It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 58

Episode Date: November 5, 2022

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

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast,

Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app

or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by

an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hello and welcome to another episode of It Could Happen Here. I'm your guest host of this episode where I'm hoping to take a moment to discuss the commons,

the principles of successful commons management, and why certain attempts to establish the commons have failed. My name, by the way, is Andrew of the YouTube channel Andrewism. You can follow me on YouTube.com slash Andrewism. I'm joined here with my two co-hosts that will be uh garrison davis hello and james stout hi awesome but before i get into exactly what makes the commons work i first want to discuss what exactly the commons are. Because despite being common throughout human history, a lot of people can't imagine how they might have worked, what they are. Of course, the commons is a very specific definition in a particular context of feudalism and whatnot but even outside of that the idea of the commons is essentially

the resources accessible to all members of society the totality of the material riches of that community or even of the world regarded as their whole inheritance rather than being subject to enclosure and to privatization. Even today, despite the process of enclosure, which is worthy of its own podcast episode or series of podcast episodes or book even, even today, there are still, you know, viable existing commons institutions.

And they've, in some cases, endured for well over a thousand years. Most famously, Eleanor Ostrom, the economist who explored the concept in depth and debunked the tragedy of the commons, her book governing the commons that from you know the alpine meadows of tobel switzerland to the three million hectares of japanese forests to the irrigation systems of spain and philippines the possibility of community of popular rather than public or state or private or corporate ownership exists. The possibility of communal ownership as opposed to capitalist or state ownership exists. There's also the communal land of Chiapas in Mexico after the successful Zapatista revolution. And of course, as I discussed in a previous episode, there are the Commons of Barbuda,

where the entire island of the Twin Island Nation of Antigua and Barbuda is owned collectively by all Barbudans and regarded as their collective heritage. These projects, of course, are not static. The Commons in Barbuda, for example, existed for about a hundred years, but had some precedents prior to that, and are now honestly being encroached upon after the sole shock doctrine of the hurricane that ravaged the island has opened up an opportunity for Antigua and Barbuda's government to sort of swoop in and privatize the land for the benefit

of foreign companies and foreign resorts. So the commons is not this timeless, eternal institution that can't be interrupted, doesn't ever change um to the case in chiapas you know they had similar projects similar institutions prior to colonization colonization rolled in and interrupted all that and thanks to the zapteast revolution they were able to institute some semblance of that sort of commons institution, of that communal land, for their collective benefit. They respond to experience, to conditions, to circumstance, to serve or, in some cases, to eventually not serve the people.

But of course, not all commons are able to work. Not all commons institutions operate effectively. And she talks about why using various case studies to illustrate her point. In the course of governing the commons, she used, of course, the existence case studies to develop certain principles that she believed make the commons work. The principles that she found in common between Switzerland and Japan, the Philippines, and Spain. And she then used those principles to examine the comments institutions that didn't work and identify which principles were missing from the equation.

But I'm talking a lot about what these principles, about these principles of successful comments management, and I haven't broken down what they are exactly. So to get into that, the principles of successful commons management are as follows. Number one, clearly defined boundaries. Boundaries in the sense of having, of those involved, the appropriators of the commons, the people who are directly accessing the commons having a clear sense of the structure and characteristics of the resource system itself whether it be through a

scientific study or through generationally preserved folk knowledge as well as knowledge and a clear sense of who is involved in withdrawing from and sustaining it. Even if, you know, even in the case where the entire world has been common, where all land has been returned to common land, to the ownership of none and everyone simultaneously. In such a case, in individual instances of common pool resources, whether it be a forest or a fishery or a lake or groundwater basin, the people most directly accessing that segment of the commons, that system, that common pool resource, need to have a clear sense of exactly what that resource entails, the limits of that resource, the renewability of that resource, and who is involved in withdrawing from and sustaining that resource

so that they're able to collaborate. If, as in the case with the tragedy of the commons, everybody's just this isolated actor not communicating at all not collaborating there's no collective institution in place to help them you know work it out you're basically going to end up in a case like the tragedy of the commons where the system is depleted because nobody has a sense of what anybody else is doing um there's no there's no open channel of communication. Which brings us, of course, to collective decision-making power. That's the third principle.

So I'm jumping ahead slightly, but it flows better this way. Having collective decision-making power over the commons, meaning there's an institution in place that those who are drawn from the commons are able to come together and discuss the rules of the commons how they're going to draw from the commons how they're going to deal with the commons how they're going to deal with each other as they deal with the commons and so on and so forth the idea of rules is not anti-anarchist as a concept um just the idea that there is not you know popular inputs and collective inputs and free association in place um and so with consensus with this institution of collective decision-making power people will be able to come up with and modify the rules as it suits their situations as it as it suits their shifting circumstances um

and of course and this is the second principle that their appropriation and provision rules of the commons are compatible with local conditions the whole idea is that they're not relying on any external authorities to come up with these rules to commit to these rules to bind themselves to these rules, to bind themselves to these rules, even when the temptations to violate those rules apply. So as a practice of developing community, you need to have some sense of shared norms and developing those shared norms over time regarding behavior. And of course, as in the case in almost all societies of course reputation and one's reputation would play a role if you are known to be consistently

violating the commons rules of course they're going to be social consequences to that that's a natural consequence just because the commons exist doesn't mean that people are free of the consequences of how they use those commons just like in the case of the environment you know just because you can cut down all the trees in the forest doesn't mean you're free of the consequences from cutting down the trees of that forest. Your actions are still going to have consequences, whether it be environmental or social. There are, of course, limits as there are in any other aspect of life. But of course, simple norms regarding behavior or concerns about reputation may help, but you're also going to need the fourth and fifth principles established in some form to effectively maintain social harmony. The fourth principle is, of course, monitoring, which is the process of continuously evaluating the conditions of the common pool resource itself as well as the

behavior of the appropriators now term monitoring is kind of spooky right it sounds a little bit 1984 like big brother is watching you kind of vibe but that's not really the intention it's just the idea that it's just this this constant informal process of looking at and observing and collecting data on the conditions of the commons the conditions including how people behave with the commons as well as the you know commons themselves the resources themselves how much of them we have how quickly they're being you know renewed that sort of thing and then through that process of each person each appropriator of the commons institutions monitoring the system continuously you begin to learn what rules work and what rules don't and so you can adapt your rules to suit the circumstances, to suit how people actually behave, which is something that centralized and hierarchical institutions have a bit of trouble doing.

Because when you have this horizontal commons institution, you're able to look at, okay, this is how things are going so far. And let me, we can now talk about it. We're constantly in this dialogue we all able to contribute our information in this horizontal system and adapt our rules and our behavior to suit whereas in the pyramid structure of a hierarchical and centralized organization the further up the pyramid you go yes the more power there is as centralized institutions tend to have but also less information because the narrowing of the pyramid leads to less and less information from the bottom filtering up to the top and so when you have these centralized

institutions rules are a lot more rigid because they're not able to respond quickly and effectively and as informed as informedly to the situations as they arise that's also why 80 percent of the planet's biodiversity is being protected by a very small percentage of indigenous people because they are on the ground because they are they're interacting with the systems in real time they're able to respond directly and quickly to changes in that biodiversity to changes in behavior in order to maintain and sustain that system whereas you'd find that a lot of conservation projects a lot of restoration projects environmental restoration projects are failing you know i recently read an article about how a lot of these tree planting initiatives that governments have been doing these days well you know it gets them good publicity it gets them

good you know social social political international clout when you go back one year, two years, three years down the line, almost all, if not all, the trees are dead. The communities living by these reforestation projects were not involved in the process. They don't have any say in the selection of the trees. In fact, the trees aren't always even chosen in accordance with local conditions there often isn't enough biodiversity in terms of the trees i mean when it comes to a forest and that's what people don't understand a forest is a living

organism you know it's it has multiple layers has multiple parts you can just plop a set of trees down and expect things to work out okay you know um james c scott talks about this in seeing like a state you can't just in these states they they start these sort of forestry projects they they try to legible legibilize you know these forests these simple rows and organizations and you cut out all the um the all the shrubbery, all the other plants that are competing, quote unquote, you end up with a dead system. You end up with a system that is very fragile. It's not able to respond to changes in the environments that arise because it does not

have the buffers of a complex web of life in place. Indigenous groups and really anybody who is grounded in the local context is able to most effectively engage and respond because they have access to that information because they're able to see the shocks of the system the buffers what works what doesn't humaculturists are able to you know to have these intensive systems because they are constantly monitoring, coming full circle here, constantly monitoring the feedback that they're getting from their systems.

And of course, there's a fifth principle. In these sort of situations, you're still going to have a couple opportunistic people who may be tempted to take advantage of the trust present in the group. And when I say opportunistic people, I don't mean to create this other, this out group. I just mean it's in the sense of, you know, you have, like we all do, moments of weakness, right? And in those moments of weakness, it can be easy for some to falter.

And in that faltering, jeopardize the security of the system as a whole. And so the fifth principle of successful comments management is the practice of accountability and systems of accountability through graduated sanctions. Of course, empathy needs to be maintained throughout the process.

And I don't think that every infraction must automatically be responded to with sanctions. Like, again, I'm not trying to do something in 1984. It's just obviously when you have a system that has, and I know I'm referencing 1984 like a right finger, but. Yeah, I think it's fine to reference 1984 correctly as opposed to like someone who hasn't read it or read anything else that he wrote. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, we can take it back. But, you know, obviously not every situation can respond to its sanctions. Obviously, empathy should be maintained throughout the process. But when you have a system in which a lot of people are dependent on the sustainability, not just people living right now,

but generations to come, and that's not something we're accustomed to thinking about, but generations to come, you have to think about with these sort of commons institutions. You can't do as the capitalists do and just let people do

whatever with minimal if any environmental protections with minimal if any like standards in place yes infractions vary in severity and stuff but when the livelihood of the entire community is at stake you know things can't be so easy. When infractions are just, you know, temporary deviations or unthreatening to the overall survival of the CPR, then, you know, tolerance can be high, but it depends on the circumstance. And that's why it really is important that the prior four principles are in place. You know, you have the clearly defined boundaries. You have the rules of the commons established by collective decision-making power

over the commons with a constant process of monitoring in place. Because again, the responsiveness of the people on the ground is a lot more in tune with the conditions of the commons and with the needs of the people themselves because they are the people and the fifth principle and the fourth principle all the other principles

would be nothing without the sixth principle which is the presence of conflict resolution mechanism humans are gonna human you know we make mistakes we have disagreements and it needs to be some sort of means of discussing and resolving conflict in a healthy and effective way. There are a lot of processes in place. A lot of communities, egalitarian communities throughout history have used some sort of system of mediation. There's also arbitration, which tends to be more common in state societies. And there are also new models and methods of justice being established and drawn from from the past as well that we can look into but they are conflict resolution mechanisms they

have to be in place for successful comments management we live in a society and society includes conflict conflict is not always necessarily a bad thing but it's a thing and you can't ignore it and expect it to go away the seventh principle is the freedom to organize and this principle is you know the basis upon which the other principles rest in some places people have a lot of autonomy to self-organize free of state control. In other places, they don't. In other places, there's a lot of state encroachment on the commons because that has been the mission of the state, to further their tendrils in every sphere of life and existence.

of life and existence so obviously the end goal or one of the end goals is the complete abolition of the state and obviously the process upon which we reach those end goals would require prefigurative politics in the sense of establishing the institutions that we want in a future society in the here and now and building that dual power capacity to provide a competitive excuse the capitalist terminology but a competitive model that can you know compete with rise from and separately from and eventually replace the existing system so that's the process of social revolution i have a video coming up on that in december lastly and this does not apply to every instance of commons management but in some cases you'll need the eighth and final principle for successful comments management, and that is nested enterprises, which is basically the same principle as an anarchist confederation. commons institution that other communities are accessing or if the commons that a group of communities are accessing are part of a larger regional commons or archipelagic commons or

continental commons then you want to have means of collaboration bottom-up of course bottom-up organizations but you know maintain the power of the local level while coordinating these larger means of collaboration, bottom-up, of course, bottom-up organizations, but maintain the power at the local level while coordinating these larger-scaled commons and ensuring that there's a smooth running and smooth communication between the appropriators, the people involved. These principles very clearly differentiate between success and the failure cases to reiterate the commons and the principles of successful commons management as follows clearly defined boundaries rules compatible with local conditions collective decision-making power to establish those rules monitoring to ensure those

rules are compatible with people and conditions graduated sanctions to ensure that rules are kept up with and the commons are protected from potential threatsict resolution mechanisms, because humans are going to human. Freedom to organize, particularly in the fragile early stages of establishing these projects. And nested enterprises. Confederation from the bottom up. In certain failure cases, we see that none of the principles apply. For example, in the book, Elno Ostrom references these two Turkish fisheries, the Bay of Izmir and Bodrum, where there was severe rent dissipation, continuing unabated. Of course, the book was written a while ago, so I'm not sure how the situation has evolved since then.

But rent dissipation is basically a circumstance in which the commons, common pool resources, are being depleted severely and the sustainability of those commons are at stake. And so with all those principles in place to ensure that doesn't happen, you get a situation like what's going on or what was going on in the Bay of Izmir and Bodrum. In the Kirindi Oya Irrigation Project in Sri Lanka, they did have clear boundaries, that one principle in place, but the other principles were not. In Mojave, California, they did have the institution of collective choice.

They did have conflict resolution mechanisms and it did have the recognized right to organize. But the other principles were not in place And so that institution was also a failure. Or we can look at the case in the Mawela fishery, also in Sri Lanka, where rent dissipation had become a very severe problem, particularly after 1938. Now they did have rules in place. They did have a monitoring system, Now, they did have rules in place. They did have a monitoring system. But unfortunately, despite having those rules, despite regulating the access to the beach and the use of the beach scenes and the control of the number of nets to be used, they really did try. It wasn't a problem of ignorance. The issue was that, although they were aware of the consequences of adding too many nets and drawing too much from the fishery, the issue became that the appropriators, the fishermen themselves, they don't have the autonomy to make and enforce the rules of the fishery that was deprived of them and so the institution was not able to sustain itself in the long term so in all these cases you know no more of the three design principles actually characterized any of these cases and so they were unable to solve the problems that they faced any of these cases and so they were unable to solve the problems that they faced there are of course also issues where they are viable but fragile common systems where you know

they have more of the principles in place but they still lack all of them so also in Sri Lanka there was the Gal Oya where boundaries and membership were clearly designated, where rules had been devised and monitored, where collective choice arenas had been set up, but they did not have the autonomy and they did not have conflict resolution mechanisms in place. And so the institution is not as robust as it could be. Of course, when it comes to the commons and existing institutions, existing fragile institutions, existing successful institutions, existing failures of institutions, that does not necessarily need to limit our imagination of possibilities, but it's got to be informed as to what has worked in the past and what hasn't. We can still imagine future scenarios and experiments and how they might play out.

But the point is, if we're trying to reinstate the commons, we need to understand what makes them work. At least what has made them work in the past and in the present. For more information on the commons and also the potential of a library economy, you can check out my videos on the commons and the library economy on my channel, youtube.com slash andrewism. You can also check out Eleanor Ostrom's book, Governing the Commons, as well as a book called Eleanor Ostrom's Rules for Radicals, which I haven't read yet, but I've heard it was pretty good. If you like what I do and you'd like to support me,

you could follow me on patreon.com slash stdrew and on twitter.com slash underscore stdrew. That's all I have for today. It could happen here. Peace. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows

as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals.

You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google

search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with.

His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Make It Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and then maybe kind of putting them back together again, sort of. This is a special episode about thing that happened, where thing that happened is the brazilian election and with me to talk about this is garrison hello and james hello so i i think i think people probably know by now i louise anacio lula de silva better known as lula has defeated jr bosonaro in Bolsonaro in a absolutely terrifying squeaker of a presidential election um this is like by far

the closest election that Lula who's a former two-term president of Brazil has ever won um part of this is a campaign of last minute voter suppression that Bolsonaro and his supporters did where like like basically like the Brazilian federal police started setting up, like they set up like 550 roadblocks to stop people in the Louis strongholds from voting. There's like, they assaulted people. Um,

it wound up not mattering. And right now, as, as a time of recording, which is, uh, 1 PM, 1 30 PM Pacific on Halloween.

Bolsonaro is missing in action. No one's seen him. The only sign of life that there has been from him is he unfollowed his wife. Amazing stuff. It sounds like he just locked himself in the presidential palace and turned all of the lights off. Yeah, he's missing it.

Nobody's seen or heard from him. So by the time this episode comes out, there's like a small chance there's been a coup. There's like a small chance he's died from COVID. I don't know. Probably neither of those have happened. But, you know, so Lula won his election. Like he won like like 50.8% of the vote, roughly.

And OK, so there's a lot of voter suppression, but even voter suppression cannot explain why Lula, who won his last elections with respectively 61 in 60 percent of the vote, was reduced to like 50.8 percent this time. And OK, so this begs two questions. Who is Luis Inácio Lula da Silva and how did we get to this election? So the first episode of this is going to be answering the first question and the second episode is largely the second question. is going to be answering the first question. And the second episode is largely the second question. Okay. So who,

who actually is Lula? Lula is born in 1945. Actually his birthday is a few days ago to a desperately poor family in Brazil's Northeast. And this family moves from the Northeast to what became known as the ABC region of Brazil, which is Santa Andre, San Bernardino, San,

sorry, Santo Andre,, San Bernardino, sorry, Santo André, São Bernardo... Jesus. Who can't say names in Brazil now? Okay, here's the thing. This is not a famous name. This is São Bernardo. Wait, wait. Wait, are you conflating Brazil and Argentina,

which are famously not the same country? Also, different languages. Here's the thing. If this was in Spanish, I could do this. I'm going to make this as glamour here. All of my pronunciations of this are based on my terrible knowledge of Spanish. The problem is Brazil famously speaks Portuguese, a language that is not Spanish. So, yeah.

But, okay. So, there's this thing called the ABC region because there's three cities there that are at abc um got it as part of this sort of mass migration which is popularly remembered as like this mass migration of people from the northeast to sao paulo but the the sort of the action that that's a popular memory of it the the actualities that millions of people flow into sao paulo like from all across brazil um the abc region becomes brazil's sort of industrial heartland like every story you read about this we'll call it like brazil's detroit and that's kind of true and kind of not true like i don't know every everyone who writes

about brazil is like how can we make this the u.s and like god forbid other countries have their own realities yeah and like okay like the the there is an extent to which brazil is also like the ex slave colony thing right but no like brazil is its own country um however, comma, the ABC region becomes the core of Brazil's massive metalworking industry. And this industry is just like from the 50s to the 80s, just like purely expanding. The historian

J.D. French notes that the ABC's population increased by 800% from 1950 to 1980. So Lulu arrives in the middle of a veritable industrial revolution. This is going to end in one of history's sort of great built industrial working classes. But when he's there, that's kind of not what's happening. The other thing I should mention about this region is that when I say metalworking,

so the reason there's so many Detroit comparisons is that this is a region that is massively involved in Brazil's auto industry, which in this period is expanding and is very large um i think i think i've actually talked about this in the neoliberalism episodes um a little bit but yeah so lula like leaves school in fifth grade to basically find whatever work he can in the street and this is another sort of very famous thing that everyone talks about about lula about he oh like he has like a great school education and that's like sort of true like it is true that he never like grad like graduate like you know he never

went to school past like fifth grade mostly i thought we'll get to some other stuff that he did later um what what happens basically is that his his mom's able to get him into this this metal this this government metalworking sort of apprenticeship program that is teaching young people how to basically become skilled metalworkers. And this also is an education, right? You know, the people in this...

There's a lot of very interesting theory stuff about this, about how these people are also kind of worker intellectuals because in order to be a metalworker and to do all this stuff, you have to know a shit ton of stuff. You have to know, you have to know a bunch of tactical stuff about how metal works.

You have to know, you know, it's, it's very highly skilled, very high, like degree of knowledge you have to have. So, you know,

he, he, he gets this kind of education. Um, and he becomes a very, very good metal worker. And he's, he's part of a,

a, like a highly skilled and the academic literature will call it highly paid. Although, okay, this is highly paid compared to someone who's a worker, but who's not a metal worker, one of the sort of skilled, quote unquote, metal workers. These people aren't lawyers, right? like lawyers right like they're they're they're so closer to the actual sort of working class than you know some like people who are sort of like auxiliary parts of the ruling class and he enters you know he enters this sort of manufacturing boom as part of what's called the brazilian miracle well okay so he's there a bit before the sort of brazilian miracle starts but there's this period under the military dictatorship which takes power in 1965 where they kind of like luck into a functioning economy although i should i should

mention this now um okay so in this period in brazil like inflation being good and under control is inflation is at 20 like when inflation is at 20 everything is when inflation is at 20%, everything's considered fine. And when it goes up from 20%, it's like, Oh no, we've lost control of inflation. And this, this kind of like, this is a survivable thing because people's wages are sort of indexed to,

um, like their index, the cost of living increases to some extent, which is a thing that like, yeah, it will never happen here. Yeah. Well,

I mean, I guess if, if you do the kind of stuff these guys do you can probably get some of this but yeah so but the the the the sort of interesting thing about what's happening here is you have a very large industrial working class but it's not really very militant for most of the time lula's in it except for sort of right around the military like coup in 1965 lula sees some of kind of like the old radicalism like he he talks about like you know like watching people like storming factories because they're on strike uh the the brazilian working class does there's a lot of fun stuff that they do like they do things like okay so everyone will show up to a protest

with like a bunch of like pockets full of marbles and when a cavalry charge starts they'll just roll marbles down the street and the horses will step on the marbles and fall that's an OG Battle of Cable Street maneuver my absolute

favorite one this is just like pure looney Tunes shit. They do this thing where they'll string piano wire up between light posts and then they'll bait cavalry units into charging at them and then they'll run under the thing and the guys will just get

fucking clotheslined. It's so good. Yeah, that's pretty great. Horse cops You don't see horse cops in America Well you see them sometimes Like I have seen some horse cops

Portland's horse cops only like Stopped existing a few years ago Yeah in the UK up until Very recently they used them to police Protest Yeah There was footage from 2020 of people getting run over by horses in the states

yeah they still do this it fucking sucks I think the most famous police horse related story in the US is a Philly sports fan I think of the 2014 punching a police horse which

what a city yeah is a Philly sports fan. I think of the 2014 punching a police horse. What a city. Yeah. The most famous British police horse thing is the horse humping the cop. Oh, God. Critical support to the horse? Yeah. I'm just going to quickly copy the image into the chat

so you can all enjoy it. Okay, all right. I'm glad that we've taken this episode in this direction. Oh, my fucking God. Holy shit. Oh, my God. Okay. That is much more graphic than I thought it was going to be. That is extremely graphic.

Holy shit. Do you know what else will take a cop and bend it over? Nope. All right. Well, here's some ads. We can't promise that, Garrison. Here's some advertisements. And we're back with other things

that will scar my soul forever. Oh, boy. Up until sort of 1965, there had been a kind of left-wing government in brazil and then the military coup like just overthrows it and the left is kind of just like annihilated from this and it's not just from the pure political repression which forces like like all the communist parties are forced underground like um but the one of the one of the things like one of the real things that sort of like really shatters the brazilian left is that like the coup happens and the left you know the left

sort of knows there's a coup coming right but they expect that when the coup happens there's going to be strikes and like the working class is going to fight them and they're going to beat it and everyone kind of just like in the factories kind of just shrugs and nothing happens and they just get rolled over. And this is the start of this period of sort of like, you know, this kind of like the workers movement, like nothing is happening again. There's some sort of radical student groups trying to do stuff. But like, I know there's a Brazilian version of May 68, but mostly what happens there is like one factory gets occupied and then the army shows up with guns and they get owned and it's really grim and you know you have these sort of like like tiny like actually okay you have these tiny catholic maoist groups who are these maoist student groups wait yeah yeah yeah okay we'll just go straight through that all right

it's it's nuts um normal totally normal yeah i yeah yeah and then you know they're trying to try to do like guerrilla insurgency stuff and the army just sort of like kills them all um they're horribly destroyed so for almost a decade and a half like you have a very depoliticized industrial proletariat and and lula's part of this right like from from like when he enters the workforce until like the late 70s he is not political at all are they doing the thing under the dictatorship where they have like pet unions i guess when it's like one mandated union for the industry actually i was about to talk about this um yeah so the brazilian labor system and the thing is okay so this wasn't set up under this military dictatorship it was kind of set up under like a previous one

but this yeah it's still sort of set up under like a previous one but this yeah it's still sort of a thing all the unions have to register with the state and when they're doing contract negotiations right they're not negotiating with the corporations are negotiating with the state and so this means that like the state is setting wage rates which is gonna become important later but yeah there's a really interesting sort of problem here because there's this entire class of basically sort of like government union guy who's like basically a bureaucrat and is like really corrupt. We love you, Nance. Yeah, well, and this is the way – and like a lot of people just hate them because like – because they – like literally what these people are, are like they're a guy who's doing this job to get ahead.

And then their job is to sort of like – you know technically it's like mediate the class struggle right but like what that actually means is like make sure that like there isn't actually sort of like like make sure the union isn't actually sort of a source of class conflict and you know this this is this is the whole sort of thing behind this because before like the 1940s brazil had this really really built and like uh labor movement they had a bunch of anarchists like the anarchist tractor over to the government a couple times they have these huge general strikes there's a communist party is like a real thing and then the government tries to like bring all of like you know okay fuck it we're gonna bring all the unions under our control and it's still also true that these are like they're still technically unions so there are people who are sort of doing union

organizing in them right like they still do some regular union stuff and yeah we're gonna talk about this a bit more later but there's i don't know these unions are fucking weird like they're not like unions anywhere else i've ever seen yeah but so because the other thing like lula in this point like is apolitical right people keep trying to talk to him about politics and he's like i just want to play soccer and like chase girls. And he talks about this, like drinking, like in speeches a lot. But his brother, who's known as Frey Chico, is a Brazilian Communist Party militant for like his entire life. And being a PCB militant in like the 60s and 70s, this is like life threatening. The party is outlawed. Everyone is so clandestine that like fray chico's own wife doesn't know

that he's a communist and finds out that he's a communist when he gets arrested like it's it's this this is like this is like the level of like clandestine shit that everyone that that like you know the sort of communist parties are working on under here um but fray chico's also like an open union activist and everyone knows he's like he's a leftist basically because you know the the even even sort of like the unions are sort of like split between like there's sort of left factions that are like trying to actually do union stuff but like for towards sort of leftist goals there are like more moderate people who are like bread and butter trade unionists and then there's also just like a bunch of people who are like just the corruption faction. people who are like just the corruption faction um but yeah like lula doesn't like lula like doesn't care about the union at all like he's not even in the union until free chico like his brother just like like literally just like drags him kicking and screaming into running for an elected position in the union because i like he needed a guy to run on a slate but he couldn't

run himself because everyone knew he was a leftist, so he was like, okay, I'm gonna brother, you run. You're not openly a leftist. You can actually win this. And then this works, and he gets elected, and this is where Lula learns politics. From the book Lula and His Politics of Cunning,

quote, Lula would have to master the mundane aspects of union life, including bureaucratic routines, budgets, services, and preparing union assemblies. Lula would have to master the mundane aspects of union life, including bureaucratic routines, budgets, services, and preparing union assemblies. Lula would also undergo a gradual politicization through relationships with fellow directors, union lawyers, and staff, and activists central to the union's turbulent internal politics. Finally, Lula would need to learn about the repressive dimension of working class life under military rule, including close supervision and surveillance by police, employers, and labor ministry officials. And what's interesting about this story is that everyone around him when he joins this union, including basically his boss in the union, a guy named Vidal, who's a very powerful union leader, his brother, everyone thinks he's going to be this sort of, like, compliance, like, obedient fingerhead.

And instead, what they have done is they have created arguably the greatest politician of the 21st century. One of the things that's important to note here is that, like, okay, so, like, the unions are, like, fucked up, right? And everyone kind of understands they're fucked up. These are still probably the most, like, like, these are probably still the most competitive

democratic elections that are happening in Brazilzil like brazil technically has elections there's these sort of like two official parties so okay so it's kind of weird that the military like is in power but like they have this sort of veneer that they're not and they technically they technically sometimes have a civilian president they have these sort of like parties that are kind of real but you know the union actually has like there are like leftist slates there are conservative slates like there's actual sort of politics going on and lula is actually able to sort of like make his mark through through his ability to just like make friends with people on both the sort of like radical and moderate side of the union

um union sort of political aisle and this is because lula like lula is just is funny he loves playing soccer he loves just like dancing and hanging out and this lets him like win his election slate like pretty easily because you know she's just she's just very popular so these are things that like i don't know like the other workers in the factory a lot of times don't care that much about union politics but they do care about like that you care about soccer a lot and so lula was able to build a bunch of support and this lets him sort of easily take a position in a union system that like i it's basically a miniature state like the unions have their own welfare programs they have they have their own education system and you know this is part of the thing about people talking about like lula's like completely uneducated it's like

no it's not like he he spends a bunch of time like in classes that like the the union like puts on basically like university and academic classes right for for its workers and for other people sort of affiliated with them so he spends a bunch and this is like you know part of where he learned sort of politics and where he learned political economy is like is through the through these classes the union has and he sorry he the union also like you know i talked about like they they run welfare programs right so he's like he's like a social worker right trying trying to sort of like help workers and pensioners with his job he gets this position that like everyone hates like he he has this

position basically like running running their sort of like like welfare program and like nobody wants it but he like does it and he does it really well and this makes him really popular because he's the guy that like you know if you're like a pensioner right like he's the guy you go to to figure out pension bullshit he's the guy you just go to in order to sort of get stuff done and yeah you know this means he's spending a bunch of time doing paperwork and like negotiating with government bureaucracy and he this makes him a very very effective politician um here's from lula's politics at cutting again but lula also gained access to an even larger constituency at the union headquarters a working class public

sphere do you know how many people pass by the union daily he asked a journalist in 1979 at minimum 1500 those frequenting the union did so for many reasons often for various sorts of assistance or assistencia which i think is yeah like government like union assistant stuff yeah assistencia but also to complain about work shoot the breeze or catch up with friends some union directors often arrived late to the headquarters and were off always busy when they did the gregarious lula by contrast maintained an open door policy and his office became a gathering point for rank and file workers factory activists and fellow directors still linked to production and this is another thing that's sort of important about this is that like okay like once you reach like a certain position in the union like you're

just a full-time a union guy guy. There's a lot of people who join the union and become union people because it takes you off the shop floor. The government does this deliberately because it means the thing they're trying to do is create a bureaucratic layer between the working class and their union.

Lula's still really connected to what's going on on the shop floor because he's just talking to everyone all the time and the product of this is that lula is becomes a very very like he becomes a trade union leader becomes a very very powerful one he rapidly becomes the president of his union after some like vidal who's like his boss there's this whole thing where he's trying to stay in power but he doesn't run for president of the union because of some complicated political maneuvering and so lula ends up as the head of the union vidal's like it's fine i'm still going to be in control here and that is not what happens like you you you you have just you have just given the presidency

to like like a a a genuinely, truly singular politico figure. But there's something that's very, very important about Lula that you need to understand to understand anything that's about to happen here and basically sense. Lula is not a communist. This is very important. So this is very important. He could not have done what he's about to do, which is, you know, become literally like a living symbol of one of the largest strike waves in Brazilian history. He could not have done this if he was a communist. The military, if he was a communist, the military would have tortured and possibly executed that he didn't have it as bad as like a lot of other people did which is true but also like they tortured the shit out of him and it was fucking horrific and the fact that like every single like person like the fact that every single fucking member of the military dictatorship was not fucking like taken out behind a fucking shed shot and had their like corpses fed to dogs is like genuinely one of

the reasons why we're here right now this stuff is awful it is yeah familiar theme of the podcast yeah yeah but what to do with dictators you know and lula and chico's wife are eventually able to sort of get him released because he's not like a very high like he's in the pcb like he's in the communist party like his brother like but he's not like a high-ranking guy and you know the sort of cruel irony of it is like they knew that he didn't know anything that they didn't already know but they just tortured the shit out of him anyways um but one of the important things that happens here is his brother like under torture like insists that lula is not a communist and like continues to insist this because he isn't. And, you know, and like people who are like that and people in the military leadership like believe this, right?

Because like they're, you know, they have a really extensive sort of intelligence network. Like at this point, they've basically like they've basically destroyed the Brazilian Communist Party and they've like captured and killed most of their cadre. And because he's not a communist lula's able to stay in the labor movement even if in the short term after his brother gets arrested he loses his job in the union because and he's able to do this because like beyond his brother who like his brother has literally been like saying communist stuff at him for decades and he's just been like i don't care um and like a couple of other people he's's just kind of friends with Lula has no connection to the

organized left, he's not sort of like he's not like a leftist in that sort of conventional sense, he's not tied to one of the old left political factions and this means that he can stand in as a kind of

sort of labor leader that the more moderate fashions the military dictatorship have been looking for which is this sort of like non-communist like quote-unquote genuine trade unionist and okay so like talking about like a moderate faction of a military dictatorship is always kind of fraught because you know it's a military dictatorship but like like all these people suck it's also true that there were there were factions within the military dictatorship who so there's a fashion called like the dungeon which is like the people torturing all these people to death there were other people in

the military dictatorship who are like this is really fucking gauche like why are you guys doing this like this makes us look bad also why are you torturing these people? And those guys look at Lula and they're willing to work with him because like what they think they're doing is creating this sort of like authentic non-communist labor movement that will like work with them to stop communism, like sort of like the AFL-CIO, like specifically you talk about this, like in the way that the AFL-CIO does in the US working as an anti-communist force, they think that they can get Lula to do this. And Lula does a lot of stuff that like looks like collaboration to the sort of like surviving leftists around him. He develops like literally like personal relationships, kind of friendships. It's not really friendships, but like develops personal relationships and professional relationships with members of the regime. And, you know, again, like it looks like he's collaborating, but that's not what's actually happening. What's actually happening is that he's holding these negotiations in order to sort of increase the power of the union and build this, like, safety network. Like, that because he has

these personal relationships with people in the regime, it means that he's not going to get fucking disappeared and his people aren't going to get disappeared. And this has happened to a lot of, even a lot of sort of other regular union activists who didn't have this kind of connection just like get vanished and the people able to build connections with like keep him from being like vanished and keep his trade units and being slaughtered and you know like the the the people in like in in the military dictatorship like really think that like okay they've gained that you know they're gaining an ally and defeating communism uh the thing they are actually doing

uh is progressing their own grave diggers um okay you know who else before yes there we go you know who else is creating their own grave diggers garrison uh the advertising industrial complex yes they have produced us.

We can dream. Unbelievable. Well, in the meantime, so inside the new Batman game, you play as the four sidekicks after Batman allegedly dies. And the weirdest thing is that because three of the sidekicks don't usually have capes they you know they don't

do any kind of mass gliding feature for city traversal instead you have a really slow bat cycle and then you have an almost spider-man like grappling hook and it's it locks onto anything around you it's really confusing and are we back okay yeah all right and we're back we should we should leave in like just like two minutes of batman talk it was completely baffled so okay the other thing about lula just as a person is that fundamentally he's a negotiator like his style is almost like biden-esque in the sense of like biden sort of believes like talking to everyone across the political aisle etc etc except like okay the key difference here is that lula is actually charismatic um yeah but like you know he will just sit there like with people across the aisle and like talk things out negotiate with them he'll

talk with employers we'll talk with members of the military dictatorship but you know the other difference is that like okay so biden is like is a consummate politician right like when he when he talks about like talking with people across the aisle he means like strum thurman right when lula is talking with people he's talking with everyone like he like literally everyone he runs a class he's talking with random people at like union halls at meetings at picket lines at like soccer games at bars and because he spends all of this time talking to people constantly, he gains this just like incredible ability to read crowds and like tailor message messages for them and like figure out what sort of like,

like what, what sort of things will work with whatever person he's saying. And he gains this like absolutely incredible ability to, to sort of charm people. And it works on people, even on people who fucking hate him. Like there are, there are like journalists who will spend literally their entire careers trying to destroy him and who but when they're asked about him they're like well i mean like

he was a person he's really charming like he's a nice guy and but you know so part of what he's doing in this period this this is this is this is the late 70s um going into the early he's playing this like this very specific like game of respectability politics of like not directly criticizing the government and like so there are these like there are these strikes that start happening because okay so it turns out that the military government has been trying to get inflation like the the whole sort of economic system they've been doing starts to fall apart and inflation starts to come back and they start doing these like measures to combat inflation and the unions okay so originally no one would believe them but the union has like has

like a like they have like a think tank kind of right they have like a social sort of like center with a bunch of sort of like sociologists and economists and they figure out that the union's been lying that's right the government's been lying about how bad inflation is. And then the IMF in the late 70s confirms this, that the military dictatorship has been lying about how bad its inflation is by doing subsistical stuff. And this matters because they've been setting cost-of-living adjustments by a lower level of inflation than what's actually happening. And this pisses everyone the fuck off because they're like, literally the government is robbing us. Like they've been lying about how bad inflation is.

Like, this is like a 30% income drop, right? For these workers. And this pisses everyone the fuck off. And suddenly there's these massive like protests. There were like hundreds of thousands of people, like a hundred thousand people will show up to a soccer stadium as part of a strike like but you know lula has to make sure that everyone doesn't get murdered and so he does these things like he'll like he avoids directly

criticizing the government he has this whole thing about how like he wants to negotiate directly with the employers he like kicks out like leftist student groups who are like trying to like distribute like communist students who are like trying to distribute pamphlets at the rallies because he's trying to make sure that the stri are trying to distribute pamphlets at the rallies because he's trying to make sure that the strikers aren't seen as communist subversives and instead they're seen as good, upstanding, hardworking citizens.

And yeah, here's from that book again. Given the diverse outlooks, Lula represented himself as a thoughtful, righteous man who disparaged riotous behavior as unworthy and counterproductive like all honest workers he called for the strikers to be disciplined and counseled against classes with the police he continually framed their fight as one with the

companies not the government or the policemen and this like works because any more radical action probably is going to get everyone killed and i mean like like that when the strikes are going on there's like like they're they're getting buzzed by helicopters, there's like fucking army trucks everywhere. But, you know, he manages not to get everyone killed, and the result of this is that Lula immediately becomes the most famous

worker in Brazil. He's, like, on TV, he's leading strikes everywhere, like, there's these massive rallies, and, you know, there's some really, like know there's some really like there's some really like genuinely adorable stuff that's happening where like when he's giving his first speech to one of these rallies it's like it's fucking raining the soccer stadium is just mud like his podium is literally sinking into the mud he's trying to speak and this is like

the first time he's addressed a crowd this loud and he's nervous and people start leaving and like they're doing one of the other things i learned about this is how old this how old the crowd mic is so they're doing this thing that becomes known as the crowd mic where like you don't have a microphone or you can't reach everyone so each so okay so some the the speaker says like a sentence and then each person in the crowd says a sentence and it just sort of moves back through the crowd from everyone repeating it and he's trying to give the speech it's not going great and like the workers in the front row start like yelling like hey you can do this lula don't worry you got this and then he like and then this is like absolutely adorable moment and then he sort of like like you know like gets better at it and like by like the second one of these like people are just

like in love with him he is unbelievably unbelievably popular. He's an incredible speaker. He's like, you know, and it's very easy to, and you, you see writing about this at the time that are like, that look at him and are like, well,

this guy, like this guy is literally like, like people, people are like calling him literally the Messiah of the working class. Right? Like this is the kind of sort of like, like a claim that he has, like there are there after one of his speeches,

like the entire crowd literally carries him on their shoulders from one end of the soccer stadium to the other. Like there are like, like there, there, there are people like walking on stage and calling him like father and saying Hail Mary's like, it's,

it's fucking wild. Um, but you know, but like, and like when, when, when, when like sort of rich and educated people look at this,

they're like, Oh, these people are like blindly obedient to him. They're like, they have this client patron relationship. He's like manipulating the masses. And that's not what's happening. Like that, that's just, that's not what's happening. Like he actually, like the union votes against him like a couple of times, like it, because he's, he's, he's trying to do negotiations. Right. And there's, there's, there's this thing this thing where if I'm understanding the story right,

I think what happened is that he's trying to negotiate people coming back to work so negotiations can continue. It's like a show of good faith or whatever. And the union's like, fuck no, we're not going back to work and just votes him down. And so this kind of stuff happens, right? People respect him enormously

and he is literally, in some sense, he's like the avatar of the industrial working class. Like working class people look at him and like, and they see themselves in him. And they see the power that he's able to sort of exert. How many people he's around then they're like, oh shit, the union is strong. Like we are strong. We can actually sort of fight back. But it's not like a sort of client patron thing.

It's just like he's at the head of a workers movement that is a force in and of itself and has its own agency and capacity to act and lula has to like negotiate with that and like he has to sort of like rebuild their trust after he you know is taking a sort of more moderate line he he eventually gets like arrested in 1980 although he gets released after like a month and from there he gets to work founding like every important leftist organization like the last 40 years um so in 1980 he's one of the people who founds the workers party uh in 1983 he founds the cut or uh so the english translation of it's a unified worker central which like to this day is brazil's like national trade union

center like it's like it's like their big union federation. And this is illegal at the time, but you just like, fuck it. We're doing anyways. Like these people are losing the, the, the,

the, the, the dictatorship losing control. Um, in the CUT, like plays a huge role in how the dictatorship loses power. Um, so does the PT to some extent,

like the PT, the PT, like as a party are powerful enough that like they're involved in drafting the constitution he's there for the founding of the landless workers movement which is a social movement that like seizes land that's not being used as a relationship to workers he's heavily involved in the campaigns to sort of force the military out of power and you know as a military dictatorship like kind of falls apart and democracy like kind of like fully returns to brazil in 1989 he goes like full intellectual politics but the the problem is that like he's kind of too early for his politics um he he spends

like the entire 90s just like getting his ass handed to him in elections over and over again and part of what's happening you know part by part of literally what he's doing in the 90s is rebuilt it's like he's like rebuilding the entire latin american left like from ground zero after the fall of the berlin wall wall and the sort of like global defeated left in the 80s um he's one of the founders of the forum of sao paulo which is the first of this series of sort of like meetings of leftists from latin america and the caribbean which is trying to figure out like okay like hey what what is socialism now that like the berlin wall is down and everything's sort of going to shit and in 1990 that's a really bleak prospect like

neoliberalism is completely ascendant nationalism has destroyed socialism like every sort of former socialist state's falling apart like capitalists are running rampant across the globe like literally entire communist parties are just like disbanding and all of their sort of former socialist state's falling apart like capitalists are running rampant across the globe like literally entire communist parties are just like disbanding and all of their sort of cadre are becoming liberals but you know as the 90s go on and people actually have to sort of like live under this they increasingly realize that it sucks ass and that i you know what living under natalism means is like imf structural adjustments and like the economy, like there's the Asian market collapse. There's a bunch of other market collapses. And, you know, as after Zapatista sort of go on the take, like are the first part of the left to really go on the offensive after their uprising in 1994, the left kind of starts to put itself back together.

left kind of starts to put itself back together. And this left, like, I think like this version of left, it's kind of dead now, but like, I think there are people who are old enough to remember it or like, remember sort of like what it used to be like the, the,

the slogan of this sort of whole, like, like left, like the, one of their big slogans is another world is possible, which is sort of like the, the anti, like the anti,

it's like, it's a response to like Thatcher's. There is no alternative. It's like another world is possible. It is. This is the sort of like alter globalization left like this is a left that does the battle of Seattle in 1999 and Lula's there for like all of it like after Seattle he helped after the battle of Seattle like he helps found the world social forum which is just like giant meeting place for like international social movements um and you know and so you know through this whole period like the left is sort of gathering his

strength everywhere like well okay in latin america and also like i mean it is in a lot of places right like in india um it's like indonesia to some extent the u.s although the u.s has this problem that 9-11 happens and yeah that's a shit show yeah it's just it's amazing how that this movement existed almost everywhere else, but not, to my knowledge, as significantly here. Yeah, well, I mean, we had Seattle, right? But then when 9-11 happened, the big unions pulled out of doing any direct action shit,

and then everything kind of got ate by the anti-war movement, which was true. And then the Green Scare. Yeah, yeah. the anti-war movement which yeah and then the green scare yeah yeah then that led to ad busters doing and uh stuff at occupy wall street and then yeah and that's that's the last one okay i i would say this i i think there's i think there's a there's a break here like i think i think occupy is when that kind of politics died because when when occupying went under and this is the sort of irony of this and

we'll get you next episode is that like you you can there's a good argument that the place that that politics actually died was in brazil when the workers party fucking like tear gassed and rubber bulleted the absolute shit out of a bunch of protesters who had been who were like the brazilian wave of sort of like that series of protests and they crushed the shit out of them it is horrible like this is one of this is like one of like my foundational political memories is like fucking tanks rolling down the street people shooting rubber bullets at people like seven-year-olds getting tear gassed it is a it is a fucking shit show but in in 2002 like you know it's not that we haven't gotten there yet like even the sort of like most cynical trotskyite like can't imagine the fucking pg rolling tanks through the favelas which is what they're gonna be doing in 12 years and when britain we had that was when i can't quite remember when

tony blair i think it was 97 but like brit the british tony blair right like represented this other vision for the left yeah well and everything is like people like i like one of the books i was reading was like people talk about obama as being like the end of the same wave except obama sort of like the like even more so than any of the other politicians we're talking about is a sort of like recuperation of this right like yeah he's the guy who takes all his energy and is like yeah and and okay so we're we're gonna get into like the negative side of all of this shit next episode but like in some sense lula does play a similar role in brazil and we will get there but right now you know okay so there's another part of this that

like doesn't get talked about that much which is that in the early 2000s in latin america it's not just that like the left is winning elections like there are open revolutions going on like i mean there's there's a bunch of them there's a like like arguably like the last communist revolution like ever happens in uh like the last sort of like the last gas of the classical workers room it happens in argentina in 2001 there's this huge revolt against the imf and austerity and like this is this is the last time like in world history that like people occupy factories and then attempt to like like take them over and use them

as a way of seizing the means of production people occupy factories in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2014 but like by that point those guys are occupying factories and then having like occupy meetings in them they're not like attempting to sort of like seize production yeah but you know like these are real revolutions right like there's there's there's

there's a coup against hugo travis that gets overturned by another popular revolution um there's the water and gas wars in bolivia which culminate in like literally the like the capital is like entirely blockaded off from the rest of the country and surrounded by road blocks and the fucking government like this is in 2005 the government is like entirely blockaded off from the rest of the country and surrounded by roadblocks and the fucking government, like this is in 2005. The government is like fucking imploding. The military has fallen apart. Like, you know, like, like, and this is, this is, this is the sort of chain of events that brings E.H. Morales into power. But like, they very nearly just destroyed the entire Bolivian government.

the cycle sort of ends with the Oaxaca uprising in 2006 where like like the people of Oaxaca just fucking take the city and hold it for like a few months and like run it through democratic assemblies and then like the army shows up and they get yeah but like you know like there is

a point like that was like I think like in my lifetime like the workers of a city fucking just took it over like this is stuff that like yeah you know like i think now we're we kind of like we have problems like i think most people sort of forgotten about this stuff like this this was a moment in which like like revolution and the destruction of capitalism was on the table yeah and like i did a lot of it i'm not super i lived in venezuela for some of this time uh briefly but i it felt very possible in a way that like it probably hasn't since right like

yeah it was fascinating to see like and the cooperation between those countries was very real right like um obviously cuba like cuba cuban doctors are fucking everywhere right if you travel yeah resourceful thing though but it was fascinating to see like people from here coming here and i think they had that sao paulo forum right where they would where these ideas would be exchanged and it it yeah it that was very formative for me it genuinely felt like it was possible for something as a result of this like ghoulish imf policy that we'd had for the previous 20 years. People are like, no, fuck this. We're doing it our way.

Yeah. And yeah, didn't turn out great. Okay, but this is what's really weird about Lula because Lula's running in 2002 and he's watching all of this happen and his strategy, his response to this is basically the analysis, because he because he okay so he spent the entire 90s lose running leftist campaigns and losing right yeah and his strategy in 2002 is

he's going to move the pt the workers party to the right both in terms of messaging and in policy so as not to sort of like scare voters and he finally convinces the rest of the pt to do something he's been advocating for for like decades which is allying with sort of like liberal or conservative like non-leftist parties which they do in this election and uh we're gonna see how that goes uh later because oh boy but you know okay so like why why why are they sort of doing this there's a few reasons partially it's because lula has been like losing elections as being like we have to do something different partially it's because the pt is a product of the collapse of like okay the pt like in in the 2000s like the the the base that had formed that party is basically

collapsed right the pt is like its core constituencies are sort of like leftist groups there's like like left-wing catholic groups and the sort of like the the the giant sort of like trade union stuff that like the giant workers movement that lulu is a part of but by 2002 like the catholic church has swung back to the right like the sort of the sort of left catholic people are on the retreat there's very few of them left. We're going to talk about this more later, but the sort of giant industrial unions that Lula had been ahead of and that Lula's career and the PT itself comes from have been shattered by deindustrialization and the collapse of Brazil's industrial economy. And the product of this is that without its sort of social basis, Lula keeps losing elections so he goes okay so his solution to this and the pt understands this right like they're they're aware of the fact that like part of what's happening with them is that like they've you know they're losing parts of their working class base because that that working class

literally doesn't exist anymore they're gaining a bunch of sort of middle class, like leftist activists, but they need to find a way to sort of broaden their appeal. And so like he promises, like openly gives this like speech about how he's not going to do like a rupture with the economy, which is what this party had been campaigning on because, you know, the PTR leftist, right? The whole point of another world is possible is we don't have to live in capitalism anymore. Lula's like, no, no, no, no, no no no no no guys hold on hold on i didn't mean that like we're not going to do a rupture and instead what lula does is pledges to and like stays in the brazil's commitments to the imf including like fucking insane shit like maintaining primary budget surpluses which is nuts and you know and he instead of like wow yeah yeah he stays in the end and you know so argentina famously like in argentina's solution to the sort of uprisings

that are happening is that they default on our debt to the imf they're like fuck you we're not paying and lula's like nah nah we're paying like it's fine we'll just keep paying it and like the pt itself is like what the fuck is going on like Like, what is happening here? Why is this happening here? Like, why is he doing this? And, you know, Lula's just like, well, okay, we need to take power. We need to do this to take power. And so he does. And weirdly, in the middle of this cycle of sort of like the resurrection of the left, he's running increasingly to the right.

And, you know, okay, part of what's happening here is that there's an inherent problem that leftist governments have when they take over the state, especially when they take over a capitalist state by winning an election, which is that if you are in control of the government, right, if you control the state, your job is now to keep the economy running. And in theory, this isn't incompatible with leftist beliefs, but if you

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

But the solution to this problem that these sort of like pink tie governments come to is basically to let a faction of the sort of national bourgeoisie, the sort of national capitalist class, the people who are like capitalist domestically. Like they let them into this product of sort of like this nationalist developmental project. And so what this means essentially is you are like, you are buying a section of the ruling class off, right? You are giving them access to state contracts, you're doing

state investments in infrastructure that helps them like expand things like mining so they can, you know, take some of the profits from it. You're giving them preferential access to government contracts in exchange for sort of supporting you and there's a lot of ways this can look like the mas and bolivia for example starts bringing these elites directly into the party with their sort of developmentalist faction um in brazil it looks like an alliance of something called the centro which is like centro sorry my Portuguese is not good um which is this like the sort of like ever-present force

in brazilian politics which is like the corruption faction it's like this this series of sort of parties that are like kind of loosely knit who kind of vote together but you don't like they don't their parties nominally have ideology but like their ideology is i i am i am like a local political like powerful political person and you are going to pay me or you will not be able to pass literally any bill ever. And okay, so they have to form an alliance with sort of these parties. And the other thing they start doing is that they are just literally – like they just literally start buying people off. And this leads to sort of like a bunch of corruption scandals that we're going to get to next episode. And this leads to sort of like a bunch of corruption scandals that we're going to get to next episode.

But while Lula is in office, this seems like it's working really well. He's able to sort of pay off the bourgeoisie and fund these social welfare programs for the Brazilian working class. And this has a massive impact, right? Like this lists something like 20 million people out of poverty. right? Like this lists something like 20 million people out of poverty and okay. And I, I, I and other people will argue about what it means to like lift people out of poverty and how poor they still are. But you know, it is true. These people have a massive increase in quality of life. Like people are getting running water in their homes for the first time. Like people are having electricity for the first time. Um, uh, it's also worth pointing out that lula who is white spends a fucking shit ton of time fighting like fighting against racism and fighting for educational job

opportunities for black people even though okay there's like an asterisk next to that that has to do with the police that we'll get back to shocking yeah oh it's it's fucking oh boy it is worse than you can possibly imagine um but you know like he's trying to end hunger he has this very famous program called the bosa familia which is basically like if you're poor enough and you agree to send your kids to school and get them vaccinated like the government will just give you money and you know there's also a micro loan part of this which is my dot dot dot uh this won't go oh yeah uh nothing bad will happen from the Brazilian government attempting to get a bunch of people to take microloans. This does not lead us into fascism at all.

But, you know, OK, like this works, right? Lula is able to grow the economy like Brazil's economic growth. This period is like 7%, which is fucking nuts. Like year on year. He leaves office with I've seen it alternately said it's like an 85 or a 90 approval rating he's unbelievably popular um you know so every everything like looks good right kind of from inside brazil it looks like the pt has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of everyone they've been like they've been a successful social democratic party and that they've lifted a bunch of people out of

poverty there's like people who are alive because like who are alive today who would not be because the pt was in power right and you know there are people who don't starve there are people who don't go hungry there are people who have opportunities like opportunities, who have opportunities to advance themselves for the first time ever. And it's a successful capitalist government too, because again, 7% year-on-year growth, right? Like this is fucking nuts. Like this is a kind of economic growth that is like unimaginable in most parts of the world. However, comma, if this at all actually worked, we wouldn't be here right now with the fascist president going into hiding. And so next episode, you know, March, I've been talking about gravediggers sort of this episode, right? There's a famous part of the Communist Manifesto where Marx talks about capitalism producing its own gravediggers.

And capitalism has never done that, right? To this day, right now, capitalism has yet to produce its own gravediggers. And capitalism has never done that, right? Like, to this day, right now, capitalism has yet to produce its own gravediggers. Social democracy has produced its own gravediggers in every single fucking country anyone's ever done it. And the next episode, in the next episode, we're going to watch the PT produce its own gravediggers, and we are going to watch them attempt to bury

Luisa Nacia Lula da Silva and the rest of the Brazilian working class alive. Oh, good. Do you want to do a bolsonaro update because he's apparently left the building oh shit okay yeah uh bolsonaro up to wait bolsonaro has left the building hold on breaking breaking news yeah it's he left the palace finally yeah in a convoy of black suvs oh he's expected to break the silence yeah so i'm looking at bentham and fogle who's pretty good on this yeah he's expected to break the silence but not to congratulate lula on winning jesus christ is i have lost goodbye okay so yeah i there might be a if if i i don't know what we're

gonna do if there's a coup in between in between this episode and the next episode. It will be. Hopefully not. I don't know. I mean, one thing that, like, I will say and that I think we're going to talk a bit about next episode is that, like, part of what's happening right now that's very important is that Biden is in office in the U.S. And, I mean, okay, so the Brazilian military has a long history of doing coups but usually when they're doing coups they're doing coups with the backing of the u.s government and biden like just on a personal level fucking hates bolsonaro and there is a there is a very real chance that this

is a significant factor in why we haven't seen a coup is literally the president of the united states personally does not like the fascist president of brazil and this is a fucking batshit state of affairs right like the fact that like the like personal inclinations of the president of the united states has this much of an impact on like the politics of an entire country is nuts um this happened in the other direction for a while right like it's i guess not personal it's just the personal inclination of the president in that case yeah well there's weird things here too because like like lula was weirdly friendly with with bush which i think is why part of why he never like they never tried to cue him

as opposed to chavez who called him the devil. Yeah, which is really interesting, because Lula and Chavez are friends, right? But Chavez gives the speech about how, like, everyone has their own, like, at the World Social Forum, gives a speech about how everyone's existing in their own, like, conditions, so you can't expect, like, you know, you can't expect Lula to be Chavez, you can't expect

Chavez to be Castro, like, stuff like that. Yeah, but it's weird. Hopefully Bolsonaro fucking leaves office. If not, I don't know, but either way, I don't know.

Things are. The history of Brazil during this period is also kind of bleak, but after this period is way the fuck bleaker. So yeah, we're going to talk about that tomorrow and yeah we'll update you if there is a coup welcome i'm dan thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season

digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.

Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry

and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines

everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, God is dead and the woke left have killed him. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast where we celebrate the destruction of Jair Bolsonaro and the concept of Christianity in the human soul, both of which happened recently in Brazil, as far as I understand from skimming the news on Twitter. How's everybody else doing today? Utterly exhausted, but you know, such as

the world without Christ we have destroyed. Yeah, that's what the woke mob did. Speaking of woke mobs, what are we doing today? What are we talking about? We are talking more about the Brazilian elections.

I guess we should start with our with our perennial update about what seems to be happening there right now so okay currently it is what 11 a.m pacific time we're recording this on yeah that sounds about right yeah yeah that one so as of right now bolsonaro like still so he's appeared but he still hasn't conceded the election um he sure hasn't yeah and okay so the other thing that's been going on is that there's been okay so one of the sort of perennial bolsonaro things is that he has a bunch of support among a bunch of sort of like. Like a bunch of different sort of like kinds of truckers.

And there's been a bunch of this before has been setting up a bunch of barricades. I OK, from from talking to people. On the ground and from what I've seen from it, I. I don't know it's hard to get it's hard to gauge like how serious these like i mean blockades actually some of these blockades i've seen videos of some that involve several dozen vehicles yeah i mean they have a lot of vehicles like as the thing okay so the supreme court has ordered the police to like clear the barricades. Yes.

And as best I can tell, they're kind of just getting their asses kicked. Like they're not really resisting. Like particularly hard. And so I don't know if this is like. Yeah, I mean, it's the kind of thing that it will present perhaps a model for other people in the future. If there's any efficacy to it, it certainly could be part of an effective coup, like locking down the roads in this way. Yeah, I mean, this is how the coup against Allende started, for example. Allende started, for example.

If Bolsonaro and the military don't both go in 100% right now, basically, then what these Trekkers are doing will not be much more than like an annoyance. It's the same thing as with January 6th. If Trump, when they breached the Capitol, if Trump had declared, I'm remaining president, everybody rise up, well, then a whole thing might have happened. But he didn't. And so the momentum that might have kind of led into a more thorough takeover of the government fizzled out with a bunch of guys getting, you know, into fistfights with the Capitol police and shit. Yeah. And there's an aspect, I think, too,

that's sort of important of, like, Bolsonaro, like, this whole sort of, like, truckers blockade thing, like, this has been going on in various forms for, like, the entire time he's been in office. And, like, he sort of turned them into these motorcades that he would do. But they're really weird in that, like,

okay, so, so like they are blocking roads but a lot of it is kind of pure spectacle like there's this whole wave of sort of right-wing candidates like like basically but like there's a whole wing of sort of right-wing politicians who like got their start from like doing instagram videos from like or like tiktoks or like shit like whatever like yeah basically like from these blockades so like i don't know they don't they don't seem to be like as of right now i don't think they're like an incredibly serious fighting force but you know i mean it's not good this is happening um it's also not good that the police was like initially cooperating with them and that the police set up their own roadblocks to stop people from voting. So I don't know. The situation is not good, but it's not as bad as it could be. And yeah,

I want to reiterate that the US has recognized that Lula has won the election, which I think makes it infinitely harder. Yes. And this is one of those things when people on the left talk about, like, is there a harm reduction point in voting? Well, this is harm reduction, right? Because if Trump had been in office, he would have backed Bolsonaro and Lula would be in prison again. And there would be absolutely no hope for stemming the destruction of the rainforest. Not that things are going to work. Things could still be a nightmare in Brazil. Don't get me wrong but we've we've at least avoided the most obvious way things could have

been a disaster yeah although i i do want to point out that the obama administration had a huge role in uh like this entire shit to be fair the obama administration i don't think was trying to put bolsonaro in power they were trying to put the neoliberal ghouls in power. But they definitely – we'll get into that next episode. But they definitely, like, helped get us here. No, I mean, that's true. It also follows in the continually building story that, like, Biden's actually a much better president than Barack Obama. Yeah, low bar, but stunning. that like Biden's actually a much better president than Barack Obama. Yeah.

Low bar, but. I mean, incredibly low bar because Barack Obama led directly to Donald Trump for a variety of reasons. Yeah. There you are. This is a weird world that we live in. Yeah. And it's also like people are now starting, you know, rightfully so. I know we're going to be talking about a bunch of fucked up stuff about Lula.

Most recently kind of bringing up his very bad takes on Ukraine. But it's also like, I don't care. Like, obviously, I think I would always like for people to have, if they're going to have a representative democracy, better leaders. a representative democracy, better leaders. But at the end of the day, like the rainforest being destroyed at the rate it's being destroyed is an existential threat to all life on earth. And Lula has a proven track record

of reducing deforestation in the Amazon. So like, I don't care that he has a bad take on you. I just don't. Like, it doesn't matter really. Yeah, yeah. I saw articles that were like, ah, Lula like supports democracy in Brazil, but supports authoritarianism abroad. It's like, guys, shut up.

Like, holy shit. Jesus Christ. Like, I can, if I go back to 2017, I can find all of you, like, writing fucking provost Nauer articles. So, like, shut up. So, okay. So, let's get to how everything went to shit so last episode we sort of left the pt like riding high lula's out with like a like 80 90 approval rating he's done like an economic miracle he's pulled one street by poverty uh and you know if things had continued like that

uh we wouldn't be here right now so obviously something happened and to understand what happens uh unfortunately we have to do some materialism um okay so bear with me through the materialism i promise we're going to get to a bunch of like absolutely horrific crimes against humanity but first we need to do a bit of crimes against humanity yeah yeah there it's oh there there are lots of criming there there oh it's oh boy i'm already hard wait maybe i shouldn't have said it that way moving moving swiftly on so okay i i i'm good i'm gonna quote here from one of the sort of more famous Marx quotes from 18th Primaire that is genuinely a very good way of understanding history, which is, Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. They do not make it under self-selective circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

but under circumstances are existing already given and transmitted from the past. So, okay. What, what, what are the circumstances that like 2002 Lula is inheriting? Um, Lula is sort of social democratic plan is able to sort of grow the economy

and also pay off the ruling class to be able to stay in power at the same time, because of something called the commodity boom, um, a commodity boom broadly is just like it's a large spike across the board in the prices of commodities over a sort of period of time. We're using the sort of like mainstream bourgeois definition of commodity, which is like primary commodities. It's stuff you can like pick up off the ground dig up or harvest so it's things like soybeans like copper iron horses uh lead um condoms yes we understand what commodities are yes look brazil condom tree i don't know i

got nothing so okay and lula lula like takes office and leaves power like almost exactly perfectly to take to take advantage of like the peak of the commodity boom, right? Lula comes into power in 2000 and well, okay. So he wins 2002 election. He takes off in 2003. The commodity boom,

according to a Cambridge, to Cambridge is a handbook of primary commodities in the global economy took off in 2004 and ended in about 2014, but it's slowing by about 2010, 2011 ish. And Lula exits office in 2010 due to the two-term limit, which means he never has to deal with the consequences of the downturn. And let's stop here for a second.

How do term limits work in the Brazilian system? Because it's not the same as here. Here, like a term limit means you get your two as president, and then you're done. Yeah, so I, okay, so the way I think it works and I could be wrong about this, but I'm 90% sure the way it works. Okay. So you can have two terms and then you can't run again in a row,

but if, if like someone else comes in, you can then run again after that. It's just that you can only do two in a row. I mean, I'm happy that he's beaten Bolsonaro, but that is a very silly way to do it. Yeah.

Well, I will say something about this is something about Lula that like I think kind of infuriates a lot of the people who like don't like him politically and want to sort of scream about his authoritarianism or whatever. Like he he was always like like mostly really scrupulous about the sort of like democratic norm stuff. Like he, a lot of other sort of like pink tide leaders in the same position. Like this is actually how even Morales originally gets in trouble is that he tries to seek a third term and Lula is just like, not I'm out.

I'm fuck it. Like, which is, which is good. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it,

it, it kind of like on the one hand, it, it, it, in, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it kind of, like, on the one hand, in theoretical terms, this is sort of, like, good for Brazilian democracy, et cetera, et cetera. In practical terms, it's kind of a disaster. I mean, it's good because I think that it's always good when popular leaders acknowledge, like, absolute limits. But, yeah, I mean, the timing wasn't ideal. Yeah, and, but yeah, I mean the timing wasn't ideal. Yeah. And you know, it,

but you know, okay. So like the, but the, the, the reason that he's able to sort of like, you know, I'm like,

if he, if he, if like, if the constitution had allowed him to run for a third turn, he would have just like, like he would have clobbered everyone. There's, there's just not even like any remote competition to him.

And the reason he's able to do this again, is because the quantity boom. People like this guy. He got like 10% less of the vote this time. I mean, yeah, but what was that? Yeah, okay. Like this election was like really close compared to the last. No, no, no. Oh, you're talking about this most recent one.

Most recent one, yeah, yeah. I'm talking about Lula back then, yeah. Yeah, yeah, Lula back then, like literally unstoppable political drug. He's very, very popular at this point. Yeah, but this is because of the commodity boom. And we need to, in order to understand what is going to happen to the PT, we need to understand why the commodity boom

happened in the first place. This turns out to be very important. There's a lot of causes technically that have to do with a lot of complicated macroeconomic stuff. The single most important cause for us, and I think generally the one that is credited with the reason that these commodity prices are increasing, is the skyrocketing growth of the Chinese economy in the 2000s. And when I say skyrocketing growth, we are talking double-digit GDP increases every year. This is when we have that Olympics where they have all the drummers and you have that newsweek article about how scary china is maybe it's time um yes and and you know and the sort of the massive increase in industrial

production like they are the ccp is like like china is industrializing on a scale that is, I think, like almost hitherto unimaginable. And this means, you know, there's an enormous increase in demand for primary commodities. But this boom was only sustainable as long as the Chinese economy can maintain something like double digit GDP growth. But the problem is after 2008, the Chinese economy starts to slow. And sort of in response to this in 2009, thep does like one of the largest stimulus projects ever and they they spend four trillion rmb on like infrastructure and welfare programs to save off a recession and and it works but you know like they this is this is like the largest like stimulus program ever and it can't really keep the economy growing like ever ever since 2010 uh every single year

well okay i excluding the weird rebound stuff in 2021 but like uh like every single year like year-on-year growth or the rate of growth of the Chinese economy has been decreasing. Right. And OK, well, the commodity boom, you know, is produced by by feeling, you know, by by increased Chinese demand. But. But, you know, okay, so in the 2000s, like, this is great. These are the sort of material conditions that make ludicrous, like, politics possible, right? You have enormous economic growth, and this economic growth is happening in sectors, like, in very important sectors of the Brazilian economy to the extent that it's able to provide a revenue, a stable revenue base for the state that allows it to fund welfare programs, like, and pay offgeoisie which is you know this is sort of like like papering over this sort of like fundamental contradiction of the PT's base right which is that they have to like they have to keep the economy running so they have to have to pay off a bunch of sort of like

incredibly corrupt dudes and also just sort of like Brazilian capitalists and they also are trying to sort of feed their welfare programs but you know the commodity boom collapses and suddenly there's only enough money to either pay the capitalists or pay the workers and not both and the project begins to collapse and and this this happens across latin america um like i i i would make the argument that like the end of the commodity boom like is the reaper that came for the latin american left it is at least as important if not more so in the collapse of the sort of the pink tide over over the the course of 2010s like then the actual cia like the cia is very heavily involved in this but the

commodity boom just sort of like just nuking all of these economies uh like coming to an end is like that that is an enormously important uh sort of like like element of this entire story and there's all there's there's another thing that we should note which is that there's a problem with organizing your economy to be sort of like in a way that's reliant on sort of like primary commodity like export production a handbook of primary commodities in the global economy specifically notes, quote, Brazil's significance in coffee, cotton, iron ore, sugar, and tobacco, and Chile is a dominant exporter of coffee. So, okay, Brazil exports

like 11% of the world's cotton, 20% of the world's iron ore, 15% of its coffee, 39% of its sugar, and 18% of its tobacco. And and also it has an enormous cattle industry it's got like a bunch of soybean farming which is actually really important because uh it turns out as china gets richer it turns people into into into soy boys yeah it also makes soy sauce which is our very important for i mean more importantly our reserves of of beta cuck energy would be disastrously low if if we didn't have brazilian soy so thank you jay or bolsignaro for keeping the soy flowing yeah well i mean this this is sort of like like this is a joke like this is this is sort of the issue with this right like okay so politically this is a there's also a massive timber industry

which has been literally destroying the entire planet yeah but like okay so like here's the thing if you know anything about sugar coffee cotton and tobacco uh you know those are slavery crops and you know like these are these are like the primary exports of a plantation economy and the people who run those kind of like like economies the people who like those plantation owners are like the scariest people who have ever lived anywhere like at any time on earth. And in Brazil, these people have been in power for 500 years. And unfortunately, this is like a big part of what sort of Lula's economic miracle is resting on. And this isn't really like a base that produces socialism.

Like if your economic base is relying on these, like, like unbelievably psychotic, racist, like planter oligarchs, like your economic base, something that creates fascism. However,

comma Robert, do you know what else produces fascism? The products and services that support this podcast? Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Some of them, I guess, are fascism, just directly. So true. Yeah, the gold people probably would be the main example of this. But we also are sponsored by bigfascism.org.com.

Ah, shit. I don't know. Just roll the fucking ads. Ah, we're back. Boy, that was a good ad pivot. I hope everybody's happy. Chris, why don't you continue talking about Lula? Yeah, so speaking of fascism...

I was doing a... Not well. No, this is going great. It's hard to... We'll have Danil fix that up in post. Yeah. Okay, so speaking of creating fascism,

let's talk about that time Lula invaded Haiti. Alright. Okay, to speaking of creating fascism, yeah, let's talk about that time Lula invaded Haiti. All right. Well, okay. To be fair, whomst among us hasn't invaded Haiti? This is true. I've actually never invaded Haiti. That's true. I've never invaded Haiti.

However, the US and Canada also and the UK. Okay. Oh, well. That is more what I was saying. Okay. Like, it's. Yeah. So, okay. what i was saying okay like it's yeah so okay so in 2004 a cia backed coup ousted haiti's democratically elected leftist president uh jean-baptiste aristide and initially okay so

the initial sort of occupation force that's sent in by the un is a u.s is like an american french and canadian force um and they're sent in ostensibly under the guise of restoring stability or whatever. When I think about who can make Haiti stable, it's France and the United States. Partners in Haitian

stability. And Canada. And Canada now. I'm glad you guys are getting involved in in your big brothers crimes against humanity yeah I'm wondering for the Canadian stuff how do they

ship all of all of the Mounties all the way to Haiti okay so they took their horses over the water Garrison yeah built the land bridge yeah allowed them to write you know okay so but the thing about this force right is that like okay so even to like the most casual observer

having literally france in the u.s and also canada which is like the it was just the u.s but there's also a french part of it uh like literally weird fucking sausage soup on their goddamn french fries disgusting it turns out okay so like like the the the optics of these people just militarily occupying haiti is really bad um so okay the un is trying to figure out like a permanent force and initially Lula like opposes Brazil getting involved in this which is good but that's that's that would make sense when I think about change when I think about whether or not Brazil should be involved in places Haiti would not be the top of my list you know this is always this is always just like a really sad thing of

sort of like just like the history of latin america of like how many countries like owe their existence to haiti over and over and over again like sending them troops and ships and weapons and then every single one of these countries are like ah fuck you haiti so lula like basically lula becomes convinced that like this is this is like his big opportunity to like build the influence of brazil on the international stage and so brazil just like takes over the occupation or the auspices of the united nations stabilization mission in haiti which has the like utterly impronounceable acronym minishta or something i god damn it guys come on i you know how to do an acronym you have enough money jesus you would think however comma no it's this bullshit and okay so apparently this is part

of a plan to try to get u.s and french support for a bid to get brazil a permanent seat in the un security council uh if you google who is currently on the UN Security Council, you will see how this went, which is to say it did not work. And shit starts going horrifically badly almost immediately. Basically, like at the outset of the occupation, Brazilian troops in Haiti launched an attack on a, quote, gang leader.

And note, by the way, here, the terminology that is used to describe this operation and the people that they're fighting is exactly the same way as the paramilitary forces in Haiti are described like right now by the U.S. and the U.N.

as the U.S. tries to stage another invasion, this time with the backing of Mexico's nominally leftist President AMLO. So, yeah, a real sort of legacy of people who Americans think are leftists doing imperialism in Haiti. Good job, everyone. Well, everybody does a little bit of imperialism in Haiti, you know, as a treat. Every single country in Latin America is bound and determined to prove that you actually cannot do. Contrary to popular opinion about this, you actually can't do social democracy without imperialism.

And every single time someone tries to do a social democracy, they have to invade Haiti. It's just sort of like, it's in the contract here. here okay and so they they the the the un the sort of like the and by the way i should point out the un force is commanded by a brazilian general like the entire basically once the brazilians take over it's commanded by brazilian generals the entire time um and those guys seem nice uh yeah okay so they they they go after this guy and they fire 22 000 rounds of ammunition into basically just like apartment buildings. To this day, nobody knows how many people they killed, but from eyewitness reports, we know they killed babies, they killed children, they killed pregnant women. It is Vietnam shit.

It is absolutely awful. Augusto Helano, I don't know how to pronounce this guy's name. He's the guy who leads this operation, becomes the head of Bolsonaro's Institutional Security Bureau. Here's a headline from Poder 360 from last week. Quote, it is not possible to admit the return of the Red Gang, says Helano. And by the Red Gang, he means Lula. He's calling lula a communist and this is fine and good from a guy who again is the head of the institutional security bureau um uh this guy like sucks so much um when he retired in 2011 uh helano defended this is from reuters

when he retired in 2011 helano defended brazil's 1964 to 1985 military dictatorship as a bulwark against the, quote, the communization of the country. Sure. and this is absolutely true, they're also just like eating the ass end of Foucault's boomerang because all of the fascism that they're about to do is exported to Haiti before it comes back. Here's some writers. This is talking about Bolsonaro's cabinet. His proposed defense minister, former General Fernando Alvarez de Silva, served under Helano as an operations chief. Bolsonaro's incoming infrastructure minister. Tricicio Fritas was a senior UN military engineer in Haiti, arriving shortly after Helano left

in 2005. Retired General Carlos Alberto dos Santa Cruz, Brazil's next government minister, led UN troops in the Caribbean nation in 2007. All of those guys, by the way, this was written before the election. All of those guys took office. Two, fully two of Bolsonaro's secretaries of government were part of this occupation. So, yeah, this obviously went great for Lula. Like, yeah, okay, good job.

You sent a bunch of colonial troops to occupy haiti and then all of the generals came home and were like let's fucking do fascism here too yeah so i in this episode we're talking a lot about sort of the brazilian fascism because you know we're this is a brazil episode but i don't want to minimize like what this did to haiti where like to this day lula is like fucking despised um for you know like betraying the haitian people and fucking occupying the country with troops like there's there's this whole thing where like he lula goes to haiti and he has this whole thing about how like he has he's playing like a soccer match and he's like okay we're gonna show the world there's

an alternative to bullets and meanwhile this soccer stadium is literally surrounded by the Brazilian army. And it's, oh boy. I love showing the world. I mean, there is an alternative to bullets. And it's just threatening people with your guns because they know you've shot enough people that you'll use them. Oh, and drones too, by the way. This is where the UN learns how to do drone warfare. The other thing that's happening here is this occupation this occupation is where the un starts to like fight

quote like hybrid wars for the first time it you know the like the wars that they're that they're doing these sort of peacekeeping operations quote-unquote uh they're starting they're starting to do kind of insurgency shit where like the enemy can be mixed in with the population and you know they kill a shit ton of people there is rampant rape and sexual assault because it turns out that i when you when you send troops to another country to occupy it this is what happens um and when when when when this force eventually pulls out in 2017 they just like leave a shit ton of fatherless babies behind because the people who you know did all this shit were like fuck it we're just gonna leave if you like leave these children behind um i think most famously okay so there's there's a giant earthquake in

haiti in 2010 and this leads to this like enormous sort of redoubling of the occupation and troops are brought in from other parts of the world including there's a condition for nepal and the result of this is that yeah definitely haiti seems like a place nepalese soldiers ought to be this is this is by the way like the this this is like the new revolutionary government in nepal that is like finally defeated the monarchy after like god decades like decades it's like we all looked at the british empire and we're like well that's clearly fucked up but what if we did it in a decentralized way right like what if what if it wasn clearly fucked up. But what if we did it in a decentralized way? Right.

Like, what if what if it wasn't just the British? What if everyone was sending Nepalese shock troops into crackdown on popular insurgencies? Well, the thing that the thing that particularly goes wrong with the Nepalese troops is that the Nepalese troops would bring cholera to Haiti. And OK, well, again, who hasn't? You know, OK, these. The defeat of cholera, this is like one of the few genuine victories we have had over sort of like

the last 200 years, over the forces that have caused human misery and suffering for this time immemorial, is that we defeated cholera. And then we brought it back! The fucking UN occupation brings, like, this is the first large-scale cholera outbreak in modern times um 800 000 haitians get cholera as a result of this fucking christ yeah

it's it's not hard to not spread cholera yeah we success like even if you're looking by the standards of military occupations like the russians didn, haven't spread cholera in Ukraine. It's not hard to not spread cholera. We didn't spread cholera in Vietnam. No, we didn't create a cholera epidemic in Afghanistan or Iraq. It is not hard to not create a cholera epidemic. Yeah, to be fair, the Saudis have managed to create one

in Yemen now too. Yes. But that's probably worse than this one. But yeah. That more just reinforces my point that most imperialist occupations are able to not cause cholera epidemics it's hard and okay you know and and obviously right like okay you you've now created your colonial army uh the colonial army is going

to come home and literally these same troops go back to brazil and launch a war in the favelas. Like, under Dilba Rousseff's PT, like, the fucking army is literally occupying the favelas. And, you know, this is all part of the PT's, like, massive campaign to sort of buy weapons and modernize the army, which, you know, and by, like, I think currently they're involved in, like, well, okay, I'm not entirely sure about my dates on this. I'm not entirely sure if they're currently involved in nine UMPC cooperations or 16. But there are, like, there are Brazilian troops, like, all over the world still doing this bullshit. like all over the world still doing this bullshit and you know again as we've talked

about like literally the people who are in Haiti like are the people who are going to help put Lula in prison and put Bolsonaro in power so you know this is some this is some fucking enormous like creating your own gravedigger shit okay so okay we've now we've now gotten through one of the sort of sets of grave diggers

the pt is building for themselves um but also back in back in brazil things are also like you know not going great for them which and the way that this is specifically not going great is that like even even you know sort of in the hour of triumph triumph of the workers party right lula ascendant etc etc there is a massive fissure opening under the feet of the brazilian left and that fissure is the gig economy um we we have talked like literally ad nauseum on this show about how the gig economy is bad for workers um for for our purposes the the the thing that's kind of important here is that doing this kind of gig work right like becoming an independent like an independent contractor um it has a profound social and political effect and it creates a sort of profound

social political atomization right it breaks down the sort of social bonds that like built the workers who've been the pt and transform and instead of instead of the sort of social bonds that built the workers who have been, the PT. And instead of the sort of massification, the conversion of people into these concrete mass social entities who can take collective action, you get these neoliberal subjects who are incredibly atomized, incredibly isolated, and vulnerable to fasc like, you know, fascist projects that promise like community and unity, like this new organic call. And, you know, guess where Bolsonaro draws the support from? Oh, wait, it's a newly evangelical section of the working class. but the way the PT runs their welfare programs makes everything just exponentially worse. We talked about this a bit last episode, but one of the big things that the PT's welfare programs do is they're about getting, giving people access to micro credit. And okay. So in the short run, this is technically incredibly effective at combating poverty, but it had another another effect which was to sort of like deeply and firmly like sort of like like ingrain vast sections of brazilian workers into the banking system and turned them into micro entrepreneurs and okay so being a social democratic party and

on purpose constructing an entire class of micro entrepreneurs is like maybe the single best example of producing your own gravediggers that I've seen since like the military dictatorship cooperated with Lula in the first place. This is a terrible idea. But, you know, okay, so I think it's worth asking, like, why is the PT doing this shit, right? Like, this is something that is, like, otherwise absolutely incomprehensible. And the answer is that the PT was never quite the party that people think it is. Here is from a group of Brazilian anarchists writing in Crimethink.

The rulers linked to the realization of mega-events cheaply reap political rewards. For FIFA and its corporate cronies, not coincidentally the same companies that financed the electoral campaigns of the PT, the benefits were financial. Profits stretched into the billions, underwritten by public resources and guaranteed by police repression. The PT could not have done this alone. It was the party that received the largest total of private donations in recent years, 75 million in 2013, while other

parties like the PSDB, the Social Democratic Party and pmdb party of democratic movement the biggest and oldest party in brazil mostly center-right and conservative politicians only managed 46 million dollars altogether in 2014 the year of dilma rousseff's re-election the pt received 47 million dollars from contractors facing lawsuits and investigations while the pmdb got 38 million the psdb got 28 million this demonstrates the symbDB got $38 million and the PSDB got $28 million. This demonstrates the symbiosis between the Workers' Party and those who control the flow of capital in the country, a connective tissue of economic and political power. So this is not good. And you can sort of ask, what was the PT really doing here, right? Like,

why? Okay, why are they doing microloans? Why are they taking all this money? And there's a really, really good pair of articles from a Brazilian group called Militants in the Fog that was published at Illwill called Work and Revolt in Brazil's Dead Ends. And I'm going to read from some of it. A bank account, a smartphone with access to the internet, and a profile in an app. A bank account, a smartphone with access to the internet, and a profile in an app. The means to collect emergency aid, which is emergency aid is, part of this is talking about Bolsonaro stuff. So Bolsonaro implements this policy called emergency aid, which is like, it's kind of the equivalent of like the US's, like the stimulus checks that we got, but slightly different. But the means required to collect emergency aid are the same required to create an account for Uber, a sign that we are facing fundamental parts of this, quote, new way of working.

Years ago, it was already possible to identify the Bolsa Familia program, which is that giant PT, like workers party cash transfer program that we talked about last episode. like workers party cash transfer program that we talked about last episode whose dimensions were small in the face of the 2020 financial aid program the the objective of forming a unified workplace more deeply subjugated to capitalist relations the quote bankification promoted by the program contributed to the expanding contributed to expanding the reach of microcredit systems, a process of financialization of informality, which was deepened in recent years with the dissemination of increasingly agile and easy payment terminals and electronic payment systems such as PIX, a quicker and tax-free money transfer method. The phenomenon reached unprecedented intensity due to the emergency aid. The state-owned bank, Caxia Economica Federal, absorbed 30 million customers in 10 days,

in what was possibly the fastest bankification process in history, thus reaching a record profit in 2020. Access to credit is essential for the emergence of a precarious workforce to which capital costs and risks are transferred, while interest rates introduce a new level of productivity to the old... Okay, this is a Portuguese word that, oh boy. Via caro, which is like getting by, which is this sort of like... It's a sort of slang term for kind of like doing stuff in the informal economy to like survive. Yeah, which is now directly connected to global financial markets. Thus, the focus of these income policies would be less on expanding consumption capacity for the beneficiaries, as in the Keynesian distributive model, and more on expanding their investment capacity, financing the acquisition of work instruments and, quote, self-valuing their human capital.

Enthusiasts of such programs claim that the financial cushion provided by basic income can represent enough stability for people to be able to spend their own savings or other capital starting a business so okay what's happening here um and the militants of fog is arguing this after the work of a brazilian academic named uh ludmilla abilio is okay what's happening here is is the real subsumption of the formal economy which okay so like what what does that mean i we need to take a step back do you like a little bit more marx so marx makes this distinction between what he calls formal and real subsumption so assumption is this like whole philosophy thing i'm not going to get into here but basically what he's talking about is stuff getting like subsumed by capitalism right like becoming a part of the of the sort of capitalist like processing system and this comes in stages right the first is formal subsumption where okay so say you have

a peasant right formal subsumption is where the peasant like enters the market for the first time and suddenly be instead of being a peasant is now like a wage worker right and you know in in in this phase right capitalism has entered a new sphere right someone who was a peasant who was like not doing capital stuff before right who was going for self-production and had like futile dues and obligations is now a wage worker but you know and then they're selling the goods to the market but the actual process of production which is like okay so like how a peasant does like how how your former peasant new agricultural worker like grows their crops and what crops they grow. And like when they decide to work in, in, in this first stage, this is still the peasant's choice. That ends with real subsumption where all control over the workplace that like workers had had is completely destroyed.

And you're just, you know, okay, this is, this is what like we think of as a regular job right we're like okay the the way the job works is your boss tells you what to do i your your entire labor process has been like fully integrated into into into this sort of like broader capitalist production processes that you have no control over and this is what's been happening in the informal economy over the past few decades in brazil this is a real subsumption right like and and you know what like it it stuff that had formerly been you know like people taking wage labor but the the the sort of structure of how people do the jobs that they're doing right was still up to them uh this this has been ending and the way it's been ending is through basically the degree of control offered by two employers by

apps like uber of oh and like yeah the control that these apps give you over the informal economy and the results have been absolutely catastrophic um on the one hand the sort of limited autonomy that the formal economy like that the informal economy used to give you has been crushed by sort of sorry has been crushed by algorithmic control from gig economy apps that you know like track where you are and tell you where you need to go and how how fast you have to get there and like what lights you have to run in order to get there and also increasingly uh these gig workers are being squeezed by a new level of middle management who work basically the same way as like gang like the old gang bosses that

controlled chinese labor in the turn of the 20th century where you you have these guys who act as like private recruiting companies and foremen for workers who okay so you you you go to this place right these people are like okay i will give you a job and they negotiate they're the people who negotiate directly with the company and take money from the company and then use that money to sort of like pay the employer and this this you know this sucks right because on the one hand you have all of the bad parts of a regular job, which there's a guy who tells you what to do. And if you don't do what he tells you, you get fired. And then you have all the bad parts of an informal sector job, which is that you don't have any legal protections that workers with formal contracts have. And the effect of this has been to create super hell for vast, vast swaths of the Brazilian working class.

And this has been a just unbelievably catastrophic sort of disaster for Brazilian politics. But okay, you know what else is creating super hell for the Brazilian working class? I mean, not the products and services that support this podcast. Yeah, no, no. They want nothing but the best for the Brazilian working class. Those ones just do it for the American working class. Now, yeah, okay. Here's fucking ads.

Oh, we're back. Wow. I, for one, think everything's going to be fine. The fact that Lula won this resounding victory over Jair Bolsonaro by nearly a whole percentage point is going to mean none of these problems that you're talking about are ever things again. Yep. Nope. And, you know, OK, so speaking of reasons why this will not be a problem again, the sort of like financialization bullshit, this doesn't just like stick in sort of labor process. Like this stuff spreads to the social movements as well, which are in a lot of cases like very old and powerful Brazilian social movements are reduced to these sort of like state-backed financialized husks of the former selves. Where like, you know, you have social movements that are literally like issuing bonds to like fund their their members businesses you have social movements that are like okay if you show up to assemblies you can like earn points so that you can get

access to like be put on a waiting list for like a government rent stabilized apartment or something like it is a shit show and and this whole process sort of leads to the hollowing out of the Brazilian left. And, you know, as the left is sort of like being sort of like torn apart from the inside out, and as you get into sort of like 2011, 2012, 2013, as the Brazilian economy begins to slow, you get Brazil's version of the sort of like movement of the squares like 2011 2013 uprisings which is going to be waged against a hostile well okay a a pretty hostile pt governments like there's a sort of public show by dilma rusev they're like yeah no i support the protests uh when they're not violent and we're gonna do do stuff, but okay, this goes badly very quickly. So these protests start over these like raises in public trends in, in the cost of public transportation, like the fair cost raises in a bunch of cities.

And very quickly, there were like 3 million people in the street. The, the sort of conventional narrative about what happened here is that. So the protests start off leftists, right? For like a more egalitarian society and for like the right to the city and like stopping evictions and stuff like that to the sort of like anti-corruption crusade against PT, against the PT, against Dilma Rousseff and against sort of like the left itself. And OK, this is true, like as far as it goes, we'll be talking more about that impeachment campaign like next episode. episode but there's more going on here and the more going on here is that in 2013 there were massive protests like 800 000 people um protested confederation cup which is which is like the soccer tournament hosted by uh like that that's perceived like is it's one of the things that

like precedes the world cup i don't know i'm not a soccer knower but yeah and there's these massive protests against them and they are just unbelievably brutally suppressed. Like 50, 54,000 cops are sent out to like stop this shit. And they, they beat the absolute shit out of everyone. And to,

to understand why these movements were crushed and how the right was able to take power, we need to talk about the Brazilian police. So I, I think, you know know most of our listeners you to me like we we are familiar with the american police right like if you're listening to the show odds are decently good you have seen them beat your friends to bloody pulp

you have seen them tase the parents of children locked in a building with a mass shooter you have seen them slaughter men women and children in the street for no other reason than they can because they are a fascist death squad fused with organized crime outfits funded by putting guns to the heads of the american working class they are descendants of slave catchers working each and every day to keep the american racial hierarchy firmly intact um okay well you put it that way it sounds bad but i don't know like i like law and order so like the TV show. Yeah, you know, they have good propaganda. You've never watched Law & Order SVU? Oh, no.

Oh, Garrison. You're missing out on all of the good Law & Order. Is that the one with the goth chick in it? I honestly don't know. There's like 40 different Law & Order shows. It's impossible to keep track of them. But there is that one goth chick that they brought in because our grandparents would think she was hot. Yeah, I think.

The power of goth chicks to extend police budgets. Yeah, it's fun and good. And, okay, you know, we know how bad the U.S. police are. I'm going to read this from the la times quote brazilian cops kill at nine times the rate of u.s law enforcement nine times well that's pretty bad yeah you know and it's worth pointing out here that brazil was the last country in this hemisphere to evolve slavery. Like they abolished it like 20 years after the fucking U.S. did.

Right. And so, you know, when you're thinking about what the Brazilian police is, take everything you know about the American police and understand that the Brazilian police. Right. OK, so with the American police, right, the murder dial goes up to 11 with the Brazilian police. Okay, so with the American police, right, the murder dial goes up to 11. With the Brazilian police, that murder dial goes up to 99, and that's where they've cranked it to? Here's some crime think. In 2014, Brazil's prison population became the third largest in the world, with 570,000 prisoners. There's like 600-something thousand prisoners today, most of whom are black. During the PT administration, this figure increased by 620%. Cool.

Yeah. This is a part of the PT that people really sort of tiptoe around, which is that they preside over a regime of mass executions and mass incarceration that is like utterly atrocious.

And as an aside here, okay, so like there are probably some of our listeners whose thing is that they want to go into electoral politics. And if you are doing this, you have one job, like solely you have one responsibility, and your job is to fucking annihilate the police. Your job is to destroy them so utterly and completely that their very name is spat as a curse in the street by people who make the sign of cross for protection every time they think about them. woods without access to a weapon that even as deadly as a two by four. And every time they attempt to enter a town, people need to be like chasing them and throwing rocks at them. And if you do not do this, you will live like Lula has to see literally everything you have ever done crumble beneath the weight of a fascism that is too terrible to imagine. And you will also experience in your lifetime.

And instead of doing this, the PT is like, fuck it. No, we're going to use the police to stamp out protest against the mega events that they're putting on uh the police repression around the world cup is like arguably worse than the stuff for the confederation cup in order to prepare for the world cup the pt stage is this like massive social cleansing campaign we talked about this

in our sports episode like they they carry up mass evictions against both like regular people and also against like like there's there's a bunch of sort of left and also sort of just like regular people who squat in brazil right like a huge part of the social movements have been about seizing property and building like building stuff on and seizing abandoned buildings and yeah this stuff all gets evicted so they can be replaced with world cup businesses it's you know like what is happening here is it's like all the violence, gentrification, but in the span of like a year. Right. The PT are literally rolling German tanks through the favelas because like, you know, subtlety is something that happens to other people, not like to reality.

And, you know, as we talked about before, they're putting them under literally military occupation with colonial troops who were like fighting in Haiti. Right. before they're putting them under literally military occupation with colonial troops who were like fighting in haiti right evict 250 000 people for this fucking tournament um here's some other shit they did this is from a series of uh pieces by brazilian anarchist group called fictional faction in 2012 the federal government and fifa signed the general law of the world cup to ensure that the country would quote uphold uphold FIFA standards of organization during the 2013 Confederation Cup and the 2014 World Cup. This agreement constituted an enormous legal offense to the Brazilian people, entailing the suspension of many constitutional rights and norms that were already precarious for most. For example, a court established to rule within 48 hours on strikes

that occurred within the World Cup. Workers lost the right to strike or fight for improvements, while FIFA avoided paying taxes on businesses within Brazilian territory. A special secretary to public security for great events was created, breaking the laws stipulating that justice may not have special sponsors or clients who demand priority. The privatization of public space was legitimized by the creation of, quote, exclusive streets for FIFA and its partners, in which even local businesses were required to keep their doors closed within the exclusion zone around the stadium. The laws allowed FIFA to intervene directly in the market without the oversight of the state. FIFA was able to stipulate the price to charge for tickets, suspending the usual half price for students and any application of consumer protection

code. In addition, more than 20,000 people were allowed to work as unregulated volunteers during the World Cup. These volunteers did not receive the protections of basic labor rights and operated outside of constitutional norms in situations analogous to slavery. According to Brazilian law, these exceptions to labor and safety law are supposed to be limited to volunteer work for non-profit institutions that have a civic, cultural, educational, recreational,

or social assistance purposes, which hardly describe FIFA. The state even overlooked the use of child labor and activities related to the game, such as the role of ball boy, which had been banned in Brazil since 2004. So this goes great. And the thing that, you know,

so this happens in 2014 under Dilma Rousseff, but it's worth noting, like, this is Lula's project from the beginning, right? Like he has been fighting to get Brazil the World Cup, like since like the opening for applications to get this World Cup in Brazil to happen. And what you know, this this this campaign to get the World Cup takes the form of a literally all out war against leftist protesters, squatters, workers, people living in favelas, people who are literally all of those at the same time who are, you know, supposed to be the PT's base. And this is what the PT spends literally

the rest of its time and power doing, right? Like, Dilma Rousseff implements a bunch of austerity measures, like, the expanding police powers, like, this is the shit that the PT is doing, like, literally as the Grim Reaper is coming to their door. Like, two months before Dilma rusev

is impeached uh she uh passed a pair a pair of anti-terrorism laws targeted at protesters and okay we're gonna we'll go into the impeachment next episode but i want to close on this which is preventing this from happening right right? Preventing the party of workers from fucking rolling tanks through the streets in fucking working class neighborhoods. Like, this is the actual sort of beating of, this is the actual sort of principal politics of anti-capitalism. This is why there is a sort of rigid anarchist opposition to the state right this isn't just ideological purity it is the concrete knowledge that any other path is death because we literally cannot continue to do as the pt has been doing for the past fucking 20 years to produce our own gravediggers literally the ecosystems we draw our life from will not survive if we keep doing this it does not matter how many people you live you lift out of poverty if you do not actually destroy the class system capitalism and fascism

will force them back into poverty. Almost all the poverty gains that Lula gained during his entire time in office were destroyed in four years of Bolsonaro. Every day that the state is allowed to exist, every day the class system is allowed to exist, it creates a thousand more Bolsonaros. It creates a thousand Bolsonaros in the police. It creates them in the armies.

It creates them in corporations. It creates them on the street. And they have to be destroyed or this world will fucking burn. And in next episode we are going to watch a thousand person up bolsonaros burn the entire country and that that is my incredibly angry response to this absolute fucking bullshit that is the reason like are a lot of the reasons why everything is completely fucked cool well everybody have a happy start of november and hopefully brazil isn't in a state of civil war by the time you listen to this episode yeah Yeah, I update at the end of the episode. I don't think there's been any change.

Remember, folks, if you somehow take control of the political apparatus in Brazil, dismantle the police and the military. That should be a lesson for you. I know a lot of you are on the verge of taking power in Brazil, so hopefully that message will get out. Yeah. And I mean, in general, don't fund them.

Like, don't give them more money. Don't spend a bunch of money buying them German tanks. Like, well, OK, like, why? Why are we focusing on German tanks? They make fine tanks. OK, but hear me out here. Can you name a single good thing a German tank has ever been used for? Yeah!

Defeating the commies, I'm guessing. Yeah, some communists, probably. I don't know. Let's... Anyway. Killed a lot of Englishmen. Anyway. And Canadians. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. presented by I Heart and Sonora.

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on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

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available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It could happen here it's it could happen here it's the podcast that's happening right now um yeah it's it's about things that you know about it's our third and final episode about the brazilian elections uh it's me chris it's it's I'm here with James Stout hello hi Chris so we have we have an update on on this situation which is that Jair Bolsonaro okay he's still he's still I don't think has publicly announced defeat but he apparently told the Supreme Court quote it's over so he seems to have committed defeat which has not stopped a bunch of his followers from calling for a military coup. Yeah, and for these people that still seem to be blocking roads, right?

Yeah, it's happening. I don't know. I... Yeah, it's sort of unclear to me to what extent his followers are going to back down i don't think there's really much chance of a military coup at this point like they seem to have just lost i read something earlier about bolsonaro making plans to like so there's like there's like a like a sash thing you're supposed to hand over to the next president and he was

making plans to not be in the country when lula took office he was gonna have his vice president hand it over instead which is like this is like the most whiny baby shit i've ever seen which is like oh god what a what a loser holy fuck like first as tragedy and then as fast and then as fast yeah and continually as fast like that's how the right operates right yeah i actually almost had that like i i actually almost started the lula episode with that quote and then i was like well his return i was like that that's that's too mean to say about lula like his return hasn't been farce yet like yeah but bolsonaro is oh boy yeah he he's going to go spend more time with the novel coronavirus. That's why he's withdrawing from politics.

You know, I heard there's a great line in one of the things I was talking about that Milton's in the fog piece from Elbow yesterday where they talked about like, I forget their exact quote. It was something like, it's not just that Bolsonaro failed to respond to coronavirus, it's that he was a vector for coronavirus. And I was like, yeah, this is both literally and metaphorically true. Like, several of the outbreaks are just from Bolsonaro. Oh, yeah.

Absolutely amazing. Yeah, real piece of shit. Yeah. Yeah, so today we're're gonna be talking about the very specific so we spent last episode talking about sort of like the the the enormous army of grave diggers that the pt had sort of built around them and this episode is going to be about like how their grave was actually sort of built and then filled in um so i talked about in episode one um there was in 2005 i think i might have actually accidentally said 2006 in the original

episode but it's 2005 there's just a giant corruption scandal involving the workers party that like shakes all of brazil basically the the the short version of it is that a bunch of senior members of the pt were accused of bribing members of the central centro who's like brazil's sort of like perennial elite corruption faction to like buy their votes to get bills passed which honestly like i'm okay with this like we're gonna talk about some corruption later that like does suck uh this i think is fine like I'm I am I am OK. Like I'm going to put this on the record. Me, Christopher Wong, I am OK with literally just buying the votes of like weird corrupt right wingers to get them to vote for legislation.

That's actually good. Like whatever. I don't care about this. Like this is bullshit. Like who cares? But that that said, I... Okay. So, this entire episode...

Like, well, okay, the first, like, three quarters episode. This episode's, like, a lot about corruption. And before we go any further, like, we need to talk about, like, what corruption actually is and about the politics of it so okay i want to say this as someone who lives in okay so i i think most of our listeners understand that chicago is notoriously corrupt i didn't grow up in chicago i grew up in chicago's even more corrupt suburbs like i i literally watched a mayor sell physically sell city hall to the highest bidder. Like she actually literally physically sold city hall. Like this, this is the kind of shit you get out in the suburbs.

Like it is fucking mind boggling. Right? Like that, that, that, that wasn't my town, but like I have seen some shit. Right.

And okay. The thing, the thing I can say about government corruption is that there are two kinds of people in the world. There are people like Chicagoans who understand that every single politician, no matter if every single politician whatsoever, is going to rob you blind because they're all corrupt. And, you know, there's a sort of like a more analytical color area to this, which is that like corruption. Corruption is just a structural tendency of the state. Right. It's a product of state officials like having access to the state's enormous supply of resources it's a product of the kind of structural incentives that like being in a state produces and it's a product of the fact that the state you know

acquires resources due violence and you know okay so there's people who understand this on various levels right like i mean there's and this is genuinely the nice thing about chicago is like everyone gets it like you don't have to convince people and then there's a bunch of people like like the other category of people are people who genuinely think that like politics is about people debating political principles and that like if we just make slightly better arguments and like have slightly better land use policies the politicians who literally spend all day taking bribes from developers or like somehow end homelessness or something or that like somehow like like like ah corruption is a matter of political principles like no no they're all they're all doing this to you like you guys you gotta understand this yeah it's it's very funny

and it's uh like we don't get enough credit for our corruption in san diego i feel like right oh yeah and run by the sea, as San Diego is known. It's very funny to see people being like, oh, there can't be corruption because identity politics this or because not Donald Trump, rather than like this is the nature of the state, especially the state under capitalism, especially the state under capitalism in the United States,

is that you don't get fuck all unless you pay for it. Yeah. I will say this corruption as a policy of the state is essentially trans ideological like the reddest communist the brownest fascist and the most bleeding hard red white and blue capitalists all take bribes they all give contracts to their family and they all steal money from the government like you you can tell this by the fact that the u.s is literal like the u.s just made it legal to give like they made it legal for a corporation to give money to a candidate in order to have the vote a certain way this is legal

Nazi Germany corrupt as shit the U.S. is are famously insanely corrupt like this is not this is not actually a product of ideology it's just a sort of structural like tendency of the state and it doesn't matter like the military dictatorships are corrupt like the parliamentary democracies are corrupt like this is just like how the state and it doesn't matter like the military dictatorships are corrupt like the fuck like the like the parliamentary democracies are corrupted like this is this

is just this is just like how the state works right um and and the like so political corruption genuinely isn't that interesting right like the actual politics of it like it's not that interesting like it's just people just corrupt right what is interesting is anti-corruption politics and we need to get this out of the way immediately. It is simultaneously true that almost no one openly supports corruption. It's almost impossible to find anyone who will come out on the record and say they're pro-corruption. You can't do it, right? one of these people across the entire political spectrum is corrupt. And, you know, no politician is actually anti-corruption. This is something that's very, very important to understand. None of these people are fucking anti-corruption.

This is one of the lessons of Chicago, which is that all of the anti-corruption crusaders are just as corrupt as the people they're replacing. Well, this is part of the way I don't want to go extreme Marcuse, but this idea, this false choice, yeah well this is part of the way like uh i don't want to go like extreme marcusa but like uh the like this idea this false choice right the corruption in and itself creates a means for another person who is equally corrupt to enter simply by claiming to be anti-corrupt right like

and then this we can just kind of continually one-up each other and claiming to be different and doing the same shit and and people will embrace this fucking false choice yeah you know, we're going to see this in this story later on. I will give you a preview of where this is going. So Sergio Moro, who is this judge who turns out, who's like like Brazil's like great anti-corruption crusader turns out to, I've been funding is quote unquote, anti-corruption investigations by sell illegally selling information to the FBI and then getting paid and fine money collected by the U S some successful

corruption prosecutions. find money collected by the US from successful corruption prosecutions. He also is going to very blatantly and pretty openly take a job as Brazil's justice minister in exchange for putting Bolsonaro's political opponents in prison. Magnificent. Okay. Yeah. And, you know, so, okay, what's the thing that's important about this right is that anti-corruption is not a real politics right like it's not it's not an actual real set of political

political positions right what it is is a set of politics you con rubes with but it turns out is really really good at conning rubes because people really fucking hate corruption and and the thing the thing the thing that being like an anti-corruption quote-unquote candidate does is it lets anyone like appear to be the sort of like populist champion of the people against the corrupt elite and this is really useful to the right and to sort of i mean not just to the right it's really useful to sort of like bourgeois like capitalist politicians in general because there are a lot of times where in order to sort of protect their interests you know or protect the interest of like their specific faction of the ruling class they need to win an election and they need to win the sort of hearts of minds of the people who see that the world sucks and like reflexively hate, quote unquote, the establishment because they know they're getting screwed. And the easiest way to sort of con these people is to take up the politics of anti-corruption.

It's like the absolute picture perfect neoliberal politics right like rudy giuliani for example um got his start going after the mob in new york and you know and what he did right really so he goes after the mob he's anti-corruption guy and then he replaces them with like even more efficient and extractive neoliberal bureaucratic parasites yeah and it's perfect like yeah in terms of neoliberalism right in terms of completely avoiding a class analysis because you can you can appeal to people who are genuinely oppressed and marginalized by the system right by saying i'll go against this corrupt system which is oppressing and marginalizing you but also to the bourgeoisie because you can say oh

the reason your fucking business is not as successful as the other one is corruption so just vote for me and we'll sort that out and you can continue exploiting the workers who I'm also appealing to and you know like Giuliani specifically his name is just literally a punchline now right like it's not even worth talking about him fucking

like chomping on a cigar doing an ad for a cigar company in the middle of the video right like but you know he's selling flip flops now isn't that his't that yeah something like that but that's the thing like the anti-corruption stuff was really really good for his career and you know this is the politics anti-corruption is the politics that the brazilian right finally figures out as like the only thing that can stop the workers party juggernaut now like in 2005 the corruption case

brings down a whole bunch of sort of, like, high-profile PT party members. But it doesn't touch Lula himself, who is, like, he gets this rep, like, basically similar to Reagan, it's just, like, the Teflon president where everything just bounces off of him. But, you know, the right in 2005 really thinks that they've

got him. And they're like, okay, we're going to crush him in this next election, everything's going to go back to normal, and then, you know know and it is true that from 2000 compared to 2002 lula does have less support in 2006 he goes from 61 of the vote to a whopping 60 of the vote so okay so this didn't work right but the right still sees that like this is the only thing they've been able to come up with that like actually damages the pt at all and in 2014 a judge named sergio moro who we've are moro who again we have given you the spoiler this is like the this is one of the most corrupt dudes in like the history of brazilian politics but he he goes after he finds like a

different corruption ring to go after that he's not a part of. And I think it's important to understand sort of from the outside of this, right? That like this anti-corruption stuff is essentially like a newer faction or like a slightly different faction of the Brazilian ruling class going after another faction of the Brazilian ruling class. So he finds, he starts to think that that becomes known as Lava Jato or Operation Car Wash. And what Moro's going after is this legitimately, genuinely enormous corruption ring surrounding Petrobras, which is Brazil's state-owned oil company. And the investigation leads to the arrest of an enormous number of government officials. Like, there's – like, some of the like richest people in brazil go to jail like and it is true that like like there is an enormous amount of corruption like there are billions and billions of dollars that are being sort of stolen from the oil company right through sort of like contracts and like payoffs and stuff um but we also get to some real like lepers eating

people's faces party shit here as well, where. OK, so 2013, Dilla Rousseff signs a law that massively expands police powers that includes, in particular, allowing them with no strings attached to offer plea bargains to people to get them to confess to stuff. Amazing. And like give the cops information they want to hear, which is like genuinely really unethical because for a lot of reasons, right? Which is, like, genuinely really unethical because, I mean, for a lot of reasons, right? Like, the whole plea bargaining system is, like, the reason, like, one of the reasons the whole U.S. justice system is completely fucked up. Because everyone just fucking pleads out instead of going to trial because they know, they know, they're like, everyone is pretty sure they're going to lose. And so people, you know, people will just plead a shit they didn't do because they have no chance of winning the case.

It's completely fucked up. And Dilma Rousseff's like, nah, yeah, fuck it. Like, we're going to sign this. Like, you know. and Dilma Rousseff's like nah yeah fuck it like we're gonna sign this like you know and I get that like she was responding to like the protests and I get that she thought it would mostly be used

against like fucking protesters or some shit but like who did you think this was gonna be used against like wait wait why like come on like seriously it's like come on yeah like I seriously? Yeah, this is good letters eating their own face shit. Yeah, like, I just, oh, it's like, it is simultaneously true that there was, like, an incredibly coordinated, sophisticated, like, joint American-Brazilian, like, intelligence and, like, justice state operation to bring down the PT.

the PT. It's also true that the PT like, like the reason they were able to be kneecapped so easily is that like they'd spent the last like six years like firing rounds over and over getting thrown knees. So like, okay, these things are both true at the same time. But okay, and so Lava Jato

like eviscerates an enormous part of sort of a section of the Brazilian ruling class. But it very quickly becomes clear that it's being used as a political weapon against Dilma Rousseff and the PT section of the brazilian ruling class but it very quickly becomes clear that it's being used as a political weapon against dilma rousseff and the pt despite the fact that like literally every brazilian like party is involved with this like i think the psol might be like the only major brazilian political party who wasn't involved in this and like that's because i don't think they had anyone who was senior enough to do it. So, like,

you know, but, you know, everyone instead, like, just is using this to go, is, like, very clearly using this to go after the PG. The problem is that, like, and this is going to be a perennial problem

with these investigations, is that they can't actually directly nail Dilma Rousseff or Lula with doing anything. They have real problems with this. You know, Dilma wins re-election in 2014, but in 2015, there are these,

as Lava Jato is, like, going, and there's this enormous fucking press fury around it, there are these massive sort of anti-corruption protests demanding that she resign, that's ripped up by, again, the right-wing media goes just completely batshit in this period. And, you know, okay, so,

again, Moro's running into this problem that he can't find anything that Dilma Rousseff did that was illegal. So he starts relying on political theater instead. He starts, he stages this like enormous series of raids on like Lula's house, his nonprofit, like he's like his brother's business. And, you know, with the entire press corps like there, right?

Like with all the next stage for all these raids, they drag him off to like jail for questioning. But again, like they don't really have anything. They kind of invent this case about Lula based on some convoluted shit about a property that he didn't own. The thing here

basically is that as with all corruption scandals, this is a fight between parts of the ruling class. The actual details of who's taking money from who are essentially irrelevant, because that's not what actually matters, right? What matters here is that, like, these sort of right-wing prosecutors have decided

they're going to destroy the PT. And, you know, the PT has helped them do it at every step. It's not just the prosecutors, right? There's this, like, press plus prosecutors. Yeah, plus a bunch of political parties, too. Yeah, it's like the there's this like press plus prosecutors it creates plus a bunch of political parties too yeah it's so not to like draw a comparison where it's not necessarily entirely valid but like look at the united kingdom right we have boris johnson like monumentally fucking up the covid response tons of people die and it's not that that brings him down it's that

he had a suitcase of wine and a karaoke party like because at some point... But it's the appearance, right? It's this political theater of accountability. But you're not actually accountable to the people who you let down or the people who you lied to. You're accountable to 17 media editors. Yeah, to Rupert Murdoch, right? And Brazil has its own versions of Murdoch who are like... Yeah, I can only imagine.

People to who, if I said my actual opinions on them like the the the fcc would specifically start regulating podcasts because like oh boy all of these people should i'd redacted parody etc etc um we'll just have like a five minute bleep here yeah so okay but but again so okay they have this problem again which is they can't really We'll just have like a five minute bleep here while Chris goes off. So, okay. But, but again, so, okay. They have this problem again, which is they can't really get Dilma Rousseff on anything. And so what happens instead is that the Brazilian Senate is sort of like scrambling for something they can use. And what they eventually impeach Dilma Rousseff for is this like accounting procedure thing, basically, that like everyone does. And when I say everyone does, like almost every previous president, like every single, like, what's it called?

Like every single, like, why am I blanking on it? Governor, is that the right word? Yeah, like the people who are like the heads of states. Yeah, I think like all the governors do this like fucking literally everyone in brazilian politics does this including some of the people who are signing like the fucking uh uh uh impeachment thing but they they remove her from this and okay so like a part of the like the the the sort of sort of like like decrepit and despised neoliberal right takes power. But the notable part thing here is that Dilma Rousseff is impeached by her own allies, right?

She is impeached. Like Michael Temer, the guy who replaces Rousseff, like winds up as president because Dilma rusev made him her vp like it's just like you know and this this is this is dating back to like this this is like really old sort of pt political maneuvering stuff dating dating back to like lula finally winning out over the sort of pt base in 2002 right where he's able to convince them to like have a sort of like conservative guy like be his running mate and here this this is this is where this finally goes to shit because the pt is making alliances with sort of like center-right parties and all these corruption parties and it's like okay you allied yourself like i i i understand

the reason they were doing this was that the sort of central which is like the sort of corruption parties have enough votes that you kind of have to work with them but also like what did you expect was gonna happen like did you did you really not expect that the leopards were gonna eat your face like i okay it's you know like it's really like okay like you let a mosquito into your house and you are now like fucking pikachu facing because they because the mosquito bit you. It's like, really like, you know, and this all comes back to sort of like the things I've been talking about

in the last two episodes about like the inherent contradiction of being a leftist and having to, having to keep the state and having to run a state. We have to keep the economy going. Right. Which again, it means that you have to make sure that capitalists get money and Lula could just pay these people off like literally or figuratively because he was he was benefiting from the commodity boom right but then when the

chinese economy goes under and suddenly the money dries up because the commodity boom's over and the brazilian economy starts to collapse like you know there's nothing to pay off the bourgeoisie with and you know and dilma rousseff's like she's trying to pay them off but you know in order to fund it now now she's doing austerity and that's sapping her and that's sapping her base because you know okay you have to choose one or the other but she's not but again but she's also not able to pay off enough of the bourgeoisie to stop this from coming and so they off her and you know okay so the the the the pt pt supporters will describe what happens like that this impeachment is a coup, which is like true, like as far as it goes.

Like it is true that like a bunch of absolute like psychopaths, like just like overthrew the democratically elected president on bullshit. I actually think it's less of a coup than the next thing we're going to get to. the next thing we're gonna get to um or but yeah so okay so the product of this is that michael tammer who is it like just a unfathomable neoliberal ghoul like i really like oh god like really one of the worst people ever um who again rusev picked as her vp uh becomes president in 2016 spends the next two years oh wow if Draco Malfoy grew up this is what he would look like yeah no it's really incredible you do owe it to yourself to look up this guy

this man is very streamlined but otherwise yeah he just looks like exactly who he is but otherwise, yeah, it's remarkable. I mean, he just looks like, he's one of those people who just looks like exactly who he is. Yeah, yeah. I cannot believe this guy succeeded in politics

when he looks like an evil snake. Yeah, I think he also got arrested for being even more, like, okay, so like, there is corruption going on in the PT. Temur is the corruption party, right? Like, he actually goes down eventually in Lava Lugato. He is, like, unfathomably corrupt. Like, he goes down for, like, what did he do?

He took, like... It's a bribe from a meat packer, right? Oh, that guy. Yeah, that was one of them. He funneled like 180 million dollars into like his political like into like his friends and his like like unfathomable and this stuff genuinely sucks right like it actually does suck that literally hundreds of millions of dollars are being just like fucking stolen by these ghouls right um yeah especially in a country where like people genuinely struggle

to get by every single day yeah and and and i i think it's worth mentioning like like the level of poverty that we're talking about here is like like again like people who don't have running water people who live in deserts and like don't have water at all like it is really really bad and you and then you know you you're you are watching just this bullshit happening right like this fucking like guy who i god just this is like absolute fucking demon just stealing a hundred like fifty million dollars right yeah it's just like rich people playing monopoly with your fucking future

and your children's future yeah but you know but again like nobody fucking voted for this guy right like and he he's just immediately starts implementing like unfathomable just atrocious austerity. He has a 7% Apuva rating.

Everyone who's calling for him to resign. Jesus Christ! Yeah, 7%. This is the second lowest Apuva rating I've ever seen for a ruling politician after Kim Jong-Pil, who I think got down to 3%. One day I'm going to do an actual Kim Jong-Pil episode. I feel like you're within the error margin of any polling once you get into the single digits yeah no one likes you like literally

like like remember like people like people from his own party want him to resign right and he just doesn't he just stays in power because there's no and no one could do anything about it because well you always get that right when you when you engage in this politics of corruption the the like sort of palace coups and international backstabbing won't necessarily happen because that is how you further your own career and therefore benefit more from the corruption, right? Like, again, see the clusterfuck that is the United Kingdom. Yeah.

Now, do you know who else doesn't benefit from corruption like the rest of us? I don't think we can say that with any degree of certainty chris it's it's shell it's it's shell it's it's the products and services that support this podcast okay and and we're this entire time right this this thing is going on for years and years and years and years and it's reiterating that Lava Jato is being illegally backed by the American Justice Department Justice Department the SEC the FBI probably all I think also the CIA although weirdly this is okay and this is where things get very strange because this like from the documents that we've seen there is some evidence the cia

handed them shit the thing we have the most evidence for is actually the fbi running this coup weird yeah it's very weird what's happening basically is that okay so the way american corruption laws work is that like if any money passes through like an american bank account the fbi has the authority to go after them and the fbi and the justice department fucking hate the pt and they're they're looking at petro boss and they're going like this is so much fucking money we can get if we go after these people and also we hate them and it's also worth noting okay so uh Sergio Moro is like he's a Harvard guy right he he's a Harvard guy he was trained by like a bunch of American police people like he he is like he's like one of these sort of like he's he's a

Nazi ghoul basically right but like he's like the the law version of a Nazi ghoul and so the the entire like and again it's funny like the fbi in theory is not supposed to be like the fbi is supposed to be a domestic agency which does not make them any better by the way but like they're not supposed to be going after like they're not supposed to be trying to overthrow the president of brazil but you know they are and again like they are they are taking down the black panthers increasing anti-se, yeah. Just your normal standard domestic stuff. Yeah, shooting anarchists, shooting, like, possibly assassinating MLK. Yeah, yeah. That's your normal stuff.

That's what we expect from them. Yeah. They're not supposed to be doing the foreign crews. That's the CIA's job. But they're muscling into the CIA's territory here. It's worth mentioning as well that, like the obama administration is heavily involved in this right um and you know it turns out that by the time you get to 2016 the trump administration 2017 trump's administration's in power they love this shit because it's trump it's like wow damn

who could have guessed yeah that is wow yeah yeah and and as and this is gonna come out it's gonna come out later um by okay this is the second time that glenn greenwald is just handed like one of the biggest news stories of the decade like literally dropped on his lap and he gets to like write about it is that yeah it comes out that like this stuff is being politically like very obviously politically motivated like sergio moro's like he's openly cutting deals with with Bolsonaro to do political persecutions. There's, again, the stuff about how he's being paid by, he's literally getting, like, the task force is being funded by the FBI through these slush funds of fine money collected from PetroBoss. Like, it's unbelievably shady shit. shit um now the entire time this is going on uh Sergio Moro has been like illegally wiretapping Lula's conversations and leaking them to the press to like destroy Lula and De La Rosa politically

it's and you know and like like Operation Car Wash like prosecutors are just like going on tv and telling the entire Brazilian public like no Lula's guilty there's no doubt about it and then in 2017 moro has lula convicted now lula appeals this on the grounds that like this is incredibly obviously a show trial like but by the because there's a lot of you will read a lot of like the sort of liberal press in the u.s like fucking loves this shit and like she doesn't 14 doesn't 15 doesn't 16 doesn't so much it doesn't like, by 2017, even the sort of American liberal press is like, hey, you're running these trials too fast. Like, these don't look like real trials anymore. Like, it really is, like, they stopped having even the pretense of this not being a show trial.

So, they're just, like, convicting people, convicting people, convicting people, convicting people. And, like, you know, in the Lula case, there's some interesting stuff, which is that like, okay, Moro doesn't have the legal jurisdiction to prosecute Lula here. Like the crimes that were supposedly committed aren't committed in a place where Lula, where, where Moro has any jurisdiction at all. Like it's another state and he just does it anyways. Cause he's just like, fuck it. Like, yeah, whatever. And so it's more of a vibe when you are also the government yeah well and again like this is the thing like

people people get really really really hung up about legal technicalities and that shit and as we're about to see in that in in in this case right like that shit does not matter right this this is entirely about sort of power power brokering and sort of like where where the brazilian elite is in a particular time who's backing what lula puts in a petition he puts in a writ of habeas corpus that's like hey there's stuff in the constitution that's like i shouldn't be put in prison until my appeals are done and this goes to the supreme court at which point a fucking brazilian general who apparently be apparently, this apparently was planned by 15 other generals, who, a guy named Eduardo Villas-Bolas, like, literally starts threatening the Supreme Court on Twitter. Like, he starts implying, and this tweet is read on Globo which is like the fucking like like big like big biggest news network in brazil they like read out this tweet like the the subtext of which is if you

don't put lula in jail we are going to do a coup so they drag lula off to prison and they put him in solitary for 580 days which is like yeah yeah they they they are like they are torturing the shit out of him um jesus yeah yeah like yeah yeah they're just living out there like uh fucking like you know like previous generation of coups against latin american like chopping victor hara's hands off fantasies yeah and like i said you know i say this like like I say, Lula was arrested by the military dictatorship in the 80s, right? But even the military dictatorship only held him for 30 days

and then let him go. Yeah, they got nothing on the neoliberals. They're trying to put him in prison for I think it's originally seven years and then it's extended to 12 years. And there's this whole thing, but he's also not allowed to speak to the press during this time.

And the reason this is happening is that if if you're in prison you can't run for president and in 2018 if Lula is allowed to run for president even with all the press shit he is going to fucking stomp literally anyone in the field yeah and yeah so this is going on but before we talk about the election a little bit and then sort of wind down, there's one more thing I want to talk about, which is that four days before Lula is arrested, Mariella Franco, who is a incredibly radical city city councilor in Rio de Janeiro, is assassinated by a death squad. who she was sort of like there's a lot of coverage of her story about how she's a black lesbian woman who came who like was from an incredibly poor family in the favelas and how she sort of like worked her way out to the politician but like they don't talk about you know people will sort of obliquely mention her human rights work or they'll talk a bit about how she's part of the psol which is this leftist party that like okay so i'm still i i spent a lot of looking i'm still kind of hazy

about their exact story i think what happened was there was a group of pt of pt like uh politicians who refused to vote for an austerity package the pt was trying to push through and they got kicked out of the party for it and they founded the psol um and you know they'll talk about sort of this stuff what what they won't cover really is what she was actually doing. And I think this is incredibly important because the thing she was actually doing was a bunch of very radical and unbelievably dangerous anti-police activism. So in 2008, this is again under Lula's PT government, there was a reorientation of police strategy in the Favellas Tours. This new program called Pacifying Police units or upps and the idea was that instead of doing constant raids into the favelas and then leaving them they were just going to put them under like constant police occupation yeah and you know like something like 400 000 people at a time

are just living under these occupations. And in the beginning, it's supposed to be tied to like, so like there's supposed to be like an expansion of like social services into the favelas and just supposed to be like community policing. And that just doesn't happen. And by 2013, they just like give up the pretense of doing any social work. And they,

they, they found this thing called tactical groups of proximity police, which very quickly turned into just like fucking death squads but but they're they're both death squads and they're also doing like stop and frisk shit and just like harassing random black people there's just murdering people on the streets um on a scale that is like it's worse than it's been before like there were individual police unit there's an individual police unit that kills 117 people in a year like it is it is fucking horrible right this is what i was talking about about the brazilian police killing killing at a rate that's

11 times higher than the american police like it is it is fucking atrocious um oh yeah and there are some incredible videos of yeah like it's fucked um yeah and they're at war with parts of their own population yeah i mean i'd say this, like, this is one of those things about fascism, right? Where, like, fascism, like, always kind of has works in this system of alliances between sort of, like, the police paramilitaries who are sort of tied to the police and organized crime. Yeah. And, you know, like, there is an extent to which there are a bunch of gangs and the police are fighting them there's also an extent to which like everyone involved is just shaking down all of these fucking like unbelievably poor uh largely black like working class people who are just getting fucking robbed every day it's horrible um yeah and is that where it might be a bit of a

sidebar that we we don't like need to fit in here but um in which case we can just delete it but there's a i know that one of the big brazilian prison gangs is like ostensibly leftist they're like they're called red command right yeah i think is it it's commandante vermell yeah yeah so they they they used to be yeah so so okay red command used to be like an ml group that was like a a sort of like alliance between like regular people in prison and like leftist people who've been put in prison commander yeah and it it it it does a similar thing to like like there are parts of the fark that go like this there's a lot of there's a thing that happens when you're dealing with sort of armed groups like this which is that okay so like a lot of the things that you do

to get money as an armed group are things that are also a good way to get money so things like kidnappings things like entering the drug trade and there's a lot of groups that start out ideological that just cease to be ideological and the people are just in the drug trade and there's a lot of groups that start out ideological that just cease to be ideological and the people are just like well we're just in the drug trade now and this is kind of what happens here with these people but okay there's actually this actually does tie into this because so maria lefranco like spends her entire life like fighting these people she she she gets she gets a sociology degree and like what she's doing in like while she's doing sociology stuff is she's like making reports and like like telling everyone like what these people are doing like what what the fucking police are doing and when she dies like there's a fucking judge who's like uh actually uh i what what

happened was that uh uh she was uh she was she was working with red command and uh she got behind her debt payments and they killed her and it's like this is some fucking bullshit like right like she so we think is we actually still don't really know much payments and they killed her. And it's like, this is some fucking bullshit. Right. So the thing is, we actually still don't really know much about who killed her, right? We know that one of the people who's being tried for it, the getaway driver,

was pictured with Bolsonaro. There's a bunch of weird ties to Bolsonaro's brother because Bolsonaro's very, very heavily tied into a bunch of armed paramilitary groups. It works well for everyone to have these groups that they can paint as like the great Satan, right? Like the police can be like, we're combating the gangs. The gangs can be like, well, you all hate the fucking police, right?

And then they could just blame anyone else whenever there is. And it's like this self-supporting structure. But every once in a while you get someone. Like Mariela Franco, she's a very, very rare kind of person. She winds up as a city councilor, right? She's a very, very rare kind of politician who, like, everyone likes. Like, everyone on the left likes. Like, even your sort of, like, most hardcore, like, fucking guy.

And, like, your most, like, hardcore guy in, like, a tiny ML sect. And, like, your most hardline anarchists like everyone likes her because she's doing she's doing like she's every day putting her life in danger trying to stop the police yeah and you know and when you get someone like that who is not part of the sort of like is not part of either of these factions right and who is a genuine threat to both of them because she is unbelievably popular she gets the fifth most votes of anyone like who's who's running for city councilor and she's doing it again running for the psol who's like they have like five seats i think in in uh the senate or something like that like they're not like they're not like they are a kind of large party but they're not like one of the parties

ever gonna like win a national election right like and but you know but she she is an incredible threat to them and so they have her killed uh we know that the bullets that were that that i she was killed by were part of a batch that was sold by the police we know that from from another one of the batches that was in that sequence uh there's a bunch of other people who were killed by the police and this is also like wait sold to the police or sold by the police sold by the police magnificent oh good yeah yeah um you know and there's a lot of stuff going on here too which is like there are a lot of activists in brazil who get killed like this is this happens all the time there are a lot of indigenous activists who get killed there are a lot of

black activists who get killed they're just like if you piss off the wrong person like you can just get executed and this assassination is one of the symbols of it because like she was a city council woman, right? Like she was part of a major political party and they just fucking shot her. Yeah. And no one's been held accountable. Yeah.

It's, it's fucking horrible. Um, I, yeah, I don't really have, I don't have any sort of like clever thing to say here. It's just,

it's just fucking awful there's one more thing i need to mention which is that yeah okay so the thing she was doing like like literally she was at a conference like she was killed like driving home from a conference right and the thing she was doing like literally in the days leading up it like leading up to her assassination was um so michael temer has this thing called the quote the quote unquote federal intervention which was apparently like extremely popular in brazil which is like a sign of how fucked up everything is which is that he just like was like fuck it we're gonna hand control of quote unquote security in rio de janeiro to the army and let them like go to war with the

gangs yeah fucked unbelievably fucked and she she is takes an incredibly bold stance against this and is trying is trying to fight it and then she is mysteriously assassinated yeah it's a bit like you know how like you obviously people will say that fascism is like the return of colonialism to domestic policy right colonial colonial methods in in the metro instead instead of in the colonies and like it this is similar here right like what you're seeing is just they're doing a colonialism but just to poor people yeah although i i should mention it a lot of us and that analysis is developed in like like it's developed for europe and the brazilian context is not the same thing as that because like brazil was also doing all

of this stuff to its own population because again brazil has a mass like like like brazil's a settler colony that was also a slave state right so all of this violence is just it's the same thing that they've been doing since they got there like yeah i mean and this is something actually lula talks about a lot which is like the people who've been in power for 500 years are still in power. But I think it's important to understand like part of how Bolsonaro is able to do what he does is that everyone is already like everyone is already so primed to just like back the fucking army coming in. And like, right, like there's so much racism. There's so much just like there's this whole law and order shit thing that's going on. There's this whole sort of law and order shit thing that's going on. And the sort of product of all of this is in the 2018 election, the PT put in basically some – I mean, he's not some random guy. He was like a kind of prominent politician, but they basically run like some guy, and he gets clobbered with Bolsonaro.

And part of this is there's a lot of stuff that happens here that's like very similar to sort of U.S. disinformation campaigns like there's all these like telegram groups going around we're like yeah his name is Fernando Haddad there's this whole thing about how he's gonna like turn your kids gay and like he's a satanist um yeah so and then yeah the same thing is interesting right because I think people um there's this analysis like we have to see everything through the lens of american politics like the bolsonaro is the america the brazilian trump but like it's and my knowledge of this is not deep but like it strikes me that he embraces catholicism to a degree that is like much greater than uh like

trump did religion. I mean, it's interesting. So like the Latin American context has, you know, it has this like thing. I think, I think you know about,

which is like, it's there, there's this sort of right wing Catholic evangelical alliance. Yeah. That is happening here. And, you know, cause like a whole bunch of,

of, of Bolsonaro's base is a shit ton of evangelicals, but he, but he's like, there's this sort of shared language around, specifically like around anti-abortion stuff around opposing gender ideology and like feminism and stuff like that where it's like yeah you can you can do this sort of dog like not even dog wasn't you can just sort of like whistle at them and you know and like it works and this is sort of like you know i and like okay like i if if i had any energy left in me i would probably do another episode that was like like two three i could do like a fucking year of

episodes but everything that happened to their bolsonaro um yeah i'm just to sort of hit some of the like low lights. I don't know what you call it. Like Bolsonaro. Okay. But Bolsonaro managed to kill less people than Trump did, but, and also than Biden did, but comma,

he also killed a fucking unfathomable number of people with COVID. Like he refused to buy vaccines. He like was like really into the uh classic coraclean stuff like contractual stuff like he he like personally spread covid to a bunch of people like there's uh like one of i think one of the most famous things that people know about like the sort of bush nara regime is that the amazon was fucking burnt um because they're all these like a huge part of his base are these like basically illegal loggers and bolsonaro was just like yeah fuck it go like destroy all destroy all this indigenous land

fucking kill the people on it and they have been just like annihilating the amazon didn't he also and i may again be completely off base on this didn't he break down a lot of the like from funai is the uh brazilian national organization that among other things does some sometimes problematic but protection of indigenous peoples didn't he like a dismantle all of the structure of that and try and defund it yeah and it's like trump right like it'll take years to undo this bullshit wait it might never be i'm not liking that that's like we're running out of fucking time right like we don't have yeah well and this is one of the things we're like we have to hope lula actually fucking holds up

to his word here because like okay so the pt the pt's record on deforestation is was is way way enormously better than bolsonaro but it's also true that a lot of the sort of legal framework that bolsonaro has been using to push this stuff like is stuff from the pt and you know i i lula has pledged to stop deforestation like i hope he does or fucking everyone is going to die yeah uh yeah i mean there there's you know like everything that was like that i've talked about that was bad before got enormously worse under bol. The police violence got worse. The military violence got worse. There's just like,

he's able to sort of like do this like enormous anti-communist fervor. But the problem is that he kills like, he kills too many people. It's not so much that he's killing his own voter base. I mean, he is, but like, the thing is like,

I, he really just destroys the entire Brazilian economy. Like he just nukes it. And this costs him the support of a bunch of the ruling class. And this is actually the thing that this is like, ultimately what defeated Bolsonaro-ism, like insofar as we could even talk about it being defeated. What defeated Bolsonaro personally is the fact that like he like he loses it all for the ruling class that when lula appeals like when lula's actual case appeal goes to the supreme court they throw it out and sergi moro

like turns on him for a bit although moro comes back and endorses bolsonaro in the election because he's a piece of shit but like yeah there's he loses a bunch of sort of the support of the ruling class. And there's this kind of this is, he was recognized by sort of everyone who opposed Bolsonaro. He's the only person who could stop him. But this means that he's drawing a bunch of support from the right. His running mate in this election is a guy named Karel Delachmin. Yeah, this is a guy

that Lula beat by 20 points in an election. Or 30 points, something like that like this is literally like a right-wing guy who lula fucking destroyed an election and he had and lula brings him on as a running mate because he's trying to sort of appeal to like disaffected like he he's he's running the sort of like biden suburban strategy right like he's doing the like appeal to sort of moderate voters thing yeah and like i mean like this is going on to the point where like he's telling

people like not to like bring pt flags or like wear pt colors to rallies because they're trying to downplay yeah because they're trying to downplay the sort of like communism thing and this doesn't really work because like bolsonaro's just calling him everyone's just calling him a communist anyways yeah right and and he like squeaks by this fucking election right like i mean he probably won by he probably would have won by a couple more percent than the actual vote total show if there hadn't been voter suppression but like it was close and the other thing that's really really bad about this is that i like the right like bolsonaro's party like controls the senate right so and and this is everything right if bolsonaro's party can cut enough deals and you

like jettison bolsonaro like bolsonaro ism as like as a force is still there right like the this this this this sort of like fascist right has consolidated as its own political force and you know there's a non-zero chance that they just impeach lula right and this you we literally watch this entire fucking cycle that has happened again yeah fuck like right like this kind of shit like this could happen um yeah so things are still not great and yeah lula's actual hand to do stuff here is very good i should also mention though like i don't know like there was literally like partying in the streets in like like there were like they were parties in the streets of cities that like he didn't even win like like this is like he i don't know like the the fact that he won is genuinely very good um i have i don't know what can be done to actually sort of defeat bolsonarism

as a structural force because again like he won like 49 of the vote right like yeah that's still there killing like like a yeah tens of thousands of his population and being a general shithead yeah so yeah yeah yeah they're not yeah i don't know like i don't know like the like actual structural things have to change about both the brazilian political system like the brazilian political system the police the military and the economy have to structurally change or we're or like we're gonna get in gonna get another bosnar like this is what's happening in the u.s right like there hasn't actually been a sort of structural shift in like in the american political system so we're just gonna get another trump maybe it'll be actual trump who knows like right but like like this is the thing like until until fascism sort of like

class base and base in the state is destroyed like and and's sort of ideological base in sort of like right with constructions of the family it's religious base like a particular like we're just we're going to be back here and we're going to be sort of like continuously teetering between fascism and something that's not fascism but has no way to oppose it and yeah yeah that fucking sucks um yeah but we keep doing it like we keep trying to defeat fascism by running like closer and closer to fascism to pull away like the marginal fascists okay so here's the thing i i one thing one thing i will give to lula is that like okay his way of doing this was that i a bunch of people found pictures of i bolsadaro and

illumina like like with a bunch of like a bunch of like in freemason robes with a bunch of freemasons and this i think genuinely may have cost bolsonaro like like there's an argument this cost bolsonaro like a bunch of election points with his own base because people found this there was another thing like like the day like a couple days before the election like an old tv clip turned up of bolsonaro just out of nowhere saying quote i would eat an indian yes yes the cannibalism this turned into a cannibalism i mean this is like you know because like this is really about his racism right but he's turning into a whole cannibalism thing the supreme court ruled like i think incredibly cowardly because he did say this the supreme court ruled that yeah uh he couldn't run

ad that lula couldn't run ads calling him a cannibal but there were stuff like this where suddenly I don't know, and I will applaud Lula for this he hasn't really he could have run an election where he just fucking threw his entire base under the bus and was insanely racist

and was like, no, I hate queer people and I hate women he could have run a camp, he could have run a Bolsonaro campaign and he hate women and like he could have he could have run a camp he could have run a bolsonaro campaign and he didn't right and and in insofar as he was tapping into right-wing shit he was tapping into hey this guy's a fucking this guy's in freemason robes like it was sort of it was sort of funny shit that like it's probably not great that this is where the political sphere is yes it's not like like you know okay bolsonaro literally saying he would eat a human being is like i i would

rather that be the kind of insane right-wing thing that's going around than like i don't know queer people are gonna murder your children or something which is like the normal shit that yeah you hear yeah and it's in 2016 it's not like he said it when he was 18 no like like six years ago like yeah i think he said it's like a journalist as well right yeah no problem journalist no problem oh god yeah what a fucking terrible guy you can imagine donald trump saying he'd eat someone like he probably has i think i think i think donald trump you'd have to prompt bolsonaro just unprompted. There is no connection here. He was just like, fuck it. No, I am so racist.

I'm just going to say this. Oh, God. I don't know. I wish I... Yeah, I wish good luck and good fortune and yeah, like, victory to everyone in Brazil who is fighting this shit. Yeah, seriously.

Yeah, fuck Bolsonarosonaro i hope all this i hope he fucking dies of covid finally um yeah and i i hope also i hope i really do hope that bolsonaro can be can be defeated um yeah i don't know like make better choices pt please god we can't do this again yeah i hope all the people in brazil who continue to be impacted by this this bullshit can yeah yeah have better meaningful improvements to their lives yeah and this election and i mean i will say like like this is proof that like bolsonaroism isn't isn't undefeatable right like it like the the fact that he wasn't able to pull off a military coup right like it is beatable it's just it's very very hard and yeah i mean that this is true of fascism everywhere right it's hard to beat but it can be stopped

and we are going to because the alternative is the fucking annihilation of the earth so yeah fuck them we're gonna win Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters. To bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. natural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows

as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. and Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story,

as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, it could happen here. podcasts. It Could Happen Here is a podcast that you're listening to right now. If this is a surprise to you, if you thought this was the Joe Rogan experience, let me assure you, everyone here does eat a diet of nothing but elk meat. And to talk to me about the health value of elk meat is, no. So about, I don't know, a week or so ago, we're talking with Sarah Yong. Sarah, how are you doing? Good. How are you? I'm pretty good. Sarah, you're a deputy features editor at The Verge. You are a lawyer and a journalist, so you have embraced the two most cursed vocations

in 2022. And you've, number one, most recently written an incredible piece about the Portland van abductions, which is like brutal and very important for The Verge. People ought to check it out. It is a, I don't know, I've had trouble getting through all of it because it is very good and because I was there, but everyone needs to read it. It's an important piece. We're not talking about that today.

We are talking about a post that you made on the twitter.com uh about a week or so ago that i i messaged you about wanting to chat about do you want to kind of talk about what that post was uh and what you were trying to get across yeah the audience so if you live in portland right now it's um it's absolutely fucking rancid like i think and i think the discourse not the city well sometimes the city sometimes the city but uh the discourse is rancid uh it's like this in a lot of other cities as well um but you know how portland is like the discourse around homeless people right yeah yeah every every conversation you have with any random person, it eventually goes to, oh, it's gotten so bad here lately.

And it's always about homeless people. And it always goes to this place where they're like, oh, we should start rounding people up into camps and getting rid of them. And it's like people are a little too excited to literally murder homeless people. it's like people are a little too excited to literally murder homeless people like you you get just people saying the most insane things like oh i'm not gonna break my car if i see one of those homeless people it's it's awful and like yeah it's really really awful and like and then you get people going like oh well, well, you know how things are. And like pulling out murders that have happened in like New York of Asian women at me to like justify why it is that I need to start supporting the cops and so on and so forth. There's this thing where I think that well-meaning leftists really want to sort of pull out, like, let's humanize homeless people, which, like, yes, but the people you're talking to, they don't deal with empathy, actually, right?

They already don't see most of the population as people. So what you're doing is you're not even speaking the language that they speak. population as people. So what you're doing is you're not even speaking the language that they speak. The issue for me is that what people are doing when they dehumanize the homeless or like turn them into like a problem that you can just sweep away or like kill or put in danger or drop into a camp where they're more likely to die or get sick or be harmed. It's that you're making a vast class of people based on superficial characteristics. They might be dirty, they're intense, whatever. You felt threatened by one of them once, so now everyone who's ever been homeless deserves to have a worse off life because you didn't feel great about it this one time and or two times and it's

it's really absurd to me because like yeah i i've had many instances in my life where i haven't felt very safe um because of someone who was, because of someone who is an addict. I mean, I'm a small Asian woman. I take public transit. The vibes are off in every fucking city right now for people who look like me. But that doesn't mean that everyone who looks like the person who's making me uncomfortable deserves to be swept up into a fucking camp and in fact like if i like roll the tape back and look at sort of oh let's look at people who've made me feel threatened afraid whatever i've like gone through big old sprints

in my life where i'm getting a lot of death threats from white supremacists. I mean, I'm sure you've lived this life too. I mean, I can see it. I see it. But like you, I don't know, because you're a woman writing on the internet, like you'll get more in a couple of months than I do in an average like year. I mean, it depends, right? Like it depends.

I mean, I was just looking at your midgets. Yeah, I don't know. I don't really look too carefully carefully so i don't even know what the numbers are like these days i did have an incredible like six month period where it was really intense um because tucker carlson was like putting me on his show with my picture for a for a while. So it was, it was really bad. Like people, like some guy called into my office and, and, uh, threatened to firebomb it. And the people who got the phone call, like were stressed out enough that they called the cops and there's like a police report. And like, um, there was a bunch of stuff that happened during this period that was pretty scary. And, uh, and it was like, guys who all sort of looked the same.

Right? It's like all the, you know, the Oakley sunglasses, like, taking a selfie of themselves in the car, like, that sort of stereotype. Yeah. Right? And, you know, gotta say, for a while, I'd see that, like, that little profile picture

or I'd see someone in person and, like, my, like, heart would start beating faster. Right? It took a while for I'd see that little profile picture, or I'd see someone in person, and my heart would start beating faster. It took a while for me to be able to dial that back. During that six-month period, I'd hear someone yell a racial slur, and I would almost have a panic attack. Because I'd be like, oh no, someone going to come in and make good on these threats. And I don't like I don't want to round people up into camps or looking like a shitty racist suburban white guy. Yeah, it's like I'm not a fucking Nazi. Like, it's like, it doesn't matter what you've experienced, or like what legitimate harm you faced from people who look a certain way. Like, you don't round them up into camps or like, talk about like how you're not going to break on this on the street in your car. I'm glad I was happy for kind of your perspective on the matter. Cause I do try, like whenever people talk about how scary Portland is or how scary the

homeless camps are, like the thing I want to say is like, like I have like five or six different running routes in the city. And most of them have homeless encampments on them. And I run through them at night. I run through them at the day, never had a problem. You know,

sometimes there's like trash and I would like it if it were cleaner, but also primarily the people cleaning up are usually like autonomously organized groups of formerly houseless folks, which is the thing that happens in a couple of the neighborhoods that I go to. And like, but at the same time, I don't want to bring that in when there's an argument about it, because i'm a six foot three 200 pound white guy right like of course i'm as a general rule in a lot of situations i don't feel worried when other people do because i'm a big white dude and that's um but what i will say i had an experience a couple of months back a person that i live near like a neighbor of mine is a young woman with like a six month old infant. And she was out jogging on one of the

trails near our house. And two guys in new Kawasaki, like motorcycles, dirt bikes, whatever you want to call them. I assume rich kids because these were very new bikes, drove up and shot at her and her baby with BB guns, hit her in the face, nearly hit her baby. And it was like homeless folks and people at an illegal skate park who came to her aid and like made sure she was okay. And when I got out there, cause I rolled out there with a fucking beat stick and a handgun just to be like, if I see these motherfuckers, we're going to have words. And I started talking to homeless folks that I knew on the route who were all like, yeah, those people, like they come by to shoot at us.

And I have heard this in multiple encampments. I've heard this at Laurelhurst, a number of places that like kids from the suburbs will come in to shoot homeless people with BB guns and mace them. And I'm not going to say, again, I have also been in a situation where like an agitated houseless woman was like swinging a machete at some folks and everything was deescalated. But like I get it. The fact that there are people out there who are having like mental health difficulty means that people are going to have encounters that can be frightening. But by and large, the people that I find myself most threatened by are like kids people like those assholes rolling by and shooting people with bb guns and of course folks driving gigantic trucks

in tiny streets like assholes often while wasted um like those are the things that scare me in portland not the encampments yeah and honestly like there there are some increasing safety issues in portland but like a lot of it is also just like from cars right like it is a it it's more there's more of a car culture than there used to be um and people get hit and uh they go to the hospital or they die like it's it there's like there there are big changes in the city for sure but like yeah it's there's so much focus on homelessness as being like the root of all of that and like i don't know they'll say oh portland has gotten so bad in the same breath as like talking about how high rents are or like how expensive houses have gotten just not even connecting those two things right like why is it that housing is so expensive now

like clearly people are placing bets on real estate either that or just we haven't built out enough could that be something um or maybe things aren't as bad as you think and it's it's a desirable place to live um it it's really like it is it's extremely frustrating um i i also think that there's this weird thing where you just don't really think about the fact that you might have one or two encounters where it's upsetting you you feel scared and then like the vast majority of people who are unhoused are just trying to stay the fuck out of your way right and like they're you're not going to see them you're not going to talk to them unless you go out of your way to talk to them and reach out yeah and like they're probably scared of you because they don't know who you are. Like, you're a stranger. You might be one of those assholes on Kawasaki's like out to shoot you, out to shoot them.

And like, it's really frustrating. Like, it's halfway. I don't know. Some of the people who buy into this kind of discourse are just outright terrible human beings, right? Yeah, they're just fascists. They're just fascists. They're just fascists. And this is useful. But then there's like, it's really frustrating how many people in the city right now are

just useful idiots for the fascists, have just like gone down that rabbit hole and aren't thinking past like what it means to quote unquote take care of the homeless problem. Like, what do you want to do here? What do you actually want to do? Where are these people going to go? Like what's going to happen to them? And it's, it's super frustrating. We're focusing on Portland because it's where we live. But all of these things are evidence of like broader trends. You can see a lot of the same tactics being used in Los Angeles and Austin and Minneapolis. One of the things is this conflation of disorder, drug use, homelessness with deadly violence. And a number of things like we've talked about kind of jailing and putting into camps the homeless is one thing people suggest. There's also a lot of other suggestions. We saw this in San Francisco with the DHS abode and the police, like just refusing to enforce like the,

the law when they were, when Chessa was attempting to carry things out in a different way. And like what we're seeing in Portland right now, we've got, um, a city commissioner, Joanne, uh,

Hardesty, who, uh, number one is a, the only black woman in the city council um the only person on the city council who rents uh and the only person in the city council who is in debt and who has endured and i'm not going to say she's a perfect counselor a perfect politician there's plenty of things to criticize hardesty over um but there has been like number one this kind of

unhinged campaign of attacking her because of the fact that like her financial situation isn't great, which I see actually as a plus because a lot of people in Portland are in rough financial condition. Maybe it's nice if they're represented on the fucking city council. But also she's instituted as people keep fetching about, you know, violence and gun violence, which are problems that have gotten worse in Portland, although it is important to note Portland is one of the safest of Portland in the recent past, which was essentially a series of traffic calming measures. Right. Like, I think that's probably a fair way to say it. It was sort of altering the way in which traffic worked in a neighborhood to kind of try and reduce some of the situations that were like leading to violence. And she's undergoing this massive attack right now by a candidate, a right wing candidate. I mean, like everyone who runs in Portland,

he claims to be a Democrat. He's donated to Republicans. He's named Rene Gonzalez, who's being backed by a lot of the same business interests that are pushing this anti-homeless agenda, pushing the mayor's proposal to put homeless people in encampments. And I don't know. It's just I feel like I can see it all coming together. And I hate how many people are, as you said, kind of useful idiots about it, where they're like, you know, look, clearly these people who are talking about rehabilitation or who are trying to like actually who are not suggesting a carceral solution to the fact that it's unpleasant to see people suffering on the street are wrong because look at what the news

tells me about how much worse violence has gotten and stuff like I. It's very frustrating. It's don't vote for Renee Gonzalez. Yeah. But yeah, please don't vote for renee gonzalez yeah but yeah please don't vote for a man who donated to a republican pack yeah six months after january 6th well please please let's not do that uh but uh god it's it's i think like really sad that, I mean, like, people, I think, really just don't want to think about how damaged all of society is right now. Yeah. Like, we lived through, you know, our country had one of the worst responses to COVID. Millions of people are dead. Our mental health is fucking shot through uh even people who didn't

experience sort of federal jackboots on the ground um it we're not well right like it it's any number of housed perfectly like financially stable people turn to substance abuse during this period. And are still recovering. People who are unhoused also turn to substance abuse if they weren't already there. And their mental health is also shot through.

And sort of the upshot of this is everyone is fucking sick. And taking it out on each other. And it really sucks to see people be their worst selves. Just increasingly and increasingly, yeah. And I, first off, I want to try to provide people with some objective numbers. And this is just on the city of Portland.

So Portland, number one, never defunded its police. Our police currently get the most money they've ever gotten. But we do have one thing that is accurate to say is we have fewer police per capita than any major city in the United States. And we have the fewest number of police on the force in living memory, I'm fairly certain right now, there's like 700 Portland police officers, which is significantly down from 2020 because it's not a pleasant job because people hate the cops here in Portland. So they keep quitting and moving to other cities. And it is true that when the pandemic hit, violent crime in Portland raised by about 207% from January 2019 through June of 2021, which is the largest increase compared to five comparable cities. This is from an article in the Oregon Capital Chronicle, Minneapolis, Atlanta, San Francisco, Denver, and Nashville. However, it's also worth noting that over the course of the last year, we're at seven fewer homicides than we were the year before. Last year, we're at seven fewer homicides than we were the year before. Overall, the number of homicides in 2022 has fallen 2% from 2021, even as we continue to have fewer and fewer police, almost as if the surge in violent crime was not a result

in policing. But as you said, the result of a lot of other factors around the pandemic and around the economic situation and And like the rate of violence has been continuing to decrease. It's also worth noting that while we're talking about homicides here, and Portland did see a surge in homicides during the pandemic, that's not the only kind of crime or the only kind of violent crime. And I want to quote here from Travel Oregon. In February 2021, the Major Cities Chiefs Association issued a report noting that 63 of 66 major cities saw at least one violent crime category grow in 2020. Among cities of comparable size, Portland generally experiences violent crime at somewhat lower rates.

Like a lot of this is media driven. Specifically, the thing that you highlighted in the post that made me reach out to you was talking about how particularly white suburbanite homeowners are driving this panic and are driving these kind of surge and very like fascist solutions to the fears that they have about homelessness and about crime. And one of the reasons why this shit works is these people don't go into the city. They live in the suburbs. They see the scary news. And that's the thing I don't know how to actually combat because it is a nationwide problem. Shootings and deaths due to shootings, they have increased since the pandemic. But if you look at them on like a 20-year graph, fairly flat nationwide. But what has surged –

Portland doesn't even keep very good stats, right? Like they only started nobody does keeping statistics of gun crimes like what in like the last couple years and then now they're saying that gun violence has increased like it's it's yeah yeah anyways like what had what we what has increased vastly more than gun crime is reporting on gun crime which has surged it like and and that's because you know if it if it bleeds, it leads in whatever. But it is this thing of like, that's the stuff that gets people to pay attention. And it's the stuff that spreads on social media, just like pictures of like poop on

the streets of San Francisco can spread on social media. And it all exists to keep these kind of suburban voters at a constant state of agitation, which makes them easy to manipulate. And like, that's the thing that scares me the most. Yeah. I mean, things are almost shittier with Portland because, well, like, okay, the San Francisco poop situation, so I used to live in the Bay Area. That was a real situation. Yeah, there's poop in San Francisco. Yeah, no, there's just human shit everywhere. It's, you know, you live with it's it just is what it is and and you know someone's from new york when they start complaining about it right like it's uh and it i think new york which smells like pee everywhere by the way

i mean it smells like hot garbage because they don't they don't take their garbage they like just put their garbage out on the curb and when it's summertime it just smells fucking terrible um but uh so everyone's got their problems but uh it's it's this like weird thing where just because of the way that we're drawn up geographically we've got all of these people like like you said like out in the burbs uh who vote who have control over the way the wind blows, who just never come out here. Ever. They never come out here. And in San Francisco, like, yeah, they've got outlying areas as well,

but it's not drawn up exactly the way that we are quite, right? Like, the people who are going to be the most alarmist about san francisco are like not going to be in the area where they're voting about the things that happen to san francisco the way the chesa stuff went down like i mean that's complicated right like i mean it was a it was a witch hunt. And it made me really. Chesabood, the DA, former DA in San Francisco. It made me really want to never move back. But it was like, we've just got a different sort of setup here where the people who are the most upset about all of the crime in Portland, like like they don't come out to where they think the

crime is happening at all no like they like they just don't really interact with the city they're off somewhere else and it's it is truly strange really annoying uh yeah yeah and it is this is like i don't know this is part of why this is part of why politically I tend to align myself with like libertarian municipalism. I think one of the problems we have is that. Places that have very little to do with each other get to pass laws that impact how people live in those those places, like which is a problem. impact how people live in those those places like and which is a problem um as we all just got overseeing with fucking donald trump right like that's that's a version of the problem and a version another version of the problem is that like people in los angeles can pass a gas tax that makes total sense for cities in california but fucks over people who live in the middle of nowhere. And all of these things are like, I don't know. It's the, you get the,

it's two simultaneous issues. Like one of them is you've got these liberals in Portland who the rest of the state resents for dominating politics in the entire state, even in areas that have very little to do with like Western Oregon. And then you have these, these outlying, like you have these folks who don't live in Portland, who, you know, are pushing for like, you know, who are responsible for the fact that we might get a Republican governor in the state, right. Who are reacting to like what they hear about Portland, even though it's not accurate. And I't know i i this is we're getting past like what people can do in terms of like voting on local elections but i wish we had a system in which

like folks weren't constantly pitted against each other in this way because i don't think it's very productive well we're chopped up in a really by the way i vote for charter reform etc if you live in portland uh like we we've got some some other other things going on with our uh our city government that makes things additionally weird and um suboptimal there's a bunch of things that i'm kind of dreading in the near future or from the the midterm elections, including, you know, Rene Gonzalez. You know, I have strong feelings on the proposed gun control measure, but I'm broadly optimistic about charter reform.

That actually seems like something good that we're likely to do. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about that a little bit, because Portland would be the first city in the United States to reform its city council along these lines, if I'm not mistaken. Along which lines? Like the way the charter reform is like set up. So basically Portland currently has a commission form of government in which we have a very powerful mayor and four city council people who are handed portfolios by the mayor.

And they basically run the city government, which is it's a pretty dysfunctional system. It leads to a small number of people running very large bureaucracies that they usually don't know how to handle, which is one of the reasons why the city is so dysfunctional. In addition to the fact that our mayor, Ted Wheeler, is politely speaking, dog shit. Under the new form of government that's being voted on right now, the charter, the commission structure will be jettisoned. City council members will not directly manage bureaus. Instead, they'll pass laws and meet with constituents. The mayor will no longer be part of the city council. Instead, they'll pass laws and meet with constituents. The mayor will no longer be part of the city council. Instead, he'll lead the executive branch.

I'm not wild about the amount of power that the mayor will still have. But I think broadly speaking, it's a much better system and there will be a larger group of people involved in actually like managing the city's affairs um i don't know it what we have currently certainly is not particularly effective um and i would like to see a more democratic system put into place yeah i mean and what we had was like obscenely outdated right like it's like yeah i don't know who else does things like portland currently does but the charter reform is is greatly needed uh yeah and it's going to bring in rank choice voting as well when people vote on yeah on their on their like city like which is uh like one of the issues that we've had here is that – or that we're having right now with the gubernatorial race is that you've got three candidates running, one of whom is kind of positioning themselves as an independent, Betsy Johnson, who does not really have a chance to win and seems to be being funded by people like the Nike guy in order to take voids away from Tina Kotek,

who's the democratic candidates. So that Christine Drazen, who's the Republican candidate will be more likely to win. I don't know. Like I, I still don't know how much I believe Drazen actually has a shot, but the polls show them neck and neck. So it certainly seems like it's possible.

The polls are pretty terrifying. Yeah. We're, we're kind of like hovering on the cusp of of the governor's seat going red to yeah it's yeah i don't know um yeah that's the election that scares me like i really do I really don't want to see Rene Gonzalez win. But if charter reform passes, the harm that he can inflict on the city becomes limited. Just because right now, city council seats just have outsized power in a very dysfunctional way. And that changes with charter reform like we just get a little bit more of a normal city um and uh the but the state

the state election though that is that's pretty scary stuff yeah the state especially since if the democrats stay in power at the state level then there's a good chance that i mean that as far as like what people are talking about then we're going to actually see like portland become or oregon become a sanctuary for uh reproductive health right like that's one of the things that's that's on the ballot um so if you uh like if you care about that that's kind of the the whole game right like regardless of the fact that kotech has a history with our current governor that's not entirely positive our current democratic governor has been a shit governor and handled the pandemic terribly like at the end of the day it's it kind of has to be all about, um,

uh, all about reproductive health. Right. Because like the, the, the Republicans would not have handled the pandemic any better. Um, but they will also support a crackdown against people having access to

abortion. We also have the craziest Republicans out here. Like, and I mean, part of that is the areas they're representing or whatever, but part of it is also just, we've been under democratic control for so long that like the minority party gets weirder and weirder and weirder.

Like we've got the guys who like, what ran away from the legislative session rather than vote on a climate change bill. Right. Like, it's not it's not good. It's really bad. Like handing handing them the keys to the kingdom is is a terrible move. Yeah. I don't know what else to say.

You got anything else to say as we as we head into the midterm elections here in Oregon? I felt like I don't know. This is broadly speaking oh actually i want to hear about your your your feelings on that gun control measure um yeah so we've got measure 114 coming up which is um uh gun control so for people who don't know uh and this may surprise folks given how blue it is. Oregon basically does not have any kind of gun control laws. This is a state in which any kind of gun that's legal to own in the United States and any kind of magazine you can own in the state of Oregon. and you apply for a concealed carry permit, they have to give it to you. Gun owners have quite a few protections at present.

The first major, there was a gun control law passed in 2015. Most reasonable gun owners had no issue with it because all it did was say, you have to get a background check. So there's this thing called face-to-face sales whereby in a lot of states like Texas, you can just hand somebody a gun for cash. As long as you're not a professional gun dealer, that's legal. And that's bad. Generally, it's how a lot of guns get across the border. That was removed as a legal possibility in Oregon back in 2015.

But other than that, we haven't had a whole lot of gun control. In the wake of the Uvalde shooting, an organization, I think Lift Every Voice is what they're called, led by some church leaders, pushed for a ballot measure. So this is not something where, and I do think this is interesting, this is not a situation where democratic politicians in the state of Oregon are trying to pass gun control. This is a situation in which a ballot measure was proposed and enough people voted that the entire state is voting on whether or not to have gun control, which regardless of my opinions on the measure itself, I think is a better way for stuff like this to work than a bunch of legislators just like making a law. But anyway, the measure itself is, in my opinion, deeply flawed in the way that it's written. It does a couple of things. For one thing, it requires that every person who buy a gun pass a background check, which is already the law

that's in the bill. And it shouldn't be because it's already the law. I think one of the things that reasons I think that's dishonest is because it always gets summarized and like, this is what the bill will do. It will require that everybody pass a background check. Well, they're all they're already required. It does not actually do anything there. It adds in a magazine capacity restriction, as in you won't be able to buy or take out in public magazines that have a higher capacity than 10 rounds. We can talk about that in a second. And then the primary thing it does is it requires people pass a series of tests in order to purchase firearms.

And the people who will be administering those tests and running the whole program are the police. So the police essentially get control over who gets to own firearms. I do consider that. That is particularly the thing that I find problematic. For one thing, regardless of your opinions on gun control, the right to bear arms is similar to the right to freedom of speech and guaranteed in the same way. And so the fact that the police are being made the arbiters of who gets to exercise that right is deeply problematic to me. I think given what we know about how often police in Oregon work with far right groups, work with organizations like the Proud Boys.

It is very likely that we will see uneven enforcement and uneven, like, the police granting the ability to bear arms very unevenly, which concerns me greatly. We had a mass shooting earlier this year at a protest in which a right winger killed a woman, a 61 year old woman and injured five other people. That person was stopped by a left wing demonstrator with an AR-15 style rifle. Well, it was actually technically a handgun, but that's anyway, whatever. It was an AR-15 style weapon. I'm concerned that under this new law, the right winger would have still had the ability to acquire firearms, but the person who stopped him would not. So that's why I have an issue with it. I also think if you're going to – I don't personally advocate magazine capacity restrictions, but also I don't speak out against them.

Washington recently passed a law restricting magazine capacity. I didn't say anything about that. I think maybe it – I think if it works, I will be happy. of standard capacity magazines, of 30-round magazines and higher, without giving the police an opportunity to harass and arrest people over what they own, which I think is important. The way the law is written, if you had whatever you had prior to the ban taking effect, you can keep and continue to use as normal. Just no more can be sold. And so the thing you're trying to stop with a magazine capacity ban at this point is someone doing what the Uvalde shooter did, right? Where a kid goes

out and buys a weapon and a bunch of 30 round magazines and then goes on a mass shooting, right? You want them to not be able to go and immediately acquire those magazines. It is, I think, by making it illegal to take them out in the world if you already own them, what you're doing is giving police pretext to stop and search people, to search people going out and shooting in the woods like folks do in Oregon without having an impact on mass shooters because they're not going to care about violating that particular law. If you want to stop more of those things from being sold, I think a law written the way the Washington law is written does the maximum in order to restrict people from purchasing the thing you don't want them to purchase without giving police the ability to harass and arrest people. Anyway, that's my thinking on 114.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's an's like an important is an important uh series of distinctions to like get out there yeah um anyway i i i voted against it i i try really i actually do try despite my opinions not to talk about gun control too much on this show but like that's my my thinking on the matter folks can do whatever they want we'll know when on january or on november 8th how they voted yeah i mean like it's it's hardly the most uh disturbing thing on the ballot right now yeah no no no and i i am like like i i there's there's so much going on right now and it's one of those things I guess we'll all learn in the near future. We're going to learn a lot from this election in Oregon. If Hardesty stays on, if we get charter reform, and if Kotech wins, then regardless of what happens with 114, I will be broadly optimistic heading into 2024.

Because it'll show that the campaign of fear didn't work entirely yeah um and if gonzalez and and drazen when and chatter reform gets defeated i will be really pessimistic heading in yeah yeah yeah if if drazen wins like that's yeah it's uh If Drazen wins, like, that's, yeah, it's, yeah, it's bad. It's really bad. It's bad news for a lot of fucking reasons. Yeah, I mean, Roe, that's huge. Yeah.

But, yeah, like, it's, the sky's the limit for a state that has been under Democratic control for this long. They've just gotten so complacent, is all I can think. Oh, I mean, the spoiler candidate, obviously, that did change a lot. But the complacency was, is alarming. Yeah. Um, well, is there anything else you wanted to say about what we're heading into? Uh, well, I mean, uh, don't let your fear control you. Um, don't be a useful idiot for Nazis and, uh,'t put people into camps i guess yeah that that's my thinking don't like if somebody's trying to make you scared

uh about a group of people who are the most powerless people in your community you might want to assume that the person doing that is trying to take advantage of you um that's that's that's kind of where i land on this sort of stuff um yeah don't put people into camps we really shouldn't have to say that anymore but yeah we shouldn't have to tell people to not be patrick bateman from fucking america right like it's like we should be like but no it's yeah we've we should not be regressing this hard in terms of uh our moral compasses but that's where we are that's where we are well do you want to plug your pluggable sarah yeah so uh uh robert mentioned that i just put out a big feature about the port van abductions published on The Verge. It's a

longer series that we did this year about the Department of Homeland Security, which is 20 years old this year. So we did a bunch of features, some about Puerto Rico and FEMA, some about the TSA, of course. I did a short little thing about how Chad Wolf was illegally head of the DHS for a hot minute. And so there's some fun stuff in there. We've still got another feature that'll go up by the end of this year. I think your listeners would enjoy going through some of those. Excellent. All right. Well, that has been the episode. This has been It Could Happen Here. Bye.

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