Upstream - [UNLOCKED] From the Frontlines: Revolutionary Disaster Response in Los Angeles w/ Gage and Sean of All Power Books

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

One thing that has become quite clear in recent decades is that the best form of disaster preparedness is …community. Being plugged into an organized community can make all the difference when disasters hit. This is just as true for the slow violence perpetrated against all of us under capitalism as it is for responding to emergencies like hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, or wildfires.  In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about organizing in our communities—specifically focusing on some of the organizing taking place in response to the LA wildfires—but also zooming out much more broadly to talk about organizing in general. It’s the inaugural episode of our organizing series here on Patreon, taking deep dives into a wide variety of different organizing spaces and issues, from immigration to labor to issues around abortion access and trans rights and much more.  Although we focus most of our political education work on upstream root causes—taking deep dives into many radical ideas and revolutionary theories—it’s crucial to also focus on the practice itself, the on-the-ground work taking place on the frontlines, so that we can, as Frank Chapman has so eloquently put it, also practice our way into correct thinking. And, of course, as Fred Hampton famously put it: "Theory's cool, but theory with no practice ain't shit. You got to have both of them—the two go together."  In this inaugural episode, we’ve invited on two friends and comrades from the incredible All Power Books in Los Angeles to talk about their involvement in the grassroots, community response to the fires whose impacts are still being felt—and will be for years—on the broader Los Angeles population.  Gage is a co-founder of All Power Books as well as an artist whose work is featured prominently at All Power. Sean is a co-founder and leader of the All Power Free Clinic. All Power Books is a radical bookstore and community space in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles. They co-hosted our very first live episode last year with Abby Martin. In this conversation we talk about Gage and Sean’s experiences during the first hours of the fires which erupted on January 7th. We talk about the emergence of mutual aid and survival programs which focus specifically on disaster response, the challenges and lessons that emerge from this kind of work, the role that disaster plays in capitalism, how to build class consciousness and infuse on-the-ground survival work with political education, the failure of the official response, All Power’s free clinic, and much more.  Further resources: All Power Books Support All Power Books AP Free Clinic Socialist Rifle Association Chinatown Community for Equitable Defense (CCED) Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid (PUMA) Aetna Street Solidarity Ktown For All Southbay Mutual Aid Care Club People's Struggle San Fernando Valley A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit Mutual Aid LA Midnight Books Mask Bloc LA Related episodes: Capitalism, The State, and How We Got Here with Christian Parenti Breaking the Chains of Empire w/ Abby Martin (Live Show) Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

A quick note before we jump into this Patreon episode. Thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers for making Upstream possible. We genuinely couldn't do this without you. Your support allows us to create bonus content like this and provide most of our content for free so that we can continue to offer political education media to the public and help to build our movement. Thank you comrades. We hope you enjoy this conversation. Ah The response of my body felt similar to 2019, you know, when we're having the uprising.

It felt similar to 2020 when we were still in March figuring out what is this new virus that we're dealing with. But what was different this time for me anyways is I had my comrades and we had this network to be able to immediately start building. We already had this network built so we were able to just make quick decisions and figure out how to get items where they needed to go, masks, food, water even. Yeah, it was a very stressful time, but luckily because of the network pre-built and pre-used, we were able to respond quickly. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream.

A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan and I'm Robert Raymond. One thing that has become quite clear in recent decades is that the best form of disaster preparedness is community. Being plugged into an organized community can make all the difference when disasters hit. This is just as true for the slow violence perpetrated against all of us under capitalism, as it is for responding to emergencies like hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, or wildfires. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about organizing in our communities, specifically

focusing on some of the organizing taking place in response to the LA wildfires, but also zooming out much more broadly to talk about organizing in general. This is the inaugural episode of our organizing series here on Patreon, taking deep dives into a wide variety of different organizing spaces and issues, from immigration to labor to issues around abortion access and trans rights, and much more. Although we focus most of our political education work on upstream root causes, taking deep dives into many radical ideas and revolutionary theories, it's also crucial to focus on practice itself, the on-the-ground work taking place on the front lines, so that we can, as Frank Chapman has so eloquently put it, practice our way into

correct thinking. And of course, as Fred Hampton famously put it, theory's cool, but theory with no practice ain't shit. You gotta have both of them. The two go together. In this inaugural episode, we've invited on two friends and comrades from the incredible All Power Books in Los Angeles to talk about their involvement in the grassroots community response to the fires, whose impacts are still being felt and will be for years on the broader Los Angeles population. Gage is a co-founder at All Power Books as well as an artist whose work is featured prominently at All Power. Sean is a co-founder and leader of the Allpower Free Clinic.

Allpower Books is a radical bookstore and community space in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles. They co-hosted our very first live episode last year with Abby Martin. In this conversation, we talk about Gage and Sean's experiences during the first hours of the fires that erupted on January 7th. We talk about the emergence of mutual aid and survival programs, which focus specifically on disaster response, the challenges and lessons that emerge from this kind of work, the role that disaster plays in capitalism, how to build class consciousness and infuse on-the-ground survival work with political education, the failure of the official response,

All Power's free clinic, and much more. And now, here's Robert in conversation with Sean and Gage from All Power Books. All right, Gage and Sean from All Power Books. Welcome. Thank you. Good to be here. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, it's great to have you both on. And yeah, let's maybe before we get into stuff, I'd love it if you could both just sort of introduce yourselves more on a personal level and maybe just talk a little bit about how you got into organizing, maybe how you got involved with All Power Books and where you're based and some of that kind of stuff.

Yeah, I'm Gage. I'm one of the co-founders of All Power Books. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, but in Socom my whole life. So all this, the recent fire stuff's, hit really close to home, literally. We started All Power Books. It was me and four other starting members.

We met in the Socialist Rifle Association. This is in the wake of 2020 George Floyd uprisings. We were doing a kind of distribution of food to unhoused people in Venice. And after several months of that, we were kind of running up against limitations of what you can really do out of a van in a park. And that's how we came to the idea of having a physical space for people to coalesce around, for meetings to happen, for political education to happen. And then sort of a couple months after that,

Sean got involved with the clinic. Yeah, hi, I'm Sean. So I'm one of the co-founders of All Power Free Clinic. And, you know, a lot of the same as Gage here is born out of the protest scene, coming from BLM and then seeing the contradictions in our healthcare system from 2020 and the COVID pandemic. And seeing All Power Books getting formed and talking to these guys, going to the shop and really just getting involved in forming this clinic to help fill that healthcare need as well. Amazing. Yeah. Thank you both. And it might be helpful maybe just

before we dive into talking about the fires in LA and the mutual aid work that you guys have been involved with and also more of the programs that you have at All Power Books. Maybe just like a little one-on-one or intro and like what is All Power Books? Like where do you base? Like where is the storefront or the hub or whatever you're calling it? And like what kind of like basic stuff do you guys do aside from host live upstream events? Yeah we we're out in West Adams, which is sort of like right in the middle of LA. If you ever visited and you went to Santa Monica, it's sort of like right halfway between Santa Monica and downtown. It is a bookstore. We carry a pretty small selection of text just because we like to keep it tight so everybody can kind of talk about the texts that are in there. But really, the main goal was sort of third space, organizing space, somewhere for the

left to coalesce in LA. Because there was so much energy around it and nowhere for it to really like, no center for it to gather. We do kind of group studies of texts, we have author talks, a lot of political education stuff. Every Saturday we do free groceries. We've been doing that every Saturday for about three and a half years And if you extend that into kind of what we grew out of it's been more than four years

And then of course is the clinic which is how many guys do like six a month or some crazy shit like that? Yeah, so we're doing a lot of clinics now. I mean this past year We've had a lot of activation a lot of people joining. We've been able to reach out and We work out of All Power. You know, All Power is the main hub of our clinic. We also have a clinic for the neighbors and the community in West Adams. We function with the distro every Saturday morning and we also work with the different mutual aids in LA. We work to help in the encampments and help the communities that

they work with. Those mutual aids are CCED, Cape Town for All, Aetna Street, Solidarity, South Bay. We work with Puma and we over the years we've developed a really good working relationship with these mutual aids and been on the ground in encampments and even the motels that a lot of the houses community were put into the InsightSafe program, bringing healthcare to them. Incredible.

And later on, I'm gonna ask you to give us even more details and maybe walk us through some like what some of your events might look like. So that's all Power Books, just in a nutshell. And then, so the reason I asked you both on is specifically because you guys have been doing, All Power has been doing what looks like from afar from me here in the Bay Area, some really incredible work in sort of, you know, disaster relief, like grassroots disaster response, in a sense, responding to all of the different needs

that have popped up since the LA fires began. And yeah, I wanna get into that and get into some of the work that you've been doing around the fires and the relief work. But first, I guess just, I'm curious for both of you, like what was your experience like during the night and the morning of you know, when the fires began because it looked really fucked up, you know, like from just watching it on social media. And I was like, at one point, I was just like, it looks like there's these like spontaneous fires that

are just popping up all over L.A. You know, like multiple different neighborhoods like are flying embers flying miles apart and like landing in different neighborhoods. Like what is going on? But yeah, you know, you were both there. So maybe we could start there. Like what was your experience like since I grew up in L.A. So fires are like a yearly occurrence. So when the news was sort of breaking, I was sort of like, OK, great.

Another year of fires. It really didn't settle in how serious it was until the next day, because, you know, I've like had school canceled because there was too much ash in the air. I've had just like my doorstep covered in ash just because there's just so much ash in the air. Wildfires are really no new news.

So I was really I think I and a lot of other people underestimated it at first, but sort of that night being all buttoned up the apartment just seeing the winds, which the likes of which I've never seen before, it was just knocking shit over. The next day like in front of my apartment was just covered in roof tiles, so it was it wasn't until the next day really that it really looked really severe. Because on any given wildfire season there are multiple fires. That's not new. What's new is the intensity and the scale.

Yeah, a lot of the same for me as Gage. It was the night before we saw the fires popping up. And like Gage said, the winds were kind of what was different this time, but went to bed thinking, okay, this will likely get controlled. There's no way, you know, two entire neighborhoods are going to burn down. It wasn't until the morning that, uh, woke up and started checking the phone and watch duty and really seeing how large and how just expansive across LA these fires were getting, I had to go into work at the hospital actually.

So just seeing these fires take hold and reaching out to my comrades and just immediately starting to form a plan of, okay, are we gonna be able to respond and how can we? Yeah, Sean was actually at work at the hospital when he hit the group chat with, we should do something about this, which is really crazy to think about. For people who are not based in LA can you maybe situate a little bit like so all power is in West Adams like where are

you in terms of these fires you know in relation to some of these fires and maybe just like sketch a quick like picture of that for us or anybody who is having a little bit of trouble visualizing the spatial layout of LA in terms of the fires. So roughly, West Adams is kind of maybe, I don't know, six to 10 miles south of Hollywood, a couple of miles east of Santa Monica, a couple of miles west of downtown. So it's quite central. The Palisades fires are affecting the hills northwest of Santa Monica and a couple miles west of downtown. So it's quite central. The Palisades fires are affecting the hills northwest of Santa Monica. And the Eaton fires are in kind of Pasadena and Altadena area, which is northeast. All power itself is pretty far from each of these centers, separated by many miles of city.

So therefore not really at risk of any burn, but it's, you know, right in between. We're basically bordered by fire at the moment. And you were mentioning before we hit record about you're not necessarily at risk of the direct fires, but there's all sorts of like health hazards that are coming up in conjunction with the fires. Yeah. Right. Most most socal wildfires are just forest fires. So there is health risk, but it's not as severe as. So basically the whole city of Altadena burned down. and that's cars, batteries, like polyurethane couches, all kinds of things that let off harmful fumes into the air.

There was a webinar recently about the health effects that compared it to the Twin Towers burning down and the health effects of that fumes and called it magnitude worse because the area burn is just so much larger. So there's going to be lots of impact moving forward and the city is willfully unprepared for air disaster as we saw in COVID. Right. And that brings us to like one of the things that I've been seeing is one of the biggest needs is masks for people. And that's one of the things that have been, you know, I think you guys have been a hub for distribution for. But yeah, I guess, you know, next question I have is around what was the response like? So you mentioned, Sean, you were working and you texted the group chat. So, yeah, on both a personal level, but also in terms of, you know, your work with All Power, like, what was that original response like?

You know, what did it feel like being like in the midst of a real-time disaster like this and also gearing up and thinking about like, OK, what are the needs? How do we respond to this? Yeah, so on a personal level, it was very, it made us all feel very uneasy, but not unlike feelings we've had before, right? You know, this was the response in my body felt similar to 2019, you know, when we're having the uprising. It felt similar to 2020 when we were still in March figuring out what is this new virus that we're dealing with, you know. But what was different this time for me anyways is I had my comrades and we had this network to be able to immediately start building. We already had this network

built. So we were able to just make quick decisions and figure out how to get items where they needed to go. Masks, food, water even. A lot of the water isn't able to be used in these areas that have been affected by the fire. On a personal level, like Gage mentioned, I was in the hospital. I was at work. My hospital is not in Mid City where I live. It's more close to the hills, to the Eaton Fire where my hospital is not in Mid City where I live. It's more close to the hills to the Eaton Fire where my hospital is and we actually had to be evacuated. All the

medical offices were evacuated, the ER was closed down and patients were diverted. I was out of ratio of patients which means there wasn't enough staff to adequately staff the hospital so I had to take on more patients than is legally allowed. There was actually smoke inside the hospital. Even with our masks on, you know, we were smelling smoke and our throats were irritated, our eyes were dry, and we were just discharging as many patients as we could because we didn't really know,

it was still so early in the morning, which direction the fire would go. It ended up going, unfortunately, eastward and towards Alphadena a little bit more than where I was at. But yeah, it was a very stressful time, but luckily because of the network pre-built and pre-used, we were able to respond quickly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's such a crucial point, right? Like having that network already established. I used to do a podcast that just looked at natural disasters. And we spoke to like lots and lots of people that have been doing similar work as you guys have all sorts of different disasters. And one of the main takeaways was always like, what's the best form of disaster preparedness? Having a community, right?

Like being plugged into your community is the best. The best way. Yeah. Yeah. Same same question for you, Gage. What was it like on a personal level and sort of, you know, this like experiencing what was going on in real time and then also gearing up and preparing? Like what how are we going to respond to this? Yeah, I think it was such a shock because it developed so quickly overnight.

It was sort of like, this is probably an everyday wildfire, which is a crazy phrase, first of all, to, oh my God, this is like a generational event. Like the last thing I can remember of this magnitude, and I don't even really remember it, I was so young when it happened, but like this is on the scale of the Northridge earthquake, which is like one of the defining disasters of SoCal history but the next day kind of

When Sean's message came through we were all like, yeah, obviously we should do this It just hadn't occurred to anyone yet because it happened so quickly But we kind of just went down there and as Sean said because there's a network already We can kind of reach out to people and say, you know We're gonna be gathering stuff here and then once we find out where to send it, we'll send it. Definitely a lot of chaos in the first days because I think what's really inspiring is that

people have such an impulse to help. We were kind of drowning donations for the first couple days and because Pasadena and Altadena had not yet got their feet under them, people were still in motion kind of running from the fires. They didn't know where was gonna be safe to set up a shelter. What we really did was in the first couple of days,

was kind of just holding stuff and waiting for, to get word from those areas of like, there's a shelter here, we need XYZ. There's a shelter there, we need XYZ. I think it's hard to overestimate or overstate the importance of personal relationships because in those chaotic moments, there's all these groups involved and like, you know,

there's a discord that's going on, which has been really helpful. But between all the little chats and all that stuff, it's really easy to get lost. But if you just get on the phone with someone you know, there's a discord that's going on, which has been really helpful. But between all the little chats and all that stuff, it's really easy to get lost. But if you just get on the phone with someone you know, and just be like, what's going on over there? It's huge. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And one thing that stuck out to me that you just said is like people being really eager to help. And it makes me think a lot of sort of, based sort of loosely off the work that Rebecca Solnit does in her book, A Paradise Built in Hell, but it's much broader than that. And it's this idea that I've come across various different ways of describing it, like disaster collectivism or disaster socialism. I think Michael, or not Michael, a Christian, his son used that term once when I was talking to him for an interview. And

I guess, yeah, do you have any like, it sounds like you had a sense of feeling that like, when there is this kind of like rupture in society, this, like a acute disaster, like, it opens up a space or a gap for people to practice things that might otherwise be muted, or, you know, doused with water during like regular everyday interactions. There's this sense of like, I want to help a sense of solidarity that's like, almost feels like innate. And like, I'm wondering, I don't know if you you guys have experienced that have any thoughts or analysis or reflections on any of that in your personal experiences?

Yeah, I think it just sort of goes against that whole idea of like, one of the big building blocks that capitalism is predicated on is, oh, it's just human nature to be self-interested. It's just human nature to look out for oneself. And I think that in times of disaster, which arguably is when you see people's true colors, is that people want to help each other. There's that Mr. Rogers quote, which is just like, whenever there's a disaster, I look for the helpers and there's just so many helpers. And then of course, there's the flip side of that, which is sort of the disaster

capitalist side, which we can explore more as we go through. But let's get into like some of the actual work on the ground that you guys ended up doing, like, you know, he's spring into action. And I saw, you know, on your Instagram, all of a sudden there's these like pictures and videos you were posting and you had all of these supplies that were being donated and all of this. It just looked like a crazy amount of activity that just spontaneously emerged. Well, I guess not so spontaneously, but yeah, maybe if you could talk a little bit about what it's been like organizing around this in the last, you know

The last few days the last week or so Yeah, it's been it's been pretty chaotic as you mentioned There's a lot of stuff flowing in and and I kind of I don't want to put too rosy a glass to everyone wants To help because there is a lot of sort of I want to help here is a sack of old clothes So that's there's been a lot of sorting There's been a lot of trying to nail down communication lines, which again, and I'm going to harp on this because I don't think it's possible to overstate is the, you know, the streamlining that happens when you know someone

personally have a personal relationship. Cause it's super easy to get lost in chats. It's like, Hey, we have a ton of air filters, for instance, where is this needed? And people will post kind of an Instagram flyer that I don't know how old it is, I don't know if they still need it, because we did have situations where we would see a call for supplies, send a car, and by the time they got there, they didn't need the supplies anymore.

So what's really important is being able to pick up the phone, being like, hey, you guys are over in Pasadena right now, tell me what's going on, and then I can send something. Yeah, and I can attest to what I've seen on the ground, it's so many people I've been able like new volunteers, people just been activated by this crisis because it's been a real leveler right. I mean people always think

you know I'm untouched you know I have a home, I live in the Palisades, whatever but these disasters and the oncoming disasters too even after this are the great level or someone can lose their home in an instant and then they're houseless and now they need their community to rely on because Their community can react way quicker Than the system can at this point. Yeah, there's that tweet That's climate disaster will be you watching a disaster on your phone closer and closer to you until you're the one in it.

And that's been quite literally what's happened here. And I think Gage, you had mentioned something about like theoretical beef between organizations and tendencies evaporating. And I don't know if that's something that you wanted to maybe talk a little bit about. Yeah, I mean, I think anyone who does any left organizing knows there's all this kind of like, tendency beef that's that's mostly kind of online, I would say. I've never met anyone in person doing this work who has any beef about it. But it all sort of has instantly

evaporated when it comes to this. There's anarchists working with Maoists, working with Marxist-Leninists, working with any possible permutation. And I think that that was so inspiring to see because when you're kind of lost in the sauce of organizing every day, that can look insurmountable. But when the chips are on the table, it has truly disappeared. That's, that's really good. You were talking about like information and the benefit of having people's phone numbers and being already like sort of plugged in. And it makes me think about, we explored this and in that podcast, I was mentioning earlier, so the Mexico city earthquake in 2017, it was like, you know, huge earthquake hit Mexico city. And a very interesting story that emerged after the fact from that was like, there was all of this and maybe maybe you

guys remember this from the news, but there's all this attention that had been put on a 12 year old child that was trapped in the rubble of a collapsed building. And they were, the media was focused on this. They had firefighters coming in from different countries and many of them ended up going to try to like find this child that was supposedly, and I'm giving it away by saying supposedly, buried under the rubble. And it turned out that the whole thing was just a series of miscommunications and that whole episode is about like verifying information and fighting misinformation in the aftermath of you know you might call it like something similar to the fog of war but it sounds like one of the one of the things that you

were really sort of like ahead of the curve on here was being organized already already being able to do this work. And it was maybe a little bit more seamless for you to be able to like jump in and go from something that All Power Books doesn't, you know, I'm assuming is not a focus of yours, which is like acute disaster relief, but being able to like sort of step

into that role so seamlessly. I don't want to overstate how smoothly it went. There were definitely some issues of like, we sent a car out to an organization called Bike Oven, which is in Northeast LA, so a bit closer to the fires. And as soon as I had sent off that car, someone arrived in a car full of supplies from Bike Oven. So in the early days, there was definitely that fog of war,

but kind of being able to get that all straightened out, definitely having a network in place, first thing is huge. And you're right, disaster, certainly wildfire disaster relief is not part of our main programming, but I'd argue that like what the clinic does is disaster relief for the disaster that is the US healthcare system. Our grocery distribution is disaster relief for the disaster that is food insecurity. Sean, if you want to talk a little bit more about like the condition on the ground for the US healthcare system. Our grocery distribution is disaster relief for the disaster that is food insecurity. Sean, if you wanna talk a little bit more about

the condition on the ground for clinic, I feel like that is just a constant disaster. Yeah, you know what's funny is, like you guys say, clinic is a response to a disaster that's happening every day, the housing disaster. Our operations haven't really changed that much. Sure, it's a higher volume and the supplies we're getting out are a little bit different. We're focusing on PPE. We're making sure people are safe. A lot of people aren't talking

about the winds that came right before the fires or exacerbated the fires. Those blew away a lot of tents, a lot of tarps, a lot of people's temporary housings that are on the street. So a lot of different, a lot of tarps, a lot of people's temporary housings that are on the street. So a lot of different mutual aids have been working to replace those. So our operations haven't much changed. We're still out there with all the mutual aids we work with, with Puma, with Aetna, with K-Town for All, and all the others just helping support them and their people on the ground. So you mentioned some other orgs that you're working with specifically with AP Free Clinic.

I'm curious, like, can you sketch us a little bit of a picture of like what it's been like networking with all of these different organizations in this acute situation right now, but maybe also feel free to broaden it out as well. But like, I guess I'm just curious, do you feel like there is a pretty cohesive network of organizations right now that are pretty like plugged into each other that are working together? You know, I mean, anarchists talk a lot about how, you know, you want to network and sort of like federate different individual organizations or individual

like mutual aid efforts or different cities, for example, have like the cooperation network like Cooperation Jackson or whatever it may be. There's no overall overarching sort of like left organization that is doing this work really. So I guess I'm just curious like what it's been like being a part of this network and what the network looks like. Kind of right before this happened, there have been some meetings and attempts at kind

of building that kind of federation that you're talking about. They're going by Los Angeles Association of Mutual Aids and there are a lot of the orgs that Sean was talking about. End of Street Solidarity, Works in the Valley, PUMO, which is Palms Association of Mutual Aids. And there are a lot of the orgs that Sean was talking about. End of Street Solidarity that works in the Valley. Puma, which is Palms and Howes Mutual Aid. CCED, which is Chinatown Collective. Equitable Defense. Yeah, so there was sort of like the proto beginnings

of that network, which again, I think, is part of what led to such an effective response. We weren't starting from scratch. I can add on that. They're already sharing supplies day to day. You know, hey, do you have some tents? Our mutual aid are out. Our funds are low.

We need some extra meals for our folks that just got swept. You know, so everyone's already used to sharing supplies and talking to each other. It's just with this disaster relief, all it is is just a higher volume and quicker need. And you know, through our chats and everything we've been able to respond, I think for the most part pretty effectively. But we do have to acknowledge our limitations, you know, because we're able to get dry goods and clothing where it needs to go. But there is a limitation at a certain moment. We can't fix the water. We can't get people's houses built, etc. You know.

But yeah, that brings me to the question of like, what has the official response looked like? And where are the gaps in that? And like, where the limitations do you think and the challenges that come up when you're thinking, you know, we've observers from outside, you know, hearing stories about how the National Guard is like, policing the border of Alta Dena. of Altadena and you see cops hanging out, like, not doing much but of course, so much money was diverted from the fire department to LAPD. So I'm wondering, like, can you speak to that aspect of it at all?

Yeah, I mean, the idea that you would decrease the fire department budget in Los Angeles, one of the driest, most wildfire prone large cities in the country, if not the most, is quite absurd. They had a 2% decrease last year compared to an 8% increase that the LAPD had. And you write all those footages of kind of in Altadena specifically, of the National Guard preventing people from checking on their homes, black families getting accosted or arrested for going to check on their homes, black families getting accosted or arrested

for going to check on their homes specifically, all this talk of looters as if someone's gonna go into a fire zone to loot a house to maybe get like a PlayStation. It's all quite absurd and Midnight Books was doing a lot of relief out there and they have a video of sort of, on one side of the street, it's the National Guard

and the police standing around with Humvees and guns. Other half is just the community cleaning up debris and distributing aid. It's really woeful and it kind of highlights just how much even a liberal city like Los Angeles, like you know when a conservative might think like oh the most liberal place on earth, it is still really just out for the interests of corporate powers. The person put in charge of rebuilding efforts is like a real estate tycoon. Of course. And I think it's important for anybody who doesn't know,

Altadena is a majority black neighborhood with a very beautiful and rich history. And Octavia Butler's grave site is in Altadena, and the fires didn't make it there, but they were close to there. And Octavia Butler's grave site is in Alta Dena and the fires didn't make it there, but they're close to there. So thinking about how disasters impact communities along racial and class lines is very important. We're seeing that play out in real time.

Has there been anything helpful in terms of the state response or anything like, have you... I know that I saw some stuff where it was like there was some credit being taken. There was some like just weird sort of interactions between, you know, these groups of people that generally socialists, anarchists, etc. are generally oppressed and repressed by by the state. But now the state is sort of like, I don't know, you know,

not only relying upon a lot of these same organizations and individuals to do the actual work, but, you know, potentially taking credit for it or, yeah, I don't know, just being obnoxious about it. If humor is helpful, then yes. In June 2024, Mayor Bass considered a mask ban and protests. And then when this all sort of going down, they asked a mask block LA, which is an organization of like, it can't be more than 12 people. The city of Los Angeles with a billions of dollars budget asked these 12 or so people for masks after attempting to ban them. So I mean, that made me chuckle. I don't know if that's helpful. I mean, just to what Gage said, it's funny that, you know,

everyone is referencing mutual aid or politicians even, you know, when they've been fighting the same people in the streets and doing all that for this long and now finally acknowledging it but also it like really brings forth like the contradictions here right how we can act and they can or you know they do eventually maybe a week later but how we're on the ground and able to respond quickly it also reminds me what I would like to see is keeping people citizens safe. I was talking to a nurse today at the clinic and I was helping. She's a member of our clinic at All Power today.

And she was one of the people that were evacuated. She lives in Pasadena. And she was saying her power got shut off, you know, with that internet and everything. They didn't really even know how bad anything was because of that. So there's not even a good evacuation system in place. She said she opened her door and looked outside and that's when she realized, you know what, I got to pack and I got to get out of here. And once she was packed, that's when the evacuation orders came in on on her phone, which is, you know, funny to think about. But at the same time, what about all those people

that don't have phones, you know, the elderly or maybe they didn't charge their phone, you know, I don't know. There's just been some outright failures and contradictions that have become pretty stark from all of this. Yeah, passing's water has not been drinkable this whole time. And I don't believe they actually started distributing water at the city of Pasadena until at least three days in. You can't even boil the water to make it safe. It's just the fire department had to use so much because there's no contingency plan for this.

There's no water source that's prepared for these inevitable fires. So they drain the city water systems, which are not designed for this volume. And that kind of like kicks up all the sediment and makes all the treatment less effective. And to go to sort of like an effective state response would have happened ages ago, you know, like SoCal Edison, which is the biggest electrical supplier in SoCal, basically every time there's a wildfire,

they're implicated. They have these transformers out in the dry brush, the clear solution to put the blinds under ground. But that costs like between 15 and 30 billion dollars. They can do that, or they can just pay the state the 80 million every time they get fined. Yeah, and give the rest to shareholders. Right, and so that's sort of like the big thing

that I think like centrists and conservatives will say, hey, look, look at this inefficient state response. But really like, it's only because the state has been captured by private interest. This public utility should not be managed by a private company, which will put profit first always. And it's perfectly willing to let thousands of people get displaced, dozens of people die if they don't have to go and dig power lines. Yeah, absolutely.

We have a similar sort of public-private company named PG&E in Northern California, which is also, it's like pretty much implicated in, you know, like all of the different fires that take place here. There's like more often than not, it's a PG&E transformer that was, you know, around, it was either like an old-ass transformer that should not have been functioning still, or they hadn't trimmed the trees or pruned the trees around the line, something like that. And yes, PG&E is fucking notorious. People have been trying to have them taken over by the state for many, many years now, but they're just too powerful and they're just gonna keep doing this.

And what they end up doing is they're cycling through CEOs one after another after another. They're diverting all the money that's supposed to be going towards maintenance and stuff that's being diverted towards dividends for shareholders and that kind of thing. So it's a kind of classic story. And I do think it's really funny that you do mention like LA, but specifically California has sort of like a popular conception of being like left. Yeah, call me fornia as they call it. People conflate liberalism with left in this country because, you know, unfortunately,

for many reasons, which we don't have to necessarily get into right now but it is a joke because now you know this is just the same system it's the very same system that conservatives and right wingers who are sort of decrying all of this you know communist socialist stuff it's like now the liberals are on your team you know you guys are part of the same team yeah I actually did the math on the the So Edison stuff. So in they have $16 billion of annual revenue. Their last settlement was in 2020 for the Bobcat fires. It was 80 million. That's the equivalent of if you make $50,000 a year, a $250 fine, which is less than it costs like get your car out of impound if it gets towed. So are they ever going to replace those old transformers? They have to do the proper maintenance? Absolutely not. No, it's a smart business decision for them. The CEOs are doing their due diligence, right?

Yeah, they're doing exactly what they're supposed to do according to their obligation to the shareholders. And that's the problem is that their obligation to the shareholders is not to people who need electricity. I don't know if you want to talk about while we're still sort of before we jump more into like all power and the more broad work that you do in AP Free Clinic, you know, we've been hearing a lot of different reasons for why these fires took place. And I think there's obviously like a constellation of factors that go into it.

But you know, you have people like Elon Musk and Libs of TikTok talking about this is because of DEI, you know, it's like black people have jobs. That's why they're fires. And yeah, because the fire chief is a woman, you know, all sorts of different strange reasons that are being conjured up here. And I don't know, you know, if you've come across these or if you have anything to say as far as like where these fires came from, what led to these fires and what led to it turning into what it did. I'm 100% sure none of those people would ever dare say something like that in LA. Especially not right now.

The fire chief did warn the city kind of when their budget was announced that they were not going to be able to do brush clearing and training and all kind of stuff that would have prevented this from getting as bad as it did. So they can throw that right out the window. In terms of like just the general climate crisis, it's quite clear that we can't keep producing at the scale of producing. You know, the link to US imperialism was going on Palestine, the US military and its allies are the greatest consumer of fossil fuels in the world.

It's impossible to see the fires and everyone losing their homes in LA and not think about the climate impact of the tons and tons and tons of bombs being dropped in Palestine, not to mention the fuel it cost to contribute over there, all the money being wasted to just make the climate worse when a fraction of that money could have prevented all of this. Let's talk a little bit about some more of the programs. I know you did like a sort of bullet list of them up top, but like I'd love to know sort of all power is a bookstore.

But you know, like you mentioned, you guys do all sorts of different events and really mixed in with political education. And just curious, maybe talk a little bit about any of those programs. I'm going to ask you Sean about the free clinic in more detail in a sec, but also just what are some of the events that you put on? What kind of like community members show up? What is it like organizing in West Adams? What are the challenges? What are, you know, the successes? Like, yeah, give us a sense of, you know, what it's like on the ground doing this kind of organizing work specifically in LA and West Adams.

Yeah. So for people who are not from the West Adams also historically black neighborhood before they built the 10 freeway through it, it was quote unquote the Black Beverly Hills, a lot of kind of black wealth in that area before they destroyed it. And so the neighborhood is unique. It has deep roots, it's majority black. Everybody kind of in the neighborhood who comes through has some knowledge of the Panthers.

So, you know, we're really honored to have any comparison to that whenever they come through. And I think a lot of the organizing and the education that we do for LA at large, it does bring in kind of people who maybe mostly are on the internet about the leftism or were radicalized through social media. And it's really great to get them on the ground and meeting each other. And seeing that people in poor neighborhoods, like you don't have to explain to them why or how they're being

oppressed. They're quite aware. The difficulty is that they're so preoccupied with surviving that there's no bandwidth really to try to stand up and fight if you don't even know where your next meal is coming from. So we do like to call most of what we do survival programs in the, you know, the black human called them survival and pending revolution. And it's just it's a thing that gets you up on your feet, just so you can like have a breath to start thinking about, well, why don't I have food?

Why is my apartment so shitty and so expensive? Why is my landlord able to get away with all this? So that's sort of the bridge we're attempting to build. I love that. It's sort of like clearing the space and giving people the opportunity to even begin thinking about this stuff, like putting their head out from under the water to like look around and analyze stuff a little bit more, like politically. And anyone who's been paycheck to paycheck can know how all consuming that is. Yeah, absolutely.

Ashon, is there anything you wanted to add to that? Yeah, I think it's also of note that, you know, we're we're right there in West Adams. We've been now for years. Clinic is spread out across L.A. with the various mutual aid that we've been now for years. Clinic is spread out across LA with the various mutual aid that we've talked about, but just like our neighbors in West Adams, we're in the same boat. We're all paycheck to paycheck. We're not some folks that moved into town

and are doing this, we're of them and they are of us. And, you know, they see that and our neighbors every day that we're open come in and hang out talk to us hang out at the food distro and you know help us even they've been helping us with car issues even through this wildfire relief they've been donating brand new clothes that happened today at clinic so So, you know, it's just really inspiring and really great to be honorable really to be a part of this community and neighborhood in West Adams.

And Sean, walk us through how the free clinic works. What are the basic needs that you're fulfilling? And what kind of work do you do do and like maybe a little bit about your background to like how you specifically got into this specific kind of organizing and mutual aid work. And just so people get like a sense of the scale like list them and say what area they're in. Yeah, yeah definitely. So I'm one of the co-founders of All Power Free Clinic just through getting to know the people at all power We started it a couple days ago a couple years ago Holy shit. Yeah, we're so big right now

That's the importance of network No, but it we've been at it for almost three years now and We've been at it for almost three years now and shortly after the founding of it, another nurse came in and we found what works for us is you can't just walk into any neighborhood or any camera and be like, hey, I'm a registered nurse. Let me take a look at your body, right? Like they're going to kick you out. And you know, that's not the type of care we wanted to even provide. It's not us giving you care. It's

Collective in nature, right? Like we're trying to liberate health care knowledge. We're trying to liberate health care as a whole So we teamed up with these different mutual aid We have one in CCED in Chinatown We have one with Puma on the west side in Palm who's been doing a lot of good work directly on the west side. They're most near to the fires at this time. We have Etna Street in the valley. They've been directly affected by all the smoke and ash, doing a lot of great radical work. We've been working with South Bay Mutual Aid Care Club and also K-Town for All and we also do the

bookstore clinic. So we're having all of those clinics, most of them twice a month. So that's just kind of the scale that we've been running at. We're a group of about 40 to 50 right now and that's been growing over the years. And yeah, we just dispatch the different clinics that we run. So we have what's called like a walking clinic. We take our go-bags and we go through the encampment. They already know us. We're invited. We make sure that everybody wants us there. And we do a lot of wound care.

We've gotten to the point now where we are not just nurses, we have EMTs, we have paramedics, we have doctors, we have med students. So we're able to bring pretty much full medical care to the people most at need right there on the street. And we can have a doctor look at them and even call in prescriptions now for whatever they need, be it cellulitis, I mean, some antibiotics, a respiratory condition now.

And then we also do the one at the bookstore alongside Distro, which allows us to kind of be a little bit more free with our time, since we actually set up a table, and we get to really do a lot of healthcare education through that, which is super lacking in our healthcare system. You know, we have no preventative healthcare here. We don't even have access or most people don't even have appropriate access of healthcare we need.

So we try to like get rid of the whole hierarchy of healthcare and have like, we're telling you when to come to the doctor, we're telling you what questions to ask. And we, and by the way, we only have 15 minutes with you before we leave the room. And that's $2,000. Thank you very much. Exactly, even worse, right? Yeah, and it's $2,000.

Hope you can pay your rent too. Yeah. We're having people sit down in a chair, we're taking their full vitals, doing diagnostics, having them bring their medications to us that they're prescribed. And we're finding, I mean, we know this, all of us, they don't even know what they're prescribed sometimes.

You know, they're just taking, there's polypharmacy, a lot of different doctors describing different things, and we're doing a lot of education, keeping track of their vital signs. So they have something to bring to their doctor, to their primary care physician, and be like, hey, this is kind of what's been happening. I'm knowledgeable, I know what's going on with my health.

And that's what we like to think of, and call, we're trying to liberate healthcare and really just bring a community and collective aspect to it that this current system, this current for-profit system completely lacks. That's incredible. That's so incredible. The mobile clinic is one thing, but like you're mentioning this almost science, like healthcare education, advocacy,

empowering people with information is a element of it that I hadn't even considered, which when you put it that way, it's like so absolutely crucial. Cause you know, as someone who unfortunately, you know, I know a thing or two about the healthcare system, the for-profit healthcare system, that's definitely a part of it.

And you know, I can imagine if you're somebody who doesn't know how to use the right language, if you don't have the right appearance, et cetera, how easily you're probably dismissed and treated like shit in the system. Completely, and that was a radicalizing moment for all of us as healthcare workers too. We like to view this as our practice

as socialists in medicine. You know, everything we've learned, everything we've read, everything we've seen, and this is us trying to inspire and create an alternative system. You know, we're doing necessary survival work here, but we're also dreaming. I love that.

And can I say like, all of the things that you just heard Sean talk about, the like incredible scale of this program started because he came up to us and he was like, would you guys want to do a clinic? I think, you know, something that's really come up a lot in this new influx of people who are just like, what can I do? How can I help? Sometimes you have to exercise a little creativity and a little initiative.

You know, we don't want a million little orgs doing the same thing, but also if you can't find a place for you to use your skills, make the place. Because sometimes you show up, you're like, what can I do? And like, that's just another task for me to try to find something for you to do. Whereas if you're like, hey, here's what I can do.

Where do you want me? It's way different. Yeah, absolutely. That's such an important point. One thing I wanted to ask you and, you know, both of you and maybe the same response, maybe not, but like particularly thinking about the free clinic, like I know All Power is all volunteer run. I'm sure that the free clinic is as well, like you guys aren't, you know, getting a paycheck from this work. And, you know, I know a lot of activists, there's there's a lot of different ways that you can get into this work, right? You can be you can live in poverty.

You can have a partner maybe who's, you know, paying the bills. You know, there is the nonprofit route where there is funding that if you're lucky enough and you're willing to, you know, sacrifice certain things, you can get some grants. I don't know, you know, like I guess I'm just curious, like, how is this work sustainable for you guys? Like, how do you and not just you personally, but all the other volunteers as well? Like, how do you keep it sustainable? How do you keep an organization, organizations or programs like this running like materially? Part of that is the bookstore.

Our income on the bookstore is about half the books, prints and merch sales. And then the other half is donations in terms of, you know, our daily life. We all kind of just keep our jobs. Um, yeah, the nurses particularly are, I don't know how they do it. They'll come off a 12 hour shift, pick up a duffle bag and go do a clinic. Nurses are built differently. They are truly built different. Yeah, I honestly like I'll be kind of like, Oh, I

had such a hard day at the bookstore today. And then they'll have they'll have a nurse come in in scrubs still from the hospital, pick up something to go to a clinic. I'm just like, Oh, my God, I don't know what it'd be. I think the hop on it's just, you know, it, it's the radicalization of everything, you know, we're a little bit what I was talking about earlier. We're in the same boat. We're all of one class and we have this network. We have a duty to our community members and ourselves to build this.

And you know, this is our practice to just not only provide the care that's desperately needed and our current government is turning its back on, there's no Medicare for all. There's no access to health care. A lot of it is tied to employment or being drug free or just whatever other hoops you got to jump through. And you know, I think everyone recognizes that like, I'm one injury away from being in the same situation. So a lot of it is just responsibility to ourselves in our community. You know, yeah, Gage mentioned,

yeah, you know, we do work our shifts and at the bookstore and at clinic, we work our jobs and do it afterwards because not only is it the necessary work but it's the radicalization of others because we're not gonna just get through this through the bookstore or through clinic or through anything it's gonna be through math class consciousness and math selective action. Absolutely. Yeah and and like it is definitely hard to, you know, pay rent and do all this work on top of it. But you know what else is hard is just watching all the misery pass you by. And you know, it's nourishing. 100%. Doing work that's meaningful and so few people are able to be plugged into that in this system. So, and it you know, unfortunately, like I've always loved the idea of like paid revolutionaries. And I get frustrated sometimes when certain people tend

to I don't know, like finger wag at like being able to make your work sustainable. But I'm you know, what you guys are doing is heroic and that you should be paid like wonderful salaries. We're not there yet in terms of growing the socialist movement, but that's a goal of mine. Thank you. Thank you for your support. I won't hold my breath. So, Sean, you mentioned healthcare education, which I thought was an incredible thing to

think about and the incredible thing that you're doing. And also, there's the question of political education. And I think that one thing that I really love about All Power Books is you guys are out there doing the mutual aid work, you're doing the free clinic, you're doing what you might call and have called survival programs, and you're infusing it with political education. Because I do think that that's almost just as important, at least if you're looking at the long term and like building a movement and class consciousness out of this stuff. It's like. You don't want to just be putting out the fires, right? Like you want to be building something more than that.

And that's I think we're what's that too soon. Oh, I did not realize I said that. You do want to be putting out the fires and you also want to be building something more than that. And you guys are totally doing that. And I'd love to hear more. Savannah, I know is coming on the show actually at some point coming up.

She has an interview scheduled with Della to talk about like her Marxism 101 classes. And I know that another co-founder of All Power, Jess, he's a musician, right? And he does a lot of stuff around the politics of the music industry and stuff. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about the role that political education plays in your programming. Shout out to Jessy, Sticks to Your Guns.

A lot of people do come to us radicalized off their music. Shout out to Savannah for all the education work she does. I'm so glad she's doing a podcast too because she's so much better at this than either of us are. In terms of the political education part of it, that's sort of what makes it not charity to me, I think, you know, right? It's like, that's what makes it part of building

a better society and building a better community is you have to connect it to why is it that you don't have these things? Why is it that these random people have to help you? Why is it that we all have to spend our own money to help each other when we live in the most, the wealthiest country in the world? Connecting it to the political part is really vital. You know, Huey Newton called it survival pending revolution. It's really just to get you through until you can build the political consciousness for people to rise up and take control of their own destiny. Yeah, absolutely. How about for you, Sean? I don't know if there's any kind of, you know, like when you're out there at the clinic, I imagine there's too much going on to

hand somebody a copy of like Mao's Red Book, but like, I don't know. And this is for both of you too, but there's a quote that I came across recently, or a line that was in the book by a black socialist activist, Frank Chapman, who's with FRSO. And the line was, practicing our way into correct thinking, sort of this

idea that, you know, it's through practice that we actually are able to dialectically build and hone and strengthen our theoretical understandings of, you know, socialism and communism and capitalism. I'm wondering also in just in terms of like, you know, the goal is class consciousness, right? It's to make people conscious of the class war that they're currently unknowingly participating somehow whether they want to or not in the class war, and then how to fight back most effectively. Like, do people pick that up organically in your sense? Like you mentioned that you don't have to explain to people living

in poverty that the system is fucked. But like, what about that sort of like the communist socialist element of it? Like, how do you and Sean, I don't know if this is something that comes up for you. I'm particularly interested because I think, you know, all power, you guys are a hub that is sort of known for your politics in a sense, but maybe not the free clinic as much. I don't know. But I guess, you know, there's a question in there somewhere. Yeah. With free clinic, at least. It's much easier in the bookstore. We got a lot of flags on the wall that pretty clear what our motivations are.

And, you know, you can see all through the clinic we have our red star too, but we actually create a lot of our own literature from the members of clinic. You know we have educators, health care educators in clinic and we make brochures and we try to include even the wound care tutorials that we put into our wound care kits that we passed out and they're full of poems they're full of you know little quotes marks you know other communist leaders and let's be real like these people need so much help they're not really super open the position we're taking is more so you are not at blame for the

conditions that you are in. You know, you are not personally responsible. You are a victim of the system. The system is working exactly how it's supposed to. It is violent and you are a victim of violence. So that's how we frame it. It also helps with them accepting us, but the political education aspect on the street is a little bit lower because we're really there just trying to keep people alive and help in any way that we can. But through the education programs we do out of the bookstore, it's definitely a big part. You know, we do protest medicine, we do medic trainings, we do stop the bleed and we do wound care directly with the mutual aid. They'll

ask you, be like, hey, you know, for some reason this spring, I'm getting a lot of wound care. Can you guys do a teach in for us? And you know, we'll include some political education there. And yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that yeah, that makes total sense. Like when you're out there on the front lines, like maybe not the best time to be talking about, you know, the labor theory of value or whatnot. Yeah. I mean, a big part of it is we're we're engaged in a lot of deprogramming here in the U.S., especially like there's been such a vicious and violent

suppression of the left that just the word socialism is a dirty word for a lot of people and a big part of our kind of broad goal is just if people see socialists doing this kind of work, doing the clinic, doing groceries, hopefully it'll put in their head like oh these people aren't so scary after all and then that's another big step I think in the class consciousness part. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's important to like realize what the concrete conditions are that we're working under right now. And the left and socialists in the United States are very, very like we're at a very preliminary stage of just really not even necessarily maybe even all the time building class consciousness, but just destigmatizing the fucking word. You know, like, or even just something that's like, hey, maybe if your neighbor needs something, you should give it to them. Yeah, something as simple as that is like, sometimes it feels like an uphill battle, but again, not in times of crisis. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I'm wondering sort of, I guess, was we're

sort of coming to the closing chapters here of our conversation, bringing in that theory part, and you both touched on this a little bit, but maybe just to have it in one place and more like directly, mutual aid. It's a term that can feel kind of nebulous and I think it's used in a lot of different ways. You guys, actually I'm not quite sure about you Sean, but I know that all-power books is generally more Marxist leaning, not so much the anarchist tendency. Mutual aid has a reputation of being something that's, well not just just a reputation, but I mean, it was sort of the concept of it was developed by an anarchist and, you know, anarchist organizations really put mutual aid front and center. And it's this idea that like, we take care of ourselves. And for me, I think there's something very beautiful about that. I also think that it's not a smart move to ignore the state. It's not a smart move to just work around the state.

Like the state is there, we're paying taxes to the state, and it's not going anywhere. And I guess for me, the tension lies in like the beautiful, you know, like I mentioned Rebecca Solnit's idea of the paradise built in hell and the disaster collectivism and we take care of ourselves. And then there's the tension with the like, but what the fuck about the state? Like, shouldn't the state be using our tax dollars to do this in a more effective centralized way? Like you mentioned Gage, like mutual aid networks can't fix the water pipes. You know what I mean? So again, I'm sure there's a question in there somewhere, but I'm just going to throw all of that to you. And like,

I would love to hear your thoughts, like, you know, mutual aid and anarchism versus the more Marxist, like we need to actually confront the state and take over the state, those different tendencies and the conflicts there and the tensions there and like what you make of all that as somebody who does this work on the ground or two people that do this work on the ground. Yeah, all power books, you know, we welcome all tendencies, we work with all tendencies, but the core organizing cadre is Marxist-Leninist. And you're right, mutual aid, beautiful sensibility, beautiful tool to build these networks of

solidarity, which aren't necessary for building power. But ultimately, we don't need, when there's a fire for all these groups, to go buy a bunch of stuff from Target and Amazon and give it to people. We need shipping lanes of our own. We need to be able to have the authority to make a company open its warehouse doors to house and feed people. We need the control of the utilities to say, hey, let's take these transformers out of the brush and put it underground so we don't have this problem next year. So yeah, we do more accurately call our work most of the time survival programs, but the mutual aid work that's happening is absolutely necessary for building networks I talked about earlier, most of the time, survival programs. But the mutual

aid work that's happening is absolutely necessary for building networks I talked about earlier, kind of like the ability to pick up the phone and mobilize quickly. That's part of the dual power of showing the power of the alternative model. And, you know, Sean, maybe you can talk more about like industry solidarity. They do like a really good job of kind of truly building a mutual aid interconnected project. Yeah, they do. That's a mutual aid and solidarity project happening in the valley that I mean, just

so much great radical work they're doing. I recommend everyone check out what they're doing. A lot of great people. They host community nights every week they're on the ground. The people that are leaders there are directly house-lifts too. They host a market every Saturday called the really really free market which is exactly what this disaster relief has been just on a smaller scale. It has clothes, it has medical care, it has hot food, dry goods, everything.

So their model of mutual aid is beautiful in how it should be working. They're taking care of each other and the wider community by sharing supplies. But just to reiterate a little bit of what Gage need and the disaster level on the state level, we need to be able to have a wider, faster response. I mean, the mutual aids that have been doing this amazing work shouldn't have to step up and do this. You know, I was having this conversation at the bookstore this morning after clinic, someone was mentioning to me, this is so beautiful, how we can do this all this all and you know it really shows we don't need a government and I said that

then I said hey you know what we do we just need a government that actually cares for its people and is designed for the people and of the people I don't know about Gage and everyone else here at All Power and you, Robbie, but I don't want to be doing this hard of work every single day. Yeah. So yeah, like to bring it all around. You're right, Robbie, that, you know, mutual aid doesn't get us to control of the shipping

and the factories and the warehouses, but it is a necessary precursor to the networks that have the power to seize that. So what are the biggest needs right now? What could you use help with? And if anybody is interested in from afar, maybe donating or helping out somehow, or, you know, anybody local, like what are your biggest needs? How can people get plugged in? So right now we are kind of winding down our general supplies

distribution as Pasadena and Altina get their feet under them. We are receiving a big shipment of like supplies to do DIY air filters, I think tomorrow. So we're going to enhance for that. It's not easy keeping a socialist bookstore. Well, first of all, it's not easy to keep a bookstore open. It's definitely not easy keeping a socialist bookstore open. So if you want to support, you know, we're on Ko-fi, we're on Venmo at All Power Books. If you need tax deductible donations, we have a Zeffi link for that. I'm sure Rob will put all this in the notes. But yeah, I think just supporting this project is, I think, really important. I hope that we are proving sort of the viability of this

alternative model and that continued support will help the movement grow. And Allpower has a spectrum of amazing shirts that Gage has designed and they're all on the website and they're all really, really cool too. Another great way to support the bookstore. And Sean, on your end, what's the biggest need right now? If anybody has a background that could potentially help serve the cause, what can people do? How can they find out more? Yeah.

You know, we always say when we're on the ground at the bookstore and clinic, like many hands make light work, you know. So if people are of socialist, communist, broadly leftist, we're a bit of an umbrella group. We'll take you in and we always need more health care professionals. We're trying to grow. We're trying to be in every corner of the city. Financially, you know, we can always use donations too. We have a Venmo at AP Free Clinic. You can also donate to All Power and that'll get to us or purchase something that goes to directly supporting us. And honestly, another way to support is if you're from afar, just not even talk about us

directly, just talk about socialism to your coworkers, your friends, you know, just get this word out because, you know, we have an interesting political climate coming and right now maybe a new red scare. So let's normalize it, show the people doing the hard work on the ground, it's not scary, you know, it's of the people you are the people You can't be scared of yourself Hmm. I love that and

Just imagine your words ending the podcast as a stick to your guns song slowly fades in Sweet. Thank you so much, guys. This has been incredible. You're both doing like heroic, amazing work. And yeah, Gage, I'm going to throw all those links in the show notes. And yeah, I guess I guess that's it. Let's y'all have any final words you'd like to share? I think to Sean's point about just talking about socialism in general, I think people have this allergy to kind of any quote unquote political extremism in this country. But if they have some trepidation about that, just ask them in a disaster which extremists are out there helping. It's really not the far right.

It's not even the city, which is either liberal or conservative, wherever you live. It's the far left of all stripes. So you know, if you need that little rhetorical tool to get people on our side. Yeah, I just want to say thank you for having us on and giving us space to talk. Love your podcast for a long time. You've been listening to an Upstream Patreon episode with Sean and Gage from All Power Books. Sean is a co-founder and leader of All Power's free clinic, and Gage is a co-founder of All Power Books. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode.

Upstream theme music was composed by Robbie. Thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers for making Upstream possible, we genuinely couldn't do this without you. Your support allows us to create bonus content like this and it also allows us to provide most of our content for free, so that we can continue to offer political education podcasts to the public and help to build our movement. For more from us, visit upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Blue Sky at Upstream Podcast. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you hear, please give us a 5-star rating and review. This really helps get Upstream in front of

more eyes and into more ears. Thank you. You're fucking spotless With every accusation You're telling on yourself And in your desperation You're creating a living hell It's all in your head It's all in your head Remember it's not real It's all in your fucking head