get you next episode is that like. You can there's a good argument that the place that that politics actually died was in Brazil when the workers party fucking like tear gas then rubber bulleted the absolute shit out of a bunch of protesters who had been who were like the Brazilian wave of sort of like that series of protests and they crushed the shit out of them it is horrible. Like this is one of this is like one of like my foundation political memories is like fucking tanks rolling down the street people shooting rubber bullets at people like 70 year olds getting tear gas. It is a it is a fucking shit show but in 2002 like you know it's not that we haven't gotten there yet like even the sort of like cynical Trotsky I like can't imagine the fucking PT rolling tanks through the favelas which is what they're going to be doing in 12 years. And we had that was it went I can't remember when Tony Blair maybe there's 97 but like Britain the British Tony Blair right like represented this other vision for the left. Yeah well and everything's like people like one of the books I was reading was like people talk about Obama is being like the end of the same wave except Obama sort of like to read like even more so than any of the other politicians when we talk about is the sort of like recuperation of this right like yeah he's the guy who takes out energy and is like yeah and and OK so we're going to get into like the negative side of all of this shit next episode but like in some sense Lula does play a similar role in Brazil and we will get there but right now. OK so there's another part of this that like doesn't get talked about that much which is that in the early 2000s in Latin America.

It's not just that like the left is winning elections like there are open revolutions going on like there's there's a bunch of them. There's a like like arguably like the last communist revolution like ever happens in like the last sort of like the last gas the classical workers it happens in Argentina in 2001. This is huge revolt against the IMF and austerity. And like this is this is the last time like in world history that like people occupy factories and then attempt to like like take them over and use them as a way of seizing the means of production. People occupy factories in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2014 but like by that point like those guys are occupying factories and then having like occupy meetings in them. They're not like attempting to sort of like seize production. Yeah. But you know like these are real revolutions right like there's there's there's there's a coup against Hugo Chavez that gets overturned by another popular revolution.

There's the water and gas wars in Bolivia which culminate in like literally deep like the capital is like entirely blockaded off from the rest of the country and surrounded by roadblocks and the fucking government like this is in 2005. The government is like fucking imploding the military's fallen apart like you know like very like and this is this is this is the sort of chain of events that brings you realize into power but like they very nearly just destroyed the entire believe in governments. The cycle sort of ends with the Oaxaca uprising in 2006 where like like the people of Oaxaca just fucking take the city and hold it for like a few months and like run it through democratic assemblies and then like the army shows up and they get. Yeah but like you know like like there is a point like that that was like. I think like like in my lifetime like the workers of a city fucking just took it over. This is stuff that like you know like I think now we kind of like we have problem like I think most people sort of forgotten about this stuff like this this was a moment in which like like revolution and the destruction of capitalism was on the table. Yeah and like I did a lot of it. I'm not super I lived in Venezuela for some of this time briefly but it felt very possible in a way that like it probably hasn't since right like yeah.

It was fascinating to see like and the cooperation between those countries was very real right like obviously Cuba like Cuba Cuba doctors fucking everywhere right if you travel. Yeah. But it was fascinating to see like people from here coming here and they think they had that Sao Paulo forum right where they would where these ideas would be exchange and it. Yeah that was very formative for me it genuinely felt like it was possible for something as a result of this like ghoulish IMF policy that we've had for the previous 20 years people like no fuck this we're doing it our way. Yeah. And yeah. Okay but this is this is this is what's really weird about Lula because Lula is running in 2002 and he's watching all of this happen. And his strategy his response to this is basically the analysis because he spent the entire 90s lose running leftist campaigns and losing right.

Yeah. And his strategy in 2002 is he's going to move the PT the workers party to the right both in terms of messaging and in policy so as not to sort of like scare voters. And he finally convinces the rest of the PT to do something he's been advocating for for like decades which is allying with sort of like liberal or conservative like non leftist parties which they do in this election. And we're going to see how that goes later because oh boy. But you know okay so like why why why are they sort of doing this. There's a few reasons partially it's because Lula has been like losing elections is being like we have to do something different. Partially it's because the PT is a product of the collapse of like. Okay the PT like in the 2000s like the the the base that had formed that party is basically collapsed right the PT is like it's core constituencies are sort of like leftist groups there's like like left wing Catholic groups.

And the sort of like the the the giant sort of like trade union stuff that like the giant workers that Lula is a part of but by 2002. Like the Catholic Church has swung back to the right like the sort of the sort of left Catholic people are on the retreat there's very few of them left. There's and we're going to talk about this more later but the sort of giant industrial unions that like Lula had been ahead of. Like and that you know Lula's career in the PT itself comes from have been shattered by sort of like the by the industrialization and the collapse of sort of Brazil's industrial economy. And the product of this is that with it without its sort of social basis like Lula keeps losing elections. So he goes okay so his solution to this and the PT understands this right like they're they're aware of the fact that like part of what's happening with them is that like they've. You know they're losing parts of their working class base because that that working class literally doesn't exist anymore. They're gaining a bunch of sort of middle class like leftist activists but they need to find a way to sort of broaden their appeal.

And so like he promises like openly gives us like speech about how he's not going to do like a rupture with the economy which is what there's party have been campaigning on because you know the PT are leftist right. The whole point of another world as possible is we don't have to live very capitalist anymore Lula's like no no no no no guys hold on hold on. I didn't mean that like we're not going to do a rupture and instead what Lula does is pledges to and like stays in the Brazil's commitments to the IMF including like fucking insane shit like maintaining primary budget surpluses which is nuts. And you know and he instead of like yeah yeah he stays in the end and you know so Argentina famously like Argentina solution to the sort of uprisings that are happening is that they default on our debt to the IMF they're like fuck you we're not paying. And Lula's like nah nah we're pay like it's fine we'll just keep paying it and like the PT itself is like what the fuck is going on like what what is happening here why is this happening here. Like why why is he doing this and you know Lula's just like well okay we need we need to take power we need to do this take power and so he does and weirdly in the middle of this cycle of sort of like. The resurrection of the left he's running increasingly to the right. And you know okay part of what's happening here is that there's an inherent problem that leftist governments have when they take over the state especially when they take over a capital state by winning an election which is that.

If you are in control of the government right if you control the state your job is now to keep the economy running. And in theory this isn't incompatible with leftist beliefs but if you stop if you stop and think about what this actually means for a second. Keeping the economy running means keeping the economy growing and economic growth right means that capitalists have to keep making more money every year than they did last year. Like that that's what economic growth is right and this is a real problem if you are a leftist taking power. Because if you don't do this you will a lose elections because regular people get pissed off because when capitalists don't make more money they start firing people. And be the bourgeoisie who only ever grudgingly accepts the leftist sort of like a legitimate power in the first place. If you're if you're if they're if they're not getting more money every single year they will overthrow you. And you know Lula knows this right.

But the solution to this problem that these they sort of like pink tie governments come to is basically to let a faction of the sort of national bourgeoisie the sort of national capitalist class. The people who are like capitalist domestically like they let them into this product of sort of like not this nationalist developmental project. And so what this means essentially is you are like you are buying you are buying a section of the ruling class off right. You are giving them access to state contracts you're doing state investments infrastructure that helps them like expand things like mining so they can you know take take some of the profits from it. You're giving them preferential access to government contracts and exchange research supporting you and there's a lot of ways this can look like. The M.A.S. and Bolivia for example starts bringing these elites directly into the party with this sort of developmentalist faction. In Brazil it looks like an alliance something called the Centro which is like some throw. Sorry my poor Jesus not good which is this like this sort of like every present force in Brazilian politics which is like the corruption faction.

It's like this this series of sort of parties that are like kind of loosely knit who kind of vote together but you don't like they don't. The parties nominally have ideology but like their ideology is I am I am like a local political like powerful political person and you are going to pay me or you will not be able to pass literally any bill ever. And OK so they have to form an alliance with sort of these parties and the other thing they start doing is that they are just literally but like they just literally start buying people off. And this leads to sort of like a bunch of corruption scandals that we're going to get you next episode. But while Lula is in office this seems like it's working really well. He's able to sort of pay off the bourgeoisie and fund the social welfare programs for the Brazilian working class. And this has a massive impact right like this lists something like 20 million people out of poverty and OK and I and other people will argue about what it means to like lift people out of poverty. And how poor they still are.

But you know it is true that people have a massive increase in quality of life like people are getting running water in their homes for the first time like people are having electricity for the first time. It's also worth pointing out that Lula who is white spends a fucking shit ton of time fighting like fighting against racism and fighting for educational job opportunities for black people even though OK there's like an asterisk next to that. That has to do with the police that yeah oh it's it's fucking oh boy it is worse than you can possibly imagine. But you know like he's trying to end hunger. He has this very famous program called the Bolsa Familia which is basically like if you're pouring off and you agree to send your kids to school and get the vaccinated like the government will just give you money. And you know there's also a micro loan part of this which is my dot dot dot. Nothing bad will happen from the Brazilian government attempting to get a bunch of people to take micro loans. This does not lead us into fascism at all.

But you know OK like this works right Lula is able to grow the economy like Brazil's economic growth in this period is like seven percent which is fucking nuts like year on year. He leaves office with I've seen it ultimately said is like an eighty five or ninety percent approval rating he's unbelievably popular. And you know so everything like looks good right kind of from inside Brazil it looks like the PT has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of everyone. They've been like they've been a successful social democratic party and that they've lifted a bunch of people out of poverty. There's like people who are alive because like who are alive today who would not be because the PT was in power right. And you know there are people who don't starve there are people who don't go hungry. There are people who have opportunities like educational opportunities to have opportunities to advance themselves the first time ever. And it's a successful capitalist government too because again seven percent year on year growth right like this is fucking nuts.

Like this is this is the kind of economic growth that is like unimaginable in in most parts of the world. However comma if this at all actually worked we wouldn't be here right now with I you know the fascist president going into like hiding. And so next episodes you know March I've been to I've been talking about Grave Diggers sort of this episode right there's a famous part of the communist manifesto. When Marx talks about like capital like capitalism producing its own Grave Diggers and capitalism has never done that right like to this day right now capitalism has yet to produce its own Grave Diggers. Social democracy has bruised its own Grave Diggers in every single fucking country anyone's ever done it. And the next episode in next episode we're going to watch the PT bruised its own Grave Diggers and we are going to watch them attempt to bury Luisa Nassia Lula de Silva and the rest of the Brazilian working class alive. Oh good. Do you want to do a Bolsonaro update because he's apparently left the building. Oh shit okay yeah and Bolsonaro up to wait Bolsonaro has left the building hold on breaking breaking news.

Yeah it's he left the palace finally. Yeah in a convoy of black SUVs. Oh he's expected to break the silence. Yeah but so I'm looking at Benjamin Fogel who's pretty good on this. Yeah he's expected to break the silence but not to congratulate Lula on winning. Jesus Christ. I have lost goodbye. Okay so yeah there might be a if I don't know what we're going to do if there's a coup in between this episode and the next episode.

Hopefully not I don't know. I mean one thing that like I will say and that I think we're going to talk a bit about next episode is that like part of what's happening right now that's very important is that Biden is in office in the U.S. And I mean okay so the Brazilian military is a long history of doing coups but usually when they're doing coups they're doing coups with the backing of the U.S. government. And Biden like just on a personal level fucking hates Bolsonaro and there is a there is a very real chance that this is a significant factor in why we haven't seen a coup is literally the president of the United States personally does not like the president of Brazil and this is a fucking batshit state of affairs right like the fact that like the like personal inclinations of the president of the United States has this much of an impact on like the politics of an entire country is nuts. This happened in the other direction for a while right like it's I guess not personally just the personal inclination of the president in that case. Well there's weird things here too because like like Lula was really friendly with with Bush, which I think is why part of why he never like they never tried to kill him. As opposed to Chavez who called him the devil.

Yeah, which is really interesting because Chavez are friends. Yeah. Right. But Chavez gives the speech about how like everyone has their own like at the at the the world social form gives a speech about how everyone's existing in their own like conditions so you can't expect like you know you can't expect Lula to be Chavez you can't expect Chavez to be Castro like stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, but it's it's weird. Hopefully Bolsonaro fucking leaves office, if not, I don't know, but either way, I don't know things are the history of Brazil during this period is also kind of bleak but after this period is way the fuck bleaker. So yeah, we're going to talk about that tomorrow and yeah, we'll update you if there is a coup.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, alphabet boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of alphabet boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to alphabet boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, God is dead and the woke left have killed him. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast where we celebrate the destruction of Jair Bolsonaro and the concept of Christianity in the human soul, both of which happened recently in Brazil as far as I understand from skimming the news on Twitter. How's everybody else doing today? Utterly exhausted, but you know, such as the world without Christ we have destroyed. Yeah, that's what the woke mob did. Speaking of woke mobs, what are we doing today? What are we talking about?

We are talking more about the Brazilian elections. I guess we should start with our perennial update about what seems to be happening there right now. So, okay, currently is, what, 11 a.m. Pacific time? We're recording this on Tuesday? Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah, yeah, that one. So as of right now, Bolsonaro like still, so he's appeared, but he still hasn't conceded the election. He sure hasn't. Yeah, and, okay, so the other thing that's been going on is that there's been, one of the sort of perennial Bolsonaro things is that he has a bunch of support among a bunch of sort of like, like a bunch of different sort of like kinds of truckers. And there's been a bunch of, there's been a bunch of barricades. Okay, from talking to people on the ground and from what I've seen from it, I don't know. It's hard to gauge how serious these blockades actually are.

I mean, some of these blockades, I've seen videos of some that involve several dozen vehicles. Yeah, I mean, they have a lot of vehicles. Like, as the thing, okay, so the Supreme Court has ordered the police to like clear the barricades. And as best I can tell, they're kind of just getting their asses kicked. Like, they're not really resisting, like, particularly hard. And so I don't know if this is like, I don't know. I mean, it's the kind of thing that it will present perhaps a model for other people in the future if there's any efficacy to it. It certainly could be part of an effective coup, like locking down the roads in this way. Yeah, I mean, this is not like the coup against Allende started, for example. If Bolsonaro and his in the military don't both go in 100% right now, basically, then what these trekkers are doing will not be much more than like an annoyance.

You know, it's the same thing as with January 6th. If Trump, when they breached the Capitol, if Trump had declared, I'm remaining president, everybody rise up, well, then a whole thing might have happened. But he didn't. And so the momentum that might have kind of led into a more thorough takeover of the government fizzled out with a bunch of guys getting, you know, into fistfights with the Capitol police and shit. Yeah. And there's an aspect, I think, too, that's sort of important. So these are like Bolsonaro, like this whole sort of like truckers blockade thing, like this has been going on in various forms for like the entire time he's been in office. And like he sort of turned them into these these motorcades that he would do, but they're really weird in that like, okay, so like they are blocking roads, but a lot of it is kind of pure spectacle. Like there's this whole wave of sort of right wing candidates, like basically, but there's a whole wing of sort of like right wing politicians who like got their start from like doing Instagram videos from like or like TikToks or like shit, like whatever, like, basically like from these blockades. So like, I don't know, they don't they don't seem to be like as of right now, I don't think they're like an incredibly serious fighting force. But, you know, I mean, it's not good. This is happening. It's also not good that the police was like initially cooperating with them and that the police set up their own roadblocks to stop voting.

So I don't know the situation is not good, but it's not as bad as it could be. And yeah, and I want to reiterate that like the US has recognized that Lula has won the election, which I think makes it like infinitely harder. Yes, the fact that and this is this is one of those things when people on the left talk about like, is there a harm reduction point in voting? Well, this is harm reduction, right? Because if Trump had been in office, he would have backed Bolsonaro and Lula would be in prison again. And there would be absolutely no hope for stemming the destruction of the rainforest. Also, I do like things could still be a nightmare in Brazil. Don't get me wrong, but we've we've at least avoided the most obvious way things could have been a disaster. Yeah. Although I do want to point out that the Obama administration had a huge role in like this entire shit happening to be fair.

The Obama administration, I don't think was trying to put Bolsonaro in power. They were trying to put the neoliberal ghouls in power, but they definitely will get into that next episode. But they definitely like helped get us here. No, I mean, that's true. And it also follows in the continually building story that like Biden's actually a much better precedent than Barack Obama. Yeah, low bar, but I mean, incredibly low bar because Barack Obama led directly to Donald Trump for a variety of reasons. There you are. This is this is a weird world that we live in. Yeah. And it's it's also like people are now starting, you know, rightfully so.

I know we're going to be talking about a bunch of fucked up stuff about Lula, most recently kind of bringing up his very bad takes on Ukraine. But it's also like I don't care. Like obviously, I think I would always like for people to have if they're going to have a representative democracy, better leaders. But at the end of the day, like the rainforest being destroyed at the rate it's being destroyed is an existential existential threat to all life on Earth. And Lula has a proven track record of reducing deforestation in the Amazon. So what I like, I don't care that he has a bad take on you. I just don't like it doesn't matter really. Yeah, yeah, I saw I saw articles that were like, ah, Lula like supports democracy in Brazil, but supports authoritarianism abroad.

Like guys shut up like, holy shit, Jesus Christ. Like I can I if I go back to two thousand, like 17, I can find all of you like writing pull fucking probos in our articles or like shut up. So OK, so let's get to how everything went to shit. So last episode we sort of left the PT like writing high Lula's out with like a like 80 90% approval rating. He's done like an economic miracle. He's pulled one street by poverty. I and you know, if things like continued like that, we wouldn't be here right now. So obviously something happened and to understand what happens.

Unfortunately, we have to do some materialism. Um, OK, so bear with me through the materialism. I promise we're going to get to a bunch of like absolutely horrific crimes against humanity. But first we need to do a bit of crimes against humanity. Yeah, yeah, they're it's oh, they're there are lots of crimes. They're they're it's oh boy. I'm already hard. Wait, maybe I shouldn't have said it that way.

Hmm. Moving swiftly on. So OK, I'm good. I'm going to quote here from one of the sort of more famous Marx quotes from a future bear that is genuinely a very good way of understanding history, which is men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. They do not make it under self-selective circumstances, but under circumstances are existing already given and transmitted from the past. So OK, what are the circumstances that like 2002 Lula is inheriting? Um, Lula's sort of social democratic plan is able to sort of grow the economy and also pay off the ruling class to be able to stay in power.

At the same time, because something called the commodity boom, a commodity boom broadly is this like it's a large spike across the board in the prices of commodities over a sort of period of time. We're using the sort of like mainstream bourgeois definition of commodity, which is like primary commodities and it's stuff you can like pick up off the ground, dig up or harvest. So it's things like soybeans, like copper, iron, horses, lead. Um, condoms, yes, we understand what commodities are. Yes, look, Brazil condom tree, I don't know, I got nothing. So OK, Lula like takes office and leaves power like almost exactly perfectly to take advantage of like the peak of the commodity boom, right? Lula comes into power in 2000 and well, OK, so he wins 2002 election, he takes office 2003. The commodity boom, according to Cambridge, Cambridge is a handbook of primary commodities in the global economy, took off in 2004 and ended in about 2014, but it's slowing by about 2010, 2011 ish.

And Lula exits office in 2010 due to the two term limit, which means he never has to deal with the consequences of the downturn. And let's stop here for a second. How do term limits work in the Brazilian system? Because it's not the same as here, here like a term limit means you get your two as president and then you're done. Yeah, so I, OK, so the way I think it works, and I could be wrong about this, but I'm 90% sure the way it works. OK, so you can have two terms and then you can't run again in a row. But if like someone else comes in, you can then run again after that. It's just that you can only do two in a row.

I mean, I'm happy that he's beaten Bolsonaro, but that is a very silly way to do it. Yeah, well, I will say something about this is something about Lula that like I think kind of infuriates a lot of the people who like don't like him politically and want to sort of screaming by his authoritarianism or whatever. Like he he was always like, like mostly really scrupulous about the sort of like democratic norm stuff like he a lot of other sort of like pink tide leaders in the same position. Like this is actually how even Morales originally gets in trouble is that he tries to seek a third term. And Lula is just like, not I'm out. I'm fuck it. Which is which is good. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it kind of like on the one hand.

And so in theoretical terms, this is sort of like good for Brazilian democracy, et cetera, et cetera. In practical terms, it's kind of a disaster. I mean, it's good because I think that it's always good when popular leaders acknowledge like absolute limits. But yeah, I mean, the timing wasn't ideal. Yeah. And, you know, it. But you know, OK, so like the reason that he's able to sort of like, you know, like if he if he if like if the Constitution allowed him to run for a third term, he would have just like, like he would have clobbered everyone. There's just not even like any remote competition to him. And the reason he's able to do this again is like this guy.

I mean, he got he got like 10 percent less of the vote this time. I mean, yeah, but what was that? Yeah, OK. Like this election was like really close. No, no, no, you're talking about this most recent one. Most recent one. I'm talking about Lula back then. Yeah. Yeah. Lula back then, like literally unsophable political. He's very, very popular at this point. Yeah.

But but this is because of the commodity boom and we need to in order to understand what is going to happen to the PT. We need to understand why the commodity boom happened in the first place. This turns out to be very important. There's there's a lot of causes technically that have to do with a lot of complicated macroeconomic stuff. The single most important cause for us. And I think generally the one that is like is credited with the reason that these commodity prices are increasing is the skyrocketing growth of the Chinese economy in 2000s. And I mean, when I say skyrocketing growth, like we are talking like double digit GDP increases every year. This is when we have that Olympics where they have all the drummers and you have that Newsweek article about how scary China is.

Maybe it's. Yeah. Yes. And, you know, the sort of the massive increase in industrial production, like they are the CCP is like. Like China is industrializing on a scale that is I think like almost to one imaginable. And this means there's an enormous increase in demand for primary commodities. But this boom was only sustainable as long as the Chinese economy can maintain something like double digit GDP growth. But the problem is after 2008, the Chinese economy starts to slow and sort of in response to this in 2009, the CCP does like one of the largest stimulus projects ever. And they spend four trillion R&B on like infrastructure and welfare programs to save off a recession.

And it works. But, you know, like they this is this is like the largest like stimulus program ever. And it can't really keep the economy growing like ever ever since 2010, every single year. Well, OK, I excluding the weird rebound stuff in 2021. But like I like every single year like year on year growth or the rate of growth of the Chinese economy has been decreasing. Right. And OK, well, the commodity boom, you know, is produced by by feeling, you know, by by increased Chinese demand. But OK, what happens when that, you know, isn't true?

But, you know, OK, so in the two in the two thousands, like this, this is great. These are the sort of material conditions that make this like politics possible. Right. You have enormous economic growth and it brings in this economic growth is happening in sectors. Like in very important sectors of Brazilian economy, to the extent that it's able to provide a revenue, a stable revenue base for the state that allows it to fund welfare programs like and pay off the bourgeoisie, which is, you know, this is sort of like like papering over this sort of like fundamental contradiction of of of the PT space. Right. Which is that they have to like they have to keep the economy running.

So they have to have to pay off a bunch of sort of like incredibly corrupt dudes and also just sort of like Brazilian capitalists. And they also are trying to sort of do the welfare programs. But, you know, the commodity boom collapses and suddenly there's only enough money to either pay the capitalists or pay the workers and not both. And the project becomes the collapse. And this happens across Latin America. Like I would make the argument that like the end of the commodity boom like is the reaper that came from the Latin American left. It is at least as important, if not more so in the collapse of the sort of the pink tide over over the course of 2010s, like then the actual CIA. But the CIA is very heavily involved in this.

But the commodity boom just sort of like just nuking all of these economies like coming to an end. That that is an enormously important sort of like like element of this entire story. And there's also there's another thing that we should note, which is that there's a problem with organizing your economy to be sort of like in a way that's reliant on sort of like primary commodity like export production. A handbook of primary commodities in the global economy specifically notes, quote, Brazil's significance in coffee, cotton, iron ore, sugar and tobacco and Chile is a dominant exporter of coffee. So, OK, Brazil exports like 11% of the world's cotton, 20% of the world's iron ore, 15% of its coffee, 39% of its sugar and 18% of its tobacco. And also has an enormous cattle industry has got like a bunch of soybean farming, which is actually really important because it turns out as China gets richer. It turns people into into into soy boys. Yeah, it also makes soy sauce, which is very important for.

I mean, more importantly, our reserves of of beta-cuck energy would be disastrously low if if we didn't have Brazilian soy. So thank you, Jair Bolsonaro, for keeping the soy flowing. Yeah, well, I mean, this this is sort of like like this is a joke, but this is this is sort of the issue with this, right? Like, OK, so politically, this is a there's also a massive timber industry, which has been literally destroying the entire planet. Yes. But like, OK, so like, if you know anything about sugar, coffee, cotton and tobacco, you know, those are slavery crops. And, you know, like, these are these are like the primary exports of a plantation economy. And the people who run those kind of like like economies, the people who like those plantation owners are like these the scariest people who have ever lived anywhere like at any time on Earth.

And, you know, in Brazil, these people have been in power for 500 years. And unfortunately, this is like a big part of what sort of Lewis economic miracle is resting on. And this isn't really like a base that produces socialism. Like if your economic base is relying on these like unbelievably psychotic racist like planter oligarchs, like your economic base is something that creates fascism. However, comma, Robert, do you know what else produces fascism? The products and services that support this podcast. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. That's like our fascism just directly.

So true. Yeah. Yeah, the gold, the gold people probably would be the main example of this. But we also are sponsored by big fascism.org.com. Ah, shit, I don't know. I don't just roll the fucking ads. Oh, we're back. Boy, that was a good ad pivot. I hope everybody's happy.

Chris, why don't you continue talking about Lula? Yeah. So speaking of fascism. Doot, doot, doot, doot. I was doing a... Ah, yeah, I went into it. Not well. It's hard to...

We'll have Dan'll fix that up in post. Yeah. Okay, so speaking of creating fascism. Yeah, let's talk about that time Lula invaded Haiti. All right. Okay, to be fair. Whomst among us hasn't invaded Haiti. This is true.

I've actually never invaded Haiti. I've never been to Haiti. However, the U.S. and Canada also and the U.K. Okay, well, okay. That is more what I was saying. Like, it's... Yeah. So, okay.

So, in 2004, a CIA bat coup ousted Haiti's democratically elected leftist president, Jean-Batriot Aristide. And initially... Okay, so the initial sort of occupation force that's sent in by the U.N. is a U.S. and Canadian force.

And they're sent in, like, ostensibly under the sort of guise of, like, restoring stability or whatever. Because when I think about who can make Haiti stable, it's France and the United States. Yeah, yeah. Partnization stability.

And Canada. And Canada now. I'm glad you guys are, you know, getting involved in your big brother's crimes against humanity. I'm wondering, for the Canadian stuff, how do they ship all of the Mounties all the way to Haiti?

Okay, so here's the thing about the U.S. They took their horses over the water, Garrison. Yeah. We built the land bridge. Yeah. Loud and divided. The thing about this force, right, is that, like... Okay.

So, even to, like, the most casual observer, having literally France in the U.S. and also Canada, which is, like, it was just the U.S. but there's also a French part of it, like, literally... And they put weird fucking sausage soup

on their goddamn French fries. Yeah, it turns out, okay, so, like, the optics of these people just militarily occupying Haiti is really bad. So, okay, the U.N. is trying to figure out, like, a permanent force. And initially, Lula, like,

opposes Brazil getting involved in this. Which is good. But... When I think about... When I think about whether or not Brazil should be involved in places, Haiti would not be the top of my list. You know, I mean, this is always...

This is always just, like, a really sad thing of sort of, like, just, like, the history of Latin America, of, like, how many countries, like, owe their existence to Haiti over and over and over again. Like, sending them troops and ships and weapons and then every single one of these countries are like, ah, fuck you, Haiti.

So, Lula, like, basically, Lula becomes convinced that, like, this is, like, his big opportunity to, like, build the influence of Brazil on the international stage. And so, Brazil just, like, takes over the occupation or the auspices of the United Nations

stabilization mission in Haiti, which has the, like, utterly impronounceable acronym Minishta or something. God damn it, guys. Come on. You know how to do an acronym. You have enough money.

Jesus. You would think, however, comma, no, it's this bullshit. And, okay, so, apparently, this is part of a plan to try to get US and French support for a bid to get Brazil a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. If you Google

who is currently on the UN Security Council, you will see how this went. Which is to say, it did not work. And shit starts going horrifically badly almost immediately. Basically, like, at the outset of the occupation, Brazilian troops in Haiti launched an attack

on a, quote, gang leader, and note by the way here, the terminology that is used to describe this operation and the people that they're fighting is exactly the same way as the paramilitary forces in Haiti are described, like, right now by the US and the UN

as the US tries to stage another invasion, this time with the backing of Mexico's nominally leftist president, Amlo. So, yeah, a real sort of legacy of people who Americans think are leftists doing imperialism in Haiti. Good job, everyone.

Well, everybody does a little bit of imperialism in Haiti, you know, as a treat. I mean, this is the thing, right? Every single country in Latin America is bound and determined to prove that you actually cannot do a contrary

sort of popular opinion about this. You actually can't do social democracy without imperialism, and every single time someone tries to do a social democracy, they have to invade Haiti. It's just sort of like, it's in the contract here. Mm-hmm. Okay, and so,

the UN, the sort of like, and by the way, I should point out, the UN force is commanded by a Brazilian general, like the entire, basically once the Brazilians take over, it's commanded by Brazilian generals the entire time. Well, those guys seem nice. Yeah, okay, so they go after this guy

and they fire 22,000 rounds of ammunition into basically just like apartment buildings. To this day, nobody knows how many people they killed, but from my witness reports, we know they killed babies, they killed children, they killed pregnant women, it is, it is Vietnam

shit. It is absolutely awful. Augusto Helano who, I guess, Helano, I don't know how to pronounce his guy's name, the guy who leads this operation becomes the head of Bolsonaro's institutional security bureau. Here's a headline from

Poder 360 from last week, quote, it is not possible to admit the return of the red gang, says Helano, and by the red gang he means Lula, he's calling Lula a communist. Okay. And this is fine and good from a guy who again is the head of

the institutional security bureau. This guy like sucks so much. When he retired in 2011, Helano defended, this is from Breuters, when he retired in 2011, Helano defended Brazil's

1964 to 1985 military dictatorship as a bulwark against the communization of the country. Sure. And, okay, so we can say that as much as sort of Brazil's like fascism is homegrown and this is absolutely true, they're also just like

eating the ass end if you cause boomerang because all of the fascism that they're about to do is exported to Haiti before it comes back. Here's from Breuters, this is talking about Bolsonaro's cabinet. His proposed defense minister, former general Fernando Alvarez

Silva, served under Helano as an operations chief, Bolsonaro's incoming infrastructure minister, Tercicio Fritas was a senior UN military engineer in Haiti arriving shortly after Helano left in 2005.

Retired general Carlos Alberto do Santa Cruz, Brazil's next government minister led UN troops in the Caribbean nation 2007. All of those guys, by the way, this was written before the election, all of those guys took office two, fully two

of Bolsonaro's secretaries of government were part of this occupation. So, yeah, this obviously went great for Lula. Yeah, okay, good job. You sent a bunch of colonial troops

to occupy Haiti and then all of the generals came home and were like let's fucking do fascism here too. Yeah, so in this episode we're talking a lot about sort of the Brazilian fascism because this is a Brazil episode but I don't want to minimize what this did to Haiti where to this day

Lula is like fucking despised for betraying the Haitian people and fucking occupying the country with troops. There's this whole thing where Lula goes to Haiti and he has this whole thing about how he's playing like a soccer match

and he's like okay we're going to show the world there's no alternative to bullets and meanwhile this soccer stadium is literally surrounded by the Brazilian army and it's oh boy I love showing the world I mean there is an alternative to bullets and it's just threatening people

with your guns because they know you've shot enough people that you'll use them Oh and drones too by the way this is where the UN learns how to do drone warfare. The other thing that's happening here is this occupation is where the UN starts to fight hybrid wars for the first time

the wars that they're doing these sort of peacekeeping operations they're starting to do counterinsurgency shit where like the enemy can be mixed in with the population and you know they kill a shit ton of people there is rampant rape and sexual assault because it turns out that

when you send troops to another country to occupy it this is what happens and when this force eventually pulls out in 2017 they just like leave a shit ton of fatherless babies behind because the people who did all this shit were like fuck it we're just going to leave

leave these children behind I think most famously okay so there's a giant earthquake in Hades 2011 and 2010 and this leads to this like enormous sort of redoubling of the occupation and troops are brought in from other parts of the world including there's a

contingent from Nepal and the results of this is that the Nepalese troops Hades seems like a place Nepalese soldiers ought to be this is by the way like this is like the new revolutionary government in Nepal that is like finally defeated the monarchy

after like decades it's like we all looked at the British Empire and we're like well that's clearly fucked up but what if we did it in a decentralized way right what if it wasn't just the British what if everyone was sending Nepalese

shock troops into crackdown on popular insurgencies the thing that particularly goes wrong with the Nepalese troops is that the Nepalese troops bring the Nepalese troops back to the country and okay well again who hasn't you know okay these things the defeat of cholera

this is like one of the few genuine victories we have had over sort of like the last 200 years over the forces that have caused like human misery and suffering for like just time immemorial is that we defeated cholera and then we brought it back

the fucking U.N. occupation brings like this is the first representation to get cholera Jesus fucking Christ it's not hard to not spread cholera we success like even if you're looking by the standards of military occupations

like the Russians didn't haven't spread cholera in Ukraine it's not hard to not spread cholera we didn't spread cholera in Vietnam no we didn't create a cholera epidemic in Afghanistan or it is not hard to not create a cholera epidemic to be fair the Saudis

have managed to create one in Yemen now too but that's probably worse than this one but yeah that more just reinforces my point that most imperialist occupations are able to not cause cholera epidemics it's hard and okay

you know and obviously like okay you've now created your colonial army the colonial army is gonna come home and literally these same troops go back to Brazil and launch a war in the favelas like under

under Dilba Rousseff's PT like the fucking army is literally occupying the favelas and you know this is all part of the PT's like massive campaign to sort of buy weapons and modernize the army which you know and buy like I think currently they're involved in like well okay

okay I I'm not entirely sure about my dates on this I'm not entirely sure if they're currently involved in 9 UNPCT operations or 16 but there are like there are I Brazilian troops like

all over the world I still doing this bullshit and you know again as we've talked about like literally the people who are in Haiti like are the people who are going to help put Lula in prison and put Bolsonaro in power so you know this is some

I this is some fucking enormous like creating your own grave diggers shit okay so okay we've now we've now gotten through one of the sort of sets of grave diggers the PT is building for themselves um but also back in back in Brazil things are also

like you know not going great for them which and the way this is specifically not going great is that like even even you know sort of in the hour of triumph triumph of the workers party right Lula ascendant etc etc there is a massive fissure opening under the feet of the Brazilian left

and that fissure is the gig economy we we have talked like literally ad nauseum on this show about how the gig economy is bad for workers for our purposes the thing that's kind of important here is that

doing this kind of gig work right like becoming an independent like an independent contractor has a profound social and political effect and it creates a sort of profound social political atomization right it breaks down the sort of social bonds that like built the workers who've been the PT

and transport and instead of the sort of like you know massification right like the conversion to people into sort of like these these like concrete mass social entities who can like take collective action you get these neoliberal subjects who

are incredibly atomized incredibly isolated and vulnerable to sort of like you know fascist projects that promise like community and unity like this new organic call and you know guess where Bolsonaro draws his support from oh wait it's a it's a newly evangelical section of the working class and to be clear here

the informal sector in Brazil has always been massive but the way the PT runs their welfare programs makes everything just exponentially worse we talked about this a bit last episode but one of the big things that the PT's welfare programs do is they're about giving

people access to microcredit and okay so in the short run this is technically incredibly effective at combating poverty but it had another effect which was to sort of like deeply infirmly like

sort of like ingrain vast sections of Brazilian workers into the banking system and turned them into micro-entrepreneurs and okay so being a social democratic party and on purpose constructing an entire class of micro-entrepreneurs is like maybe the

single best example of producing your own grave diggers that I've seen since like the military dictatorship cooperated with Lula in the first place this is a terrible idea but you know okay so I think I think I think it's worth asking like why is the PT

doing this shit right like this is this is something that is like otherwise absolutely incomprehensible and the answer is that the PT was never quite the party that people think it is here is from a group of Brazilian anarchists writing in CrimeThink the rulers link to the realization of

mega-events cheaply re-political rewards for FIFA and its corporate cronies not coincidentally the same companies that financed the electoral campaigns of the PT the benefits were financial profit stretched into the billions underwritten by public resources and guaranteed by police repression the PT could not have done this alone

it was the party that received the largest total of private donations in recent years 75 million in 2013 while other parties like the PSDB, the Social Democratic Party and PMDB, Party of Democratic Movement the biggest and oldest party in Brazil

mostly center right and conservative politicians only managed 46 million dollars all together in 2014 the year of Dilma Rousseff's re-election the PT received 47 million dollars from contractors facing lawsuits and investigations while the PMDB got 38 million

the PSDB got 28 million this demonstrates the symbiosis between the workers party and those who control the flow of capital in the country a connective tissue of economic and political power so this is not good and

you can sort of ask what was the PT really doing here right like why okay why are they doing micro loans why are they taking all this money and there's a really really good pair of articles from a Brazilian group called militants in the fog that was published at illwill called work and revolt in Brazil's

dead ends and I'm going to read from some of it a bank accounts a smartphone with access to the internet and a profile in an app the means to collect emergency aid which is emergency aid is part of this is talking about Bolsonaro stuff so Bolsonaro implements this policy

called emergency aid which is like it's kind of the equivalent of like the U.S.'s like stimulus checks that we got but slightly different but the means required to collect emergency aid are the same required to create an account for Uber

a sign that we are facing fundamental parts of this quote new way of working years ago it was already possible to identify the Bolsa Familia program which is that giant PT like workers party cash transfer program that we talked about last episode

whose dimensions were small in the face of the 2020 financial aid program the objective of forming a unified workplace more deeply subjugated to capitalist relations the quote bankification promoted by the program contributed to the expanding

contributed to expanding the reach of micro credit systems a process of financialization of informality which was deepened in recent years with the dissemination of increasingly agile and easy payment terminals and electronic payment systems such as PIX

a quicker and tax free money transfer method the phenomenon reached unprecedented intensity due to the emergency aid the state-owned bank caxia economic and federal absorbed 30 million customers in 10 days in what was possibly the fastest bankification process in history

thus reaching a record profit in 2020 access to credit is essential for the emergence of a precarious workforce to which capital costs and risks are transferred while interest rates introduce a new level of productivity to the old okay this is a

Portuguese word that oh boy via caro which is like getting by which is the sort of like it's a sort of slang term for kind of like doing stuff in the informal economy to like survive which is now directly connected to global financial markets thus the focus of these

income policies would be less on expanding consumption capacity for the beneficiaries as in the Keynesian distributive model and more on expanding their investment capacity financing the acquisition of work instruments and quote self-valuing their human capital enthusiasts of such programs claim that

finance the financial cushion provided by basic income can represent enough stability for people to be able to spend their own savings or other capital starting a business so okay what's happening here um and Milton's a fog is arguing this after the work of a Brazilian academic

named uh Ludmilla Abilio is okay what's happening here is the real subsumption of the formal economy which okay so like what what what does that mean we need to take a step back and do like

a little bit more marks so marks makes this distinction between what he calls formal and real subsumption so assumption is this like whole philosophy thing I'm not going to get into here but basically what he's talking about is stuff getting like subsumed by capitalism right like becoming a part of the sort of capitalist like processing system

and this comes in stages right the first is formal subsumption where okay so say you have a peasant right formal subsumption is where the peasant like enters the market for the first time and suddenly be instead of being a peasant is now like a wage worker right and you know in

in in in this phase right capitalism has entered a new sphere right someone who was a peasant who was like not doing capital stuff before right who was going for self production and had like feudal dues and obligations is now a wage worker but you know and then they're selling the goods to the market but the

actual process of production which is like okay so like how a peasant does like how how you your former peasant new agriculture worker like grows their crops and what crops they grow and like when they decide to work in in in this first stage this is still the peasant's choice on that ends with real subsumption

where control all control over the workplace that like workers had had is completely destroyed and you're just like oh okay this is this is what like we think of as a regular job right we're like okay the way the job works is your boss tells you what to do your entire labor process has been like fully

integrated into into into this sort of like broader capitalist production processes that you have no control over and this is what's been happening in the informal economy over the past few decades in Brazil it's a real subsumption right like and and you know what like it stuff that had formerly been you know like

people taking wage labor but the sort of structure of how people do the jobs that they're doing right was still up to them this has been ending and the way it's been ending is through basically the degree of control offered by two employers by apps like uber of

and like yeah the control that these apps give you over the informal economy and the results have been absolutely catastrophic on the one hand the sort of limited autonomy that the formal economy like that the informal economy used to give you has been crushed by sort of sorry has been crushed by

algorithmic control from gay economy apps that you know like track where you are and tell you where you need to go and how how fast you have to get there and like what lights you have to run in order to get there and also increasingly these gig workers are being squeezed by a new level of middle management

who work basically the same way as like gang like the old gang bosses that control Chinese labor in the turn of the 20th century where you have these guys who act as like private recruiting companies and form in for workers who okay so you go to this place right these people are like okay I will give you a job

and they negotiate they're the people who negotiate directly with the company and take money from the company and then use that money to sort of like pay the employer and this this you know this sucks right because on the one hands you have all of the bad parts of a regular job which there's a guy who tells you what to do and if

you don't do what he tells you like you get fired and then you have all the bad parts of an informal sector job which is that you don't have any legal protections that like workers with formal contracts have and you know the the effect of this has been to create super hell for like

vast vast swaths of the Brazilian working class and this has been a just unbelievably catastrophic sort of disaster for Brazilian politics but okay you know

what else is creating super hell for the Brazilian working class I mean not the products and services that support this podcast we're just we'll just do it for the American working class now now yeah okay here's fucking ads

oh we're back wow I for one think everything's gonna be fine the fact that Lula won this resounding victory over Jair Bolsonaro by nearly a whole percentage point

is gonna mean none of these problems that you're talking about are ever things again yep no and you know okay so speaking of reasons why this will not be a problem again the sort of like financialization bullshit this this doesn't just like stick in sort of labor process

like this stuff spreads to the social movements as well which are in a lot of cases like very old and powerful Brazilian social movements are reduced to these sort of like state back financialized husks of the former cells where like you know you have like you have social movements that are literally like issuing

bonds to like fund their members' businesses you have social movements that are like okay if you show up to assemblies you can like earn points so that you can get access to like be put on a waiting list for like a government rent stabilized department or something like it is a

shit show and this whole process sort of leads to the hollowing out of the Brazilian left and you know and as the left is sort of like being sort of like torn apart from the inside out and as you get into sort of like 2011,

2012, 2013 as the Brazilian economy begins to slow you get Brazil's version of the sort of like movement of the squares like 2011, 2013 uprisings which is going to be waged against a hostile well okay a

pretty hostile PT government like there's a sort of public show by Dilma Rousseff they're like yeah no I support the protests when they're not violent and we're going to do stuff but okay this goes badly very quickly so these protests start over these like raises

in public trends in the cost of public transportation like the fair cost raises in a bunch of cities and very quickly there are like 3 million people in the streets the sort of conventional narrative about what happened here is that

so the protests start off leftists right but then the leftists get run out as the protests sort of keep going by these sort of like far away political like conservative nationalists that like take them over and turn them from this sort of like leftist call

for like a more egalitarian society and for like the right to the city and like stopping evictions and stuff like that to this sort of like anti-corruption crusade against PT against the PT against Dilma Rousseff against sort of like the left itself and okay this is true like as far as it goes

we'll be talking more about that impeachment campaign like next episode but there's more going on here and the more going on here is that in 2013 there were massive protests like 800,000 people protested a confederation cup which is

like a soccer tournament hosted by like that's preceded like it's one of the things that like precedes the world cup I don't know I'm not a soccer knower but there's these massive protests against them and they are just unbelievably brutally suppressed like 50-54,000

cops are sent out to like stop this shit and they beat the absolute shit out of everyone and to understand why these movements were crushed and how the right was able to take power we need to talk about the Brazilian police so I think

you know most of our listeners you to me we are familiar with the American police right like if you're listening to the show odds are decently good you have seen them beat your friends to a bloody pulp you have seen them tase the parents of children locked in a building with a mass shooter you have seen them slaughter

men women and children in the street for no other reason than they can because they are a fascist death squad fused with organized crime outfits funded by putting guns to the heads of the American working class they are descendants of slave catchers working each and every day to keep the American racial hierarchy firmly intact okay when you put it

that way it sounds bad but I don't know like I like law and order so like the TV show yeah you know that they have Garrison you've never watched law and order SVU though

you're missing out on all of the good law and order is that the one with the golf check I honestly don't know there's like 40 different law and order shows it's impossible to keep track of them but there is that there is that one goth chick that they brought in

because our grandparents would think she was hot yeah I think okay the power of goth chicks to extend police budgets yeah it's it's fun and good and okay you know like we know how bad the US police are

um I'm gonna read this from the LA Times quote Brazilian cops kill at nine times the rate of US law enforcement nine times well that's pretty bad yeah you know I and I it's worth pointing out

here that Brazil was the last country in this hemisphere to evolve slavery like they abolished it like 20 years after the fucking US did right and so you know when you're thinking about what the Brazilian police is take everything you know about the American police and understand that

Brazilian police right okay so with the American police right the murder dial goes up to 11 with the Brazilian police that murder dial goes up to 99 and that's where they've cranked it to um here here's some crime think in 2014 Brazil's prison population became the third largest in the world

with 570 thousand prisoners just like 600 something thousand prisoners today most of whom are black during the PT administration this figure increased by 620 percent cool yeah I like and this

this is a part of the PT that people really sort of tiptoe around which is that they preside over like a regime of mass executions and mass incarceration that is

like utterly atrocious and as an aside here um okay so like there are probably some of our listeners whose thing is that they want to go into electoral politics and if you are doing this you have one job like solely

you have one responsibility and your job is to fucking annihilate the police your job is to destroy them so utterly and completely that their very name is sped as a curse in the street by people who make the sign of cross for protection every time they think about them like by the end of your first term these people need to be living in fucking hovels in the woods

without access to a weapon that even as deadly as a 2x4 and every time they attempt to enter a town people need to be like chasing them and throwing rocks at them and if you do not do this you will live like Lula has to see literally everything you have ever done crumbled beneath the way of a fascism that is too terrible

to imagine and you will also experience in your lifetime and instead of doing this the PT is like fuck it no we're going to use the police to stamp out protests against the mega events that they're putting on the police repression around the world cup is like arguably

worse than the stuff of the confederation cup in order to prepare for the world cup the PT stage is this like massive social cleansing campaign we talked about this in our sports episode like they carry up mass evictions against both like regular people and also against like

there's a bunch of sort of leftist and also sort of just like regular people who squat in Brazil right like up a huge part of the social movements have been about seizing property and building stuff on and seizing abandoned buildings and yeah this stuff all gets evicted so they can be replaced with world cup businesses it's you know like what

is happening here is it's like all of the violence gentrification but in the span of like a year right the PT are literally rolling German tanks through the favelas because like you know subtlety is something that happens to other people not like to reality and you know as we talked about before

they're putting them under literally military occupation with colonial troops who were like fighting in Haiti right evict 250,000 people for this fucking tournament um here's some other shit they did this is from a series of pieces by Brazilian annex group called fictional

faction in 2012 the federal government in FIFA signed the general law of the world cup to ensure that the country would quote uphold FIFA standards of organization during the 2013 confederation cup and the 2014 world cup this agreement constituted

an enormous legal offense to the Brazilian people entailing the suspension of many constitutional rights and norms that are already precarious for most for example a court established to rule within 48 hours on strikes that occurred within the world cup workers lost the right to strike

or fight for improvements while FIFA avoided paying taxes on businesses within Brazilian territory a special secretary to public security for great events was created breaking the laws stipulating that justice may not have special sponsors or clients who demand priority

the privatization of public space was legitimized by the creation of exclusive streets for FIFA and its partners in which even local businesses were required to keep their doors closed within the exclusion zone around the stadium the laws allowed FIFA to intervene directly in the market

without the oversight of the state FIFA was able to stipulate the price to charge for tickets, suspending the usual price for students and any application of consumer production code in addition, more than 20,000 people were allowed to work as unregulated volunteers during the world cup

these volunteers did not receive the protections of basic labor rights and operated outside of constitutional norms in situations analogous to slavery according to Brazilian law these exceptions to safety and labor the labor and safety law are supposed to be limited to volunteer work for non-profit institutions

that have a quote civic, cultural, education, recreational social assistance purposes which hardly describe FIFA the state even overlooked the use of child labor and activities related to the game such as the role of ballboy which had been banned in Brazil since

2004 so this goes great and the thing that, you know, so this happens in 2014 under Dilma Grissif but it's worth noting like this is Lula's project from the beginning, right like he has been fighting to get Brazil the world cup like since

the opening for applications to get this world cup in Brazil to happen and what, you know this campaign to get the world cup takes the form of a literally all-out war against leftist protesters, squatters, workers people living in favelas, people who are

literally all of those at the same time who are, you know, supposedly the PT's base and this is what the PT spends literally the rest of its time in power doing, right like Dilma Grissif implements much of austerity measures like the spending police powers

like this is the shit that the PT is doing like literally as the grim reaper is coming to their door like two months before Dilma Grissif is impeached she passed a pair of anti-terrorism laws targeted at protesters and, okay

we'll go into the impeachment next episode but I want to close on this which is preventing this from happening preventing the party of workers from fucking rolling tanks through the streets in fucking working class neighborhoods

like this is the actual sort of beating of this is the actual sort of principle politics of anti-capitalism this is why there is a sort of rigid anarchist opposition to the state, right this isn't just ideological purity it is the concrete knowledge that any other path is death

literally cannot continue to do as the PT has been doing for the past fucking 20 years to produce around gravediggers literally the ecosystems we draw our life from will not survive if we keep doing this it does not matter how many people you live you live out of poverty if you do not actually destroy the class system

capitalism and fascism will force them back into poverty almost all of the poverty gains that Lula gained during his entire time in office were destroyed in four years of Bolsonaro every day that the state is allowed to exist the class system is allowed to exist it creates a thousand more Bolsonaro's

it creates a thousand Bolsonaro's in the police it creates some of the armies it creates them in corporations it creates them on the streets and they have to be destroyed or this world will fucking burn and in the next episode we are going to watch a thousand Bolsonaro's burn the entire country

and that is my incredibly angry response to this absolute fucking bullshit like are a lot of the reasons why everything is completely fucked cool

well everybody have a happy start of November and hopefully Brazil isn't in a state of civil war by the time you listen to this episode yeah I update at the end of the episode

I don't think there's been any change and remember folks if you somehow take control of the political apparatus in Brazil dismantle the police and the military that should be a lesson for you I know a lot of you are on the verge of taking power

in Brazil so hopefully that message will get out and I mean in general don't fund them don't give them more money don't spend a bunch of money buying them German tanks well what do you do why are we focusing on German tanks

they make fine tanks ok but hear me out here can you name a single good thing a German tank has ever been used for yeah the communists probably I don't know

they killed a lot of Englishmen anyway and Canadians during the summer of 2020 some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what

they were right I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy each season will take you inside

an undercover investigation in the first season of Alphabet Boys we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver at the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse

and inside his hearse was like a lot of guns and on the good and bad ass way and nasty sharks he was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcast

or wherever you get your podcasts I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC what you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person in space

and when I was there as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories but there was this one that really stuck with me about a soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down

it's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country is falling apart and now he's left defending the union's last outpost

this is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world listen to the last soviet on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

what if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science the problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic

and not an awful lot of science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price two death sentences and a life without parole my youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday I'm Molly Herman join me as we put

science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI how many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus it's all made up

listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts it could happen here it could happen here it's the podcast that's happening right now yeah, it's about

things that you know about our third and final episode about the Brazilian elections it's me, Chris, I'm here with James Stout hi, Chris so we have an update on this situation which is that Jair Bolsonaro

he still, I don't think has publicly announced defeats but he apparently told the Supreme Court quote, it's over so he seems to have committed defeat which has not stopped a bunch of his followers from calling for a military coup

yeah, and from these people that still seem to be blocking roads right? yeah it's happening, I don't know yeah, it's sort of unclear to me to what extent his followers are going to back down

I don't think there's really much chance for a military coup at this point like they seem to have just lost I read something earlier about Bolsonaro making plans to like there's like a sash thing you're supposed to hand over to the next president and he was making plans to not be in the country

when Lula took office and the vice president handed over instead which is like this is like the most whiny baby shit I've ever seen which is like, oh god what a loser, holy fuck like first

as tragedy and then as fast and then as fast and continually as fast like that's how the right operates right? yeah, I actually almost had that like I actually almost started the Lula episode with that quote and then I was like

well his return, I was like that's too mean to say about Lula, like his return hasn't been farce yet, like yeah but Bolsonaro is, oh boy yeah, he's going to go spend more time with the novel coronavirus that's why he's withdrawing from politics

you know, I heard, there was a great line in one of the things that I was talking about that Milton's and the Fog piece from Ilwell yesterday where they talked about like I read their exact quote it was something like it's not just that Bolsonaro failed to

respond to coronavirus it's that he was a vector for coronavirus and I was like, yeah this is both literally and metaphorically true, like several of the outbreaks are just from Bolsonaro oh yeah, absolutely amazing yeah, real

piece of shit yeah, so today we're going to be talking about very specific so we spent last episode talking about sort of like the enormous army of grave diggers that the PT had sort of built around them

and this episode is going to be about like how their grave was actually sort of built and then filled in so I talked about in episode one there was in 2005, I think I might have accidentally said 2006 in the original episode

but in 2005 there's just a giant corruption scandal involving the workers party that like shakes all of Brazil basically the short version of it is that a bunch of senior members of the PT were accused of bribing members of the Centro who was like Brazil

sort of like perennial elite corruption faction to like buy their votes to get bills passed which honestly like I'm okay with this like we're going to talk about some corruption later that like does suck this I think is fine I am okay

I'm going to put this on the record me, Christopher Wong, I am okay with literally just buying the votes of like weird corrupt right wingers to get them to vote for legislation that's actually good like whatever I don't care about this like this is bullshit like who cares

but that said I okay so this entire episode like well okay the first like three quarters episode this episode is like a lot about corruption and

before we need to go any further like we need to talk about like what corruption actually is and about the politics of it so okay I want to say this as someone who lives in like okay so I think most of our listeners understand that Chicago is notoriously corrupt I didn't grow up in Chicago I grew up in

Chicago's even more corrupt suburbs like I literally watched a mayor physically sell city hall to the highest bidder like she actually literally physically sold city hall like this is the kind of

shit you get out in the suburbs like it is fucking mind boggling like that wasn't my town but like I have seen some shit right and okay the thing I can say about government corruption is that there are two kinds of people in the world there are people like

Chicagoans who understand that every single politician no matter like every single politician whatsoever is going to rob you blind because they're all corrupt and you know there's a sort of like a more analytical culerary to this which is that like corruption is just a structural tendency of the state right it's a product

of state officials like having access to the state's enormous supply of resources it's a product of the kind of structural incentives that like being in a state produces and it's a product of the fact that the state you know acquires resources to violence and you know okay so there's people who understand this on

various levels right like I mean this is genuinely the nice thing about Chicago it's like everyone gets it like you don't have to convince people and then there's a bunch of people like like the other category of people are people who genuinely think that like politics is about people debating political principles and that like if we just

make slightly better arguments and like have slightly better land use policies the politicians who literally spend all day taking bribes and developers or like somehow homelessness or something or that like somehow like corruption is a matter of political principles like no no they're all doing this to you

like you guys you gotta understand this yeah it's very funny and it's like we don't get enough credit for our corruption San Diego I feel like and Ron by the sea as San Diego is known but it's very

funny to see people being like oh there can't be corruption because identity politics exists or because not Donald Trump rather than like this is the nature of the state especially the state under capitalism especially under capitalism in the United States is that like you don't get

fuck all unless you pay for it yeah although I will say this corruption as a policy of the state is essentially trans ideological like the red is communist the brown is fascist and the most leading heart red white and blue capitalist all take bribes they all give contracts to their family and they all steal money from the government like

you can tell this by the fact that the U.S. is literal like the U.S. just made it legal to give like they made it legal for a corporation to give money to a candidate in order to have them vote a certain way this is legal Nazi Germany corrupt as shit the U.S.S. are famously insanely corrupt this is not

this is not actually a product of ideology it's just a sort of structural like tendency of the state and it doesn't matter like the military dictatorships are corrupt like the fuck like the like the parliamentary democracies are corrupted like this is just like how the state works right um and

like so political corruption genuinely isn't that interesting right like the actual politics of it like it's not that interesting like it's just people just corrupt right what is interesting is anti-corruption politics and we need to get this out of the way immediately it is simultaneously true that like almost

no one openly supports corruption like it's like it's almost impossible to find anyone who will come out on the record and say their pro-corruption like you can't do it right and it's also true that like every single one of these people across the entire political spectrum is corrupt

and no politician is actually anti-corruption this is something that is very very important to understand none of these people are fucking anti-corruption this is sort of this is one of the lessons of Chicago which is that all of the sort of anti-corruption crusaders are like just as corrupt as people they're replacing well this is part of the way like

I don't want to go like extreme marcusia but like the like this idea this false choice right the corruption in itself creates a means for another person who is equally corrupt to enter simply by claiming to be anti-corrupt right like and then this we can just kind of continually one up each other

and claiming to be different and doing the same shit and people will embrace this fucking false choice yeah and you know we're gonna see this in this story later on I will give you a preview of where this is going so Sergio Moro who is this judge who's like great anti-corruption crusader turns out to have been funding is

quote-unquote anti-corruption investigations by illegally selling information to the FBI and then getting paid and find money collected by the US some successful corruption prosecutions he also is going to like very blatantly and pretty openly take a job as

the as Brazil's justice minister in exchange for putting Bolsonaro's political opponents in prison magnificent okay yeah and and you know so okay what's the thing that's important about this right is that anti-corruption

is not a real politics right like it's not it's not an actual real sense of political political positions right what it is is a set of politics you con rubes with but it turns out is really really good at conning groups because people really fucking hate corruption and the

thing the thing that being like an anti-corruption quote-unquote candidate does is it lets anyone like appear to be this sort of like populist champion of the people against the corrupt elite and this is really useful to the right and to sort of I mean not just to the right but it's really useful to sort of like bourgeois like capitalist politicians

in general because there are a lot of times where in order to sort of protect their interests you know or protect the interests of like their specific faction of the ruling class they need to win an election and they need to win the sort of hearts of minds of the people who see that the world sucks and like reflexively hate quote-unquote the establishment because they know they're getting screwed

and the easiest way to sort of con these people is to take up the politics of anti-corruption it's it's like the the absolute picture perfect neoliberal politics right like Rudy Giuliani for example God is start going after the mob in New York

and you know and what he did right really because he goes out to the mob he's an anti-corruption guy and then he replaces them with like even more efficient and extractive neoliberal bureaucratic parasites yeah and it's perfect like yeah in terms of neoliberalism right in terms of completely avoiding a class analysis

because you can appeal to people who are genuinely oppressed and marginalized by the system right by saying I'll go against this corrupt system which is oppressing and marginalizing you but also to the bourgeois east you can say oh the reason you're fucking business is not as successful as it does want its corruption so just vote for me

and we'll sort that out and you can continue exploiting the workers who I'm also appealing to yeah and and you know like Giuliani specifically like he is his name is just literally a punchline now right like it's not it's not even worth talking about him fucking like chomping

on a cigar doing an ad for a cigar company in the middle of the video right like like but but but you know he's selling flip flops now isn't that yeah something like that but that's the thing like the anti-corruption stuff was really really good for his career and you know

this is the poll does anti-corruption is the politics that the Brazilian right finally figures out as like the only thing that gets off the workers party juggernaut now like in 2005 the corruption case brings down a whole bunch of sort of like high-profile PT party members but it doesn't touch Lula himself who is like he gets his rep

like basically similar to Reagan is just like the Teflon president everything just bounced off of him but you know the right in 2005 really thinks that they've got him and they're like okay we're gonna crush him this next election everything's gonna go back to normal and then you know and it is true that from

2000 compared to 2002 Lula does have less support in 2006 he goes from 61% of the vote to a whopping 60% of the vote so okay so this didn't work right but the right

still sees that like this is the only thing they've been able to come up with that like actually damages the PT at all and in 2014 a judge named Sergio Morro who we've our Morro who again we have given you the spoiler this is like this is one of the most corrupt dudes in like the history of Brazilian politics

but he he finds like a different corruption ring to go after that he's not a part of and I think it's important to understand sort of from the outside of this right that like this anti-corruption stuff is essentially like a newer faction or like a slightly different

faction of the Brazilian ruling class going after another faction of the Brazilian ruling class so he finds he starts to think that that becomes known as Lava Jato or Operation Car Wash um and what Morro's going after is this

legitimately genuinely enormous corruption ring surrounding Petro Boss which is Brazil's state-owned oil company and the investigation leads to the arrest of an enormous number of government officials like there's like some of the like richest people in Brazil go to jail like

and it is true that like there is an enormous amount of corruption millions and billions of dollars that are being sort of stolen from this oil company right through sort of like contracts and like payoffs and stuff um but we also get to some real like lepers

eating people's faces party shit here as well where okay so 2013 Dilma Rousseff signs a law that massively expands police powers that includes in particular allowing them with no strings attached to offer plea bargains of people to get to the confess to stuff and like give the cops information they want to hear

which is like genuinely really unethical because I mean for a lot of reasons right like the whole plea bargaining system is like the reason like one of the reasons the whole US justice system is completely fucked up because everyone just fucking please out instead of going to trial because they know they know they're like everyone is pretty sure they're gonna lose and so people

you know people will just plead a shit they didn't do because they have no chance of winning the case it's completely fucked up and Dilma Rousseff's like nah yeah fuck it like we're gonna sign this like you know and I like I get that like she was responding to like the protest and I get that she thought

it would mostly be used against like fucking protesters or some shit but like who did you think this was gonna be used against why like come on like seriously it's like come on

it's like it is simultaneously true that there was like an incredibly coordinated sophisticated like a joint American Brazilian intelligence and like just a state operation to bring down the PT it's also true that the PT

like the reason they were able to be kneecapped so easily is that like they'd spent the last like six years like firing rounds over and over again into their own knees so like okay these things are broke through at the same time but okay and so Lava Jato like

eviscerates an enormous part of the sort of the a section of the Brazilian ruling class but it very quickly becomes clear that it's being used as a political weapon against Dilma Rousseff and the PT despite the fact that like literally every Brazilian like party is involved with this like

I think the PSOL might be like the only major Brazilian political party who wasn't involved in this and like that's because I don't think they had anyone who was senior enough to do it so like you know I like but you know everyone

like just is using this to go is like very clearly using this to go after the PT the problem is that like and this is going to be a perennial problem with these investigations is that they can't actually directly nail Dilma Rousseff

or Lula with doing anything that they have real problems with this um you know Dilma wins re-election 2014 but 2015 there are these as Lava Jato is like going and there's this enormous fucking press fury around it

um there are these massive sort of anti-corruption protest demanding that like she resigned that's ripped up by like again like the right wing media goes just completely batch it in this period um and you know okay so again moral is running into this problem that he can't

find anything that Dilma Rousseff did that was illegal so he starts relying on political theater instead he he starts he stages this like enormous series of raids on like Lula's house this non-profit like he's like like his brother's

business and you know with the entire press court like there right like with all the like stage for all these raids they like they drag him off to like jail for questioning but again like they don't really have anything they they kind of like invent this case about Lula based on some convoluted

shit about a property that he didn't own it's like I know the thing here basically is that like as with all corruption scandals right this this is a fight between parts of the ruling class right like the actual details of who's taking money from who are essentially irrelevant because that

that's not what actually matters right what matters here is that like the sort of right wing prosecutors have decided they're going to destroy the PT and you know they're the PT has helped them do it at every step um just the prosecutors right there it's like there's like press plus prosecutors

it creates this plus a bunch of political parties too yeah it's so not to like draw a comparison where it's not necessarily entirely valid but like look at the United Kingdom right we have Boris Johnson like man you mentally fucking up the covid response tons of people die and it's not that that brings

him down it's that he had a suitcase of wine in the karaoke party like because at some point but it's the appearance right it's this political theater of accountability like but you're not actually accountable to the people who you let down or the people who you lied to you're accountable to like 17 media

editors yeah to Rupert Murdoch right and Brazil has its own versions of Murdoch who are like I yeah I can only imagine like people people to who if I if I said my actual opinions on them like the the the FCC

would specifically start regulating podcasts because like oh boy all these people should I'd redacted parody etc etc and we'll just have like a five minute bleep here while Chris goes off so okay but but I can't so okay

they have this problem again which they can't really get Dilma Rousseff in anything and so what happens instead is that the Brazilian Senate is sort of like scrambling for something they can use and what they eventually impeach Dilma Rousseff for is this like

accounting procedure thing basically that that like everyone does and when I say everyone does like almost every previous president I'd like every like every single like what's it called like every single like

why am I blanking on it governor is that the right word yeah like the people who are like the heads of states yeah I think like all the governors do this like fucking literally everyone in Brazilian politics does this including some of the people who are signing like the fucking I'd I impeachment

thing but they remove her from this and okay so like a part of the sort of like decrepit and despise neoliberal right takes power but the notable part thing here is that

she is Dilma Rousseff is impeached by her own allies right she is impeached like Michael Temer the guy who replaces Rousseff like winds up as presidents because Dilma Rousseff made him her VP like

it's just like this is dating back to like this is like really old sort of PT political maneuvering stuff dating back to like Lula finally winning out over sort of PT base in 2002 right where he's able to convince them to like have a sort of like conservative guy like be

his running mate and here this is where this finally goes to shit because the PT is making alliances with sort of like center right parties and all these corruption parties and it's like okay you allied yourself like I understand the reason they were doing this was

that the sort of center which is like the sort of corruption parties have enough votes that you kind of have to work with them but also like what did you expect was going to happen like did you did you really not expect that the leverage were going to eat your face like I okay

it's you know like it's really like okay like you let a mosquito into your house and you are now like fucking Pikachu facing because they because the mosquito bit you is like really like you know and this all comes back to sort of like the things I've been talking about in

the last two episodes about like the inherent contradiction of being a leftist and having to keep the state and having to run a state we have to keep the economy going right which again it means you have to make sure the capitalists get money and Lula could just pay these people off like literally or figuratively because he was benefitting from the commodity boom right

but then when the Chinese economy goes under and suddenly the money dries up because the commodity boom is over and the Brazilian economy starts to collapse like you know there's nothing to pay off the bourgeoisie with sure and you know and Dilla was like she's trying to pay them off but you know in order

to fund it now now she's doing austerity and that's sapping her and that's sapping her base because you know okay you have to choose one or the other but she's not but again but she's also not able to pay off enough of the bourgeoisie to stop some coming and so they offer

and you know okay so the PT supporters will describe what happened like that this impeachment is a coup which is like true like as far as it goes like it is true that like a bunch of absolute like psychopaths like just like over through the democratically elected president

odd for bullshit I actually think it's less of a coup than the next thing we're going to get to but yeah so okay so the product of this is that Michael Timber who is it like just a unfathomable neoliberal ghoul like

I really like oh god like really one of the worst people ever um who again Rousseff picked as her VP because president in 2016 spends the next two years like oh wow also if Draco

Malfoy grew up this is what he would look like yeah no it's really incredible yeah you do owe it to yourself to go look up this kind of this man is very streamlined but otherwise yeah it's remarkable

he just looks like one of those people just looks like exactly who he is I cannot believe this guy succeeded in politics when he looks like an evil snake yeah I think he also got arrested for being even

but like okay so like there is corruption going on in the PT. Timber is the corruption party right like he actually goes down eventually he is like unfathomably corrupt like he goes down for like

he took like there's a bribe from a meat packer right yeah that was one of them he funneled like a hundred and eighty million dollars into like his friends unfathomably

and this stuff genuinely sucks it actually does suck that literally hundreds of millions of dollars are being just like fucking stolen by these ghouls right yeah especially in a country where people genuinely struggle to get by

every single day I think it's worth mentioning the level of poverty that we're talking about here is like again like people who don't have running water people who live in deserts and like don't have water at all

like it is really really bad and then you know you are watching just this bullshit happening right like this fucking like guy who god

absolute fucking demon just stealing a hundred like fifty million dollars right yeah it's worth just like rich people playing Monopoly with your fucking future and your children's future yeah but you know and again like nobody fucking voted for this guy right

and he's just immediately starts implementing like unfathomable just atrocious austerity and he like he has a seven percent appuha rating everyone in his country is going to resign this is the second lowest this is the second lowest proven rating

I've ever seen for a ruling politician after Kim Jong-Pil who I think got down to three percent one day I'm going to do an actual Kim Jong-Pil episode I feel like you're within the error margin of any polling once you get into the single digit no one likes you

like literally like people from his own party want him to resign right and he just stays in power because no one can do anything about it but you always get that right when you engage in his politics of corruption they're like sort of palace coups

and intranizing backstabbing will necessarily happen because like that is how you further your own career and therefore benefit more from the corruption right like again see the cluster fuck that is the United Kingdom now do you know who else doesn't benefit from corruption like the rest of us

I don't think we can say that with any degree of certainty Chris it's it's shell it's the products and services that support this podcast okay and we're back okay this I think is a good

time as any to mention that like okay so Lava Jado is going on this entire time right this thing is going on for years and years and years and years and it's reiterating that

Lava Jado is being illegally backed by the American Justice Department the SEC the FBI probably all I think also the CIA although weirdly this is okay and this is where things get very strange because this like from the documents that we've seen

there is some evidence the CIA handed them shit the thing we have the most evidence for is actually the FBI running this coup weird yeah it's very weird what's happening basically is that the way American corruption laws work is that like if any money passes through

like an American bank account the FBI has the authority to go after them and the FBI and the Justice Department fucking hate the PT and they're looking at Petra Boss and they're going like this is so much fucking money we can get if we go after these people and also we hate them

and it's also worth noting so Sergio Moro is like he's a Harvard guy right he he's a Harvard guy he was trained by a bunch of American police people like he is like he's like one of these sort of like he's a Nazi cool basically right but like he's like the

law version of a Nazi cool and so the entire like it's funny like the FBI in theory is not supposed to be like the FBI is supposed to be a domestic agency which does not make them any better by the way but like they're not supposed to be going after like they're not supposed to be trying to overthrow the president of Brazil

but you know they are and again they are taking down the Black Panthers increasing anti-Semitism just do normal standard domestic stuff yeah this yeah shooting anarchists shooting like possibly assassinating MLK um yeah yeah

that's what we expect from them yeah not they're not supposed to be doing the foreign cruise that's the CIA's job but they're muscling into the CIA's territory here um it's it's it's worth mentioning as well that like the Obama administration is heavily involved in this

right um and you know it turns out that by the time you get to 2016 the Trump administration they love this shit because it's Trump it's like wow damn who could have guessed yeah that is wow yeah and and as and this is gonna come out

it's gonna come out later um okay this is the second time that Glenn Greenwald is just handed like one of the biggest news stories of the decade like literally dropped on his lap and he gets to like write about it is that yeah it comes out that like this stuff is being politically like very obviously politically motivated

like Sergio Moro's like openly cutting deals with Bolsonaro to do political persecutions uh there's again again the stuff about how he's being paid by he's literally getting like the task force is being funded by the FBI through these slush funds of of fine

money collected from Petra Boss like it's unbelievably shady shit um now the entire time this is going on uh Sergio Moro has been like illegally wiretapping Lula's conversations and leaking them to the press

to like destroy Lula and Dilra Rusep politically it's and you know and like like Operation Car Wash like prosecutors are just like going on TV and telling the entire Brazilian public like no Lula's guilty there's no doubt about it and then in 2017 Moro

has Lula convicted now Lula appeals this on the grounds that like this is incredibly obviously a show trial like but by the okay there's a lot you will read a lot of like the sort of liberal press in the U.S. like fucking loves this shit and like he doesn't 14,000, 15,000, 16,000 someone says he doesn't have 17 but like

by 2017 even the sort of American liberal press is like hey you're running these trials too fast like these don't look like real trials anymore like he's just like there's there's like it really is like they stop having even the pretense at this not being

a show trial so just like convicting people convicting people convicting people convicting people and like you know in the Lula case there's some interesting stuff which is that like okay Moro doesn't have the legal jurisdiction to prosecute Lula here like the crimes that were supposedly committed aren't committed in

a place where Lula where Moro has any jurisdiction at all like it's another state and he just doesn't anyways because he's just like fuck it like yeah whatever yeah well the law is more of a vibe when you are also the government yeah well and then again like this is the thing like people people get really really really hung up

about legal technicalities and that shit and as we're about to see in that in in in this case right like that shit does not matter right this this is entirely about sort of power power brokering and sort of like where where where the Brazilian elite is in a particular time who's backing

what Lula puts in a petition he puts in a writ of habeas corpus that's like hey there's stuff in the constitution that's like I shouldn't be put in prison until my appeals are done and this goes to the Supreme Court at which point a fucking Brazilian general

who apparently be in this this apparently was planned by 15 other generals who I got a guy named Eduardo Vias Bolas like literally starts threatening the Supreme Court on Twitter and like

he starts employing and this tweet is read on Globo which is like the fucking like biggest news network in Brazil they like read out this tweet like the subtext of which is if you don't put Lula in jail we are going to do a coup so they drag Lula off to prison

and they put him in solitary for 580 days which is like yeah yeah they are like they are torturing the shit out of him Jesus yeah yeah

they are also living out there like fucking like previous generation of coups against Latin America like dropping Victor Harra's hands off fantasies yeah and like I say this like Lula was arrested

by the military dictatorship in the 80s right but even the military dictatorship only held him for 30 days and they let him go yeah they got nothing on the neoliberals yeah and they're trying to put him in prison for I think like it's originally 7 years 10 to 12 years and there's this whole thing but like he's also

not allowed to speak to the press during this time and the reason this is happening is that if you're in prison you can't run for president and in 2018 if Lula is allowed to run for president even with all the press shit he is going to fucking stop literally anyone in the field yeah and yeah so

this is going on but before we talk about the election a little bit and then sort of wind down there's one more thing I want to talk about which is that just before Lula is arrested Mariela Franco who is a incredibly radical city city councilor and Rio de Janeiro is assassinated

by a death squad there's a lot of coverage of like who she was sort of like there's a lot of coverage of her story about how she's a black lesbian woman who came who like was from an incredibly poor family in the favelas and how she sort of like worked way out to the politicians

but like they don't talk about you know people will sort of bleakly mention her human rights work or they'll talk a bit about how she's part of the PSOL which is this leftist party that like okay so I'm still kind of looking I'm still kind of hazy about their exact story

I think what happened was there was a group of PT like politicians who refused to vote for an austerity package the PT was trying to push through and they got kicked out of the party for it and they founded the PSOL and

they thought about sort of this stuff what they won't cover really is what she was actually doing and I think this is like this is incredibly important because the thing she was actually doing was a bunch of very radical and unbelievably dangerous anti-police activism

so in 2008 this is again under Lula's PT government there was a reorientation of police strategy in the favelas tours this new program called pacifying police units UPPs and the idea was that instead of doing constant raids into the favelas and then leaving them they were just going to put them under like

constant police occupation and you know like something like 400,000 people at a time are just living under these occupations and in the beginning it's supposed to be tied to like there's supposed to be like an expansion of like social services into the favelas and there's supposed to be like

community policing and that just doesn't happen and by 2013 they just like give up the pretense of doing any social work and they found this thing called tactical groups of proximity police which very quickly turned into just like fucking death squads but they're both

death squads and they're also doing like stop and frisk shit and just like harassing random black people there's murdering people on the streets on a scale that is like it's worse than it's been before like there were individual police unit there's an individual police unit because 117 people in a year

like it is it is fucking horrible right this is what I was talking about about the Brazilian police killing killing at a rate that's 11 times higher than the American police like it is it is fucking atrocious um oh yeah and there are some incredible videos of yeah like it's

fucked um yeah and they're at war with parts of their own population yeah and I mean I'd say this like this is this is one of those things about fascism right we're like fascism like always kind of has works on this system of alliances between sort of

like the police paramilitaries who are sort of tied to the police and organized crime yeah and you know like there is an extent to which there are a bunch of gangs and the police are fighting them there's also an extent to which like everyone involved is just shaking down all of these fucking like unbelievably poor

largely black like working class people who are just getting fucking robbed every day it's horrible um yeah and it's that where it might be a bit of a sidebar though we don't like need to fit in here but um in which case

we can just delete it but there's a I know that one of the big Brazilian prison gangs is like ostensibly leftist they're like they're called red command right yeah I don't know I think I think is it really it's commandante vermel

vermel yeah yeah so they they used to be yeah so okay red command used to be like an ML group that was like a sort of like alliance between like regular people in prison and like leftist

people who've been put in prison commander yeah and it it does a similar thing to like like there are parts of the FARC that go like this there's a lot of there's a thing that happens when you're dealing with sort of armed groups like this which is that okay so like a lot of the things that you do

to get money as an armed group are things that are also just a good way to get money so things like kidnapping things like entering the drug trade and there's a lot of groups that start out ideological that just seems to be ideological and the people are just like well we're just in the drug trade now and this is kind of what happens here with these people but okay there's actually this actually

does tie into this because so Maria LeFrenco like spends her entire life like fighting these people she she she gets a sociology degree and like what she's doing and like while she's doing sociology stuff is she's like making reports and like like telling everyone like what these people are doing like

what what the fucking police are doing and when she dies like there's a fucking judge who's like actually what happened was that she was she was she was working with red command and she got behind her debt payments and they killed her

and it's like this is some fucking bullshit like right it like she so we actually still don't really know much about like who killed her right we know that one of the one of the people who's being tried for the getaway driver was like picture with Bolsonaro there's a bunch of weird ties to like Bolsonaro's brother

because Bolsonaro's very very heavily tied into a bunch of armed paramilitary groups or it works well for everyone to have these groups that they campaign as like the great satan right like the police can be like we're combating the gangs the gangs can be like well you all hate the fucking police right like and then they yeah they

could just blame anyone else whenever there is and it's like the self supporting structure yeah but every once in a while you get someone and like she's a very very rare kind of person she winds up as a city council right she's a very very rare kind of

politician who like everyone likes like an inch like everyone on the left likes like you're even you're sort of like like most hardcore like fucking guy and like you're most like like hardcore guy and like a tiny ml sect and like your most hardline anarchists like everyone likes her

because she's doing she's doing like she's every day putting her life in danger trying to stop the police and you know and when you get someone like that who is not part of the sort of like is not part of either of these factions right and who is a genuine threat to both of them because she is unbelievably popular

she gets the fifth most votes of anyone like who's who's running for city councilor and she's doing it again running for the psol who's like they have like five seats I think in in the senate or something like that like they're not like they're not like they are a kind of large party but they're not

like one of the parties ever gonna like win a national election right like and you know but she she is an incredible threat to them and so they have her killed we know that the bullets that were at that that I she was killed by were part of a batch that was sold by the police we know that from from

another one of the batches that was in that sequence like there's a bunch of other people who were killed by the police and this is also like wait sold to the police or sold by the police sold by the police magnificent oh good yeah yeah um there you know and there's a lot of stuff going on here too which is

like there are a lot of activists in Brazil who get killed like this is this happens all the time there are a lot of indigenous activists you get killed or a lot of black activists you get killed are just like if you piss off the wrong person like you can just get executed and this assassination is one of the symbols of it because like she was a city

council woman right yeah like she was part of a major political party and they just fucking shot her yeah and no one's been held accountable yeah I it's it's fucking horrible um I yeah I don't really have I don't have any sort of like clever thing to

say here it's just it's just fucking awful there's one more thing I need to mention which is that yeah okay so the thing she was doing like like literally she was at a conference like she was killed like driving home from a conference right and the thing she was doing like literally in the days leading up it

like leading up to her assassination was so Michael Temmer had this thing called the quote the quote the quote the quote federal intervention which was apparently like extremely popular in Brazil which is like a sign of how fucked up everything is which is that he just like was like fuck it we're gonna hand control of

quote-unquote security in Rio de Janeiro to the army and let them like go to war with the gangs yeah fucked unbelievable fucked yeah and she she is takes an incredibly bold stance against this is trying is trying to fight it and then she is mysteriously assassinated yeah it's a bit like

you know how like you obviously people will say the fascism is like the return of colonialism to domestic policy right colonial methods in in the metro instead of in the colonies and like this is similar here right like what you're seeing is just they're doing a colonialism

but just to poor people yeah although I I should mention a lot of us in that analysis is developed in like like is developed for Europe and the Brazilian context is not the same thing as that because like Brazil was also doing all of this stuff to its own

population because again Brazil has a mass like like Brazil's a settler colony that was also a slave state right yeah so all of this violence is just it's the same thing that they've been doing since they got there like yeah I mean and this something actually Lula talks

about a lot which is like the people who've been in power for 500 years are still in power but I think it's important to understand like part of how Bolsonaro is able to do what he does is that everyone is already like everyone is already so primed to just like back the fucking army coming

in and like right like there's so much racism there's so much just like like there's this whole law and order shit thing that's going on and the sort of product of all of this is in 2018 election the PT put in basically some

I mean he's not some random guy like he was like like he was like a kind of prominent politician but they basically run like some guy and he gets clobbered with Bolsonaro and part of this is there's a lot of stuff that happens here that's like very similar to sort of US disinformation campaigns

like there's all these like telegram groups going around where like yeah his name is Fernando Haddad there's this whole thing about how he's going to like turn your kids gay and like he's a satanist um yeah so yeah the satanist thing

is interesting right because I think people um there's this analysis like we have to see everything through the lens of American politics like the Bolsonaro is the Brazilian Trump but like it's I'm not this is not deep but like it strikes me that he

embraces Catholicism to a degree that is like much greater than like Trump did religion I mean it's interesting so like the Latin American context has you know it has this like thing I think you know about there's this sort of right-wing Catholic evangelical alliance

that is happening here and you know because like a whole bunch of Bolsonaro's base is a shit ton of evangelicals but he's like there's this sort of shared language around specifically like around anti-abortion stuff around opposing gender ideology and like feminism

and stuff like that where it's like you can do this sort of dog like not even dog wasn't you can just sort of like whistle at them and you know like it works and this is sort of like you know I am like okay like if

if I had any energy left in me I would probably do another episode that was like like 2, 3 I could do like a fucking year of episodes but everything that happened to their Bolsonaro um yeah I'm just gonna sort of hit some of the like

low lights I don't know what you call it like Bolsonaro okay but Bolsonaro managed to kill less people than Trump did and also than Biden did but comma he also killed a fucking unfathomable number of people with

covid like he refused to buy vaccines he like was like really into the class of core clean stuff like he personally spread covid to a bunch of people like

there's like one I think one of the most famous things that people know about like the sort of Bolsonaro regime is that the Amazon was fucking burned um because there are all these huge part of his base are these like basically legal loggers

and Bolsonaro was just like yeah fuck it go like destroy all destroy all this indigenous land fucking kill the people on it and they have been just like annihilating the Amazon didn't he also and I may again be completely off base on this didn't he break down a lot of the like from FUNAI

is the Brazilian national organization that among other things does some sometimes problematic but protection of indigenous peoples didn't he like dismantle a lot of the structure of that and try and defund it yeah and it's like Trump

right like it'll take years to one dude it's bullshit wait I might never be I'm not looking at that we're running out of fucking time right like we don't have yeah well this is one of the things where like we have to hope Lula actually fucking holds up his word here because like okay so the PT the PT's record of deforestation is

way way enormously better than Bolsonaro but it's also true that a lot of the sort of legal framework that Bolsonaro's been using to push this stuff like is stuff from the PT and you know I Lula has pledged to stop deforestation like I hope he does or fucking everyone is going to die yeah

uh yeah I mean there's you know like everything that was like that I've talked about that was bad before got enormously worse under Bolsonaro the police violence got worse the military violence got worse um there's just like he's able to sort of like do this like

enormous anti-communist fervor um but the problem is that he kills like he kills too many people it's not so much he's killing his own voter base I mean he is but like the thing is like he really just destroys the entire Brazilian economy

like he just nukes it and this costs him the support of a bunch of the ruling class and this is actually the thing that this is like ultimately what defeated Bolsonaro is um like in in so far as we can even talk about a big debate what what defeated Bolsonaro personally

is the fact that like he like he loses it off for the ruling class that when Lula appeals like when Lula's actual case appeal goes to the Supreme Court they throw it out and Sergio Moro like turns on him for a bit although Moro

comes back and endorses Bolsonaro in the election because he's a piece of shit but like yeah there's he loses a bunch of sort of the support of the ruling class and there's this kind of this is the thing I think is kind of disturbing about this election even to Lula one is that

Lula did this like giant united French strategy right like he pulled together like he was recognized by sort of everyone who opposed Bolsonaro was like he's the only person who could stop him but this means that he's drawing a bunch of support from the right uh his his running mate in this election

is a guy named Geraldo I mean yeah he this is a guy that Lula beats by 20 points in an election or 30 points something like that like this is literally like a right-wing guy

who Lula fucking destroyed in the election and he had and Lula brings him on as a running mate because he's trying to sort of appeal to like disaffected like he he's running the sort of like Biden suburban strategy right like he's doing the like appeal to sort of moderate voters

thing yeah and like I mean like this is going on to the point where like he's telling people like not to like bring PT flags or like wear PT colors to rallies because they're trying to downplay the sort of like communism thing and this doesn't really work because like

Bolsonaro's just calling him everyone's just calling him a communist anyways right and and he like squeaks by this fucking election right like he I mean he probably won by he probably would have won by a couple more percent than the actual vote total shoulder hadn't been voter suppression but like it was

close and the other thing that's really really bad about this is that I like the right like Bolsonaro's party like controls the senate right so and and this is everything right if Bolsonaro's party can cut enough deals and you know like Jettison Bolsonaro like Bolsonaro

ism as like as a force is still there right like this this this this this sort of like fascist right has consolidated as his own political force and you know there's a non-zero chance that they just impeached Lula right and this you we literally watch this entire fucking cycle that has happened again yeah fuck like right like this kind of shit

like this could happen um yeah so things are still not great and yeah Lula's actual hand to do stuff here is very I should also mention though like I don't know like there was literally like

partying in the streets and like like there were like they were parties in the streets of cities that like he didn't even win like like this is like he I don't know like the fact that he won is genuinely very good

um I haven't I don't know what can be done to actually sort of defeat Bolsonaro as a structural force because again like he won like 49% of the vote right like that's still there killing like

yeah tens of thousands of his population and being a general shithead yeah so yeah yeah yeah yeah I don't know like I don't know like

actual structural things have to change but both the Brazilian political system like the Brazilian political system, the police, the military and the economy have to structurally change or like we're gonna get another Bolsonaro like this is what's happening in the US right like there hasn't actually been a sort of structural shift in like

in the American political system so we're just gonna get another Trump maybe it'll be actual Trump who knows like this is the thing like until until fascism is sort of like class based and based in the state is destroyed and it's sort of ideological based

in sort of like right when constructions are the family it's religious based like in particular like we're just we're gonna be back here and we're gonna be sort of like continuously teetering between fascism and something that's not fascism but has no way to oppose it and

yeah that fucking sucks yeah but we keep doing it like we keep trying to defeat fascism by running like closer and closer to fascism to pull away like the marginal fascists yeah okay so here's the thing I one thing I will give to Lula is that like okay his

way of doing this was that a bunch of people found pictures of Bolsonaro in aluminum like with a bunch of aluminum like in freemason robes with a bunch of freemasons and this I think genuinely may have cost Bolsonaro like

there's an argument this cost Bolsonaro like a bunch of election points with his own base because people found this there was another thing like the day like a couple days before the election like an old TV clip turned up of Bolsonaro just out of nowhere saying quote I would eat an Indian yes yes this turned into a cannibalism

I mean this is like this is really about his racism right but he's turned into a whole cannibalism thing this Supreme Court ruled like I think incredibly cowardly because he did say this this Supreme Court ruled that yeah he couldn't run ad that Lula couldn't run ads calling him a cannibal but you know like like there were some

like this like we're like like suddenly this that like there were like I don't know like this is and I will applaud Lula for this like he hasn't really like he could have run an election where he just fucking threw his entire base under the bus and was like insanely racist and was like no I

hate queer people and I hate women and like he could have he could have run a camp you could have run a Bolsonaro campaign and he didn't right and in so far as he was tapping into right-wing shit he was tapping into hey this guy's a fucking this guy's in freemason robes like it was sort of it was sort of funny shit that like

it's probably not great that this is where the political sphere is but like like you know okay Bolsonaro literally saying he would eat a human being is like I would rather that be the kind of insane right-wing thing that's going around than like I don't know queer people are gonna murder your children

or something which is like the normal shit that you hear yeah and it's in 2016 it's not like he said it when he was 18 it was like like I think he said it's like a journalist as well right yeah no problem

no problem what a fucking terrible guy you can imagine Donald Trump saying he'd eat someone like he probably has I think I think Donald Trump you'd have to prompt Bolsonaro just unprompted there is no connection here

he was just like fuck it no I am so racist I'm just gonna say this I don't know I wish good luck and good fortune and yeah like victory to everyone in Brazil who is fighting this

yeah fuck Bolsonaro I hope he fucking dies of covid finally yeah and I really do hope that Bolsonaro can be defeated yeah I don't know like make better choices PT please God we can't do this again

yeah I hope all the people in Brazil who continue to be impacted by this bullshit can have better meaningful improvements in their lives in this election and I will say like this is proof that like Bolsonaro isn't undefeatable right

like the fact that he wasn't able to pull off a military coup right like it is inevitable it's just it's very very hard and yeah I mean this is true of fascism everywhere right it's hard to beat but it can be stopped and we are going to

because the alternative is the fucking annihilation of the earth so yeah fuck them we're gonna win during the summer of 2020 some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what

they were right I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series alphabet boys as the FBI sometimes you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy each season will take you inside

an undercover investigation in the first season of alphabet boys we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver at the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse

listen to alphabet boys on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts it's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved

country the Soviet Union is falling apart and now he's left defending the Union's last outpost this is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed

the world listen to the last soviet on the iHeart radio app, apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts what if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual

science the problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science and the wrongly convicted is a horrific price two death sentences and a life without parole

my youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday I'm Molly Herman join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science

in CSI how many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus it's all made up listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app apple podcast

or wherever you get your podcasts it could happen here is a podcast that you're listening to right now if this is a surprise to you if you thought this was an experience let me assure you

everyone here does eat a diet of nothing but elk meat and to talk to me about the health value of elk meat is no so about a I don't know a week or so ago

we're talking with Sarah Young Sarah, how are you doing? good, how are you? I'm pretty good at the verge you are a lawyer and a journalist so you have embraced the two most cursed vocations in 2022

and you've never won most recently written an incredible piece about the Portland van abductions which is like brutal and very important for the verge

people ought to check it out I've had trouble getting through all of it because it is very good and because I was there but everyone needs to read it it's an important piece we're not talking about that today we're talking about a post that you made

on the twitter.com about a week or so ago that I messaged you about you want to kind of talk about what that post was and what you were trying to get across to the audience so if you live in Portland right now it's absolutely

like the discourse not the city well sometimes the city but the discourse is rancid it's like this in a lot of other cities as well but you know how Portland is the discourse around

homeless people every conversation you have with any random person it eventually goes to oh it's gotten so bad here lately and it's always about homeless people and it always goes to this place

where they're like oh we should start rounding people up into camps and getting rid of them and it's like people are a little too excited to literally murder homeless people like you get just saying the most insane things like oh I'm not going to break my car

if I see one of those homeless people it's awful and like it's really really awful and like and then you get people going like oh well you know how things are and like pulling out

murders that have happened in like New York of Asian women at me to like justify why it is that I need to start supporting the cops and so on and so forth and it's just there's this thing where

I think that well-meaning leftists really want to sort of pull out like let's humanize homeless people which like yes but the people you're talking to they don't deal with empathy actually they already don't see most of the

population as people so what you're doing is you're not even speaking the language that they speak the issue for me is that what people are doing when they dehumanize the homeless or like turn them into like a problem that you can just sweep away

or like kill or put in danger or drop into a camp where they're more likely to die or get sick or be harmed it's that you're making a vast class of people

based on like superficial characteristics right they might be dirty, they're intense whatever you felt threatened by one of them once how everyone who's ever been homeless deserves to have a worse off life because

you didn't feel great about it this one time and or two times and it's it's really absurd to me because like yeah I've had many instances in my life where I haven't felt very safe

because of someone who is homeless because of someone who is an addict I mean I'm a small Asian woman I take public transit the vibes are off in every fucking city right now for people who look like me but that doesn't mean

that everyone who looks like the person who's making me uncomfortable deserves to be swept up into a fucking camp and in fact like if I like roll the tape back and look at sort of oh let's look at people who've made me feel

threatened, afraid, whatever I've like gone through big old sprints in my life where I'm getting a lot of death threats from white supremacists I mean I'm sure you've lived this life too I mean I can see it but like you I don't know

because you're a woman writing on the internet like you'll get more in a couple of months than I do in an average like year I mean it depends right like it depends I was just looking at your midgets yeah I don't know I don't really look too carefully

so I don't even know what the numbers are like these days I did have an incredible like six month period where it was really intense because Tucker Carlson was like putting me on his show looking at my picture and stuff for a while

so it was really bad like people like some guy called into my office and threatened to fire bomb it and people who got the phone call like were stressed out enough that they called the cops and there's like a police report and like there was a bunch of stuff that happened

during this period that was pretty scary and and it was always like guys who all sort of looked the same right it's like all the you know the Oakley sunglasses like taking a selfie of themselves in the car like that sort of stereotype

and gotta say for a while I'd see that like that little profile picture I'd see someone in person and like my like heart would start beating faster right took a while for me to like be able to dial that back

during that six month period I'd hear someone yell a racial slur and I would almost have a panic attack because I'd be like oh no like like someone's gonna come and make good on these threats and um I don't like

I don't want to round people up into camps or looking like a shitty racist suburban white guy like it's like that's because I'm not a fucking Nazi like it's like it doesn't

matter what you've experienced or like what legitimate harm you faced from people who look a certain way like you don't round them up into camps or like talk about like how you're not gonna break on the street in your car

I was happy for kind of your perspective on the matter because I do try like whenever people talk about how scary Portland is or how scary the homeless camps are like the thing I want to say is like like I have like five or six different running routes in the city and most of them have homeless encampments on them

and I run through them at night I run through them at the day never had a problem um you know sometimes there's like trash and I would like it if it were cleaner but also primarily the people cleaning up are usually like autonomously organized groups of formerly houseless folks which is the thing that happens in a couple

of the neighborhoods that I go to um and like but at the same time I don't want to bring that in when there's an argument about it because like I'm a six foot three 200 pound white guy right like as a general rule in a lot of situations I don't feel worried when other

people do because I'm a big white dude and that's um but what I will say I had an experience a couple of months back a person that I live near like a neighbor of mine is a young woman with like a six month old infant and she was out jogging

on one of the trails near our house and two guys uh in new Kawasaki like motorcycles dirt bikes whatever you want to call them I assume rich kids because these were very new bikes drove up and shot at her

and her baby with BB guns hit her in the face nearly hit her baby um and it was like homeless folks and people at an illegal skate park who came to her aid and like made sure she was okay and when I got out there because I rolled

out there with a fucking beat stick and a handgun just to be like if I see these mother fuckers we're gonna have words and I started talking to homeless folks that I knew on the route who were all like yeah those people like they come by to shoot at us and it's and I have heard this in multiple encampments I've heard this at

Laurelhurst a number of places that like kids from the suburbs will come in to shoot homeless people with BB guns and mace them and um I have I'm not gonna say again I've also been in a situation where like an agitated houseless woman was like swinging a machete at some folks

and you know everything was de-escalated but like I get it the fact that there are people out there who are having like mental health difficulty means that people are going to have encounters that can be frightening um but by and large the people that I find myself most threatened by

are like kids people like those assholes rolling by and shooting people with BB guns and of course folks driving gigantic trucks in tiny streets like assholes often while wasted um like those are the things that scare me in Portland not the encampments yeah and honestly

like there are some increasing safety issues in Portland but like a lot of it is also just like from cars right like it is a it's more there's more of a car culture than there used to be um and people get hit

and uh they go to the hospital or they die like it's there's like there are big changes in the city for sure but like yeah it's there's so much focus on homelessness as being like the root of all of that and like I don't know they'll say oh Portland has gotten

so bad in the same breath as like talking about how high rents are or like how expensive houses have gotten just not even connecting those two things right like why is it that housing is so expensive now like clearly people are

placing bets on real estate either that or just we haven't built out enough could that be something um or maybe things aren't as bad as you think and it's a desirable place to live um it's really like

it is it's extremely frustrating um I I also think that there's this weird thing where you just don't really think about the fact that you might have one or two encounters where you it's upsetting you feel scared

and then like the vast majority of people who are unhoused are just trying to stay the fuck out of your way right and like they're you're not going to see them you're not going to talk to them unless you go out of your way to talk to them and reach out and like

they're probably scared of you because they don't know who you are like you're a stranger you might be one of those assholes on Kawasaki's like out to out to shoot you uh out to shoot them and like it's it's really frustrating like it's halfway

I don't know some some of the people who buy into this kind of discourse are just outright terrible human beings right yeah they're they're just fascists they're just they're just fascists and this is useful but then there's like it's really frustrating how many people in the city right now

are just useful idiots for the fascists have just like gone down that gone down that rabbit hole and aren't thinking past like what it means to quote unquote take care of the homeless problem like what do you what do you want to do

here what do you actually want to do where are these people going to go like what's going to happen to them and it's it's super frustrating we're focusing on Portland because it's where we live but all of these things are

evidence of like broader trends you can see a lot of the same tactics being used in Los Angeles and Austin in Minneapolis and one of the things is kind of this conflation of like disorder drug use homelessness with like deadly violence

and a number of things like we've talked about kind of jailing and putting into camps the homeless is is one thing people suggest there's also a lot of like suggestions around massively increasing the number of police and this all also goes into

you know you've got this kind of series of of right-wing coups against elected leaders who have any kind of other suggestions we saw this in San Francisco with the D.A. Chesa Bowdoin the police like just refusing to enforce

like the the law when they were when Chesa was attempting to carry things out in a different way and like what we're seeing in Portland right now we've got a city commissioner Joanne Hardesty who number one is the only black woman in the city

council the only person on the city council who and the only person in the city council who is in debt and who is and I'm not going to say she's a perfect counselor a perfect politician there's plenty of things to criticize Hardesty over but there has been

like number one this kind of unhinged campaign of attacking her because of the fact that like her financial situation isn't great which I see actually as a plus because a lot of people in Portland are in rough financial condition maybe it's nice if they're represented on the fucking city council

but also she's instituted people keep fetching about you know violence and gun violence which are problems that have gotten worse in Portland although it is important to note Portland is one of the safest cities in the entire United States even after the quote unquote surge in violent crime I don't think that mitigates that I just think

it's important to keep like things in perspective but Hardesty has instituted the only effective program that has reduced gun violence in the city of Portland in the recent past which was essentially a series of traffic calming measures right like I think that's probably

a fair way to say it it was sort of altering the way in which traffic worked in a neighborhood to kind of try and reduce some of the situations that were like leading to violence and she's undergoing this massive

attack right now by a candidate a right-wing candidate I mean he like everyone who runs in Portland he claims to be a Democrat he's donated to Republicans is called named Renee Gonzalez who's being backed by a lot of the same business interests that are pushing this anti

homeless agenda pushing the mayor's proposal to put homeless people in encampments and I don't know it's just I feel like I can see it all coming together and I hate how many people are as you said kind of useful idiots about it

where they're like clearly these people who are talking about rehabilitation or who are trying to like actually who are not suggesting a carceral solution to the fact that it's unpleasant to see people suffering on the street are wrong

because look at what the news tells me about how much worse violence has gotten and stuff like I it's very frustrating don't vote for Renee Gonzalez yeah please don't vote for a man who donated to a Republican pack six months after

January 6th well please let's not do that but uh it's it's I think like really sad that I mean like people I think really just don't want to think about how

damaged all of society is right now like we lived through our country had one of the worst responses to COVID millions of people are dead

our mental health is fucking shot through even people who didn't experience federal jackboots on the ground were not well right like it's any number of

housed perfectly financially stable people turned to substance abuse during this period and are still you know recovering people who are unhoused also turned to substance abuse if they weren't

already there and their mental health is also shot through and uh sort of the upshot of this is everyone is fucking sick and taking it out on each other and it really sucks to see people be their worst selves

increasingly and increasingly yeah and I first off I want to try to provide people some objective numbers and this is just on the city of Portland so Portland number one never defunded its police their police our police currently get the most money they've ever gotten

but we do have one thing that is accurate to say is we have fewer police per capita than any major city in the United States and we have the fewest number of police on the force in living memory I'm fairly certain right now there's like 700 Portland police officers

which is significantly down from 2020 because um it's not a pleasant job because people hate the cops here in Portland so they keep quitting and moving to other cities and it is true that when the pandemic hit violent crime in Portland raised by about 207%

from January 2019 through June of 2021 which is the largest increase compared to five comparable cities this is from an article in the Oregon Capital Chronicle Minneapolis Atlanta San Francisco Denver and Nashville however it's also

worth noting that over the course of the last year we're at seven fewer homicides than we were the year before overall the number of homicides in 2022 has fallen 2% from 2021 even as we continue to have fewer and fewer police

almost as if the surge in violent crime was not a result in policing but as you said the result of a lot of other factors around the pandemic and around the economic situation and like the rate of violence has been continuing to decrease it's also worth noting that

while we're talking about homicides here in Portland did see a surge in homicides during the pandemic that's not the only kind of crime or the only kind of violent crime and I want to quote here from Travel Oregon in February 2021 the major cities chiefs association

issued a report noting that 63 of 66 major cities saw at least one violent crime category grow in 2020 among cities of comparable size Portland generally experiences violent crime at somewhat lower rates like a lot of this is media driven and it's specifically the thing that you highlighted

in the post that made me reach out to you was talking about how particularly white suburbanite homeowners are driving this panic and are driving these kind of surge and very like fascist solutions to the fears

that they have about homelessness and about crime and one of the reasons why this shit works is these people don't go into the city they live in the suburbs they see the scary news and I that's the thing I don't know how to actually combat because it is a nationwide problem shootings and deaths due to shootings

they have increased since the pandemic but if you look at them on like a 20 year graph fairly flat nationwide Portland doesn't even keep very good stats they only started keeping statistics of gun crimes like what in the last couple years and then now they're saying that

gun violence has increased anyway what has increased vastly more than gun crime is reporting on gun crime which has surged and that's because if it bleeds it leads in whatever but it is this

thing of like that's the stuff that gets people to pay attention and it's the stuff that spreads on social media just like pictures of like poop on the streets of San Francisco can spread on social media and it all exists to keep these kind of suburban voters at a constant state of agitation

which makes them easy to manipulate and like that's the thing that scares me the most yeah I mean things are almost shittier with Portland because well like okay the San Francisco poop situation so I used to live in the Bay Area that was a real situation

yeah there's poop in San Francisco streets there's just human shit everywhere it's you know you live with it it just is what it is and you know someone's from New York when they start complaining about it and it I think like

New York which smells like pee everywhere by the way I mean it smells like hot garbage because they don't take their garbage they just put their garbage out on the curb and when it's summertime it just smells like fucking terrible but uh so everyone's got their problems

but uh it's it's this like weird thing where just because of the way that we're drawn up geographically we've got all of these people like like you said like out in the burbs who vote, who have control over the way the wind blows who just never come out here

ever they never come out here and uh in San Francisco like yeah they've got outlying areas as well but it's it's not drawn up exactly the way that we are quite right like

like the people who are going to be the most alarmist about San Francisco are like not going to be in the area where they're voting about the things that happen to San Francisco the way the Chesa stuff went down like I mean that's complicated

right like I mean it was a witch hunt and it made me really Chesa Boone the DA, former DA in San Francisco. It made me really want to never move back uh but uh it it was like we've we've just got a

different sort of setup here where the people who are the most upset about all of the crime in Portland like they don't come out to where they think the crime is happening at all no like they like they just don't really interact with the city

they're off somewhere else and it's it is truly strange really annoying yeah yeah and it is this is like I don't know this is part of why this is part of why politically I tend to align myself

with like libertarian municipalism um I think one of the problems we have is that places that have very little to do with each other get to pass laws that impact how people live in those those places like

which is a problem as we all just got overseeing with fucking Donald Trump right like that's that's a version of the problem and a version another version of the problem is that like people in Los Angeles can pass a gas tax that makes total sense for cities in California but fucks over people who live in the

middle of nowhere um and all of these things are like I don't know it's the you get the you it's two simultaneous issues like one of them is you've got these liberals in Portland who the rest of the

state resents for dominating politics in the entire state even in areas that have very little to do with like Western Oregon and then you have these these outlying like you have these folks who don't live in Portland who you know are pushing

for like you know who are responsible for the fact that we might get a Republican governor in the state right who are reacting to like what they hear about Portland even though it's not accurate and I don't know I this is we're getting past like what people can do in terms of like voting

on local elections but I wish we had a system in which like folks weren't constantly pitted against each other in this way because I don't think it's very productive well we're chopped up in a really by the way for Charter reform etc if you're living in Portland

like we've got some some other other things going on with our our city government that makes things additionally weird and suboptimal there's a bunch of things that I'm

kind of dreading in the near future or from the the midterm elections including you know Renee Gonzalez you know I have strong feelings on the proposed gun control measure but I'm broadly optimistic about Charter reform that actually seems like something good

that we're likely to do yeah let's talk about that a little bit because Portland would be the first city in the United States to reform its city council along these lines if I'm not mistaken along which lines like the way the Charter reform

is like set up so basically Portland currently has a commission form of government in which we have a very powerful mayor and four city council people who are handed portfolios by the mayor and they basically

run the city government which is it's a pretty dysfunctional system it leads to a small number of people running very large bureaucracies that they usually don't know how to handle one of the reasons why the city

is so dysfunctional in addition to the fact that our mayor Ted Wheeler is politely speaking dog shit under the new form of government that's being voted on right now the Charter the commission structure will be jettisoned city council members

will not directly manage bureaus instead they'll pass laws and meet with constituents the mayor will no longer be part of the city council instead he'll lead the executive branch I'm not wild about the amount of power that the mayor will still have but I think

broadly speaking it's a much better system and there will be like a larger group of people involved and actually like managing the city's affairs I don't know what we have currently certainly is not

particularly effective and I would like to see a more democratic system put into place what we had was like obscenely outdated I don't know who else

does things like Portland currently does but the Charter reform is greatly needed and it's going to bring in ranked choice voting as well when people vote on on their like city which is

one of the issues that we've had here is that we're having right now with the gubernatorial race is that you've got three candidates running one of whom is kind of positioning themselves as an independent Betsy Johnson who does not really have a chance to win

and seems to be being funded by people like the Nike guy in order to take votes away from Tina Kotec who's the democratic candidate so that Christine Drazen who's the republican candidate will be more likely to win I don't know

I still don't know how much I believe Drazen actually has a shot but the polls show them neck and neck the polls are pretty terrifying we're kind of covering on the cusp of the governor seat going red

yeah yeah I don't know that's the election that scares me I really don't want to see Renee Gonzalez win but if Charter reform passes

the harm that he can inflict on the city becomes limited right now city council seats just have outsized power in a very dysfunctional way and

it's that changes with Charter reform a little bit more of a normal city but the state the state election though that's pretty scary stuff yeah the state especially since

if the democrats stay in power at the state level then there's a good chance that as far as what people are talking about then we're going to actually see like Portland or Oregon become a sanctuary for reproductive health

that's one of the things that's on the ballot so if you care about that that's kind of the whole game regardless of the fact that Kotec has a history with our current governor that's not entirely positive our current democratic governor has been a shit governor

and handled the pandemic terribly at the end of the day all about all about reproductive health right because like the republicans would not have handled the pandemic any better

but they will also support a crackdown against people having access to abortion we also have the craziest republicans out here and part of that is areas they're representing or whatever but part of it is also just we've been under a control for so long that the minority

party gets weirder and weirder and weirder we've got the guys who ran away from the legislative session rather than vote on a climate change bill it's not good it's really bad handing them the keys to the kingdom

is a terrible move yeah I don't know what else to say anything else to say as we head into the midterm elections here in Oregon I felt like I don't know this was broadly speaking we're talking about

I kind of want to hear about your feelings on that gun control measure yeah so we've got measure 114 coming up which is for people who don't know and this may surprise folks given how blue it is, Oregon basically

does not have any kind of gun control laws this is a state in which it's legal to own in the United States in any kind of magazine you can't own in the state of Oregon we are a shallow issue state which means if you are a law-abiding citizen

and you apply for concealed carry permit they have to give it to you gun owners have quite a few protections at present the first major there was a gun control law passed in 2015 most reasonable gun owners had no issue with it because all it did was say

you have to get a background check so there's this thing called face-to-face sales whereby in a lot of states like Texas you can just hand somebody a gun for cash as long as you're not a professional gun dealer that's legal and that's bad generally it's how a lot of guns get across the border

that was removed as a legal possibility in Oregon back in 2015 but other than that we haven't had a whole lot of gun control in the wake of the Evaldy shooting an organization I think Lyft Every Voice is what they're called led by some church leaders who wished for

a ballot measure so this is not something where I do think this is interesting this is not a situation where democratic politicians in the state of Oregon are trying to pass gun control this is a situation in which a ballot measure was proposed

and enough people voted that the entire state is voting on whether or not to have gun control which regardless of my opinions on the measure itself I think is a better way to like this to work than a bunch of legislators just like making a law but anyway the measure itself is in my opinion

deeply flawed in the way that it's written it does a couple of things for one thing it requires that every person who buy a gun pass a background check which is already the law that's in the bill and it shouldn't be because it's already the law I think one of the reasons I think that's dishonest is because it always gets

summarized and like this is what the bill will do it will require that everybody pass a background check well they're already required to not actually do anything there it adds in a magazine capacity restriction as in you won't be able to buy or take out in public magazines

that have a higher capacity than 10 rounds we can talk about that in a second and then the primary thing it does is it requires people pass a series of tests in order to purchase firearms and the people who will be administering those tests and running the whole program

are the police so the police essentially get control over who gets to own firearms I do consider that that is particularly the thing that I find problematic for one thing regardless of your opinions on gun control

the right to bear arms is similar to the right to freedom of speech and guaranteed in the same way and so the fact that the police are being made the arbiters of who gets to exercise that right is deeply problematic to me I think given what we know about how often

police in Oregon work with far right groups work with organizations like the Proud Boys it is very likely that we will see uneven enforcement and uneven like the police granting the ability

to bear arms very unevenly which concerns me greatly we had a mass shooting earlier this year at a protest in which a right winger killed a woman a 61 year old woman and injured five other people that person was stopped by a left wing demonstrator

with an AR-15 style rifle well it was actually technically a handgun but that's anyway whatever it was an AR-15 style weapon I'm concerned that under this new law the right winger would have still had the ability to acquire firearms but the person who stopped him would not

so that's why I have an issue with it I also think if you're going to personally advocate magazine capacity restrictions but also I don't speak out against them Washington recently passed a law restricting magazine capacity

I didn't say anything about that I think maybe I think if it works I will be happy I think the way the Washington law was written was a lot more sensible than the Oregon law because it was written in such a way that it stops the additional sale

of standard capacity magazines of 30 round magazines and higher without giving the police an opportunity to harass and arrest people over what they own which I think is important the way the law is written

if you had, like whatever you had prior to the ban taking effect you can keep and continue to use as normal just no more can be sold and so the thing you're trying to stop with a magazine capacity ban at this point it goes out and buys a weapon

and a bunch of 30 round magazines and then goes on a mass shooting you want them to not be able to go and immediately acquire those magazines it is I think by making it illegal to take them out in the world if you already own them what you're doing is giving police pretext

to stop and search people to search people going out and shooting in the woods like folks do in Oregon without having an impact on because they're not going to care about violating that particular law if you want to stop more of those things from being sold

I think a law written the way the Washington law is written does the maximum in order to restrict people from purchasing the thing you don't want them to purchase without giving police the ability to like harass and arrest people anyway that's my thinking

on 114 yeah yeah I think that's like an important as an important series of distinctions to like get out there yeah anyway I voted against it I try really

I actually do try despite my opinions not to talk about gun control too much on this show but like that's my thinking on the matter folks can do whatever they want we'll know in on January or November 8 how they voted yeah I mean like it's hardly the most

uh disturbing thing on the ballot right now yeah no no no and I am like there's so much going on right now and it's one of those things I guess we'll all learn in the near future

like we're going to learn a lot from this election in Oregon like if Hardesty stays on if we get charter reform and if Cotech wins then kind of regardless of what happens with 114 I will be broadly optimistic heading into 2024

because it'll show that the campaign of fear didn't work entirely yeah and if Gonzalez and Drazenwin and charter reform gets defeated I will be really pessimistic heading in

yeah if Drazenwin like that's yeah it's uh yeah it's bad it's really bad it's bad news for a lot of fucking reasons yeah I mean

row that's huge but yeah like it's the sky's the limit for a state that has been under democratic control for this long right like it's they've just gotten so complacent is all I can think

um oh I mean the spoiler candidate obviously that that did change a lot um but uh it it's the complacency was is alarming yeah um well

is there anything else you wanted to say about what we're heading into uh well I mean uh don't let your fear control you um don't be a useful idiot for Nazis and uh don't put

people into camps I guess yeah that that's my thinking don't like if somebody's trying to make you scared uh about a group of people who are the most powerless people in your community you might want to assume that the person doing that

is trying to take advantage of you um that's that's that's kind of where I land on this sort of stuff um yeah don't put people into camps we really shouldn't have to say that anymore but yeah we shouldn't have to tell people to not be Patrick Bateman

from fucking america like it's like we should be like but no it's yeah we've we should not be regressing this hard in terms of uh our moral compasses but that's where we are that's where we are well do you want to plug your

pluggable Sarah yeah so uh Robert mentioned that I just put out a big feature about the Portland Van Abductions published uh on The Verge um it's part a longer series uh that we did this year about

the Department of Homeland Security which is 20 years old this year um so we did a bunch of features some about Puerto Rico and FEMA um uh some about the TSA of course uh I did a short little thing about how Chad Wolf was illegally

head of the DHS for a hot minute um and so there's some fun stuff in there um we've still got another feature that'll go up by the end of this year uh I think your your listeners would enjoy going through some of those excellent all right uh well

that has been the episode this has been it could happen here um bye hey we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here as a production of

CoolZone Media for more podcasts from CoolZone Media visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at CoolZoneMedia.com

slash sources thanks for listening Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations in the first season we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests it involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse

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