It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 76

Episode Date: March 25, 2023

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

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. 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. I did eat a whole sleeve of Oreos in front of a 7-Eleven today and was scolded by a 10-year-old. It was for medical reasons. Okay, how am I going to introduce?

That's the start. That's the start. We already got it. Okay, yeah, we're doing it. We start with the Oreos. Yep. Fuck 10-year-old children. Okay, I guess.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is, we're at work. And today, everyone, because it's Monday, we are starting something that we like to call Shitty Mayor's Monday. I don't know if they'll actually let us put shitty in the title. They might, but they might not. We'll figure it out. But that's what we're calling it.

That's what we're calling it on the fucking recording. They can't stop us here. It would be funnier if it just had like 10 seconds of bleep and then it was like a Mayor's Monday. I'd said some truly unfathomable shit. Okay, so we've noticed that across America, right, there are a lot of mayors who ran and were elected as liberals, progressives, certainly as Democrats,

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

record on homelessness. We're going to talk about his life a little bit. And then we're going to look at sort of the promises he made when he was elected, I guess, and the things that he's done, which it will shock you to hear are not the same things. And we're also going to talk about his hip-hop video. Wait, wait. Yeah, yeah, yeah, buddy. Really? Really? Yeah, no, he did Return of the Mac,

but hilariously changed it to Todd Gloria is Back. Oh. Yeah, no, if you want to see some problematic lip-syncing you're going to yeah okay all right i guess brace yourself i did a local newspaper had a headline that called it the cringiest video ever which i think it was rare win for local media look everyone's to know why local news does one good thing yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. They occasionally, like a stopped clock. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

All right, so when Todd Gloria talks about his early life, he talks about being the son of a maid and a gardener. And it's a way, I think, of distinguishing himself from the very few elites who have held power in the city for a very long time, right? People whose names are on every building. But his dad's LinkedIn profile tells a little bit of a different story. According to his own LinkedIn account, Phil Gloria, age 64,

has been in the aerospace industry for many years, including as a production controller at General Atomics, who people might remember as the manufacturers of the Predator and Reaper drones. Oh! Yeah, so it's a slightly different story, right? It's different from Maiden and Gardener. Prior to working at General Atomics, Phil Gloria worked for 14 years as a supervisor at United Technologies, another aerospace and technology company.

Gloria has clarified later that his parents didn't work in those specific fields, the son of a Maiden and Gardener thing, recently, but they did when he was born. So he wasn't, he's not. Yeah, that's not. Yeah. That's bullshit. Like I could, I can, I could, I could take this argument and argue that like,

I am the child of like a, a pancake maker and a dishwasher. Like this is. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's, it's sort of classic,

like this classic politicians, right? Like telling enough of the truth for it not to be a lie. But, but maybe not telling the whole truth. And like, classic politicians, right? Like, telling enough of the truth for it not to be a lie, but maybe not telling the whole truth. And, like, I know, like, my folks worked in agriculture when I was a kid. They still do. But, like, they also worked very hard, you know,

to, like, provide for me and get a better space in life, and I wouldn't want to run them down by denigrating the work that they did. But, hey, I don't want to be a mayor either. Yeah, but also, like, you don't get to do your fucking, like, burnishing working class credentials and then your dad worked for a fucking, like, military contractor.

Like, come on. Yeah, yeah. None of my parents have ever made a Reaper drone. So I guess I do have that in my favor. It is an extremely San Diego story. In 2020, the San Diego Union Tribune wrote, he was running so does San Diego's story that allowed his mother, a hotel maid,

and his father, a gardener, to work hard and afford a home doesn't end with their generation. That story seemed to admit the glaring reality that San Diego is one of the least affordable cities in the world right now. And its housing is unaffordable as ever has been. And it's got worse since Togloria became mayor. So who is Togloria? He's an enrolled member

of the Tlingit Haida Indian tribe of Alaska. He was born and raised in San Diego and graduated from the University of San Diego with a bachelor's degree in history and political science. He began his career at San Diego's Health and Human Services Agency, and then he worked with Congresswoman Susan Davis, who became his mentor. He was elected to the city council in 2008 and 2012, and served as interim mayor from August 2013 to March 2014. He was also elected to the California State Assembly in 2016 and 2018, and he chose not to seek re-election for the assembly when he launched his campaign for mayor in 2020 so he's done the kind of the the sort of the the climb up of offices

that you see a lot of these folks do right and i'm sure that he has ambitions to run for further office that would be my guess and so in 2020 he was elected mayor of san diego he became our first gay mayor our first mayor of color our first indigenous mayor so it was elected mayor of San Diego. He became our first gay mayor, our first mayor of color, our first indigenous mayor. So it was a lot of firsts for us. And like, it is good to have a gay indigenous mayor, right? Like if we're going to have a mayor, you know, like it's nice that it's a position that's open to more people.

But unfortunately, he hasn't done a lot else to encourage upward social mobility. He made a big push for private sector housing building as opposed to subsidized public housing, and he promised police reform. In a 2020 op-ed for the Union Tribune, Gloria wrote, we watched in horror as George Floyd was killed by four Minneapolis police officers. Mr. Floyd and other victims of excessive force by law enforcement demand that we revisit, reconsider reconsider and reimagine how police operate in our community and how we expect them to interact with the public it's time we work

together to create a more just system of policing the primary responsibility of government is protect its people all people many of us don't feel safe or protected particularly our black community so it seems like a like a pro at least at least reform statement right uh he went on to say whether it's our mental health crisis or our homelessness crisis we resort to the same solution send the police and arrest people we have to stop severely penalizing some people for minor missteps and invest in lifting people up from difficult situations i will need to put a pin in that as we talk about his politics. It will shock you to hear that he's done exactly that. He also wrote, the rapidly expanding and secretive

use of digital surveillance of our community members is unconstitutional and it should end. Again, put a pin in that as we get back to discussion of the cameras that we're putting on streetlights in San Diego. So in a PDF of his plan to end homelessness, which has been removed from his campaign website, but was thankfully preserved by our friends at Voice of San Diego, Gloria wrote, no more criminalizing the existence of San Diego's poorest and sickest residents. He also told right wing news station KUSI that San Diego cannot claim to be America's finest city, or even a great city, when thousands of people live unsheltered and dying on our streets.

It's time to stop the Band-Aids, the temporary solutions, and bad policy from City Hall on this issue. He said, as mayor, my administration will prioritize ending chronic homelessness. I will focus the city's energy and resources on results-oriented programs

proven to get homeless individuals off the street, connected to services, and back on their feet. Now, to be fair, well fair well there's two things one is that at any time okay like any person who is running for mayor is systematically lying to you about what they're going to do the second thing is if you ever hear someone say the words results oriented it is time to grab like the largest saber you have and like yeah get to work oh yeah and as we'll discover the the results uh that he is oriented towards uh somewhat disappointing for i was gonna say for all of us hashtag for all of us is his campaign slogan uh jesus christ yeah it's just it's very cringe and i don't know

we'll it's very sad when we see the impact of this for the least fortunate people in San Diego. It is very funny, but when you see how this plays out on the street, it's also very sad. You know what is also very funny and kind of sad, Mia? The Ronald Reagan coin services? Yeah, ronald reagan silver coins that pay for my friends to get hormones so please enjoy these adverts thank thank you ally ronald reagan for funding my hrt yeah thanks ronnie all right we're back and we're talking about tog loria san diego's mayor

uh and we've just before the break we talked about like his promises right so let's see how he did on those promises um i want to start with january 9th 2021 uh tog loria taken office a few days before if you can cast your mind back then there had been a significant event at the uh at the capital a couple of days before proud boys neo-nazis other assorted chuds decided to visit san diego three days after they visited the capital and anti-fascist assembled shows them they weren't welcome and the police responded by declaring the anti-fascist assembly illegal escorting the chuds around pacific beach as they did various crimes and trying to shoot me in the dick with pepper balls. Garrison's just smirking. I thought, Gloria, the guy who ran on police reform, had this to say.

Mayor Gloria spoke candidly about what happened at the Capitol and how that's reverberating around the country. After seeing what happened in Washington on Wednesday, what are you doing out on our streets supporting that mess, right? Racism, fascism, anti-democracy. Why would you choose to be out there? Gloria says despite his feelings, San Diego supports peaceful protests of all kinds. But on Saturday, police say three people were arrested and five officers suffered minor injuries.

We're asking for the public's assistance in helping us to identify some of those folks who we were not able to apprehend yesterday to make sure they're held accountable. These are people on both sides of the debate. Both sides. Yeah, both sides. So some of you will remember some other people have called out people

on both sides of the debate. So I think the most blatant sort of thing he did with regards to the police comes after Derek Chauvin, the cop who murdered George Floyd was convicted of murder. I guess a few of you can probably remember where you were that day. I can remember where I was and it was at the very least like after an entire summer of protest, right?

It was like the smallest token instance of accountability, but I guess at least it was something. And in that moment tol gloria who was looking at that same thing that nearly everyone was looking at in this country that day right he thought about what he wanted to do and he decided that rather than talking to the black organizers who had been a street for almost a year and had been pepperballed and tear gassed and maced and never stopped demanding justice. He was instead going to call the cops. Many such cases. Yeah, yeah.

And check that the verdict wasn't making them sad. What he did was took over the entire police scanner radio thing and delivered a message to the cops, which I've got audio of here. Colleagues, this is Mayor Todd Gloria. I want to address each and every single one of you who nobly serve our great city. Today's verdict is just the beginning of building a deeper trust with our community. Justice was served today against someone who does not represent you or us or our department or who we are as a nation. So I want you to hear from me today. or who we are as a nation.

So I want you to hear from me today. I know who you are. You are people who help complete strangers on the worst day in their life. You are people who believe in collaboration and community. You are people who put your lives on the line every single day to protect this city. I and the people of San Diego are grateful for your dedication and your service with today's decision made it is now time for all of us to come together to heal and to move forward

please take care of yourself of each other and of the people of this great city be safe everybody has anyone ever said the words to move forward and not just be an absolute dipshit? This sounds like it was written by an AI. Yeah, if you had a chat GPT

for a liberal mayor, it wouldn't look hugely different to what we have in San Diego. Do a liberal mayor statement. Submit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Chat GPT write a liberal mayor writing a peon to the cops. Now it's time to heal and come together as a community. Yeah, uh-huh. Stop with your black lives mattering it's uh it's scary yeah yeah it was extremely cringe like especially

when you consider how it differs from what he was saying just a few months ago uh and that again like this was about a man who murdered someone and that somebody in san it wasn't stpd who killed the person but somebody in san San Diego died in similar circumstances with someone doing a carotid restraint on them. A few days before this, Gloria also proposed a budget. In his budget, he proposed that we cut library hours significantly and lay off 153 library employees, but give the police $19 million more than the previous year.

The previous year, I probably don't have to remind people, is a year in which San Diegans had turned up in droves at Zoom council meetings to urge the city to do the exact opposite of this. Let's check in on that surveillance claim he made. You remember that he said it was unconstitutional, right? So on March 2nd of this year, Todd Gloria, in a shocking vault fast, tweeted,

Streetlight cameras and license plates readers can be helpful public safety tools. You know, just because he thinks it's unconstitutional doesn't mean he doesn't think it's right. Yeah, he's once again been held back from protecting the people of San Diego by that pesky constitution.

The city passed strong privacy protections last year and now it's time for atSanDiegod to use this technology to keep us safe public's meetings to get this done start soon so yeah we um these street lights they were deactivated in 2020 but they had previously been introduced and built as a way to assess traffic patterns but in fact they never assess traffic patterns doubt yeah this this will shock you.

They put thousands of cameras and microphones on our streets, including one outside a Planned Parenthood facility. You know, for traffic. You know, the funniest part about this, this was literally the thing about doing traffic science. This was literally Tom Cruise's cover story in one of the early Mission Impossible movies. So that's what we have next is it fucking scientology coming for san diego uh yeah it'll uh it'll shock you to hear that uh we stopped using these for very reasonable uh people had very reasonable concerns in 2020 that you know it's not a good idea for the cops

to be able to see and hear everything that you do to be able to read your license plate and see everywhere that you go but Todd wants them back and it if people actually want to follow the discussion about having them back because every single time like every single public meeting there's someone and they'll stand up and have a vehement like position pro cameras and then it'll turn out that they are like a prosecutor at the DA's office. Oh, really? In one instance. There was a prosecutor in one instance who insisted he was there in his personal capacity. The lieutenant for Sauron is defending all of these surveillance cameras

that are being posted around Middle-earth. Curious. This is a guy whose name is not Big Brother is here to advocate for having cameras in your home. The king of the Uruk-hai is backing Sauron on his new surveillance program. But he's wearing a fake mustache so you can't tell who he is. So let's look at what he said about stopping criminalizing homelessness. And this is a big, issue in san diego we have a massive and growing unhoused population because our rents are exceptionally high and our wages are not so the number of unhoused people has increased under

gloria so have deaths on the street which hit a record of 574 in the county last year and that's because it's more than a one person dying every single day in the streets, right? He's opened some shelters, but some shelters are scheduled to close. The shelter beds and traditional transitional housing provided have failed to grow at the same rate as the unhoused population, but this hasn't stopped him taking photos and claiming every single one is a huge step forward.

We also continue to build what are called congregate shelters, which don't give people privacy, right? Which don't give them... A lot of people might not want to go into a congregate shelter into effectively a dormitory. And there are a number of reasons why you might not want to do that. And yet, that's what we're building.

There are also some other single occupancy shelters, but nowhere near enough. He's been a huge backer of something called California's Care Court. Are you guys familiar with the Care Court at all? no this shit is dystopian this could be a whole episode maybe one day it will be care stands for community assistance recovery and empowerment which i have a feeling that this is not going to be about empowerment yeah when it's empowering someone garrison uh but but it's empowering someone, Garrison,

but it's not empowering the people we might want to empower. What it is in practice is a massive expansion of forced conservatorship. So I'm going to quote from Human Rights Watch here. Human Rights Watch said the plan promotes a system of involuntary, coerced treatment enforced by an expanded judicial infrastructure that will, in practice, simply remove unhoused people with perceived mental health conditions from the public eye without effectively addressing those mental health conditions.

Jesus. Yeah, it's pretty bad. It doesn't provide money for mental health services. It takes money that's already existing in the budget and puts it across to court-mandated treatment. It doesn't provide housing, which the multiple studies show that a housing-first approach is a way to solve homelessness. Instead, it allows for a broad range of people,

which include family members, first responders, including cops and outreach workers, the public guardian, service providers, and the director of the county behavioral health agency to refer individuals to the jurisdiction of the court to take away their autonomy and liberty. It very broadly covers people it describes as having schizophrenia, spectrum or other psychotic disorders. Under this system, judges can force people into treatment and housing. If they don't comply, they can be forced into conservatorship. Now, obviously, evidence doesn't support the conclusion

that involuntary outpatient treatment is more effective than intensive voluntary outpatient treatment. And indeed, it does show that involuntary coercive treatment is harmful. But it isn't really about people with mental health. It's about keeping unhoused people where they can't be seen. And Human Rights Watch claims that this violates due process and international human rights conventions and yet like cloak doria and gavin newsom to be fair who i'm sure will run for president soon

have been cheerleading this and it's it's like i'm surprised it hasn't got more press coverage internationally and nationally sorry because it's it's a massive assault on personal freedoms right and it's extremely easy to effectively say that somebody quote-unquote needs mental health help force them into conservatorship and if they're not willing to attend these treatments so they're not able to attend these treatments they're not willing to go into the housing that they are assigned uh let's say that they don't want to live in in housing right or something like that um or they're in housing with someone who they don't feel comfortable or safe with and they could be forced into conservatorship and effectively lose all their liberty, right?

Yeah, it's pretty bad. It's a new and exciting way of criminalizing homelessness effectively. Like I said, it doesn't provide housing. It doesn't provide funding for behavioral health care. It just directs existing funding to court-mandated programs. So I could pick hundreds of other examples of this todd gloria stuff um but i want to pick one more to focus on um and it's something that like i think it gets a little bit into like inside politics grifty stuff but it it like it it has ruined a good number of careers in san diego

politics and i'm really happy heavily indebted to La Prensa and Voice of San Diego for their reporting on this. But let's start by talking about public restrooms. So I think most of us can agree that having a safe place to shit and wash your hands is a pretty basic human right. But in San Diego, it's something that not everyone has. So since 2000 2000 four grand jury reports have warned the city's inadequate public restroom infrastructure could become a public

health threat that's what happened in 2017 and 2018 when a hepatitis a swept through the city sickening 582 people and killing 20 so after the hepat yeah it's not a thing that like you expect right and like like on the left coast in america's finest city like most americans will not encounter thankfully hepatitis in their lifetime and but sadly me this isn't our only hepatitis outbreak so that's great oh no and so after the hep a outbreak the city stopped locking restrooms at night, which it had done previously. But that changed with the COVID pandemic when the facilities were temporarily closed. And some have since not returned to 24-7 service. Following this, a 2021 Shigella outbreak sickened at least 41 homeless residents, most of whom were staying in central San Diego.

Further shed light on the city's restroom issues much of this was dealt with in a great report by bella ross in the voice of san diego to which gloria commented the goal here isn't to add as many permanent public restrooms as possible the goal is to help get unsheltered residents off the streets and into safe sanitary shelter and permanent housing and like i don't quite know what he was going for here but not having a place to shit is an everyone issue like this this isn't just an unhoused issue right like everybody poops and not all of us live in houses and have giant offices in city hall downtown and so it it was this bizarre kind of gaslighting approach. Like we fundamentally have an issue with access to bathrooms.

And to try and like reframe this as another issue where he's also failing was, it's kind of indicative of their response, but also very bizarre. And where the city has installed new bathrooms, they're often installed by private groups as part of development projects, which is great, right? A good old public-private partnership has never gone wrong before god

so it will shock you to hear that these private groups are responsible for maintaining and securing these facilities and this means that they're often locked so despite literal human shit being all over downtown and people are being forced to endure the massive indignity of having nowhere to poop in december 2022 research by by SDSU's Project for Sanitation Justice found that less than half the city's permanent restrooms could be considered truly open access and that just two permanent facilities were available around the clock seven days a week. Gloria has later acknowledged that city has an issue but he's chosen to blame residents i just need folks to quit acting a fool in these bathrooms i mean it's not just the homeless population it's everybody

he said in an interview in february 2023 nearly five years after the last outbreak san diego county again began recording an uptick in hepatitis a cases which is great right we're back to where we started um much of this reporting was met with absolutely unhinged responses on twitter from some of gloria's staff they call themselves the todd squad uh that sucks yeah yeah it's pretty bad uh so notable responses come from dave roland who left the old weekly city beat for a job in pr and rachel lang who who she's Todd's, I think, head of public relations. She spent June of 2020 posting about Black Lives Matter whilst also doing volunteer public relations work for the cops. Wow. Amazing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Could volunteer public relations? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's like a joke on, like, there's like a joke on like there's like a sort of pejorative label for okay so on Chinese Twitter there's this joke calling people unpaid 5 cent army

which is like the number of cents changes over time but it's like yeah there used to be a thing where like you get paid by the government to get like like to like you get paid per post like post get like like to to to like you that you get paid per post to like post oh wow whatever fucking shit the chinese government wanted to like have posts on but this person's actually literally an unpaid like actually literally volunteer

yeah like volunteer public relations for the cops like what the fuck is this bullshit oh yeah it was really a magical public record find when when i sent that pra email uh yeah yeah um i think she framed it as like helping the community and the police talk to one another in a difficult time uh the future is is the giant boot stamping on your face as long people volunteer to paint the boot yes yeah that is yeah yeah it is a rainbow boot uh yeah i mean you can you can find their feed some of the attacks on myself and some of my colleagues are like incredibly petty and unprofessional uh and also quite unnerving when you consider uh the huge amounts of taxpayer money that are wasted on their salaries which pay them to post uh and again this

is a town where people die because they don't have a place to take a shit uh but but we're we're paying people to uh to get into twitter beef you know it's it's also it's it's also really cool that like the the the sort of two axes of American politics are you can't use the bathroom because you're trans and you can't use the bathroom because you don't own one. And then sometimes they just converge and it's the same. Yeah, yeah, locking. Yeah, that's a hands clasping meme.

Locking homeless trans people out of the bathroom. So now we're about to get to the Todd Squad's finest hour, which is when they use city resources and work time to make a video of them singing Return of the Mac. Only it wasn't Return of the Mac. It was Todd Gloria is Back. And yeah, I'm going to make you all watch it.

Whoa Come on Oh yeah Was he walking through a Yeah, at City Hall, yeah Was the first part him walking to a security line at the airport? Yeah, which is funny because That's a security line to get into City Hall. Oh, okay, okay. Have you never been to a City Hall before?

I didn't have that. It certainly does now. In Chicago? Yes, it certainly has that now. My local town one didn't. Are they saying that the mayor lied to the city? Is that what they're saying? the mayor lied to the city? Yeah the previous man, oh the pre

Wasn't he the previous mayor? Only for a little bit of time then he he was interim mayor Okay Oh my god Believe you what you said air guitar on broomstick. I thought it'd be one guy doing air guitar on broomstick. That was like 12 guys. This feels like it's gone on for like 40 minutes. Yeah. This is my Stalin grad.

There's a point where they come in dressed as Flavor Flav, but I think it's here. Anyway, one of them's wearing a medallion that just says Cox on it. Okay, Todd Gloria's wearing a medallion that just says Cox on it and okay Todd Gloria's wearing a medallion here we can probably no no

hang on here he is again oh that's some cops what what is what is going why are they laying

on the ground in a circle with their heads touching there's the person with the Cox medallion again this is Why are they laying on the ground in a circle with their heads touching? There's the person with the Cox medallion again. This is... This is one of the worst things I've ever seen.

One of those people showed up with a chain. It was like an SD for San Diego. When it first comes on the screen, it really looks like a swastika. This is a Padres that's yeah that's like yes that's a shitty ass team go mariner the padres did a different genocide and it should should it be conflated with the uh the other genocide i'm guessing this is like a sports thing or something yeah uh yeah yeah they are a the sports ball team yeah that's what i thought baseball to be specific i do that very proud of them here uh but yeah as you'll have

noticed one of the most cringe things that has ever fucking happened yeah that's pretty rough yeah it's pretty bad right like like it it's it's it's pretty crushing when, like, like, I have personally known people who have died on our streets, and also my merit is making Return of the Mac videos dressed as Flavor Flav. So I think we're mostly done. I want to talk about one more thing, because no review of San Diego politics will be complete

without a mention of the giant monument to Griff that is 101 Ash Street. So what is 101 Ash Street? In 2016, San Diego leased a downtown high-rise hoping to house city employees. It turned out that the building was riddled with asbestos. And it turns out the city knew

it was riddled with asbestos when it started to lease the building. Yeah. And then it will shock you to lease the building. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it will shock you to know that they denied this at first, but in the agreement to lease to own the building, it says,

buyer acknowledges that the building contains asbestos and that Sempra has maintained an asbestos monitoring and handling program. So eventually in 2019, they managed to move staff in after a renovation that ballooned in cost. In 2020, they were forced to evacuate the building because of the asbestos. Since then, DA's investigation has been opened into Jason Hughes, who publicly represented himself as a volunteer advisor to the city, according to Voice of San Diego.

But unbeknownst to the city, collected $4 million dollars from sistera who owned 101 ash street the city attorney's office alleged but could not prove that the city's former top bureaucrat chris michael ordered city information technology staff to purge records tied to the 101 ash street debacle last year so they couldn't prove that she posed records but what they do know that she did was pass a confidential legal document to c Briggs, a candidate for city attorney. NBC reported that the memo included a footnote, which Elliot and others later decried as fabricated. In the footnote, they claimed that Elliot's office made an effort to shield Gloria from an outside probe of the 101 Ash Street debacle. The footnote suggested an interview with Gloria might have clarified why the city decided to go forward with the ash street lease given gloria's skepticism about a similar

past deal um so it's not clear if this if this footnote was real or fabricated like and then it's alleged it was fabricated um which uh it's bizarre like this whole sort of weird corrupt corrupt thing is bizarre and it may this may well not be true, to be clear. During this time, Dorian Hargrove, who is a reporter who obtained some of those records, faced legal threat of prosecution from a city attorney and lost his job for obtaining those records. So far, the city has poured more than $60 million

into 101 Ash Street, roughly the same amount as its annual library budget. It's only occupied the office space for... Yeah, it's only occupied the office space for yeah it's great it's absolutely this has been occupied for like less than a couple of months for the five years since the city acquired it are they do do we do we know what their ties to like the contractors who are doing the uh renovations are and that would be an interesting thing.

I actually don't know that. Yeah, because that's the classic Illinois grift. Yeah, you just keep renovating a building, keep getting donations from the contractors. Or the contractors are just your friends, and so this is how you pass around. Okay, yeah, keep the money around, yeah. Well, they're not doing any more contracting on it mere because uh the city agreed to buy the building uh which

needs 115 million dollars in repairs for 86 million fucking last year yeah it's good stuff amazing yep this week the ut reported that san diego's top real estate official did not seek input from her staff or review internal files before recommending the city buy out the 101 Ash Street lease. They also reported that in a confidential memo to the city auditor's office, anonymous employees wrote, the city of San Diego should be aware of the level of waste and abuse that is occurring within the real estate and airport management department, which has led to a toxic, hostile, revenue wasting and unproductive work environment which is great um we did a gel yep we did this is the san diego we wanted hashtag for all of us um so this is a lot of inside san diego politics right so it's a lot of lists of things and promises made and promises broken uh but i

want to come back to the fact that this is a guy who ran for mayor on a ticket that pushed compassion and a relatively liberal set of policies and he's done the exact opposite in his time in office he ran as a progressive but he's done very little to differentiate himself policy-wise from mayors like republican kevin faulkner obviously we're just cracking the lid on some of these policies here he's consistently chosen to subundant to fund and support the police over the people of the city. He's consistently moved to make it harder to live on the streets and harder to get off the streets. And he's consistently chosen photo opportunities over real governance for the city. His PR people spend hours bashing mutual aid workers like Michael, who we had a guest on the show on Twitter, and wasting taxpayer money doing it.

Michael, who we had a guest on the show on Twitter, and wasting taxpayer money doing it. Just this week, he welcomed right-wing maniac Rishi Sunak, who actually is Prime Minister of the UK, despite the fact that people haven't noticed, to our city. And San Diego State University researchers released a report saying negative interactions with police are driving black people who are experiencing homelessness away from services and housing opportunities. This is what we got from a mayor who positioned himself as a progressive and has governed as a rainbow Republican.

So yeah, I would say that's all I have to say about Togloria. If you follow me on Twitter, you'll know that it's not the case. And I will continue to have more to say about Togloria. But yeah, it's really sad. It's deeply sad. And like I said, it's funny. The cringy music video is funny. We'll link to it in the show notes.

But it's also really deeply troubling that this has real impacts for real people who are already down on their luck and living on the streets or experiencing over-aggressive policing or all the things that he said he would fix have just got worse. And yeah, it sucks. So thanks for listening to me whine about my city everyone and yeah again my apologies for

traumatizing you further with that video it's fine next week next week we're well okay so we would have been doing chicago's own version of of this exact same person which is loy lightfoot except to the surprise of absolutely zero people who live in Chicago and everyone who doesn't live in Chicago, Lightfoot didn't make it out of her fucking primary, so we're instead going to be doing Chicago's

once in the future, well, not once potentially future Mayor Paul Vallis, who absolutely sucks ass so stay tuned for that in another week when I get a yell about Paul Valas and inflict some truly horrific bullshit on all of you. Very excited to get my revenge.

Very well. I will look forward to seeing Paul Valas' hip hop video. Kirsten's just sitting there in the background dying. This is worse than anything the Daily Wire can throw at me should we just pivot to more

cum content Garrison I'm so fucked off okay this has been Nick and Apocere you can find us at HappenHerePod on Twitter and Instagram but we're gonna leave before one of us dies dies. 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. 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 the 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, Eliane Gonzalez's story as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here with me, Andrew, of the YouTube channel Andrewism. And today I'm joined by Mia and Gare. Hello, hello, hello, hello. And I want to talk about cities because I very recently published a video on Sulipong City Planning. I mean, I don't know what y'all are going to hear this podcast, but I did recently

publish it. And you can check that out on my channel and I thought I'd share a bit about a bit more about one particular historical urban planning movement that I talk about in that video and that is Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities movement and his book

Garden Cities of Tomorrow are y'all familiar with either? No I don't think so. Yeah. So Ebenezer Howard, side note, by the way, I don't know who looks at a child and names them Ebenezer Howard, but he presented this idea of the garden city concept in 1898 in a book called tomorrow a peaceful path through real reform later he republished in 1902 under the name garden cities of tomorrow and take note in the title of the book of the use of reform and peaceful path because it does highlight a noticeable lack within howard's vision that we'll discuss later.

He wants to provide access to the benefits of both town living and country living. As he describes it, town and country are like magnets drawing people to them. You know, so according to him, town offers vibrant society and opportunity and transportation. But it lacks the beauty of nature. It has pollution. It has crowding it has disease i mean this is victorian era um cities he's talking about place will stink um in contrast the country and country offers the space and the beauty of nature and its abundance but it lacks society and it can feel isolated and really spread out.

So he wanted to create a hybrid of both concepts, a third magnet of town, country, the combined benefits of both. Howard believed that- A secret, sorry, I have to jump in here and make a secret- A secret third thing. Yes, yes. Thank you. Yeah. Not town, not country, but a secret third thing. We've fulfilled our contractual obligations. One joke. All right, I'm going to sign off the call. Andrew, you take it from here.

So yeah, a secret third thing. of all economic backgrounds could be created by establishing these town-country cities with very specific parameters run by strong government institutions. In Ebenezer Howard's context, again, no offense to the Ebenezers of the world, but jeez, I can't let go of those implications. I think we need to bring back the name ebenezer actually it's it's it's been too long since i've seen an infant named ebenezer meaning i've never seen one i feel like we should see more just absolutely absurd old-timey names what do you what do you call the baby do you call them ebby or something like how does this you call the baby ebenezer the baby's name god

why would you you call it the baby's name you could call it ebby you could call it niza you could eventually call it weezer okay different options horrible nickname that is awful oh yeah that is okay i'm hearing the implications i I do never, I never want to hear that again. Yeah, I digress. Howard's writing, I'm just going to call him Howard. Howard's writing during the Industrial Revolution was in response to, well, the Industrial Revolution. You know, his response to the urban slums, the pollution, the lack of access to the countryside. And much of his book is dedicated to the idea that cities, as they existed in his time, were not sustainable in the long run. By the middle of the 19th century, over half of Britain's

population lived in towns, and in 1900, that proportion had risen to over three quarters. But English towns and cities presented social and environmental problems of an unprecedented scale, and cities presented social environmental problems of an unprecedented scale and much of Britain's history in that period could be connected with the efforts to ameliorate the frightening conditions that a lot of people lived in. When it comes to the design Howard wanted to create these highly structured carefully laid out communities to provide the best conditions possible for every kind of person he saw he wanted to purchase like large areas of land from aristocratic owners and start setting up garden cities that would house up to 32 000 people in individual homes on 6 000 acres and that whole vision of individual homes is i think um it belies a limitation the

imagination there but it's somewhat understandable considering the historical conditions of the time where people were living in these overcrowded um slums and stuff and the the dream was really to have a home of your own that you didn't have to crowd out. It didn't have to be crowded. You didn't have to share it with others. But anyway, I think a sustainable city should trade the sprawl that single family homes generate for more dense development. For the most part, that is. But I digress once again. That's not all his plan entailed. His garden cities would also include a huge public garden with public buildings like a town hall, lecture halls, theaters, and a hospital.

An enormous arcade called the Crystal Palace, not arcade as in video game, where residents would browse a covered market and enjoy a winter garden. thence would browse a covered market and enjoy a winter garden. Neighborhoods with cooperative kitchens and shared gardens, schools, playgrounds and churches, factories, warehouses, farms, workshops and access to a train line. In its ideal form, the Garden City would become a network of smaller garden cities built around the larger central town the idealized vision of the garden city contained very specific utopian elements like small communities planned on a concentric pattern that would accommodate housing industry and agriculture surrounded by green belts that would limit their growth. Now there's a diagram that he did up for his book that has been popularized that represents like a sort of a concentric circle design but he didn't

believe that that necessarily had to be the shape of the garden city. He still wanted the city to be adapted to the local layout somewhat And these elements of garden city design were all interdependent. He wanted strong community engagement. He wanted community ownership of land. Although he wasn't a socialist, mind you. He was a Georgist. Oh God, wait, that explains so much

about all this politics. of course he was a georges yeah quite quite an interesting crew of characters oh um he wanted mixed 10-year homes and housing types that were generally affordable you know to to go on another digression i find georges own to be such an interesting To go on another digression, I find Georgism to be such an interesting fixation of a philosophy. It's like, you know, looking at all the problems in society and you know what we need? A land tax. That'll solve things. I mean, obviously that's all there is to that

political philosophy that economic approach but I just find it every time I think about it I find it funny that it was just really like the whole movement was basically this one like

tax proposal it's really like that was the whole focus of it yeah it's really funny too because it has one of the sort of largest like collapses of any ideology ever

like this is like a very serious it was a big ideology. It literally helped to develop the board game Monopoly. It was a huge thing. This is something I've actually been looking

into a lot. I've been trying to track down some of the original 1920s copies of Monopoly that's more based on the second theory. I've been trying to find the ones that were pre-Parker Brothers. I found a few two months ago, but before I could order

them, it was sold to somebody else on eBay. So I've been trying to track down another one in the past two months, and it's been a bit more challenging just because I'm kind of a Monopoly freak. Yeah, it's

really interesting to see how that game was developed and then changed over time and how Hasbro stepped in. Hasbro, the Parker Brothers, whatever, stepped in and did their

do and kind of basically rewrote the history of the board game entirely yeah but anyway elements of the Garden City, strong community engagement

community ownership of land Mixed tenure homes, housing types are generally affordable A wide range of local jobs with easy commuting distances of homes Well designed homes with gardens combining the best of town and country and green infrastructure

that enhances the natural environment with strong cultural, recreational and shopping facilities in addition to integrated and accessible transportation. It's not all sunshine and roses, though. I mean, you could look at the sort of the cream-washing elements of the Garden City design.

And even in their time, they were criticized were criticized i mean they were praised for being an alternative to the overcrowded industrial cities but they were also criticized for damaging the economy being destructive to the beauty of nature and being inconvenient you know they they weren't able to be and furthermore because they had this sort of top-down design philosophy, they weren't able to truly reflect the natural and organic developments of a town or a country. So secret third thing, couldn't do either of the things that the original two stuff could do. couldn't do either of the things that the original two stuff could do. And then of course you have the mustached man himself,

Murray Bookchin, stepping in, in the limits of the city to eviscerate the idea of the garden city. He talks about how Howard's scheme was basically a system of benevolent capitalism that presumed to avoid the extremes of communism and individualism. And as a result, his entire book was, quote, permeated by an underlying assumption so typically British that a compromise can be struck between an intrinsically irrational material reality and a moral ideology of high-minded conciliation. Mic drop. Yeah. I feel like the most brutal part of that is just the typically British part.

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

solar punk stuff online as well i mean we've already talked about definitely greenwashing throughout the solar punk aesthetic and stuff but yeah i mean it is it is an interesting interesting interesting aspect that keeps propping up and it's just intriguing that it like dates back over a hundred years ago, like this same exact thing. Yeah, exactly. And funny enough, you know, his garden cities were even falling short of utopias that were thought of

before his time, you know, like, I'm not even just utopias, but also actual historical political experiments that, you know like i'm not even just utopias but also actual historical political experiments that you know try to address various social problems you know like unlike the greek polis which had some basis of face-to-face democracy howard just had a central council and a department structure based on elections. Unlike in Thomas Moore's Utopia, there's no proposal for rotating agricultural and industrial work. Unlike the Paris

Commune of 1871, which was established long before Howard wrote his book, he had no sort of incorporation of that sort of political experimentation in the Garden City development. The criticism really is how superficial a lot of Howard's ideas are, right? Like there was just a lack of social analysis in favor of just design. Yeah, Georgism. Like, sure, it would probably be better than what we have now. Well, yeah, for sure.

But it by no means fixes all of the systemic issues. It's like Amsterdam, right? I would rather have capitalism while riding a bike. But Bookchin also talks about how these communities do not encompass the full range of possibilities a human experience again quote because you know bookchin is low-key a boss right neighborliness neighborliness is mistaken for organic social intercourse and

mutual aid well manicured parks for the harmonization of humanity with nature, the proximity of workplaces for the development of a new meaning for work and its integration with play, an eclectic mix of ranch houses, slab-like apartments and bachelor-type flats for spontaneous architectural variety, shopping mart plazas and a vast expanse of lawn for the agora, lecture halls for cultural centers, hobby classes for vocational variety, benevolent trusts for municipal councils for self-administration. One can add endlessly to this list of misplaced criteria for community that serve to obfuscate rather than clarify the high attainment to the urban tradition. Indeed, the appearance of community

serves the ideological function of concealing the incompleteness of an intimate and shared social life. Again, boom, you know? And people are brought together, you know, they have all these conveniences and these pleasantries, but they're still culturally impoverished. They're still atomized they still

deal with the stark reality of capitalism in the spaces that they're gonna inevitably spend most of their day at work like it's nice that the city is well designed but how much of it are you going to get to see if you still have to go to work for eight hours plus a day? I mean, if anything, at least, you know, your commute will probably be shorter, but that's about it. And that's if you get a job in the city itself. This is interesting because in some ways, the invention of the suburb in the years after this kind of tried to solve for this issue while also just doing it in an incredibly racist way. Like you can see the invention of the suburb

of trying to create these little nestled communities, but also getting away from the urban center, which was seen as this like scary place full of people who were non-white. So you have like this white flight thing that developed this notion of the suburbs which in in some ways kind of does this but in a in a much worse way actually it's it makes it makes the idea of the garden city look like a much better alternative to what the suburbs did and it's it's just interesting that even the version of this

that got implemented was just done in a way that is so much more dystopian and depressing. Yeah. I mean, and Buckchin addresses that comparison to the suburbs as well, right? He says, in the best of cases, the new towns differ from suburbs primarily because job commuting is short

and most services can be supplied within the community itself in the worst of cases they are essentially bedroom suburbs of the metropolis and add enormously to its congestion during working hours i can't i can't believe bookchin beat me to the punch on this one he outbookedbooked you. You've been booked in. I'm devastated. This is the first time Bookshin's ever has ever beaten me. This is truly terrible. Despite some of these flaws and criticisms, Howard was passionate

about his idea. He published the books. He also organized. He's actually not sitting on Twitter. He's actually doing something about his idea, right? I mean, he published the books. He also organized, like he's actually, he's not sitting on Twitter, right? He's actually doing something about his ideas. So he organized this Garden City Association in 1899 in England to promote the ideas of social justice, economic efficiency, beautification, health, and wellbeing in the context of city planning. That Garden City Association later became the town and country planning association which still exists to this day women played a very active role and continue

to play a very active role in the organization i mean as howard says himself in his book women's influence is too often ignored you hear that ladies these guys are feminists when the garden city is built as it shortly will be women's share in the work will be found to have often ignored. You hear that ladies? These guys are feminists. When the garden city is built, as it shortly will be, women's share in the work we found have been a large one. Women are among our most active missionaries. He's doing some Abdullah Ajalon shit now.

Look at that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's liberating life, you know? But yeah, the TCPA, yeah yeah yeah it's liberating life you know but yeah the TCP the Town Country Planning Association has continued to campaign for a new generation of garden cities based on modern

garden city principles they work cross sector and government influence policy and legislation they raise awareness through guidance and training. They promote affordable homes and inclusive, healthy, and climate-resilient places. And they try to explore barriers, opportunities, and practical solutions necessary to make new garden cities a reality. They also are genuinely interested in empowering people to have a real influence over decisions about their environments and to secure social justice within and between

communities or at least that is what their website says outside of the tcpa the idea of a garden city definitely sort of rooted itself in urban planning and the urban planning tradition and it did sort of feed into this rise of green spaces within urban landscapes that we now find around the world the concept of the garden city is definitely still revisited today but it's considerably different from the original idea um it's more so taking the garden city as an inspiration as an aesthetic inspiration um to create greater integration between urban areas and green spaces in his time though going back to the late 19th and early 20th century howard was a successful fundraiser again he was

trying to get things going in the first years of 20th century he built two garden cities letchworth garden city and wellwyn garden city both in hertfordshire england and both still exist today letchworth was originally quite successful. It was first an ancient parish from like the 11th century and remained a small rural village until the start of 20th century when the land was purchased by a company called First Garden City Limited,

which was founded by Howard and his supporters. And they went on to establish the United Kingdom's first roundabout the Soloschatz Circus a lot of urban like parkland and open spaces including a green space named after Howard called Howard Park a green space named after howard called howard park um but after howard's passing the first garden city limited was sort of taken over in 1960 and the company sort of changed how the town was managed uh the residents of the local council kind of lost some say. The original Garden City ideals were reduced and the corporation eventually became, first the company created a corporation,

transferred ownership to the corporation, which was now called Letchworth Garden City Corporation. And then that corporation was replaced by a charitable body in the 1990s called Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation, which continues to own and manage the estate to this day. Letchworth was a sort of an interesting experiment. The people who helped to found that town were very much otherworldly, as some people would describe them. otherworldly as some people would describe them um they for example they had a some people described them as health freaks they actually voted on a ban to set um against the selling of

alcohol um a ban on the selling of alcohol in public premises oh boy so which is i mean for a british village right in the early 1900s to vote against having a pub unheard of right they did eventually create a pub but that pub didn't serve any alcohol bum Bummer. Bummer. Hate to see it. Yeah. But Letchworth was still like a real pioneer. You know, its approach to blending town and country was used in the Australian capital, Canberra, in Hellrao in Germany, in Tapanila in Finland, and in the Mesa Parks in Latvia. And of course, in the other garden city, Wellwyn. Howard had arranged for that land to be purchased

by a company called Second Garden City Limited. Real creative there. And first they were going to call the city Diggswell, but a couple of days later they changed their mind, probably because they realized that's a dumb name. And they decided to call it Wellwyn. I wasn't going to say anything, but yeah, that's not a great name. Yeah.

And so the town is laid out along these three-line boulevards. It's sort of a New Georgian town centre. There's a lot of grass, a lot of parks, as we expected. And the planners had intended to create the Garden City to have like one shop called Wellwind Stores, which was basically a monopoly that all the residents were expected to shop at. Lastly, I think I want to bring up one final inspiration. I was a bit torn on whether I would include this one or not, but I said, you know what, it might be entertaining and I might want to talk about it further in the future a certain character by the name of walt disney oh no drew a great deal oh no this is epcot this is this is this is the extravento prototypical city of tomorrow yes this is oh no this is the florida project oh no disney's epcot was designed in concentric circles with

radiating boulevards no this is this this is the worst jump scare i've ever had oh but it should be noted or rather it should be expected that unlike Howard Mr. Disney envisioned having a lot of personal control over the day to day management of life in his city so really Epcot was only loosely inspired by Howard's idea of combining the populace with industry

this city would have had a hotel at the center with more than 30 stories and a convention center. There would be an internationally themed town center. There would be a mega mall. There would be themed restaurants, shops, and attractions. There would be a monorail. Yeah, it sure is. attractions there would be a monorail yeah he was a car free community

advocate yeah like his plan was that nobody would drive in Epcot delivery trucks and other automobiles that needed to enter the city were to be kept underground.

So it's kind of like a fusion of Ebenezer Howard and Elon Musk. That sucks. That sucks. Yeah. Also, the city would be climate-controlled with a glass roof. Yes.

I mean, it's funny because, like, he couldn't even do this properly. because like he couldn't even do this properly like he couldn't even build this instead it got turned into like a bare skeleton of what his original plan was because Epcot failed in so many ways

reason being that he ended up dying right? like even on his deathbed he was still sketching up designs for epcot so he never really got to implement it pro-life dictator dies anyways things of this nature the actual like the actual like living communities in in in disney world florida are are so different and in in many ways they're they're just like another suburb um except you're in a suburb owned by disney yeah yeah and i mean it's gonna be a little peek into what life would have

been like under epcot right your home would have been pre-fabricated and modular so the materials and technologies could be tested as soon as they were available by the way, while they have nothing against prefab homes, I think they could be very useful but Disney's idea was basically your home is prefab so that anytime he wanted to install an update on it, he could that's great

you know like the entire city was basically like a guinea pig for any technologies he came up with and so he wanted to really retain absolute control like a guinea pig for any technologies he came up with. And so he wants to really retain absolute control of the city. Like they wouldn't even own anything. Disney alone would own the land so that he and his successors can make updates and changes without ever being slowed down by this pesky thing called citizens votes and rights and all that.

It's funny because this is actually now under attack by Ron DeSantis in Florida. The sovereignty of Disney may change a lot. I think they lost it. I think they already stripped it. Yes, but how this plays out in actuality is yet to be determined. But it is funny that this is actually like this is a very uh very recent thing it's like the last like a week or so but see we what we can see here

is one of the inevitable transitions as as as we as we saw in british colonial rule in india which is that direct corporate rule is always replaced by indirect corporate rule via the state. Yeah, pretty much. In some ways, we will probably learn that it was better to live under Disney than run DeSantis. But that is not saying much. Next time he opens up a DeSantis world.

No, no. Do not call that into being. It's literally just like 18 Gitmo exhibitions. Oh Lord. I mean, DeSantis world would just be the United States when DeSantis was the presidential election. Oh God. True.

Sad, but true. But let me tell you a bit more about Epcot, right? If you were 18 or older, you have to have a job. Also, you don't get to retire. Nobody's allowed to retire. You only get to stop working if you either die or leave. Amazing. One way out.

Also, and reason being, he believed this would prevent slums or ghettos from forming in any part of his magical city because i mean if everyone has a job then nobody will be struggling to pay rent or eat right funnily enough of course a lot of disney workers today can't afford to pay rent or eat but hey the theoretically everybody in epcot would have their basic needs met also though in exchange for that they wouldn't have any privacy because epcot was also supposed to be like a tourist attraction you know you look outside the window and tourists are like looking inside the window so that was a that was a thing that was epcot thankfully it doesn't it wasn't fully implemented i mean some people have said that singapore is like a dystopian city state run by

disney but we could talk about that another time that's the basic rundown on Garden City's past, present, and future. The idea of it, I think, was notable, admirable, good effort, but flawed. And because it lacked a strong ideological foundation and economic foundation and analysis that took into account the contentions baked within society that manifests in the urban landscape. And I think it's a clear warning that for solar punks and for any people who are interested in urban planning as a whole, that aesthetics is not everything. Design is not everything. There has to be some meat to those, let's say some meat underneath that

flesh it's a really weird analogy but yeah yeah no but like yeah the the the the principle of okay i'm just gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna abandon the walter benjamin thing i was gonna do there but no try it keep keep going keep going we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna try the walter benjamin thing i haven't i haven't actually read any of his stuff in like five years. But one of Benjamin's things was when politics is sort of displaced or converted into aesthetic, it becomes fascism. So don't do that. In fact, have actual politics and not simply reduce your politics to an aesthetic or to aesthetics, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah.

True. True. All right. Well, that, etc. Yeah. True. True. All right. Well, that's it for me. You can follow me on youtube.com slash andrewism on Twitter at underscore stdrew and on patreon.com slash andrewism.

You can find us at Happen Here Pod or Cools on Media on Twitter and Instagram. And you can find me tweeting about my desire to understand the mechanics of how disney world operates at hungry bowtie mostly on twitter yay Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. 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.

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 Michael Duda Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, Or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. everywhere. 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. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast that I, Mia Wong, occasionally hijack to talk about Asian American stuff. And, you know, some pretty interesting Asian Americanian american stuff happened which is that uh yeah there was a a sort of massive sweeping cultural victory question mark for the asian american community tm when everything ever all at once did okay i'm getting conflicting sources about exactly the record that i said at the oscars but it won seven oscars did very well everyone is very happy um yeah so i decided that i was going to use this to talk

about some other stuff that is related to it um and with me to talk about many things including sort of the family and patriarchy and asian american uh culture and media is tiffany yang a filmmaker from new york tiffany welcome to the show hi mia thanks for having me on thanks thanks for being on um so we were trying to figure out how precisely we want to sort of start this because you know there's a lot of sort of angles you can take i think that the thing that i want to start with is well like a okay everything ever all at once is a very good movie in a lot of ways and i think it's sort of it's kind of the apotheosis of a a structure of asian american media that i've talked about before on this show um that i'm I'm going to run through a brief explanation of what this is.

So something that I've talked about a bit before that I think about a lot is the way in which Asian American media has been – it has basically a structural form. been it it it has a basically a structural form it has there's a very specific story or set of story structures into which anything you're trying to tell has to be fit and and that that series of things is okay so you have a small business you have you have a bunch of immigrants that come to the u.s or that there are well usually they're already in the u.s and they're trying to run a small business and they're having these issues sort of integrating into sort of like white American society. And there's some kind of conflict in the family and the TV show or the movie is about like resolving this sort of conflict. Yeah, and I think everything ever all at once is like the best version of this that we've ever gotten in a lot of ways. But, you know, and this is something I talked about in the sort of New Year's episode is that there's something about, I guess, Asian American, like the way our sort of political culture works that makes it so that this is the only story that we tell. it so that this is the only story that we tell and you know i mean you can look at a lot of the sort of like sorry i've been rambling for a lot but i want to get this out of the way before

we go further but you know like there's a lot of movies that are like it's like like you know shows like fresh off the boat like iron fist is also sort of like almost literally this right um like turning red is a sort of like an emblematic example of sort of thing that is exactly this like fresh off the boat is basically this right i think part of the sort of there's a kind of ideological shell game happening here that's about the family everything ever all at once has a lot of similarities with crazy rich asians in ways that are kind of not immediately apparent i have finally reached the point tm which is that both everything everywhere all at once and crazy rich asians end in exactly the same way right which is the the the like the the the the

sort of family tension that has had been sort of building up and playing out throughout the entire movie like is resolved and everyone sort of goes back to being a family and this is interesting specifically for crazy rich asians because in in the original like in the book version of this story the family shatters so the plot of that movie is this this asian american girl is dating like this guy who's from singapore who has not told her that he's from like an unbelievably rich like singaporean family and the story is by him going to is about them going to singapore and realizing that this guy is unbelievably rich and that his family are just

assholes who suck and in the book like the family like mistreats both of them really badly and so they just leave and they book it and they cut they cut off the rich family but in the movie they some weird thing happens where like the the main character plays mahjong with the guy's mom and like a miracle occurs and the family works out and everything everywhere all at once has has a very similar sort of thing where like the way this movie ends and I have to say this like I do I do like this movie a lot but the way that it ends is

Evelyn who is Joy's mom walks up to her and says you're fat and I don't like that you got a tattoo but also the family is good and like we should work it out and then they do like a miracle occurs and there's this sort of running ideology in this which is that like the the family is sort of is sort of too

big to fail like you're you're not allowed to have a a movie that's about something that's not about the family or be a movie where you know like the end of it is people walk away from their family because it's hurt them a lot right and i will also say that sort of asian american cultural production that doesn't center the family it actually just doesn't get read as being asian american right like i think i um i don't know if you've um seen this but like Bing Liu has this beautiful documentary called Minding the Gap. And it's about like his trauma and his like sort of youth growing up in a broken home and hanging out with skateboarding friends, some of whom are like black. friends um some of whom are like black and that just never gets talked about as an asian american film even though it's made by an asian american filmmaker and his experience as like someone who actually migrated from china is such a big part of his story like because it's not about this sort

of family conflict and reconciliation it actually doesn't get read as an asian american film a lot of the time um which to me is interesting um and yeah i just wanted to second your point that like in both of these films everything everywhere all at once and crazy rich asians like nothing actually changes you know there's the reconciliation within the family but nothing about the family structure changes like i think evelyn her the sort of like conciliatory gesture she gives is like oh i'm your mom and i would always choose to be with you in any universe i forget like the exact phrasing it's been a while since i've seen this film but it's something like that it's like you know i would still want to be with you because I'm your mom. And it's like this very, the family is its own explanation. Yeah.

And I think it points to sort of, this is the movie that I think hit the exact limit of this kind of sort of asian family politics because in in in its in in the sort of like moment where it needs to justify itself it can't it doesn't have anything the moments it's sort of it's it's it's empty of an actual like it's it's empty of of any sort of like ideological message about why this should be redemptive right like just you know and and i i think this is something that like we don't think about enough which is that like like okay if if your mother hurts you like a lot right like them being your mother is not a redemptive thing i mean this is something i've

been thinking about a lot in the context of sort of transness and and you know and in the ways that like trans people like i mean literally get killed by their families in the ways that they get you know kicked out from their families and and the ways that sort of this sort of self-justification of it's good because it is, right? Like the relationship, yeah, this is sort of what you were saying, right? It justifies itself by just like, well, I am your mother. It's like, well, that's not an argument, right? Yeah. Right.

And it's not enough. I think Joy spends the whole film fighting to be seen by her mom. And in the end, her mom doesn't really give any reason why she loves Joy. There's nothing specific to Joy herself as a person. It's just like, you're my daughter. I'm your mother. Of course, I love you. And, you know, like, why should that be something a queer child settles for? Like just this very basic baseline of acceptance rather than anything that like actually celebrates who they are as an individual. Yeah. And that's something that I also wanted to talk about with this is like, is, and this, this is not just like the specific,

you know, we're talking a lot about the specific movie because this is like the most recent one that's come out. And, and we're not sort of saying this to like, like there is a lot of like good stuff in this movie. Like this is the movie. Like,

like joy is probably the character who is like closest to me who I have ever seen in anything at any point. Right. And like there was something, you know, sort of incredibly emotional. Like I cried a lot during this movie that was like incredibly emotional about, you know, like seeing yourself in it. Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But there's something about the way that Asian Americans, like, especially sort of like cishet Asian Americans, think about queerness that I think is you see in this movie, which is that. Okay, so this movie has two queer relationships in it, right?

Unless you're going to count, like, the guy and the raccoon, which is funny, but I don't know about that one. But, you know, the actual two sort of like queer relationships are between Joy and her girlfriend and then between Evelyn and the tax lady. And there's two things that are interesting about that. One is that both of the characters they're in relationships with are white. And this is something that's very very specifically like pointed out about joy's girlfriend and you know as you know there's the joke it's like well she's half mexican but she's played throughout the entire thing as like an outsider who like doesn't understand what's happening in in the sort of scenes like doesn't understand the family dynamic doesn't doesn't understand his knees and you know and you see this again with okay so who

like you know they're able to imagine a world in which like evelyn the main character who has like just been homophobic this entire movie is in a queer relationship and like yeah like i good for her but if you look at who it's with right it's it's the character in the movie who is this tax lady who her thing is that she is like like she she she is like the human representation of the sort of white supremacist like capitalist bureaucracy that is you know attacking this family and is sort of like driving these people into the ground and then then she's sort of redeemed by like love and queerness. But there's this way that queerness gets positioned as outside of Asian-ness.

By the way that the only possible queer relationship that they can imagine is with a white person. As someone who's explicitly marked as an outsider. Right. Yeah. is with a white person as and you know as someone who's explicitly marked as an outsider right yeah i think that's a really good point like queerness queerness is like attached to these anxieties over assimilation yeah from the perspective of like the older generation like evelyn and g and Gong Gong it's like the fear of them being assimilated too much into this western culture um which is just a very it's it's very strange to me that this is the thing that keeps coming up in like Asian American narratives and discourses because obviously like Asian American like Asian queer cinema in Asia is like such a powerful cultural force.

And the film makes all these Wong Kar Wai references. And I feel like Wong Kar Wai has made like one of the greatest works of queer cinema happy together of like recent decades. And so it's just, it's so strange how queerness is being positioned as like an external threat and i mean like you know you you could you could take a sort of like like the if you want to do the lib analysis of this like china has had queer rulers like there has there has the west produced one like maybe i i possibly at some point maybe but like you know like i it's kind of like it's

ideologically frustrating right like we like you you know you can fall back on the like we know that like we have records of queer people in china for like 5 000 fucking years right like it's you know but like i i think i i think what's really interesting about this is that this is something that's seen as so natural that people writing, like even like Asian American writers writing about the film don't even notice it. Like they just sort of passively reproduce it. Yeah. And I don't know. know i i think it's like i mean it's deeply frustrating like being an asian queer person because this is something that like you know the the the kinds of right-wing nationalism

that like are like they they you know like there's different kinds of chinese nationalism right that will make that will make this like explicitly make the same argument that like gay people are like a like a sort of like i mean i guess they would have they would have said it was bourgeois but now it's a sort of like decadent western like imposition onto the like onto the world of asia but it's like like no but then but then but you know you you get these like sort of like very well credentialed like progressive like asian american writers who are just either implicitly or almost explicitly making exactly the same argument yeah yes and it's also what the american right wing think right like they look to china as like if you know china represents this like sexual threat of having this society where everyone is in their place.

They imagine that the traditional gender roles are much more adhered to in China, which is why it's like we're on the decline, like China's rising. So it's – yeah, it is a very weird idea that nationalists on both sides are attached to, and it's disappointing that Asian Americans who think of themselves as progressive or even radical kind of reproduce this unthinkingly. Yeah, I mean one of my like recent black pill moments was – I don't know if people remember this, but there was someone on twitter who very kind of famously got like just like obliterated for saying that i for for for saying that like people people shouldn't like cancel their subscription to the new york times uh after they like did the whole thing this they did this whole bullshit and people don't know what this sort of scandal was so the uh a bunch of people who'd written for the new york times sent them a a very very mild letter saying like hey can you guys like fix some obvious like not even saying fix like can you report on trans issues better here are some like glaring certain mistakes that you made in

new york times through a hissy fit and got really mad at them and and you know this this person's reaction was like oh well you can't you like don't cancel your subscription like you have to support the news and it was this like sort of moment and she is one of the hosts of like one of the big progressive asian american podcasts and it was like it was this you know for me it was this really sort of like black pilling moment of like oh this is like this is like what like like you know what like like three like three 375 a month is what these people think my life is worth like yeah i don't know i think this kind of ideological stuff is very deeply tied into the way that asian americans have been representing and thinking about the family instead of recent years.

But before we go into that, do you know what the family is trying to sell you? It is the products and services that support this podcast. We have to take an ad break. We will be right back. Mia, just out of curiosity, since I don't have the pleasure of listening to the ads while we're recording like what is gonna play during that oh I have no idea like it could be anything I don't know it could be a gold ad it could be the f well we haven't had the FBI tried to do it yet we've had we've had we've had law enforcement agencies we've had people selling gold Ronald Reagan coins we've had

I don't think I've seen that since I was a child I think they used to have television commercials yeah they do it on podcast now apparently a thing that I discovered when people sent me the clip of it

so who knows maybe they'll do a thatcher one and you you two can own the the immortal words there is no such thing as society there is only individuals in the family yeah wow well whatever it takes to keep the podcast running. Yeah. So, all right. Something I wanted to sort of circle back to is, you know, I think one of the sort of – one of the things about this kind of Asian American media, you know, have this this sort of ambivalence of like like who like what the sort of queer child is supposed to be and you know like i would say this like it is a pretty common experience if you are like a queer child of an asian family that your family does fucked up shit to you um like that's a thing um and this is

i wanted to ask you about something that you've been talking about that i'm sort of interested in which is one of the things that that i don't know when you try to talk about this stuff there's this way in which the way we sort of collectively think about when i say we this is like i guess like a kind of specific asian american thing the way we think about trauma gets involved very quickly yeah and i was wondering if you could talk about that some more yeah i i feel like there's this, there are these sort of like unspoken discursive rules where when you talk about trauma within an Asian immigrant family, there are like, first of all, it's always intergenerational trauma, right? Like you can't talk about like a queer child experiencing trauma without then like getting into the fact that oh like the parents have um

experienced traumatic things like through the process of immigration or like war um the refugee experience etc etc and so there's this sort of like economy of trauma where some members within the family get their trauma treated as more legitimate and others don't i think it's like really common to hear this um refrain which is like oh um second generation immigrants are like the you know people like us asian immigrant children who are born in the west um can't possibly know the like the real trauma that our parents or grandparents went through because they were the ones who like fled their countries or experienced war firsthand or grew up in poverty but then it's also just like when we talk about intergenerational trauma, there's this sort of like obfuscation of who is enacting that trauma

within the family, right? Like if the intergenerational trauma exists, like who is passing it down? And so I don't know if I'm articulating myself well on this, but yeah, I guess the central idea is that I think there's this like mechanism, which kind of immediately delegitimizes any talk of abuse or trauma from the perspective of Asian youth or from the perspective of like the child in the family. Yeah. And I think that's a kind of, I don't know, there's this really baffling, deep unwillingness in a lot of ways to think about. And I think this is a sort of broader like cultural thing too, but there's this deep unwillingness to think about the family as a

violence and as a side of sort of profound violence it's like you know like it's the place where the the violence that shapes you comes from in a lot of cases and i mean like i i know a lot of people this has happened to you this happened to me to some extent and there's this real kind of you know this is what this is what i actually really liked about everything if we're all at once it's like it like goes into that in a lot of ways like it is a movie for about 99 tenths of the movie it is a movie about how like the people around like how the people in your family can hurt you repeatedly and about the sort of like the the ways that they think about it the way but you know there's there's

but but but but i think this is where the sort of perspective thing comes into it where like yeah we're i think like we don't really have a language to sort of talk about this stuff. And the, the way the film deals with it is sort of like, you know, is, is, is,

is this kind of like very specific kind of nihilism, which is like definitely a thing that you could fall into, right? Like, you know, like that, like that, that is definitely a reaction to being traumatized,

but it's seen as like illegitimate and will destroying i think in a lot of ways because it causes you to sort of like if that's your experience with the family like you're going to leave or you're going to or you're only going to stay in by force and so it you know the movie sort of rejects it but but you know there's this way that it's very difficult to talk about this stuff and about the sort of like long arc of how people have thought about the family before us right what what's an example of what you mean by like how people have thought about the family before us well i i think i think in the chinese context in particular there's a very there's like there's i mean if if you look at what was happening in the sort of very radical periods in Chinese history in the last hundred years, you look at sort of what's going on in 1925.

If you look at what happens immediately after the Chinese Revolution, there is a real period of questioning patriarchal authority of questioning like what is the family for like why why are we doing this and you know i think i think the answers they came to were ultimately unsatisfying which is that like well we need the family around because like we we our our economy does not function without uncompensated labor so the the the maoist sort of like attempt to grapple with this fails but i i don't like as as as as with many things that maoism attempted grappled with i don't think they were wrong to look at it i think their solutions were all terrible but i i think there's this kind of i mean there's this reaction there's there's a kind of older asian queer reaction which i think is is like kind of deeply suspicious there's this reaction there's there's a kind of older asian queer reaction

which i think is like kind of deeply suspicious of the family as you know this thing that has an enormous amount of potential to sort of inflict violence on you and sort of destabilize your life and cut you off from resources and information sort of i mean i i was struck by someone else making this comment um about how like in everything everywhere all at once you know they can imagine like this sort of infinite um number of universes but in every single one the family unit remains the same um you know like the the social arrangement never changes across all of these different universes um yeah i thought that was a really good point um there's just like the sense in which a lot of the recent asian american culture can't imagine the family as like something that can be transformed it just kind of takes it for

granted as this like static eternal structure which can't be challenged and people if they find reconciliation or happiness it needs to be somehow within that same arrangement yeah and i think a lot of that has to do with like the thing that we've decided about elders collectively which is another one of those things that like is like the the the legitimacy of the authority of elders is something that in in chinese revolutionary history is something that's very much up for debate. And almost everyone who decided to like take up arms against the state, like almost all of those people were like, this is messed up. And then, you know, I think partially as a result of how badly sort of the Maoist project goes.

And then also I think as, as, as a kind of like explicit part of state policy, there's this way in which that kind of authority gets re-inscribed and any sort of questioning of it gets, gets looked at as like, Oh, we're like a return to sort of like Maoist egalitarianism or whatever, which is the thing that I see a lot in the ways that like not really Asian Americans, but like in the – I don't know.

You see this in Chinese discourse like a decent amount. I mean you see this in kind of messed up ways in some of the Asian American discourse from people whose families never participated directly in the Maoist project you know they might have like a lot of people who immigrated here to the

US weren't like they were connected to the KMT they were on the nationalist side these are people who ideologically were never aligned with um any sort of socialist project and you know they'll they'll invoke things like well you know this is exactly what my ancestors were fleeing from china yeah that's like okay like you guys like i i i have really bad news for you about like what the kmt's ideology was and like what i feel like this is like sort of these are like the egg

monopoly people right yeah and but i i think i i think like this has two effects right which is like on the one hand those people like that like specific kind of very weird chinese anti-communist is sort of incredibly privileged in in the way that like that stuff's thought about but then you know like there are a lot of people who are in like from like from china who are in the u.s like specifically because of the failure of this project and this is something else he talked about in the atlanta episodes but like several of the people like who were killed in atlanta like were there because like liberalization drove them to a point where like they you know where they had to work to support their families and you know

and and the the other thing that sort of comes hand in hand with liberalization is that that is and i i i don't know this is something that like people really don't want to think about which is that you know economic and to some extent political liberalization in china came hand in hand with this massive entrenchment of the patriarchal project which is the one child policy just sort of slamming down like a hammer of being of the state just being like we are going to just directly like we are going to directly control your reproductive autonomy we are going to you know we are going to forcibly sterilize people we are going to like we'd literally just limit the amount of kids you can have we are going to make this sort of like giant i don't know like this enormous state

intervention into like social reproduction and the people who are the victims of that like you don't really hear from them much i mean like one of the stories i i'm sorry i'm still just haunted by is that one of the people who died in atlanta like her family refused to bury her like refused to take her remains to bury her because like their village was like no well you you you never married so you can't be like buried in the village and wow yeah and so you know like her like she had a funeral in the u.s that was attended by no one who knew her because none of her friends could show up because they get arrested by the cops and you know there were these like there were these kinds of like transnational linkages of like the violence of people's families that just disappears from this sort of like narrative of like like asian-american-ness like is the family

is this unit is this relation right and on that note did we also want to talk about how the sort of like focus on the small business slash family or the family as a small business obscures some of the class conflicts within the asian american community like these very massage workers you're talking about i remember in the wake of that atlanta shootings a lot of people started they kind of use the massage workers as like an emblem of the Asian American community more broadly um when in fact like a lot of the sort of like more professional class Asian Americans or like the Asian Americans who get platforms in the media um they aren't like they aren't from the same

class as like the massage workers are, um, we heard from like a lot of small business owners, but those are, those are the same people who like own massage parlors and hire these exploited workers to like have undocumented status and who can thus be like put into much more precarious positions than like you know u.s citizens and so um yeah i did you want to talk a bit more about that yeah i mean i i think i think the small business owners are it's a really sort of interesting and powerful character like especially in the u.s because it's it's like it's possible to be a small business owner be really poor but also not be propertyless

yeah and and i think that like the like the specifically like the core of the american dream is just to own property and you know so here is this class you can point out it's like oh well we're really poor but you don't actually you never have to look at labor relations at all right and that that like frees you from having to actually think about what capitalism is and it also lets you it it lets really like the actual sort of like the the real sort of asian american ruling class right like the actual billionaires right yeah sort of asian american ruling class right like the actual billionaires right yeah there are asian american billionaires there's a good number of them there's also just a bunch of just asian billionaires because there is a there's just an asian ruling

class it lets those people especially in the u.s hide behind the image of the sort of small business owner right and they can you know and they can use it to launder their sort of reputation because like it's in the u.s like being anti-small business is like the hardest position you can possibly take it is like like it is you you like i don't know if people remember this um a friend of mine vicky osterwe, wrote this book called In Defense of Looting. Oh, yeah. That's a great book. Yeah, great book. Everyone should read it. There were sitting US senators were yelling about the book.

A huge swath of the left got unbelievably mad about it. A lot of you will probably also get mad about it. But one of the things that always comes up with looting is like, it's like, well, are you going to loot small businesses? And it's like like one of the things that always comes up with with with looting is like i you know it's like well are you going to loot small businesses and it's like well actually yeah like like insofar as people looting small businesses a lot of times it's the people

who work there and it sucks because working for small businesses is fucking terrible and right yeah or people in the community where those small businesses are and like are discriminatory towards yeah and Vicky makes this point about this there's this kind of populism that gets invoked where you know one of the police statements about I think it was about Ferguson

was they're talking about like they burned down our Walmart and it's like well what do you mean our Walmart like we don't fucking our walmart like we don't fucking own the walmart like we don't get shit from it like everyone who works in the walmart gets fucked everyone has to buy from the walmart but it's it's this really hollow like populism like it's this thing that like you you assemble a community based around the around a corporation and and i i think that's kind of what's been happening with like i think

this is the reason why asian american culture is like like this because it's it's this it's like you know there's there's this very hollow like in a lot like like multinational like populism has been assembled around like the figure of the small business owner but it's ultimately like it doesn't really have ideas other than you should let us like you should let us make money without being racist and also the it has that idea and then it has the idea that the family is good because it is and that's kind of

it yeah yeah I don't know I think there's a lot about well okay i i will say this like the the the the day people are okay with looting small businesses is the day the u.s can actually fall at any moment until before then like it will it will survive because that's always the sort of last defense of of capitalism is like what about small businesses and you will you will get people who call themselves communists who will be like

no no no actually these are fine it's like i okay so i i wanted to kind of pivot back around a bit to talk about elders a bit more because i feel like i kind of sidetracked us off of that and i yeah i think this is really i don't know there's been this kind of like rehabilitation of the elder in a way that like was something that was deeply questioned in in periods where it was kind of like it was more obvious and less and more socially acceptable to sort of look at the power these people have and how much it can suck well yeah i think i noticed this picking up during you know the the sort of like first spate of anti-asian attacks during covid i think that's when like a lot of progressive Asians started invoking the figure of the elder, right? Like our elders are being attacked, like an attack on our elders is an attack on our community, like that sort of thing.

Where the elder is kind of like used as a sort of emblem of the innocence of the Asian American community? Or what do you like, what work do you think the elder is doing there in this discourse? Like, why does it have to be an elder? Like, what if you were just saying Asian people are being attacked? Or like, what if it was Asian youth being attacked? Like what, why does it have to be the Asian elder? Because I think we were talking about this earlier empirically it's not exactly true right it wasn't mostly old people who are victims of these attacks yeah and i mean i think this is one of the areas where like the murky like you know it's really really hard to get good data on who's being attacked because i mean police reports are obviously incredibly unreliable right

and then you know like there's self-collected data but the self-collected data is not all encompassing it you know it's sort of skewed in its own ways but yeah i i think i think there's this way in which like i don't know like i think there's almost this way in which elders almost are like they're also like like personally infantilized by it whereas like they're picked as this sort of like like part of like they use this as sort of symbol of like people who can't defend themselves which partially isn't true like there were actually examples of like Asian elders like defending themselves but but it does this kind of like and also like the the rates of um gun purchase purchases went up with it i mean i i know like just anecdotally in the chinese american community i knew so many like

like elderly chinese people who are like i'm gonna go out and buy a gun now yeah yeah i think like the the way that that thing it was invoked has a lot of sort of like i don't know it was it was like there was this way in which they like they became framed as like this is sort of like this is the apotheosis of like everything that it is to like be asian american and that like that like the fact that that was under attack was this sort of incredible crisis right and i think like i i think there's like that obscures a lot about what was happening which is that like if there was one clear trend in the data it was that women were being attacked at like a way higher rate than anyone else and you know and this has been a a thing that has sort

of continued which is like i don't know like there's been more attacks in the last like few months right and it's it's it's it's been a lot of like young women getting like young asian women getting pushed in front of trains and people have just really stopped caring like yeah to the extent where like it's like literally a meme that you can like watch the the cycle of like the the stop api hate like signs coming up and down right and i don't know i i i i think i think the elder part of it kind of like it obscured a lot of what was actually happening yeah i i feel like the last incident that really made a splash in the media was um the murder of christina y, is that her? I forget what her last name is, but, um, Christina Yuna Lee, um, getting murdered in Chinatown, and this was already a year ago, um, and I haven't really heard anything since, like. I see things in the local news.

Where I live in Queens recently had a couple of attacks just a week ago, I think. But it didn't make the national news or anything. Yeah, and I think the way that the kind of like hierarchy of victimhood i guess affected that like has it had i mean i'm not sure it's the biggest like single reason why everyone has sort of stopped caring but like i like i think the sort of stop aapi hate like that moment kind of only happened because there was this sort of backlash against like there's this backlash against black lives matter and against the insurrection and people needed another people needed a kind of like ideologically safe like thing like way of demonstrating

like how good their politics were or whatever but i think it definitely contributed to sort of why like stuff has been abandoned and i also wanted to ask do you see this this thing this fixation on elders um it's happening at the same time that ancestors get invoked a lot in like asian american literature especially queer literature um i'm thinking of authors like ocean wong like how did ancestors become such a thing yeah it's really i don't know i really don't understand how that happens like a lot of my ancestors fucking sucked like i i don't like i like i i don't know how to sort of like i i i don't know i i i i have this sort of

i don't know i i i have this sort of weird sense of the kind of politics at work here which is like there there's a lot of kinds of politics that i think can work and for example in indigenous contexts that are very very powerful that don't really work in the asian american context where like like our ancestors like if you're chinese right your ancestors did some fucked up shit. Like your ancestors did a lot of genocides. Like you, you like, you know, and I think, I think this is something that's actually at the core of, of the, of kind of like right wing Chinese nationalism, which is that like right wing Chinese nationalism is basically about the anger that China was like ceased to be able to be an empire. China was like ceased to be able to be an empire because like if you look at the sort of colonization process, right, like the Qing are this very, very expansionist like sort of militarist imperial state, right? Like they're – they're like – they conquer like – if they fight a bunch of wars around Tibet, they conquer Xinjiang. They do a genocide there like immediately.

They're pushing south. They're pushing – like they're basically pushing like in every direction they could possibly push and then they kind of like you know they they they hit like a pretty impressive territorial boundaries and then their ability to do imperialism gets kind of halted because suddenly there's other imperial powers like in the region and you know it's the sort of end of this is like they they they lose all these wars and you have the start of like this you have the start of the century of humiliation and all of the sort of stuff that happens there but it's like like the actual thing that they're like the actual thing that the century of humiliation people are humiliated about well i mean the fact that

it's called the century of humiliation and not like I don't know like the century of death or something which for people who don't know what the century of humiliation is so I think it's I think that the actual 1840 to 1940 there's this sort of nationalist term around understanding

this period in which China is undergoing like it is genuinely like like people in china are like suffering enormous imperial violence um you like i like unfathomable numbers of people die in this period this is like the opium but basically a period from the opium wars until you know sort of through the various japanese conquests and then sort of ending essentially with the revolution but yeah i don't know like i think it's interesting that it's understood in the in terms of national humiliation in terms of

sort of like the loss of this ability to do like i mean to do imperialism and instead of in sort of terms of like the just unfathomable human suffering that went on and i i i think this all of this sort of comes back to this weird kind of intensification of of nationalism kind of among everyone in in the last like especially since 2020 you know i mean there's been there's been in like a kind of like explicit like nationalist turn in some parts of the left, but I think it's really kind of hit everyone in ways that hasn't really been examined. having a kind of like theoretical and cultural language to speak about Asian-American-ness partially because, well, because like the, you know, I've talked about this before, right? But like the term Asian-American was created by like third worldists, right? Many of them are Maoists, some of them are Marcus Leninists, but like that whole language

just died. I mean, like, you know, you can still find like Baba V-Leninist, but like that whole language just died. I mean, like, you know, you can still find like Baba Vankian or whatever, but like the sort of language is like understanding yourself as part of the third world and like, you know, like as like a national liberation movement, like that's over. National liberation is

basically dead as a politics, like anyone who tried it after a certain point like just got called secessionists and now just get murdered horribly um and like you know and there's obviously also the sort of like china vietnam cambodia fighting each other thing that that has this massive impact on on that kind of politics and it gets replaced with um this kind of politics that's based that you know it gets sort of replaced by like the the asian civil rights movement stuff right but like there's there's no but the thing is the asian civil rights movement is it doesn't have politics like its politics are completely

incoherent like you have like you literally have these marches where you have like like old school like kmt death squad guys like marching next to maoists and it's like why because it's supposed to be a sort of like pan-ideological thing and over time like all the all the ideologies are supposed to compose it die and but that meant that like there's no like there's no actual language to sort of talk about the experience because the the two sets of vocabularies that like or like wait like frames of understanding the struggle are just have both kind of like. Either basically collapsed or been discredited. And I think that leaves this hole and people are trying to fill the hole by like adopting other people's politics.

But like it doesn't work for us i don't think like i i don't know like i like i i think people will disagree with me about the potential of of sort of ancestor politics and the politics of elders but like i don't think it does that much for us yeah i think the last thing that that i do want to say is you know if we've reached the limits of a lot of the politics that we've been seeing here um what what what kinds of politics and what kind of also sort of what kind of media do you do you see as stuff that we can use to go beyond this because i think there is a of like, like there are a lot of like people creating good, like queer stuff that are not like,

yeah, actually, I think I mentioned this to you. I recently watched this film called return to soul. It's by a director called Davy Chu. And it's about a French Korean adoptee. So she was adopted from Korea as a baby. I mean, yeah, as a baby by French parents and grew up in France.

And the film is like kind of a journey of her going back to Korea and meeting her birth family. But it's like, it's not, it doesn't fall into the same sort of like family natalist politics. It's very like deeply questioning of, um, of the family and of even like this idea that, um, I guess what the sort of like wayward, queer, stray Asian child like needs in order to heal from trauma. Like she doesn't really have,

um, reconciliations with either family, like either her French family that she comes from, like they're very much sidelined in this film. They just don't play that big of a role. And then she, and then when she goes to Korea, you know, she has these very like awkward encounters meeting her birth family. Cause they're like immediately like oh you know we're

so sorry we gave you away now you're back you could come live with us and she's just like hold on like i don't even know if i consider you my family and so it it seemed to me like to really um depart from this like script that we've become so accustomed to in asian diasporic film in a really interesting way i thought and it's also a lot about music like it's a very moody music driven film it doesn't feel that identitarian yeah i would recommend everyone to watch it everything i've read all at once is we have that we have now told the best version of that story and i i think we can find you know i would just like like this is this is a really broad recommendation but like go watch one car this is this okay this is the most film nerd i'm

ever gonna get that doesn't involve i i why am i suddenly blanking on the name of the thing sorry daniel uh the most film nerd i'm ever gonna to get that doesn't involve La Commie de Paris 1871 is go watch Roncar Y. Like they're there. I don't know. I think I think there is something to be gained by looking at, you know, I mean, they're like looking at Hong Kong cinema, looking at. I don't know. I like good, good. Americans have finally realized that korean

cinema is really good which is wonderful um i'm glad i'm glad we're you know getting to the place where people realize that it's that like there's a lot of great stuff going on there but we know it is possible to for asians to tell different stories because all across the world they already are right like we we are already telling stories that are different and more interesting than this and I think well then and I'm not specifically saying like then everything everywhere all at once but

then that then the specific structure that that these that the Asian American movies fall into and yeah people should go discover them because they're great and yeah we can find new and better kinds of queer joy. And yeah. Yeah, Tiffany, thank you so much for joining us and being on.

I don't know why I'm saying us as if there's more than me here. But yeah, thank you. Thank you for being on the show. Yeah, anytime. Thank you for having me on. And it's been a really stimulating conversation yeah yeah this has been it could happen

here you can find us at happen here pod on twitter and instagram you can find cool zone media at cool zone media I hope it's cool zone media I'm actually not 100% sure if that's I should know this by now I I simply have not learned um

yeah go go go go into the world be gay do crime 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. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, 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 Nocturnne Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex 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. 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. Gonzales 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. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today we have a really exciting episode. We're going to be talking to a group of workers from the California Nurses Association, which is specifically their national organizing committee, which is, I think, better known to most people as NNU or National Nurses United. And these people are part of a shift of workers who was, for the first time, running a rank-and-file slate for the Council of Presidents, which is sort of...

They're a body that combines the positions of vice president and president of the union. They're called shift change. And so, Eric, do you want to introduce yourself? All right. My name is Eric Cook. I've been a nurse for 32 years. I currently work in the cardiac telemetry floor. And I became a nurse after being a Navy corpsman in the first Gulf War and just continued in healthcare from there. I was originally in LVN and then became a registered nurse. And I've been on the past three negotiating teams for AltaBates Summit Hospital. And I've seen a lot of changes in the attitude and movement of the union in the past 12 years. So I'm hoping with John and Raina and Mark to make a change for our union and our members for the better. Yeah, glad you could be here to join us.

Thank you. Yeah, Raina, do you want to introduce yourself? Hi there. I'm Raina Lindsay. I have been a California nurse for over 13 years. And out of those 13 years, eight of them, I've been in AltaBase Medical Center, which was my first union as an RN. And also, I'm sorry. And also I work in ICU and I've been there for about seven years. Wow. And I worked with Eric a year prior to that. So the reason why I became a nurse is a long story, but the bridge version is at the beginning, I wanted to be a lawyer. So when I went to college,

kind of thought I was dyslexic. So that kind of backed out. And then I also was a teen mom, which that's something that a lot of people do not know about me. And during that whole process, me. And during that whole process, I wanted to find something that I could be an advocate for people and also know the political side of it. So nursing became the best benefit. One thing I love about nursing is you can learn everything about the world and know about people without going anywhere. So that was the thrill. And then also being an advocate for the patients I take care for. In addition to that, you know, knowing my peers and knowing that we all have the similar struggles when it comes to the systems that we work for, it doesn't matter which employee you work for. And so being in the union, it gives you that way of a contract between

you and your employer. And along the way, there has been some issues which Eric and I and John all been experiencing where things do need to change. And being part of shift change is part where we have the change of leadership and be more transparent between the union the employer and the people in general hell yeah and yeah john do you want to introduce yourself yeah sure um i'm john hieronymus. I'm a PACU recovery nurse at University of Chicago. Before that, I was in the medical ICU for six and a half years. And then before that, I was like a associate's degree, RN working at the emergency room at Holy Cross Hospital. And I also started, which is funny to me, as an LPN, which is the same thing as an LVN that Eric did. And I was a CNA before that. I decided to become a nurse way back in the day when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do

after dropping out of high school. And I was thinking about, man, maybe I should become like a history teacher and i was like oh why would i want to go back to this place i hate so much i dropped out of it um and i personally got like incredibly sick with something called ulcerative colitis and i got um a bunch of surgeries done and got some really amazing experience uh being taken care of by nurses and it became really immediately obvious to me like I also like Raina wanted to help people and also I thought that nursing was

like a way where even like for you know individuals I could change someone's day just a little bit for the better but also like maybe change some bigger things. And so I thought nursing was just like a really great way to do that. Also, I was really fortunate to be raised by an amazing nurse. My mom was a nurse and she was always like, she's like one of those people who's my hero. And a lot of other nurses in my family, both men and women, including someone who is like a Kentucky frontier nurses, like the first group of nurse practitioner, nurse midwives back in the, like the 1940s back in Kentucky. So I got a lot of nurses in my family and this like incredibly proud to be like pairing on all the stuff that they have been doing for all their years as like nurses.

So and like meeting the folks out in California, like Rain bigger impact on how things are happening in our profession and the healthcare industry and just the broader world. Yeah. Yeah. We've talked to like a decent amount on this show now about sort of the labor issues that have been facing nurses, both actually here and in the UK, and I think a little bit in a couple of other countries. Yeah, I was wondering what were the sort of specific things that y'all were dealing with, both just in the profession and then also in the union

that got y'all together to run this slate? Okay, so one of the things that caused us to actually meet by coincidence was one of my co-workers, Torald Ordahl, who's a Norwegian nurse who's been a nurse here in America for over 30 years. She contacted Labor Notes and realizing something was wrong in our union, she started talking with specifically Sarah Hughes at Labor Notes. And through Labor Notes and Sarah, we were able to connect with John in Chicago. And it was amazing that what we discovered is that our problems here in California were mimicking what they've experienced in Chicago. And through Sarah finding out from other diverse communities of nurses in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, New York, and Minnesota, that the same things are happening there under our same union. And our complaint was, through our union, was that we felt we were being siloed. And of course, when I say siloed is, actually in our negotiations, we had

17 facilities negotiating, but we were told that we were not allowed to communicate with each other, that it was forbidden by the federal mediator. Now, this is my... Yes, yes, I know. That was my reaction initially too. There were two other negotiators on the team. There were two other negotiators on the team. It was highly suspicious because the union wanted to put all new nurses onto the negotiating team. And that was a little bit of a red flag. There were so many red flags through this negotiations. I swear I could almost see Lennon's tomb. That's how many red flags there were. It was amazing to us is that they said the mediator forbade us from talking to each other because that was part of the agreement to have the federal mediator. We, the three of us that had previous experience with negotiating, just knew that was the wrong thing. And it took over at least about seven months before we started breaking through to other tables and communicating with them on text and having our own Zoom conversations with them to convince them that, no, this is a lie. We are allowed to talk to each

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

And then in the midst of this, you have a union that shortchanges you at a point when we had so much power. And thank heavens for Sarah to put us into contact with all these other nurses to realize that it wasn't just the Sutter division of the California Nurses Association that was running things amok. It was actually, it seemed to be a perceived playbook plan of what they were doing throughout the country. And I think nobody perceives themselves as doing evil or anything like that. I think they always think that they're doing it for the better interest of everybody. But that's what's important about a rank and file movement is that every nurse, every person in the union is important and deserves a voice. union is important and deserves a voice. And we don't need to be gaslit. We don't need to be mistreated by the union that we pay to represent us. We need to be marching on the boss. We could have had an unending euphoria for nurses with a contract. We could have had great staffing. We could have

had better pay. We could have had everything that we wanted to make our work lives to be the best they could be. And it seemed our union already had a pre-planned agreement with the corporation. Now, they deny that, but it's kind of hard to believe when they had the same agreement that they were supposedly negotiating in silos, that each table was supposedly negotiating their own, but it was the same thing they wanted at every table. And not all the tables were equal. It was very sad for us. Like I said, this is the third negotiating team I was on. The first negotiating team I was on, we lasted over two years negotiating and we went through nine strikes and threatened a 10 tenth until we got an agreement.

So our hospital, obviously, it's Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley. Our sister hospital is Summit Hospital in Oakland. And we have affiliated with us is the Herrick Campus, which is the psychiatric facility. psychiatric facility. And we have struggled so much through this pandemic. And it was amazing to us that we came up with less than what we should have gotten. I will tell you that thanks to Sarah and meeting all these other nurses, we were able to come back. And I think through fear and intimidation, our union was forced to back us. And we were able to get economically what we wanted. But like the rest of the country as nurses, we wanted better staffing. We needed more bodies at the bedside.

We're overworked. We're fatigued. Raina worked in the ICU, and they had their own COVID unit there. I don't think there was enough Tums and Rolaids to go around for all of those nurses. The anxiety and the heart in your throat. And of course, John himself, I don't want to his personal business, but, you know, his experience, he has long COVID. So we, we as nurses have suffered quite a bit and we expected a lot more from our union. yeah and i mean even just on a very basic level like no matter what you go through you have the right for your union not to lie to you

that's it that seems like a very elementary sort of thing that's a really elementary thing mia but like it's really um it's really scary um how comfortable some of the people who are paid their wages out of our dues are with lying to us. I think that's a thing that like, you know, like we're one of the things we're specifically fighting for is like transparency and accountability, especially for our staff. And, you know, when I, you know eric mentioned that i had had long covet i'm finally getting i've been to the point where i'm like as recovered as i probably ever will be and

which is great you know being recovered from long covet is so much better than having long covet um but you know i was always like someone that they came to, to ask for help with like political sorts of issues inside the union, um, or they would come to me for Medicare for all, or, um, you know, uh, speaking, um, around things like ratios, that sort of stuff. Or they would send me off to when the Chicago teachers went on strike in 2019, uh, I was sent to speak on behalf of our union for them. And, you know, just doing the work of, I'm kind of a, I'm a bit of an agitator. And then COVID hit and it was just a really surreal experience. And my area of the hospital

is one of those places where they basically did everything they could to minimize the amount of surgeries we were doing initially when the lockdowns were happening for the first six months of pandemic. And then, but they were moving us into because we are all former ICU nurses. So I would do my few shifts up in the medical ICU. Then we made a special clean ICU because we were still getting traumas. University of Chicago apparently sees more penetrating gunshot and stab wounds than any other hospital in the United States. 30 percent of our traumas are are from some sort of violence, which is substantially higher than anywhere else in the US. And then I got sick, right? And so, to me, the union was like a thing that was like, man,

this is nice to have. I had never worked in a union hospital before. Getting union raises was like a big step up in my life, you know and it was also like oh yeah our union's progressive like i kind of i like most of the things that it stands for um and i didn't really think of it as someone that needed the union right to do the things that unions really kind of like it's the bread and butter of unions which is like coming in and like helping you when you need help as an individual worker and um you know when you're not in the middle of like a contract negotiation and i got sick with long covid and lost we had negotiated this great you know like covid sick pay policy and management just took that away without like, for me,

without really giving any notice or, you know, explanation why and you sit there trying to get like the help that you need from your union. It's like, um, I'm trying to explain why it is that like, this is a problem for me to our labor rep. It's like our, I call them business agents, labor reps, whatever. There are people who basically are paid out of our dues to kind of help us in theory like stay organized and be pushing management to do you know to follow the contract and uh it got to the point where like my partner

uh who's like is like literally screaming at the labor rebel. I'm on the phone with the labor rep and she's, you know, it's just like, what the fuck is your union even doing? Like why are they not making sure that you're taking care of? And it was like this really like come to Jesus moment where you're like, Oh yeah. Like this union shit. Isn't just like, you know, platitudes about like, we need a ratio bill in Illinois or, you know, Medicare for all or bernie sanders it's like oh this shit is actually like about my material well-being and like my family

still hasn't recovered from all that because they only you know after an enormous amount of pressure was put on staff they finally started looking into it um and we got you know payouts for not just me but for 10 other nurses who had had their covid pay like uh cut uh you know like really in unjust ways um and really opened my eyes as to like what a union should be doing um and it really opened my eyes that maybe there's a problem with how staff interact with us as workers because like there should be um you know we try and like say like you know there's a service union service or service unionism and then there's rank and file unionism we have this weird situation where they tell us we're a rank and file democratic union except the the staff kind of treat us like you

know it's a business union so we get told one thing but then we see another thing and like not that i think that like uh it's you know the whole point of a union is you kind of pull together to take care of people who can't necessarily take care of themselves in that moment and like it just took an enormous amount of effort on my family's part to like get that moving. And it just seemed incredibly, it was just very eyeopening for me as a, you know,

my experience here in Chicago. No, that that's really bleak. I mean, that that's another thing that you would, you know, you would expect a union like to just be on top of. Not even just a sort of, oh, well, you asked them and they started doing it. You would think that, hey, the people who got COVID doing this job not getting paid what they're supposed to be getting paid would be a priority and not something you have to fight them over that is oh that is that is incredibly grim i don't know well i have a story for you so my first year working at out to baits i before that i was

working in smaller hospitals and they gave you certain packages about your benefits so when it was time for me to get my benefits, I couldn't get my benefits at all because during that time they were doing it at the yearly. So I said, is there any way possible at least to get something? Because mind you, they are paying for my benefits. I'm not paying for anything for it, that there should be a reason. Cause if I had any medical issues, what would happen? And basically the union was very lackluster about it now of course I went to the manager went to human resources basically they basically told me where there's 1800 nurses and you know what we're going to do about this issue and pretty much it was

it's pretty much disappeared about it there was was nothing I could do. So for that whole year, so I worked in January of 2015, I had to wait till the following year to get benefits, to get medical benefits. Now I got everything else. I'm going to be honest. I got everything else, but the medical benefits is important, but thank God I don't have any health issues. Thank God my daughters didn't have any health issues where we didn't require any help and it wasn't an emergency. But when I started noticing there were other nurses or T's that were experiencing the same thing, because a lot of us got hired within that timeframe, they weren't telling us these issues and we would end up getting these things sooner. And it's all about the transparency. It's all about our value.

And then over the years, people always complain, I'm paying these dues. Why are they not helping? Why not supportive? And when I was actually hired, they were quick to give you the paperwork to tell you how to pay this off so they could take money off your dues quicker than what about the history about the union? Why is the history is, why is the union important? And what you can do if there's a grievance, there none of that and to this day it's still the same thing because i precept new grads and i tell them about you know part of the union what he got oh i didn't get a booklet or oh i didn't hear anything about it but i got this paper here to so they could take out my dues that's what pisses me off, if anything, is that part.

So and then all this stuff dealing with what Eric has told you, what we've been doing with the strikes and the negotiations. Me personally, we should have done negotiations within the first year of the pandemic. And I think we got everything. But they were quick were quick to say no we're going to get all these facilities all together at one and so we can all negotiate and then the gag order happened the slam of the gag order and i'm like there is a lot of collusion going on and that shit needs to stop so i mean things that they don't really tell us which i think is really a thing that we want to resolve is they don't really inform you what your union rights are. You kind of get the initial, like, here's your wine garden rights, which means that you have a right to representation whenever you're being disciplined. um in particular about um the kinds of things that we have uh as like union members what our rights are what are our rights within the union um how the union works so many of my co-workers don't like a big part of our work is just explaining that there's an election happening

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

Our union in particular spends, brags internally about never having a, they call them unfair labor practice. about never having a, they call them unfair labor practice. Like if a nurse or any worker in any union decides that their union, you know, did not represent them, their financial interests, they can file something called an unfair labor practice claim for failure to represent our union is like, they've never had an unfair labor practice claim stick. We FOIA one of their unfair labor practice claims and somehow it got like withdrawn like in this really like sketchy way and it was like just a

random one that we picked to just see what happened and so then it got like assigned like a special like liaison like uh afterwards like they're like oh we weren't supposed to do that like when we contacted the department of labor um we're gonna look at that again and figure out what's going like, uh, afterwards, like they're like, Oh, we weren't supposed to do that. Like when we contacted the department of labor, um, we're going to look at that again and figure out what's going on with this. Um, and it also turns out when we started doing research, which I think every union member listening to this should know every union has to file paperwork. Um, they're legal, there's legally mandated, uh, reporting. So there's things called LM2s and 990s that you can get from the Office of Labor Management. You Google them and they'll figure you can search for your own union.

And you get to see the union finances. And we found out that there's like $42 million that our union receives in a bank account. And this goes to, there was an article. I think it was in Jacobin. I'm not sure about like the financialization of unions and we're like 42 million dollars what is that it's that like and they you know unions will brag it's like oh we've got a 42 million dollar war chest but like what are we spending that 42 million dollars on uh is it to like fight arbitrations and constantly be making like our, like working conditions better and taking fights to the bosses? And it's like, no,

actually what they're doing is they're spending that money on settling unfair labor practice claims. So they don't actually officially stick. So the war chest isn't even against, you know, isn't to go to war against our, you know, supposed, you know, I mean, to go to war against management, it's to go to war against kind of us. When you think about it, it's just, it's just so wild when you start digging into this stuff. It's just crazy. Eric, you want to tell them about the office in Oakland? Yeah, so obviously, we're in the heart of the empire. You know, I live just a few miles from the CNA headquarters,

and I've been there many times prior to the pandemic. You know, and I have taken part in lobbying in Washington, D.C. on behalf of the union, you know, nurses from all across the country that are in the union go to DC and we lobby for, you know, not only for single payer and Medicare for all, but, you know, individual bills that will benefit nurses across the country, whether they're in the union or not. And, you know, I'm very familiar with it. I've lobbied in Sacramento and I've been to the NNU convention in Minnesota. So I've met a lot of nurses across our union. In fact, it's one of the, when you do that, that's about the only time you get to reach out and see other union members. One of the things I will tell you that John and I and the person that's not on the call right now is Mark Goodick. He is an American citizen now, but he was a Canadian nurse before, and he is right now working on our campaign video to introduce us to a broader audience. And that's why he's not on the call tonight. We, we should be intermingling and talking with other nurses across the country.

I should not be siloed here in Oakland and not knowing that what a nurse is doing in Texas. And yeah, we need to be part of our pledges that we're, we need to join hands across this country. Every nurse needs to see, we need to digitalize our contract. We need to see a university of Chicago's contract digitalized. We need to be sharing our contract. So we know what good things that maybe they got in Texas or what good things they got at the University of

Chicago or what good things we have in our contract. We need to see that nurses can say, hey, I want that language. We need to be sharing that. I don't know why it's not happening or why it's just at the upper tiers of union management that they see these things. But we need to be joined together. No more siloing nurses. You know, Alta Bates to nurses, stay in your lane. Kaiser nurses, stay in your lane. University of Chicago, stay in your lane.

No, no, no, no. We need to be one fighting body for the betterment of nurses. It's amazing when you find out that we have a beautiful building that the union purchased in downtown Oakland. They only occupy a few floors of it and they rent out the rest. And you know what? It is a fabulous building and it would be great for it to be a headquarters where we're not just fighting and lobbying for democratic politicians, but we're actually fighting for nurses at the bedside. And that's what our whole mission is that we're going to be running for is for the council of presidents. We need to take the macro focus down to what is happening at the bedside for every nurse across the country and make the change for the better for them.

And that's the big difference here. I'm all for an activist union. And I think we and we have been. The union is active in climate change and how the environment affects the community. These things are important. the community. These things are important, but it's more important that we take care of the nurses at the bedside and offer opportunities for those nurses who want to be involved to make the community better. We need to have those resources available for them. And if we make nurses' lives at the bedside better, we're going to have more nurses available to make the community better.

the bedside better, we're going to have more nurses available to make the community better. And that's what we need to be working on. It is going to be a fight. I can't be more honest than to tell you, we are David versus Goliath. We are four nurses who really have no big national exposure, but the most important thing we have is that we're bedside nurses and we know what's important for bedside nurses. I do want to say, there's four of us who are running for the for the council presidents but we would not be even talking to you if we didn't have like at least 100 nurses all over like the hospitals that we're based in like doing the work of building our campaign so i do want to point out that like because like our slate is like three white guys and it's reina and reina is like and we we want to make sure that we're not that it's we made a choice the

choice that we made was not you know us coming together as four individuals being like we should fix the union by ourselves it was this uh we keep mentioning labor notes. There's a healthcare worker chat with a fair number of nurses in our union. And we noticed that there was an election coming up. And this is also at the time when both AltaBates was having their issues. And then in Cook County, we had a particularly traumatic firing of a very popular staffer who like without any uh without any um input from the local nurses or elected local nurse leadership um and we got together and we all were like what are we gonna do this is crazy and we had people like we were like well who would do like we have this opportunity and if we run as a slate we can

do things like get access to we can send emails out to other nurses and break down those silos connect nurses from across the country um and we're like well if we don't do anything we're kind of stuck in this kind of like square one of you know a few small hospitals talking to each other um not small but you know a few hospitals talking to each other still struggling against like these kind of silos that have been constructed for us by staff and we had a vote and there was you know over 20 nurses all together raised their hands and were like we could do this with an imperfect group of people that we recognize isn't like the fully representative of everyone in the union, but are fully committed to democratizing the union. Or we could sit and wait.

And a nurse who had been in the union for a very long time, and she's now retired, said, if you all don't take this chance, you don't know what could happen in, you know, three years from now. Union could be completely different. And so two thirds of everyone in that call said, it's time to go. And we don't care. We would rather that you run and take that swing and maybe get big for all of us. So a big part of what we're doing is like I've got a meeting with Cook County nurses on Thursday and they're all basically going to come to me and tell me all the shit that I need to do for them, not the other way around. When you're the rank and file leadership, it's like taking that pyramid and you invert it, right? The people who are matter the most are the regular bedside nurses. And all we can do as like people who step up into that role is we take that, we take that heat and put ourselves out there so

that we can enact what our coworkers are asking us for. I literally have coworkers walking up to me completely unsolicited. I'm a very, like, I'm not walking around telling, I like, I told a few people up front in the beginning because I was like, all right, you're about to see my face on some flyers.

Let me tell you why. Um, but, uh, I now have coworkers coming to me and they're like, John, you've got to tell me what the fuck's going on because, uh,

I heard a little bit about it and I need to help you.'m just like okay it's very it's like i it's a little bit like a drug but i have to be careful because like i like i can't let this whole thing like none of this we we all have to stay humble as we're doing this because all four of us john all four of us were volunteering to help other people to run. Exactly. We were like, okay, we're here. You know, John, Mark, Raina, myself, we're here to help you guys. Who's running now?

We're going to help you. We're going to help you. And then it's like they're crickets, you know, and it's like, oh. Exactly. And it goes to show. what happened it goes to show how um impoverished the internal democracy of our union is that people who are leaders already did not feel comfortable or prepared to take on that kind of leadership role you know these are nurses who have been in our union for decades who are taking fights to their bosses all the time already. And they did not feel that they knew enough about the union because there's an intentional, I believe, obscuring of how the union works.

And that's like how you end up with a situation where people are like, well, I guess we're just kicking the door down for all these people who we know will be doing it better when we get it situated so that they can do it better. It's amazing, though, to tell us that an American history class or you have civics class, you learn about the U.S. government, right? You know how it functions, how it runs. But when it comes to our union, we were all asking each other, you know, we were putting pieces together. Oh, wait, I know the council presidents. Yeah. Well, how does this person fit into it? How does the board fit into this? Well, how does the election run? How is it done? We had no, we had to search out the answers. We had to call all sorts of people, and we were only getting bits and pieces. There should be a clear outline of how you run a democracy and a union. I mean, it shouldn't even be that difficult. Obviously, there'd be

specific rules for the union, but they shouldn't be occluded. They should be, you know, they shouldn't be occulted from the, from the members. We should clearly know how you step forward to be a, a more of a contributing member to the union to run and to serve the others in the union. And that was an amazing thing that we're finding out amongst each other. It's like, wow, how does our union run? I mean, why is it difficult to find out these things? And I mean, I don't think it's insurmountable for us. I don't think that should disqualify us. I don't think if we can step in and do healthcare in a pandemic, we can very easily learn how the union functions in a quick little tutorial. I don't think that's going to be a big deal for us. if we're talking about democracy in the union how is it that it takes i mean to find the bylaws we can all tell you it took a tremendous amount of effort to find the bylaws that are used and run

by hold on hold on let me tell a story about the bylaws so we have a nurse in chicago who decided to make a pain of themselves about how to get the bylaws. And instead, they went to the union. They're like, I want to see the bylaws. I want to see the bylaws. And they were just like, you know, like, and they give him the runaround. And eventually, they gave him, he got a personally delivered envelope that was like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of the bylaws. And it's funny because legally, the bylaws are also to be filed with the federal government and like from our pressure and

organizing to figure out how our union worked they had to publish the newest set of bylaws and on the federal reporting websites um i was in uh oakland in 2019 for the global nurse assembly and there was an after party and it was a bunch of staffers and like, you know, some nurses and, you know, just chit chatting. And I was like, man, it'd be really good. I told a story about, you know, like the, you know, the nurse who tried to get the, finally got a copy of the bylaws to, you know, some of these, one of these staffers like, man, it'd be really great if we,

you know, could figure out how are, you know, you got any hints for how the union works and just as like, good luck with that. And they just disappeared. I'm not, yeah. Because what we're finding is that at any staff that help nurses learn how the union works, find themselves out of a job. Like that's what's really, that's what really sketches everyone out is when like people, I mean,

you all can tell, tell the story about the, the, the staffer who like got run, ran a foul. So I will tell you that there are a lot of great labor reps. Yes, there are good staffers. A lot of really great people out there. But to tell you that they would communicate with us, because obviously I told you I've done all these other actions, so I know a lot of people. And they have my personal number just because when we, you know, when we're in other cities, you know, you text each other and, uh, Hey, we're at this place now, where do we meet you, et cetera. So we were getting texts from some labor reps in the union saying, you know, you guys need to stand tall. Uh, there are a lot of us supporting you. Uh can't come out and publicly support you because we'll get fired.

What? So, yeah. So we were getting these texts from the labor reps saying what they're doing to you is wrong. And they were, you know, we actually got together and we, we wanted to go out on strike in October and we were getting this run around from a group of this. I thought they were, we wanted to go out on strike in October and we were getting this run around, uh, from a group of this.

I thought they were, it was just an inner cabal. Little did I know that it probably extends throughout the, you know, the organization, but that they were telling us that there was no need for a strike. And it seemed they were trying to just pressure us into taking a pretty low ball contract. And so we're getting push.

The good labor reps are texting us like, stick it, stick to it, stick to it. card campaign. And we actually drove up to the executive director's house in Sacramento, knocked on her door and delivered 500 and some postcards that we organized on our own. It wasn't a union driven, it was just nurses, union nurses driven. And we delivered postcards saying we want to go out on strike. And the union, of course, still fought us on it, but we were allowed to go out on strike. And there's a video of us confronting the executive director at our strike line, asking her why we were gagged, why the mediator gagged us. And she clearly didn't know what was going on because she said the mediator wouldn't gag you why would they gag you so she didn't even know what was going on at our table we then got we were contacted and they we were told oh my god they're running around like chickens with their heads cut off because they're

petrified that they might lose their jobs that they've been exposed to what they've been doing to you and so one of the labor reps that used to work for us uh she used to be at our hospital and then she uh moved along and she was at uh sutter solano and uh her her nurses were asking hey did you see this video of this speech Eric made on this, you know, at, at the strike line. And it was a speech where I kind of excoriated the union about why they would gag us that that wasn't, you know, we needed to be united and we didn't need a union, you know, working behind our back. We, they needed to stand with us. And so she says, well, let's see. So she was looking at the video on her union cell phone and with the negotiators, nurse negotiators at her hospital, Sutter Solano, who were also in negotiations with us that we weren't supposed to talk to because the mediator forbade us.

So she's showing the video. And they thought because she was formerly at our hospital that she was our inside scoop for all this information. What? I can swear to God and take a lie detector test. I can swear to God and take a lie detector test. I had one exchange with her during the 21 months that we were negotiating. It was at a joint bargaining council meeting on Zoom where the union kept muting us on Zoom and preventing us from writing in the chat. We were saying, we want to go out on strike.

We want to go out on strike. And next thing you know, we would find out we couldn't type in the, in the chat. So I texted her and says, can you see this? I'm trying to write in the chat and I'm forbidden from writing in the chat. They, they muted me. They, they, I can't type in. And she goes, I'm feel for you, buddy. I feel for you. That was my only exchange with her. That caused her and the fact that her nurses asked her to look at this video with them. That's what cost her her job.

Jeez. It was clearly guilt by association. And the charges were outrageous for her. And the charges were outrageous for her. We had labor reps leave because they just felt that they couldn't live with themselves with what they were doing to the nurses. It was incredible for them that they're here to work for the nurses. They're here to work for the most progressive union in the country and it was a fraud that's been like a big like consistent problem is that we know that they are busting their own like the staff are supposed to have a union the staff have their own contract and that's a normal thing inside unions right yeah you know to keep uh you know we believe in or that every worker who you know works for wages should be in a union and we have seen time and again that like the like the contract that they've busted their own unions so like that they've uh there was a slate that was run of uh nurses in um are not nurses of the the staffers i think it was in 2021 where they were

like trying to get something together uh to change you know things inside you know how they relate to their management and um and several of those uh staffers were basically illegally fired jesus so this is like, I mean, and I know you keep saying Jesus a lot, but like, there's a reason me, you know,

me, I wouldn't be running into this sort of situation if it wasn't like, so like out of, out of this world, the stories that we hear and they're the same. This is what's disturbing. Is it? And it's because the union is bait like i

was just talking to a lawyer today she was looking over the bylaws of our union and she's like this is set up like a local like it's one big local union it's got like a tiny little committee of people who are making the decisions that affect or we believe that it's mostly the director, non-nurse director staff that make the decisions, but these four people kind of rubber stamp them and that they make decisions for 150,000 some odd nurses. Jesus. And it's so centralized. One of the things he described is like it's almost irresponsible. You know, this is one of the things he's described is like, it's almost irresponsible because,

you know, we live in, you know, you know, crazy times and all it takes is one wrong election or bad decision in Supreme Court. And it would literally, our union could be dissolved with like, you know, if they just arrested, you know, a handful of people and froze our bank accounts. And a big part of our goal is to help disperse those resources out and to foster more local leadership so that in the event that, you know, something, you know, like that terrible happens, like that we're not caught without anything because the way it's situated now is we have this massive concentration of all of the decision making and resources in a very small group of hands. And most of these people are not, have never been nurses or if they've been nurses, they've you know out of practice for so long um that they wouldn't know how i mean they maybe they can put band-aids on i don't need to like i

don't want to disparage anybody you know a nurse is a nurse i know nurses you know you learn it and you learn a lot of things it's really important great skill but there's something to be in practice if i you know i can walk back into my the medical icu i used to work in you know now it's going on like five years and be the same nurse that i was when i was at the peak of my practice there and there's a real key thing to i think we're all committed none of us are doing this because we want to be the face of uh california nurses association Nurses United for the next 20, like 30 years. We're doing this because we feel that there's a real value to there being a continual turnover in leadership, new ideas, people bringing in new energy. We think that nurses should have the

opportunity to work release time so that they could see how the union works as staffers from the inside and then go back to the regular jobs. We're doing everything we can to like, I like my job. I think my job is great. I don't want to leave my job. But doing what we can to bring our mentality as those bedside nurses to the sensibility of running the union because nursing does give you a lot of really powerful tools as like uh you have to be able to listen to people you know we're not listening a lot tonight but you know we've got to talk and get the word out

um being able to kind of see the a big thing we see is like you know you have a lot of people who will tell you things and then they act in a different way and that's a big part of um nursing practice is being able to understand what people's real deal is and uh you know it's kind of that's one of the things where it's real frustrating is like we know when people are lying to us. I know we all know when the staff are lying to us. Nurses do have bullshit detectors, that's for sure. I slept through the class in nursing school where they teach you how to grow eyes in the back of your head. The class I slept through where they teach you to get a forearm. And I really regret sleeping through the class where they teach you how nurse mitosis like being able to asexually reproduce an extra nurse but I definitely didn't sleep through the class where I

can learn where I can see when someone is saying one thing and then but it's like but they're fucking lying to me yeah and that's like a that's like a a constant theme and that's one of the things that's driving a lot of our organizing is that a lot of people are tired of just being lied to by people who were paying their paychecks and it's like and it's like they think that we i mean we have staff informants right we know people inside staff who are allied with us we know how they talk about us when we're not there they talk about us like we can't figure this shit out and it's like motherfucker i know how they talk about us when we're not there they talk about us like we can't figure this shit out and it's like motherfucker i know how to keep a person alive who's like who shouldn't be alive like i know how to walk a family through like you know multiple family members with

conflicting opinions through like an end-of-life discussion and along with a doctor who can't really make up his mind like you don't think it, while I've got, you know, like multiple pressers and like continuous dialysis, you don't think I can't figure out like when you are like telling us one thing and then another thing's happening, we know why they're canceling meetings right now. They don't want us talking to each other where we get that.

And this is kind of like, it's, it's almost like a feminist practice like of women talking to each other makes men nervous right and it's like nurses talking to each other makes management nervous and it sure as hell is making our union nervous we want our union to be encouraging nurses talking to each other not like discouraging. And anytime someone is discouraging people from talking to each other who have similar concerns, that is an immediate, you know, like Eric was saying the red flags, it's like,

this is the kind of thing that like this, it's like an almost an abusive relationship. You know, I would not be running if it wasn't this intense of a problem. This has been, Could Happen Here. Join us tomorrow for part two of the interview, where Shift Change discusses more of their vision for what the union could be. In the meantime, you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at HappenHerePod, and you can find Cool Zone Media the same place as at Cool Zone Media.

We've also posted a link in the description to Shift Change's GoFundMe if you want to help support their campaign. 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 Sonoro. 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex 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 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. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here. We now continue our conversation with the team from Shift Change.

Enjoy. Outside of the obvious, the union is doing landlordism for some reason part, which is just sort of, I can't get over it. Like, what? What do you mean you have $44 billion? The thing you're doing is being a landlord. But yeah, I mean, it seems like they're, you know, like out of one side of their mouth saying this is a democratic union,

their side of their mouth, they're doing political purges. They're like doing everything possible to make sure people don't know how to like democratic process works, which I think is a pretty like basic precept of, of democracy is that if, if, if it's impossible to figure out how the system actually works,

it's not, it's not, it's not actually a democracy in any real sense. Yeah. And, you know, yeah. And this is the thing you're saying is like they seem to be acting like bosses, like they're firing people. They get nervous when people start organizing, which is not a thing that you would think a union would be ecstatic. And it's like, oh, hey, there's this one to organize themselves. I don't know. It's just. a thing that you would think a union would be ecstatic at this like oh hey our nurses want to like organize themselves i don't know it's just i mean there's a there's a there's a

mentality inside among some people and even among some of the nurses that like you know when people are causing problems or um you know it's the yeah it's, it's, it's a very, it's a very perplexing situation to be in. And, um, many of us, it's taken us years to really figure it out because you don't, we all come to work, right. To do our job. You know, I don't come to work to like figure out every like little nuance thing about what's going on inside my union i didn't become a union nurse because i wanted to be like a hero union member i did it because it was down the street and it was a good job and like i wanted to be a nurse more than anything in the world so you know this is but this is what we do and this is why things like labor notes and learning how your union works is really important we've been self-educating ourselves like it's almost like you have to become a jailhouse lawyer right yeah like a yeah we've been sharing our favorite resources for like how do you learn about how a union works or what your rights are

and like we're basically taking notes for what we're going to have to do when we if we get in power inside the union to educate all the nurses in our, our union. One of the things a little too, I mean, I, every time I talk with people about this, I try and give little tips and tricks.

Don't leave your staffer alone in a, at the negotiating table. They'll tell you, oh, everything's going great. Go get, go get some dinner. And you come back and you can't do regressive bargaining.

You can't unbargain a, a, like a thing when someone's been empowered to decide something for you. And this is where, especially new, like new units in, um, hot in countries or parts of the country without strong union culture are

finding that they'll step away from the bargaining table and they'll come back and then all these decisions will be made that they don't have any you can't go back on it it's like literally no backseats in like in union negotiations no and so you have there's no such thing as regressive bargaining if i offer if i say that uh i want a uh you know you offer a 50 increase in a 50 cent an hour increase for floating to another unit. I can't turn around and you can't offer me 45 cents the next offer, or you just say, that's my final offer. So the idea of regressive bargaining is, I have to tell you, it's amazing, is that when we negotiated against Sutter in 2011 through 2013, we had multiple cases of ulps filed for regressive bargaining on their part um they constantly uh made these mistakes which we as nurses and the labor reps caught uh and now for us it's so important that we don't regressive bargain regressive bargaining on our own members here. We need to be moving forward. We should be making

quantum leaps and bounds as nurses for what we've gone through. We're supposedly the most trusted profession in the country. I think it's for the past 20 years. The only time we have not been the most progressive or the most respected profession was in 2001. And you can obviously guess that it was firemen. It was firemen. But it's like 25 years or so in a row, we've been the most trusted profession. It's because, you know, how can you not trust somebody who's cleaning you up when you soiled yourself in the bed, who's holding your hand when you're scared? That's why we're the most trusted profession. And we should be the most respected for what we do. It's just amazing that our union can't carry us through that. Our union was formed in a revolution.

We overthrew and kicked out management nurses and formed the California Nurses Association. The bargaining part of the organization, the association, broke away from the management part. And Torold Erdahl was a wonderful example, somebody who was part of that revolution. And for over 20-some years, we were a rabidly progressive union. We didn't have all the rank-and-file things that we should have have had in the union but it was in the right direction for nurses and we've kind of made in the past 10 years this u-turn and the association which i think is bad for nurses We need to be going forward. And we have new nurses and a new generation that is joining the union, and they need to be a part of it. And they can't look at me and say that old fogey that's been in the union for 30 some years, that I'll be doing the work for them.

for 30 some years, that I'll be doing the work for them. They need to be active in that union and they need to love the idea of solidarity. Out of the fires of desperation, burn hope and solidarity. It was one of the ladies said, I think Sharon Burrow from Australia, an Australian labor activist said that. We need to have every union member. I don't think every one of them has to be rabid about it, but they should be aware that they need to stand tall and support each other. They need to support the non-union nurses. We need to get more nurses unionized. We need to get more nurses unionized. The problem with unions is there's not enough unions out there. There's not enough people in the unions.

We need to get more nurses unionized. And our union hasn't been able to do that in quite a while. We've been raiding a lot of other unions, but we need to get out there and get people in the South unionized. We need to get other nurses in the Midwest organized that aren't unionized yet. We have a bigger vision as bedside nurses than I think that our national union has. I'm only as strong as the person next to me. I need support. As John said, yeah, we're four people running for the Council of Presidents, but behind us, there's so many nurses supporting us. Nurses are texting me all the time. Hey, give me some pliers. Give me some buttons. I want to pass

them out. It's important for us. I know we're at a disadvantage. We don't have the people we're running against, even though it's illegal for them to have the union promote them. They're obviously going to have that advantage like a sitting president, because they're going to be in the National Nurse Magazine going around the country, doing the things they do as sitting presidents. So they're going to get that free publicity. I wish our union presidents went around the country, because as far as I know, they've never come here to Chicago. the country because as far as I know they've never come here to Chicago I think the only time we've been to Chicago is when we had that people power

convention there and that was my first visit back to Chicago and I think 10 years was when I went there and it was it's amazing is it should be our Union should rotate rotate where they have their uh their their conventions they should we should be all around the country we should be going to the south and having conventions so that we can attract people um i i think it's important we we need to make inroads um you know i know a lot of it is they're going to say the pandemic and i think the pandemic did hasten this siloing um and you know some of it was a little understandable but even when it was evident that they should have come out of the borough they never did

and they people have been saying how tired they are from the pandemic, right? I don't know how they could have been tired. The union could have been tired when they were just having Zoom calls. No, no. I mean, the nurses are saying that they're tired. But here's what's interesting. This is a thing that I'm seeing in real time as we're doing this work, is that nurses who have been exhausted, and some of the most beat down, like nurses who are in the worst situations here in Chicago, are tired. they hear something interesting is going on with the union that is actually something that they have a say in, which is very unusual in our union. And people get very excited. So I'm having

co-workers coming up to me who are the least interested in union business until maybe it's time for a strike. And it's interesting because like when we did our strike, uh, organizing 2019, the first strike in Chicago's, uh, of nurses in like 40 years in, uh, in Chicago, you know, they kept, it would call these small kind of symbolic actions and they call them stress tests or structure tests, uh, for like, you know, we're going to do a, we're going to do a press conference and you'd have like, you know, a handful of nurses come out for the press conference. You had like 10 or 15 nurses that come out

and they're like, oh, they're all wringing their hands. And then we start calling pickets and then we start blowing past our turnout numbers. And then when we did our strike, they were expecting 800 nurses or 1,200, 1,400 1400 nurses more nurses than ever been in any one place in our hospital like it was like a giant party so it's kind of like when people have know that there's something that really has like they have a stake in right there's an infinite amount of energy almost um and this election is really kind of like, we can't make the buttons fast

enough to give away. Like they keep, people keep coming up and they're like, here, give me a handful. I've got coworkers and we're doing there's, uh, you know, let's get the pictures of everyone with their nurse, with their, uh, with their shift change buttons, vote shift change. Uh, and you know, we're turning that stuff into, we're getting ramped up and prepared for like our social media, like outreach. And this is part of it is like getting people to see like, Hey,

there are people out there who wants to do something different. And that put you like, as a, as a bedside nurse, this is our opportunity to get you into the driver's seat of how your union is run, how strikes are called, how we negotiate. We want to have a council of hospitals in contract campaigns. It's just nurses from negotiating teams so we can coordinate and decide when we want to go on strike. And it's not someone who's never been a nurse making that call for us.

Yeah, which seems just baffling that you'd have some random person who hasn't been a nurse making strike decisions. I mean, the fact that it's not also just, there seems like there's such an enormous gap between the things you would just basically fundamentally expect a union to be doing and what's actually happening,

which has nothing to do with that. And it's just the sort of, would just basically fundamentally expect a union to be doing and what's actually happening which has nothing to do with that and it's just the sort of i mean almost it seems like like intentional demobilization well they want to treat us like a spigot like they want to like you can turn us on and turn us off you know the problem is is that people don't respond to that well and you kind of constantly have to be honing your practice through defending the contract, which is a big thing that like a lot of my coworkers are just constantly annoyed at the contract. We're not defending. Our chief nurse rep is always annoyed that she can only, you know, scrape together, you know, like four or five people. And, you know, I do it.

I'm not like I'm really good when i'm in the room with you know i my co-workers think that i do a good job but you know when it comes time to like doing all the reading and everything to make sure it's done i need you know it's the thing that i'm always working on and trying to get better at um but you know the that is kind of the lifeblood of trade unionism is like if you're going to have a contract you need to in between uh contract bargaining campaigns where you can go on strike you need to be constantly probing and pushing um and finding where the weak spots are and keeping people in the practice of like fighting um and if you do that and you're really effective at it you can affect some pretty

impressive changes in between contracts um when our friend was uh was the labor rep at cook county they went from having maybe like 10 people doing like the the rep work to over 60 people doing the rep work she partnered with a really phenomenal um chief nurse rep who had a family uh her dad had been you know president of a seiu local um and they were they had pushed so hard that they were able able to read to open negotiations for attention bonuses which after you've settled a contract is like to open something on economics like on the order of you know 15 20 15 or 10 000 retention bonuses is a huge deal yeah the problem was is that then they fired her when she connected us uh at cook county or the nurses at cook county with nurses at University of Chicago.

And we started comparing notes with what our staff were like. And their chief nurse reps started asking the director of bargaining, who's not a nurse and has never been a nurse, to say, why is it that we're bringing in... Why is my facility bringing in $4 million worth of dues and we get like, you know, $220,000 worth maybe of staff. Like what's the deal and why is it that we don't spend any money on arbitration or any of this stuff? They're constantly afraid of doing anything. And that's when they fired Natalie. And then, and now they're down to, they're trying to whittle those, those nurses retention bonus negotiations down to like 3000, 4,000 bucks from like 15,000. You know, you bring

in the right people and all of a sudden management has to like hire in like, um, an entire legal, extra legal department at Cook County health services. It's not, it's not that somebody is not a nurse. That doesn't matter. Natalie was not a nurse, yet she was an outstanding example of what a labor rep should be. An organizer. Yeah. I mean, you stand with the workers. I do believe that we need more nurses involved in organizing and inside the union. But I have no issues with, you know, when you have labor reps like Natalie, that's what you need to keep the union thriving. And unfortunately, to cut her down when she was making inroads to really empower nurses and the union, it's just beyond the pale to make that decision. Why they made that decision is something that I think if we won the presidency, we'd want to find out. Why was that decision made?

Yeah, a big part of this is holding the holding the staff accountable is our big thing like we just need to know at right now there's no accountability to so imagine having a job where like if you were a nurse like if we're speaking to our co-workers right now imagine being a nurse and no one ever checking your charting no one ever checking your charting. No one ever checking what a patient has to say about the care they got. No one asking a doctor like what you did during a shift. Right. No one checking your like to see if like all of your vital signs are actually really reflected in like the monitor. That's the situation we're dealing with staff right now no one who's outside of their staff bosses at the director level has there's they're only accountable to those people and they are only accountable and and they're not actually accountable they just write like they they write everything themselves they write their own reports they get they you know they'll take you know a nurse will come up with a good idea they'll run it up the flagpole check out this awesome idea i have boss i mean it sounds like a downer i guess it's like uh it all sounds very like this is all grim and like depressing but the fact is is that we are at a

point now where we see what's going on and what we need to do we've been educating ourselves about what can be done to change the union because the union is a democratic structure, even in like just the shell form of it. And as nurses, we've got a lot of faith that as nurses, we can figure this out and come up with a much better, more democratic way to run our union.

And I think that it'll fundamentally be a much stronger organization. I think that's the fear is that somehow we like, you know, some people are like, Oh, you're, you're gonna make it worse. It's like, I don't know that you could make it worse. It's like, you know, there's the healthcare industry is changing. I think we're seeing this in real time as the healthcare industry is changing. And we are seeing to to the you know you have hospitals that come up with the most cutting-edge version of health care like the university chicago or the university systems out in california or maybe like stanford that's like the very like the top end of like what

health care is and those hospitals are like, there might as well be gold mines. And then you've got the safety net hospitals. And my fear is that the safety net hospitals, they would like to casualize to Uber, they keep telling us about, oh, they're going to Uberize nursing. Well, you know, what is it that they're doing to stop, you know, over half of the nurses being at Cook County Health Service from being replaced with agency nurses right now. Like, how long is that going to go until there's like, you know, they go from a bargaining unit of, you know, over 1500 nurses in the union or 1700 nurses in the union to like, you know, it could theoretically drop down to, you know, a handful of union nurses. And so they've like, it's like an unofficial

layoff, right? People quit and they institute a hiring freeze and then they don't replace them. They bring them in as agency nurses because they would rather in these safety net institutions, not pay benefits, not pay pensions. You know, our hospital, we lost, they took our pension away and the union didn't do anything to fight that back. I was in the pension plan for like two years. And then they were like, guess what? No more pensions. And the union didn't do shit about it.

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

you know, striking, I think there's this idea that it's scary. I have coworkers who are telling me, John, just tell me when the next strike is. I can't wait for the next strike. But we've been through it. We have a lot of coworkers who haven't. Half of our nurses are new. They've never been through a strike. But you build a union through strikes,

which is a little counterintuitive, especially if you do it the right way and you're strategic about it. Raina, you've been real quiet. What do you think about all this? That's really the whole deal. Well, number one, I'm a lady and I don't interject unless I absolutely have to. So to go back earlier, what was said about how unique our slate is, well, it's unique in itself for one, of course, I kind of sit with being a

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

nursing is not what I thought. I did not sign for, for this pandemic. I never, I've been a nurse for 13 years. I never knew that was never thought it was going to be a pandemic like this. So it changed your whole spectrum of what nursing stands and also what we should do to preserve it. Now, I, you know, I look young, but I am a grandma about to be a four. And so one of them are going to be a nurse one day. And actually one of them is a 10 year old. So one of them are going to be a nurse one day. And actually, one of them is a 10 year old. And he told me, he said, you know, looking at all my nursing books and looking at, you know, all my medical stuff. And he looked at me, he said, you know what? I may want to be a nurse. Now, mind you, two years ago, he wanted to be a race car driver. So it happened.

So it kind of inspired me a little bit like I need to do more leadership. I mean, I think I'm a natural leader in itself. It's just how to do it, where to go. And this is just a step for me. I'm at that age. You know, I need to look behind me of all the younger nurses, my family and what my young grandchildren, what they may be. And I want to preserve that. And that's a third reason why I'm standing to do this. So and my peers, I mean, you work, any nurse work eight to 12 hours. The facility that you work with is almost a second home to you. to 12 hours, the facility that you work with is almost a second home to you. So you want to stand up with your peers. You know, there shouldn't be no divide. We're all standing for an employer who has been trying to take benefits away, trying to take, you know, anything that makes it decent

for you to just work and also is wearing and tearing on your, your wellness and your work-life balance and just your whole mental state. So it's, it's so important to really know about your union, about the breakdown of it, about the history, about everything you need to keep your employer accountable. And also within the union, just like nurses have to be accountable for everything we do.

And if we get in trouble, of course, we're going to be reprimanded. The union needs to also go through the same thing as we do. It's only fair. So that's pretty much it for me. Any other questions? You're reading,

have you finished up your copy of Solid solidarity unionism yet uh reina oh you mean the rank and file i am on chapter three it's been on it's been interesting and since i will be going on vacation well i am on vacation right now i'll be leaving tomorrow i should be finishing up that book by then that's a that's one thing that like i don't want anyone to think just because i can speak about the union um in a halfway intelligible way that i've been studying this for a long time a lot of my knowledge about the union is pretty new and recent and uh like i got um you know i picked up a copy of uh staunton lynn's the rank and file uh labor law for the rank and filer uh there's an audio book of it it's just this great like short little book about

everything you need to know to kind of like exercise your rights and try and stay out of like trouble um i picked up a copy of uh you know uh jane mccavely's no shortcuts uh we've been passing around a copy of stott and lynn's uh solidary unionism um and like there's a lot and then we went to labor notes and like it's funny because our union sent us to labor notes like i've got pictures of me and like uh other shift change uh people that uh were taken by staff that we were at the labor notes conference the funny thing was is that i was in the the talks about how to build a caucus and how to uh exercise our democratic rights i was one of the few the only nurses in some of those spaces um and uh you know i i don't know what they expected to happen but the way they're treating this whole thing every little thing that little thing that we've gotten, the fact that we're about to be able to send emails out

was the thing that we had to fight for every step of the way. They gave us a set of rules that the rules are the most conservative interpretation of our legal democratic rights that are set in federal law. They us like the 1950s like carpenters union interpretation of like those those rights uh they ignored all the case law that we have to be able to communicate with our co-workers through normal union channel like every communication method our union uses to normally communicate with us legally we should have access to now they're trying to throttle that it's like oh you can only send an email communication every 15 days it's like you know what like you're doing your

little whisper campaign like 24 hours uh 24 7 just by and then you have to opt in to like to communication about the uh about the election like they they were trying to keep and they're cutting meetings short they're cutting meetings off they were trying to bury this they're cutting meetings short. They're cutting meetings off. They were trying to bury this. Now we think that they're trying to shift gears because they know that this is a lot more serious than they thought it was. We're not here to turn the union upside. Well, maybe turning it upside down is a good way to think of it, but in a good productive way, a you know turn it upside down and shake it you know to like you know destroy it we want to turn it upside down so that it's the way a real union is supposed to be is it people who are elected into leadership are accountable to the people

who elect them and um and our goal is to you know to make the union like we want to go from something like you know chicago teachers union which is want to go from something like, you know, Chicago teachers union, which is really powerful and famously like democratic wasn't always that way. It was only focused on very basic stuff, you know, before the women in the Chicago teachers union took it over and changed it for the better. You know, that's our goal is we want our union to be to have that internal

vibrant discussion and debate about how the union should be work should work because we know that as nurses that we've got the skills and the capacity to have an impact on that. As I said, we don't think that people who are paid out of our due should ever be afraid when a nurse opens their mouth and says, I think things could be better, or I don't like how this is happening. Yeah. And I think one more thing I do kind of want to add is that you were talking a bit earlier about sort of the risk of stagnation. And I mean, I think something that people don't want to hear is it like you know there's been a wave of militancy in the last few years but the actual union like

the actual unionization rate of the u.s keeps going down and i think a big part of that is you know like even even even in the periods when unions were really strong they got into these sort of bureaucratic patterns where people were busy sort of fighting their own internal – like busy fighting their own rank and file. And then when the bosses came for them, they got destroyed. And I don't know. It really seems like a moment where either unions are going to – people like you are going to win, and you get these rank and file movements that are changing what the union is to be what it's supposed to be or the last remnants of unionism is going to die and that's i don't know like i mean it's depressing but that's like if you just look at the unionization rate chart it

just keeps going down and down and down and every time it seems like it's hit a new low it's like it finds another way to go out which I guess is kind of a grim way to look at it but I don't know I mean it is very positive to think about how how there's organizing that's difficult it's hard to get people to do some things right

it's difficult to pull people together or you know certain types of organizing when they don't feel like they have a say or a stake in what's going on. But I will say that like, it has been, it is always eyeopening when I watch my coworkers pull together in this thing. And I think that there's that common experience at work and especially care workers right now.

It is like, um, that is driving us to do different things. There's a reason why we're having a rank and file movement in our union now. And things aren't just continuing, like continuing to stagnate. I think that people recognize that their union has to be fighting for them. I think that's a big thing.

People want the union to fight, um, not to just kind of like sit there. And, you know, people get really frustrated when they feel like their dues are being taken and they're not seeing that immediate benefit. The immediate benefit only comes when we pull together and we fight back. So, I think that I totally see what you're saying. I think a lot of that comes down to people who get into these positions. And this is why we believe in the principle of like rotation and like, uh, and turning over the leadership, uh, as much as possible is, um, that I think when you stay in a, no

one should be in a position of order organize yourself out of a job right yeah if you're doing your your if you're being effective you're organizing yourself out of a job and i have organized out of myself out of some jobs and right now i've organized myself out of telling people that there's a movement and that we've got to participate in it and now i'm moving on to other things because i have like a whole crew of people in my hospital who are doing that organizing work without me having to do it. So I think that there's like, it can be a little depressing when you look at like the raw numbers. But I think that a lot of that is like, it's like, if your union is clearly not great and

people kind of complain about it, then yeah, no one's going to want to join it like if your union thinks it's more important to be a landlord or you know stash 42 million dollars in the bank then it is to invest that money in actually building organizational expertise or you know building organizing the unorganized like eric was saying in places that are like right to work states which we've won we have won that are like right to work states, which we've won. We have won contracts in right, right to work states, but you have to be looking, you have to be constantly pushing for it. And if you can't just take a little win here,

there, and then be excited because you just got another union to affiliate you. Like our union does, like we need to be working on actually bringing more and more workers into our union. And, um, if we don't do that, it will die. But I think that there's a spirit in the, you know, that, you know, when you come to a place to work with coworkers and you face common enemy and common problems, common conditions, you do see what it can look like when people decide to do something on their own. You know, to get back to Mia's point about declining unionism in this country,

in order to, you know, to change this decline in unionism, we need to change who we are as union members. We need to, you know, that I'm not a big Dr. Phil fan, but he used to say that thing all the time. Well, how's that working for you? Unions need to take a look at themselves and say, how is this working for you? We are declining. Why do we continue to do the same thing we're doing over and over again? We need to change who we are. For example, as a nurse, a nurse needs to know when they stand up and speak out, that when they stand up, they won't be standing alone, that there'll be somebody around them, that other nurses are going to be there right behind them, backing them up. And that goes for any trade. We can't progress as workers without struggle,

and there will be struggle. We need to march forward. We need to be able to say, everybody that can be in a union should be in a union. And we need to expand ourselves as nurses. I mean, I don't want to harp on it, but this pandemic was devastating for us. Obviously, no nurses worked remotely. No, I should say, no bedside nurse worked remotely. I know many of our nurse managers worked remotely and checked in on us through online things. But for the most part, every nurse, bedside nurse was at that bedside. It was not pleasant. It was something that I'm sure many nurses are probably in counseling for. They were that traumatized

by it. Many people had lost family members just like the rest of the public did, yet they still had to continue to work. I think as a union, we need to change who we are.

And like I said, I don't want to point fingers or anything at people that are in the union now or the people we're running against. I'm sure they're good people, but we have a different idea and we want to bring a change to how the union runs. And I think that change will make us a stronger and better union. And I think we'll have happier nurses and we'll end up with more activist nurses who will expand the union. It's going to be a word of mouth. One thing, you can have the best organization in the world, but the things that are the best product, but what really makes your product worthwhile is word of mouth campaigns. People have to talk about you. People have to say, hey, you know, that California Nurses Association, that NNU, they're really

doing something. I want to be a part of that. We've been pressing on a Medicare for all, single payer, and of course ratios for everybody. But we need to start organizing more in all those states where those workers suffer. Because I can tell you this right now, I never talked about it with John, our hospital is filled with nurses from the South. And they tell you, oh, I came to California for the ratios. They need to fight for those ratios back in Alabama and Mississippi and all the states they come from.

We need to help them bring unions to the South. The basic core of right to work was racism. The racism is what drove right to work. It was the same people that brought you segregation is what brought you right to work. And that's a fact. and uh you know that's a fact uh and it's important for us that uh you know we we want to be an activist union and i i'm not opposed to that uh but we can do that by unionizing these hospitals and making those nurses bedside lives a lot better um you know uh stott and lynn it's funny is that i always laugh, you know, John brings it up. I'm from originally from Canton, Ohio. And of course, Stoughton Lynn taught, I believe it was at Youngstown state. He was from, he was, he spent the last part of his life after his Vietnam war

activism in Youngstown, in the Youngstown area. And I think the last book I read by him was Wobblies and Zapatistas. You know, he was talking about the, it's a great book. And not many people know about him. I knew about him in Ohio because, you know, social justice work there, you know, at Walsh, at that time it was Walsh College and then Walsh University now. You know, Joe Torma, the professor there, you know, was often talk about Stott and Lynn. And that's how I, you know, started reading a lot of his works. The things that he says about rank and file workers is something that we need to make part of the

national conversation. And we need to get that message out. We need to tone down the big union actions and the big union talk. And let's just make it a nurse's conversation. We always talk about our union, about nurses' values. Nurses' values are invaluable. They apply to every walk of life, every trade. And I think that's what we need to do. And I know that's what Mark would say if he was on the call with us. I just got a text from him. He's almost finished with our video. So he's working hard. I mean, the guy took two weeks of his own time. And that's another thing. Here we are. We are bedside nurses. He had to self-teach himself how to make

pretty high-end quality videos. And we're not bought and sold. We don't hire anybody to do our work for us. We're doing this ourselves. We're bootstrapping it as what they call bootstrapping it yourself up here. We are bootstrapping a campaign and a movement.

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

And I know that sounds greedy, but in reality, we do get paid considerably more in California than than in other places in the country. But also to buy a house in a bad neighborhood is a million and a half dollars. Correct. So it's so it's I have to drive an hour away just to get to work. It is cheaper where I live right now than it is in the Bay Area. I could not get a house in the Bay Area at all. And we should be incorporating housing demands into our negotiations as well. Especially if the union is going to be a landlord. Come on.

Well, okay. How about we, you know, the first public housing was really cooperative housing built by unions like there's no reason why um you know these some of these institutions are in like incredibly wealthy and building uh you know if we can we have the kind of power to bring them to you know a screeching halt we should be able to like it you know get the kind of um things that we need to live by in our community. Like we should be living where our patients are anyway. And it's, uh, you know, and it's a, a way of bringing our, uh, bringing us ourselves into our community so that our community is, you know, that we're part of our community. Um, and you know, I think we're, I just gotta say to say I'm going to be waking up in six hours so that I can go back to work.

And we want to make sure that people know a couple of key things. So there is an election happening. If you are a nurse in a CNA, California Nurses Association or National Nurses United and an OC oc like hospital there is an election happening ballots are being mailed out to you um on uh on april 10th um we expect that they're going to start arriving a day or two after that um we are the shift change slate so the the four of us are running for the council of presidents uh it's Eric, Raina, John, and Mark. And if you want to find us on social media, we just got our, our Instagram account. We are called shift change and a new we're on Tik TOK.

Now we're going to be releasing some videos shift change and a new, and then we're also going to have, we've got our youtube and uh facebook set up as well look for us there and we've got to go fund me because we've got to buy the materials that we are using to help organize with thankfully by the sounds of it our lawyers are going to be working for us for um because uh they believe in what we're doing and these are movement lawyers. These are not right-wing people who want to, uh, fight unions. They want unions to be, uh, you know, accountable to the workers and to be strong fighting unions. And that's our main goal

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

one of the those kind of jobs that people aspire to and not something that they come into for two or three years and then leave because it's so terrible so i don't know what else to say i'm ready for shift change reina you ready for shift change yep and just like nelson mandela say i never lose i either win or I learn. Hell yes. Hell yeah. I love this. This is the stuff I live for. Thank you so much. Thank you,

Mia. Thank you all for being on. This was great, and I really hope you all win. And if we win, bring us back. Yeah, that's what I was about to say. Yeah, give us a report back. We'll tell you everything that happened, and maybe if we win, bring, bring us back. Yeah. I was about to say, yeah, give us a report back. We'll tell you, we'll tell you everything that happened. And maybe if we win, we'll have a nice victory party and maybe we'll let you come out.

You and the rest of the, it could happen here. Crew, maybe do some live stuff for us. Cause I think that should be a kick out of that. Every time I hear a nurse say that I listened to it could happen here. A part of me just like does a little Snoopy happy dance. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. 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. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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.