Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 47: Reaching Out for the Gold (w/ special guests Claire Lobenfeld and Jonny Coleman)

Episode Date: April 15, 2018

Today we're joined by Claire Lobenfeld and Jonny Coleman of NOlympics LA, a campaign launched by members of the Los Angeles chapter of Democratic Socialists of America to stop the 2028 Olympics games from coming to Los Angeles. We talk about how large shiny development projects get forced onto small tax bases in order to squeeze as much money out of constituents as possible. We also talk about how Little Giants should be interpreted as a product and statement of the proletariat.

Kiss on your dogs, kiss on your cats Just make sure it's not of a sexual nature Is that Casey Musgraves, dog? Did you see how the... Let me get my zone. Did you see how the special downstairs is a donut burger? I wanted to take advantage of that, but that's the height of how you get a nickname.

And man, my stature can't beat in a donut burger without getting some kind of ridicule. From Jenkins to Pine Mountain Settlement School, everybody will know Tom Sextonlement School, everybody will know. Tom Sexton. Old Cronut. Old Cronut over here. I was sixth in the Cronut.

Let's see here. Oh, man. Got my shoes off. Do you think that... Sounds good. Do you think that... Sounds real good. I kind of feel like...

Do you feel like country music is now the sort of... Is becoming the entry point? It's like a way station on the road to becoming a pop star. Sort of like how Taylor Swift started out as a country musician. It's like the D-League for pop stars. Yeah.

The G-League. Why do they call it the D-League? Why do they call it the G-League? I forget why now. That's a pretty great name for an entire league of sports. Yeah, I know. The G League? The entire league of sports.

Let's see what we got here. One entire league. Oh, snap. Did you figure out the... Oh, I'm good, man. I'm rolling. This is good. Last time I felt we the... Oh, I'm good, man. I'm rolling. This is good. Last time I felt we were recording here, I felt really...

Constrained. Constrained. I was just really thirsty and had to pee really bad. But because of all of the hoops you've got to jump through just to get out of this... Best to hold it. I just, yeah, had to just deal with it. And so, like like the last 45 minutes of that interview,

I was really not doing great. Let's see here. Yeah. Yeah. The G League. Yeah. So the G League.

So the G League. A dude jied in the G League a few weeks ago. Man, I'm not gonna talk about about that I'm having chest pains right now I can't go ahead right now Let's see Let me just give you the advice Let me just give you

The advice that my grandfather gave me I come from a long line of people with heartburn Let me just say I'll just give you the advice my grandfather gave me 90% of chest pains is heartburn the one time you guessed wrong I think you would know though I think you would know that you were having a well the way you would know is you would die but right you would figure it you would figure that. That you were having a... Well, the way you would know is you would die. But... Right. You would figure it out real quick

that it wasn't heartburn. Right. Yeah, you would die. Yeah, you're right. Like, oh, well, we know it wasn't heartburn. I'm telling you, my grandpa was really...

How did your... Is your grandpa still with us? No, he's not. Not this one. You have one still with us. I do. I do have one still with us. I do. I do have one still with us. But the one that gave you the heartburn wisdoms went on?

Can I ask how he went on? Lung cancer. Oh. Yeah. But. Really, now that I went that far, I was like, there's no way to twist that into a joke at all. Without being insane. You tried to turn my dead grandpa's...

To a sick bit. To a sick bit. What the fuck is wrong with me? No, he was a good guy, though. Did you say he was a good grandpa? Yeah, well, he was a good guy. I think. He was a good grandpa, which does not always equate to being a good person.

Just because you're a good family person doesn't mean you're a good person. Is he the beekeeper? Yeah, he was. He did that as a hobby, though. But just let me look off. Just let me look off. He said, no, no, no. He said, he did that as a hobby, though.

Like you're trying to shush me down before I went any further to make some character indictment on him for keeping bees. It's just a hobby, though. I wasn't professional or anything. No, but he, growing up, man, I would just be hanging out with him and he would just be like out with him, and he would just be like... You know, just like totally, with his entire body in being,

he would just like burp. You know what I mean? He'd just have the most debilitating belches. Never got out of it. Yeah, and so the only reason... So as I got older and also was afflicted with terrible heartburn, that's how I comforted myself with, you know, I was like, this isn't, you know, I've seen this before. I've seen this before, yeah.

In my line of people. Yeah. No, it's true. I have, the thing that gets me is I think I fuck my esophagus up so much I just have little burning pains constantly. Even when I'm not even eating bad. Sometimes they last for days and I'm like, okay, I gotta get this checked out. Well, when I first started getting real bad Barrett's esophagus, when I first started getting that real bad, I was so paranoid about throat cancer.

Because generally, prolonged heartburn, indigestion over a long span of time can result in throat cancer because generally prolonged heartburn indigestion over a long time long span of time can result in throat cancer can can it's always like one percent of well the funny thing is like it would take forever but like two years ago i was like i'm gonna fucking die man i'm gonna fucking die oh yeah dude no i remember I remember picking you up off the table. You were ready to get out of there, and that nurse had to pull you back in. You're like, no, no, no, you're not ready. Yeah. Man, thank you for that, by the way.

That was this time two years ago. Thanks for taking me to the dock. I look out for you, pal. I should have been there with you, though. Well, if you ever want to do that, I'll take you. Would you? Yeah. I want to be on, I'll take you. Would you? Yeah. I want to be on the other side of that situation.

I want to be on the other side of it. Yeah. For my own mental relationship to my ongoing health problems, my diseases, I need to be able to look down on it happening in another human being. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I think it would give you some perspective, really. Yeah.

Damn. Well, I don't know how to contact our guest today. There's one detail we left out of our email exchange list. But I'm guessing they'll look at it at 8.30 and be like, hey. So anyway, while we wait, what's going on in the world? So, Syria.

Or do we not even want to come down? Oh yeah, no, let's talk about that, hey? Let's talk about it because i really need all i know listen i'm gonna get profound with you for a minute i'm i'm just gonna say i don't know shit about what's going on in syria i literally every time somebody even talks about it i get anxiety but you don't have to know shit about a situation to know that war is not good never good always bad 10 out of 10 times bad yeah 10 hours and and so i don't you know you don't have to

fucking know what's going on there even if it's the most heinous shit even if it's like six-year-olds getting gassed with whatever there is literally literally nothing you, as an American citizen, can do about that. We're not going to add anything to that. There's no value to be added to that. You know, like, and I think that you... It's cliche, but the best person on this is Chomsky, which is, like, ethically, morally, philosophically,

you try to change what you can you can you change what you can control you cannot change what's happening there and so i guess this is just specifically directed at the people who the liberal humanitarians who want to say oh well there's something bad happening there like we have to go like we we do not it always ends bad we know how this ends yeah Embrace proletarian international revolution. That's a much better strategy to ending the suffering

of other people. Other than I don't know. Between those two choices what you think is going to be humanitarian war and an international proletarian revolution. I think I'm going to go with the latter. Yeah, no, I'm with you on that.

As an aside, are we too cool for Chomsky now? We have to give qualifiers like, hey, I know it's a cliche. I don't know, are we? I kind of feel like he's... I read a lot of his stuff and I haven't been... I don't know. He kind of feels like he's sort of drifted a little more

to the center, in my opinion. Oh, really? Just some of the things that he's said lately in the last five years or so. But who the fuck knows, man? I mean... Does that come with age, you think? Marriage?

I think I've so internalized the whole... Yeah. Yeah. I've internalized the whole, like, oh, he's an old white academic or whatever. And it's so stupid. And so, like, for that reason, I've, like, tried to, like, not engage with him so cowardly. I don't know. I feel bad.

No, I think it's also, no, to be honest with you, it's not that. It's not because of his politics. It's because I think that his sort of linguistic analysis, his whole linguistic work is now being proven systematically to be completely wrong. Man, what a way to, can't you just wait until the guy dies before you do that? Like let the poor bastard go out thinking that, you know. Which, you know.

Thinking he moved the needle. That's what we all want to do. Yeah, I think that, which is stupid. You know, I don't know. I mean, like, I guess the way we view knowledge and the way we view how we, like, come to scientific truths about these things, it's so competitive. It's so ruthless. that Chomsky was a vital important part of developing all kinds of important theories about linguism and language acquisition and all this other shit. But

you can't say that he wasn't a really monumental person in that link of discoveries. I don't know. You know what I mean? Just because we are finding out that a lot of his things are not true and they're not right

doesn't mean that we like, can't say that a lot of his... If we've poked holes in the book God wrote, then Chomsky's not above reproach.

I don't know why I'm dying on this silt today. Man, speaking about dying, how much oxygen do you think we have in this bus? Yeah, we're 15 minutes in. We've blocked every airway. We've smoked it out. We're gonna be like Ace Ventura

when he's inside that robotic rhino and he's burning up and he has to take his clothes off and crawl out the ass of it. Did you ever see that? Yeah. That was like the funniest goddamn thing when you were eight years old, 10 years old. Jim Carrey crawling out of the back of a rhino's asshole.

Oh yeah, dude. Dude, you know, I'll tell you this. I think a movie that never got its due is The Cable Guy. Really? I think The Cable Guy's brilliant. I never watched it. I always saw it on TV and I would have it on, but it just never grabbed me.

Yeah, it's not as accessible as his other work. As Carrie's earlier work. Why, because it's darker? It's very dark. Has it got Ben Stiller in it? Yeah, it does, but it's got... Who's the fucking guy? I always think this guy's one of the friends,

but he's not one of the friends. Who's the guy that you think is on friends that is not really on friends uh um christopher walken adri selba let's see here yeah while we wait i just want to say i just want to reiterate war is bad. If anybody even seriously talks about it seriously for a minute, you should definitely. When you see war, go the opposite way. Here's a little PSA for you kids.

On a serious note, it's interesting. Anti-war movements have kind of went out of vogue a little bit, haven't they? Well, I think it's because people were... Like explicitly anti-war movements. Well, I think it's because... I think it's maybe because the invasion of Iraq elicited the largest protests ever seen in history, like worldwide at that point. And it's still, like there was no response to that. It didn't matter.

It resulted in nothing. You're saying it didn't move the needle? It did not move the needle. And, you know, I don't know. But I'm not sure if at that time the left was i don't know those were just different times but no uh war movements are that might actually provoke the state or it might actually cause the state to blink in an important way go on i don't know i think just i think challenging empire is a necessary part of challenging the legitimacy of the state and um by doing so we can sort of build a larger movement but also you know raise consciousness also again of the

legitimacy like that to me is a question that i think we should be putting on everybody's mind at all times the legitimacy of the state and empire is like criticizing empire building a movement around that building a movement around like anti-war I think could get us as a movement to a place where we can start putting pressure on vitally, I don't know, just putting pressure on the state in a way that causes it to flinch.

Effectively. And when you've done that, you know what I mean? When they flinch. When they flinch. When they flinch. Dude, I'm talking out my ass. You might have just moved the needle.

I'm talking out my ass. I'm just fired up, goddamn. I'm fired up too, man. I don't want us to go to war. Seriously. This is no good. No, this is... You know what the thing, though, is? And I think why sort of the muted response is because echoes of the Bush era wars

that never really ended, I think people are so well-adjusted to wars. Yeah. For the average person, for us, I mean, we obviously know, like, okay, this is not good at all. Yeah. like okay this is not good at all and and also could have just i mean other than making a bad situation worse has serious ramifications for protectorates uh russia iran right uh which is nothing that we want, obviously. Yeah, the sort of like... Or excuse me, the series of protectorate of Russia and Iran. Pretty much, yeah.

Well, definitely Russia, but Iran are... So from what I understand, doesn't Russia need a crucial port there at Tripoli, I think? Wait, isn't that Libya? There is also a Tripoli in Libya. Oh, there's two Tripolis? I think there is. Interesting.

But yeah, I don't know. The whole thing just gives me a headache. But I think you're right. We have sort of normalized america being at constant war but i think uh again people are used to that but it is the sort of unseen toll of that like i think that rural communities are really where that sort of you see that a lot. It's not buried underneath all these other layers of society. Yeah, I think also with that

sort of rural thing, I think one of the hallmarks of rural manhood is having served. Yeah, that's true. This idea of having served. And so I think these wars are sold in places like this.

Yeah, for sure. Because it's always been the plot of poor and working people to go fight these things yeah well you know that is definitely the case i i do know for a fact that like people were recruited from eastern kentucky from the coalfields and you know west virginia an astonishingly high number of people in central appalachia right we're Right, we're drafted in Vietnam. In Vietnam. But yeah, but no.

All the wars. Yeah, all the wars. But, you know, like, it's important to, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know, man. I think you're right. We have normalized that as an everyday part of our existence. But, you know, just like everything else, just like healthcare, just like everything. I don't know.

Like, empire has a toll on our communities and has a toll on our self-actualization. How do you like that term? I love it. I love it. You like that word? Yeah. No, I think that's right I think

you know just as kind of an aside how on the nose I mean obviously this is often talked about but how on the nose is hypernormalization

I mean how fucking dead spot on in light of all this man what I find so fascinating about that is it's so strange. I was talking to my coworker, Wes, about this the other day, about how because a lot of Americans

only seem to relate to politics in this sort of purely symbolic way. The result of that is that that also bleeds into governance. Yeah. And so you've got this weird limbo state where nothing gets done, but everybody talks about things in the most inflammatory way possible, and it's all this brinksmanship and all this. Brinksmanship. You like that?

I'm throwing them all out today. Well, brinksmanship coming at you. Yeah. Wow. But as a result of that, we live in this sort of state where we see things going on, like things appear to be moving.

The sort of machinery of things appear to be moving the sort of machinery of government appears to be moving but nothing's actually happening other than empire still sort of empire still turns along pretty efficiently and the police state in terms of deportations and shit like that

otherwise policy can't get I don't know and in the realm of I will say that they are very efficient also in addition to deportations and shit. They are very efficient in further speeding along environmental destruction and shit, just like the amount of permits in West Virginia for mountain tarp removal and stuff.

Let's get it out while we can. I think everybody feels like there's a a claticism, a cataclysm of some sort coming and it's like just this huge grab on every end. Did you see how like the guy that they're trying to, that the GOP is trying to,

or I guess the Trump administration is trying to install as Scott Pruitt's deputy in the event that Scott, this whole scandal with Scott Pruitt results in him leaving, is a former coal industry executive.

Who isn't? I don't remember his name now. Like Oklahoma? I'm not sure. I'm not sure who he's from. I just read the lead, the headline in the lead earlier today.

I was like, oh, this will be it. Back to a corner, haven't I? Fuck. Let's call our guests here. You can hear us fine? Yeah, I can hear you. We can hear you. Sorry, it took us a minute there.

No, it's all good. This is how it goes, that first 15. Yeah, if we get it up and get going in 10, 15 minutes, I feel like that's fast for DIY podcasting. My girlfriend does a lot of podcasts too, and she works with a real studio, but one of them is in New York, but we're in LA, and they don't have a studio,

so they have to do it in the apartment. It's just like a nightmare every time. That's like a professional or whatever. That's what we're doing. We're literally in a closet right now. Everything is green screened. Oh, yeah. That's what we're doing. We're literally in a closet right now. Everything is green screened. Oh, yeah. That's right.

We're going to put a big American flag back here with an eagle or some shit. I don't know if you know, but this is Hollywood. Nothing's real here. I don't know. I'll just be a Hollywood guy all day. Is that a Beehive Collective thing, Tom? It is.

Damn. Do y'all know what the Beehive collective is i don't think so they're like this radical co-op or something i guess they're in maine yeah they they make these posters um i'm just laughing at tom because i only see those in like the most radical like uh i've banished all my bad posters to the closet here because my girlfriend won't let me go away. All the pinups, all the 80s. Yeah, that's right. Big watch pinups. My roommate in college, you guys follow NBA, any?

My roommate in college was Kenneth Fareed that plays for the Denver Nuggets. And above his bed, he had this very ornate like Muslim prayer rug, and it was flanked on either side by a Family Guy poster and the periodic table of sex positions. And now that guy's got more money than God. That's the way it goes, though.

The first poster I ever had was Britney Spears. I had a Britney Spears poster in seventh grade. I thought she was hot. I don't know. I had a Spencer's poster. I had one that had a bunch of... I forget what it was, but it was different smiley face moods. Oh, yeah.

I don't know what genre that is. I never had a poster, but I was always really fascinated with like Big Dogs and Big Johnson stuff. That's my era. Oh yeah, hell yeah. Nice, very nice. What about you, poster wise?

Oh, I mean like what kind of poster? I mean Jonathan Taylor Thomas. There you go. JTT, baby. He was hot. He was really hot. He used to hang out with friends of mine when I moved to LA when I was 18.

He didn't go to the school I went to, but he was just like high school friends with someone, so he would just show up, which was like really unfair, too. Like, how are you going to be in the room with a bunch of 18-year-old people when JTT walks in and has like a like like a hard lemonade or something i swear the first year here was rough i can't imagine having yeah having to compete with jtt

at a party god damn oh man it's over it's over you know sorry for name dropping like two minutes oh me too me too bullshit thing i could know, your name draft's way cooler than mine. But the JTT thing made me think of, do y'all remember Devin Sawa, who was like the poor man's JTT? He just never really blossomed. He was not the poor man's JTT. He had his own. So you think I'm wrong in that assessment?

He was, oh God. He was like, did you see the Casper movie with Christina Ricci? That's right. So you know when like Casper turns into like a real boy? That was him. My real boy. I can't place it, but okay. Was he also in the like Tom and Huck movie?

Was he opposite? JTT? Is he alive? Because that's like if he's a child actor and he's alive, like that's a huge accomplishment. I don't think that he is. Not to make fun of it, but it's like JTT is Is he alive? Because if he's a child actor and he's alive, that's a huge accomplishment. Not to make fun of it, but it's like JTT's obviously still kicking. Is Samuels Sauer still alive?

We're going to have to put the interns on that one. Yeah, I bet. Probably not. I brought it up. Too soon, man. Too soon. Can you give me a little more volume from them over here?

Yeah. He's alive. How old is he now? He was in Now and Then. He was in Little Giants. Oh, Little Giants is the one I remember him from. He's the Final Destination dude. Are all children's sports movies, not to segue

in about class consciousness, because Little Giants definitely is, right? Oh, yeah. That's us. That was a great movie. Everyone on the left is that. It's the same template, right? We're all being coached by Rick Moranis.

Yeah. It's late period Moranis. Oh, shit. All right. How about we go ahead and start this? How about we go ahead and get this show rolling? Whenever. Whenever.

Whenever you're ready to do it. Well, this week on the show, we're having... Would you like to introduce yourselves? Sure. I'm Johnny Coleman. I'm an organizer with DSA in Los Angeles and in Olympics LA, particularly. I'm Claire Lobenfeld. I'm doing the same stuff that Johnny's doing.

The same shit. Nice. Well, so maybe we could just kick it. You know, Johnny, when our mutual buddy, Izzy Padilla, put this together, I kind of instantly became excited for the prospect because I think what y'all are doing really connects with what we're doing here,

and we'll get to that in a second, but we've had a lot of hiccups and setbacks, so I just want to say I'm glad that we're finally getting this rolling here. Me too. that in a second, but we've had a lot of hiccups and setbacks. So I just want to say I'm glad that we're finally getting this rolling here. And maybe we could just kick it off and y'all can tell us a little bit about Nolympics and how y'all got started and all that. Yeah, sure. It's like almost a year ago or a little bit over a year ago, I was kind of really kind of getting swept up in this kind of like post-election wave. uh started really kind of putting my money where my mouth was as far as

getting more involved in organizing like moving from charity charitable and volunteer work to like you know more just different more more elaborate more um I don't know just leftist based work in LA and LA has a huge fucking housing and homelessness crisis right now. I know it's bad in a lot of places but like a year ago in May the numbers from 2016 came out and the homelessness went up like 23% in LA which was about 15,000 people in one year alone and it was skyrocketing in Latin communities. And it affects me personally as a renter. We have a ton of renters here.

We have cops killing people of color and just people in general problem, cops killing mentally ill people, cops killing homeless people problem. We kind of lead the country in a lot of these issues. We have ice crawling through our backyards and our schools and our businesses, collaborating with law enforcement, even though theoretically they're not supposed to in some places. And just like hell, it's like hell. It's like it's summer like nine or

ten months out of the year here uh uh the joke of like oh socialism becoming your retirement plan you know that's been going around it's like kind of was feeling palpable to me as someone who's entering his mid-30s was getting involved was seeing that an olympic it was looked very likely we were going to get some Olympics or another, started talking to a lot of the housing and homelessness and policing people and DSALA and other groups. And we realized that there was a huge demand from this from different communities. They were super freaked out about it, but their hands are so full, like dealing with people being shot yesterday or, and not getting any results from it that they really needed

to, I think, help getting this off the ground and establishing it. Even though we knew it was very likely that in September of last year we would not flip any city council people or kind of change any of the power dynamics yet. But everyone I talked to, Boston kicked it out, a couple of their cities had various levels of success kicking it out. Rio obviously got stuck with it and it was really kind of difficult there. We've been working with a lot of people in places where it's going to happen or it might happen or it has happened or it almost happened and didn't, collected a lot of information, started building a coalition, started agitating our

mayor and the kind of mapping the power behind this, seeing where the money is going obviously, and starting to educate in a community that has a lot of social problems that is really geographically spread out because it's about 700 square miles of stuff we're talking in million literally millions of people we're talking about educating you know we don't have any money um and but it's all been really good like we're about a year in um we're doing all sorts of different projects and it keeps kind of growing and mutating and we're finding little ways to win. And sorry, not to like sum it all up in one mouthful, but that's kind of the genesis of it. We're using it as an opportunity to kind of inform people of all the other problems

that we're leading the country and parts of the Western world in. And we have, as of Peter Thiel announcing moving to L.A. like a month ago, we now have 59 billionaires. So it's not like we don't have the resources it's a question of distribution you know we're our city is majority renter we have like over 50 percent of our city is renters we should have the best renters protections like anywhere basically we don't we're working on it and we're trying to use the Olympics which is something everyone knows about because of their billion-dollar marketing machine

to kind of talk about hyper-local issues, basically. That's kind of it in a nutshell. That's my elevator pitch, at least. Yeah. Well, yeah. So as I understand it, I think, was it Budapest last year decided that they didn't want to host it, which would mean that I think it's Paris and Los Angeles

are the two cities that it's down to for 2024. Is that correct? 2028. Around this time last year. Yeah, that was the landscape Budapest backed out. And then it was not a very well-kept secret, but just for everyone, because a lot of people in LA don't even know.

Even though it's going to like potentially substantially impact their lives in ways that are visible and invisible but we are awarded the games for 2028 the IOC was so afraid that no one was going to bid on the 2028

games that they decided to do a twofer and give Paris 2024 and LA 2028 this has never happened before they had to like undo all their weird arcane fucking right Kissinger blessed like internal rules bylaws and whatever to do this because they can they can do whatever they want and so now they're in this weird situation where they have to go backwards in time and assign 2026 but they can't they're it's really complicated but like another american city can't have it then because they'll lose 20 the la people will lose

out on ad revenue so it's looking like it might be calgary but they they're going to have a vote on monday to probably kick it out which la never had and i can get into later but um we basically so on paper we are awarded the games for all intents and purposes and the way the media reports on it, which is a whole other thing we can get into. It's happening in 2020. We're having it, right? Yeah. There is precedent for one city. It was for the 76 Olympics that were supposed to be happening in Denver.

They got awarded them, and then the people got together on a variety of issues and pushed it to a public vote, and they kicked them out. And so there is precedent we're actually working with some DSA people in Denver because they're coming back around again to look at 2030 for Denver and we've kind of basically modeled what we did and handed it off as a kit to people in Salt Lake City where the Olympics are also looking for 2030 and Denver and Calgary. And they're looking at some places in Austria. So it's all over the place.

We're kind of doing some organizing with remotely in different parts of the world with these people. And we're also kind of like getting tapped into some of the conversations around the Amazon H2 and World Cup and other mega events that kind of operate in this similar, for anyone who's interested, the background of the modern Olympics

came out of a sideshow of the World's Fair, basically at the end of the 1800s. No shit. Kind of like the post-industrial world. And we don't have, the World's Fair technically exists, but I didn't know, but it hasn't happened in America since 1984 and it happened in the city where I'm from, where I grew up in New Orleans.

And I guess it fucked over the city enough that American cities where I grew up in New Orleans and it I guess it fucked over the city enough that American cities got the idea that we don't want it anymore so now it happens in more like Seville or like countries that are cities that might even have like more of an argument that it could who knows I haven't looked into that but maybe it would actually help their revenue or tourism or whatever but like it doesn't happen in major cities anymore and I think the Olympics is maybe next in line I think even before FIFA but they FIFA Amazon all these like hyper predatory capitalists kind of go into cities and they kind of shake it's like that corporate welfare thing where they kind of shake them down like you're going to get all this money all these jobs will come it's going to trickle down your mom and pop business owners are going to love it.

And there's really no data to back that up. If anything, there's much more anecdotal evidence that people get, like normally operating businesses get disturbed by these temporary things that kind of come up. And that seems to make sense, you know? But labor, we have actually had a problem having any serious outward facing like labor partners. And we knew going into that that it would be really hard sell on labor because they still think it's, even if there's not a ton of arena building in this bid, that there will be building projects around it. And they think that that's going to pay dividends, even though a lot of their membership or leadership knows off the record that it won't. Right.

But it's kind of the game they have to play with the mayor's office. But so labor has a weird relationship. We're going to be doing something for May Day this year, I think, where we're going to go around May Day and pass out pamphlets where we explain specifically why this is a labor issue, too, whether it's the athletes being exploited on a variety of fronts and not getting paid, but, you know, just the abuse issues to the thousands of volunteers in each host city that like volunteer for billionaires and get treated like shit like in pyeongchang yeah you know they had all those like wild like super dangerous uh temperatures and wind conditions and people they're like getting hyper cases of hypothermia but i don't

know it's it's wild and most people know this but you just need to kind of take the time to get their attention in different formats and like break it down and if they have remotely decent politics I think eventually most people come around and be like yeah I don't I like watching it as a show you know like we both kind of and a lot of people in our group like grew up and have profound you know like pop culture we're also like involved you know we work we work around pop culture and know that when it's great which it hasn't i think been in a while it can be captivating television oh yeah for me for me it was like the 92 and 96 games were powerful michael johnson with the gold cleats yeah it was yeah so it can be good tv and it can be really

uplifting but they're obviously not telling you all the stories we have a new series called the olymp true olympic stories where we talk about all the athletes that don't have these kind of storybook finishes um and a big thing for me growing up that i realized now was like a radicalizing moment but i never would have said at the time was i was a wrestler as a kid and i remember kevin jackson was an olympic gold medalist and i remember speaking of posters we had in our rooms i feel like his poster was in my closet too and he would do the summer tour and do like little youth clinics for kids. And that's really how he made his living. And he was, he wasn't living out of his car, but he was like not doing well. And he had just proven he was the best in the world at what he did. And, and, um, it was a weird bummer, but yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think that that, like, I think if considering the way that, like, the treatment of athletes, I think, like, you know, just thinking about pop culture, I mean, they're so, I think you can kind of see, like, how little people want, people who are not necessarily politically inclined want to pay attention to sort of the truth behind either things that happen to athletes or like the way these stories really happen like I mean the fact that there was an Oscar nominated movie about Tanya Harding that paints Tanya Harding as like the hero of it because like she was coming like she just really wanted to be in the olympics so badly i mean i think that that sort of at least gives us like a portal into uh how much of a fantasy there is around the olympics and yeah um and i think that that there's like this magic to it that convinces people to, or that like allows people to ignore different things

and to treat people like garbage. I mean, there was a speed skater on the South Korean team who was hospitalized after the most recent winter games in Pyeongchang, because she wouldn't, she didn't skate the way people wanted her to. And the team, South Korea took the silver medal in speed skating, and she still ended up being hospitalized for an anxiety disorder, because the jeering

and the way that she was treated by her like her country people in her hometown like literally like defeated her um and I think that like so there's just like a a like multitude of things that people need to be more aware about like when it comes to their entertainment and I know that that can be like a buzz kill um but I think one of the things that we you know you were just we were talking earlier about the NBA I mean those people make astronomical amounts of money and there's like still labor issues there because like there's a there's a salary cap i mean like the person that owns the golden state warriors makes more money like doesn't change how much money steph curry makes even when he's like doing insane athletic things that nobody is ever

going to do yeah and it's kind of the same in the NFL when you think about, like, CTE and all this stuff. Like, even though these guys are well compensated, I mean, yeah. Well, there's, like, it's very clearly, and to anybody who's paying attention, it's very clearly a relationship of manipulation. Or someone is being exploited in this scenario. You know what I mean?

And I think people know that now. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of these two things. It kind of reminds me of, like, both as individuals and as a culture, we kind of suspend our normal rules of operation. There's that kind of shock doctrine thing, like rule of exception thing happening on a massive scale, but it also happens on a very, like, personal level, too, where we're, like, yeah, like, we're impoverished

and we haven't, like't invested in our public infrastructure in forever and unions have been getting killed forever. And the median income in LA is like $27,000 or something just absurd. But it's like, but we'll take the little like bubble. You know, they'll dangle this in front of us and for a lot of cases it works more than it doesn't. And it's really depressing.

But I also think that most people, like you said, get it and I think most people approach just even viewing sports in general in America differently even if they're not necessarily politically active or hasn't stopped them from engaging in it just as a consumer, which is fine. But I think that we kind of are, and maybe I'm in my own little like leftist bubble, but I think we kind of realized that to me the parallel of how we treat, you know, like an NFL player who's like literally sacrificing their heads in a lot of cases, their mind and their future, on average what, like two and a half years,

and the median value of what they'll make over that time is really small. And then when we're done with them, same way when we're done with Olympic athletes who in America never get paid in the first place in most cases, we kind of discard them the way we kind of discard soldiers, I feel like. We're kind of like done with them and then the rest of their lives are like extremely difficult.

And a lot of the stuff, and a lot of the indoctrination stuff that happens, the reason we have kind of some of these sex abuse scandals is because people are so afraid of coming forward because of this like these power dynamics that are in these youth systems or you know army and military boot camps and they're all not about questioning authority and just like letting all these terrible things happen until usually it's too late well and because we put like so much value on on these these things you can dangle in front of people's faces, because especially, I mean, obviously I don't know what it's like to grow up in

other countries, but I know that there's inherently so much pressure in America to be special. And I think when you put that on on people for their athletic abilities like not everybody gets to be a professional athlete not everybody makes it out of the NCAA and if you make like you're not getting paid there either as then even when your school is making money off of you and I think that like that I think one of the things that's like important for us to do in the Olympics is not just like working with you know our coalition partners about with housing and homelessness but really just like raising awareness of like about how we view other people in our lives and I think that that's like, like we, we should be really clear about how, like how we treat others and who, how we relate to other people through their treatment of others.

I mean, like, I don't, you know, we will probably like harp on our mayor a bunch, but like, you know, again, what Johnny said about dangling something in front of somebody's face, this is Los Angeles. This is not a place where... It's a pretty blue place. And to think that someone like the mayor of Los Angeles would be happy to buddy up with Donald Trump so we could have the Olympics while we're in the middle of a home, like a housing crisis, like that is being reported by our local paper as like, like a literal crisis that is affecting our country. It's pretty, it's pretty, it makes you feel pretty bad about how we care, like do we care about each other or not? The whole thing is supposed to be a celebration of unity through the entire globe and instead there's so much waste that happens around it and it's really disheartening.

Yeah, so many people get hurt it's like it isn't becoming the opposite of what it is on paper right like it's supposed to be about coming together and it's really more about like our differences and our divisions and speaking of like uh shiny things that we you know you hang out you hold out in front of people i think uh one of the things that i've seen that they talked a lot about to sell the the games coming to LA was that they held them in 1984 correct like they held them before and it was it was you know the narrative or the spin that they've come away with is that this was a success it was supposed to highlight sort of Reagan's America and I think Reagan even opened the ceremonies,

which was at that time, I believe, unheard of. Like, leaders didn't do that. And from what I understand, the narrative that they've walked away with is that this was a successful thing. It created all kinds of jobs. But if you look at it, and I think that I remember reading something by Dave Zierin in The Nation,

I believe, who said that there's a sort of direct line you can draw from those Olympics to the riots in, what was it, 92? I mean, could you talk a little bit about why this narrative is so popular with people and what's wrong with it? Yeah, absolutely. This is when we get a lot, especially locally, but there's a lot of stuff going on with 84 and it is really important. And, you know, there's so many parallels, you know, outside the Orwellian thing with 84 and now cycling back, like it's really on the nose, but yeah, it was like, it was, there's two things to point out one we've had the olympics before that in 1932 which were which most people even in la aren't even aware of some of the ins

and outs of that but that was in the height of the depression when no one else wanted the olympics and they sold it and they just imported thousands of palm trees and they sold it as a real estate speculation scam which basically worked i mean hollywood was going on but like that is so dark yeah i mean we should do at one point probably a podcast with someone just on 32 because underrated one of our colleagues works in academia and she's been researching it and she's been teaching me a lot of stuff and i've lived here for almost 20 years about that era yeah and so there's some shady shit that happened then but 84 is obviously in most people's culture a lot of people's cultural

memory here and a lot of people had positive experiences because It was in the end of the 70s when no one wanted the games as well when it was also an economic recession You see the themes like we keep getting the Olympics when no one else wants them Yeah, I think it was between us and Tehran and Tehran pulled out or or either way we beat It was basically us or no against one person or no one we got them and it was a kind of financial mess and it was the first one that was really the capitalist games where they had big corporate sponsors yeah and i you know i'm not an economist but the way i understand it is it was kind of an accident it was kind of a fluke that they generated a surplus

um great right like no one was expecting that um and the other thing was is they were expecting like horrible traffic but no one everyone was afraid to drive for those two weeks and amongst other things everyone stayed home or left town so there wasn't a lot of traffic yeah so people were like huge success a lot of problems with that though like you mentioned the military the militarization aspect but another aspect is that even that money, which a lot of, you know, centrists or right wing people get caught up on is that that money goes into a foundation called the 84 Foundation, which is a nonprofit, which is not publicly accountable.

So same with 2028. If in the wild chance that nothing goes wrong, it doesn't go over budget. It still won't be public publicly accountable money, and it'll go to like parks programs essentially not it can't go to housing homeless people things that we feel and people in the communities we've talked to are higher priorities yeah parks are fine but like we need like 20 other things before we need um you know we need we need toilets for homeless people before we need like a new a new swing set for example um but that's a tricky argument but But yes, to the point that Dave's iron article,

there's so many different pieces that if you ever get looking into Daryl Gates, the old LAPD chokehold monster of a police chief in the 80s, that he used 84 as like an opportunity to really upgrade the police force, which was already pretty nefarious and shitty in a lot of different ways.

And, you know, there are rumors of certain people being sent to train with the Israeli army in advance of it. I'm talking about beat cops taken there. They got tons of money. They got, like, all this, like, new, like, gear, like, big battering rams that they would use later in the 80s for, like, things called, like,

Operation Crash and Operation Hammer, where they would go into, like, poor neighborhoods of color and just literally there's a lot of news footage on this like destroy houses if you haven't seen it it's a really it's really horrifying and um and so many people were thrown in jail for a long period of time in these Olympic sweeps whether they were homeless whether they were they were just people of color that maybe knew someone in a gang or were active gang members. All this terrible stuff happened. Our mayor at one point on Bill Simmons's podcast or at some point last year said it was an urban legend or a rumor. This was reported at the time in, you know, like the New York Times,

the LA Times, all the kind of established media outlets at the date. It wasn't an urban rumor. It just, the narrative, because they have millions and billions of dollars over the year in NBC, like, they've whitewashed the narrative. It's like most people in the suburbs don't know about any of that shit. It's funny that you said the thing before about, like, the measure of success with the traffic in the 1984 Olympics, and I'm, like, thinking about, like, okay, well, where, like, because people left home, so they weren't driving, okay, well, because people left home so they weren't driving, where will the 100,000 unhoused people go? No one knows.

Oh, I guess they're not driving either. Yeah. I mean, no, I mean, and it's also just, I mean, there are still people whose number one issue in LA is traffic politically, which probably isn't surprising. The traffic is fucking terrible. It was bad when I moved here, and it's really bad now, even though we have, theoretically, a a more built out public transit system.

But that's kind of been a failure in a lot of ways too. And they're trying to tie transit and transit development. Which has its own, you know, that's a whole fucking other tumbleweed over there of issues. But they're using that as an excuse to kind of drive. I don't know. It's kind of a mess here i don't i honestly don't know what la is going to look like in 10 years except for the fact that it's going to be fucking brutally hot everything else like the mayor no one else i think can say with any certainty how we're going to be consuming media how is how are we going to be even watching the olympics will the olympics be half esports because there's like a big like

that might be a thing or how are they they've already fucked up the whole trans issue of how do we deal with gender in the Olympics because that's such an old school construct right of just their men on this side and they compete and the women compete over here like that's not going to be around forever in our culture and it's just there's so many parts of where it doesn't make sense in like 21st century life and I think that there should be like a better I think there is a much better version of it because everyone's like so what is a better version they're like a lot of if you look back in history in between and before you know before world war one between the world wars world wars and after world war two there

are a lot of socialist takes on the like alternatives to the olympiads both in America and like Chicago, where's the other city, and in different parts of Europe. So like there are models that are like worker driven, anti-nation, you know, like no national flags, and like pure amateurism, the way that the NCAA and the Olympics

were like supposed to be about, and they're not driven for profit. It's like actually not that complicated to like imagine. It's just to get people to leave this thing and come over here. I think it is really complicated for people to imagine something that isn't brought to you by Pepsi. No, you're right. You're right. It's easy for me. You're right.

But yeah, that's the problem because they haven't seen it. Yeah. Right? They haven't seen it on TV. And maybe it doesn't happen on TV. Maybe it's just, like, streamed somewhere. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, that's, I think, like, that's the thing. Like, one of the things that I would really like to hear from the local government is, like,

what do they think Los Angeles is going to be like in 10 years? Like, what, like, this is, and that's like how we kind of understand that this is such a big political, like this is an event that has a lot of politics attached to it because there are climate issues, there's housing issues, there are transit issues which are separate, there's jobs issues, and then there's like of course, more internal or private issues with how the athletes are being treated and things like that.

So I think that, yeah, it's just too much. It takes away from people's fun to think about the actual people that live in the place or do the thing. How the sausage gets made. Yeah. It's not nice. You all mentioned earlier that you had touch base with folks that had organized in places where the Olympics had either happened or were supposed to happen and all that sort of thing are there any common threads in terms of like how this is sold to people locally that you all picked up on and if maybe y'all just talk about that for a second I'm curious yeah I mean um it's almost I mean in our experience with the cities we've been talking to, it's almost always like fame seeking or people whose ambitions it is to be something greater than mayor, like a neoliberal liberal, a liberal with neoliberal kind of leaning policies, a pro-business, a pro-tech kind of people, pro-developer types.

That's a one thing. That's a one thing. We've noticed that there's places, it's weird, places that already have for the most part issues or like a militarized police, especially in the last few ones, look at London, look at Sochi, look at Rio, the police there were already extremely militarized and had hardcore surveillance and then they got upgraded while they were there. You know, LA, Pyeongchang. What else? What are some of the other similarities? They're all, they all have like, like most of the, most of the other organizers we work with are coming from homelessness or housing related issues. A lot of them happen to be artists or media people as well, which is also true of our group, even though there's all sorts of you know careers and backgrounds in there we're all super pissed off obviously and

I think one of our goals can be maybe to like create something that's more viable and I think that's what we're already doing by helping other people getting started earlier in other cities like even before the bidding process starts is to kind of get them to drop out as early as possible because as organizers like the earlier you get it, the higher, you know, you won't hopefully have to spend 10 years on it. Yeah. You know, but they, it's hard because they go back and forth.

But for a while, sometimes they're really popular in places that are more authoritarian. Like, you know, like Russia, obviously. Right now, what the IOC wants to do for the 2026 and 2030, they want to put them in places that are more traditional, so places that have had them before, wealthier places. A lot of the winter places are more touristy to begin with and more places that live or outside of the normal urban areas. So the problems are typically a little bit smaller, but still definitely there.

Anywhere where there's a profit and there's people there's like right now it's where anyone's desperate to kind of you know you saw it with mitt romney with salt lake city like he wanted to run for president he knew that was a feather in his cap to fix the finances yeah um yeah it's mostly where we can find like political ambition a lot of mayors don't want to go on to be president there's never been a mayor that's successfully run for president in america it actually doesn't happen very often so the fact that we have one right now is kind of weird um he knows that he has no other political victories and this is a you know this is a political victory for him just getting it awarded even though he will be long gone i like that is

i like that his name sounds like the uh karketty karketty. He's a fucking piece of work. So, like, how does this work? Like, from what I understand, is there, like, a local sort of, like, council of people who, like, get together and they decide behind closed doors that this is what LA needs, and then they take it to the sort of, like, local power structure? I mean, is there a local organizing committee, I guess, is what I'm asking?

Yes. Yes. That guy Casey Wasserman got a call a couple of his buddies. They raised $60 million in like a week or two. So we're going up against a huge war chest. So getting back to Little Giants or other sports movie metaphors. Yeah. It's like we're always, we realize we have the truth and time

and all these other things and like factual people and communities on our side. And they have like a fuck ton of money and a brand on their side that people are familiar with. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so they got together, they got like,

Kobe, Dr. Dre, all these other millionaire billionaires. Damn. Some athletes. All the big guys. Some Goldman Sachs people, Larry Probst, a lot of like, Wall Street gangsters, some very extremely wealthy people, some people from NBC, a huge cadre of people, and they have put together a lot

of, in my opinion, really tacky propaganda. Check out some of their videos or just even the logo for it. It's really, Casey Wasserman, one of his own companies, got paid a million dollars, which he supposedly recused himself from that, but he's already paying himself back for this. They have a lot more money that they're going to throw at this, even though they're still soliciting the help of volunteers. They wanted to raise the money privately because they didn't want to have what happened in Boston happen to them, where the people kicked it out. They had between 15 and 25, when I started investigating this around a year ago, quote unquote community meetings with the community

that their publicist kept sending back to me. I was like, cool, I'm looking at these community meetings and these agendas and these aren't like meeting notes. I don't see where there was discussion. There were a lot of small business, chamber of commerce meetings in upper middle class areas that have nothing to do with the communities that will be the most effective negatively by this.

But like on paper, technocratically, they're like, yes, we did a lot of outreach. And we realized that they obviously didn't. They didn't go to Skid Row to talk to people in Skid Row to see how they felt about it. They didn't go to South LA. They didn't go to East LA. They didn't go. And we did.

And that's what we've done the last year. We've kind of talked to those people in all different ways and heard a lot of different kind of concerns. And the number one concern is that there wasn't any real public't there wasn't any real public input and maybe on and they'll fight that till the day they die like they get really in the weeds about that they get mad when we say that there it wasn't very democratic and it wasn't it went in front of at the last minute they had to change it from 2024 to 2028 there was a new council person elected she wasn't there for them like she literally voted on it and wasn't never even heard public comment on it. And when that happened, the fact that they got greedy on top of greedy from August to September of last year,

I think really lost a lot of faith in the process from people in the press that were kind of on the fence, that were like, y'all are just some mad leftists that are creating problems where there are none. And a lot of those people, at least personally, I think kind of changed. And it kind of was like an awakening to them that like these people do not care at all. It's a foregone conclusion. And I think we helped expose that even though, you know, I think, you know, the next everyone's like what's next? I think we're looking towards like a ballot measure in a couple of years once we've done

some more education and once kind of some of the dynamics change a little bit more and once Garcetti's, I mean, he's already has one foot out the door, but once he's really out of the picture, we can kind of start, you know, and it just gets, it's a slow burn. It's like a bummer, you know, it's like, it bums me out too, but it's like more constructive than just being mad online

or feeling helpless about homelessness or whatever. It's like, yeah, I mean, you know, I come from like a journalistic background, clarity is stupid, but it's just like, yeah, it's like, I'm fine with asking questions that are unpopular. I was shocked. That's how it started.

I was researching an article too. I was like, why isn't there a resistance? Over the course of it, I really convinced myself and I talked to other people that this needs to exist. There are so many challenges, the fact that it's far off and all these other things. But I think the next year is gonna be really interesting and hopefully people keep hearing about it. Hopefully our network grows too so that when the World Cup

this summer's in Russia, we had someone reach out today, a student group's pissed off because because they're gonna build some World Cup thing next to the student center at this university in Moscow and the student body just found out about it at the 11th hour and they're pissed and build some like World Cup thing next to the student center at this university in Moscow. And the student body just found out about it at the 11th hour and they're pissed. And they're like, you're displacing us as students. Like what's going to happen? So we'll be there in some sort of way helping them even if all of us can't go over to Moscow.

And then we'll be looking at Japan with Tokyo Olympics in 2020. We will be there. Some of us will make it there by 2020. There's all sorts of nasty shit. It's already $9 billion over budget. They're deforesting all these ancient forests. There's still nuclear radiation from Fukushima in some of the places where they plan to have water events

in like 18 months. It's wild. So we'll be there. And we'll probably be in France at some point too to work with them. And we'll be there and we'll probably be in France at some point too to work with them and we'll be wherever we can, you know, because we're in all volunteer org like this is what we do in our spare times in spare time, but uh It's wild. It's never boring though. There's always some it's it's kind of if you look at the wiki for how

It's funny because FIFA I would expect to have its own separate wiki But it doesn't but the the IOC the International Olympic Committee of the FIFA of the Olympics they have their own special devoted wiki for scandals and controversies and it's wild and it's like wild that anyone would ever want to like loan someone like 20 bucks let alone like yeah they are kind of like a uh they seem to me to be kind of like a... I remember reading an article about they had made all these demands on, I guess, Oslo? Yeah.

When they wanted to bring the Winter Olympics there, and they were pretty funny. They were like... It was like people in the IOC had their own special walking lanes that people couldn't like the regular people and attendees of the olympics couldn't walk in and they had to be like it's like a it's like a crazy diva like um like tour rider where you can't look them in the eye all the m&ms taken out of the right yeah he's t-shirt guns they get whatever they want they get yeah exactly they're kind of

uh yeah they're an elite they're a group of elitists with a lot of money just like any other sort of power structure it's like in the cast of characters you've got the people in la with billions of dollars trying to bring it there and then you've got the ioc which is its own sort of like oligarchic power structure. They have like that old Nazi money. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah. Like they have that weird old European, North African, Middle Eastern kind of just royalty money. Like 10% of them I think are all nobility or royalty.

They're all in the Bilderberg group. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And in America, you've got the West Coast version of that, like all the kind of like weird Hollywood adjacent like new criminal, new like international criminal money that want in on it. We also realized too that like the whole bidding process itself, you know, as I was from the south it reminds me of the debutante system where it's in a weird way. And it's also like a way, because the two or three years that Eric Garcetti

and these other you know Casey Wasserman have been going around the world because they'll go to like Lima to go meet the IOC for this thing and then go to this other thing in Switzerland

for a couple weeks is what we realized that they were also doing is building out Garcetti's like international donor base for his presidential run

so that like which he you know if he's shrewd that makes sense to me because he knows that it can't just be LA money if he's shrewd that that makes sense to me because he knows that it can't just be la money if he's gonna have like a real shot at running president so it's fucking

gross these people yeah but it's like these people are like have run such a bad show recently that like and with all the sexual abuse stuff and all the financial kind of problems and the like you name a subject and it's like they're on the wrong side of it but who knows you had that kind of faux reform and from FIFA a few years ago which I don't obviously didn't go that far but I feel like with this one it's going to be a more radical tank and I think they get desperate like I think they keep getting more desperate the harder it is to find cities and our goal is to like help them not find the cities the good thing thing is most other cities don't have a positive previous Olympics to go back to. LA is kind of the perfect storm of a lot of really bad things,

unfortunately, that we're fighting against. But we still feel like we can shake some shit up. When we were first talking about this, Johnny, it's interesting to me sort of the parallels between what y'all are going through with kind of being sold on the same things, but because of not mega events. I'm sorry. I'm butchering this. What he's saying is that we have uh you know in the sort of like rush to um create like economic development out of small tax bases

to squeeze as much money out of a tax base as possible which is what um you know it's just it's i don't know just one of the facets of modern living in a capitalist system. What we get presented with are these big shiny objects that accrue tons and tons of capital in their wake, but, like, leave behind really nothing afterwards. Like, right now we're getting offered a prison. And there's some interesting parallels with how there was a – Stop creation now right there.

Well, that's what they say. Sorry. That's what they say. There's some interesting parallels between like how there's a local committee, usually of the local elite, that sort of like lobbies the local power structure. And then before you know it, you've got a congressman on board who takes billions of dollars, millions of dollars from prison industry and all this other stuff.

And then, and so, yeah, I don't know, just the sort of political machinations of how these things get created, they're very similar with where we live and with what you're going through at the moment. And the prison that we're being offered, which is a federal prison, is the best sort of parallel to that, I think, is what. Yeah, you're sold something that people don't actually need, right? And it could go to, I don't know,

you could probably tell me, and other people in your community could tell me of a lot of other places where that money could probably be better served. And did they use public-private partnership? Did that phrase come up ever? Yeah. Yeah. That's the scary phrase. That's what kind of unites all these things together is the umbrella and the work we do isn't just about the Olympics or isn't just about

Amazon or World Cup or these things. It can happen in a much more, with much smaller rich people and much less urbanized areas too. It's a pathological kind, or it's just like a pattern of, and yeah, I mean, I don't know if we'll have, I don't think there's any magic bullet. I think it's pretty clear, but it's like I think, you know, maybe people's, you know, that's something we're trying to change here in LA too, because we have the most incarcerated people, at least in America, I know.

In Louisiana, where I grew up, it was the most per capita, the most incarceration, like percentage wise. And in LA, we have the most incarcerated people, at least in America, maybe in the, or in the planet, in the square area. So just prison abolition or reform is something that we talk about a lot. So just prison abolition or reform is something that we talk about a lot. I'm less involved in some of the work being done here around that, but it's something that is disgusting. Having only been lucky to visit some other places and be in other countries where that's not the case, and where you also have a strong economy and also have all these other things and like you know strong quality of life. Yeah I don't know I think I think like probably someone probably someone in their life will experience several projects if they're paying attention in wherever town they're in in America

and I'd hopefully like to make it or at least LA or places where I can be as inhospitable this as possible and just like be a place where developers and people don't want to be pitching this stuff anymore because even if they build it, we know it will make their lives hell. Right. You know, just agitate them into pieces. Yeah. So has the prison been sold yet? Is the idea in process?

Well, the record of decision was signed on it on Easter weekend. And so you had this really gross thing where our congressman, Hal Rogers, who's the representative of Kentucky Five, which happens to be the country's poorest congressional district for 40-plus years now, made this really gross Facebook announcement where he's like, made this really gross Facebook announcement where he's like, Good Friday indeed in eastern Kentucky where we're going to allocate $444 million to build this federal prison. And it's just like tying that to a celebration of Jesus Christ being executed by the state is pretty dark.

Well, we thank you both for joining us. How can people learn more about what's going on with Nolympics? You all got a website. What's your social media presence? Want to plug that stuff? Yeah, hell yeah.

NolympicsLA, N-O-lympics la.com and at nolympics la on all the major socials um uh we have a ton of information on our website uh you can email us no at nolympicsla.com one of us will if you have any questions about any of this stuff or you want to kind of get in the weeds on anything we literally will talk to anyone um we have a bunch of new film projects coming out we'll hopefully be on some more radio shows and podcasts soon kind of talking about more specific things um once we have our survey stuff out we have some new union made merch um yeah i was gonna say i was gonna ask whose palms do we have to grease to get those uh black uh what is it says like Sin Hogaris or something. Yeah.

We'll talk to the group. We'll see what we can do. But regular members can come, or any person can come to nolympicsla.com slash merch. We've got a couple goodies up there. If you see us at an event soon, come say hi if you're on the West Coast. We're very much online. Like the more you can kind of join in uh online is great um we'll probably be doing some more petitioning and other projects

later in the year where we need participation but otherwise we're just kind of we're doing some more projects in skid row and around skid row in south la in the next couple months and in long beach it's just it covers so much geographical terrain that we're kind of all over the place physically but um if all else you know if all goes correctly like you'll be hearing us from us in the next couple years as we move to this ballot or whatever the next kind of major move is and we really appreciate i'm glad the trailbillies is back yeah next time anywhere remotely over there uh i'll have to come look y'all please do for sure please do for sure our guests today today are Claire Lobenfeld and Johnny Coleman with Nolympics LA,

and we thank you both so much for being with us this fun. Reach out for the medal Reach out, reach out for the gold I'm made to win Never give in The time is right for you to come Never give in The time is right for you to come and make your stand Reach out Reach out You now hold the future in your hand You have come from everywhere across the land

The stars are shining