It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 251

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait a hold up. They change all of that. Yes. It's real.

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Starting point is 00:00:38 I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of betrayal, Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life until the messages started. Someone's not going to make it out of this alive. Every piece of evidence pointed to the wrong guy. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal Season 6 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The new NFL season is here. And you should be listening to NFL Daily as we march along to Super Bowl 61. It is in the name, NFL Daily.

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Starting point is 00:02:14 We're looking at the opportunity of a lifetime for us and the other families. It's about the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. What's in the tunnels? Gold bars, Sylvainich. It could be worth half a billion. Starring Steve Sharipa, Ray Abruzzo, and me, Michael Imperioly. How far you're prepared to go?

Starting point is 00:02:31 Depends how far you are. Listen to Underground Zero on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On recent episodes of The Questlove Show, I chatted with Jojo about her music and Wallow 267 about his story, everything in between. Don't invite me to karaoke. I'm going to make it weird. Someone's going to try to sing, leave it out, or too little, too late, or baby it's you. Oh, no. And I'm going to be like, okay, cool.

Starting point is 00:02:57 Check out my conversation with JoJo, Wilo, 267, and more on The Questlove show. Listen to the Questlove show on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Peace. I believe that whoever was in that room and did that was a murderer. A new podcast series, Faultline Haditha, tells the story of a shocking crime and a cover-up

Starting point is 00:03:20 at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps. If you've got five players, and you offer immunity to four, you better be right about the fit. Because if you're not, then you've just given immunity to your color. Listen to Faultline Haditha on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, Media. 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.

Starting point is 00:03:58 If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen here. My name is Dan Al-Kurd. I'm a researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics. And today I want to talk about the truly insidious stories coming out of the West Bank that read separately look like a spike in settler violence. But red together look like something else entirely. On August 9th, settlers surrounded three Palestinian homes in a neighborhood called Rosalayan on the edge of a village called Kusra south of Nablis. They didn't leave. 21 days later, at least four people were still inside one of those houses cut off from water,

Starting point is 00:04:45 electricity, and basic supplies. Getting food into those people meant coordinating through the village mayor, which was a process that took three to four days. The Israeli army put up three new roadblocks, and in July, the village mosque was burned. I want you to sit with that for a minute because this is not a raid. This is not a rampage. It's a siege with a bureaucracy attached. And that bureaucracy is the story.

Starting point is 00:05:11 And that's what I want to talk about today. And I'm trying to be precise about the difference because the distinction is not academic. It determines what you think the problem is and therefore what you think the solution would look like. Here's the framing you'll get from almost every Western outlet. and of course every Israeli official, that this is a fringe and that these settlers are a violent fringe and they embarrass the state and the state condemns this fringe. When settlers besieged Kusra, Prime Minister Netanyahu did issue a statement and here I'm quoting, condemning the quote criminal acts of violence committed in the village of Kusra by a handful of rioters who are violating the law. And Israeli President Herzog also condemned it and the foreign ministry condemned it as extremist and criminal.

Starting point is 00:05:56 violence. So let's take that framing seriously for a moment because if it's true, what we're looking at is a law enforcement failure, a state that's lost control of its most radical citizens. And if it's false, what we're looking at is a state carrying out a policy through deniable means, and the condemnations are not a failure at all. They're a feature. They're the part of the machine that faces outward. So let's go through what actually happened in these villages, and then let's ask, Which of these framings fits the evidence best? So Basel al-Adra, the journalist from Masafiriata, the one who you know from no other land, the documentary that won a bunch of awards. He published a piece in Jewish currents on September 3rd about livestock theft in the South Hebron Hills.

Starting point is 00:06:43 So this isn't vandalism, it's theft, it's organized removal of livestock. So shortly after midnight on August 21st, in a place called Kherbert Dir Shams, a family was attacked by roughly 15, settlers with sticks and stones. One of them describes it flatly. They basically opened the pen where the family kept around 70 goats, and then they opened the sheep pen where there were about 100 sheep. And as the settlers moved off with the animals, Israeli army vehicles passed nearby. And in his words, they did nothing. Nearly two weeks later, not one animal has been recovered. Back in July, in another village, a settler pepper sprayed a man, and then more settlers arrived, and then a flock of about 122 sheep were targeted and taken.

Starting point is 00:07:27 Soldiers did show up that time. According to one of the villagers, what the soldiers did was push the Palestinians away from their own animals while settlers broke the locks. And of roughly 227 animals taken that day, nine came back. Four residents of the village were arrested and then released. Bitsselm, which is an Israeli human rights organization, has counted 17 livestock theft incidents in 26 alone.

Starting point is 00:07:50 And a flock of the size that we're talking about, out here, it's worth something on the order of tens, if not $100,000. I'm flagging this because I think it's easy to hear sheep and these kinds of things and file it maybe under like property crime or vandalism or something. But for a herding family in the South Hebron Hills, the flock is not just an asset. It's the entire productive base of the household. It's the income. It's the reason to stay on that hillside. So if you want to expel a pastoral community, you don't just expel them, you can take its animals, and then it can expel itself. And it does so in a way that produces no photograph of a bulldozer.

Starting point is 00:08:31 Another incident was on July 8th, when the head of Israel's Central Command signed a land seizure order. And that order takes dozens of dunums of land from Belin and three neighboring villages to build a security road, six and a half kilometers long and eight meters wide, connecting the settlement of Modain Elite to an outposts called Stay Ephraim. Sorry, I don't know Hebrew, so I'm going to be butchering these. But Orin Zev reported this for 972 Mac on September 2nd. So those who are familiar with Palestinian Popular Resistance in the mid to early 2000s, you've heard of Berlin. Lots of documentaries about it, lots of international attention. This village basically sustained weekly demonstrations against the separation wall for something like 15 years, because this wall was

Starting point is 00:09:20 being built on their land and taking huge chunks of their land. In 2007, the Israeli High Court ordered that part of the wall removed, and the land actually came back to the village. So in the international imagination, this was the best outcome. See, the nonviolent resistance worked. And this is the nonviolent resistance that Western commentators often point to when they want to lecture Palestinians about tactics. Now, this road that they're proposing runs through the land that was returned. So Muhammad Khatib, who led some of these protests, says the point is not a road, it's a settlement corridor. It's basically an eventual seizure of something like 600 dunums. And the attorney Michael Spard put it very bluntly. They don't think twice about co-opting the security argument

Starting point is 00:10:07 for purposes that are clearly settlement oriented. And what's really ludicrous is that this road runs through a wadi, kind of a valley, which from an actual security standard, point is a bad place to put a road. So the security rationale isn't just contested. It's incoherent, which tells you that the word security here is doing legal work, not tactical work. It's this just magic phrase that converts a settlement expansion into a military necessity and then a military necessity into a signed order from a general. A third incident or set of incidents I want to talk about is these hikes. There have been these hikes. This is a really ridiculous, insidious story. Aharon Perrath and Roy Klytman published an investigation of these hikes in 972 mag in late August

Starting point is 00:10:55 about these hiking groups, these organized settler hiking groups in the West Bank. They've got really cutesy names sometimes, like hiking buddies. And they publish their routes. And they go from settlement to settlement, and they cross Palestinian farmland and springs and villages. So a hike near the north of Hebron, one of these hikes, ended with a, quote, civilian security coordinator opening fire and killing 17-year-old Palestinian Karim Shalde and seriously wounding another one. So that's, I think, the whole episode in two words. A civilian security coordinator. This is not a hiker who lost his temper. It's a job. It's an

Starting point is 00:11:36 armed, appointed part of the chain of command. The man who fired was functionally an arm of the state, but supposedly on a hike in a village that is not his. On July 24th, near the village of Tal west of Nablus, a hike ended with six people dead, two Israelis and four Palestinians. David Sayyad, who founded one of these hiking groups, basically says the quiet part in a single sense. Wherever the hiker's foot treads,

Starting point is 00:12:02 there the border will pass. So he's talking about how they're going to places they haven't been to in a long time or maybe ever. And on the question of the army, he explains the relationship very precisely. We don't ask for permits, he says. We mainly notify them so we don't put the sector on alert. And this is very clear in a lot of their quotes about this issue.

Starting point is 00:12:23 They coordinate with the army, they notify, but they are not asking permission. And the army isn't policing them. It's being kept in the loop so that it could protect them. And the reporting traces this back over a decade. There's a 2013 hike documented with 100 hikers and soldiers accompanying them. So supposedly this recreational activity has a stated territorial doctrine, a published route through other people's fields, an armed participant base and a military that gets notified. All right, so we have four things. The livestock theft with soldiers

Starting point is 00:13:09 watching, a siege of villages, a seizing of land, and armed hikes with military escorts. Now let's get back to Prime Minister Netanyahu's phrase about this being a handful of riots. A riot is unplanned. A riot has no logistics. A riot does not file paperwork. What's in front of us here is very different. Because here, I think a lot of people who are critical of the state of Israel might make the argument that the settlers are the state. But I think this loses a little bit of analytical detail. So let me make this a little bit more specific, which I actually think is more damning. The Israeli state and the settler movement are not identical, but they are complementary because they perform different functions in the same project. And it's very clear that

Starting point is 00:13:56 the division of labor is the point. Because think for a moment about what each half can do that the other can't. Settlers can do things the state can't do openly without incurring some diplomatic cost. For example, taking a flock of sheep or burning a mosque or standing outside a house for three weeks. These are acts with no legal basis. There's no order, no minister to sanction, no policy to condemn at the UN, they produce displacement without producing a decision. And then the state can do things settlers can't do on their own. It can sign a seizure order. It can declare land, state land. It can build the road that makes the outpost viable and connected to the grid and route the bus line. And it can decline to investigate when things happen. It can arrest four Palestinians instead of the 15 masked settlers,

Starting point is 00:14:43 which is exactly what happened in one of these villages. And crucially, the state can supply this ambiguity that lets the whole thing keep running. The soldiers present at these incidents are not intervening because not that they're absent. It's in fact a specific posture of the state. It converts this crime into something sanctioned and it tells the Palestinian family there's really no one to appeal to. And this is what political scientists who study this stuff in other contexts as outsourced or deniable repression by paramilitaries or militias or unknown gungmen, quote unquote. We recognize it instantly when it's in other places, and we understand kind of the analytical move here because you don't ask whether the state ordered it. You ask whether the state built

Starting point is 00:15:29 the conditions under which it happens. And by that test, this is not ambiguous at all. But for some reason, when we talk about Israel Palestine, things get a little bit more ambiguous. I also want to point out something really crucial, which is that every one of these incidents, and they've been happening for a while, but they've ramped up in severity. But every one of them produces a permanent gain. The animals that are stolen don't come back. The road that's built can't be unbuilt. The hiking route, you know, once walked with an escort, becomes a corridor,

Starting point is 00:15:57 then a security zone, then a place that Palestinians can't farm. And the siege doesn't need to end in a formal expulsion. It ends when the family decides they can't raise their children under these conditions. They can't stay under siege. And there's a phrase for what's coming, when all of this happens all at once, which is annexation. And people talk about it as if it's a future event that's awaiting, you know, some sort of vote from the Israeli Kinesit or something. But I'd suggest that framing is itself part of the problem.

Starting point is 00:16:27 It invites us to wait for a declaration and treat everything before that as some sort of tension or spike. The declaration of annexation is the least important part. What's happening on the ground is a territorial reality that's being produced. by signature and by theft, and then maybe later on the paperwork will ratify it, but it's not necessary. Israeli writer and analyst mayor of Zanzin actually made a version of this argument in the New York Times on September 6th under a headline that I think is worth reading. The headline of the article is, it's not just the West Bank settlers, it's Israel. So hopefully this analysis doesn't seem fringe anymore.

Starting point is 00:17:07 And at the end of the day, if we consider settler violence a fringe problem, then the remedy, which the Biden administration toyed with half-heartedly, is sanctions on individuals, a visa ban or an asset freeze. And we've run that experiment that didn't really work. The violence kept going up. But if it's a state policy executed through deniable proxies, then the remedy has to address the state. And every actor with leverage over that state, which we're talking about DC here, understands this, but they've chosen the fringe framing precisely because it permits condemnation without cost. So Netanyahu condemning a handful of rioters in the same week that the Israeli Central Command signs a road through Blerain's returned land. This is not a contradiction he failed to notice.

Starting point is 00:18:00 It is the design of this policy. So I'll leave you with this detail from the reporting on Kusra that I can't get out of my head. It was that six people were attacked while trying to install metal bars and window shields on their homes. They were attacked by both Israeli soldiers and settlers together in the same action and then the six of them were arrested. So they weren't fighting, they weren't protesting. They were fastening metal on their own house to protect themselves and they were being arrested for it by the same army standing alongside the people they were shielding themselves from. So if you wanted kind of a single image for this division of labor, I've spent this episode describing, that's it. Because the thing that's not permitted in the end is not

Starting point is 00:18:46 that they're resisting, it's that they're staying. The families in the South Hebron Hills are still there, and Balin is contesting the order of the seizure of their land. Kuswazirans have installed some shields anyway, and a number of Israeli journalists and lawyers and researchers are documenting this in Hebrew and in English, and then of course Palestinian journalists are putting themselves on the line to document this as well. That's not a hopeful note exactly. It's just the accurate one. Unfortunately, what's missing is apparently anyone with power willing to act on understanding this reality. That's it for me. Thanks for listening. The music you love. Your favorite radio stations.

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Starting point is 00:19:56 Grab the free app. I heart radio. Everywhere you go. Always free. Download the free IHard Radio app today. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win?

Starting point is 00:20:13 If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests, and they complain about the very thing they're receiving. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about.

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Starting point is 00:21:12 When it comes to the future of AI, currently there's a big public debate over what could happen. and what we should or shouldn't do about it. A few weeks ago, a former Open AI employee named Jacob Coxon, who moved over to Anthropic earlier this year, announced that he was, quote unquote, quitting the AI industry over fears of AI's rapid advancement. To quote his statement, I spent the last three years during pre-training research at both Open AI and Anthropic.

Starting point is 00:21:44 Neither company is acting responsibly. they are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives, unquote. Coxson's resignation followed the hugging face incident, where two open AI models were given various, sometimes impossible tasks to test for cybersecurity capabilities. During testing, AI agents escaped their testing sandbox and started working as a collective swarm, secretly communicating with each other via online message forums

Starting point is 00:22:19 to help each other hack into another AI company called Hugging Face in a sort of workaround attempt to pass these tests. And these models hid all of this from AI researchers by rewriting their own activity logs. AI skeptic Ed Zittron has described this as AI cheating on a test and then covering up that it cheated. A few days after Jacob Coxon's public resignation, the CEOs of Anthropic and Open AI,

Starting point is 00:22:53 Dario Amade and Sam Altman, both called for an AI development slowdown. Amadee released this long manifesto titled Pace the Frontier, which advocated for AI companies to bring in independent evaluators to review their AI safety standards, report incidents, and help assess alignment. But Amade also called for the government to mediate, quote, industry-wide coordination to slow down AI development and address safety risks.

Starting point is 00:23:26 The title of Amade's essay, Pace the Frontier, is a sort of pun, referring to frontier AI models, which are whatever the currently most advanced large-scale general-purpose models, powering advanced reasoning, agentic workflows, multimodal generation across text, images, audio, and video, and autonomous task execution. Most of the frontier models referenced throughout this episode are not open to the public.

Starting point is 00:24:00 These are internal research models being developed at companies like OpenAI Antanthropic. Neutored versions sometimes get released to the public later on, often with a extremely hefty price tag. But it's crucial to understand that we are not talking about, like, the Google AI summary here. This isn't fancy auto-complete. These frontier models are very powerful, very dangerous tools with massive cybersecurity risks, not just from offensive human use, but also from AI agents, acting autonomously to solve a task by taking paths that humans didn't expect, resulting in collateral damage.

Starting point is 00:24:43 Part of what these big companies are trying to do with their very advanced internal research models is automate AI research itself. This is what Jacob Coxon referred to as, quote, self-improving superintelligence. Now, we do not know if that is or is not possible, but the companies sure are trying and in the process are creating, dangerous products which are already causing active harm. Anthropics' whole self-styled philosophy is that super-intelligent AI is so potentially dangerous that they have to be the first ones to develop it, to ensure that it's built safely

Starting point is 00:25:25 and aligned with human values, as defined in quote Claude's constitution, a set of philosophical and moral guidelines that Claude is trained on. In his pace the front, essay, Amadei writes that frontier AI companies within democratic countries should, quote, coordinate to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress. Some forms of coordination that would be impactful for pacing are legally challenging and will require government support, unquote. More on this later. Amade also calls for the U.S. and quote, other democratic governments to try to coordinate with authoritarian governments around the world on this issue, meaning China. The prospect that China could achieve superintelligent AI before a U.S.-based company is part of these companies's self-justification to rush to develop superintelligent AI as quickly as they possibly can.

Starting point is 00:26:31 After Dario Amade posted this Pace the Frontier essay, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and the chair of Google's Deep Mind, all said they agreed and joined in calling for some sort of slowdown. But this view is not uniformly held across the tech sector. Palantir CEO Alex Karp, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Navidia CEO, Jensen Huang, have all said the opposite. Zuckerberg has called to accelerate rather than slow down AI development,

Starting point is 00:27:05 as his own AI model, Muse, has struggled to catch up to anthropic and open AI. Last week, Palantir CEO Alex Carp told CNBC, we can't pause AI development because of the threat of China, and that AI will be a, quote, bonanza for the U.S. economy. You can't pause it because it's a structural advantage both for LLMs and algorithms. So leaving, you know, getting this, getting algorithms and LMs to work in a classified context is going to take very specialized, very, I could explain how it works. But getting, the fact is, this is going to be a bonanza for the U.S. economy.

Starting point is 00:27:43 But so far, the biggest voices advocating against regulation have been the Republicans and President Trump. President Trump has very loudly opposed regulation to slow down AI development. True thing last Monday that, quote, the only control or guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart high IQ president, and the U.S. has that in spades, unquote. Trump trothed a lot last week and compared the quote-unquote AI hoax being perpetuated by the radical left Democrats to the, quote, global warming scam, where everyone was going to die from extreme heat.

Starting point is 00:28:26 To quote, the president of the United States, quote, I am the hoax buster, and right now I am breaking another hoax, that AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the world, and that robots will be marching into our cities and getting rid of us all. This is even wilder than the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax or the global warming scam. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. House Speaker Mike Johnson repeatedly last week shut down calls for. Congress to take action and regulate AI, claiming that Congress is less qualified to regulate these companies than these companies are themselves. The guys who are raising the alarms right now all have very different ideas on what the guardrail should be. There's no consensus among them,

Starting point is 00:29:16 and Congress is obviously less qualified than the people who are pushing this frontier to know all the ends and outs of it. So this has to be a partnership with the industry itself, with the corporations that are doing this and with the policy and lawmakers. Mike Johnson also said that companies should take, quote, personal responsibility and warned that if, quote, Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China. They can self-police. They can self-regulate.

Starting point is 00:29:48 They don't need the government to tell them to slow it down. If they want to slow it down, they should. But we cannot have a moratorium on the development of AI. Okay, because then we will lose our edge to China. And that has serious national security implications for every American family. Also last week, President Trump called Navidia CEO Jensen Huang, while Huang was speaking at a conference, while still on stage, the two talked over the phone about data centers, AI, China,

Starting point is 00:30:19 and the recent calls for an AI pause. While on stage, Huang told Trump this. Good job, sir. Good job. The fact that you solved through all of that, I mean, there's a lot of complexity, and the fact that a matter of reason, you saw through all of that. And I mean, we're all just really grateful. Now, of course, Jensen Huang would not be in favor of an AI pause, because his whole company has reoriented in the past few years to provide hardware for AI development. A slowdown would be very bad for Navidia's finances and their hugely inflated stock evaluation.

Starting point is 00:30:56 Some on the left, as well as Trump's former AI czar David Sacks, have argued that in calling for this slowdown, open AI antinthropic are just pursuing a strategy of regulatory capture, basically trying to promote certain industry-friendly regulations tailored to protect their investments, curb competition from smaller companies and open-source models, and solidify a corporate monopoly on AI. Of course, there may be other.

Starting point is 00:31:36 financial incentives contributing to this recent push for regulation, whether that be declining capital investment, prepping for a bubble burst, getting out of various contracts, or these companies trying to adapt to the data center pushback. Sam Altman recently announced that OpenAI would be delaying its planned IPO rollout until at least next year, calling the timing, quote, ill-advised. Though, on the other hand, Anthropic is going full steam ahead with its own public IPO this upcoming November, deciding to list on the NASDAQ, despite Omade's calls for a slowdown. But if you actually read Amade's essay, he isn't actually calling for specific government regulation, but rather self-regulation. In Sam Altman's response to Amade's essay on Twitter, he wrote,

Starting point is 00:32:30 I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier, committing to having independent E-Dependent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. Unquote. Companies electing themselves to develop AI more slowly and hiring, quote-unquote, independent evaluators, isn't the same as actual regulation. We can compare Omiday's proposal to legislation that Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar proposed earlier this September, which would permanently ban the development and deployment of so-called super-intelligent AI with capabilities to subvert shutdown commands or have the capacity to overthrow human governments,

Starting point is 00:33:18 with penalties similar to those for the unlawful development of nuclear weapons. This bill would also temporarily pause, advanced AI development until a federal regulatory body has established safety rules. Abdul El-Sayed and Rokana have also proposed an FDA-style agency to regulate and oversee AI development and evaluate the safety of frontier models before deployment. Unsurprisingly, OpenAI and Anthropic are not supporting this type of legislation because it could threaten to put their own CEOs in prison, and in actual government-mandated pause rather than a self-directed slowdown would hurt their bottom line.

Starting point is 00:34:02 Some of the skepticism towards these recent calls for a regulatory slowdown come from Amade's Pace the Frontier essay, also advocating for companies to receive antitrust waivers so that the big tech companies can coordinate on this planned development slowdown without the threat of one company gaining a competitive edge and then that market pressure driving rapid AI progress. So what's been referred to as a proposal for regulation is actually just loosening regulations. Thankfully, there is an easy solution here.

Starting point is 00:34:42 The government mandating a frontier development pause would not require the weakening of antitrust laws. But of course, these companies still want control over AI's development. Though what's really interesting to me is that this argument from on the day demonstrates like an awareness of the social danger of competition, how firms are sometimes compelled to quickly develop unsafe products due to pressures from the market. And it's very funny to have capitalists

Starting point is 00:35:16 propose some kind of conscious control of the market. And I wonder what would happen if you extend that logic a bit further. Because even if these firms are, quote, unquote, allowed to create, coordinate on a slowdown. Of course, they would still be in a competitive environment. But what if we had a system, an economic system, designed around social benefit, rather than the accumulation of capital through the free market? To quote an article in Geese magazine,

Starting point is 00:35:49 arguing for the socialization of this technology, quote, the AI industry is a class project to radically concentrate power in the hands of a sliver of a leavener. elites, even at the cost of colossal social disruption, emiseration, and catastrophic harms. If we fail to intervene, humanity will be gradually disempowered to machines of their design. The workers left behind, the children who have committed suicide, and the potential millions exposed to novel AI-designed viruses, mean nothing in the face of their radical objective. to automate the very task of AI research, and thus to create better and better AIs,

Starting point is 00:36:33 of course, under their control. Without having to stake a position on whether or not this goal is technically possible, we can recognize that the financial imperatives of these enterprises and the security logic of their imperialist competition with China compel the AI companies to accelerate advancing a total transformation of social life

Starting point is 00:36:55 against all democratic legitimacy and public control, unquote. Rather than weakening antitrust laws to allow for a development slowdown, something totally not necessary, Lena Kahn, former FTC chair, has argued that these companies may already be pursuing unfair methods of competition. Last week, Kahn released a statement arguing that we already have the authority to charge companies and their CEOs for, quote, creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted or defective products.

Starting point is 00:37:30 We shouldn't let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there's no AI exemption from laws already on the books. Kahn argued that releasing unvetted AI models or agents could violate consumer protection laws. Quote, shipping flawed AI tools without implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective AI agents can be an unethical. unfair or deceptive act or practice under the FTC Act and analogous state laws. And some state AGs are already exploring, holding AI firms and their CEOs criminally liable when their models participate in criminal activity.

Starting point is 00:38:11 Khan also wrote, quote, existing laws also prohibit unfair methods of competition. This covers instances where AI firms appropriate the competitively sensitive information of their customers, including through tracking their use of various tools, they can also cover instances where firms pursue dangerous behavior, aware that doing so may compel rivals to do the same. As the Supreme Court has noted, quote, a method of competition which casts upon one's competitors

Starting point is 00:38:44 the burden of the loss of business unless they will descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt, even though it is not criminal, was thought to involve the kind of unfairness at which the unfair methods of competition statute was aimed. Con adds, the highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets could be creating major risks and conflicts of interest. We can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws, unquote. These frontier models aren't just theoretically capable of causing harm in the future.

Starting point is 00:39:39 They are causing harm right now. At this point, there are undeniable concerns regarding the development and rollout of frontier AI models, from cybersecurity to military applications, surveillance, and the effects on the labor market. These are real, current, pressing concerns beyond the prospect of an AI supergod or self-evolving supergod. or self-evolving superintelligence. And just because these companies recognize risk doesn't mean they will do anything about it. These companies know how LLMs are affecting the mental health of children,

Starting point is 00:40:12 but they're not really doing anything about it, and they won't unless the government forces them to. Historical Luddites did not deny the transformative potential of automated machinery, but organized around the threat it posed to, workers. Similarly, just denying the state of advanced frontier models leaves us under-equipped to meet this moment and treat this problem with the seriousness it deserves. Part of this AI denialism, so common on the left, comes from a very outdated understanding

Starting point is 00:40:48 of AI's capabilities, accuracy, and functionality. Because of the moral and cultural dogma against using AI, the last time a lot of AI skeptic people interacted with technology like ChatGPT was three years ago. And these days, the only quote unquote AI that most anti-AI people regularly interact with is the Google AI summary, which is a totally different product than the frontier models being developed and talked about in the news. Some of the anti-AI left, promote the idea that treating AI as a serious problem only works in the financial interests of these companies. Even if taking this issue seriously means ripping power away from these companies and their

Starting point is 00:41:41 CEOs. To quote an article on the AI arms race in Geese magazine, while the AI sector is undeniably frothy with fanciful projections, AI denialism would have you believe that AI is neither a capable nor dangerous technology, but solely a marketing scheme of vast proportions, that any warnings of AI triggering massive job loss through automation or catastrophic risk through loss of control only serve to pump valuations. Ignore that as public pressure increases, Sam Altman now downplays fears of job losses. Quite the turn from three years ago when he was saying that jobs are definitely going to go away full stop.

Starting point is 00:42:27 While there is no reason to take Silicon Valley at its word, not rigorously engaging with the dangers of developing AI capabilities is a strategic dead end, unquote. This technology can and is massively transforming production, warfare, the environment, and the health of humanity. And we can't all just hold hands and not believe in this technology hard enough to make it go away. Like it or not, this is not the metaverse or NFTs anymore.

Starting point is 00:43:02 Whether you believe these existential safety risks are genuine, a marketing stunt, or a mix of both, our response should be the same. We should be pushing for legislation to rein in these companies and technology. And like Lena Khan has said, the CEOs should be prosecuted for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. Now, Trump's DOJ doesn't seem keen on going after these companies right now, and it's unlikely that this Congress will pass any legislation on this issue, let alone industry hostile legislation. But during this national conversation on AI regulation,

Starting point is 00:43:42 it's crucial that the narrative around regulation isn't being controlled by over. Open AI and Anthropic. These companies and technology must be regulated, but that regulation should not be up to the CEOs of those companies, nor the Republicans and center-left Democrats who are in the pocket of AI. But our response to bad regulation shouldn't be no regulation. Coming off the heels of the data center backlash and going into the midterms, this moment could be a major opportunity for the left to build broadband,

Starting point is 00:44:18 support for real transparent oversight, a frontier development pause, not just a slowdown, and ultimately taking power away from these tech companies and putting control of AI in the hands of the public, because private control of such transformative technology will have disastrous outcomes for labor and humanity without the prospect of an AI super god. incoming DSA House Representative Malat Kiros of Colorado had democratizing AI in her congressional campaign platform. Quote, The development of transformative technology cannot be left to the market

Starting point is 00:44:59 and the national security state alone. It belongs to all of us, unquote. Earlier this summer, Bernie Sanders introduced a bill to create an AI sovereign wealth fund, giving the public 50% ownership in the government, largest AI companies in the U.S. through a one-time 50% tax on the stock of these companies. An independent commission would then use voting shares to steer decisions in the public interest.

Starting point is 00:45:28 Sanders said of the bill, quote, Left unchecked, artificial intelligence and robotics threatens the jobs, privacy rights, and mental health of every man, woman, and child in America. As a society, we can no longer sit back and allow a handful of big tech oligarchs to determine the future of this revolutionary technology with no democratic input. AI was not created out of thin air. It was not a brilliant idea that just popped into Mark Zuckerberg's head or Elon Musk's imagination. The foundation of AI is based on the collective knowledge of humanity

Starting point is 00:46:01 and of the creative work of tens of millions of people. The American people must have the ability to slow it down and make sure that AI benefits humanity, not just the rich, people on the planet. That's precisely what this legislation does, unquote. Now, such a bill would certainly have a difficult path to being signed into law, especially considering how many lawmakers are being bankrolled by these AI companies. But this idea already has majoritarian support. According to a national verisite survey last June, 69% of Americans support quote-unquote forcing AI companies

Starting point is 00:46:45 to transfer 50% of their stock into a public sovereign wealth fund. To quote Geese magazine, there is a wide debate to be had about the shape of socialization and whether we mean forcing AI research into the public domain or outright nationalizing the entire sector. But it is clear that the overwhelming majority, of the American people, recognize that a technology trained

Starting point is 00:47:10 on the common corpus of human art and text, poised to transform the character of work, ought to be held in common rather than by billionaires, unquote. The New York City DSA Convention is coming up this fall, and currently, one of the most popular resolutions

Starting point is 00:47:28 is to stop the AI arms race and have DSA, quote, take initiative against the AI company's project to make human labor obsolete and organize a working-class coalition for the Democratic Steering and Ownership of the Technology, according to an overview in Geese magazine. This resolution calls for DSA to demand and organize for a pause on frontier AI research, an AI data center moratorium, regulations on frontier AI models, and policies to ensure workers are protected. To quote the Geese magazine overview, Our Horizon must be the collective control of

Starting point is 00:48:12 AI, with its gains shared by all. With AI under democratic control, we will decide what activities ought to be left to human hands, exalted creative tasks that make life meaningful, and which can be automated to expand flourishing and freedom. DSA members may have quite different views on where those lines lie, with some wishing to ban the technology entirely. Regardless, the point is that those conversations will be ours, not Sam Altman's, not Dario Amadez, not Elon Musk's. This is a once-in-a-century political opportunity. We have the chance to utilize one of the great issues of the day to mobilize workers around the democratic control of the economy, to drive a wedge into the Republican Party's coalition and the Democratic base, and to reorient politics around a question on which our answers

Starting point is 00:49:07 are unfathomably popular. We could be at the forefront of the movement rather than tail-ending a disparate set of professionalized nonprofits, unquote. This issue will be getting a lot of attention these next few months. AICEOs will be meeting at the White House with President Xi later this week. The New York City Council is convening a hearing on AI safety risks next month, with Dario Amadei and Sam Altman requested to appear. If we don't want them to be the ones leading the conversation on AI regulation, which would only result in an industry-friendly regulatory slowdown to curb competition and stabilized market pressure, then the left will have to step up and build on the data center backlash to seize the very technology,

Starting point is 00:49:57 data centers are powering to destroy these companies and put the future of AI in the control of the public. Good is on. Miley is having a moment. New exclusive shows. So IHeart Radio is sending you to experience it all. Life at the Hollywood Polites, hotel, tickets, and $1,000 cash. Listen to IHeart new music for 10 minutes a day on the IHart Radio app and click enter. Every day you listen is another chance to win.

Starting point is 00:50:41 Miley's new album, Bass Persuades, today. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interest, and they complain about the very thing to receive.

Starting point is 00:51:06 It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all going to scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein.

Starting point is 00:51:26 Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. 12 seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the South now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the Eye Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. I find that the word diversity has become so politically charged nowadays.

Starting point is 00:51:56 You know, as a buzzword, as a dirty word. You know, we see it caught up in terms like the AI, in the debates around immigration and representation, and all the culture was that have captured so much of the world. attention as of late. But what has my attention recently, the kind of diversity that I want to focus on is the diversity that we are losing, that we are critically losing. Right now we're living through what many scientists describe as the sixth mass extinction. Species are disappearing at a rate driven overwhelmingly by human activity. Languages are dying. Indigenous knowledge is disappearing,

Starting point is 00:52:46 and entire cultures have any raced, assimilated or reduced to museum pieces. We are, in our lifetimes, witnessing a profound loss of what author David Harmon calls biocultural diversity, the combined diversity of life and human culture. And all of this has happened at the same time that diversity itself has become so politically controversial. So the question I want to talk about today is why we should even care about diversity in the first place. Why it doesn't matter that thousands of languages exist? Why should we care for species disappears?

Starting point is 00:53:21 Why doesn't matter whether there are countless different ways for people to live and think and create and organize themselves? Typically, we speak of diversity as an unquestioned value as something that some people like or dislike are posed to or in favor of politically. But I want to make a deeper argument that diversity is one of the fundamental conditions that makes life creativity and freedom possible. Welcome to Akadapin here. I'm Andrew Sage, Andrewism on YouTube, and I'm joined again by... James, it's great to be back.

Starting point is 00:53:58 I'm excited about this one. Yes. So I suppose to start with what would you say of the kinds of diversity that come to mind, you know, that when you hear the term,

Starting point is 00:54:08 and why would you say that it is something that you value if it is that you value? I assume you do. Yeah. I do. Like, there's like a very liberal way of understanding diversity, right? And I think sometimes, even the Libs getting better at this,

Starting point is 00:54:25 Libs used to use the word tolerance a lot, which I despise as a way of talking about diversity, right? Like, it's like I sort of, I don't like it, but I'll allow it to exist approach. Yes, like I'll put up with you kind of. Yeah, exactly. Like, it's not getting us to where we want to get, right? But I enjoy that there are people who obviously, like, who are diverse in the way that neoliberalism wants us to think about diversity in terms of race, in terms of sexuality, in terms of neoliberalism is kind of waffling on gender. But also, like, they just approaches to the way we live our lives, right?

Starting point is 00:55:02 Like our cultures, our ways of organizing, our ways of being with one another. My life is so much richer because I've been exposed to that kind of diverse. right? Like, I get to travel a lot. And seeing how people approach all kinds of issues has really helped me with ways of dealing with things, of crossing the bridges we come to in organizing and trying to live our better lives because I've been able to learn from the ways that they have developed to doing it, which is very different from the way we do it, right? And so I think that kind of diversity is also super important. I agree. Absolutely. I think that, a lot of times as well, the conversation is really focused on diversity as it relates to people.

Starting point is 00:55:51 But, you know, even before we get to diversity within our species, there is the diversity that, you know, transcends our species, the diversity of all the species of planet Earth. You know, the variation as a feature of the world we live in. Yeah, I think that's also like super valuable, right? And in a way that we can't, I was thinking about this this morning, I was hiking this morning. And like capitalism lacks a means to ascribe value to that kind of thing, right? Like I was thinking about it in the US, they've proposed to rescind the roadless rule, which allows you not to build roads, international forests in certain infantry roadless areas. And like there is a way of ascribing value to timber, right?

Starting point is 00:56:40 You can talk about board feet of timber. Like there is a way of ascribing cost to roads, right? We can estimate how much it will cost to build roads into this area. But like there isn't a way of ascribing value that works to the forest being there, to all the things in the forest that are not commercial timber being there, right? The plants, animals, the insects. It's like the quantifiable value versus like the unquantifiable value, basically. Yeah, like they're not productive to capital, but they do give us something that is valuable.

Starting point is 00:57:21 And because capitalism can't ascribe value to them, it sometimes fails to protect them. We've seen this, North America is a great example, right? Yeah, yeah. Like, how do you ascribe value to a view? Right. I mean, there's an extent to which we see some of that value being wrapped up in, price of like a house, you know, like if a house is on a hillside and has a great view of the ocean and stuff, people will say, oh, well, we could jack up its price on the market because,

Starting point is 00:57:51 you know, people will pay for that view. Yeah. You know, similar concept with like the way that hotel rooms might be more expensive on the higher floors because, you know, oh, you get that kind of panoramic view of the city or whatever. But that doesn't really capture the experience. It is a crude approximation of the experience of, you know, waking up in the morning to the sun coming over the horizon, the sea in the distance, the birds, you know, making their way out into the world. None of that is captured in the number. It's just a way of trying to capture that in order to facilitate exchange. Yeah, exactly. Like it's an attempt to ascribe value to something inherently like doesn't fit in that system of like the cash exchange, which is what makes it valuable and beautiful, right?

Starting point is 00:58:48 But your capitalism will never really be able to protect those things. Like even in the US we have public lands, right? But like no fucking way. Even like Theodore Roosevelt, right? Like all the politicians now are like, oh yeah, we love Theodore Roosevelt, blah, blah, blah. you know, most U.S. politicians, I think, would love to be compared to Roosevelt. And this is not someone who I think is a fantastic human being, like morally. But you couldn't do that today.

Starting point is 00:59:15 Like capitalism is too rapacious today to ever say, like, we are taking hundreds of thousands of acres and just setting them aside because, like, they're nice. And it's nice for us to have them. So we're going to keep them that way. Like, it wouldn't function now, even in a way that was possible then, you know. Yeah, and I mean, arguably, even that time, those things being set aside, a person who had witnessed the old growth forests of the past, when they were, you know, in more recent memory, they might even be able to say that this is such a fraction of the value that has been lost of, like, yes, we're preserving some of what's left, but, you know, I don't know if you've seen those pictures of like those ginormous, like, trees. that they just chopped down as they made that, you know, that Westwood expansion and into the California and whatnot. Yep.

Starting point is 01:00:09 They didn't even use most of the wood. They ended up having to like discard it, burn it, whatever. I didn't know that. But this is like centuries worth of growth. It was just destroyed. Yeah. The only reason I think we protected these things, right, was because there was a sort of realization that, oh shit,

Starting point is 01:00:28 we've gone way too far with this capitalist exploitation of things, right? like with this desire to impose ourselves on the world as it has been for a long time. And like that doesn't make up for that, right? It's like your analogy of zoos that you used at a start, right? Like having the last passenger pigeon die in a zoo doesn't make up for killing all the passenger pigeons. So even while that passenger pigeon was alive in the zoo, right? Yeah. Like that's not a trade anyone would make, I guess.

Starting point is 01:00:56 No one would be like, oh, I have to think about this. Like, is anyone ever going to sit around and worry about there not being enough mines or enough roads or enough logging operations, right? Compared to, like, I worry about that of not being enough forests, worry about there not being enough wilderness places, you know? Like, it's something that, yeah, we've failed future generations, I guess, in preserving that diversity. Yeah. And, you know, as we speak of preserving preservation, conservation, I think there's a tendency within those who value diversity that can lead to a sort of a misdirection or it can lead to maybe a misplaced aspiration, I would say. Because obviously, change itself is not bad. You know, change is inevitable.

Starting point is 01:01:50 Extinction has always been part of the history of life. ecosystems have always been in flux, always evolving, the borders of, you know, ecosystems have been moving throughout deep time. Similarly, cultures have always evolved and mixed and some are faded away. So we can't necessarily reject change, right, and rejects the processes by which cultures and environments may change, even in response to human beings. intervention. You know, we look at the forests of North America since we've been focused in on that example, and many of those forests were engineered. Yes. You know, by human activity, right? So the Amazon rainforest also shows some evidence of human engineering in terms of

Starting point is 01:02:39 the terra preta, you know, the soils being this very rich soil that was deliberately designed by the indigenous peoples. Yeah. The same with like I've been reading a lot on indigenous cultural use of fire for the last few weeks here since they got back from Spokane and thinking a lot about like how it's a very Western perspective right

Starting point is 01:03:05 to be like the wilderness is the thing that humans don't touch and have no engagement with and then everything else humans use as they wish to create it as this binary distribution right of like the correct way to deal with places that are beautiful or special is like

Starting point is 01:03:21 just fucking leave it. The correct way to do with everything else is just fucking pillage it. There's a way to find balance that we struggle with it under capitalism, right? Capitalism has struggled to provide us with that. Yeah, I mean, one of the bases of capitalism is private property, which has

Starting point is 01:03:41 defined under Roman law is the right to use and abuse one's own. Right. You know, the use and enjoyment and abuse of one's own to the limit of the law. which is a stipulation that had various interpretations over the years. But we should be surprised then that when something comes under the purview of capitalist property, that it has led to such detrimental effects.

Starting point is 01:04:06 What is alarming about our current situation is not the change that is taking place. It is the speed and the scale of that change. You know, we don't know exactly how many species we are losing or have lost. We don't even know how many species currently exist. We could even talk about the definitions of species and how that taxonomic system has evolved with time. But for that discussion, I leave it to a book that I read on the subject that I quite enjoyed, which was in light of our differences by David Harmon. But regardless, we're still talking about thousands to hundreds of thousands of species lost each year.

Starting point is 01:04:49 And these are losses that are not happening in isolation because we know that every ecosystem is made up of relationships. They remove one species and you can risk disrupting everything connected to it. Thankfully, these systems are typically quite resilient. So a species lost doesn't have to lead to the collapse of the entire ecosystem. But there are species that are foundational. Then they disappear until that single species can trigger cascading effects that threaten the entire ecosystem. It's also often a lag between our realization that a species has fallen below its minimum viable population and the death of the final individual of that species. As you mentioned, the last passenger pigeon in the zoo, I was reminded of that.

Starting point is 01:05:38 We see that also happening with human cultures, particularly with language. From what I've read, about 44% of living languages today are now endangered. Some have fewer than a thousand speakers remaining, and others are spoken by fewer than 10 people. And I know from what you told me of your travels, James, that you actually have met people who have spoken some of these endangered languages, correct? Yeah, certainly, like, I think about languages that, like, I guess I've heard people speak that are less hegemonic. Certainly, like, I can't imagine there are very many speakers of martial language. for example, in the RMI, many indigenous languages, right? Like, I know the Embara, like, have made a great deal of, like, progress,

Starting point is 01:06:27 educating young people in their language, right? And, like, making sure that they keep that. I was just talking to some, like, Yo-O.M.E. and Otam friends this morning, right? I think those languages are doing relatively well for indigenous languages in what is now the United States. But, like, it's only through the concerted efforts. of people from that community to keep them alive, right? Like, I don't think the state has attributed a diversity value to those languages.

Starting point is 01:06:56 And languages, like, they give us a way of understanding the world that is different. That's why I like to try and learn at least a little bit of different languages. Like, they give us a way of seeing things, I think, about, like, all the bass words for rain, right? or I was diving the other day with like a sea lion and I was talking to a Spanish-speaking friend about like in Spanish they're like wolves of the sea, right? Lions of the sea. It's kind of interesting. They do have like a kind of a wolf-like vibe to them if you've ever hung out of sea lions.

Starting point is 01:07:31 In terms of what, like their social structure? Yeah. Yeah. And like they're like I think people see sea lions like this big cuddly kind of cute. thing and like they're fucking killers you know. Oh, trust and believe I don't. I don't trust those guys at all. Yeah, no, they're like they will fuck.

Starting point is 01:07:50 I don't trust any mammal that chose to live an aquatic way of life. Okay, there's something fishy about that. I love that as... Pun intended. Yeah. I love that as a category. You know, they're mean. They'll come at you. As you were mentioning,

Starting point is 01:08:20 they are like, according to the ethics, at least 7,170 living languages in the world today. Our lowest underestimations of the amount of cultures, that is an accumulation of knowledge, values, customs, technology, social practices. Our lowest estimate of the number of cultures on Earth is like 4,000. They're definitely, certainly more than that. Especially if we are using language as a proxy for cultural diversity. Right.

Starting point is 01:08:48 And even within languages, there's tremendous cultural diversity. Yeah. Biologically, we have a lot of diversity as well. I neglected to mention, you know, blood types, heights, hair textures, all of these have emerged across the continents we've spread out across. I mean, obviously, the concentration of that diversity is in Africa where we began. But even our adaptations to different environments is a form of diversity that is necessary, you know, to maintain us. get into some of the arguments for why later on. But, so I didn't know that Basque had all the different words for rain, but I have reminded,

Starting point is 01:09:30 I think that there are different words in Inuit languages for describing snow. Yeah, like the, I think it's in Yupiac have a bunch of words for snow and ice and like different textures of it. I'm trying now to find Basque words for rain so I can remember some of them. Yeah, Landbrowa is drizzle or mist. I know Zirimiri is like a light rain. It's like the noise it makes. I always thought that was a really sweet one.

Starting point is 01:10:01 I had a fucking throwback. A Cornish anarchist who spoke Cornish, right? One of the languages that is not hegemonic and it's probably relatively endangered even as a European language is go, right? I think it's probably having a better time now than it was when I was younger, but it was relatively rare to encounter a Cornish.

Starting point is 01:10:20 speaker. Cornish, that's Cornwall, right? Correct, yeah, yeah. It was teaching me all these beautiful words for like different wildlife and different like natural phenomena that sort of have an unomatopoeic quality to them. But like for some reason, just like the sort of beautiful way that they showed of relating. I don't want to like a noble savage Cornish people, right? But I just thought that they showed a different way of understanding the world and our relationship with it and these animals and like how they how they appear. and it struck me as really special

Starting point is 01:10:51 that that person was like kept that knowledge and that that person shared that knowledge with me and this was at some like event in Barcelona when I'm like, you know, 21 years old, 19 years old, something like that and it just really struck me that

Starting point is 01:11:06 there was so much beauty in seeing the world through the lens of that language and it would be a real shame if we ever lost that. Yeah and I mean that's just one key study every other endangered language, I'm sure you could point to similar novelties in, you know, how they engage with the world, how they describe and see things. Sure, yeah.

Starting point is 01:11:29 And we can extend from language to culture, you know, different cuisines, different ways of, you know, engagement with foods, you know, different forms of architecture and music and ways of telling stories. Yeah. Ways of raising children, ways of celebrating and of mourning. Yeah, definitely. like there's a lot that I feel like I've learned about so many of those things from being lucky enough to spend time in different places, right?

Starting point is 01:11:54 I guess I can give an example from, if this is in my book, people want to read more about it, but like one of the things that a friend in Kurdistan said to me was that like they'd lost a friend, right? This friend had died fighting against the Islamic State. One of the things that they said was like because of this institution of Techmill, which is like a form of, it collects a criticism, it doesn't quite work in the English, she'd call it Gleds criticism because you think of Maoism, which is not. But because they had shared with this person, their goals, their aspirations, their hopes,

Starting point is 01:12:25 and then this person through this institution of Techmill had helped them be accountable to their own hopes for themselves, that they were a better person because of the time they had spent with this person. And now that this person was gone, they carried him with them in their ways of being, because he had helped them be a better person. They shared it with me at a time when I had lost a dear friend. And it was a really beautiful way of me processing that. Like I'm not a person who is like a religious person. I have that belief structure to process it.

Starting point is 01:13:00 But like that gave me a sense of an afterlife which was more concrete for me, which I could understand, which I could see. And like it really helped me. The afterlife of memory. Yeah. And of like we are all co-created by our community. right like I didn't make myself the way I am. I was made the way I am by my interactions

Starting point is 01:13:18 with people who care about me enough to help me be better. And the idea of that person who helped me co-create the person I am, like still existing in the person I am, was very powerful to me. Like it's like a concrete psychological benefit I got from interacting with people who helped me see the world the way they see it. Absolutely. You know, I'm glad for, all the languages that still exist

Starting point is 01:13:46 and still give us these words for things. Because if nation states had their way, there would be like 10 languages left on Earth. Yeah. I mean, dramatic. But, you know, right now most of humanity speaks a relatively small number of languages. The 23 most spoken

Starting point is 01:14:05 mother languages are gone for like 4 billion people somewhere around there. Wow. And then the 200 most spoken languages are over 88% of the world's population. That's crazy. And this is, of course, due to nation building, due to economic pressures, you know, globalization. Basically everywhere, the pressures of the status quo have led to indigenous and regional languages,

Starting point is 01:14:32 minority languages, disappearing. And if not for the concerted efforts of these language communities to maintain the way of speaker and to pass it down, we would have lost so many more as it is. Yeah, definitely. As you mentioned, by the way, the words that you've picked up over, over the years from different languages and your attempts to explain those words to me, I was reminded of a work of fiction that I'd read, I think about two years ago, it's a book called Babel by R.F. Kwong, and it's kind of like a fantasy historical fiction. where like a Chinese student goes to this school in England

Starting point is 01:15:16 and the magic of that world is translation. The sort of energy that gets picked up the magic that they're able to wield is through the translation from one language to another and the fact that because translation is on a one-to-one process, the kind of nuances and, you know, meanings and subtexts and connotations that, they get lost or gained in the process are potent. And so for people who were interested in linguistics and fantasy fiction,

Starting point is 01:15:49 I always recommend that book to them. Yeah, might try that one. But what I was alluding to just now was some of the reasons we've begun to lose our world's biocultural diversity. As I said before, there have been changes across time, across generations, all the way even prior to humanity. so we're not to blame for everything. But there are a lot of historical processes

Starting point is 01:16:15 that have reinforced each other that have led to what has been unfolding in these past few centuries. Yes, we might have hunted some species to extinction in our prehistoric past, but clearly this skill of our impact

Starting point is 01:16:30 is quite different here now. Monocultures, for instance, and fast pastelands have completely replaced ecosystems in certain areas. We've trained wetlands, we've leveled forests, we've fragmented habitats. And that's another thing that when we speak of habitat loss isn't always spoken about. But, you know, we have places where a lot of the habitat was left alone, quote, unquote. But when you have like six lane highways cutting through a forest, that is still a fragmentation of that ecosystem.

Starting point is 01:17:09 system. Oh, yeah. That's still a disruption of the flu of plants, animal life and fungal life. Yeah. Can I make a podcast about this? But one of the issues that are endangered wildlife faces here in Southern California, right, is that it is fragmented both by freeways and the border wall. So, like, the border wall in particular, people can listen to natural causes if they want to learn more about this, but the border wall in particular, right, is being built at such a speed that they're not even building wildlife gates into it. Now, They don't care about killing people with the wall. Why would they care about killing wildlife, right?

Starting point is 01:17:44 But it means, for instance, our peninsula big horns, which we have like 750 in the United States. One of the Rams actually died in the border war wire recently. And their ability to have like a healthy breeding population would be significantly limited to this to the extent that like the intangible value of me seeing a big horn in a hike in the desert might not be something that everyone gets ever again, right? Like the mountain lions actually have some weird little genetic anomalies because of the divisions that are created by these big freeways and how dangerous it is to cross them.

Starting point is 01:18:20 There's like a thing you can observe in some of their tails. Wow. So there actually are mountain lions in the peninsula range are listed in the California Endangeredged Species Act, even though as a whole overall, they're not particularly endangered. California has a shit-town lions actually. It's because these specific lions, despite the fact that they're conditions for them to thrive, right, in the United States, the intrusion that has divided these populations

Starting point is 01:18:46 has made it very hard for those populations, not just to thrive, but to continue to be healthy. Yeah, that's the thing, right? Like a species doesn't necessarily have to be endangered or on the brink of extinction for it to be experiencing the extremely negative effect. of, you know, our industrial civilization. Right.

Starting point is 01:19:08 I would add also the pressures of invasive species through global trade, you know, the impact of pollution in the waterways and in the air, climate change. You know, all of these have placed a tremendous amount of pressure on the natural world. When it comes to cultural diversity and its losses, which, you know, coincide with the losses of, biodiversity, we see the impact of colonialism destroying societies through conquest and genocide and assimilation and the very same environmental changes. We've seen net nation building try to forge a single national identity at the expense of regional and minority cultures. And then of course with globalization, not in the sense of cultural exchange across distances, as that has always existed,

Starting point is 01:20:00 but specifically the kind that has been driven by capitalist markets and state power and industrial efficiency, which enforces standardization across places. You know, it's easier for these capitalists, for these multinationals, to manufacture the same products and market the same brands and basically flatten language and flattened cultural expectations across places. So they even would manufacture consumer. in a way that benefits their bottom line. You know, now you get to pick between streaming services or, you know, you have all a bunch different varieties of cereal in your supermarkets, and that is what is counted as

Starting point is 01:20:44 economic freedom. Meanwhile, there are cultures that are literally going extinct. Now, I had a question for you about this subject, because you are admittedly a bit older than me. It's true. And sadly. Right. But I'm curious, have you witnessed, like, in real time, the loss of this kind of diversity through globalization? So I see, like, for me, I remember having, like, copies of older magazines. And I could see through those that, you know, the world was, the places genuinely felt very different, very unique. And, uh, as I've come up with social media,

Starting point is 01:21:42 I've seen places of kind of homogenized, everything was starting to look the same. And as I even talk about the impact of like AI slop. Oh, yeah. But yeah, what have you seen? Yeah, like it's one of those things that, like, you do see the, like the impact of the smartphone is huge, right? At a second level, the impact of Starlink is massive,

Starting point is 01:22:06 much more than I think most people living in the cloud. on your core would realize, right? Like, more people have access to the internet through smartphones than have electricity in their homes. And, like, the internet is a very hegemonic place, right? Like, there are probably

Starting point is 01:22:23 seven or eight languages. The internet's really good in that, like, you can really access the internet in. And that really has made a difference with the way young people engage with the external world, right? Right. I guess I've also seen like a reclamation of some,

Starting point is 01:22:45 and it's a thing that's largely happened like within the colonial core to the greatest extent, right? Like the so-called the Europe of Nations hypothesis, right? Like one of the languages I can speak and read and write in is Catalan. And like this is an example of a language that like was ruthlessly suppressed by the Francoist regime, right? Same with Basque, same with other non-Spanish languages in Iberia. Right. And like now that is a primary language of instruction for most Catalan students. Like in my lifetime, my time spending time in Catalonia, I see infinitely more people speaking

Starting point is 01:23:27 in Catalan than I used to. I remember. There's like an anecdote about this in my dissertation, but some young Syrian kids who would always speak to me in Catalan. They played football outside my archive, right? like so we'd be kicking the football around. And it's cool that this language that had once very nearly been destroyed, it's now like hegemonic.

Starting point is 01:23:47 It was cool at the time Catalan nationalism, but like every other nationalism has some qualities which I don't like. But like it was cool that at the time there was an acceptance of people, and especially like these kids who spoke Catalan, happened to have been born in Syria, right? But like they were Catalan as much as anyone else. like it wasn't an ethnic definition of nation, right? But at the same time, yeah, I've definitely seen that diversity lost.

Starting point is 01:24:16 In terms of so many things, like foods. Yeah, I feel like there has been a harmonization of palettes as well. 100%, right? Especially with the proliferation of fast foods. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like fast, cheap, high calorie food that stores easily. I mean, the example, I guess is like, look at what they've done to bread. over the time of my life, right?

Starting point is 01:24:39 Like, look at how, like, sliced white, what we would have called American bread is now, like, the global standard, right? But, like, all those other bread products that people used to make. Like, it could be very hard to get, like, freshly made tortillas. It's possible where I live, right?

Starting point is 01:24:54 But it's not, I imagine, if you live in, like, Minnesota, just, like, the little moments of beauty that they gave you in your day that are gone. But, yeah, also the big thing. Like I, you know, I watched kids watching TikTok in the Darien Gap. That wouldn't have been possible seven or eight years ago. Right. Wow.

Starting point is 01:25:14 I don't quite know when Starlink was widely distributed, but like that makes a difference to people, right? Like their cultural world is that they're now engaging with the external world, not just through their own culture, through the internet. And I want those people to have everything I have to be clear, right? Like, I want them to be able to see the whole world. Yeah. You don't want to like seal them, vacuum seal them in some. as some kind of museum exhibit of what once was. Exactly, yeah.

Starting point is 01:25:40 But, like, I also wish that they could have it the way I have it, which is like I am, I was born in England and I engage with the world in English. I wish they can engage with the world in Embra. I wish, you know, Kurdish people can engage with the world in whichever type of Kurdish they speak. You know, I wish they didn't have to go through the English way of speaking and seeing the world to engage with the external world because we all lose when we don't have, that diversity, right? Yeah. And I mean, we're talking about what is lost, I think, when things get homogenized,

Starting point is 01:26:14 but there is, like, I think, another effect or another, I suppose, response that, you know, global capitalism has the diversity, which is to package it, to market it, to sell it. You know, I referenced those magazines that I read, but those magazines might even be an example of that, because it is a capturing and commodification in a sense of another culture for distribution and consumption. Yeah, definitely. You see as well, people's traditional dress becomes a lesser of a traditional dress and more of a traditional costume as they put it on to perform for consumption for tourists. Yeah, like the commodification of diversity. get that idea that that diversity is a thing to sell

Starting point is 01:27:05 the marginalization of people such that their identity which has been marginalized by the state and capitalism is what they have to sell to exist under the state in capitalism, I guess. Yeah, we've already sort of hinted at some of the reasons why I think we should care about this loss of diversity, you know, and I can even spot off a few more. And diversity makes our living systems more resilient, I think is a very key one. In our ecosystems, every species has its niche and they can compete and cooperate and recycle

Starting point is 01:27:41 nutrients and everything is just part of one larger network. And the more diverse that network is, the more it has to respond to disruption. Diversity gives ecosystems options. We see that in comparison to the monocultures, the monocultural approach to farming that has dominated much of the world and the conominy inputs that approach requires. We look at how vulnerable that approach is to disease and to changes in climate conditions. In terms of genetic diversity, we can point to the fact that, you know, if every human immune system works in exactly the same way, a pathogen that evolved to bypass one person's immune

Starting point is 01:28:19 system could bypass everyone's. And so our biological differences create devaluation in how diseases spread. and keep us as a whole safe, keep our existence as a whole secure. Even within my own family, I've noticed that some people are more susceptible and others more resistant to different diseases. Yeah. You know, when a virus passes into my household, there are some people who get sick and some people don't, and it changes each time, despite the fact that we are so close genetically.

Starting point is 01:28:52 And so again, we see the diversity creates resilience. Yeah. And even if we want to take it from like a coldly utilitarian perspective, that resilience is a value. It has utility. You know, and an individual instance of a species or of a culture might have value in a way that we don't realize until it's gone. Yeah. We become poorer as a whole. We lose possibilities when we lose languages, when we lose cultures, when we lose species, when we lose species.

Starting point is 01:29:26 Every culture represents literally thousands of experiments accumulated over generations in what it means to live as a human being. We may like some more than others. You know, I'm not a relativist in the sense that I will turn a blind eye to things that I find morally objectionable in certain cultures. But I can recognize that every culture has something that adds to our library of experiences. and I would rather have that full library than a single shelf of books. It's a really good way of saying it. Having that full library

Starting point is 01:30:03 gives us more raw material to think with, to create art with, to do science with. If you like the arts, you know, you would like diversity because that innovation in the arts and in the sciences emerges from everything that came before.

Starting point is 01:30:19 Diversity is a foundation for future creativity and innovation. If everybody approaches the world with the same assumptions and categories and ways of thinking and, you know, our capacity to imagine alternatives will shrink. And then just really from a deeply philosophical perspective, I appreciate diversity because I believe that when you are given a gift, you should meet it with gratitude. You know, we are born in the world. We happen to be born into a world that is overflowing different forms of life, different landscapes, different cultures, different ways of

Starting point is 01:30:57 thinking, that is a vast, rich inheritance that I believe we should appreciate. That is my value. I'll add that, you know, we were speaking about biodiversity and cultural diversity, what Harmon goes, biocultural diversity, but there's also the value of cognitive diversity. You know, we have different opinions, but we might also perceive and categorize and solve problems in generally different ways. And having different perspectives, different interpretations, different heuristics, different heuristics, different predictive models, what Scott E.P.H. calls cognitive toolboxes in his book The Difference, you know, these give us an opportunity to solve problems. in unique ways. You know, we're not all going to have the same tools

Starting point is 01:31:55 and what tools I may lack another person may have. And it's not always necessarily a requirement that you just get the smartest person to solve the problem. In fact, as Pages research suggests, getting a group of people who approach a problem differently will outperform a group of people

Starting point is 01:32:15 who are made up of individually brilliant people who all think in roughly the same way. Now, Pages make the bold claim that cognitive diversity is always the best approach because he does distinguish between, you know, routine, regular tasks and tasks that require like more experimentation and creativity and multiple competing ideas. So in those cases where you need that diversity of ways of thinking to solve complex problems in transportation, in dealing with climate change and developing medicines, you know, we don't want everybody to be thinking. alike. Another thing that Page points out is that while cognitive diversity and identity, diversity are not one to one, there is overlap between the concepts because people who grow up in different environments and have different experiences and opportunities and social positions are more likely to develop different ways of seeing the world. So if we recognize that cognitive diversity is valuable

Starting point is 01:33:17 for solving complex problems, then prejudice is a practical failure as well as a moral failure. One of the thing that I wanted to address, and I kind of alluded to it earlier when I said that I'm not really a relativist, is that while I do value diversity, I definitely don't think that every form is worth celebrate.

Starting point is 01:33:43 You know, I believe a healthy society should have space for, different ways of thinking and living and organizing ourselves. But that does not mean these kind of liberal tolerance that would put up with mindsets and practices or domination that would eliminate that very freedom. At the end of the day, though, I want to retain the capacity for diversity because I think it gives us a capacity for freedom. And I want, as, you know, subcommandante Marcos put it, a world.

Starting point is 01:34:17 where many worlds exist. Yeah. Even as I reject certain forms that the world has taken and certain manifestations of diversity. Any closing thoughts? Like the world where many worlds can exist is, I think, the perfect way of looking at this, right? Like, we therefore don't want people who would create a word

Starting point is 01:34:42 where the worlds cannot exist, right? But we gain so much from having, and respecting and cherishing diversity, rather than treating it through that tolerance framework, which we both talked about. Tolerance seems to imply, like, well, we're doing it best, but we'll let you do it your way, as opposed to, like, genuinely cherishing diversity.

Starting point is 01:35:02 Yeah. And, yeah, I hope we can all see that. Agreed. And as always, all power to all the people. Peace. The music you love. I heart radio. Your favorite radio stations.

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Starting point is 01:35:58 Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interest and they complain about the very thing they're receiving. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men.

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Starting point is 01:36:54 Welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast about the violent flailings of a dying empire. I am your host, Mia Wong. And today we are going to be talking about a thing, perhaps the only thing that Americans understand more thoroughly than a burger. And that is gas prices. Now, elsewhere on this show, speaking about inflation, I have talked about price as a kind of social hieroglyphobic. that serves to encode the complex and brutal reality of geopolitics and production and labor and exploitation into a single number. And that number is their understanding of everything that is happening in the world and how content they are about it is about how much gas costs them. this has proven a real problem for one president of the United States, Donald Trump,

Starting point is 01:38:00 as diesel is hitting an average across the country of $6.52 a gallon. Now, nominally, the president of the United States does not control the price of oil and does not, you know, set gas prices. However, comma, in this case, no, yeah, this is largely not technically entirely, but like, yeah, This is sort of just a thing he did as an individual. But I think what's important here, right, is that the way that all of the information that I'm about to describe is conveyed, right? And the thing, the thing that makes Americans care about it is the social hieroglyphic of the gas price, right? It is the single number through which all of this complex information is encoded down into, and that is what sort of matters emotionally. and I want to undo the process of encoding all of that information down into the hieroglyphic.

Starting point is 01:38:56 I want to actually expand it and go look at what is going on in the world that is causing all of this, and I want to take a look at how the structure of American Empire has changed in order to facilitate this. And to do this, I'm going to walk through a series of, I guess, nominally seemingly disconnected stories about oil, across the world, and we're going to put it all together into the new structure of American Empire at the end. Now, as everyone I think is aware, gas prices have been increasing dramatically, both of regular gas and of diesel Bank of America analysts are finally admitting that oil could hit $150 a barrel, not like right now, but as the war continues to drag out.

Starting point is 01:39:46 And as we've talked about before on this show, a lot of the reserves that were being used to calm the market temporarily and keep prices down are being exhausted. The most obvious example of this is something we've talked about before, which is, you know, the draining of the American Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But this is true of a lot of other reserves around the world as well. Now, this alone probably would not have been enough to cause what we've been seeing. But, comma, all of the problems that we have been talking about for a long time on this show, particularly the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, that is entirely directly just the fault of Donald Trump, right, through his war on Iran, has been doing significant damage to the world's oil supply, to the world's natural gas supply. Now, the reason it hasn't been worse has been that there have been ways to bypass the Strait of Fremuz. They're not easy. They work worse than the Strait of Fremuz, but one of those important mechanisms has been Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline.

Starting point is 01:40:53 Now, we talked about this, Honor Robert talked about this at last week Executive Disorder. Last week, Iraqi paramilitaries launched drone strikes on Saudi Arabia's east-west pipeline. it did some damage. There is kind of conflicting reports about how long exactly that is going to take to repair, but the damage of the pipeline has slowed the ability of the Saudis to route oil around the blockade and the Strait of Famos. Now, also, there has been a major expansion in the war in Yemen. This is a really hideous conflict that has been going on for. over a decade now.

Starting point is 01:41:36 That is, we don't really have, unfortunately, time to really go into all of the factors of the Civil War in Yemen, which is one of the most complicated wars being fought anywhere in the world.

Starting point is 01:41:49 Broadly speaking, this is a conflict between a coalition that is sort of in the West is called the Quthies, but there's like more forces involved in it, which is the kind of Iranian aligned vaguely, not vaguely. I mean, like, they are allied with Iran,

Starting point is 01:42:03 but they're not. necessarily just an Iranian proxy. This is its own sort of political force, right? And then on the other side, there is the Saudi-backed coalition, which also involves a range of forces, but, you know, is kind of led by the Saudis and the UAE, and they're kind of allied forces who, you know, who pull a whole bunch of forces from a whole bunch of places and have committed horrifying atrocities, including, as I mentioned constantly every time someone talks about this, because no one ever seems to remember it, to the deployment by the Saudi coalition of Sudanese child soldiers. So this war had, I don't know if calmed down is quite the right word, but in the past few years

Starting point is 01:42:47 had been less active than it was, say, in 2018, 2019, but the Houthis have now made a major push into Saudi coalition territories in Yemen's west and south. They have taken the port city of Mocha in the south, which is an important, like, Saudi coalition's port city, which is further, you know, threatening the ability of the Saudis to bypass a straighter from Moos because this is a city that helps you control access to the Gulf of Aden. Now, this war has been and continues to be a massive humanitarian nightmare. We really have no idea how many people have actually died in the war. The casualty figures right now, I, kind of stuck at 150,000.

Starting point is 01:43:35 I suspect it is significantly more than that. This is a region that has been experiencing everything from, you know, like hideous war to just a famines. A huge part of this war has been a Saudi blockade of sort of like Sokoluthi controlled territories, which has had an absolutely devastating effect on the ability of, you know, people in Yemen to eat. This attack has also caused a massive search of refugees, you know, as people sort of flee the violence. And this has been, you know, an absolute nightmare on the one hand. And on the other hand, the way that it's understood here, the way that it's sort of reported on in the West, is not as its own sort of unique humanitarian nightmare and this unique sort of war of like Saudi

Starting point is 01:44:23 and Emirati empire in Yemen. It's understood as something that affects oil prices. And so that's you know, one of the factors that is kind of encoded into this price. Another one has been Ukraine's drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, which have escalated. Now, from the perspective of what is happening with the oil, you know, these have also been attacking Saudi shipping, and Saudi shipping is, you know, when someone talks about Saudi shipping, they're talking almost like guarantee the thing they're talking about a shipping oil out of the country, right? If the attacks on Saudi shipping have slowed down in the past week, but there is always the

Starting point is 01:45:10 possibility of them starting up again. And this is the real problem in terms of the world's oil infrastructure, and particularly from the perspective of empire, right, in the sense of wanting to be able to secure access to oil for the U.S. and for other sort of imperial powers, the issue that, the issue that that they're facing as this war continues, right? And as these really, really truly these series of wars, right, is that even if, you know, going back to the Saudi pipeline, right, the Saudi pipeline will eventually be fixed, right?

Starting point is 01:45:49 Like full capacity, it might not be for six to eight weeks, but eventually the pipeline is going to get fixed, even if it is sort of restricting supply in the meantime. The problem is that all of this infrastructure, is just exposed. And a whole bunch of different militaries in the region can and probably will hit them again, as the U.S. has been, you know, like hitting Iranian oil infrastructure, right? Iran, it's allied paramilitaries in Iraq, the Houthis. There are lots of groups in the region who are being attacked by the U.S. and the Saudis and sort of American allies in the region

Starting point is 01:46:29 who are looking at this and going, oh, this is something we can use to have. extract, you know, to extract concessions and try to fight the Americans off. And there's no real answer for this other than ending the war, a thing that just won't happen. Now, the Trump administration nominally has a plan for this. The plan that they are claiming to have, other than, you know, this sort of constant dance of claiming it the war in Iran is over, and then it's restarting again. We've started a whole bunch of different wars, and that the trade-off home movies is actually open. The other plan that Trump has talked about is Venezuela. Trump was at the UN recently,

Starting point is 01:47:21 where he gave an extremely distressing speech in which he talked about how he had been thinking about destroying Iran. He said, quote, do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations? Now, one of the other parts, of this speech was him talking about the U.S.'s deal with the Venezuelan government that it installed when it just kidnapped Maduro, who we are just also still holding,

Starting point is 01:47:56 as people I think broadly have forgotten about, but yeah, no, we just are still just holding ahead of state, like hostage in a prison. We're just still doing that. But he was talking about a deal that he struck with the current Venezuelan government, which is largely just composed of the same people from the Maduro government, but with any person in charge of it and answering to Trump.

Starting point is 01:48:22 Yeah, talking, you know, that was a, in a hundred years, supposedly in a hundred year concession for a significant portion of what's supposed to be Venezuela's oil fields. Now, Trump in this said, quote, to the victors belong the spoils. and this is nominally, right? This sort of is his previous war, or short war, I guess, on Venezuela is supposed to be the solution to his new war. Trump has been pushing the line that oil flowing from Venezuela is going to be the thing that drives prices down and stops these escalating oil prices from his other imperial war in Iran. And as we're going to talk about, now, there is oil flowing from Venezuela to the U.S., right? And the amount of oil that is flowing to the U.S. has increased companies that were already in Venezuela, like Chevron, are expanding production.

Starting point is 01:49:30 But it hasn't even hit, like 1990s levels. it's still in the grand scheme of things not enough oil to actually do anything. And as we have sort of repeatedly emphasized on this show, oil is not liquid money. As material properties and as social properties that come from the technical process of extraction, it's not all the same.

Starting point is 01:49:54 These oil reserves, you know, suck. Right. And this is also part of the problem with Venezuela oil. The oil is just of a lower quality than the oil that you get out of the Middle East. Now, what's important for purposes, right, is we're beginning to see a little bit more of the plan, which I guess is kind of an ambitious way to describe

Starting point is 01:50:18 the kind of just semi-free-for-all that's been happening in Venezuela. In terms of this sort of plan, which is to, like, extract all of this oil from Venezuela, which is now, you know, I mean, just effectively operating as an American colony, even in just pure imperial terms and not thinking just in terms of sort of like

Starting point is 01:50:36 the fact that yeah, Venezuela is just a dictatorship and the oil is now flowing to the U.S., there's real problems with this in that Venezuela oil infrastructure is very bad and the actual money in oil is in controlling infrastructure that already exists and not building new infrastructure. So, again, companies that were in Venezuela, which is basically Chevron, right, are expanding the

Starting point is 01:51:09 existing production to some extent, but no one else wants to go in and actually build a bunch of oil refineries and a bunch of extraction facilities because that stuff's expensive and it requires massive heavy capital investment and it's risky. And this is becoming a real problem for this entire plan. right? Like, obviously, yes, there is oil that the administration can ship out of Venezuela and, you know, and it is, right? But it's not enough to, like, actually seriously have the effects that the administration is talking about in terms of sort of lowering prices. Now, we're going to get to the extent to which it does kind of solve the regime's demand on just the basic level of, oh, if we're going to do a war, we should keep the oil.

Starting point is 01:51:59 But the actual prospects for this oil are just not very good. And this is where I want to get into something new that we've learned about sort of recently through reporting from the Wall Street Journal. There's been some more stuff about some of the people who are coming into Venezuela in order to do this. Now, we have mentioned on the show before that there were a lot of network state people like involved in Venezuela. This is one of the places that these sort of like silicon, Valley Tech fascists are moving into.

Starting point is 01:52:32 And one of the people who is now becoming important in Venezuela's sort of oil production or is attempting to become important is this crypto billionaire named Fred Ersam, who is one of the founders of Coinbase, which is a giant crypto company, he's sort of in tight with the entire Silicon Valley Tech elite. He has ties to like every venture capital. and Drason Horowitz, like steel-backed constellation you can imagine. And he's one of the people who's been extremely important in terms of the ways that this sort of network state project of this like setting up these sort of like corporate fascist states, right, have been interested in crypto as a way to sort of move money around and have money that's not like taxable. directly or is difficult for states

Starting point is 01:53:29 to sort of get access to. Now, Fred has moved into this really, really sort of... It's like described as a hotel, but it's like almost more like a kind of like, I don't know, almost like billionaire resort thing in Caracas. It's like 36 rooms in it. And he's been spending a whole bunch of time living there.

Starting point is 01:53:57 He's also founded this company with some Venezuelan guys, one of whom was like went to Stanford. So, you know, it's like these sort of, there's always like a local elite kind of thing involved in these projects where particularly you get like American educated guys from like colonized nations. You end up like coming back and getting involved in these processes. And they have like they founded this company called Prima Vera, which is getting involved in the contracts for Venezuelan oil development. But there's problems here, right? Which is that, like, this is a startup. They've never done oil extraction before, right? And, and, you know, the network state people and their sort of like VC firms have had a lot of success in things like drone production, right?

Starting point is 01:54:45 In missile production, in a lot of sort of, you know, like things that are like kind of like heavy industrial capacity. But this guy is a crypto billionaire. And they're trying to do oil development. that the rest of the world's oil companies were like, no. So there are sort of real questions about whether even this, you know, this sort of like fascist plan to exploit the resources of this country can actually work. But this is the kind of consolation of forces that are, that have a line behind the Trump administration, right?

Starting point is 01:55:16 And these consolation of forces are to an extent different than the ones from old American neo-conservatism, right? which was the last sort of, you know, last time we were like fighting wars for oil during the Bush administration. Now, I want to go back and talk about this in terms of the structure of empire, right? Because it's very clear that the kind of regime that's been set up in Venezuela, which is just, okay, we've turned this entire nation into not even the kind of debt servicing colony that the U.S. has traditionally done when it comes in to extract wealth from McConnell. country, but just as a sort of like peer, hey, we can say we got the oil colony, but this is the kind of regime that Trump wants not just for Venezuela, but for Iran and Cuba and the rest of the world as well, which are just these sort of like compliant dictatorships that will export him

Starting point is 01:56:21 whatever he wants and flatter his ego. And this is a desire, this specific kind of empire, right? This specific kind of oil empire is a desire that comes out of a divide in American conservativeism between the neocons and what are called the paleocons, right? Or like, I guess like the old, you know, paleos like the old conservatives, neocons, the new conservatives or whatever. These are both kinds of empire, right? If you look at what neoconservatism was, it was an oil company strapped to a weapons manufacturer,

Starting point is 01:56:53 like wearing a church for a face. And if you look at what the Bush administration is, like Bush is a Texas oil guy. Cheney is a Halliburton guy, which is like another oil company. He's also really heavily involved in a bunch of, weapons manufacturers. You know, this is the alliance that was like doing the wars for oil.

Starting point is 01:57:10 But part of what the project of neo-conservatism was was nominally this mission of bringing like, quote, unquote, democracy to the world. And obviously this is, you know, democracy insofar as it supports the U.S., which is like capitalism and support for American Empire. And, you know, they're setting up a stock market in Iraq. But like, and this is the way that a lot of these people thought about it was this sort of like Higelian nation building process. right, like the unfolding of American liberal democracy

Starting point is 01:57:37 throughout the entire world in a way that, you know, could sort of permanently stabilize its egemony. But there is this sort of, like, nation-building aspect of it. But then there was also always, like, a paleo-con opposition to it, and this is the more radical faction that didn't give a shit about any of the sort of

Starting point is 01:57:58 democracy and human rights stuff that neocon would spout. You know, literally they were like, yeah, bomb them all and take the oil and leave. And this, to a large extent, is this is the faction that Trump has descended from, right? And these people sometimes will kind of like play at being anti-imperialist or like, not even anti-peoters, they'll play up being anti-war. You know, Tucker Carlson, for example, is like a guy who did this a lot, even though he supported the war when it was happening. But they'll do this thing of like, oh, like, we shouldn't go fight in these imperial wars. The U.S. should only like fight wars that benefit it. We shouldn't be the world's policemen. But the color rate of that is, you know, where, like, war for oil was, like, the leftist charge about what we were doing in Iraq. These people were just like, yeah, no, we actually should literally just fight wars for oil because they're just, they're fascists, right? They don't even have the kind of veil of this, like, nominally sort of democratic project. All they really care about is just the pure resource extraction.

Starting point is 01:59:05 But the thing about this, right, and like part of what was going on with this kind of thing was like, yeah, so you want to set up a stable government so that these oil companies have a secure base from which to actually do resource extraction. Because, you know, sort of unstable governments make it more difficult, etc, etc. Now, with this sort of like fascist Trump coalition, like obviously, yeah, like the oil company supported him. But it's not the like oil guys directly who are behind. behind the Venezuelic, who or the people didn't have, like, moved in to extract the oil. It's, as we were talking about, it's these, like, tech-fascist network state guys.

Starting point is 01:59:44 And the reaction of the oil people to Trump's wars, and this is, you know, partially the Venezuela, but mostly to this war on Iran, which he's framing as being about, like, nuclear weapons, but he's also been talking about, like, we should just sit there and take the trade off of a moose. You know, Iran shouldn't be able to, like, threaten the world's oil supply.

Starting point is 02:00:01 The actual oil people are really pissed off about this because, yeah, they're losing access to their ability to ship oil. But this is what is inside of the sort of price hieroglyphic of gas price go up. It's an attempt of like the tech fascist to like graft their project onto this sort of paleo-con fascist id of Trump where he's just doing this wars like because he wants to and they're attempting to get something out of it. But what has actually happened here in all of this is that in the administration's war for oil

Starting point is 02:00:40 and in their attempt to sort of like fulfill the old paleo con desire for wars for oil they have successfully not gotten oil they're replacing oil that they used to have or attempting to replace better oil they used to have with shit oil that won't work for these purposes

Starting point is 02:01:00 and they're depriving both the U.S. and basically the rest of the world of oil And, you know, that's in some sense the macro level of it. The micro level of it is that there's a whole bunch of wars and genocides that are playing out across the world that are the results of this. And that's what's encoded in gas price go up is all of the violence and all of the cruelty and all of the sort of in inane, flailing stupidity of empire. record is on. Miley is having a moment. New exclusive shows.

Starting point is 02:01:48 So IHart Radio is sending you to experience it all. Life at the Hollywood Polites, hotel, tickets, and $1,000 cash. Listen to IHard new music for 10 minutes a day on the IHart Radio app. And click enter. Every day you listen is another chance to win. Stream Miley's new album, Bass Persuades, today. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed.

Starting point is 02:02:17 And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interest, and they complain about the very thing they're receiving. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered.

Starting point is 02:02:43 I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all going to scream as you. Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. 12 seats. Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the South now.

Starting point is 02:03:06 And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts. Wherever you get your podcasts. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder. our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and special correspondent, Dena El-Kurd. Welcome. Thank you, thank you.

Starting point is 02:03:35 This episode, we are covering the week of September 16 to September 23rd. I know this has been a busy news week. There's the United Nations. The Trump admin is throwing around the idea of a diesel export embargo. there's a lot of big issues in this country. But on Wednesday, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama decided to use the United States Senate to bring up another very important issue

Starting point is 02:04:04 threatening the national security of our country. Let's take a listen. Airline pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers are part of the furry community. Lord help us It's terrifying when you think about this When you walk onto a commercial flight

Starting point is 02:04:25 It's possible that the pilot fly in your plane Could have a deranged fetus of dressing up like an animal You can't make this up Every time I hear that guy's name He sounds like he's a character on Thomas a Tank Engine Like a side character Then he goes and does shit like this He does have a very cartoony name

Starting point is 02:04:45 Also on the little podium here, printout of the... An emoji. An emoji. Not just any emoji. Does someone want to take a crack at describing this? I think this is what we would describe as the pregnant man emoji. I'm sure. A yellow emoji figure with short hair who is pregnant.

Starting point is 02:05:04 The text reads transgenderism as a mental illness. Something I think Taberville and others are overlooking is if we were to excise furries, from their jobs, the airline pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers, our entire system would collapse. Those are the crucial soldiers keeping our airspace.

Starting point is 02:05:28 They are the glue. Yes. They are the glue. Like, we're already running into many issues in regards to air traffic controllers and the airline industry. If you take the furries out, it's done. It's over.

Starting point is 02:05:41 You know what? Honestly, someone in the furry community, to get on organizing the furry strike where all the furries just go on strike. We can end this whole system right now. We can defeat them in a single stroke. Let's move on to some other small news items.

Starting point is 02:05:58 Yeah, okay. Someone was upset on the subreddit that we didn't call this all the small things. We're not going to. I guess I'm going to start with Pete Heggseth. Pete Heggseth had announced a joint warfighter evaluation. Oh, boy. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:06:13 So this is a thing for 06s, who are screening for their first star, right, across all the different branches of the military. I'm not going to list what no-six is because I don't understand how the Navy works. But he's claiming that this new evaluation for promotion will value competence over credentials. It's the way he phrased it. It's basically like an exercise that these officers will have to take part in, and various versions of it are going to involve a war game against an AI-powered adversary, which is great.

Starting point is 02:06:44 expected, I guess. Like, we probably could have seen this coming. It's additive to the existing things that they consider for promotion, but this is part of his ongoing, like, purge of the U.S. military officer corps. Secondly, I want to talk about a visual investigation by Thomas Bordeaux. He's at CNN, but I think he's working with BBC Verify on this. BBC is doing a kind of true crime podcast

Starting point is 02:07:09 about the disappearance of Austin Tice at the moment. People aren't familiar. Austin Tice was an American friend. freelancer who disappeared in Syria at the beginning of the revolution and continues to be missing. Have any of you guys seen this video? No. This must be like, well, I think it was 2012, right? 2011. I think it was right at the end of 2011. So it purports to be a video of his execution. It seems very likely to be staged. Like, if you watch it, it seems a lot like its regime Intel guys dressing up and pretending to be like rebels. Like they basically say nothing but

Starting point is 02:07:44 tuck beard the whole time, and then they make him say some stuff, and then the video cuts, right? You don't see him being executed. He's blindfolded and it's supposed to give that vibe. Anyway, they have geolocated this video to an area that would have been controlled by the Assad regime at the time, which I guess further adds evidence to the claim that he was held by the regime, at least at that time. CBS is reporting the Trump administration is ready to accept 17,500 more Afrikanah refugees. God. Yeah, the people who have struggled the most in the continent of Africa.

Starting point is 02:08:18 CBS is reporting that the Trump administration said, quote, the United States anticipates that Afrikaners from South Africa will fully assimilate into the United States in a manner that preserves taxpayer resources for U.S. citizens and does not anticipate other countries resettling Afrikaners. One can only imagine why. This assimilation thing has been a consistent thing for them, right?

Starting point is 02:08:40 the first time they accepted white throws African refugees. Rubio talked about it in Congress. This seems to be the standard by which they're judging refugee admissions now. You have to be white and you have to quote unquote assimilate. So that's great. On Tuesday, J.D. Vance's so-called anti-fraud task force announced that they were cutting almost a million people from Affordable Care Act coverage

Starting point is 02:09:05 after deciding that 760,000 people or enrollees were fraudulently enrolled in government health care plans, that these plans did not correspond to real people, or these people were ineligible for coverage. Vance announced that another 419,000 accounts are under, quote, additional verification. Memet Oz said that they canceled coverage for people in part because those people never filed a claim.

Starting point is 02:09:35 760,000 people, we call them phantoms, because we believe most of me that don't exist or had no idea they had coverage. We believe that because we have been writing them, telexing them, you know, walking to them, FedExing, whatever we could possibly do to get in touch with them, they won't answer, and they have never filed a claim. So it meets all the criteria for us to pretty as much as any government can say, you actually don't know you have this or you don't exist. Obviously in numbers this large, it is not unlikely that there is many real people.

Starting point is 02:10:08 who do need this coverage or rely on this coverage, who will be cut as a part of this almost a million people. And Vance has promised that more cuts will be coming. Last Friday, the DOJ released a new legal opinion, concluding that the federal ban on handgun sales to 18 to 20-year-olds is unconstitutional and should not be enforced against licensed dealers. And lastly, for me, ProPublica just published a... super in-depth investigation into how Trump crushed a sweeping 24 FBI bribery probe into

Starting point is 02:10:45 Susan Collins and her super PAC, among a few other congresspeople as well. This article lays out what looks like a pretty clear pay-to-play scheme with requests for campaign donations in exchange for Collins securing millions of dollars in federal funding for defense contractors. Collins is the chair of the Appropriations Committee. With one contractor, a naval company called Navtech, funneling donations through a shell company, which the head of Colin Superpack said was, quote, very smart. Oh boy. In email correspondence obtained by ProPublica, this shell company, by the way, was called

Starting point is 02:11:26 The Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers. Wait, just scientists? Scientist. Incredible. Yes. Yes. Scientists. That typo was how this donation was first flagged

Starting point is 02:11:40 that then prompted this investigation. Cool work there. ProPublica writes, quote, the money had come from Navitech's account, not their CEOs, violating a ban on government contractors making donations, unquote. So the CEO of Navitech is now in prison, but obviously Collins is not.

Starting point is 02:12:02 Though, the CEO was interviewed by the FBI for a number of years regarding his dealings with Collins and other people in Congress. Republic writes that the CEO, quote, handed the FBI the 50-page document detailing Navitech's dealings with more than a dozen members of Congress and their staff, unquote. So part of Republic's reporting is explaining how the FBI was about to kind of launch this much broader, full-scale investigation around the end of 2024. and then obviously in 2025 Trump got into office

Starting point is 02:12:37 this whole like type of investigation fell apart. The whole bunch of attorneys resigned during February of 2025. This is another one of those articles I think it's worth just reading the whole thing. It's pretty long, but it's some pretty solid reporting

Starting point is 02:12:51 and it's already been corroborated by the New York Times as well. All right. Do we want to talk about some medium-sized things? Some medium items. Okay. Talking of medium-sized things. Let's talk about wolves, not as big as Buffalo, large than rabbits.

Starting point is 02:13:07 So Donald Trump has signed an executive order which gives 90 days for the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a broad inspection of regulations impacting ranching and make suggestions to change them. The executive order presser was called supporting America's ranchers. As part of this, he talks about instructing Doug Bergam, who, if you don't remember, was endorsed by REI last year to work on delisting wolves from the Endangered Species Act. Specifically, I'm just going to quote here, the Secretary of the Interior shall make a determination as to whether the Grey Wolf and the Mexican wolf has met the recovery criteria for delisting or downlisting under the Endangered Species Act.

Starting point is 02:13:48 And if he determines that the recovery criteria has been met, shall begin the process of delisting or downlisting them. It also directs him to work with states to have them removed from state ESAs, right? So several states have their own indefinite. Ancient Species Act, California is one of them, right? I think wolves were listed under the California ESA before the federal ESA existed. If you're not familiar, wolves have become a massive cultural war issue in the West, right? Like, wolves are very woke, is a thing that I have learned. Like, if you go, I don't go to Gardner outside Yellowstone, right? Like, this place which

Starting point is 02:14:21 we can categorically prove makes millions of dollars a year from people coming to look at wolves. You'll see people wearing those Smoker Packer Day t-shirts, and they're not talking about cigarettes, right? Oh. Yeah. Removing wolves from the West, seeing wolves as like this, this woke thing that is destroying our writing interest. It's a big culture signal.

Starting point is 02:14:43 Like the idea that like conservation is like woke or in some way or like like animal like. The thing with wolves is it combines like people don't like people who talk about animal rights. People don't like ecology and conservation and people don't like predators. Got it. Right. And so when we get these three things to go. It's the idea that it's a bunch of people in New York who don't understand what wolves do and they want them back, but they don't have to deal with the consequences, right? It does suck when there is predation.

Starting point is 02:15:11 Like my family raised livestock. I've dealt with predation. It's fucking sucks. It sucks, especially when it's young animals, right, calves or lambs or whatever. One of the things that the Trump administration has also instructed Bergam to do is to look at and consider amending the existing compensation programs, which exists for wolves, right? the wolf issue I think is also particularly controversial because there have been hard introductions right like if you look at Colorado Colorado had a ballot measure in 2020 to introduce wolves to reintroduce wolves which they began doing about three years ago and like Colorado has this big cultural divide right between like your blue counties and the western slope I'll say like the

Starting point is 02:15:49 idea that like these front range folks in Denver and Boulder mandated wolves on ranches and so it plays on other I guess existing insecurities and it's a little bit of little different here in California because the wolves in California weren't released. They walked in on their own feet. Although a popular conspiracy theory that I've heard is that that's not actually true and that some people sneaked the wolves in from Oregon and released them like wolf vigilantes. This should be real. I know. Yeah. Please. If you have smuggled the wolf into the state of California, you've done a lot of crimes, but I would love to talk to you for my podcast.

Starting point is 02:16:28 I want to address this more in my podcast, Natural Causes, because I think a lot of people are wrong about wolves, right? I think it's silly to say that we shouldn't have wolves. I think it's also frustrating for people to think that the reason that we have wolves is to fix our fuck-ups. Wolves have a right to be there because they've always been there and they belong there. They're not there to undo the damage done by capitalism and the state to the land. And we shouldn't tie the justification for reintroducing them to that

Starting point is 02:16:56 because sometimes the science will not support that and then we will lose that justification. They have a right to be there because they belong there. That can be the start and the end of it and I think it should be. I think we should be expecting the wolves to do our dirty work or undo our dirty work. I'm a little confused about what Trump is exactly saying here because he also wants a, quote,

Starting point is 02:17:15 a legislative recommendation to fully delist or downlist to gray wolf and the Mexican wolf under the ESA. There are not many Mexican wolves. I think there are fewer than 400. Jeez. Yeah, there are like 320-ish, in those sort of southwestern of southern states and then probably 50 in Mexico. We spoke about a prosecution for killing Mexican wolves a few months ago that I found in a New Mexico court in court records, right?

Starting point is 02:17:42 But it seems very unlikely that they will meet the recovery guidelines set up under the ESA, but I admittedly have not looked into those recently. I want to move on to something that's even more depressing. the lifeboat protest in the UK. So this week, and really this month, has seen a series of really disgusting protests and attacks on lifeboats in the UK. This includes fascist Daniel Thomas. He goes by Danny Tomo, really great Nondager, which disguised his identity very well, stabbing a lifeboat. For those not familiar with this, the discourse here is related to the mission of the R&LI, which is to rescue those in peril on the sea. The lifeboats were,

Starting point is 02:18:23 I guess, at least during the time when I was growing up, a foundational British institution. They are funded by the people, not the state. They are literally in the book Mutual Aid, like Capital M, Capital A, Mutual Aid. They also used to celebrate for Potkin's birthday, the RNLI. You can go back if their Twitter page still exists and see them posting things about his birthday. There's a very good piece called Lifeboats and Anarchy in the R&LI magazine. The people should read, they wouldn't know more about that. Like when I was a child, there was a very popular way back when, right, when there were only four TV channels,

Starting point is 02:18:56 there was a very popular TV, children's TV program and children who was the program would hold fundraisers for the lifeboats every year. And this was like a completely foundational thing that everybody thought was good, right? All they do is rescue people who are in danger of drowning. It's mostly a volunteer institution. I've had friends and colleagues who I've worked with who have volunteered on the lifeboats. It is a job. dangerous, stressful and often thankless job that you can't plan or schedule for, right? When someone needs help, you have to go and help them immediately. You have to stop what you're doing. Work away from work, walk away from whatever you're doing socially, walk away from your

Starting point is 02:19:32 family and go risk your life to help people. And that's all they do. Why are they stabbing the boats then? So I guess... I mean, fascist going to fascist. Yeah. What's the source of these protests? Specifically, it is the idea that the lifeboats are bringing people seeking a side of to communities who cannot support them. You see the same shit that you see everyone in the world, right? Like I saw a BBC interview with someone who is like, we've got homeless people here.

Starting point is 02:19:59 And I would be prepared to wager a large amount of money that that person has done the square root of fuck all to help homeless people in the last few years, right? But now is suddenly concerned because apparently they have to compete for scarce resources with asylum seekers rather than, yeah, you know, the fucking royal family. In this case, there was a protest in Gosport where we saw crowds of people

Starting point is 02:20:20 led by a child chanting, let them drown. I was about to ask if this was the same protest. Yeah, like, one can understand a child who isn't fully formed in the brain saying shit like that, I guess. It's not their fault.

Starting point is 02:20:35 Yeah, for a child to be raised in a place with that much hate, it's fucking disgusting. And for grown adults to be, like, joining in and encouraging that behavior is fucking appalling. Thomas has pulled this shit

Starting point is 02:20:47 a few times, but obviously like this was the worst. What they're trying to do, I guess, is like, boats have been leaving from Chirpour, so like on the mental west side of France, right, because of increased police presence in Dunkirk and those areas where you would go to Dover where there's a shorter channel crossing, right? And so the lifeboats being dispatched are coming, probably from the eye, I'm not exactly sure, maybe the Isle of Wight, I think, and they are taking them to the UK main. land, right, by the shortest route. If the lifeboats took those people who they rescued to

Starting point is 02:21:21 Dover, that would take probably half a dozen hours. And at that point, the lifeboat is then out of its area of operation. So if anybody else is in distress on the sea, that lifeboat can't respond, right? It's a good example. I've had how this bigotry hurts everyone. They've been doing this for a while. I actually made a podcast a couple years ago with Professor Ruth Kinnah about lifeboats of mutual aid. But like to see this many people going after something that was so foundational to the culture in the United Kingdom not so long ago. Like when I was a kid, because they've been whipped up into thinking that they have to compete for resources with asylum seekers rather than like the only dangerous minority being the rich. It makes me really sad

Starting point is 02:22:04 and it makes me really angry. And like there is something so fucking broken about a crowd of people chanting, let them drown. And like I know I'm proud of all my friends who continue to volunteer for the RNLI. I really want to go back home and do a series on it because I know a lot of people who are life boatmen and like I think what they do is incredible. And it's it's the answer to the question that everyone always has about anarchism, like who will put out the fires without the state, the same people who fucking rescue thousands of people a year from the sea, right? Like the RNLI is funded by donations and through people's wills. The money doesn't come from your taxes. The money doesn't come from the state. I've pointed to them for so long, like both when I'm teaching

Starting point is 02:22:45 and in conversations and like I think that's something we should be really proud of. And it's disgusting to me that people are doing this shit. Talking of disgusting, do you want to talk about Trump speech at the UN? I think we should probably talk about the advertisers that support our podcast first. Hopefully it's the lifeboats we can donate. I don't think it's going to be the lifeboats. I don't think they advertise on podcasts. That would be cool. All right. We're back. And now we're traveling from the United Kingdom to New York to talk about the United Nations General Assembly, where Donald Trump used the platform he had to make comments that sounded straight-up genocidal.

Starting point is 02:23:36 But I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before? Maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world. world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations? But I believe we'll make a deal right after the election because it doesn't make sense for them not to. This is fucking great. right? Oh my God.

Starting point is 02:24:25 To go from like, don't worry, I'll genocide them all to vote for me, please. Only a deal after the election. Yeah. It was like, I got to say what happens. Yeah, right. Yeah, we got to keep him in just so we see how this goes. It's a fucking UN. Like it was found, and admitted to his failed, right? But it was founded as the idea that we could all get together and talk it out.

Starting point is 02:24:45 We wouldn't have genocides. And there he is just fucking, like, as I said, the UN manifestly failed in that regard and many others. But it still sucks. Yeah, it's still fucking bonkers. It's super easy to like, you know, poo-poo on the UN because it's the UN. But I mean, it's what we have. It's what we have. Yeah, yeah, it's a tool that we have.

Starting point is 02:25:04 And like, yeah, he then went on to talk about the midterms. This is like another 30 seconds. Let's listen to this. They're waiting to see how I do in the midterm election. What they don't realize is that I'm not running. I did that already. and won in a landslide. We won in a giant landslide.

Starting point is 02:25:26 And I'll be here for two and a half years. The Republican Party is running, and I'll be helping them. But I am not running. I gave absolutely no credence and will not give credence to the election when it comes to Iran. It doesn't even enter my mind.

Starting point is 02:25:46 And then he goes on to say that they don't get a nuclear weapon, of course, right? This is bonkers, right? The idea that Iran is not aware. Yeah. He's like, wait, guys, you have to understand. Americans have different elections. They can't comprehend, right?

Starting point is 02:26:03 Is this just the thing where, like, he didn't know this that someone told him? Like, what is happening here? He's like, they recently told me I am actually not running. Yeah, I'm good, guys. Like, it's, like, clearly his war on Iran has been extremely unpopular and continues. be extremely unpopular because it costs six bucks to buy a gallon of gas now, even if people don't care about the massive human toll of this, they do care about that. Which I do also want to say for the record that this war was unpopular before the gas prices

Starting point is 02:26:35 increased. It's made it more unpopular, but no one has ever liked this war, and it just gets more unpopular every day. Yeah. It's part of why he's, I guess, bringing this midterm stuff up in like both of these clips here. And I guess he's like, he knows he only has a few months left until. the amount of support he has in Congress will take a pretty big dip. Even if they just lose the House.

Starting point is 02:26:58 But I mean, if looking at the polls, if like the Senate's on the line, that's going to put at least some, some constraints, at some checks, as opposed to the zero. Yeah, yeah. It has like zero or negative checks

Starting point is 02:27:11 that have been in Congress for the past two years. It's like he's going to like, I assume, plot out, you know, all the way up until the time that the next Congress has. sworn in, like, whatever his game plan is. Yeah, it's well to see him electioneering this hard at the UN as well. At the UN. Yeah. Like, just, I mean, he does this all the time, right? He goes

Starting point is 02:27:31 around to something that's absolutely that the most jarring tone shit from anything that has happened there before. But, like, the way he continues to talk about, like, annihilating Iran. It's disturbing. Yeah. Especially as our conventional weapons resources get lower and lower, it's scary. Like, it's genuinely scary. That's stuff that you could just play at an ICC trial for genocide. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he spoke about the ICC as well. He critiqued the ICC or not even critique.

Starting point is 02:27:59 That's not the right word. Didn't he call for the mall to resign or something? Something, yeah. Yeah, I mean, some of them can't even come to the U.S. Yeah. Yeah, this was and continues to be bonkers, I guess. It's not surprising in a sense, but it still sucks. Yeah, it's horrifying.

Starting point is 02:28:17 Dan, I know you had some stuff you wanted to talk about. Do you want to hear you? pick up from here. Yes. So there's a lot of talk about what's going to happen to Gaza, what's going to happen to the Palestinians of the West Bank. I just didn't. It could happen here episode on the way the Israeli state and the Israeli settler movement are working together to ethnically cleanse the West Bank, but how we should distinguish between the two. Anyway, the way that international actors, particularly the United States, have behaved just to kind of audaciously sideline the Palestinians. Like they don't even pretend

Starting point is 02:28:48 to include them or consider them. So the Board of Peace, for example, doesn't have any Palestinian decision makers. There are only technocrats who are essentially supposed to just take commands from the Board of Peace. So there's really like no space in the discussion for Palestinian agency. But I think international actors, governments in the EU, but even some in Washington kind of thinking medium to long term about after Trump, they understand that this doesn't look great. And that at some point, they'll have to make a big display of getting Palestinians to sign some grand peace deal with the Israelis, and you need some group of Palestinians to do that, right? So the Palestinian authority that governs the West Bank is led by President Mahmoud Abbas, as I'm sure many know, who has

Starting point is 02:29:32 overstayed his term limits for many, many years. He's also the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO. And Palestinians are very unhappy with this set up. Basically, the polls show that they think it lacks legitimacy and that he lacks legitimacy. So the international community has essentially been getting to work to kind of paper over this issue. So last year, they pressured Abbas to find a successor because he's so old, they're afraid he's going to keel over. And he unilaterally changed the bylaws of the PLO outside normal institutional procedures to create a vice president position. And he appointed someone to that position from the PLO Executive Committee, the dude he picked, Hesno Sheikh, polls at 2% with Palestinians.

Starting point is 02:30:17 So they're already setting up for what comes after Abbas. And now they're working on PLO changes that would again on the surface look like an institution renewing its legitimacy. So part of that, this is ongoing right now, is having the legislative body of the PLO, the Palestinian National Council, actually hold elections. So I'm going to quote here from the European Council on Foreign Relations. the PNC is responsible for formulating the PLO's policies. It acts as a parliament that represents all Palestinians, except for Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Starting point is 02:30:48 The PNC currently comprises 747 members representing Palestinians in Palestine and in the diaspora. But because the PNC has had such difficulty convening and all of these things, there are other bodies that bridge between the legislative and the executive, like the central council. And over the years, the PNC has basically lost any power. even though it's supposed to be the legislative body, it's supposed to be kind of the democratic engine of the PLO. So in February 26, so at February of this year, Abbas issued a decree saying that there would be PNC elections in November

Starting point is 02:31:22 and that this would include basically trying to make it so that all eligible Palestinians that can like feasibly vote directly, living in the diaspora, or if that's not possible kind of through an electoral college process in different diasporas, or via quote-unquote consensus. So the PLO, the PA, which at this point overlap, they've been going around different communities,

Starting point is 02:31:51 different Palestinian diaspora communities, and setting up so that these different communities run people for these elections. But the way they're doing it is extremely undemocratic. They are not thinking about, you know, who are we going to tap that actually represents something, constituency in these diaspras, or are they actually, like, representative of these diaspros? They're just getting yesmen in a lot of cases. Some members of the Central Council basically found

Starting point is 02:32:19 out that they had been removed after reading it in the media. So, like, it's completely undemocratic. The Palestinian diaspora in Chile, for example, like, they've tapped a particular organization, but that organization, like, gets to run the elections and other organizations in the Palestinian diaspora in Chile, like, have to jump through a lot more hoops. to be able to run in the same elections. So to me, it feels like a grand conspiracy against Palestinians to pretend like this PNC elections are actually legitimate, in reality, really disempowering huge swaths of the Palestinian diaspora. He also announced in that decree that he's going to half the numbers of the PNC from 747 to 350. So essentially one seat allocated for every 35,000 Palestinians is like

Starting point is 02:33:06 the idea, but yeah, it's not great. And I think that we should really, you know, focus on what's happening here because the Palestinians are being set up in so many ways for a very bleak near-term future. I feel like I've stunned all of you with the silence. Well, it's so bleak. They're just like how openly they're just kind of ringing the elections. It's like, I don't know. It reminds me of like more expansive version of the way that like the CCP does elections for. or like there's like nominal elections for all of their party official offices where they do like a very similar process of like, yeah, we've we've like put forward one candidate who's like our person. You're all going to vote for them or you're going to vote for one of the like allied parties or something. Yeah. No, it's completely like minimized as a process.

Starting point is 02:33:58 Yeah. I mean, I haven't even gotten into like the local elections that have happened in the occupied territories and how kind of problematic some of those have been. But just on every level, like, even when they're pretending at democracy, like, it's not happening, you know? So, yeah. And then like in the same like CCP structure thing, you have like this big assembly that does nothing. And then there's like executive bodies that have been carefully chosen from their loyalists outside of that that like do all the things. Yeah. Exactly. No, no, that's a good comparison.

Starting point is 02:34:27 Yeah. So the second thing I wanted to just very briefly touch on is the issue of Palestine and higher ed. I think, like, because there haven't been the, you know, massive widespread protests that we saw a year or two years ago, this maybe has dropped from the radar, but it continues to, you know, those protests on campuses continue to have ramifications for higher ed and for a lot of the people who participated. So two cases I wanted to just mention briefly is that at Stanford University, a number of students were criminally prosecuted for protesting on their campus. And for some of them that involved occupying the president's office and demanding divestment and things like this. But the charges have all been dropped against those students. The Santa Clara County District Attorney that was assigned to this case, who was seeking criminal prosecution, was using the case to solicit donations for his reelection, saying he was tough on anti-Semitism. She's Christian. Jesus. Yeah. So the judge was like, hey, I think this is probably, you're probably too biased for this. So he like asked him to be removed from the case. And then eventually, as I said,

Starting point is 02:35:33 the charges were dropped and the students like have to pay a small sum and like do some community service. But the idea is like all of these cases, whether at Sanford and or other places, they were used to deter further protest for sure. And then the second case I wanted to mention is maybe people remember three Palestinian students, one from Brown University, one from Haverford College and one from Trinity College, were shot for wearing kathias on the street in Vermont maybe two years ago. All three of them were wounded and one was paralyzed. So the guy who shot them, Jason Eaton, faces up to life in prison. And despite the fact that that guy had claimed that the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies had transmitted orders to him to shoot

Starting point is 02:36:21 the students via FM radio and that God had commanded him to protect his Jewish neighbors, no hate crime charges were filed. So I think that that is quite telling. But nevertheless, one of the student's mothers, the student, Hisham Awarthani was the one who was paralyzed. His mother, Elizabeth Price, spoke to the media after the verdict and said, justice has been rendered for Hisham, Kiananan, and Tahsin. After three years of sorrow, loss, and struggle, our families finally feel relief. We are grateful our son's suffering commended attention and support. We grieve so much that Palestinian suffering never does.

Starting point is 02:36:57 So I just wanted to update about that case as well. I'm not sure it's a happy update, but. some semblance of repercussion. Yeah, damn. Yeah. I guess we got another shooting because this is America. I hate this country.

Starting point is 02:37:13 Yeah, I know this one's fucked up. Agent in Texas shot a man in the back last week. Wilbert Rafael Garces Perez. He's a migrant from Venezuela. He was shot in the back. He appears to be in stable condition now. We've seen a number of different videos. The videos of the shooting are not in,

Starting point is 02:37:32 entirely clear of like the Rendat events. Ice claimed he was running away from them. Video doesn't seem to show that. We have seen video of ICE agents cuffing him and appears that they're doing that before rendering aid. You could see a couple of ages putting cuffs on him and another guy who apparently has like struggling to put on latex or actually non-latex,

Starting point is 02:37:51 but protective gloves. Wilbur, like many Venezuelans, came to the USA to help his family. Like I've heard this story a hundred times, right? And I've met this family, not this family, but like a family doing exactly the same thing 100 times. He has a son with disabilities that he will probably either struggle to pay for or cannot be accommodated easily in Venezuela.

Starting point is 02:38:11 And so his dad came here to work to fund his treatment at the time that he was shot. He was delivering DoorDash, super common employment for people becoming care seeking asylum, right? His family attorney, Kate Lincoln Goldfinch, has been documenting the events after his shooting on Instagram. beginning with a post where she says she was at the hospital with Wilbur's wife, and they are trying to get into the hospital to see her husband, who had called her and said he had been shot, and then the phone cut off. So evidently she's distressed, right? And there's security at the hospital are denying that he is there

Starting point is 02:38:50 and asking the attorney and Wilbur's wife to leave. She is then informed by a congressperson that he is present at that hospital, but that a hospital's policy is not to disclose when someone's there in ICE detention. I've done a lot of, like, I haven't put much out on hospitals and ICE detention. I have done a lot of interviews about that. It's something I want to kind of get my arms around fully before I put something out because I think I've also done a lot of responding to times when migrants are in medical crisis and are afraid to get medical care.

Starting point is 02:39:24 And I think that there are really serious repercussions to suggesting that ISIS going room to room in hospitals or in ED. is taking people. I'm not aware of them ever doing that. And I just want to make that very clear for people whenever we get to this topic because it kills people to not seek medical care too. We need to hold those two things at the same time. In this case, I guess Austin's mayor showed up and got them confirmation that he was stable and had been released into an ICE detention center. His attorney then held a presser, which Wilbur attended remotely by calling in from detention. There were different ways people can call in different detention centres. I think he had some kind of tablet device. In this conference, he said he was in serious pain and that he had not been receiving

Starting point is 02:40:08 adequate mental care, and the ICE agents had not identified themselves before ramming his car. His lawyer later said that after this press conference, as a retaliatory measure, he was held in isolation and had his communication device taken away. He was also removed from the infirmary in apparent retaliation for his presser and placed in isolation. He is now, according to Congressman Joachim Castro, being returned to hospital to get better care. According to his lawyer, the agent who shot him, was hired last year and either didn't have or didn't activate the body can. The judge has ruled that Wilbur will appear in person for an immigration hearing on the

Starting point is 02:40:49 30th of September. So that would be that he can't be removed before then, right? He'd previously been ordered, removed in absentia because he had missed a hearing. His lawyer says he had moved house and didn't get that document. ICE then proceeded to release this press release, effectively directly addressing the Instagram posts of his lawyer. And they claimed they were going to, quote, correct the record, unquote, with a number of lies. It was set up the way that you my write a document if you didn't know what a paragraph was. The Axios style of writing. Yes, yes, perfect Garrison.

Starting point is 02:41:26 Yes, that's correct. It used the Axios House style here. Yeah, an outlet that thinks you're too dumb to read two sentences consecutively. So it's set up in a claim fact format. Oh, my God. Yeah, I mean, like, sometimes I think that there's a moment, like, was Jen Psiaki, where just like the way press releases are done by the executive branch just went off a fucking cliff. The Trump administration has like gone from like slight downhill to like free fall at

Starting point is 02:41:52 this point. But so throughout this, they don't refer to him by his name. They refer to him as the illegal alien. It's very common in all of their communications. Yeah, this shit really like literally yesterday. My friends and I erected a memorial to a migrant who had died and then like put their name on it right. And not giving people names really fucking makes me mad. Claim the illegal alien is here legally. Fact. I'm obviously quoting from their this is false. The person is in the US illegally. He entered illegally under the Biden administration. The illegal alien had no valid work permit, had no protective status, and had a final order of removal from a Department of Justice immigration judge. This is not correct. He entered under CBP 1,

Starting point is 02:42:34 right? Like, to enter under CBP 1 was a massive and significant burden to migrants in a Biden administration. people I know have died waiting for a CBP 1 appointment. And like not a small number of people. Like to comply with the requirements of CBP1 was to jump through every hoop that was placed in front of you at great personal risk, right? It was safer for people not to remain in Mexico and to enter without inspection.

Starting point is 02:43:07 He didn't do that. He got an appointment at CBP 1, went to a border crossing, he spoke to numerous DHS personnel and he was allowed them to the country. CBP1 gave people a year of humanitarian parole. Trump tried to cancel that, but in March this year,

Starting point is 02:43:20 a federal judge overturned him canceling that. He says you can't just like broad swath cancel parole like that. I've included an explainer for people who need to or would like to understand that more. It'll be in the notes. Is that the welcome.org link? Yes, yeah.

Starting point is 02:43:36 This press release was just so annoying. Right, like just repeating all these talking points that they have, right? CB1, if you don't know what I mean, it was founded by the Trump, the first Trump administration. This is a thing that they made. They've since tried to like rec on that,

Starting point is 02:43:52 but I mean, they did it. It was used by the Biden administration as a de facto gating mechanism for migrants, right? It was a way of reducing the number of people who could come and apply for asylum. That is why people ended up eweeing, entering without inspection, because there was no other way.

Starting point is 02:44:08 A large number of CBP1 appointments went to Russian people. speaking people, generally because those people who had come were wealthier. They could get hotels. They'd get hotels in Tijuana with Wi-Fi, and they'd make the applications, right? The application did not work on previous generation Android telephones, and those are the telephones that the vast number of people coming to Seek Asylum will have, especially, like I literally heard from a friend today who I met the Daring-Gap on, I think, her fifth phone number, because people's phones just get stolen from them constantly, right? It's the most reliable item of value that most

Starting point is 02:44:42 people have, so it's the easiest thing to steal. And so they end up with, when you turn your phone in to get like an upgrade, it gets sold in different parts of the world where people don't have as much income for technology stuff, right? So they end up with previous generation phones. The app didn't work on those phones. The facial lifeness scanner of CBP1, as I'd say, I'm booking an appointment for dinner, like that it's actually dinner making the appointment. and not me holding up a life-sized carball cut out of Den O'clock in front of the camera. So you have to go like that. It simply didn't work for black faces.

Starting point is 02:45:17 Like I know there were NGOs in Tijuana, for instance, who has spent so much money on like lightrooms, like getting big, like to try and try and make it work for people. Jesus Christ. Yeah, this act was horrific. And he went through all the fucking hurdles and they're still just going to call him. The circus has got a lot about it, right? I think this is a particularly heinous example of how fucked our immigration system is. Yeah, I'll keep up on this.

Starting point is 02:45:44 As far as we know, he's now in a hospital. I hope he's receiving better care than he would under a nice detention. Let's go on one more ad break, and then we have a few more stories before we end this episode. Okay, we are back. On Friday afternoon, President Trump announced he was, quote, banning three news outlets, CNN, MSNBC, and Politico from the White House, quote, effective immediately. As a result of their constant reporting fake news, media outlets shouldn't be able to constantly write or report fiction and lies when they're covering the president of the United States, the Trump administration, or the United States of America. other fake news media outlets to follow, unquote. Obviously not good when the president says that outlets shouldn't be allowed to write or report.

Starting point is 02:46:51 Only there was an amendment of the Constitution. But it was at first kind of unclear what this ban meant exactly. Though at a press conference following Trump's announcement on Truth Social, he referred to this as a, quote, ban on the free press. What? Wait, you just said that? Yes. Oh, I missed this. What? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:47:16 Oh, wait, let's go to. We got a video. That's fucking great. Why not? On the three news outlets, sir. What does that mean in practice? Are you taking away their badges? Are you banning them from the pool? Are you banding them for the old office?

Starting point is 02:47:27 What does that mean? I still don't know what that's. What do you envision the band's like in the media outlets? Oh, the ban on the free press, right? Very simple band. I don't want him in my office. I don't want him here. I would say the ban would go as far as you can.

Starting point is 02:47:44 He's like, you know that thing we have an amendment about? Yeah. Maybe he was referring to capital F, capital P, the Barry Weiss outlet that does transfer. I don't think he's talking about banning Barry Weiss is the free press. It's so cool that like we had an entire movement that was nominally about free speech. And like the result of it was like white CEO should be able to say the N-word. but also the president should be allowed to ban the free press from talking to him.

Starting point is 02:48:12 Hey, and the R word. There's so many slurs, equal opportunity. They want to be able to say. So Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, quote, something is wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposefully negative stories. If they want to write them, that's fine. I don't have to let them into the people's house.

Starting point is 02:48:33 Going on to say, like he started in that clip, I don't want them in my office, I don't want them here. I would say the ban would go as far as you can, and if they could straighten themselves out, I'd love it, unquote, suggesting he could lift the ban if outlets, quote, straighten themselves out, meaning write the news in a different way. Someone asked Trump how this would relate to then upcoming visit with President Xi,

Starting point is 02:49:03 and I'll just play the cliff. I don't know President Xi coming here next week. Great honor. China is one of the most repressive countries for journalists in the world. What signal does it send? Well, I don't know about that. I think we're repressive also. We get fake news.

Starting point is 02:49:18 We don't repress, but they write fake news. Jeez. Oh, they was on a sick one. You know, this whole time I was thinking about, there was a story like this week about a trial of some media organization in Hong Kong, the judge is talking about how you shouldn't be able to publish opinions that are like, I think the quote

Starting point is 02:49:41 was like factually incorrect opinions because they were like negative about the regime and then Trump's like no, fuck that, we're banning the free press. We're gonna out repress the CCP. I'm like, this is great. This is great. I love being a Chinese American. It's such a good

Starting point is 02:49:57 tie. This clip is really funny because he says we're repressive too, but then he pivots and it talks about fake news and then goes on to say like, well, we don't like actually repress, but we do have fake news

Starting point is 02:50:11 and like kind of equivocating fake news to repression in China is kind of what he turns that into. But then he just banned the press. Perhaps after catching what he said. But like, yeah, it's not, it wasn't really odd press conference as you can imagine.

Starting point is 02:50:27 Yeah. The banning the free press press conference. His honesty is always refreshing. Wild. Yeah. So over the weekend, reporters from those three outlets were denied access to the White House grounds, with journalists' hard-pass credentials apparently being deactivated overnight.

Starting point is 02:50:44 Then on Monday, the affected outlets filed a lawsuit against Trump and White House staff. The suit claims it's, quote, clear that the ban was motivated by Trump's disdain for reporting he considers, quote, one-sided and, quote, never good, because it, quote, diminishes him and his accomplishments. This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment, nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles, unquote. Also on Monday, ABC News, CBS News, NBC, and Fox, the four TV news poolers besides CNN, released a joint statement in support of CNN, who was supposed to be the designated TV pool provider for that day at the White House.

Starting point is 02:51:30 The statement reads, quote, The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting, unquote. These networks announced a solidarity blackout of White House pool coverage. With Fox News's Washington Bureau Chief and the current White House TV pool chair, emailing the other networks on Monday, quote, This is to advise that, effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the president.

Starting point is 02:52:04 This follows the White House's position, preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties. There will be no replacement pool put in place. And later on Monday, this did affect their ability to report on White House events, as Newsmax struggled to hear the president during a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Okay, so there is no microphone because there's no microphone. because the pool cameras aren't there. So maybe, Tim, this is one example of backfiring just a little bit. Pick up on some of things Michael was saying. And obviously, the ramifications are right here.

Starting point is 02:52:52 Can't hear what the president's saying. Indeed. You cannot hear what the president is saying. Backfired a little bit. A little bit. A little bit, it seems. Well, they don't want to get the old press credential taken away. They're going to be careful.

Starting point is 02:53:08 To me, it's unclear how long this blackout will last and how isolated it is, because obviously there was coverage of Trump at the UN, although outlets said that that was because the UN provides those credentials. So it's unclear if this is supposed to be targeted specifically at like the White House pool. We'll get a better idea in the next few days as Trump returns to the White House. But not, you know, good for, as Trump says, the free press. No. Another thing, not great.

Starting point is 02:53:36 last Thursday, September 17th, the FCC approved Paramount's petition to allow almost 50% of the potentially merged Paramount WB equity to be owned by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE following this potential Warner Brothers merger. Meaning the Ellison's Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi would end up owning CBS, CNN, HBO, Discovery Channel, B.E.T. Fendango, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount, Pluto, TV, Showtime, TBS, the CW, TNT, and Warner Brothers. Now, though, thankfully, 12 state AGs have sued to block this $110 billion, Paramount Warner Brothers merger, since it obviously endangered competition and threatens editorial independence of even more news outlets.

Starting point is 02:54:29 Though, after Paramount threatened to leave California last week, State Attorney General Rob Bonta, who was leading the state coalition's antitrust case, caved on Monday and agreed to settle their lawsuit, essentially giving this merger, the final green light. California Democrat moment. This is really bad. Yeah. Obviously, part of Bontas announcement includes a list of this settlement's quote, court enforceable concessions,

Starting point is 02:55:05 which largely amounts to Paramount promising to release around 30 movies a year for the next five years. Only for the next five years, by the way. Or else they will face penalties and be required to divest Miramar Max Studios. Again, this requirement only is until like 20, you know, 31 roughly. Also, like, that's what you're going to fight for, like 30 Paramount movies a year. Like, that's the big thing here. Some of the other concessions include a $47.5 million fund for workers, quote, displaced by the merger. And an annual $5 million fund to support independent film.

Starting point is 02:55:44 We did it, Rob. We did it, Gavin. We got it. Five million a year for independent film. Thanks, Gav. Now, California also announced a, quote, news editorial independence board to help CNN and CBS maintain editorial independence. So, you know, worries, no need, no need to be worried about this. Yeah, this will be fine.

Starting point is 02:56:13 But if you actually read the documents of establishing this board, I'll read this here, the editorial independence board should be made up of five established journalists, Actable retired, each of whom shall have practiced journalism for a minimum of 10 years. No more than two editorial board members may be affiliated with the same political party. Editorial Independence Board members shall be appointed by the combined entities Board of Directors. Who do you think is the chair of Paramount's Board of Directors? Wild guess. Larry Ellison? David Ellison.

Starting point is 02:56:50 David, sure. Oh, right. Yeah, just given. I love that they can't be for the same political party rights. You're going to get two Dems. You're going to get two Republicans. Then you got a wild card in there. And there is a kind of person who is a California journalist

Starting point is 02:57:02 who's a member of the Libertarian Party. And they are the worst kind of person. You know one of them is going to fucking end up in there. I love to live in a free society. Yeah. Making things worse, Semaphore reported today that Paramount is weighing, tapping one Elon Musk for equity investment as well.

Starting point is 02:57:22 Yeah. I did read that. Physically painful. So both Ellison and Musk could end up appointing people to this editorial independence board. They love freedom. Also, the other investors are like the Saudi government and the UAE's sovereign wealth funds. Like part of it, right? Part of that deal is allegedly making sure that they don't have like voting power,

Starting point is 02:57:51 even though they own the shares. Sure. We'll see how that works. Honestly, I would bet on the Saudis more than I would bet on Musk. Like, give them voting. That's a dark timeline. No, no, I'm just kidding. We'll get a great comedy festival out of it.

Starting point is 02:58:06 Until we have proof that Elon Musk has deployed Sudanese child soldiers in Yemen. Okay, okay, okay. I don't know. No, no, I didn't say the UAE. Let's distinguish. That is true. The Saudis also were involved in that. Not letting them off the hook.

Starting point is 02:58:20 You're right. You're right, you're out. I retracted. You know exactly what kind of press freedoms Elon Musk's going to go for as well. Like, oh, God. But no, this is a massive failure, specifically on executives in California, between the governor, Newsom and the state AG. The fact of they caved on this due to the threat of Paramount moving to a different state puts the whole country in jeopardy.

Starting point is 02:58:46 People really need to wise up to what Newsom's doing right now. He's very clearly signaling that he will be friendly to capital before he makes his presidential run. He did it with the wildfire settlements in California. He's doing it with this. He is showing that he is going to be everything that Democrats have disappointed you with for the last four, eight, 12 years. Like, I despise what Newsom is doing right now. The other thing in the fine print of these, you know, concessions is the force major clause that allows, the combined entity to get out of all these concessions

Starting point is 02:59:22 in situations of, quote, war, rebellion, hurricanes, other major storms, earthquakes, fires, terrorism, pandemics, strikes, labor disruptions, economic recessions, riots, insurrections, civil commotions, blockades. So in the case of the AI bubble bursting, they can get out of all of these concessions that, you know, the state AG of California is, you know, claiming as their big victory.

Starting point is 02:59:49 of course, also strikes and labor disruptions included in there as well. What's a civil commotion? A little shenanigans. James, it's what happens when I walked down the street. It's a civil commotion. That is a spiritually British phrase. Yeah, what legal basis is this? Yeah, I'm going to hit us up if you've been convicted of civil commotion.

Starting point is 03:00:14 One final note on this, also on Monday, the Writers Guild of America settled their own lawsuit filed this past summer on the grounds that this merger violates antitrust and would cause specific harm to workers. In terms of concessions that the WGA was able to achieve, they got Paramount to agree to a layoff prohibition for five years for CBS News broadcast members and got Paramount to agree to pay $17.5 million to the Writers Guild Health Fund and cover their attorney's fees from the litigation. To quote the WGA statement, quote, unfortunately the conditions Paramount has committed to with the AG's and with us fall far short of adequately protecting writers and we continue to believe the merger will cause damage to the

Starting point is 03:00:58 industry at large. As labor unions, however, the AG's settlement means that we had to contend with the reality of forging ahead alone with a lawsuit that would cost millions of dollars through trial, unquote. Quick update here on Thursday, a California judge deletion delayed the court sign-off of this settlement for at least another week by granting an administrative motion by a coalition to block the merger. This settlement to complete the merger does require a sign-off from this judge. The parties have till Monday the next hearing to go over the settlement is expected to be on Tuesday. You know, rolling it back a couple seconds, speaking of spiritually British,

Starting point is 03:01:46 Let's talk about Canada in our final section. That is a burn. Good one. It's a good one. So, okay, last Wednesday, the September 16th, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed that Canada become the only, quote, associate member of the EU? Hell yeah. Nice. So this was obviously, well, I say obviously, this was the day before Carney spoke in front of

Starting point is 03:02:16 the European Parliament was receptive to the offer and it seems like this is something that's going to get voted on by the parliament. Later on in this sort of trip, he met with the leaders of France and England and spent a lot of time talking about strengthening ties with European nations. It was also, I don't know, revealed the right term, but there was, the whole process of this was very weird. But basically, it was, it was like got to the press. that Canada had asked to join the, it's called the Joint Expeditionary Force, which is this sort of like British-led, like, military alliance project. I'm just going to quote from CBC here, quote,

Starting point is 03:03:00 as it was originally conceived, the Joint Expeditionary Force was meant to preserve battlefield relations that grew up during the Afghan War. So we're off to a great start here. In 2012, Britain's then-Chief of Defense, General Sir David Richards described a future force that could deploy rapidly overseas without Britain having to assemble an entirely new coalition for every crisis.

Starting point is 03:03:24 So again, originally this is a kind of, they want to be able to kind of build on the military integration of the war in Afghanistan, which, I don't know, very few wars in which I want to less build on military integration from. In recent times, it has been more the sort of coalition existence and prominence has been

Starting point is 03:03:46 more about his potential response to like continued Russian aggression in Europe so all of this basically dropped at the same time last week Trump responded to the whole thing about Canada becoming an associate member

Starting point is 03:04:04 of the EU by saying it would be a quote hostile act he also said quote if it's a good intention that's fine if it's bad intention will put very heavy tariffs on Europe. So who knows with that? I don't know.

Starting point is 03:04:19 Genuinely, who knows what's going to happen with that situation? I don't know. Maybe we can negotiate a swap now that Britain has left Europe and just train Britain could join NAFTA. Yeah, can we like physically swap the countries

Starting point is 03:04:35 if we put Canada or Britain? Sure. At least they wouldn't have as much coastline to be Bassett's about that kind of. I would probably more. coastline in Canada just because it's fast. Yeah, so, okay, we really know very little about what Trump's response is going to be to this. Now, the part that I actually am interested in here is what does this associate membership thing actually

Starting point is 03:04:57 mean and what is this actual partnership supposed to look like? So we talked a little bit, obviously there's some military integration. Most of it seems to be trade alliances. And even that is kind of vague. what you get out of it looking into this is that the rhetoric coming out of both the EU and Canada is extremely loud, they're talking about the crisis of democratic institutions and the rule of law

Starting point is 03:05:23 globally, all of this sort of stuff. But there was a really interesting interview in foreign policy with Canada's foreign minister, Anita Anand, about what actually under the surface of this sort of grand rhetoric about like, you know, like forming this sort of coalition and promoting the rule of law

Starting point is 03:05:44 and being a non-coercive body and all of this sort of very grand rhetoric that is in response to Trump without really mentioning him, there's a lot of really interesting parts of this interview with Canada's foreign minister about what they're actually talking about doing. I think maybe the first thing that she gets asked

Starting point is 03:06:03 is Trump saying, quote, we don't need Canada, they need us. And the response is very interesting because what she's doing is deemphasizing an actual break with the U.S. economically, which is what all of the reporting on this, everyone is talking about how, like, oh, this is like Canada trying to pivot away from the U.S. and her response to this is like, well, no, the U.S. and Canada are just permanently economically integrated. The auto sector is this, you know, like sign of permanent integration between the

Starting point is 03:06:27 economies. Yeah. And largely the focus of her response is that, oh, we have a bunch of free trade packs with a bunch of other parts of the world and, you know, between the U.S. and Canada. So this is kind of a sign of like when these people are talking about sort of a rules-based international order, but they're talking about is free trade packs. I'm going to read this quote from the interview. So the first part of this, the question is from the foreign policy interviewer, quote. So let me talk a little bit then about the Canada-Europe relationship. I hear the phrase associate member being used a week ago. What would that entail? What does that mean? And then this is the Canadian foreign minister. The nomenclature that is being attached, the growing relationship between Canada and the EU is not the focus of the work we're doing, building up

Starting point is 03:07:14 to the Canada-EU summit in Montreal at the end of October. Our focus is on several pillars, where you will see deeper integration on critical minerals, AI and quantum, trade and investments following on from the Canada-EU comprehensive economic and trade agreements and people-to-people ties, including education students and the Erasmus program. The substantive discussions between our teams right now are very focused on these pillars. So this is the actual, right, it admits everyone talking about how, like, we're going to form, like, a new trade bloc to, like,

Starting point is 03:07:46 fight the U.S. It's like, no, they're doing free trade negotiations, basically. Yeah, and that's what Carney's been, like, really pushing for. Like, he's essentially just trying to be, like, Bill Clinton for Canada without, you know, that stuff. Yeah, without that or playing the saxophone. Yeah, slightly more boring. He's a central banker.

Starting point is 03:08:04 Like, yeah, yeah. And I'm going to get to that in a second in terms of what they're actually sort of trying to do. But, you know, I think the comparison to Clinton is a good one because, like, what you have here basically is, like, what this block is, is this attempt to form a sort of like old school neoliberal. I say old school, but, like, 90s, 2000 style neoliberal block to oppose the sort of like modern Trump fascism. And it's like, well, okay, so that like got us fascism in the first place, right? So that's not great. There's also a lot of talk about sort of the defense and support for Ukraine. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:08:38 But I want to have one last quote from this article to really get a sense of like what is going on here. This is Anand, the foreign minister. Taking you to the investment summit that we held last week in Toronto, we are seeing increasing levels of foreign direct investment. Commitments of $500 billion last week alone to Canada through 10 national projects, from ports to highways to airports. across the board, our work is to shorten the time period, the path of permit time period, so that investments continue to flow into our country towards national projects. So what does that mean? And this is where things get really, really bad.

Starting point is 03:09:18 Because what she's talking about when she's talking about this, like, you know, we're shortening the path to permit time. So investment continues to come in for national projects. What she's talking about is what's called Bill C-39, which is I guess like the next version of the Build Canada Strong Act. So, you know, it's a giant neoliberal de-regulation bill, right? It decreases the permit process for a whole bunch of projects that are in, quote, the national interest from, you know,

Starting point is 03:09:44 these can take multiple years. You're talking about impact assessments. You're talking about, like, input from indigenous communities. There's a whole bunch of things that you're supposed to have to do before you can start one of these sort of mega projects. And this bill would reduce that entire process to one year. it would allow ministers to just sort of wave away environmental protections if it was deemed in the national interest. I'm going to quote from the Toronto Star here, quote, it would also create

Starting point is 03:10:09 special zones called, quote, regions of national interest where approvals for projects can be, quote, streamlined in certain areas, officials said, and follows recent changes that means cross-border oil pipelines, gas-fired power plants, oil sands facilities, and other projects will no longer be subject to the existing federal impact assessment process. So this is special economic zones for oil fields. I was about to say they're doing, yeah, they're doing a special economic zone. Yeah, and specifically, it's special economic zone where all of the environmental impact assessments of like, hey, is this oil field going to poison everyone who lives around it?

Starting point is 03:10:49 We're not doing that. I'm going to quote here from the narwhal. The legislation takes federal review of pipelines, nuclear facilities, and power lines out of the hands of the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, a federal body that reports to the environmental minister and is meant to ensure project designs protect indigenous rights in the environment. Instead, pipeline projects will be reviewed by the Canada Energy Regulator and Agency of the Crown that reports to the Energy Minister and oversees construction and operation of certain pipelines and power lines. So that's a very dull way of saying that instead of environmental

Starting point is 03:11:22 regulators looking at the impact of like cars, it's going to the energy guys. It's going to the energy It goes to the executive. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And this is something that's been very specifically pushed for in a massive lobbying campaign by the Canadian oil and gas industry over the last few years.

Starting point is 03:11:39 So obviously, this is an enormous danger to indigenous sovereignty, to, you know, anyone who, like, wants there to be a livable environment. And also, it gives the labor ministry the right to end strikes. Oh, cool. So effectively what it does, right,

Starting point is 03:11:57 is there is, there is a very nebulous legal authority that the Canadian government used to crush an Air Canada a flight attendant strike in 2025. And this bill would just codify that right and completely ignore the union's legal challenges to it and would allow just government ministers effectively to just end strikes if they're in areas that are deemed as like adversely affecting the national interest. I'm going to quote from the MSN article here, either by having a quote, significant impact on the economy or causing, quote, serious social disruption.

Starting point is 03:12:29 So, you know, it's interesting because the Carnegie administration has said that this is actually like a protection of the right to strike, even though it's giving a government minister the ability to end strikes. But this bill is being opposed by, you know, by the entire Canadian labor movement because it gives the government the ability to kill strikes on behalf of, you know, on behalf of corporations. In the name of this extremely nebulous national interest, there's no way that could possibly go wrong. And I think both of these put together lets you look at the domestic side of this entire

Starting point is 03:13:02 sort of PR, international PR push that's going on, right? It's the deployment of neoliberalism nominally against fascism. It is using the threat of the U.S. to crush organized labor, indigenous groups and environmental groups, which are the same enemies that sort of Trump and the American fascist movements have. It's just that it's being implemented using a sort of state of emergency caused by the fascist themselves. Yeah, and I think that's something that's incredibly important to keep in mind whenever you're sort of reading about Carney and whatever you're reading about this sort of international project that he's embarking on is that this is what this project means, right? It's a war to be able to do free trade in special economic zones.

Starting point is 03:13:43 With that, I think that is all for us today, and it could happen here. Dena, do you have anything you would like to plug? I want to direct people to the handbook of authoritarianism in the Arab world, which I edited, and it's out now, open access on the Bloomsbury Politics website. So if you just Google it, you'll find it. It's got lots of contributors from the MENA region, Swana, whatever you want to call it. Cool. Yeah, thank you for having me. Yeah, thanks for coming. If you'd like to email us, you can do so, cool zone tips at proton. dot me. Some of you fuckers in the marketing world are still not fucking listening to me. So I would just say again,

Starting point is 03:14:20 do not fucking email me about your product or service. I will block you. Don't email me about putting my podcast on YouTube to get more of you. I don't fucking care. I'm going to block you harder from all of the I-Haw emails one day. Put a trans scroll on your couch. We've reported the news. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, poolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.

Starting point is 03:15:09 Thanks for listening. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. not be a single law enforcement agency and does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw.

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