Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 76

Episode Date: March 25, 2023

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

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I am Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. This season, we dive deeper into highlighting red flags and spotting a narcissist before they spot you. Each week, you'll hear stories from survivors who

have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and their process of healing. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet feel like a nightclub. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. My name is Joanne McNeill. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, the story of MySpace, I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it. Listen to Main Accounts, the story of MySpace on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the

week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's got to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. I did eat a whole sleep of Oreos in front of a 7-Eleven today and was scalded by a 10-year-old. It was for medical reasons. Okay, how am I going to introduce? Do we need to shoot? That's the start. That's the start we already got. Okay. Yeah, we're doing it. You start with Oreos.

Mm-hmm. Yep. Fuck 10-year-old children. Okay, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is where it work. And today, everyone, because it's Monday, we are starting something that we like to call shitty mares Monday. I don't know if they'll actually let us put shitty in the title. They might, but they might not. We'll figure it out, but that's what we're calling it. That's what we're calling it on the fucking recording. They can't stop us here. It'd be funnier if it just had like 10 seconds of bleep and then it was like a mares Monday. Like, I'd said some truly unfathomable shit. Okay, so we've noticed that across America, there are a lot of mares who ran and were

elected as liberals, progressives, certainly as Democrats, but tend to have governed in a particularly shitty and terrible way that doesn't really have any material difference from a Republican mares, but like the way that they post on Instagram is a little bit different. So I guess that is nice. And we're starting with the town I live in, which is San Diego, and with the mayor we have who is Todd Gloria. The people might have heard of Todd Gloria. And last year, we did an episode with several people who work with unhoused people in San Diego, mutual aid workers, advocates, and they spoke a lot about Todd Gloria, not in glowing terms, but we spoke about Todd Gloria. So we're going to talk about his record on homelessness.

We're going to talk about his life a little bit. And then we're going to look at sort of the promises he made when he was elected, I guess, and the things that he's done, which it will shock you to hear are not the same things. And we're also going to talk about his hip hop video. Hit wait, wait. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, buddy. Really? Really? Yeah. No, he did a he did return of the Mac, but hilariously changed it to Todd Gloria is back. Oh, yeah. No, if you want to see some problematic lip syncing, you're going to. Yeah. Okay. All right. All right. I guess. Grace yourself. I did a local newspaper had a headline that called it the cringiest video ever, which rare win for local media. Everyone's know why a local news does one good thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're occasionally like, like a stopped clock. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So when Todd Gloria talks about his early life, he talks about being the son of a maid and a gardener. And it's a way I think of distinguishing himself from the very few elites who have held power in the city for a very long time, right? People whose names are on every building. But his dad's LinkedIn profile tells a little bit of a different story. According to his own LinkedIn account, Phil Gloria age 64 has been in the aerospace industry for many years, including as a production controller at General Atomics, who people might remember as the manufacturers of the Predator and Reaper drones. Oh, yeah. So it's a slightly different story,

right? It's different from maid and a gardener. Prior to working at General Atomics, Phil Gloria worked for 14 years as a supervisor at United Technologies, another aerospace and technology company. Gloria has clarified later that his parents didn't work in those specific fields that the son of a maid and a gardener thing recently, but they did when he was born. So he wasn't he's not. Yeah. That's bullshit. Like I could I can I could take this argument and argue that like I am the child of like a pancake maker and a dishwasher. Like this is yeah. Yeah. It's like it's it's sort of classic like this classic politicians, right? Like telling enough of the truth for it not to be a lie. But maybe not telling the whole truth. And like, I know, like my folks

worked in agriculture when I was a kid, they still do. But like, they also work very hard, you know, to like provide for me and get a better space in life. And I wouldn't want to run them down by denigrating the the work that they did. But hey, I don't want to be a mare either. Yeah, but also like also like, you know, you don't get to do your fucking like burnishing working class credentials, and then your dad worked for a fucking like. None of my parents have ever made a Reaper drone. So I guess I do have that in my favor. It is an extremely San Diego story. In 2020, the San Diego Union Tribune wrote he was running. So the San Diego story that allowed his mother a hotel made and his father a gardener to work hard and afford a home doesn't end with

their generation. That story seemed to admit the glaring reality that San Diego is one of the least affordable cities in the world right now. And it's housing as unaffordable as it ever has been. And it's got worse since togloria became there. So who is togloria? He's an enrolled member of the Tlingit Hyder Indian tribe of Alaska. He was born and raised in San Diego and graduated from University of San Diego with a bachelor's degree in history and political science. He began his career at San Diego's Health and Human Services Agency. And then he worked with Congresswoman Susan Davis, who became his mentor. He was elected to the city council in 2008 and 2012, and served as interim mayor from August 2013 to March 2014. He was also elected to the California State Assembly

in 2016 and 2018. And he chose not to seek re-election for the assembly when he launched his campaign for mayor in 2020. So he's done the kind of the sort of the climb up of offices that you see a lot of these folks do, right? And I'm sure that he has ambitions to run for further office. That would be my guess. And so in 2020, he was elected mayor of San Diego. He became our first gay mayor, our first mayor of color, our first indigenous mayor. So it was a lot of first for us. And like, it is good to have a gay indigenous mayor, right? Like, if we're gonna have a mayor, you didn't know, like, it's nice that it's a position that's open to more people. But unfortunately, he hasn't done a lot else to encourage upward social mobility. He made a big

push for private sector housing building, as opposed to subsidized public housing, and he promised police reform. In a 2020 op-ed for the union tribune, Gloria wrote, We watched in horror as George Floyd was killed by four Minneapolis police officers. Mr. Floyd and other victims of excessive force by law enforcement demand that we revisit, reconsider and reimagine how police operate in our community, and how we expect them to interact with the public. It's time we work together to create a more just system of policing. The primary responsibility of government is protect its people, all people. Many of us don't feel safe or protected, particularly our black community. So it seems like a,

like a pro at least, at least reform statement, right? He went on to say, Whether it's our mental health crisis or our homelessness crisis, we resort to the same solution. Send the police and arrest people. We have to stop severely penalizing some people for minor missteps and invest in lifting people up from difficult situations. I would put a pin in that as we talk about his politics. It will shock you to hear that he's done exactly that. He also wrote, The rapidly expanding and secretive use of digital surveillance of our community members is unconstitutional and it should end. Again, put a pin in that as we get back to discussion of the cameras that we're putting on street lights in San Diego.

So in a PDF of his plan to end homelessness, which has been removed from his campaign website, but was thankfully preserved by our friends at Voice of San Diego, Gloria wrote, No more criminalizing the existence of San Diego's poorest and sickest residents. He also told right wing news station KUSI that San Diego cannot claim to be America's finest city or even a great city where thousands of people live unsheltered and dying on our streets. It's time to stop the band-aids, the temporary solutions and bad policy from city hall on this issue. He said as mayor, my administration will prioritize ending chronic homelessness. I will focus cities energy and resources on results oriented programs,

proven to get homeless individuals off the street connected to services and back on their feet. Now to be fair, one is that any person who is running for mayor is a systematic lying to you about what they're going to do. The second thing is if you ever hear someone say the words results oriented, it is time to grab like the largest saber you have and like get to work. Yeah, and as we'll discover the results that he has oriented towards somewhat disappointing. I was going to say for all of us, hashtag for all of us is his campaign slogan. Yeah, it's just it's very cringe. I don't know, Will, it's very sad when we see the impacts of this for like the least fortunate people in San Diego and in like it's it is very funny, but

when you see how this plays out on the streets, it's also very sad. You know what is also very funny and kind of sad, Mia? The Ronald Reagan coin services. Yeah, it's a Ronald Reagan silver coins that pay for my friends to get hormones. So please enjoy these adverts. Thank you, ally Ronald Reagan for funding my HR team. Thanks, Ronnie. All right, we're back. And we're talking about Togloria, San Diego's mayor. And we've just before the break, we talked about like his promises, right? So let's see how he did on those promises. I want to start with January 9th, 2021. Togloria taken office a few days before. If you can cast your mind back then, there have been a significant event at the at the Capitol a couple of days before. Proud Boys,

the Nazis, other assorted chuds decided to visit San Diego three days after they visited the Capitol. Anti-fascist assembled shows them they weren't welcome and the police responded by declaring the anti-fascist assembly illegal, escorting the chuds around Pacific Beach as they did various crimes and trying to shoot me in the dick with pepper balls. Garrison's just smirking, I thought, Gloria, the guy who ran on police reform had this to say. Mayor Gloria spoke candidly about what happened at the Capitol and how that's reverberating around the country. After seeing what happened in Washington on Wednesday, what are you doing out on our streets supporting that mess, right? Racism, fascism, anti-democracy. Why would you choose to be out there?

Gloria says, despite his feeling, San Diego supports peaceful protests of all kinds. But on Saturday, police say three people were arrested and five officers suffered minor injuries. We're asking for the public's assistance in helping us identify some of those folks who we were not able to apprehend yesterday to make sure they're held accountable. These are people on both sides of the debate. Both sides. Yeah, both sides. So some of you remember some other people have called out people on both sides to debate. So I think the most blatant sort of thing he did with regards to the police comes after Derek Chauvin, the copy-murdered George Floyd, was convicted of murder. I guess a few of you can probably remember

where you were that day. I can remember where I was, and it was at the very least like after an entire summer of protest, right? It was like the smallest token instance of accountability, but I guess at least it was something. And in that moment, told Gloria, who was looking at the same thing that nearly everyone was looking at in this country that day, right? He thought about what he wanted to do, and he decided that rather than talking to the black organisers who have been in the street for almost a year and have been pepper-balled and tear-gassed and maced and never stopped undermining justice, he was instead going to call the cops. Many such cases. And checked that the verdict wasn't making them sad. What he did was took over the entire police

like scanner radio thing and delivered a message to the cops, which I've got audio of here. Colleagues, this is Mayor Todd Gloria. I want to address each and every single one of you who nobly serve our great city. Today's verdict is just the beginning of building a deeper trust with our community. Justice was served today against someone who does not represent you, or us, or our department, or who we are as a nation. So I want you to hear from me today. I know who you are. You are people who help complete strangers on the worst day in their life. You are people who believe in collaboration and community. You're people who put your lives on the line every single day to protect this city. I and the people of San Diego are grateful

for your dedication and your service. With today's decision made, it is now time for all of us to come together to heal and to move forward. Please take care of yourself, of each other, and of the people of this great city. Be safe, everybody. Has anyone ever said the words to move forward and not be like, not just be an absolute dipshit? This sounds like it was written by an AI. If you had a chat GPT for a liberal mayor, it wouldn't look hugely different to what we have in San Diego. Do a liberal mayor statement. Chat GPT, write a liberal mayor writing a peon to the cops. Now it's time to heal and come together as a community. Stop with your Black Lives Mattering. It's scary. Yeah, it was extremely cringe, especially when you consider how it

differs from what he was saying just a few months ago, and that again, this was about a man who murdered someone, and that somebody in San Diego died in similar circumstances with someone doing a carotid restraint on them. A few days before this, Gloria also proposed a budget. In his budget, he proposed that we cut library hours significantly and lay off 153 library employees, but give the police $19 million more than a previous year. The previous year, I probably don't have to remind people, is a year in which San Diegans had turned up in droves at Zoom Council meetings to urge the city to do the exact opposite of this. Let's check in on that surveillance claim he made. You remember that he said it was unconstitutional, right? So in Vice

Second of this year, told Gloria, in a shocking vault fast, tweeted, streetlight cameras and license plates readers can be helpful public safety tools. You know, just because he thinks it's unconstitutional doesn't mean he doesn't think it's right. Yeah, he's once again been held back from protecting the people of San Diego by that pesky constitution. The city passed strong privacy protections last year, and now it's time for at San Diego PD to use this technology to keep us safe. Public meetings to get this done start soon. So yeah, these streetlights, they were deactivated in 2020, but they had previously been introduced and built as a way to assess traffic patterns. But in fact, they never assess patterns.

This will shock you. They put thousands of cameras and microphones on our streets, including one outside a planned parenthood facility. You know, for traffic. The funniest part about this, this was literally the thing about doing traffic science was, this was literally Tom Cruise's cover story and like one of the early Mission Impossible movies. So that's what we have next is it fucking Scientology coming for San Diego. Yeah, it'll, it'll shock you to hear that we stopped using these for very reasonable people had very reasonable concerns in 2020 that, you know, it's not a good idea for the cops to be able to see and hear everything that you do to be able to read your license plate and see

everywhere that you go. But I'd want some back. If people actually want to follow the discussion about having them back, because every single time, like every single public meeting, there's someone and they'll stand up and have a vehement like position pro cameras. And then it'll turn out that they are like a prosecutor at the DA's office. There was a prosecutor in one instance who insisted he was there in his personal capacity, but like the lieutenant for Sauron is defending all of these surveillance cameras that are being posted around middle earth. Curious. This guy whose name is not big brother is here to advocate having cameras in your home. The King of the Orochi is backing Sauron on his new surveillance

program. But he's wearing a fake mustache so you can't tell who he is. So let's look at what he said about stopping criminalizing homelessness. This is a big, big issue in San Diego. We have a massive and growing unhoused population because our rents are exceptionally high and our wages are not. So the number of unhoused people has increased under Gloria, so have deaths on the street, which hit a record of 574 in the county last year. That's more than one person dying every single day on the streets. He's opened some shelters, but some shelters are scheduled to close and the shelter beds and traditional transitional housing provided have failed to grow at the same rate as the unhoused population, but seven stopped him taking photos and claiming every

single one is a huge step forward. We also continue to build what are called congregate shelters, which don't give people privacy, which don't give them... A lot of people might not want to go into a congregate shelter to effectively dormitory. There are a number of reasons why you might not want to do that and yet that's what we're building. There are also some other sort of single occupancy shelters, but nowhere near enough. He's been a huge backer of something called California's care court. Are you guys familiar with the care court at all? No. No. This shit is dystopian. This could be a whole episode, maybe one day it will be. Care stands for community assistance, recovery, and empowerment, which...

I have a feeling that this is not going to be about empowerment. Yeah, when it's empowering someone, Garrison, but it's not empowering to people who might want to empower. What it is in practice is a massive expansion of forced conservatorship. So I'm going to quote from Human Rights Watch here. Human Rights Watch said the plan promotes a system of involuntary, coerced treatment enforced by an expanded judicial infrastructure that will, in practice, simply remove unhoused people with perceived mental health conditions from the public eye without effectively addressing those mental health conditions. Jesus. Yeah, it's pretty bad. It doesn't provide money for mental health services. It takes money

that's already existing in the budget and puts it across to court mandated treatment. It doesn't provide housing, which the multiple studies show that a housing first approach is a way to solve homelessness. Instead, it allows for a broad range of people, which include family members, first responders, including cops and outreach workers, the public guardian, service providers, and the Director of the County Behavioral Health Agency, to refer individuals to the jurisdiction of the courts to take away their autonomy and liberty. Very broadly covers people, it describes, to having schizophrenia, spectrum or other psychotic disorders. Under this system, judges can force people into treatment and housing. If they don't

comply, they can be forced into conservatorship. Now, obviously, evidence doesn't support the conclusion that involuntary outpatient treatment is more effective than intensive voluntary outpatient treatment. And indeed, it does show that involuntary coercive treatment is harmful. But it isn't really about people with mental health. It's about keeping on house people where they can't be seen. And Human Rights Watch claims that this violates due process and international human rights conventions. And yet, like, Claude Doria and Gavin Newsom, to be fair, who I'm sure will run for president soon, have been cheerleading this. And I'm surprised it hasn't got more press coverage internationally and nationally, sorry, because it's a massive

assault on personal freedoms, right? And it's extremely easy to effectively say that somebody quote unquote needs mental health, force them into conservatorship. And if they're not willing to attend these treatments, they're not able to attend these treatments, they're not willing to go into the housing that they are assigned, let's say that they don't want to live in congregate housing, right, or something like that. Or they're in housing with someone who they don't feel comfortable or safe with, and they can be forced into conservatorship and effectively lose all their liberty, right? Yeah, it's pretty bad. It's a new and exciting way of criminalizing homelessness effectively. And like I said, it doesn't provide housing, it doesn't provide funding for behavioral

health care, it just directs existing funding to court mandated programs. And so I could pick hundreds of other examples of this talk, Gloria stuff. And I want to pick one more to focus on. And it's something that I think it gets a little bit into like inside politics, grifty stuff. But it like, it has ruined a good number of careers in San Diego politics. And I'm really heavily indebted to the prince and voice of San Diego for their reporting on this. But let's start by talking about public restrooms. So I think most of us are going to agree that like having a safe place to shit and wash your hands is a pretty basic human right. But in San Diego, it's something that not everyone has. So since 2000, four grand jury

reports have warned the city's inadequate public restroom infrastructure could become a public health threat. That's what happened in 2017 and 2018 when a hepatitis A swept through the city, sickening 582 people and killing 20. So after the habit, yeah, it's not a thing that like you expect right in like, like on the left coast in America's finest city, most Americans will not encounter thankfully hepatitis in their lifetime. And that sadly, maybe this isn't our only hepatitis outbreak. So that's great. And so after the happy outbreak, the city stopped locking restrooms at night, which had done previously, but that changed with the COVID pandemic when the facilities were temporarily closed. And some have since not returned

to 24 seven service. Following this 2021 shy gala outbreak second at least 41 homeless residents, most of whom were staying in central San Diego, further shed light on the city's restroom issues. Much of this was dealt with in a great report by Bella Ross in the voice of San Diego, to which Gloria commented, the goal here isn't to add as many permanent public restrooms as possible. The goal is to help get unsheltered residents off the streets and into safe sanitary shelter and permanent housing. And like, I don't quite know what he was going for here, but not having a place to shit is an everyone issue. This isn't just an unhoused issue, right? Like everybody poops, and not all of us live in houses and have giant

offices and city hall downtown. And so it was this bizarre kind of gaslighting approach that like we fundamentally have an issue with access to bathrooms. And just to try and like reframe this as another issue where he's also failing was it's kind of indicative of their response, but also very bizarre. And where the city has installed new bathrooms, they're often installed by private groups as part of development projects, which is great, right? A good old public private partnership has never gone wrong before. So it was shock you to hear that these private groups are responsible for maintaining and securing these facilities. And this means that they're often locked. So despite literal human shit being all over downtown, and people

being forced to enjoy the massive indignity of having nowhere to poop. In December 2022, research by SDSU's Project for Sanitation Justice found that less than half the city's permanent restrooms could be considered truly open access. And that just two permanent facilities were available around the clock seven days a week. Gloria has later acknowledged that city has an issue, but he's chosen to blame residents. I just need folks to quit acting a fool in these bathrooms. I mean, it's not just a homeless population, it's everybody, he said in an interview. In February 2023, nearly five years after the last outbreak, San Diego County again began recording an uptake in hepatitis A cases, which is great, right? We're back to where we

started. Much of this reporting was met with absolutely unhinged responses on Twitter from some of Gloria's staff. They call themselves the Todd Squad. That sucks. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty bad. So notable responses come from Dave Rowland, who left the old weekly city beak for a job in PR, and Rachel Lange, who she's Todd's, I think, head of public relations. She spent June of 2020 posting about Black Lives Matter, whilst also doing volunteer public relations work for the cops. Wow, amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. Volunteer public relations. There's like a joke on, like, this is like a sort of pejorative label for it. Okay, so on Chinese Twitter, there's this joke calling people unpaid five cent army, which

is like, five cent army is like, well, the number of cents changes over time. There used to be a thing where, like, you get paid by the government to get, like, to, like, you get paid per post, to, like, post whatever fucking shit the Chinese government wanted to, like, have posts on. But this person's actually literally an unpaid, like, actually literally volunteer, like, volunteer public relations for the cops, like, what the fuck is this bullshit? Yeah, it was really a magical public record find when I sent that PRA email. I think she framed it as, like, helping the community and the police talk to one another in a difficult time. The future is the giant boot stamping on your face,

is some people volunteer to paint the boot? Yes. Yeah, yeah, it is a rainbow boot. Yeah, I mean, you can find their feed. Some of the attacks on myself and some of my colleagues are, like, incredibly petty and unprofessional, and also quite unnerving when you consider the huge amounts of taxpayer money that are wasted on their salaries, which pay them to post. And again, this is a town where people die because they don't have a place to take a shit, but we're paying people to get into Twitter beef. You know, it's also really cool that, like, the sort of two axes of American politics are you can't use the bathroom because you're trans and you can't use the bathroom because you don't own

one. And then sometimes they just converge and it's the same. Yeah, yeah, locking. Yeah, that's the hands clasping meme, locking trans people out of the bathroom. All right, so now we're about to get to Todd Squad's finest hour, which is when they use city resources and work time to make a video of them singing Return of the Mac. Only it wasn't Return of the Mac. It was Todd Gloria is back. And yeah, I'm going to make you all watch it. Was that it? Was he walking through a city hall? Yeah. Was the first part here walking to a security line at the airport? Yeah, which is funny because that's a security line to get into city hall. Yeah. Okay, okay. Yeah. Have you have you never been to a city hall before? I might

didn't have that. Oh, it's certainly does now. Chicago. Yes, it certainly has that now. My local town one didn't. Are they are they saying that the mayor lied to the city? Is that is that what they're saying? Yeah, the previous man. Oh, the pre okay. Wasn't he the previous mayor? Only for a little bit of time, then he he was entering there. Okay. Well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, they're playing. Oh my god. I didn't believe you when you said air guitar on one guy. That was like 12 guys. Yeah, this feels like it's gone on for like 40 minutes. Yeah, this is my Stalin grad. There's a point where they come in dressed as Flavor Flav but I think it's here. And anyway, one of them is wearing a medallion that just says

Cox on it. And actually, Togglory is wearing a medallion here. We can probably no no hang on here he is again. Oh, that's some cops. Why are they laying on the ground? I think the head's touching. There's a person with a Cox medallion again. This is okay. This is one of the worst things that I've ever seen. What are the people showed up with the chain that it was like an SD for San Diego. When it first comes on to screen, it really looks like a swastika. This is the Padres logo. That's like the most famous. Yes. That's a shitty ass team. Go Barrett. The Padres did a different genocide. It should have been conflated with the other genocide. I'm guessing this is like a sports thing or something. Yeah, yeah, they are a

sports ball team. Yeah, that's what I thought. Baseball to be specific. I knew that. Very proud of them here. But yeah, as you'll have noticed, one of the most cringe things that has ever fucking happened. Yeah, that's pretty rough. It's pretty bad, right? It's pretty crushing when I have personally known people who have died on our streets and also my merit is making return of the Mac videos dressed as Flavor Flav. So I think we're mostly done. I want to talk about one more thing, because no review of San Diego politics will be complete without a mention of the giant monument to Griff that is 101 Ash Street. So what is 101 Ash Street? In 2016, San Diego leased a downtown high rise, hoping to house city employees.

It turned out that the building was riddled with asbestos. And it turns out the city knew is riddled with asbestos when it started to lease the building. And then it will shock you to know that they deny this at first. But in the agreement to lease to own the building, it says buyer acknowledges that the building contains asbestos and that Sempra has maintained an asbestos monitoring and handling program. So eventually in 2019, they managed to move staff in after a renovation that ballooned in cost. In 2020, they were forced to evacuate the building. Because of the asbestos. Since then, DA's investigation has been opened into Jason Hughes, who publicly represented himself as a volunteer advisor to the city, according to Voice of San Diego. But unbeknownst

to the city, collected $9.4 million from Cistero, who owned 101 Ash Street. The city attorney's office alleged but could not prove that the city's former top bureaucrat, Chris Michael, ordered city information technology staff to purge records tied to the 101 Ash Street debacle last year. So they couldn't prove that she purged the records, but what they do know that she did was pass a confidential legal document to Corey Briggs, a candidate for city attorney. NBC reported that the memo included a footnote, which Elliot and others later decried as fabricated. In the footnote, they claimed that Elliot's office made an effort to shield Gloria from an outside pro, but the 101 Ash Street debacle. The footnote suggested an interview with Gloria

might have clarified why the city decided to go forward with the Ash Street lease, given Gloria's skepticism about a similar past deal. So it's not clear if this footnote was real or fabricated, like it's alleged it was fabricated, which it's bizarre, like this whole sort of weird corrupt thing is bizarre. And it may, this may well not be true, to be clear. During this time, Dorian Hargrove, who is a reporter, obtained some of those records, faced legal threat of prosecution from the city attorney and lost his job for obtaining those records. So far, the city has poured more than 60 million into 101 Ash Street, roughly the same amount as this annual library budget. It's only occupied the office space for, yeah, it's great.

It's absolutely insane. This has been occupied for like less than a couple of months for the five years since the city acquired it. Are they, do we know what their ties to the contractors who are doing the renovations are? That would be an interesting thing. I actually don't know that. Yeah, because that's the classic Illinois grift. Yeah, you just keep renovating a building, keep getting donations from the contractors. Well, or the contractors are just your friends, and so that's how you can pass around. Yeah, keep the money around. Yeah. Well, they're not doing any more contracting on it here because the city agreed to buy the building, which needs $115 million in repairs for $86 million last year.

Yeah, it's good stuff. Amazing. Yep. This week, the UT reported that San Diego's top real estate official did not seek input from her staff or review internal files before recommending the city buy out the 101S Street lease. They also reported that in a confidential memo to the city auditor's office, anonymous employees wrote, the city of San Diego should be aware of the level of waste and abuse that is occurring within the real estate and airport management department, which has led to a toxic, hostile revenue wasting and unproductive work environment. Which is great. We did a joke. Yep. This is the San Diego we wanted, hashtag for all of us. So this is a lot of inside San Diego politics, right? So it's a lot of lists of things and

promises made and promises broken. But I want to come back to the fact that this is a guy who ran for mayor on a ticket that pushed compassion and a relatively liberal set of policies, and he's done the exact opposite in his time in office. He ran as a progressive, but he's done very little to differentiate himself, policy-wise from Mayor's like Republican Kevin Faulkner. Obviously, we're just cracking the lid on some of these policies here. He's consistently chosen to fund and support the police over the people of the city. He's consistently moved to make it harder to live on the streets and harder to get off the streets. And he's consistently chosen photo opportunities over real governance for the city. His PR people spend hours bashing mutual aid

workers, like Michael, who we had a guest on the show on Twitter, and wasting taxpayer money doing it. Just this week, he welcomed right-wing maniac Rishi Sunak, who actually is Prime Minister of the UK, despite the fact that people haven't noticed, to our city. And San Diego State University researchers released a report saying negative interactions with police are driving black people who are experiencing homelessness away from services and housing opportunities. This is what we got from Mayor, who positioned himself as a progressive and has governed as a rainbow Republican. So yeah, that's, I would say that's all I have to say about Toggloria. If you follow me on Twitter, you'll know that it's not the case, and I will continue to have more

to say about Toggloria. But yeah, it's really sad. It's deeply sad. And it, like I said, it's funny, the cringy music video is funny, we'll link to it in the show notes. But it's also really deeply troubling that this has real impacts for real people who are already down on their luck and living on the streets or experiencing, you know, over-aggressive policing or other things that he said he would fix have just got worse. And yeah, it sucks. So thanks for listening to me whine about my city, everyone. And again, my apologies for traumatizing you further with that video. It's fine. Next week, next week, we're well, okay, so we would have been doing Chicago's own version of this exact same person, which is Lloyd Lightfoot, except to the

surprise of absolutely zero people who live in Chicago and everyone who doesn't live in Chicago, Lightfoot didn't make it out of her fucking primary. So we're instead going to be doing Chicago's once in the future, well, not once, potentially future mayor, Paul Vallis, who absolutely sucks ass. So stay tuned for that in another week when I get a yell about Paul Vallis and inflict some truly horrific bullshit on all of you. Very excited to get my revenge. All right, well, I will look forward to seeing Paul Vallis's hip hop video. Yeah, just sitting there. This is this is this is worse than anything that anything the daily liar can throw at me. Yeah, should we just pivot to more cum content, garrison? Okay,

this has been taken out here. You can find us at happened here pod on Twitter, Instagram, but we're going to leave before one of us dies. My space was the first major social media company. They made the internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space, feel like a night club and also slightly dangerous. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on my space because it turned out it was actually not a good business. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, main accounts, the story of my space, I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it, the users. Because what happened in the my space era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms

to follow. Listen to main accounts, the story of my space on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. Narcissists are everywhere, and their toxic behavior and words can cause serious harm to your mental health. In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte, who was love bombed by the Tinder swindler. The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me, but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did. And that's even way worse than the money he took. But I am here to help. As a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself, I know how to identify the narcissist in your life.

Each week, you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and the process of their healing from these relationships. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This case has all the markings of a ritualistic, occult murder. And Eddie Cathege from Twilight. Tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a Tennessee cave, but only one returned. The Mental Walk Caves, MANTAWAUK, a production of iHeartRadio, Blumhouse Television, and Psychopia Pictures. Every minute I remain in Mental Walk County, the thick of the fog gets.

Listen to the Mental Walk Caves now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here, with me, Andrew, of the YouTube channel, Andrewism. And today I'm joined by Mia and Gare. Hello, hello, hello. Hello. And I wanted to talk about cities, because I very recently published a video on Sulapong City Planning. I mean, I don't know if you're all going to hear this podcast, but I did recently publish it. And you can check that out on my channel. And I thought I'd share a bit more about one particular historical urban planning movement that I talk about in that video. And that is Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities Movement, and his book, Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Are you all familiar with either?

No. I don't think so. Yeah, so Ebenezer Howard, side note, by the way, I don't know who looks at a child and names them, Ebenezer Howard. But he presented this idea of the Garden City concept in 1898 in a book called Tomorrow, A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. Later, he republished it in 1902 under the name Garden Cities of Tomorrow. And take note in the title of the book of the use of reform and peaceful path, because it does highlight a noticeable lack within Howard's vision that we'll discuss later. He wants to provide access to the benefits of both town living and country living, as he describes it, town and country like magnets, drawing people to them.

You know, so according to him, town offers vibrant society and opportunity and transportation, but it lacks the beauty of nature. It has pollution, it has crowding, it has disease. I mean, this is Victorian era cities he's talking about, place where it's stinking. In contrast, the country and country offers the space and the beauty of nature and its abundance, but it lacks society and it can feel isolated and really spread out. So he wanted to create a hybrid of both concepts, a third magnet of town, country, the combined benefits of both. Howard believed a secret. Sorry, I have to jump in here and make a secret. A secret third thing. Yes. Thank you. Yeah.

Not town, not country, but a secret third thing. We fulfilled our contractual obligations. One joke. All right, I'm going to sign off the call. Andrew, you take it from here. So yeah, a secret third thing. Howard believed that the ideal living conditions for people of all economic backgrounds could be created by establishing these town, country, cities with very specific parameters run by strong government institutions. In Ebenezer, Howard's context. Again, no offense to Ebenezer as the world, but geez, I can't let go of those implications. I think we need to bring back the name Ebenezer, actually. It's been too long since I've seen an infant named Ebenezer, meaning I've never seen

one. I feel like we should see more just absolutely absurd old-timey names. What do you call the baby? Do you call them ebby or something? Like how does this work? You call the baby Ebenezer, the baby's name. Why would you, you call it the baby's name. You could call it ebby, you could call it Neezer, you could eventually call it Weezer. Okay, these are so horrible nicknames. That is awful. Oh yeah, that is okay. I'm hearing the implications. I do never, I never want to hear that again. Yeah, I digress. Howard's writing, I'm just going to call him Howard. Howard's writing during the Industrial Revolution was in response to, well, the Industrial Revolution, you know,

his response to the urban slums, the pollution, the lack of access to the countryside. And much of his book as dedicated to the idea that cities, as they existed in his time, were not sustainable in the long run. By the middle of the 19th century, over half of Britain's population lived in towns. And in 1900, that proportion had risen to over three quarters. But English towns and cities presented social environmental problems of an unprecedented scale. And much of Britain's history in that period could be connected with the efforts to ameliorate the frightening conditions that a lot of people lived in. When it comes to the design, Howard wanted to create these highly structured, carefully laid out communities to provide the best conditions possible for every

kind of person. He saw, he wanted to put just like large areas of land from aristocratic owners and start setting up garden cities that would house up to 32,000 people in individual homes on 6,000 acres. And that whole vision of individual homes is, I think, it belies a limitation, the imagination there, but it's so understandable considering the historical conditions of the time where people will live in these overcrowded slums and stuff. And the dream was really to have a home of your own, that you didn't have to crowd out, you didn't have to be crowded, you didn't have to share with others. But anyway, I think a sustainable city should trade the sprawl that single family homes generate for more dense development,

for the most part, that is. But I digress once again. That's not all his plan entailed. His garden cities would also include a huge public garden with public buildings like a town hall, lecture halls, theaters, and a hospital. An enormous arcade called the Crystal Palace, not arcade, is in video game, where residents would browse a covered market and enjoy a winter garden. Neighborhoods with cooperative kitchens and shared gardens, schools, playgrounds, and churches, factories, warehouses, farms, workshops, and access to a train line. In its ideal form, the garden city would become a network of smaller garden cities built around the larger central town. The idealized vision of the garden city contained very specific utopian elements,

like small communities planned on a concentric pattern that would accommodate housing, industry, and agriculture surrounded by green belts that would limit their growth. Now, there's a diagram that he did up for his book that has been popularized, that represents like a sort of a concentric circle design, but he didn't believe that that necessarily had to be the shape of the garden city. He still wanted the city to be adapted to the local layout somewhat. And these elements of garden city design were all interdependent. You know, he wanted strong community engagement, he wanted community ownership of land, although he wasn't a socialist mind you, he was a georgist. Oh, God, wait, that explains that explains so much about all those politics. Of course,

he was a georgist. Yeah, quite an interesting crew of characters. He wanted mixed 10 year homes and housing types that were generally affordable. You know, to go on another digression, I find georgism to be such an interesting fixation of our philosophy. It's like, you know, looking at all the problems in society. And you know what we need? A land tax. That'll solve things. I mean, obviously, that's the all it is to the to that political philosophy that economic approach. But I just found I just find it every time I think about it, I find it funny that it was just really like the whole movement was basically this one like tax proposal. It's really that was the whole focus of it. Yeah, it's really funny, too, because

it has one of the sort of largest, like collapses of any ideology ever. Like, this is like, this is like a very serious. It was a big, it was a big ideology, you know, it literally helped to develop the board game monopoly. It was like, it was a huge thing. This is something I've actually been looking into a lot. I've been trying to track down some of the original like 1920s copies of monopoly that's more based on the land works game. Yes, I tried to find the ones that were like pre pre pre Parker Brothers. And I found I found a few a few I found a few like two months ago. But before I could order them, it was sold to somebody else on eBay. So I've been trying to track down another another one in the in the past two months.

And it's been a bit more challenging, just because I'm kind of a monopoly freak. Yeah, it's it's really interesting to see how that game was developed and then changed over time. And how Hasbro stepped in. Hasbro, Parker Brothers, whatever stepped in and did their do to kind of basically rewrote the history of the board game entirely. Yeah. But anyway, elements of the Garden City, strong community engagement, community ownership of land, mixed tenure homes, housing types are generally affordable, a wide range of local jobs with easy commuting distances of homes, well designed homes with gardens combining the best of town and country, and green infrastructure that enhances natural environment with strong

cultural recreational and shopping facilities, in addition to integrated and accessible transportation. It's not all sunshine and roses, though. I mean, you could look at the sort of the greenwashing elements of the Garden City design. And even in their time, they were criticized. I mean, they were praised for being an alternative to the overcrowded industrial cities. But they were also criticized for damaging the economy, being destructive to the beauty of nature and being inconvenient. You know, they weren't able to be and furthermore, because they had this sort of top down design philosophy, they weren't able to truly reflect the natural and organic developments of a town

or a country. You know, so secretive thing, couldn't do either the things that the original two stuff could do. And then, of course, you have the moustached man himself, Murray Bookchin stepping in, in the limit of the city, to eviscerate the idea of the Garden City. He talks about how Howard Scheme was basically a system of benevolent capitalism that presumed to avoid the extremes of communism and individualism. And as a result, his entire book was, quote, permeated by an underlying assumption, so typically British, that a compromise can be struck between an intrinsically irrational material reality and a moral ideology of high-minded conciliation. Mic drop.

I feel like the most brutal part of that is just the typically British part. Yeah, I mean, anything learning, look at really the plan that Howard had, you know, the offices and industrial factories and shopping centers that he intended to provide the Garden City with. Those spaces are battlegrounds of conflicting social interests. You know, there's alienated labor, there are income differences, there are disparities of work time and free time. All that conflict is not addressed just because you make a pretty city. You know, there's no resolution to the problems created under a capitalist factory, office or shopping center, just because you have a nice transit system and a green belt.

I feel like some of these same problems crop up on some of the solar punk stuff online as well. I mean, we've already talked about greenwashing throughout the solar punk aesthetic and stuff, but yeah, I mean, it is an interesting aspect that keeps propping up, and it's just intriguing that it dates back over 100 years ago, like this same exact thing. Yeah, exactly. And funny enough, his Garden Cities were even fallen short of Utopias that were thought of before his time. I'm not even just Utopias, but also actual historical, political experiments that try to address various social problems. Unlike the Greek polis, which had some basis of face to face democracy, Howard just had a central council and a department

structure based on elections. Unlike in Thomas Moore's Utopia, there's no proposal for rotating agricultural and industrial work. Unlike the Paris Commune of 1871, which was established long before Howard wrote his book, he had no sort of incorporation of that sort of political experimentation in the Garden City development. The criticism really is how superficial a lot of Howard's ideas are. There was just a lack of social analysis in favor of just design. Yeah, Georgism. Sure, it would probably be better than what we have now, but it by no means fixes all of the systemic issues. It's like Amsterdam, right? I would rather have capitalism while riding a bike. But Bookchin also talks about how these communities do not encompass the full

range of possibilities a human experience. Again, quote, because you know, Bookchin is Loki, a boss, right? Nableness is mistaken for organic social intercourse and mutual aid. Well-manicured parks for the harmonization of humanity with nature. The proximity of workplaces for the development of a new meaning for work and its integration with play. An eclectic mix of ranch houses, slab-like apartments, and bachelor-type flats for spontaneous architectural variety, shopping-mart plazas in a vast expanse of lawn for the Agora, lecture halls for cultural centers, hobby classes for vocational variety, benevolent trusts for municipal councils for self-administration. One can add endlessly to this list of misplaced criteria for community

that serve to obfuscate rather than clarify the high attainment to the urban tradition. Indeed, the appearance of community serves the ideological function of concealing the incompleteness of an intimate and shared social life. Again, boom, you know? And people brought together, you know, they have all these conveniences and these pleasantries, but they're still culturally impoverished. They're still atomized. They still deal with the stark reality of capitalism in the spaces that they're going to inevitably spend most of their day at work. Like, it's nice that the city is well-designed, but how much of it are you going to get to see if you still have to go to work for eight hours plus a day? I mean, if anything, at least, you know, the commute will

probably be shorter, but that's about it. And that's if you get a job in the city itself. This is interesting because in some ways, the invention of the suburb in the years after this kind of tried to solve for this issue while also just doing it in an incredibly racist way. Oh, yeah. You can see the invention of the suburb of trying to create these little nestled communities, but also getting away from the urban center, which was seen as this scary place full of people who were non-white. So you have this white flight thing that developed this notion of the suburb, which in some ways kind of does this, but in a much worse way, actually. It makes it makes the idea of the garden city look like a much better alternative to what the

suburbs did. And it's just interesting that even the version of this that got implemented was just done in a way that is so much more dystopian and depressing. Yeah. I mean, and Bookchin addresses that comparison to the suburbs as well, right? He says, in the best of cases, the new towns differ from suburbs primarily because job commuting is short and most services can be supplied within the community itself. In the worst of cases, there are essentially bedroom suburbs of the metropolis and add enormously to its congestion during working hours. I can't believe Bookchin beat me to the punch on this one. He'll Bookchin you. You've been Bookchin'd. I'm devastated. This is the first time Bookchin's

ever has ever has ever beaten me. This is this is this is truly terrible. So but despite some of these flaws and criticisms, Howard was passionate about his idea, right? I mean, he published the books. He also organized like he's actually he's not sitting on Twitter, right? He's actually doing something about his ideas. So he organized this garden city association in 1899 in England to promote the ideas of social justice, economic efficiency, beautification, health, and well-being in the context of city planning. That garden city association later became the town and country planning association, which still exists to this day. Women played a very active role and continue to play a very active role in the organization.

I mean, as Howard says himself in his book, women's influences too often ignored. You hear that ladies, these guys are feminists. When the garden city is built, as it shortly will be, women sharing the work we found have been a large one. Women are among our most active missionaries. And so he's doing some Abdullah Azul on shit now. What's that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's liberating life, you know. But yeah, the TCP, the Town Country Planning Association, has continued to campaign for a new generation of garden cities based on modern modern garden city principles. They work cross sector and government influence policy legislation. They raise awareness through guidance and

training. They promote affordable homes and inclusive, healthy and climate resilient places. And they try to create, to explore barriers, opportunities and practical solutions necessary to make new garden cities a reality. They also are genuinely interested in empowering people to have a real influence over decisions about the environments and to secure social justice within and between communities, or at least that is what their website says. Outside of the TCPA, the idea of a garden city definitely sort of rooted itself in urban planning and the urban planning tradition. And it did sort of feed into this rise of green spaces within urban landscapes that we now find around the world. The concept of the garden city is definitely still

revisited today, but it's considerably different from the original idea. It's also taken the garden city as an inspiration, as an aesthetic inspiration to create greater integration between urban areas and green spaces. In his time though, going back to the late 19th and early 20th century, Howard was a successful fundraiser. Again, he was trying to get things going. In the first years of the 20th century, he built two garden cities, Letchworth Garden City and Wellwin Garden City, both in Hartfordshire, England. And both still exist today. Letchworth was originally quite successful. It was first, you know, an ancient parish from like the 11th century and remained a

small rural village until the start of the 20th century when the land was purchased by a company called First Garden City Limited, which was founded by Howard and his supporters. And they went on to establish the United Kingdom's first roundabout, the Solar Slot Circus, a lot of urban parkland and open spaces, including a green space named after Howard called Howard Park. But after Howard's passing, the First Garden City Limited was sort of taken over in 1960 and the company changed how the town was managed. The residents of the local council kind of lost some say. The original garden city ideals were reduced and the corporation eventually became, first, the company created a corporation, transferred ownership to the

corporation, which is now called Letchworth Garden City Corporation. And then that corporation was replaced by a charitable body in the 1990s called Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation, which continues to own and manage the estate to this day. Letchworth was sort of an interest and experiment. The people who helped to found that town were very much otherworldly as some people would describe them. Some people describe them as health freaks. They actually voted on a ban to set against the selling of alcohol, a ban on the selling of alcohol in public premises. Oh boy. So, which is, I mean, for a British village, right, in the early 1900s to vote against having a pub, unheard of, right? They did eventually create a pub. That pub didn't serve any alcohol.

Bummer. Bummer. Hate to see it. Yeah. But Letchworth was still like a royal pioneer. Its approach to blending town and country was used in the Australian capital Canberra, in Hellraum, in Germany, in Tappaneele, Finland, and in Mesopotamia. And of course, in the other garden city, Wellwin. How did it arrange for that land to be purchased by a company called Second Garden City Limited, real creative there. And at first, they were going to call the city Diggswell. But a couple of days later, they changed their mind probably because they realized that's a dumb name. And they decided to call it Wellwin. I wasn't going to say anything, but yeah, that's not a great name. Yeah. And so the town is laid out along these treeline

boulevards. It's sort of a new Georgian town center. There's a lot of grass, a lot of parks, as to be expected. And the planners had intended to create the garden city to have like one shop called Wellwin Stores, which was basically a monopoly that all the residents were expected to shop at. Lastly, I think I want to bring up one final inspiration. I was a bit torn on whether I would include this one or not. But I said, you know what, I'll be entertaining. And I might want to talk about it further in the future. A certain character by the name of Walt Disney. Oh, no. Oh, no. This is Epcot. This is the Florida. This is the experimental prototypical city of tomorrow. Yes. This is the Florida project. Oh, no. Disney's Epcot was

designed in concentric circles with radiating boulevards. No. This is the worst jumpscare I've ever had. Oh, but it should be noted or rather it should be expected that unlike Howard, Mr. Disney envisioned having a lot of personal control over the day to day management of life in his city. So really, Epcot was only loosely inspired by Howard's idea of combining the populace with industry. This city would have had a hotel at the center with more than 30 stories and a convention center. There would be an internationally themed town center. There would be a mega mall. There would be themed restaurants, shops and attractions. There would be a monorail. Yeah. And he sort of he was he was a car free community advocate.

He was a bit of a Disney. Yeah, like his plan was that nobody would drive in Epcot delivery trucks and other automobiles and other automobiles that needed to enter the city were to be kept underground. So it's kind of like a fusion of Ebenezer, Howard and Elon Musk. That sucks. That sucks. Yeah. Also, the city would be climate controlled with a glass roof. Yes. I mean, it's funny because like he couldn't even do this properly. Like he couldn't even build this instead. Instead, he got turned into like a like a bear skeleton of what his original plan was because Epcot failed in so in so many ways. Reason being that he ended up dying, right? Yeah. Yes. Like even on his deathbed, he was still sketching up designs for Epcot. So he never

really got to implement it. Pro life dictator dies anyways. The actual like living communities in Disney World, Florida are so different. And in many ways, they're just like another suburb except you're in a suburb owned by Disney. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it's a peek into what life would have been like under Epcot, right? Your home would have been prefabricated and modular. So the materials and technologies could be tested as soon as they were available. By the way, whether I have nothing against prefab homes, I think they'll be very useful. But Disney's idea was basically your home is prefab so that anytime he wanted to install an update on it, he could. It's great. You know, like the entire city was basically like a guinea

pig for any technologies he came up with. And so he wants to really retain absolute control of the city. Like they wouldn't even own anything. Disney alone would own the land so that he and his successors can make updates and changes without ever being slowed down by this pesky thing called citizens, votes and rights and all that. It's funny because this is actually now under attack by Ron DeSantis in Florida. The sovereignty of Disney may like change a lot. I think they lost it. I think they already stripped it. Yes. But but how this plays out in actuality is yet to be determined. But it is funny that this is actually like this is a very, very recent thing. Like the last like week or so. But see, what we can see here is one of the inevitable transitions

as we as we saw in British colonial rule in India, which is that direct corporate rule is always replaced by indirect corporate rule via the state. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. It's in some ways we will probably learn that it was better to live under Disney than Ron DeSantis. But that is not saying much. Our next one, he opens up a DeSantis world. No, no. Do not do not call it to be it. It's just it's just it's just it's literally just like 18 Gitmo exhibitions. Oh, Lord. I mean, DeSantis world would just be the United States when DeSantis was the presidential election. Oh, God. True. Sad but true. But let me tell you a little bit more about Epcot, right? If you were 18 or older, you have to have a job. Also, you don't get to retire.

Nobody's allowed to retire. You only get to stop working if you either die or leave. Amazing. One way out. Also, and reason being that he believed this would prevent slums or ghettos from forming in any part of his magical city. Because I mean, if everyone has a job, then nobody will be struggling to pay rent or eat, right? Funnily enough, of course, a lot of Disney workers today can't afford to pay rent or eat. But hey, the theoretically, everybody in Epcot will have their basic needs met. Also, though, in exchange for that, they wouldn't have any privacy because Epcot was also supposed to be

like a tourist attraction. You know, you look outside your window and tourists are like looking inside your window. That was a thing. That was Epcot. Thankfully, it wasn't fully implemented. I mean, some people have said that Singapore is like a dystopian city state run by Disney. But we could talk about that another time. That's the basic rundown on Garden City's past, present and future. The idea of it, I think, was notable, admirable, good effort, but flawed. Because it lacked a strong ideological foundation, an economic foundation, an analysis that took into account the contentions baked within society that

manifests in the urban landscape. And I think it's a clear warning that for solar punks and for people who are interested in urban planning as a whole, that aesthetics is not everything. Design is not everything. They ask me some meat to those. They say some meat underneath that flesh. It's really weird analogy, but yeah. Yeah, no. But like, yeah, the principle of... Okay, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna abandon the Walter Benjamin thing I was gonna do there, but... No, try it. Keep going. We're gonna try Walter Benjamin thing. I haven't actually read any of his stuff in like five years, but one of Benjamin's things was when politics is sort of displaced or converted into aesthetic,

it becomes fascism. So don't do that. In fact, have actual politics and not simply reduce your politics to an aesthetic or to aesthetics, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. True. True. All right. Well, that's it for me. You can follow me on youtube.com slash Andruism on Twitter at underscore St. True and on patreon.com slash Andruism. You can find us at happen here pod or coolzone media on Twitter and Instagram. And you can find me tweeting about my desire to understand the mechanics of how Disney world operates at Hungry bow tie mostly on Twitter. Yay. My space was the first major social media company. They made the internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space feel like a nightclub and

also slightly dangerous. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on my space because it turned out it was actually not a good business. My name is Joanne McNeil on my new podcast, main accounts, the story of my space. I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it, the users, because what happened in the Myspace era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms to follow. Listen to main accounts, the story of my space on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. Narcissists are everywhere and their toxic behavior and words can cause

serious harm to your mental health. In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte, who was loved bombed by the Tinder swindler. The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me, but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did. And that's even way worse than the money you took. But I am here to help. As a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself, I know how to identify the narcissist in your life. Each week you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and the process of their healing from these relationships. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This case has all the markings of a ritualistic, a cult murder. The Manowar Caves. I say the Lord works in mysterious ways. A brand new immersive fiction podcast. Well, he ain't got nothing on the devil. Part psychological thriller. Part supernatural horror. The truth. Sometimes it's revealed in the intersection of facts. Sometimes it's hidden to the more. Starring Westworld's Jonathan Tucker and Eddie Cthigge from Twilight. I wouldn't go digging around, stirring up trouble if I was you. Tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a Tennessee cave, but only one returned.

This is the exact spot where we found the bodies, Julie. The Manowar Caves. M-A-N-T-A-W-A-U-K. A production of I Heart Radio, Blumhouse Television, and Psychopia Pictures. Every minute I remain in Manowar County, the thick of the fog gets. Listen to the Manowar Caves now on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Nick and Appan here, the podcast that I and Mia Wong occasionally hijack talk about Asian-American stuff. And, you know, some pretty interesting Asian-American stuff happened, which is that, yeah, there was a sort of massive sweeping

cultural victory question mark for the Asian-American community TM when everything I for all at once did. Okay, I'm getting conflicting sources about exactly the record that I set at the Oscars, but it won seven Oscars, did very well, everyone is very happy. Yeah, so I decided that I was going to use this to talk about some other stuff that is related to it. And with me to talk about many things, including sort of the family and patriarchy and Asian-American culture and media is Tiffany Yang, a filmmaker from New York. Tiffany, welcome to the show. Hi, Mia. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for being on. So we were trying to figure out how precisely we want to sort of start this, because, you know, there's a lot of sort of angles you

can take. I think that the thing that I want to start with is, well, like, okay, everything ever all at once is a very good movie in a lot of ways. And I think it's sort of, it's kind of the apotheosis of a structure of Asian-American media that I've talked about before on this show, that I'm going to run through a brief explanation of what this is. So something that I, yeah, I've talked about a bit before that I think about a lot is the way in which Asian-American media has been, it has basically a structural form. There's a very specific story or set of story structures into which anything you're trying to tell has to be fit. And that series of things is, okay, so you have a small business, you have a bunch of immigrants, they come to the U.S. or they're,

well, usually they're already in the U.S. And they're trying to run a small business and they're having these issues sort of integrating into sort of like white American society. And there's some kind of conflict in the family and the TV show or the movie is about like resolving this sort of conflict. Yeah, and I think everything ever all at once is like the best version of this that we've ever gotten in a lot of ways. But, you know, and this is something I talked about in the sort of New Year's episode is that there's something about, there's something about, I guess, Asian-American, like the way our sort of political culture works that makes it so that this is the only story that we tell. And, you know, I mean, you can look at a

lot of the sort of like, sorry, I've been rambling for a lot, but I want to get this out of the way before we go further. But, you know, like, there's a lot of movies that are like this, like, you know, shows like Fresh off the Boat, like Iron Fist is also sort of like almost literally this, right? Like Turning Red is sort of like an emblematic example of sort of thing that is exactly this, like Fresh off the Boat is basically this, right? I think part of the sort of, there's a kind of ideological shell game happening here that's about the family. Everything ever all at once has a lot of similarities with Crazy Rich Asians in ways that are kind of not immediately apparent. I have finally reached the point, TM, which is that both everything everywhere all at

once in Crazy Rich Asians ends in exactly the same way, right? Which is the sort of family tension that has been sort of building up and playing out throughout the entire movie, like is resolved and everyone sort of goes back to being a family. And this is interesting specifically for Crazy Rich Asians because in the original, like in the book version of this story, the family shatters. So the plot of that movie is this Asian-American girl is dating like this guy who's from Singapore who has not told her that he's from like an unbelievably rich like Singaporean family. And the story is about him going to Singapore and realizing that this guy is unbelievably rich and that his family are just assholes who suck. And in the book, like the family mistreats

both of them really badly and so they just leave and they book and they cut off the rich family. But in the movie, some weird thing happens where the main character plays Ma Jung with the guy's mom and like a miracle occurs and the family works out. And everything ever all at once has a very similar sort of thing where like the way this movie ends and I have to say this, like I do like this movie a lot. But the way that it ends is Evelyn who is Joy's mom walks up to her and says you're fat and I don't like that you got a tattoo, but also the family is good and like we should work it out and then they do like a miracle occurs. And there's this sort of running ideology in this which is that like the family is sort of too big to fail. Like you're not allowed

to have A, a movie that's about something that's not about the family or B, a movie where you know like the end of it is the people walk away from their family because it's hurt them a lot. Right. And I will also say that sort of Asian American cultural production that doesn't center the family, it actually just doesn't get read as being Asian American, right? Like I think I don't know if you've seen this, but like being Liu has this beautiful documentary called Minding the Gap and it's about like his trauma and his like sort of youth growing up in a broken home and hanging out with skateboarding friends, some of whom are like black and that just never gets talked about as an Asian American film, even though it's made by an Asian American filmmaker and his

experience as like someone who actually migrated from China is such a big part of his story. Like because it's not about this sort of family conflict and reconciliation, it actually doesn't get read as an Asian American film a lot of the time, which to me is interesting. And yeah, I just wanted to second your point that like in both of these films, everything everywhere all at once and Crazy Rich Asians, like nothing actually changes. You know, there's the reconciliation within the family, but nothing about the family structure changes. Like I think Evelyn, her the sort of like conciliatory gesture she gives is like, Oh, I'm your mom. And I would always choose to be with you in any universe. I forget like the exact phrasing. It's been a while

since I've seen this film, but it's something like that. It's like, you know, I would still want to be with you because I'm your mom. And it's like this very, the family is its own explanation. Yeah. And I think it points to sort of, this is the movie that I think hit the exact limit of this kind of of this kind of sort of Asian family politics. Because in it's in the sort of like moment where it needs to justify itself, it can't it doesn't have anything. The moments, it's sort of it's empty of an actual like, it's empty of any sort of like ideological message about why this should be redemptive, right? Like just, you know, and I think this is something that like, we don't think about enough, which is that like, like, okay, if your mother hurts you like a lot,

right, like them being your mother is not a redemptive thing. I mean, this is something that I've been thinking about a lot in the context of sort of transness and, and you know, and in the ways that like trans people, like, I mean, literally get killed by their families in the ways that they get, you know, kicked out from their families and the ways that sort of this, this, this sort of self justification of it's good because it is right that the relationship. Yeah, this is sort of what you were saying, right? It's like, it justifies itself by just like, well, I am your mother was like, well, that's not an argument, right? Yeah. Right. And it's not enough. Like, I think joy spends the whole film like, trying fighting to be seen by her mom. And in the end,

her mom doesn't really give any reason why she loves joy. Like, there's nothing like specific to joy herself as a person. It's just like, you're my daughter, I'm your mother. Of course, I love you. And you know, like, why should that be something a queer child settles for? Like, just this very basic baseline of acceptance, rather than anything that like actually celebrates who they are as an individual. Yeah. And that's something that I also wanted to talk about with this is like, this is not just like the specific, you know, we're talking a lot about the specific movie, because this is like the most recent one that's come out. And we're not sort of saying this to like, like there is a lot of like good stuff in this movie, like this is the

movie, like, like joy is probably the character who is like closest to me, who I have ever seen in anything, like at any point. Right. And like, there was something, you know, sort of incredibly emotional, like I cried a lot during this movie that was like incredibly emotional about sort of, you know, like seeing yourself in a like, yeah, yeah. But there's something about the way that Asian Americans, like especially sort of like Cissat Asian Americans, think about queerness that that I think is is is you see in this movie, which is that okay, so this movie has two queer relationships in it, right? Unless you're going to count like the guy in the raccoon, which I it's funny, but I don't know about that one. But right, but you know, the actual like the

the actual two sort of like queer relationships are between Joy and her girlfriend, and then between Evelyn and the tax lady. And there's two things that are interesting about that. One is that both of the both of the characters they're in relationships with are white. And very and this this is a bit like something that's very, very specifically like pointed out about Joy's girlfriend. And, you know, as you know, this is the joke is like, well, she's half Mexican, but she's played throughout the entire thing as like an outsider who like doesn't understand what's happening in the sort of scenes like doesn't understand the family dynamic doesn't doesn't understand his knees. And you know, and you see this again with okay, so who like, you know, they're able to imagine

a world in which like Evelyn the main character who is like Jesper homophobic, this entire movie is in a queer relationship and like, yeah, like I'd go for her. But if you look at who it's with, right, it's it's the character in the movie, who is this tax lady who her thing is that she is like, like she she she is like the human representation of the sort of white supremacist like capitalist bureaucracy, that is, you know, attacking this family and is sort of like driving these people into the ground. And then she's sort of redeemed by by like, love and queerness. But there's this way that queerness gets positioned as outside of Asianness by the way that like the by the other way that the only possible crew relationship that they can imagine is with

a white person as you know, as someone who's explicitly marked as an outsider. Right. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Like queerness, queerness is like attached to these anxieties over assimilation. Yeah. Yeah. From the perspective of like the older generation, like Evelyn and gongong, it's like the fear of them being assimilated too much into this Western culture, which is just a very it's it's very strange to me that this is the thing that keeps coming up in like Asian American narratives and discourses because obviously like Asian American like Asian queer cinema in Asia is like such a powerful cultural force. And the film makes all these Wong Kar-Wai references. And I feel

like Wong Kar-Wai has made like one of the greatest works of crew cinema happy together of like recent decades. And so it's just it's so strange how queerness is being positioned as like an external threat. And I mean, like, you know, you could you could take a sort of like like the if you want to do the lib analysis of this, like China has had queer rulers, like has there has the West produced one? Like maybe possibly at some point, maybe, but like, you know, like it's kind of like it's ideologically frustrating, right? Like we like, you know, you can fall back on the like we know that like we have records of queer people in China for like 5,000 fucking years, right? Like, it's you know, but like I think I think what's

really interesting about this is that this is something that's seen as so natural that people writing like even like like Asian American like writers writing about the film don't even notice it like they just they just sort of passively reproduce it. Yeah. And I don't know. I think it's like I mean, it's deeply frustrating. Like being an Asian queer person because this is something that like, you know, the the the the kinds of right wing nationalism that like are like they you know, like there's different kinds of Chinese nationalism, right? That will make that will make this like explicitly make the same argument that like gay people are like a like a sort of like, I mean, I guess they would have they would have said it was

bourgeois, but now it's a sort of like decadent Western like imposition onto the like onto the world of Asia. But it's like, like, no, but then but then but you know, you you get these like sort of like very well credentialed, like progressive, like Asian American writers who are just either implicitly or almost explicitly making exactly the same argument. Yeah. Yes. And it's also what the American right wing thing, right? Like they look to China as like it's you know, China represents this like sexual threat of having like this society where everyone is in their place, you know, like, they imagine that the sort of like traditional gender roles are much more adhered to in China, which is why it's like we're on the decline like China's rising.

So it's yeah, it is a very weird idea that nationalists on both sides are attached to and it's disappointing that Asian Americans who think of themselves as progressive or even radical kind of reproduced this unthinkingly. Yeah, I mean, one of my like recent black pill moments was, I don't know if people remember this. But there was there was there was someone on Twitter who very kind of famously got like just like obliterated for saying that I for first for saying that like people people shouldn't like cancel their subscription to the New York Times after they like did the whole thing this did this whole bullshit. And people don't know what this sort of scandal was. So the a bunch of people who'd written for the New York Times sent them a very, very

mild letter saying like, hey, can you guys like fix some obvious like not even saying fix like, can you report on trans issues better here or some like glaring sort of mistakes that you made in New York Times through a hissy fit and got really mad at them. And, and you know, this this person's reaction was like, oh, well, you can't like, don't cancel your subscription, like, you have to support the news. And it was just like sort of moment and she is one of the host of like one of the big Progressive Asian American podcasts. And it was like, it was this, you know, for me, it was really sort of like blackpilling moment of like, oh, this is like, this is like what, like, like, you know, like, like three, three, three, 75 a month is what these

people think my life is worth. Like, yeah, I don't know. I think this kind of ideological stuff is very deeply tied into the way that Asian Americans have been representing and thinking about the family instead of recent years. And but, but before, before we go into that, do you know what the family is trying to sell you? It is, it is the products and services that support this podcast. We have to take an ad break. We will be right back. Mia, just out of just out of curiosity, since I don't have the pleasure of listening to the ads while we're recording, like, what is going to play during that? Oh, I have no idea. Like, it could be anything. I don't know. It could be a gold

ad. It could be the f while we haven't had the FBI tried to do it yet. We've had we've had we've had law enforcement agencies. We've had people selling gold Ronald Reagan coins. I we've had so I don't think I've seen that like since I was a child, I think they used to have like television commercials. Yeah, they do it on podcast now, apparently, a thing that I discovered when they sent me the cliff of it. So who knows? Look, like maybe maybe maybe maybe they'll do a Thatcher one and you two can own the the immortal words. There is no such thing as society. There is only individuals in the family. Yeah. Wow. Well, whatever it takes to keep the podcast running. So all right, something I wanted to sort of circle back to is,

you know, I think one of the one of the sort of one of the things about this kind of Asian American media, you know, the you have this this sort of ambivalence of like, like what the sort of queer child is supposed to be. And, you know, like I would say this, like it is a pretty common experience if you are like a queer child of an Asian family that your family does fucked up shit to you. That's a thing. And this is I wanted to ask you about something that you've been talking about that I'm sort of interested in, which is one of the things that that I don't know, when you try to talk about this stuff, there's this way in which the way we sort of collectively think about why I say we this is

like, I guess like a kind of specification American thing, the way we think about trauma gets involved very quickly. Yeah, and I was wondering if you could talk about that some more. Yeah, I feel like there's this, there are these sort of like unspoken and discursive rules where when you talk about trauma within an Asian immigrant family, they're like, first of all, it's always intergenerational trauma, right? Like you can't talk about like a queer child experiencing trauma without then like getting into the fact that, oh, like the parents have experienced traumatic things like through the process of immigration or like war, the refugee experience, etc, etc. And so there's this sort of like economy of trauma

where some members within the family get their trauma treated as more legitimate and others don't. I think it's like really common to hear this refrain, which is like, oh, second generation immigrants are like the, you know, people like us Asian immigrant children who were born in the West can't possibly know that like the real trauma that our parents or grandparents went through, because they were the ones who like fled their countries or experienced war firsthand or grew up in poverty. But then it's also just like when we talk about intergenerational trauma, there's this sort of like obfuscation of who is enacting that trauma within the family, right? Like if the intergenerational trauma exists, like who is passing it down? And so I don't know

if I'm articulating myself well on this, but yeah, I guess the essential idea is that I think there is this like mechanism, which kind of immediately delegitimizes any talk of abuse or trauma from the perspective of Asian youth or from the perspective of like the child in the family. Yeah. And I think that's a kind of, I don't know, there's just really baffling deep unwillingness in a lot of ways to think about, and I think this is a sort of broader like cultural thing too, but there's just deep unwillingness to think about the family as a side of violence. And as a side of sort of profound violence, it's like, you know, like it's the place where the violence that shapes you comes from in a lot of cases. And I mean, like I know a lot of people

this has happened to you, this happened to me to some extent. And there's this real kind of, you know, this is what this is what I actually really liked about everything everywhere all at once is like it like goes into that in a lot of ways, like it is a movie for about 90, nine tenths of the movie, it is a movie about how like the people around like how the people in your family can hurt you repeatedly, and about the sort of like the ways that they think about it, the way but you know, there's there's but but but but I think this is where the sort of perspective thing comes into it where like, yeah, where I think like, we don't really have a language to sort of talk about this stuff. And the way the film deals with it is sort of like,

you know, is this kind of like very specific kind of nihilism, which is like definitely a thing that you could fall into, right? Like, you know, like that like that that is definitely a reaction to being traumatized. But it's seen as like illegitimate and will destroying. I think in a lot of ways, because it causes you to sort of like if that's your experience with the family, like you're going to leave, or you're going to or you're only going to stay in by force. And so it you know, the movie sort of rejects it. But you know, there's this way that it's very difficult to talk about this stuff and about the sort of like long arc of how people have thought about the family before us. Right. What's an example of what you mean by like, how people have thought

about the family before us? Well, I think I think in the Chinese context in particular, there's a very there's like, there's I mean, if you look at what was happening in in the sort of rat like in the in the in the sort of very radical periods in Chinese history in the last, you know, if you like last 100 days, you look at sort of what's going on in 1925, if you look at what happens immediately, like after the Chinese Revolution, like there is a real period of like questioning questioning patriarchal authority of questioning like, what is the family for? Like, why are we doing this? And, you know, I think I think the answers they came to were ultimately unsatisfying, which is like, well, we need the family around

because like, we are our economy does not function without uncompensated labor. So the Maoist sort of like attempt to grapple with this fails. But I don't like as as with many things that Maoism attempt to grapple with, I don't think they were wrong to look at it. I think their solutions were all terrible. But I think there's this kind of I mean, there's this reaction, there's there's a kind of older Asian queer reaction, which I think is kind of deeply suspicious of the family as, you know, this thing that has enormous amount of potential to sort of inflict violence on you and sort of destabilize your life and cut you off from resources and information and sort of, I mean, I was struck by someone else making this comment about how like

in everything everywhere, all at once, you know, they can imagine like this sort of infinite number of universes, but in every single one, the family unit remains the same. You know, like the the social arrangement never changes across all of these different universes. Yeah, I thought that was a really good point. There's just like the sense in which a lot of the recent Asian American culture can't imagine the family as like something that can be transformed. It just kind of takes it for granted as this like static, eternal structure, which can't be challenged and people if they find reconciliation or happiness, it needs to be somehow within that same arrangement. Yeah, and I think a lot of that has to do with

like the thing that we've decided about elders collectively, which is another one of those things that like is like the legitimacy of the authority of elders is something that in Chinese revolutionary history is something that's very much offered debate. And almost everyone who decided to like take up arms against the state, like almost all of those people were like this is messed up. And then, you know, I think I think partially as a result of how badly sort of the Maoist project goes. And then also, I think as a kind of like explicit part of state policy, there's this way in which that kind of authority gets reinscribed and any sort of questioning of it gets gets looked at as like, oh, we're like a return to sort of like Maoist egalitarianism or

whatever, which is the thing that I see a lot in the ways that like not really Asian Americans, but like in the in, I don't know, you see this in Chinese discourse, like a decent amount. I mean, you see this in kind of messed up ways and some of the Asian American discourse from people whose families never participated directly in the Maoist project, you know, they might have a lot of people who immigrated here to the US weren't like, they were connected to the KMT, they were on the nationalist side. These are people who ideologically were never aligned with any sort of socialist project. And, you know, they'll invoke things like, well, you know, this is exactly what my ancestors were fleeing from China.

Yeah, that's like, okay, like you guys, like, I have really bad news for you about like what the KMT's ideology was and like what these people sort of like sort of these are like the egg monopoly people, right? Yeah. And but I think I think like this has two effects, right, which is like, on the one hand, those people like that like specific kind of very weird Chinese anti communist is sort of incredibly privileged in in the way that like that stuff's thought about. But then, you know, like, there are a lot of people who are in like from like from China who are in the US, like specifically because of the failure of this project, and this is something else you talked about in the Atlanta episodes, but like several of the people like who were killed in

Atlanta, like, were there because like liberalization drove them to a point where like they, you know, where they had to work to support their families. And, you know, and the other thing that sort of comes hand in hand with liberalization is that I don't know, this is something that like people really don't want to think about, which is that, you know, economic and some extent political liberalization in China came hand in hand with this massive and transferred to the patriarchal project, which is the one shot policy just sort of slamming down like a hammer of being of the state just being like we are going to just directly like we are going to directly control your reproductive autonomy. We are going to, you know, we are going

to force them to sterilize people. We are going to like literally limit the amount of kids you can have. We are going to make this sort of like giant, I don't know, like this enormous state intervention into like social reproduction. And the people who are the victims of that, like you don't really hear from them much. I mean, like one of the stories I'm sorry, I'm still just haunted by is that one of the people who died in Atlanta, like her family refused to bury her, like refused to take her remains to bury her because like their village was like, no, you never married, you can't be like buried in the village. And Wow. Yeah. And so, you know, like her like she had a funeral in the US that was attended by no

one who knew her because none of her friends could show up because they get arrested by the cops. And, you know, there were these like, there were these kinds of like transnational linkages of like the violence of people's families that just disappears from this sort of like narrative of like, like Asian Americanist like is the family is this unit is this relation. Right. And on that note, did we also want to talk about how the sort of like focus on the small business family or the family as a small business obscures some of the class conflicts within the Asian American community. Like these very massage workers you're talking about I remember in the wake of that Atlanta shootings, a lot of people started, they kind of

use the massage workers as like an emblem of the Asian American community more broadly. One, in fact, like, a lot of the sort of like more professional class Asian Americans or like the Asian Americans who get platforms in the media, they aren't like, they aren't from the same class as like the massage workers are. We heard from like a lot of small business owners, but those are those are the same people who like own massage parlors and hire these exploited workers to like have undocumented status and who can thus be like put into much more precarious positions than like, you know, US citizens. And so, um, yeah, I did you want to talk a bit more about that? Yeah, I mean, I think I think the small business owners are really sort of interesting

and powerful character, like especially in the US, because it's like, it's possible to be a small business owner, be really poor, but also not be propertyless. Yeah. And I think that like, the like the specifically like the core of the American dream is just to own property. Right. And, you know, so here is this class you can point out as like, oh, well, we're really poor, but you don't actually you never have to look at labor relations at all. Right. And that that like frees you from having to actually think about what capitalism is. And it also lets you it lets really like the actual sort of like the real sort of Asian American ruling class, right? Like the actual billionaires, right? You know, there are Asian American

billionaires. There's a good number of them. There's also just a bunch of just Asian billionaires, because there is a there's just an Asian ruling class. It lets those people, especially in the US, hide behind the image of the sort of small business owner. Right. And they can, you know, and they can use it to launder their sort of reputation, because like, it's in the US, like being anti small business is like the hardest position you can possibly take. It is like, like it is you, you like, I don't know if people remember this. A friend of mine, Vicky Osterwald, wrote this book called Indefensive Looting. Oh, yeah. That's a great book. Yeah, great book. Everyone should read it. Like, they were like sitting US senators were like, like yelling about

the book, like, like a huge swastika left, left got like, unbelievably mad about it. Like, a lot of you will probably also get mad about it. But like, like one of the things that always comes up with with looting is like, I, you know, it's like, well, are you going to loot small businesses? And it's like, well, actually, yeah, like, like, insofar as people looting small businesses, a lot of times it's the people who work there. And it sucks, because working for small businesses is fucking terrible. And yeah, people in the community where those like small businesses are and like, are discriminatory towards. Yeah. And Vicky makes this point about this. There's this kind of populism that gets invoked where, you know, one of the police statements about,

I think it was about Ferguson, was they're talking about, like, they burned down our Walmart. And it's like, well, what do you mean our Walmart? Like, we don't fucking own the Walmart, like, we don't get shit from it. Like, everyone who works on the Walmart gets fucked. Everyone has to buy from the Walmart. But it's this really hollow, like, populism, like, it's this thing that, like, you assemble a community based around, around a corporation. And I think that's kind of what's been happening with like, I think this is the reason why Asian American culture is like like this, because it's this, it's like, you know, there's this very hollow, like, in a lot of, like, multi-national, like, populism has been assembled around, like, the figure of

the small business owner. But it's ultimately, like, it doesn't really have ideas other than, you should let us, like, you should let us make money without being racist. And also the fact, like, the, the, the, it has that idea. And then it has the idea that the family is good because it is. And that's kind of it. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I think there's, there's a lot about, well, okay, I will say this, like, the, the, the, the day people are okay with looting small businesses is the day the US can actually fall. And any moment until before then, like, it will, it will survive because that's always the sort of last defense of, of capitalism is like, what about small businesses? And you will, you will get people who call themselves communists,

who will be like, no, no, no, actually, these are fine. It's like, I, okay, so I wanted to kind of pivot back around a bit to talk about elders a bit more, because I feel like I kind of sidetracked us off of that. And I, yeah, I think there's this really, I don't know, there's been this kind of like rehabilitation of the elder in a way that like, was something that was deeply questioned in, in periods where it was kind of like, it was more obvious and less, and more socially acceptable to sort of look at the power these people have and how much it can suck. Well, yeah, I think I noticed this picking up during, you know, the, the sort of like first spate of anti Asian attacks during COVID. I think that's when, like, a lot of progressive

Asians started invoking the figure of the elder, right? Like, our elders are being attacked, like, an attack on our elders is an attack on our community, like, that sort of thing, where the elder is kind of like used as a sort of emblem of the innocence of the Asian American community. Or what do you, like, what work do you think the elder is doing there in this discourse? Like, why does it have to be an elder? Like, what if you were just saying Asian people are being attacked? Or like, what if it was Asian youths being attacked? Like, what, why does it have to be the Asian elder? Because I think we were talking about this earlier, empirically, it's not exactly true, right? It wasn't mostly old people who were victims of these attacks.

Yeah. And I mean, I think this, this is one of the areas where like, the Merck, like, you know, it's really, really hard to get good data on who's being attacked, because I mean, police reports are obviously incredibly unreliable, right? And then, you know, like they're self-collected data, but the self-collected data is not all-encompassing. It, you know, it's sort of skewed in its own ways. But yeah, I think, I think there's this way in which like, I don't know, like, I think this almost is way in which elders almost are like, they're also like, like personally infantilized by it. Whereas like, they're picked as this sort of like, like, part of, like, they use this as sort of symbol of like, people who can't defend themselves, which partially isn't true. Like, there were

actually examples of, like, Asian elders, like, defending themselves, but it does this kind of, like. And also, like, the rates of gun purchase, purchases went up with it. I mean, I know, like, just anecdotally, in the Chinese-American community, I knew so many, like, elderly Chinese people who were like, I'm gonna go out and buy a gun now. Yeah. Yeah, I think, like, the way that that thing, it was invoked has a lot of sort of like, I don't know, it was, it was like, there was this way in which they, like, they became framed as like, this is sort of, like, this is the apotheosis of, like, everything that it is to, like, be Asian-American. And that, like, that, like, the fact that that was under attack was this sort of incredible crisis.

Right. And I think, like, I think there's, like, that obscures a lot about what was happening, which is that, like, if there was one clear trend in the data, it was that women were being attacked at, like, a way higher rate than anyone else. And, you know, and this has been a thing that has sort of continued, which is, like, I don't know, like, there's been more attacks in the last, like, few months, right? And it's been a lot of, like, young women getting, like, young Asian women getting pushed in front of trains. And people have just really stopped caring, like, to the extent where, like, it's, like, it's, like, literally a meme that you can, like, watch the cycle of, like, the stop AAPI hate, like, signs coming up and down. Right. And I don't know, I think the

elder part of it kind of, like, it obscured a lot of what was actually happening. Yeah, I feel like the last incident that really made a splash in the media was the murder of Christina Yuna. Is that her? I forget what her last name is, but Christina Yuna Lee, getting murdered in Chinatown. And this was already a year ago. And I haven't really heard anything since, like, I see things in the local news, where I live in Queens recently, had a couple of attacks just a week ago, I think, but it didn't make the national news or anything. Yeah, and I think the way that the kind of, like, hierarchy of victimhood, I guess,

affected that, like, has had, I mean, I'm not sure it's the biggest, like, single reason why everyone has sort of stopped caring, but, like, I think the sort of stop AAPI hate, like, like, that moment kind of only happened because there was this sort of backlash against, like, there's this backlash against Black Lives Matter and against the insurrection and people needed another, people needed a kind of, like, ideologically safe, like, thing, like, way of demonstrating, like, how good their politics were or whatever. But I think it definitely contributed to sort of why, like, stuff has been abandoned. And I also wanted to ask, do you see this thing, this fixation on elders,

is happening at the same time that ancestors got invoked a lot in, like, Asian American literature, especially queer literature? I'm thinking of authors like Ocean Wong, like, how did ancestors become such a thing? Yeah, it's really, I don't know, I really don't understand how that happens, like, a lot of my ancestors fucking sucked, like, I don't know, like, I don't know how to sort of, like, I don't know, I have this sort of, I don't know, I have this sort of weird sense of the kind of politics at work here, which is like, there's a lot of kinds of politics that I think can work, and for example, in indigenous contexts that are very, very powerful, that don't really work in the Asian American context, where like, like, our ancestors, like, if you're Chinese, right,

your ancestors did some fucked up shit, like, your ancestors did a lot of genocides, like, you, like, you know, I think this is something that's actually at the core of the kind of, like, right-wing Chinese nationalism, which is that, like, right-wing Chinese nationalism is basically about the anger that China was, like, cease to be able to be an empire, because like, if you look at the sort of colonization process, right, like, the Qing are this very, very expansionist, like, like, sort of militarist imperial state, right, like, they're, like, they conquered, like, if they fight a bunch of wars around Tibet, they conquer Xinjiang, and they do a genocide there, like, immediately, they're pushing south,

they're pushing, like, they're basically pushing, like, in every direction they could possibly push, and then they kind of, like, you know, they hit, like, a pretty impressive territorial boundaries, and then their ability to do imperialism gets kind of halted, because suddenly there's other imperial powers, like, in the region, and you know, it's the sort of end of this, it's like, they lose all these wars, and you have the start of, like, you have the start of the century of humiliation, and all of the sort of stuff that happens there, but it's like, like, the actual thing that they're, like, the actual thing that the century of humiliation people are humiliated about, well, I mean, the fact that it's called the century of humiliation, and not,

like, I don't know, like, the century of death or something, which, for people who don't know what the century of humiliation is, um, so, I think it's, I think that the actual, it's, like, this is, like, 1840 to 1940, there's this sort of nationalist term around understanding this period in which China is undergoing, like, you know, like, it is genuinely, like, like, people in China are, like, suffering enormous imperial violence, um, you know, like, I, like, unfathomable numbers of people die in this period, this is, like, the opium, but basically a period from the opium wars until, you know, sort of through the various Japanese conquests, and then, sort of, ending essentially with the revolution. But, yeah, I don't know, like,

I think it's interesting that it's understood in terms of national humiliation, in terms of, sort of, like, the loss of this ability to do, like, I mean, to do imperialism, and instead of, in sort of, in terms of, like, the just unfathomable human suffering that went on, and I think this, I think this, all of this, sort of, comes back to this weird kind of intensification of, of nationalism, kind of, among everyone in the, in the last, like, especially since 2020, you know, I mean, there's been a, like, kind of, like, explicit, like, Chinese nationalist term in some parts of the left, but I think it's really, kind of, like, hit everyone in ways that, like, hasn't really been examined. There's been this kind of difficulty in having a kind of, like,

theoretical and cultural language to speak about Asian-American-ness, partially because, well, because, like, you know, I've talked about this before, right, but, like, the, the, the, the, the term Asian-American was created by, like, third-worldists, right, manyBut like, that whole language just died, I mean, like, you know, you can still find like, Bob Avankian or whatever, but like, the, the, the sort of languages, like, understanding yourself as part of the third world, and, like, you know, like as a, as like a, as a liberal, national liberation movement, like, that's over, national liberation is basically dead as a politics. Like, anyone who tried it

after a certain point, like just got called secessionists and now just get murdered horribly. And like, you know, and there's obviously also the sort of like China, Vietnam, Cambodia fighting each other thing that has this massive impact on that kind of politics. And it gets replaced with this kind of politics that's based that, you know, it gets sort of replaced by like the Asian civil rights movement stuff. Right. But like, there's, there's no, the thing is like in civil rights movement, it doesn't have politics. Like as politics are completely incoherent, like you have, you literally have these marches where you have like, like old school, like KMT desk ward guys like marching next to Maoists. And it's like, because it's supposed to be a

sort of like pan ideological thing. And over time, like all the ideologies are supposed to compose it die. And but that meant that like, there's no like, there's no actual language to sort of talk about the experience because the two sets of vocabularies that like, or like wait, like frames of understanding the struggle or just have both kind of like either basically collapse or been discredited. And I think that leaves this whole and people are trying to fill the hole by like adopting other people's politics. But like, it doesn't work for us. I don't think like, I don't know, like, I like, I think people will disagree with me about the potential of sort of ancestor politics and politics of elders. But like, I don't think it

does that much for us. Yeah. I think the last thing that that I do want to say is, you know, if we've reached the limits of a lot of the politics that we've been seeing here. What kinds of politics and what kind, you know, also sort of what kind of media do you see as stuff that we can use to go beyond this? Because I think there is a lot of like, like there are a lot of like people creating good, like, queer stuff that are not like. Yeah, actually, I think I mentioned this to you. I recently watched this film called Return to Soul. It's by a director called Davie Chu. And it's about a French Korean adoptee. So she was adopted from Korea as a baby, I mean, yeah, as a baby by French parents and grew up in France. And

the film is like kind of a journey of her going back to Korea and meeting her birth family. But it's like, it's not, it doesn't fall into the same sort of like family natalist politics. It's very like deeply questioning of the family and of even like this idea that I guess what the sort of wayward, queer, stray Asian child like needs in order to heal from trauma, like she doesn't really have reconciliations with either family, like either her French family that she comes from, like they're very much sidelined in this film. They just don't play that big of a role. And then she and then when she goes to Korea, you know, she has these very like awkward encounters meeting her birth family, because they're like immediately like, Oh, you know,

we're so sorry, we gave you away. Now you're back, you could come live with us. And then she's just like, hold on, like, I don't even know if I consider you my family. And so it, it seems to me like to really depart from this like script that we've become so accustomed to in Asian diasporic film in a really interesting way, I thought. And it's also a lot about music, like it's a very moody music driven film. It doesn't feel that identitarian. Yeah, I would recommend everyone to watch it. Everything I've heard all at once is we have that we have now told the best version of that story. And I think we can find, you know, I would just like, like, this is this is a really broad recommendation, but like, go watch one car. This is this. Okay, this is the most film nerd

I'm ever going to get that doesn't involve I, I, why am I suddenly blanking on the name of the thing? Sorry, Daniel. The most film nerd I'm ever going to get that doesn't involve La Commune de Paris 1871 is go watch one car. Why like, they're, they're, I don't know. I think, I think there is something to be gained by looking at, you know, I mean, they're like looking at Hong Kong cinema looking at, I don't know, I like good, good Americans have finally realized that Korean cinema is really good, which is wonderful. I'm glad I'm glad we're, you know, getting to the place where people realize that it's that like, there's a lot of great stuff going on there. But we know it is possible for Asians to tell different stories because all across the world,

they already are. Right. Like we are already telling stories that are different and more interesting than this. And I think, well, then, and I'm not specifically saying like, then everything everywhere else, but then the specific structure that the Asian American movies fall into. And yeah, people should go discover them because they're great. And yeah, we can find new and better kinds of queer joy. And yeah, yeah, Tiffany, thank you so much for joining us and being, I don't know why I'm saying us as if there's more than me here. But yeah, thank you. Thank you for being on the show. Yeah, anytime. Thank you for having me on. And it's been a really stimulating conversation. Yeah. Yeah, this this has been it could happen here.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the show about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today we have a really exciting episode. We're going to be talking to a group of workers from the California Nurses Association, which is specifically their National Organizing Committee, which is, I think, better known to most people as NNU or National Nurses United. And these people are part of a shift of workers who was, for the first time, running a rank and file slate for the Council of Presidents, which is sort of, they're a body that combines the positions of Vice President and President of the Union. They're called shift change. And so, Eric, do you want to introduce yourself?

All right. My name is Eric Cook. I've been a nurse for 32 years. I currently work in the cardiac telemetry floor, and I became a nurse after being a Navy corpsman in the First Gulf War, and just continued in healthcare from there. I was originally in LVN and then became a registered nurse. And I've been on the past three negotiating teams for Altebate Summit Hospital, and I've seen a lot of changes in the attitude and movement of the Union in the past 12 years. So, I'm hoping with John and Reina and Mark to make a change for our Union and our members for the better. Yeah. Glad you could be here to join us. Thank you. Yeah. Reina, do you want to introduce yourself? Hi there. I'm Reina Lindsay. I have been a

California nurse for over 13 years. And out of those 13 years, eight of them, I've been in Altebate's Medical Center, which was my first Union as an RN. How I be, and also, I'm sorry, and also, I work in ICU, and I've been there for about seven years. And I've worked with Eric a year prior to that. So, the reason why I became a nurse is a long story, but the bridge version is at the beginning, I wanted to be a lawyer. So, when I went to college, kind of thought I was dyslexic, so that kind of backed out. And then I also was a teen mom, which that's something that a lot of people do not know about me. And during that whole process, I wanted to find something that I could be an advocate for people and also know the political side of it. So, nursing became

the best benefit. One thing I love about nursing is you can learn everything about the world and know about people without going anywhere. So, that was the thrill. And then also, being an advocate for the patients I take care for. In addition to that, knowing my peers and knowing that we all have the similar struggles when it comes to the systems that we work for, it doesn't matter which employee you work for. And so, being in the union, it gives you that way of a contract between you and your employer. And along the way, there has been some issues which Eric and I and John all have been experiencing where things do need to change. And being part of shift change is part where we have to change a leadership and be more transparent between the union, the employer,

and the people in general. Hell yeah. And yeah, John, do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah, sure. I'm John Heronimus. I'm a Pachy recovery nurse at University of Chicago. Before that, I was in the medical ICU for six and a half years. And then, before that, I was like a associate's degree or I had working at the emergency room at Holy Cross Hospital. And I also started, which is funny to me, as an LPN, which is the same thing as an LVN that Eric did. And I was a CNA before that. I decided to become a nurse way back in the day when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do after dropping out of high school. And I was thinking about, man, and maybe I should become like a history teacher. And I was like, oh, why would I want to go back

to this place? I hate so much. I dropped out of it. And I personally got like, incredibly sick with something called ulcerative colitis. And I got a bunch of surgeries done and got some really amazing experience being taken care of by nurses. And it became really immediately obvious to me, like I also like Reina wanted to help people. And also, I thought that nursing was like a way where even like for, you know, individuals, I could change someone's day just a little bit for the better. But also like maybe change some bigger things. And so I thought nursing was just like a really great way to do that. Also, I was really fortunate to be raised by an amazing nurse. My mom was a nurse. And she was always like she's like one of those people was my hero. And a lot

of other nurses in my family, both men and women, including someone who is like a Kentucky frontier nurse is like the first group of nurse practitioner nurse midwives back in the like the 1940s, back in Kentucky. So I got a lot of nurses in my family and this like incredibly proud to be like pairing on all the stuff that they have been doing for all their years as like nurses. So and like meeting the folks out in California like Reina and Eric, it just makes me feel so good. Like we're doing really important stuff in terms of both our daily practice of being a nurse, but also like the that we can have like this bigger impact on how things are happening in our profession in the healthcare industry and just the broader world. Yeah. Yeah, we've talked to like a decent

amount on this show now about sort of the labor issues that have been facing nurses both actually here and in the UK and I think a little bit in a couple of other countries. Yeah, I was I was wondering what were the sort of specific things that y'all were dealing with both just in the profession and then also in the union that got y'all together to run the slate? Okay, so one of the things that caused us to actually meet by coincidence was one of my co-workers, Torald or Dahl, who's a Norwegian nurse who's been a nurse here in America for over 30 years. She contacted Labor Notes and realizing something was wrong in our union, she started talking with specifically Sarah Hughes at Labor Notes and through Labor Notes and Sarah, we were able to connect with

John in Chicago and it was amazing that what we discovered is that our problems here in California were mimicking what they've experienced in Chicago and through Sarah finding out from other diverse communities of nurses in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, New York and Minnesota that the same things are happening there under our same union and our complaint was through our union was that we felt we were being siloed and of course when I say siloed is actually in our negotiations we had 17 facilities negotiating but we were told that we were not allowed to communicate with each other, that it was forbidden by the federal mediator. Now, this is my, yes, yes, I know, that was my reaction initially too. There were two other

negotiators on the team and it was highly suspicious because the union wanted to put all new nurses onto the negotiating team and that was a little bit of a red flag. There were so many red flags through this negotiations. I swear I could almost see Lenin's tomb, that's how many red flags there were. It was amazing to us is that they said the mediator forbade us from talking to each other because that was part of the agreement to have the federal mediator. We, the three of us that had previous experience with negotiating just knew that was the wrong thing and it took over at least about seven months before we started breaking through to other tables and communicating with them on text and having our own Zoom conversations with them to convince them that no,

this is a lie. We are allowed to talk to each other and we ended up finding out that we were kind of being railroaded into what we considered an agreement that was less than satisfactory for the workers, for the nurses who have suffered during the pandemic. We could have gotten probably one of the greatest contracts that any nursing body had ever received. We had the industry by the throat. We suffered so much. John, everybody throughout the country, all the nurses suffered. Everybody suffered but everybody that was at that bedside during the pandemic, it was a horrific experience. It's great when you take care of people and you heal them. Yes, that's a great thing but the stress and the unending anxiety that you felt and then

in the midst of this, you have a union that short changes you at a point when we had so much power and thank heavens for Sarah to put us into contact with all these other nurses to realize that it wasn't just the Sutter Division of the California Nurses Association that was running things amok. It seemed to be a perceived playbook plan of what they were doing throughout the country and I think nobody perceives themselves as doing evil or anything like that. I think they always think that they're doing it for the better interest of everybody but that's what's important about a rank and file movement is that every nurse, every person in the union is important and deserves a voice and we don't need to be gaslit. We don't need to be

mistreated by the union that we pay to represent us. We need to be marching on the boss. We could have had an unending euphoria for nurses with a contract. We could have had great staffing. We could have had better pay. We could have had everything that we wanted to make our work lives to be the best they could be and it seemed our union already had a preplanned agreement with the corporation. Now they deny that but it's kind of hard to believe when they had the same agreement that they were supposedly negotiating in silos, that they weren't communicating. Each table was supposedly negotiating their own but it was the same thing they wanted at every table and not all the tables were equal. It was very sad for us. Like I said, this is the third negotiating team I

was on. The first negotiating team I was on, we lasted over two years negotiating and we went through nine strikes and threatened a tenth until we got an agreement. So our hospital, obviously it's Altevates Hospital in Berkeley, our sister hospital, Summit Hospital in Oakland and we have affiliate with us is the Herrick campus which is the psychiatric facility and we have struggled so much through this pandemic and it was amazing to us that we came up with less than what we should have gotten. I will tell you that thanks to Sarah and meeting all these other nurses, we were able to come back and I think through fear and intimidation, our union was forced to back us and we were able to get economically what we wanted but like the rest

of the country as nurses, we wanted better staffing. We needed more bodies at the bedside. We're overworked, we're fatigued. Reina worked in the ICU and they had their own COVID unit there. I don't think there was enough tums and roll aides to go around for all those nurses. The anxiety and the heart and your throat and of course John himself, I don't want to, his personal business but his experience, he has long COVID. We as nurses have suffered quite a bit and we expected a lot more from our union. Even just on a very basic level, no matter what you go through, you have the right for your union not to light you, that seems like a very elementary sort of thing. That's a really elementary thing, Mia, but it's

really scary how comfortable some of the people who are paid their wages out of our dues are with lying to us. I think that's a thing that one of the things we're specifically fighting for is transparency and accountability, especially for our staff. When Eric mentioned that I had had long COVID, I've been to the point where I'm as recovered as I probably ever will be and which is great, being recovered from long COVID is so much better than having long COVID. I was always someone that they came to to ask for help with political issues inside the union or they would come to me for Medicare for All or speaking around things like ratios, that sort of stuff, or they would send me off to when the Chicago teachers went on strike in 2019.

I was sent to speak on behalf of our union for them. Just doing the work of, I'm a bit of an agitator. Then COVID hit and it was just a really surreal experience. My area of the hospital is one of those places where they basically did everything they could to minimize the amount of surgeries we were doing initially when the lockdowns were happening for the first six months of pandemic. They were moving us into, because we are all former ICU nurses, so I would do a few shifts up in the medical ICU. Then we made a special clean ICU because we were still getting traumas. University of Chicago apparently sees more penetrating gunshot and stab wounds than any other hospital in the United States. 30% of our traumas are from some sort of violence,

which is substantially higher than anywhere else in the US. Then I got sick. To me, the union was like a thing that was like, man, this is nice to have. I had never worked in a union hospital before. Getting union raises was a big step up in my life. It was also like, yeah, our union is progressive. I like most of the things that it stands for. I didn't really think of it as someone that needed the union to do the things that unions really, it's the bread and butter of unions, which is like coming in and helping you when you need help as an individual worker when you're not in the middle of a contract negotiation. I got sick with long COVID and lost. We negotiated this great COVID six-pay policy and management just took that away from me without really giving

any notice or explanation why. You sit there trying to get the help that you need from your unions. I'm trying to explain why it is that this is a problem for me to our labor rep, they call them business agents, labor reps, whatever. There are people who basically are paid out of our dues to help us, in theory, stay organized and be pushing management to do to follow the contract. It got to the point where my partner who is literally screaming at the labor rep, well, I'm on the phone with the labor rep and she's just like, what the fuck is your union even doing? Why are they not making sure that you're taking care of? It was like this really come-to-Jesus moment where you're like, oh, yeah, this union shit isn't just platitudes

about we need a ratio bill in Illinois or Medicare for All or Bernie Sanders. It's like, oh, this shit is actually about my material well-being. My family still hasn't recovered from all that because after an enormous amount of pressure was put on staff, they finally started looking into it and we got payouts for not just me, but for 10 other nurses who had had their COVID pay cut really in unjust ways and really opened my eyes as to what a union should be doing. And it really opened my eyes that maybe there's a problem with how staff interact with us as workers because there should be, we try and say like, there's a service union or service unionism and then there's rank and file unionism. And we had this weird situation in our union where they

tell us we're a rank and file democratic union except the staff treat us like it's a business union. So we get told one thing, but then we see another thing. And not that I think that the whole point of a union is you pull together to take care of people who can't necessarily take care of themselves in that moment. And it just took an enormous amount of effort on my family's part to get that moving. And it just seemed incredibly, it was just very eye-opening for me as my experience here in Chicago. No, that's really bleak. I mean, that's another thing that you would expect a union to just be on top of, not even just a sort of, oh, well, you asked them and they started doing it. You would think that, hey, the people who got COVID

doing this job, not getting paid, what they're supposed to be getting paid would be a priority and not something you have to fight them over. That is incredibly grim. I don't know. Well, I have a story for you. So my first year working at out-to-bates, before that, I was working in swatter hospitals and they gave you certain packages about your benefits. So when it was time for me to get my benefits, I couldn't get my benefits at all because during that time, they were doing it at the yearly. So I said, is there any way possible, at least to get something, because mind you, they are paying for my benefits. I'm not paying for anything for it, that there should be a reason because if I had any medical issues,

what would happen? And basically, the union was very lackluster about it. Now, of course, I went to the manager, went to human resources. Basically, they basically told me where there's 1,800 nurses and you know what we're going to do about this issue. And pretty much it was, it has pretty much disappeared about it. There was nothing I could do. So for that whole year, so I worked in January of 2015, I had to wait till the following year to get benefits, to get medical benefits. Jesus. Now, I got everything else, I'm gonna be honest, I got everything else, but the medical benefit is important. But thank God, I don't have any health issues. Thank God, my daughters didn't have any health issues where we didn't require any help and

there wasn't an emergency. But when I started noticing there were other nurses, RTs that were experiencing the same thing, because a lot of us got hired within that timeframe, they weren't telling us these issues and we would have end up getting these things sooner. And it's all about the transparency. It's all about our value. And then over the years, people always complain, I'm paying these dues. Why are they not helping? Why not supportive? And when I was actually hired, they were quick to give you the paperwork to tell you how to pay this off so they could take money off your dues quicker than what about the history about the union? Why is the history is, why is the union important? And what you can do if there's a grievance? There was none of that.

And to this day, it's still the same thing. Because I precept new grads, and I tell them about, you know, part of the union, what do you got? Oh, I didn't get a booklet. Or, oh, I didn't hear anything about it, but I got this paper here, so they could take out my dues. That's what pisses me off of anything, is that part. So, and then all this stuff dealing with what Eric has told you, what we've been doing with the strikes and the negotiations. Me personally, we should have done negotiations within the first year of the pandemic. And I think we got everything, but they were quick to say, no, we're going to get all these facilities all together at one, and so we can all negotiate. And then the gag order happened, the slam of the gag order. And I'm like,

there is a lot of collusion going on, and that shit needs to stop. So. I mean, things that they don't really tell us, which I think is really a thing that we want to resolve is they don't really inform you of what your union rights are. You kind of get the initial like, here's your wine garden rights, which means that you have a right to like representation whenever you're being disciplined. But aside from that, there's very little discussion inside of our union facilities, in particular about the kinds of things that we have as like union members, what our rights are, what are our rights within the union, how the union works. So, many of my coworkers don't like a big part of our work is just explaining that there's an election

happening. And so you would hear that an election had happened, maybe. And you would be like, well, who voted? I don't know. And you'd get these like, all of the communication about the election to us as the people who are like the opposition has all been in these very like plain envelopes that don't look like anything like it could be like just an anonymous bill you wouldn't know or junk mail. And so like, you know, as a union member, you have something called a right to represent representation. So in every union, every union employee and elected officer is considered a fiduciary has a fiduciary obligation to look out for your financial interests. And if they don't do that, it's called a failure to represent. Our union in particular spends had brags internally

about never having a they call them unfair labor practice, like if a nurse or any worker in any union decides that their union, you know, did not represent them their financial interests, they can file something called an unfair labor practice claim for failure to represent our union is like they've never had an unfair labor practice claim stick. We foy ed one of their unfair labor practice claims and somehow it got like withdrawn, like in this really like sketchy way. And it was like just a random one that we picked to just see what happened. And so then it got like assigned like a special like liaison, like afterwards, like, they're like, Oh, we weren't supposed to do that. Like, when we contacted the Department of Labor, we're going to look at that again and figure

out what's going on with this. And it also turns out when we started doing research, which I think every union member listening to this should know every union has to file paperwork. They're legal, there's legally mandated reporting. So there's things called LM twos and 990s that you can get from the Office of Labor Management, you Google them. And they'll figure you can search for your own union. And you get to see the union finances. And we found out that there's like $42 million that our union is teaching them bank account. And this goes to there was an article, he was in Jacobin, I'm not sure about like the financialization of unions. And we're like $42 million. What is that? It's like, and they, you know, unions will brag like, Oh, we've got a $42

million war chest. But like, what are we spending that $42 million on? Is it to like fight arbitrations and constantly be making like our like working conditions better and taking fights the bosses is like, no, actually what they're doing is they're spending that money on settling unfair labor practice claims so they don't actually officially stick. War chest isn't even against the, you know, isn't to go to war against our, you know, supposed, you know, I mean, to go to war against management, it's to go to war against kind of us. And you think about it, it's just, it's just so wild when you start digging into this stuff. It's just crazy. Eric, you want to tell them about the office at Oakland? Yeah, so obviously, we're in the heart of the empire. You know, I live

of just a few miles from the CNA headquarters. And I've been there many times prior to the pandemic. You know, and I have taken part in lobbying in Washington, DC, on behalf of the union, you know, you know, nurses from all across the country that are in the union go to DC and we lobby for, you know, not only for single payer and Medicare for all, but, you know, individual bills that will benefit nurses across the country, whether they're in the union or not. And, you know, I'm very familiar with it. I've lobbied in Sacramento and I've been to the NNU convention in Minnesota. So I've met a lot of nurses across our union. In fact, it's one of the, when you do that, that's about the only time you get to reach out and see other union members.

One of the things I will tell you that John and I and the person that's not on the call right now is Mark Goodick. He is an American citizen now, but he was a Canadian nurse before. And he is right now working on our campaign video to introduce us to a broader audience. And that's why he's not on the call tonight. We should be intermingling and talking with other nurses across the country. I should not be siloed here in Oakland and not knowing that what a nurse is doing in Texas. And yeah, we need to be part of our pledges that we're, we need to join hands across this country. Every nurse needs to see, we need to digitalize our contract. We need to see University of Chicago's contract digitalized. We need to be sharing our contract so we know

what good things that maybe they got in Texas or what good things they got at the University of Chicago and what good things we have in our contract. We need to see that nurses can say, hey, I want that language. We need to be sharing that. I don't know why it's not happening or why it's just at the upper tiers of union management that they see these things, but we need to be joined together. No more siloing nurses, you know, out of base to nurses, stay in your lane, Kaiser nurses, stay in your lane, University of Chicago, stay in your lane. No, no, no, no, we need to be one fighting body for the betterment of nurses. It's amazing when you find out that we have a beautiful building that the union purchased in downtown Oakland. They only occupy a few floors

of it and they rent out the rest. You know what? It is a fabulous building and it would be great for it to be a headquarters where we're not just fighting and lobbying for democratic politicians, but we're actually fighting for nurses at the bedside. That's what, you know, our whole mission is that we're going to be running for, is for the Council of Presidents. We need to take the macro focus down to what is happening at the bedside for every nurse across the country and make the change for the better for them. That's the big difference here. I'm all for an activist union and we have been. The union is active and climate change and how the environment affects the community. These things are important, but it's more important that we take care of

the nurses at the bedside and offer opportunities for those nurses who want to be involved to make the community better. We need to have those resources available for them and if we make nurses lives at the bedside better, we're going to have more nurses available to make the community better and that's what we need to be working on. It is going to be a fight. I can't be more honest than to tell you, we are David versus Goliath. We are four nurses who really have no big national exposure, but the most important thing we have is that we're bedside nurses and we know what's important for bedside nurses. I do want to say there's four of us who are running for the council presidents, but we would not be even talking to you if we didn't have at least 100

nurses all over the hospitals that we're based in doing the work of building our campaign. I do want to point out that because our slate is free white guys and it's Reina, and we want to make sure that the choice that we made was not us coming together as four individuals being like, we should fix the union by ourselves. We keep mentioning labor notes, there is a healthcare worker chat with a fair number of nurses in our union and we noticed that there was an election coming up and this is also at the time when both all debates was having their issues and then in Cook County we had a particularly traumatic firing of a very popular staffer who without any input from the local nurses

or elected local nurse leadership and we got together and we all were like, what are we going to do? This is crazy and we had people like we're like, well, who would do like we have this opportunity and if we run as a slate, we can do things like get access to, we can send emails out to other nurses and break down those silos, connect nurses from across the country and we were like, well, if we don't do anything, we're stuck in this square one, a few small hospitals talking to each other, not small but a few hospitals talking to each other, still struggling against these silos that have been constructed for us by staff and we had a vote and there was over 20 nurses all together raised their hands and we're like, we could do this with

an imperfect group of people that we recognize isn't like the fully representative of everyone in the union but are fully committed to democratizing the union or we could sit and wait and a nurse who had been in the union for a very long time and she's now retired said, if you all don't take this chance, you don't know what could happen in three years from now, union could be completely different and so two thirds of everyone in that call said, it's time to go and we don't care, we would rather that you run and take that swing and maybe get big for all of us. So a big part of what we're doing is I've got a meeting with Cook County nurses on Thursday and they're all basically going to come to me and tell me all the shit that I need to do for them,

not the other way around. The rank and file leadership, it's like taking that pyramid and you invert it. The people who are matter the most are the regular bedside nurses and all we can do as people who step up into that role is we take that heat and put ourselves out there so that we can enact what our coworkers are asking us for. I literally have coworkers walking up to me, completely unsolicited. I'm not walking around until I told a few people up front in the beginning because I was like, all right, you're about to see my face on some flyers. Let me tell you why, but I now have coworkers coming to me and they're like, John, you've got to tell me what the fuck's going on because I heard a little bit about it and I need to help you. It's a little bit

like a drug, but I have to be careful because I can't let this whole thing. None of this, we all have to stay humble as we're doing this because all four of us, John, all four of us, we're volunteering to help other people to run. Exactly. We were like, okay, we're here, John, Art, Raina, myself, we're here to help you guys. Who's running now? We're going to help you and then it's like they're crickets. Exactly. It goes to show how impoverished the internal democracy of our union is that people who are leaders already did not feel comfortable or prepared to take on that kind of leadership role. These are nurses who have been in our union for decades who are taking fights with their bosses all the time already and they did not feel that

they knew enough about the union because there's an intentional, I believe, obscuring of how the union works. That's how you end up with a situation where people are like, well, I guess we're just kicking the door down for all these people who we know will be doing it better when we get it situated so that they can do it better. It's amazing, though, to tell us that in American history class or you have civics class, you learn about the US government. You know how it functions, how it runs, but when it comes to our union, we're all asking each other, we're putting pieces together. Oh, wait, I know the council presidents. Yeah. Well, how does this person fit into it? How does the board fit into this? Well, how does the election run? How is it done?

We had to search out the answers. We had to call all sorts of people and we were only getting bits and pieces. There should be a clear outline of how you run a democracy in a union. I mean, it shouldn't even be that difficult. Obviously, there would be specific rules for the union, but they shouldn't be occluded. They shouldn't be occulted from the members. We should clearly know how you step forward to be a more of a contributing member to the union, to run and to serve the others in the union. That was an amazing thing that we're finding out amongst each other. It's like, wow, how does our union run? I mean, why is it difficult to find out these things? I mean, I don't think it's insurmountable for us. I don't think that should disqualify us.

I don't think if we can step in and do healthcare in a pandemic, we can very easily learn how the union functions in a quick little tutorial. I don't think that's going to be a big deal for us. But yeah, it's pretty amazing. If we're talking about democracy in a union, how is it that it takes... I mean, to find the bylaws, we can all tell you it took a tremendous amount of effort to find the bylaws that are used and run by. Hold on. Hold on. Let me tell a story about the bylaws. We have a nurse in Chicago who decided to make a pain of themselves about how to get the bylaws. Instead, they went to the union. You're like, I want to see the bylaws. I want to see the bylaws. And they were like, and they give them the run around.

And eventually, they gave him... He got a personally-delivered envelope that was a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of the bylaws. And it's funny because legally, the bylaws are all supposed to be filed with the federal government and from our pressure and organizing to figure out how our union worked, they had to publish the newest set of bylaws on the federal reporting websites. I was in Oakland in 2019 for the Global Nurse Assembly, and there was an after-party, and it was a bunch of staffers and some nurses and just chit-chatting. And I was like, man, I told a story about the nurse who finally got a copy of the bylaws to one of these staffers. I was like, man, it'd be really great if we could figure out how

you got any hints for how the union works. And just as like, good luck with that. And they just disappeared. I mean, because what we're finding is that any staff that help nurses learn how the union works find themselves out of a job. That's what really sketches everyone out, is when people, I mean, you all could tell the story about the staffer who got, ran afoul. So I will tell you that there are a lot of great labor reps, a lot of really great people out there. But to tell you that they would communicate with us, because obviously I told you I've done all these other actions, so I know a lot of people. And they have my personal number, just because we would, you know, when we're in other cities, you know, you text each other.

And, hey, we're at this place now, where do we meet you, etc. So we were getting texts from some labor reps in the union saying, you know, you guys need to stand tall. There are a lot of us supporting you. We can't come out and publicly support you because we'll get fired. So yeah, so we were getting these texts from the labor reps saying, what they're doing to you is wrong. And they were, you know, we actually got together. And we, we wanted to go out on strike in October. And we were getting this run around from a group of this, I thought they were, it was just an inner cabal. Little did I know that it probably extends throughout the, you know, the organization, but that they were telling us that there was no need for a strike. And it seemed

they were trying to just pressure us into taking up pretty low ball contract. And so we're getting push, you know, the good labor reps are texting us like, stick it, stick to it, stick to it. And we actually got a postcard campaign. And we actually drove up to the executive director's house in Sacramento, knocked on her door and delivered 500 some postcards that we organized on our own, not, not with, you know, it wasn't a union driven, it was just nurses, union nurses driven. And we delivered postcards saying we want to go out on strike. And the union, of course, still fought us on it, but we were allowed to go out on strike. And there's a video of us confronting the executive director at our strike line, asking her why we were gagged,

why the mediator gagged us. And she clearly didn't know what was going on. She said, the mediator wouldn't gag you, why would they gag you? So she didn't even know what was going on at our table. We then got, we were contacted and they, we were told, Oh, my God, they're running around like chickens with their heads cut off because they're petrified that they might lose their jobs that they've been exposed to what they've been doing to you. And so one of the labor reps that used to work for us, she used to be at our hospital. And then she moved along and she was at a Southern Solano. And her nurses were asking, Hey, did you see this video of this speech Eric made on this, you know, at the strike line? And it was a speech where I kind of excoriated the

union about why they would gag us, that that wasn't, you know, we needed to be united and we didn't need a union, you know, working behind our back, we, they needed to stand with us. And so she says, well, let's see. So she was looking at the video on her union cell phone. And with the negotiators, nurse negotiators at her hospital, Southern Solano, who were also in negotiations with us that we weren't supposed to talk to, because, you know, the mediator forbade us. So she's showing the video. And they thought because she was formally at our hospital, that she was our inside scoop for all this information. I can swear to God and take a lie detector test. I had one exchange with her during like the 21 months that we were negotiating.

And it was at a joint bargaining council meeting on Zoom, where they kept the union kept muting us on Zoom. And preventing us from writing in the chat, because we were saying, we want to go out on strike. We want to go out on strike. And next thing, you know, we would find out we couldn't type in the, in the chat. So I texted her and says, can you see this? I'm trying to write in the chat and I'm forbidden from writing in the chat. They muted me. I can't type in. And she goes, I'm feel for you, buddy. I feel for you. That was my only exchange with her. That caused her, and the fact that her nurses asked her to look at this video with them. That's what cost her her job. Jeez. It was clearly guilt by association. And the charges were outrageous for her.

We had labor reps leave because they just felt that it was, they couldn't live with themselves with what they were doing to the nurses. It was incredible for them that they're here to work for the nurses. They're here to work for the most progressive union in the country. And it was a fraud. That's been like a big, like consistent problem is that we know that they are busting their own, like the staff are supposed to have a union. The staff have their own contract. And that's a normal thing inside unions, right? Yeah. You know, to keep, you know, we believe in that every worker who, you know, works for wages should be in a union. And we have seen time again that like the, like the contract that they've busted their own unions. So like that they've,

there was a slate that was run of nurses in, or not nurses, of the staffers. I think it was in 2021 where they were like, trying to get something together to change, you know, things inside, you know, how they relate to their management. And, and several of those staffers were basically legally fired. Jesus. So this is like, I mean, and I know you keep saying Jesus a lot, but like, there's a reason me, you know, me, I wouldn't be running into this sort of situation if it wasn't like so, you're like, out of, out of this world, the stories that we hear, and they're the same. This is what's disturbing is it. And it's because the union is bait. Like I was just talking to a lawyer today, she was looking over the bylaws of our union, and she's like, this is set up like

a local, like it's one big local union. It's got like a tiny little committee of people who are making the decisions that affect, or we believe that it's mostly the director, non nurse director staff that make the decisions, but these four people kind of rubber stamp them. And that they make decisions for 150, you know, 1000 some odd nurses. And it's so centralized, you know, this is one of the things is described as like, it's almost irresponsible, because, you know, we live in, you know, you know, crazy times and all it takes is one wrong election or bad decision in Supreme Court. And it would literally our union could be dissolved with like, you know, if they just arrested, you know, a handful of people and and froze our bank accounts.

And a big part of our goal is to help disperse those resources out, and to foster more local leadership so that in the event that, you know, something, you know, like that terrible happens, like, that we're not caught without anything. Because the way it's situated now is we have this massive concentration of all of the decision making and resources in a very small group of hands. And most of these people are not have never been nurses. Or if they've been nurses, they've been, you know, out of practice for so long, that they wouldn't know how I mean, maybe they put band-aids on. I don't need to like, I don't want to disparage anybody, you know, a nurse is a nurse, I know nurses, you know, you learn it, and you learn a lot of things,

it's really important, great skill. But there's something to be in practice. If I, you know, I can walk back into my, the medical ICU I used to work in, you know, now it's going on like five years, and be the same nurse that I was when I was at the peak of my practice there. And there's a real key thing to I think we're all committed, none of us are doing this because we want to be the face of California Nurses Association, National Nurses United for the next 20, like 30 years. We're doing this because we feel that there's a real value to there being a continual turnover in leadership, new ideas, people bringing in new energy. We think that nurses should have the opportunity to work release time so that they could see how the union works as

staffers from the inside and then go back to the regular jobs. We're doing everything we can to, like I like my job. I think my job's great. I don't want to leave my job. But doing what we can to bring our mentality as those bedside nurses to the sensibility of running the union, because nursing does give you a lot of really powerful tools as like you have to be able to listen to people. You know, we're not listening a lot tonight, but you know, we've got to talk and get the word out. Being able to kind of see the big thing we see is like, you know, you have a lot of people who will tell you things, and then they act in a different way. And that's a big part of nursing practice is being able to understand what people's real deal is. And, you know,

it's kind of that's one of the things that's real frustrating is like, we know when people are lying to us. Like, I know we all know when like the staff are lying to us. nurses do have bullshit detectors. That's for sure. You know, I slept through the the class in nursing school where they teach you how to grow eyes in the back of your head. The class I slept through where they teach you to get a third arm. And I really regret sleeping through the class where they teach you how nurse mitosis like being able to asexually reproduce an extra nurse. But I definitely didn't sleep through the class where I can learn where I can see when someone is saying one thing and then but it's like, but they're fucking lying to me. And that's like a that's like a constant

theme. And that's one of the things that's driving a lot of our organizing is that a lot of people are tired of just being lied to by people who were paying their paychecks. And it's like and it's like they think that we, I mean, we have staff informants, right? We know people inside staff who are allied with us. We know how they talk about us when we're not there. They talk about us like we can't figure this shit out. And it's like, motherfucker, I know how to keep a person alive, who's like, who shouldn't be alive. Like, I know how to walk a family through, like, you know, multiple family members with conflicting opinions through like an end of life discussion. And along with a doctor who can't really make up his mind, like, you don't think it while I've

got, you know, like multiple pressers and like continuous dialysis, you don't think I can't figure out like when you are like telling us one thing and then another thing's happening, we know why they're canceling meetings right now. They don't want us talking to each other, where we get that. And this is kind of like, it's, it's almost like a feminist practice. Like of women talking to each other makes men nervous. Right. And it's like nurses talking to each other makes management nervous. And it sure as hell is making our union nervous. We want our union to be encouraging nurses talking to each other and not like discouraging it. And anytime someone is discouraging people from talking to each

other who have similar concerns, that is an immediate, you know, like Eric was saying, the red flags, it's like, this is the kind of thing that like this is, it's like an almost an abusive relationship. You know, I would not be running if it wasn't this intense of a problem. This has been it could happen here. Join us tomorrow for part two of the interview, where shift change discusses more of their vision for what the union could be. In the meantime, you can find us on Twitter or Instagram at happen here pod. And you can find cool zone media the same place as that cool zone media. We've also posted a link in the description to shift changes, go fund me if you want to help

support their campaign. My space was the first major social media company. They made the internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space, feel like a nightclub and also slightly dangerous. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on my space because it turned out it was actually not a good business. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, main accounts, the story of my space, I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived

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even way worse than the money you took. But I am here to help. As a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself, I know how to identify the narcissist in your life. Each week, you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and the process of their healing from these relationships. Listen to navigating narcissism on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This case has all the markings of a ritualistic, a cult murder. The Manowar Caves. Well, I say the Lord works in mysterious ways. A brand new immersive fiction podcast. Well, he ain't got nothing on the devil.

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the thick of the fog gets. Listen to the Manowar Caves now on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here. We now continue our conversation with the team from ShiftChange. Enjoy. Outside of the obvious, the union is doing landlordism for some reason part, which is just sort of- I can't get over it, like what? What do you mean you have $44 billion dollars the thing you're doing is being a landlord? But yeah, I mean it seems like they're, you know, like out of one side of their mouth saying this is a democratic union, the other side of their mouth they're doing political purges, they're like doing everything

possible to make sure people don't know how the like democratic process works, which I think is a pretty like basic precept of democracy is that if it's impossible to figure out how the system actually works, it's not actually a democracy in any real sense. Yeah, and you know, yeah, and this is the thing you're saying is like they seem to be acting like bosses, like they're firing people, they get nervous when people start organizing, which is not a thing that you would think a union would be ecstatic if it's like, oh, hey, our nurses want to like organize themselves. I don't know, it's just- I mean, there's a mentality inside among some people and even among some of the nurses that like, you know, when people are

causing problems or, you know, it's the, yeah, it's a very, it's a very perplexing situation to be in. And many of us, it's taken us years to really figure it out because you don't, we all come to work, right, to do our job, you know, I don't come to work to like figure out every like little nuance thing about what's going on inside my union. I didn't become a union nurse because I wanted to be like a hero union member. I did it because it was down the street and it was a good job. And like, I wanted to be a nurse more than anything in the world. So, you know, this is, but this is what we do. And this is why things like labor notes and learning how your union works is really important. We've been self-educating ourselves. Like,

it's almost like you have to become a jailhouse lawyer, right? Yeah, we've been sharing our favorite resources for like, how do you learn about how a union works or what your rights are. And like, we're basically taking notes for what we're going to have to do when we, if we get in power inside the union to educate all of the nurses in our union. One of the things, I mean, every time I talk with people about this, I try and give little tips and tricks. Don't leave your staffer alone at the negotiating table. They'll tell you, oh, everything's going great. Go get some dinner. You come back and you can't do aggressive bargaining. You can't unbargain like a thing when someone's been empowered to decide something for you.

And this is where especially new, like new units in countries or parts of the country without strong union culture are finding that they'll step away from the bargaining table and they'll come back and then all these decisions will be made that they don't have any, you can't go back on it. It's like literally no backsies in like, in union negotiations. And so you have to say, there's no such thing as regressive bargaining. If I offer, if I say that I want a, you know, you offer a 50% increase in 50 cent an hour increase for floating to another union unit, I can't turn around and you can't offer me 45 cents the next go round. You cannot go back. If you said 50%, it has to be, you know, more than 50%

on the next offer, or you just say, that's my final offer. So, you know, the idea of regressive bargaining is, I have to tell you, it's amazing is that when we negotiated against Sutter in 2011 through 2013, we had multiple cases of ULPs filed for regressive bargaining on their part. They constantly made these mistakes, which we as nurses and the labor reps caught. And now for us, it's so important that we don't regressive bargain regressive bargaining on our own members here. We need to be moving forward. We should be making quantum leaps and bounds as nurses for what we've gone through. We're supposedly the most trusted profession in the country. I think it's the past 20 years. The only time we have not been the most progressive or the most respected

profession was in 2001. And you can obviously guess that it was firemen. It was firemen. But it's like 25 years or so in a row, we've been the most trusted profession. It's because, you know, how can you not trust somebody who's cleaning you up when you soiled yourself in the bed, who's holding your hand when you're scared? That's why we're the most trusted profession. And we should be the most respected for what we do. It's just amazing that our union can't carry us through that. Our union was formed in a revolution. We overthrew and kicked out management nurses and formed the California Nurses Association. The bargaining part of the organization, the association, broke away from the management part. And we, Torald Rodahl,

was a wonderful example of somebody who was part of that revolution. And for about 20-some, over 20-some years, we were a rabidly progressive union. We didn't have all the rank and file things that we should have had in the union, but it was in the right direction for nurses. And we've kind of made in the past 10 years this U-turn and the association, which I think is bad for nurses. We need to be going forward. And we have new nurses and a new generation that is joining the union, and they need to be a part of it. And they can't look at me and say that old Foggy that's been in the union for 30-some years, that I'll be doing the work for them, they need to be active in that union, and they need to love the idea of solidarity.

Out of the fires of desperation, burn hope and solidarity, it was one of the ladies said, I think Sharon Burrow from Australia, an Australian labor activist said that, that we need to have every union member. I don't think every one of them has to be rabid about it, but they should be aware that they need to stand tall and support each other. And not just even they need to support the non-union nurses, they need to get, we need to get more nurses unionized. The problem with unions is there's not enough unions out there, there's not enough people in the unions. We need to get more nurses unionized, and our union hasn't been able to do that in quite a while. We haven't, we've been raiding a lot of other unions, but we need to get out there

and get people in the south unionized. We need to get other nurses in the Midwest organized that aren't unionized yet. We have a bigger vision as bedside nurses, and I think that our national union has. I'm only as strong as the person next to me. I need support. As John said, yeah, we're four people running for the council presidents, but behind us, there's so many nurses supporting us. Nurses are texting me all the time, hey, give me some pliers, give me some buttons, I want to pass them out. It's important for us. I know we're at a disadvantage, we don't have, you know, the people we're running against, even though it's illegal for them to have the union promote them, they're obviously going to have that advantage like a sitting president,

because they're going to be in the National Nurse Magazine going around the country, you know, doing the things they do as sitting presidents, so they're going to get that free publicity. I wish our union presidents went around the country, because as far as I know, they've never come here to Chicago. Yeah, I think the only time we've been to Chicago is when we had that People Power convention there, and that was my first visit back to Chicago, and I think 10 years was when I went there. And it's amazing, it should be, our union should rotate, rotate where they have their conventions, we should be all around the country, we should be going to the South and having conventions so that we can attract people. I think it's

important, we need to make inroads. You know, I know a lot of it is they're going to say the pandemic, and I think the pandemic did hasten this siloing. And, you know, some of it was a little understandable, but even when it was evident that they should have come out of the borough, they never did. People have been saying how tired they are from the pandemic, right? I don't know how they could have been tired, the union could have been tired when they were just having Zoom calls. No, no, I mean, the nurses are saying that they're tired, but here's what's interesting, this is a thing that I'm seeing in real time as we're doing this work, is that nurses who have been exhausted and some of the most beat down like nurses who are in the worst

situations here in Chicago are tired, but then they hear something interesting is going on with the union that is actually something that they have a say in, which is very unusual in our union, and people get very excited. So I'm having coworkers coming up to me who are the least interested in union business until maybe it's time for a strike. And, you know, it's interesting because like when we did our strike organizing 2019, the first strike in Chicago's of nurses in like 40 years in Chicago, you know, they kept, it would call these small kind of symbolic actions, and they call them stress tests or structure tests for like, you know, we're going to do, we're going to do a press conference, and you'd have like, you know, a handful of nurses come out

for the press conference, you know, like 10 or 15 nurses who come out, and they're like, oh, they're all ringing their hands. And then we start calling pickets, and then we start blowing past our turnout numbers. And then when we did our strike, they were expecting 800 nurses or 12, 1400 nurses, more nurses than ever been in any one place in our hospital, like it was like a giant party. And so it's kind of like when people have, know that there's something that really has like they have a stake in, right? There's an infinite amount of energy almost. And this election is really kind of like, we can't make the buttons fast enough to give away, like they keep people keep coming up and they're like, here, give me a handful, I've got coworkers, and we're doing,

there's, you know, let's get the pictures of everyone with their nurse with their with their shift change buttons, shift change. And, you know, we're turning that stuff into we're getting ramped up and prepared for like our social media, like outreach. And this is part of it is like getting people to see like, hey, there are people out there who want to do something different. And it put you like as a as a bedside nurse, this is our opportunity to get you into the driver's seat of how your union is run, how strikes are called, how we negotiate, like we want to have a council of hospitals in contract campaigns, it's just nurses from negotiating teams. So that they can all so we can coordinate and decide when we want to go on strike. And it's not someone who's never

been a nurse, making that call for us. Yeah, which seems just baffling that you'd have some random person who hasn't been a nurse, making strike decisions. I mean, the fact that it's not also just, there seems like there's such an enormous gap between the things you would just basically fundamentally expect a union to be doing and what's actually happening, which is nothing to do with that. And it's just the sort of, I mean, almost it seems like intentional demobilization. Well, they want to treat us like a spigot, like they want to, like you can turn us on and turn us off. You know, the problem is, is that people don't respond to that well. And you kind of constantly have to be honing your practice through defending the contract, which is a big thing that

like a lot of my coworkers are just constantly annoyed at that the contract we're not defending. Our chief nurse rep is always annoyed that she can only, you know, scrape together, you know, like four or five people. And, you know, I do it. And I'm not like, I'm really good when I'm in the room with, you know, my coworkers think that I do a good job. But, you know, when it comes time to like doing all of the reading and everything to make sure it's done, I need, you know, it's the thing that I'm always working on and trying to get better at. But, you know, that is kind of the lifeblood of trade unionism is like, if you're going to have a contract, you need to in between contract bargaining campaigns where you can go on strike,

you need to be constantly probing and pushing and finding where the weak spots are and keeping people in the practice of like fighting. And if you do that and you're really effective at it, you can affect some pretty impressive changes in between contracts. When our friend was, was the labor rep at Cook County, they went from having maybe like 10 people doing like the rep work to over 60 people doing the rep work. She partnered with a really phenomenal chief nurse rep who had a family, her dad had been, you know, president of a SEIU local. And they were, they had pushed so hard that they were able to re to open negotiations for attention bonuses, which after you've settled a contract is like to open something on economics,

like on the order of, you know, 15, 20, 15 or $10,000 retention bonuses is a huge deal. The problem was is that then they fired her when she connected us at Cook County or the nurses at Cook County with nurses at University of Chicago. And we started comparing notes with what our staff were like. And their chief nurse reps started asking the director of bargaining who's not a nurse and has never been a nurse to say, why is it that we're bringing in, why is my facility bringing in $4 million worth of dues? And we get like, you know, $220,000 worth maybe of staff. Like, what's the deal? And why is it that we don't spend any money on arbitration or any of this stuff? They're constantly afraid of doing anything. And that's when they fired Natalie.

And then and now they're down to they're trying to whittle those those nurses retention bonus negotiations down to like 3000, 4000 bucks from like 15,000. You know, you bring in the right people and all of a sudden management has to like hire in like an entire legal extra legal department at Cook County Health Services. It's not it's not that somebody is not a nurse. That doesn't matter. Natalie was not a nurse. Yet she was an outstanding example of what a labor rep should be. An organizer. Yeah, I mean, she you stand with the workers. I just I do believe that we need more nurses involved in in organizing and inside the union. But I have no issues with, you know, when you have labor reps like Natalie, that's that's what you need to keep the union

thriving. And unfortunately, to cut her down when she was making inroads to really empower nurses and the union was it's just beyond the pale to make that decision. Why they made that decision is something that I think if we won the presidency, we'd want to find out. Why was that decision made? Because big part of this is holding the holding the staff accountable is our big thing. Like we just need to know at right now, there's no accountability to so imagine having a job where like if you were a nurse, like if we're speaking to our co workers right now, imagine being a nurse, and no one ever checking your charting. No one ever checking what a patient has to say about the care they got. No one asking a doctor like what you did during a

shift, right? No one checking your like to see if like all of your vital signs are actually really reflected in like the monitor. That's the situation we're dealing with staff right now. No one who's outside of their staff bosses at the director level has there's they're only accountable to those people and they are only accountable and they're not actually accountable. They just write like they write everything themselves. They write their own reports. They get they, you know, they'll take, you know, a nurse will come up with a good idea. They'll run it up the flagpole, check out this awesome idea have boss. I mean, it sounds like a downer. I guess it's like it all sounds very like this is all grim and like depressing. But the fact is, is that we are at a

point now where we see what's going on and what we need to do. We've been educating ourselves about what can be done to change the union because the union is a democratic structure, even in like just the shell form of it. And as nurses, we've got a lot of faith that as nurses, we can figure this out and come up with a much better, more democratic way to run our union. And I think that it'll fundamentally be a much stronger organization. I think that's the fear is that somehow we like, you know, some people are like, oh, you're going to make it worse. It's like, I don't know that you could make it worse. It's like, you know, there's the healthcare industry is changing. I think we're seeing this in real time is the healthcare industry is changing.

And we are seeing to the, you know, you have hospitals that come up with the most cutting edge version of healthcare, like the University of Chicago, or the university systems out in California, or maybe like Stanford, that's like the very like the top end of like what healthcare is. And those hospitals are like basically there might as well be gold mines. And then you've got the safety net hospitals. And my fear is that the safety net hospitals, they would like to casualize to Uber, they keep telling us about, oh, they're going to Uberize nursing. Well, you know, what is it that they're doing to stop, you know, over half of the nurses being at Cook County Health Service from being replaced with agency nurses right now? Like, how long is that going

to go until there's like, you know, they go from a bargaining unit of, you know, over 1500 nurses in the union or 1700 nurses in a union to like, you know, it could theoretically drop down to, you know, a handful of union nurses. And so they felt like they it's like an unofficial layoff, right, people quit, and they institute a hiring freeze, and then they don't replace them. They bring them in as agency nurses, because they would rather in these safety net institutions, not pay benefits, not pay pensions, you know, our hospital we lost, they took our pension away, and the union didn't do anything to fight that back. I was in the pension plan for like two years, and then they were like, guess what? No more pensions. And the union didn't do shit about it.

And they could have done something. I mean, it was like, it's because the contract language was like, well, you get whatever we offer you. And our teamsters in our facility took like a very, like a hundred, you know, two to $400 buyout to get rid of their pensions. And that was the end of our pensions for the entire medical center. And then our union, where our staffers are all bought into the steelworkers pension, right, they have a pension, they're like, well, John, maybe you'd have to strike six or eight times, which is what they say whenever they don't want to do anything. And they certainly aren't telling us about hospitals, like the folks that all debate who are struck like 10 times to get what it takes. And it's just like, you know, striking,

I think there's this idea that it's scary. I have coworkers who are telling me, John, just tell me when the next strike is, I can't wait for the next strike. But we've been through it. We have a lot of coworkers who haven't happened. Our nurses are new. They've never been through a strike. But, you know, you build a union through strikes, which is the thing that some is a little counter intuitive, especially if you do it the right way and you're strategic about it. Raina, you've been real quiet. Like, what do you think about all this? That's really the number one. I'm a lady. And I don't interject unless I absolutely have to. So to go back earlier, which what was said about how unique our slate is, well, it's unique in itself for one, of course,

I kind of sit with being a female and minority. But you also got to think about the men. Now, there is not a lot of men in nursing in general. And I think that's what also they need to look at because I heard the criticism about that. But let's flip the script on this. I mean, we individually, as Eric and John did say before, that we were not here to be a council of presidents long day. We was actually jumping on it to help other people. But for, you know, I, myself and Eric, we've been knowing each other for what, seven, six, seven years. Yeah, something like that. And that's about right. Yeah. And, you know, I have seen the changes with the union. I feel that the union has been really stagnant. I think our dues should be used for community.

And now during the pandemic, there is a lot of nurses are totally burnt out. And they're slowing to realize that nursing is not what I thought I did not sign for for this pandemic. I never, I've been a nurse for 13 years. I never knew that was never thought it was going to be a pandemic like this. So it changed your whole spectrum of what nursing stands and also what we should do to preserve it. Now, I, you know, I look young, but I am a grandma about to be a four. And so one of them are going to be a nurse one day. And actually, one of them is a 10 year old. And he told me, he said, you know, looking at all my nursing books and looking at, you know, all the medical stuff. And he's looking at me, he said, you know what, I may want to be a nurse.

Now, mind you, two years ago, he wanted to be a race car driver. So it happens. So it kind of inspired me a little bit like I need to do more leadership. I mean, I think I'm a natural leader in itself is just how to do it, where to go. And this is just a step for me. I'm at that age, you know, I need to look behind me of all the younger nurses, my family and what my young grandchildren, what they may be. And I want to preserve that. And that's a third reason why I'm standing to do this. So in my peers, I mean, you work any nurse work eight to 12 hours, the facility that you work with is almost a second home to you. So you want to stand up with your peers, you know, there shouldn't be no divide, we're all standing for an employer who has been

in trying to take benefits away, trying to take, you know, anything that makes it decent for you to just work and also is wearing and tearing on your, your wellness and your work like balance and just your whole mental state. So it's, it's so important to really know about your union, about the breakdown of it, about the history, about everything you need to keep your employer accountable. And also within the union, just like nurses have to be accountable for everything we do. And if we get in trouble, of course, we're going to be reprimanded, the union needs to also go through the same thing as we do. It's only fair. So that's pretty much it for me. Any other questions? I got your reading. Are you have you finished up your copy of a solidarity unionism

yet, Reina? Oh, you mean the ranking file? I am on chapter three. It's been on, it's been interesting. And since I will be going on vacation, well, I am on vacation right now, I'll be leaving tomorrow. I should be finishing up that book by then. That's a, that's one thing that like, I don't want anyone to think just because I can speak about the union in a halfway intelligible way that I've been studying this for a long time. A lot of my knowledge about the union is pretty new and recent. And like I got, you know, I picked up a copy of Stoughton Lens, the rank and file labor law for the rank and filer. There's an audio book of it. It's just this great, like short little book

about everything you need to know to kind of like exercise your rights and try and stay out of like trouble. I picked up a copy of, you know, Jane McCavelary's No Shortcuts. We've been passing around a copy of Stoughton Lens, Solidarity Unionism. And like there's a lot, and then we went to labor notes and like, it's funny because our union sent us to labor notes. Like I've got pictures of me and like other shift change people that were taken by staff that we were at the labor notes conference. The funny thing was that I was in the talks about how to build a caucus and how to exercise their democratic rights. I was one of the few, the only nurses in some of those spaces. And, you know, I don't know what they expected to happen, but the way they're treating this whole

thing, every little thing that we've gotten, the fact that we can, that we were about to be able to send emails out was the thing that we had to fight for every step of the way. They gave us a set of rules that the rules are the most conservative interpretation of our legal democratic rights that are set in federal law. They gave us like the 1950s like Carpenters Union interpretation of like those, those rights. They ignored all the case law that we have to be able to communicate with our coworkers through normal union channel, like every communication method our union uses to normally communicate with us. Legally, we should have access to. Now they're trying to throttle that. It's like, all you can only send an email communication every 15 days. It's like,

you know what, like you're doing your little whisper campaign, like 24 hours, 24 seven, just by, and then you have to opt in to like, to communication about the, about the election. Like they, they were trying to keep and they're cutting meetings short. They're cutting meetings off. They were trying to bury this. Now we think that they're, they're trying to shift gears because they know that this is a lot more serious than, than they thought it was. You know, we're not here to, you know, turn the union upside, like, well, maybe turn the union upside down is a good way to think of it, but in a good productive way, not in a, you know, turn it upside down and shake it, you know, to like, you know, destroy it. We want to turn it upside down so that it's the way a real

union is supposed to be. Is it people who are elected into leadership are accountable to the people who elect them? And, and our goal is to, you know, to make the union like we want to go from something like, you know, Chicago teachers union, which is really powerful and famously like democratic. Wasn't always that way. It was only focused on very basic stuff, you know, before the women in the Chicago teachers union took it over and changed it for the better. You know, that's our goal, is we want our union to be to have that internal, vibrant discussion and debate about how the union should be work, should work, because we know that as nurses that we've got the skills and the capacity to have impact on that, as we said, we don't think that people who are paid out of our dues should

ever be afraid when a nurse opens their mouth and says, I think things could be better, or I don't like how this is happening. Yeah. And I think, I think one more thing I do kind of want to add is that you know, you were talking a bit earlier about sort of the risk of stagnation. And I mean, I think something that people don't want to hear is that like, you know, there's been a wave of militancy in the last few years, but the actual union, like the actual unionization rate of the US keeps going down. And I think a big part of that is, you know, like even even even in the periods when unions are really strong, they got into these sort of bureaucratic patterns where people were busy sort of fighting their own internal, like busy fighting their own rank and

file. And then when the bosses came for them, they got destroyed. And I don't know, like it really seems like a moment where either unions are going to, you know, people like you are going to win and you get these rank and file movements that are changing what the union is to be what it's supposed to be, or the last remnants of unionism is going to die. And that's, I don't know, like, I mean, it's depressing, but that's like, if you just look at the unionization rate chart, it just keeps going down and down and down. And every time it seems like it's hit or do low, it's like it finds another way to go out, which I guess it's kind of a grim way to look at it. But I don't know, I mean, it is very positive to think about how, how

there's organizing that's difficult. It's hard to get people to do some things, right? It's difficult to pull people together for, you know, certain types of organizing when they don't feel like they have a say or a stake in what's going on. But I will say that like it has been, it is always eyeopening when I watch my coworkers pull together in this thing. And I think that there's that common experience at work. And especially care workers right now, it is like, that is driving us to do different things. There's a reason why we're having a rank and file movement in our union now. And things aren't just continuing to stagnate. I think that people recognize that their union has to be fighting for them. I think that's a big thing. People want the union to fight

not to just kind of like sit there. And, you know, you know, people get really frustrated when they feel like their dues are being taken and they're not seeing that immediate benefit. The immediate benefit only comes when we pull together and we fight back. So I think that I totally see what you're saying. I think a lot of that comes down to people who get into these positions. And this is why we believe in the principle of like rotation and churning over the leadership as much as possible is that I think when you stay in it, no one should be in the position of organizing yourself out of a job, right? If you're doing your, if you're being effective, you're organizing yourself out of a job. And I have organized out of myself out

of some jobs. And right now I've organized myself out of telling people that there's a movement and that we've got to participate in it. And now I'm moving on to other things because I have like a whole crew of people in my hospital who are doing that organizing work without me having to do it. So I think that there's like, it can be a little depressing when you look at like the raw numbers. But I think that a lot of that is like, it's like, if you, if your union is clearly not great and people kind of complained about it, then yeah, no one's going to want to join it. Like if your union thinks it's more important to be a landlord or, you know, stash $42 million in the bank, then it is to invest that money in actually building organizational expertise

or, you know, building, organizing the unorganized like Eric was saying, in places that are like right to work states, which we've won. We have won contracts in right to work states, but you have to be looking, you have to be constantly pushing for it. And if you can't just take a little win here there and then be excited because you just got another union to affiliate you like our union does, like we need to be working on actually bringing more and more workers into our union. And if we don't do that, it will die. But I think that there's a spirit in, you know, that, you know, when you come to a place to work with coworkers and you face common enemy and common problems, common conditions, you do see what it can look like when people decide to

do something on their own. You know, to get back to Mia's point about declining unionism in this country, in order to, you know, to change this decline in unionism, we need to change who we are as union members. We need to, you know, that I'm not a big Dr. Phil fan, but he used to say that thing all the time. Well, how's that working for you? Unions need to take a look at themselves and say, how is this working for you? We are declining. Why do we continue to do the same thing we're doing over and over again? We need to change who we are. For example, as a nurse, a nurse needs to know when they stand up and speak out, that when they stand up, they won't be standing alone, that there'll be somebody around them, that other nurses are

going to be there right behind them, backing them up. And that goes for any trade. You know, we can't progress as workers without struggle, and there will be struggle. We need to march forward. We need to be able to say everybody that can be in a union should be in a union. And we need to expand ourselves. As nurses, I mean, I don't want to harp on it, but this pandemic was devastating for us. Obviously, no nurses worked remotely. No, I should say, no bedside nurse worked remotely. I know many of our nurse managers worked remotely and checked in on us through online things. But for the most part, every nurse, bedside nurse, was at that bedside. It was not pleasant. It was something that I'm sure

many nurses are probably in counseling for. They were that traumatized by it. Many people had lost family members, just like the rest of the public did, yet they still had to continue to work. I think as a union, we need to change who we are. And like I said, I don't want to point fingers or anything at people that are in the union now or the people we're running against. I'm sure they're good people, but we have a different idea, and we want to bring a change to how the union runs. And I think that change will make us a stronger and better union, and I think we'll have happier nurses, and we'll end up with more activist nurses who will expand the union. It's going to be a word of mouth. One thing, you can have the best organization in the

world, but the things that are the best product, but what really makes your product work, what makes your product worthwhile is word of mouth campaigns. People have to talk about you. People have to say, hey, that California Nurses Association, and then you, they're really doing something. I want to be a part of that. We've been pressing on Medicare for All, single payer, and of course ratios for everybody, but we need to start organizing more in all those states where those workers suffer. Because I can tell you this right now. I never talked about it with John. Our hospital is filled with nurses from the South, and they tell you, oh, I came to California for the ratios.

They need to fight for those ratios back in Alabama, in Mississippi, and all the states they come from. We need to help them bring unions to the South. The basic core of right to work was racism. The racism is what drove right to work. It was the same people that brought you segregation as what brought you right to work. That's a fact. It's important for us that we want to be an activist union, and I'm not opposed to that. But we can do that by unionizing these hospitals and making those nurses' bedside lives a lot better. Stoughton Lynn, it's funny is that I always laugh. John brings it up. I'm originally from Canton, Ohio. Of course, Stoughton Lynn taught, I believe it was at Youngstown State. He spent

the last part of his life after his Vietnam War activism in the Youngstown area. I think the last book I read by him was Wobblies and Zapatistas. He was talking about it. It's a great book. Not many people know about him. I knew about him in Ohio because social justice worked there. At that time it was Walsh College and then Walsh University now. Joe Torma, the professor there, was often talk about Stoughton Lynn, and that's how I started reading a lot of his works. The things that he says about rank and file workers is something that we need to make part of the national conversation. We need to get that message out. We need to tone down the big union actions and the big union talk. Let's just make it a nurses' conversation.

We always talk about our union about nurses' values. Nurses' values are invaluable. They apply to every walk of life, every trade. I think that's what we need to do. I know that's what Mark would say if he was on the call with us. I just got a text from him. He's almost finished with our video. He's working hard. The guy took two weeks of his own time. That's another thing. Here we are. We are bedside nurses. He had to self-teach himself how to make pretty high-end quality videos. We're not bought and sold. We don't hire anybody to do our work for us. We're doing this ourselves. We're bootstrapping it as what they call bootstrapping it yourself up here. We are bootstrapping a campaign and a movement. I don't know if we're

going to win. We are at least going to make a hell of an impression on people. I hope whether we win or lose, that impression goes far and that people listen to what we're saying and demand what we're standing for, what we want our union to be. We don't want to have an SEIU-like union. We don't want to like we're paying for services here. We want a union that listens to us and does what we want. A nurse shouldn't have to beg a labor rep to say no. We said no to a last best and final. Our labor rep said, no, in our professional opinion, this is a good deal. Well, guess what, Mia? We got 10% more by saying no. And I know that sounds greedy, but in reality, we do get paid considerably more in California

than in other places in the country, but also to buy a house in a bad neighborhood is a million and a half dollars. I have to drive an hour away just to get to work. It is cheaper where I live right now than it is in the Bay Area. I could not get a house in the Bay Area at all. And we should be incorporating housing demands into our negotiations as well. Especially if you're going to be a landlord. Well, okay, how about the first public housing was really cooperative housing built by unions? There's no reason why some of these institutions are incredibly wealthy and building. If we have the kind of power to bring them to a screeching halt, we should be able to get the kind of things that we need to live by in our community.

Like we should be living where our patients are anyway. And it's a way of bringing us ourselves into our community so that our community is that we're part of our community. And I think we're, I'm just going to say, I'm going to be waking up in six hours so that I can go back to work. And we want to make sure that people know a couple of key things. So, there is an election happening. If you are a nurse in a CNA California Nurses Association or National Nurses United and an OC like hospital, there is an election happening. Ballots are being mailed out to you on April 10th. We expect that they're going to start arriving a day or two after that. We are the shift change slate. So the four of us are running

for the Council of Presidents. It's Eric, Reina, John, and Mark. And if you want to find us on social media, we just got our Instagram account. We are called ShiftChangeNNU. We're on TikTok. Now we're going to be releasing some videos, ShiftChangeNNU. And then we're also going to have we've got our YouTube and Facebook set up as well. Look for us there. And we've got to go fund me because we've got to buy the materials that we are using to help organize with. Thankfully, by the sounds of it, our lawyers are going to be working for us because they believe in what we're doing. And these are movement lawyers. These are not right wing people who want to fight unions. They want unions to be accountable to the workers and to be strong fighting unions.

And that's our main goal is we think that our union could be one of the most powerful unions in the country if we organize and fight and we organize by building our relationships, trust and solidarity by constantly working to defend our contract. And we think that as we build that energy, we can take that to all the other things that we think are important as nurses. So when we talk about nurses values, we know those are actually nurses values and not some person who decided that they're going to tag along with us and ride on our coattails to whatever political future that they think they have. This is our union and we're going to make it accountable to us so that we can change the world and change our workplace and make being a nurse one of those

kind of jobs that people aspire to and not something that they come into for two or three years and then leave because it's so terrible. So I don't know what else to say. I'm ready for shift change. Raina, you ready for shift change? Yep. And just like Nelson Mandela say, I never lose. I either win or I learn. Hell yes. Hell yeah. I love this. This is the stuff I look for. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mia. Thank you. Thank you all for being on this. This is great and I really hope you all win. And if we win, bring us back. Yeah, that's what I have to say. Yeah, give us a report back. We'll tell you everything that happened and maybe if we win, we'll have a nice victory party and maybe we'll let you come out, you and the rest of the It Could Happen Here crew maybe do some

live stuff for us because I think that should be a kick out of that. Every time I hear a nurse say that I listened to It Could Happen Here, a part of me just like does a little snoopy happy dance. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of 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. Start a coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows.

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