It Could Happen Here Weekly 205

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
Hey, what's up? And welcome to it could happen here.
I'm Andrew Siege, I'm Andrew's I'm on YouTube, and I'm
joined by James.

Speaker 4 (00:37):
It's me.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
It's nice to be back with you, Andrew once again.

Speaker 4 (00:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
Indeed, indeed in a time of poly crisis, unfortunately, Yeah,
the Hoesen crisis. People are pretty familiar with the lack
of affordability of hoes in the way that hosen has
been speculated upon, you know, the way that more and
more people are finance difficult to get something as simple
as shelter. Yeah, and it's particularly generational, right.

Speaker 4 (01:05):
Yeah, Yeah, Like I don't generally love generational discourse, but
it is a marked difference for our generation compared to
the previous generation in terms of Yeah, housing security.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
The data bears it out in terms of the age
at which people of previous generations were able to get
house in versus you know what millennials and our gen
z are dealing with there housing is concerned. Yeah, absolutely,
And then on top of that, we'll also lacking a
lot of public spaces, places to gather, places to reflect
the socialized game, to explore, to interact, to discuss. Land

(01:43):
and housing and social spaces are really what at the
heart of human survival. You know, we speak of the
hearth as in that space where you know, humans were gathering. Yeah,
but unfortunately that that ownership of that space has been
concentrated in hands of a few people, you know, ritually
EAT's and corporations, estate, and some cases still literal aristocracies. Yeah,

(02:08):
I'm sure you're you're very much familiar with that.

Speaker 4 (02:11):
Oh yeah, just thinking about like the land I grew
up on for people who were not privy to Andrew
and I talking before the show. I just spent some
time with the gwitch in people like in the very
north of Alaska there, just in the sub Arctic, and
someone was asking me like about like how I related
to my ancestral land. I was thinking about it, Like,

(02:31):
the village I grew up in was entirely owned by
one family. They owned our house, in every other house,
and my dad worked for them, and so did almost
everyone else who lived there. Like, wow, an extremely feudal relationship.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
Yeah, that's unfortunately the experience of a lot of people
through human history, or the extra experience of landlessness or homelessness. Well,
homelessness is relatively recent, yeah, all things considered, but or
paying extortion in rents, which a lot of people unfortunately
would have experienced throughout that feuderal period into a capitalism.

Speaker 4 (03:08):
Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
But the thing is, for as long as humans have
been humans, long before the states existed, and long after
the states existed, people are going to stay where they
want to stay. They're going to be where they want
to be, right and at those take a couple all
these laws and restrictions and property rights, all these things
and criminalize a very natural human inclination, people are still

(03:31):
going to do it right. And that's thing that people
do is now known as squatting. Right, But it wasn't
always so chastised and criminalized with that terminology before it
was just you know, you find a piece of land,
nobody else is living there, you go in and use that
piece of land to survive. So today we'll be talking

(03:54):
about issues with land ownership, looking into its history as
a resistance practice in England, and seeing where a politicized
approach to squadron could take us in the future. Oh cool,
Crime thinks article on squatron was really helpful for this,
so I'll link it in the show notes. Land ownership
and governance are inextricably linked. Private property and land then

(04:18):
the mooge out of peaceful agreements, but violence, wars of conquest, colonialism, slavery,
and steed repression have been the true foundation of these
now considered noble and official property titles. What we call
ownership today is just violence legitimized by law, and it
follows a very similar structure whether you're talking about feudalism

(04:41):
and empire, land inclosure, colonization. Your start of the violence,
it becomes officialized and then rent is extracted. This is
not something that people took line down. Of course, people
have long resisted it, you know, But this is why
the government responds with the police and the armies to

(05:02):
protect the landlords, and the people have criticized and have
called out these practices. Thinkers like Ricardo Flores Margon and
Alexander Berkmann, peterco Potkin mcunan. All of these hammered home
the point of the absurdity at the heart of land ownership,

(05:23):
the idea that some of they could just pull up somewhere,
claim an area of land as theirs, and back it
by soldiers and pieces of paper. Now, anarchists not in
the business of fixating on just one system of domination
or the other, because they're very connected. You know, landlords
and governments and all the other authorities contribute to the

(05:45):
system of domination that we all live under. Assander's core
rights in anarchists squat in and land use. In the West,
land ownership and government use exploitation and manipulation in a
similar manner. Where a landowner builds a fence, the government erects.
Where land owner charges rent, a government levies taxes. Were
landowner advertises a vacant house sas not to waste it

(06:08):
as an income producer. In property, a government encourages migration
to those of its territories which are not producing adequate revenue.
We are landowner evict a tenant, a government wages war
against the population. Right now, in the United States, as
we can see, the government is asian war not only
against its indigenous population, its black population, but also it's

(06:32):
migrant population and a few other populations. The list unfortunately
goes on.

Speaker 4 (06:37):
Yeah, like the two are so tied, right that, Like
in many parts of the United Kingdom, like as it
was moving towards, like before we had a universal franchise
right where people could vote if it were citizens, and
over a certain age, they had a property owner franchise right,
like if you owned land, you could vote, and if
you didn't then you.

Speaker 3 (06:56):
Couldn't landed voting. Yes, yeah, and a sense that is
still reflected in the way that the government operates today.
You know, the landowners, the capitalists, they still have far
outsized influence with anyone else, considering the laws and the
policies that our governments carry out.

Speaker 1 (07:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:17):
Absolutely, And this is really get into the heart of it,
because you know, we may have had the abolition of
slavery and the abolition of selfdom, but in no way
that the formal abolition of those things end exploitation at all.
It has continued in new and old forms. You know,
without the police and armies and laws propping them up,

(07:37):
private property would collapse. But those things still exist, and
it is through those things that the power to exclude, extract,
and dominate continues throughout our society and continues to uphold
violence throughout her society. You know, slavery may have been
formally abolished, but we still find it in the prison system.

(08:01):
So if they may have been formally abolished, but we
still find it in slightly different forms with debt and
the way that people are tied on by debt, and
as long as that principle of extraction and exploitation and
and rent is not dealt with, we will continue to
see new forms and old forms bringing up.

Speaker 5 (08:20):
Yeah, I'm going to play the devil's advocate for a moment,
right and.

Speaker 3 (08:33):
See that Maybe you know, the problem is just the
violence of its origins, the problem with land ownership and property.
If it just came from violent origins and no other
violence continued, maybe it could be excused. Maybe we could say, okay,
well that's in the past and we can do stuff
about that, but we could leave the system as it is.

(08:54):
But the violence didn't stop with the way that the
system originated. The violence continues, you know, as and as
Core notes called ownership is enforced through eviction. You know,
families are thrown out of homes, squatters beaten back by police,
villagers raised to expand mining operations, et cetera. Yeah, and
then these economic theft and cultural destruction involved as well,

(09:16):
you know, because communities are uprooted and digest traditions are severed,
neighborhood cultures getting raised by gentrification. And then all this
dispossession drives unemployment because without access to land, people are
forced into wage labor on the terms of capitalists. This
is really how that rapid period of industrialization got started,
you know, with the enclosure of the commons.

Speaker 4 (09:37):
Yeah, it's just thinking about that. With the folks are
with with right there. Their lifestyle is to hunt caribou.
That is how they've lived for twenty thousand years. They
also fish for salmon, but there are still some there
are a fewer salmon due to climate change and the
downstream effects of that. Right, But like they have their
own land, a large portion of land. But it's the

(10:00):
fact that someone in this case a Trump administration, could
lease oil rights in other land which would directly impact
their land. Because in this case, the Caribou can't carve
if there are oil wells where they want to have
their carves, right yeah. And so like it's not just
that them having some land of their own does not
provide a solution to the issue, which is that people can,

(10:24):
under our current system own exploit and destroy a resource
that should be common.

Speaker 3 (10:29):
I mean, it really highlights the absurd notion that you
can just cut up land, right, yeah, exactly, but you
can separate it by by boundaries and that its self
contained and that we all the land and wars on
the earth is connected, yeah, through all the cycles and systems.
There's one big biosphere. Right.

Speaker 4 (10:49):
The damage done in one place will have an impact
on another place. And I mean that's so very obvious
to most of us now, but that our system of
land ownership ignores that, pretend it doesn't happen, right yeah.

Speaker 3 (11:03):
Yeah. Instead, we're upholding this ridiculous notion that you can
maintain exclusive lordship, literal land lordship over a couple of
acres of property and just do whatever you want with
it because it's under your name.

Speaker 4 (11:17):
Right yeah, And that's that's your problem, because it's your land,
and it's ludicrous, it's completely ridiculous to make that claim.

Speaker 3 (11:26):
Yeah, And on top of all of these consequences, you know,
we're also dealing with poverty and hunger because when people
are producing lots of food, rent and mortgages continue to
keep people in a permanent state of paying just to exist.

Speaker 1 (11:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (11:41):
Right, And then this concentrated ownership of land and of
property produces inefficient production and environmental degradation because property ends
upsitting idle or was used to speculate, even though millions
of people are in need of that land are starving
as a result of lack of access to that land.

Speaker 6 (12:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (12:01):
Also, because so much land gets traded around as assets,
as property, rather than it being what it is, which
is our commonwealth, there's no need for the owner at
the point in time to really care about, you know,
the quality of the soil, the impact on the ecosystems.
They don't have to. All they're concerning is their only

(12:22):
need is to concern themselves with profit.

Speaker 4 (12:25):
Right, Like, it's an asset to be traded, not a
thing that has inherent value and should be protected not
just because of its economic value, but because it's all
that we can leave future generations.

Speaker 3 (12:37):
Right exactly, And I mean With all these issues of
the land in mind, I think we can talk now
about how people have resisted, particularly in England. Yeah, which
is really why I want to talk to you in
particular with this episode.

Speaker 4 (12:53):
Yeah, okay, I'm excited to hear which which particular ifing
you want to talk about.

Speaker 3 (12:57):
I mean, the story can begin in the first century, yeah, right,
with the British tribes resisting the expansion of the Roman Empire.

Speaker 4 (13:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:07):
We could also speak about the Diggers of the seventeenth
century in England in massacred for trying to reclaim common Land.

Speaker 4 (13:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:16):
England has a very long history of land struggles.

Speaker 4 (13:19):
Yeah, definitely, and it's completely or it's not lost to
us now people have reclaimed, especially that the diggers, right,
but there are still commons to an extent, but they're
nothing like what they were, right, Like, you can go
to Clapham Common and just get great as a sheep
if you wanted to. And it's really sad that we've
lost that. We've completely as a nation like accepted that

(13:41):
land is the thing that people can only shouldn't just
be for everyone.

Speaker 3 (13:45):
Yeah, I mean I kind of see how that would
get to the extent that it did. Because you know,
it was the capital of the British Empire and in
many wes, the British Isles was the laboratory where that
sort of experimentation with the control of people and land
got started and was then able to expand elsewhere.

Speaker 4 (14:07):
Yeah, very much. So yeah.

Speaker 3 (14:10):
So, I mean, there's a long timeline that we could
go through, but I really want to focus on the
all the ways the people have been squatting in England
over the twentieth century. You know, after the Second World
War it's no surprise anyone that Britain was going through it.
Whole neighborhoods were flattened, housing stock was in ruins, and
for the six years while the bombs were fallen, not

(14:32):
a single new home was built. So people took matters
into their own hands. You know. Across the country, families
and veterans began to squat because they came home from
the war and they had nowhere to live. In Brighton,
a group of ex servicemen call themselves Virgilantes, led by
the legendary Harry Cowley, started cracking houses for families. The

(14:53):
spirit of it eventually spread like wildfire and abandoned army
camps which were once beent for miolition soon became makeshift neighborhoods.
By nineteen forty six, over forty five thousand people were
squatted in more than a thousand locations, and I mean
the government was concerned this could only lead to anarchy,

(15:15):
but faced with tens of thousands of people who had
self frehoused, the state didn't really have any choice but
to step back, right, you know, direct actions solved an
issue that their bureaucracy couldn't solve, and the pr of
kicking out a bunch of veterans from homes was not
a line they seemed willing to cross at that point

(15:36):
in time. Was times changed, but yeah.

Speaker 4 (15:39):
They wouldn't have any fear of doing that.

Speaker 1 (15:40):
Now.

Speaker 3 (15:41):
It is only English that were squat in in the UK.
You know, you also had Bangladeshi immigrants that end up
coming into the UK, particularly around the nineteen seventies, and
the issue was that single men couldn't get council housing
unless they had a family, but they could bring their
families over into the UK without housing, so it's like

(16:05):
a cash twenty two. They had all these rows of
council flats sitting empty, rotten, and young men who wanted
to bring their families over, can't bring their families over,
can't get housing, what are they gonna do? They end
up squatting. Right, Organizers like Terry Fitzpatrick, working with groups

(16:25):
like Race Today and later the Bengali House and Action Group,
opened up derelict blocks to Bengali families. Pelham House, for instance,
which was slated for demolition, was transformed into homes for
three hundred people by the end of nineteen seventy six.
Over one thousand Bangladeshis ended up living in East End
squads during that period, and eventually, through that taking that

(16:48):
full step of direct action, they won. By the early
nineteen eighties, the council caved, rehoused the squatters locally and
they ended up getting to live right where they wanted
to live. But unfortunately, as you might expect, this came
with racist violence. In nineteen seventy eight, altub Ali was
stabbed to death by three skinheads in Whitechapel and there's

(17:10):
now a park that was renamed in his memory, where
the history of his people can be remembered and live on.
Beyond the English Sandi Bangladeshi immigrants, you also had another
marginalized group that took on the tactic of squatter in Brixton.
The Gay Liberation Front took over houses along Rilton Road
and Mile Road, creating a network of communal homes which

(17:34):
shared the gardens, and as you can imagine in the seventies,
eighties and nineties, you know, this was really a refuge,
you know, for queer people dealing with isolation and hostility
from their families, from their communities. These squats ended up

(17:54):
becoming places where they can find love and solidarity and
theater and radical politics. Raylton Road was also home to
black radicalism and black radicals squat in in that territory.
Ol of Morris and Liz Obi's squatted in the nineteen
seventies and resisted multiple eviction attempts and their space evolved

(18:15):
into Sabah Bookshop and later the anarchist one two one Center,
which lasted until nineteen ninety nine. Now, this intersection of
black queer and squatron created Brixton's reputation as a frontline
of resistance police harassment, racist violence, and neglect would boil
over into days of rioting in Brixton in nineteen eighty one,

(18:37):
and amidst that chaos, the Gay squats of Realton threw
open their doors, even dragon tables and chairs into the
streets for a kind of riot party, a mix of
drag and defiance. And through all this these squats allow
people to survive. They became places where people could experiment
with alternative living, even had some people declaring independence. There's

(18:59):
a space in West London called Frestonia which is sued
to own stamps and had a two year old as
Minister of Education. Yeah, and then you had other squads
ended up becoming seeds for future cooperatives and social centers
and even some businesses for this goal and age of
squat and kind of came into a decline by the
nineties and two thousand sons gentrification and new laws had

(19:22):
to tighten the screws. You know, streets like Barrington Square
or Saint Agnes's Place which were once thriving squatted communities
were cleared up. You know, the law was changed to
make could unquote adverse possession harder, so long term squatters
could no longer as easily claim ownership. And then sitting
councils like Lambeth Council began selling off properties that it

(19:44):
had ignored for decades. Evicting people who have been living
there for decades, raising families.

Speaker 4 (19:51):
Yeah, I guess post Thatcher, like when they could sell
off the council houses like that massively contributed to the
decline of working class communities, right, and then Britain went
through this extreme neoliberal turn in the late nineties with
like New Labor and Labour's entire thing came to be
punching down on the young people in the working class.

(20:13):
So like it lines up with our general political.

Speaker 1 (20:17):
Like that.

Speaker 4 (20:18):
I was a teenager at that time, right, I remember
how bleak it felt to be, like all the time
getting this like oh cool britann you know, you know,
like Britain is having its like renaissance as this like
like like outside of empire, like as a cultural capital
or whatever. Meanwhile people are struggling to get by and
people fighting it hard to put food on their table.

(20:41):
It was just such a I mean, looking back, it
was the way things were going to be for the
rest of my life, at least up to now, I guess.
But at the time I remember it being such a
jarring experience.

Speaker 3 (20:51):
Yeah, that's it's quite an interesting quote unquote end of history, right.

Speaker 4 (20:57):
Yeah, right, yeah, it's just the the end of caring.
Like it was just such a yeah to be to
be told that we'd like perfected human existence. Meanwhile, racialized
violence was on the increase, right, Like people were struggling.
We like had become more connected and aware of each
other struggles. Like we could see people around the world,

(21:19):
not just in the UK struggling, right. We saw the
communities that like my parents grew up in, just gut
it by the withdrawal of the failure of the industries
that were there before. The whole town's with like no
reason for existing anymore. And then to come on top
of that and have like, oh yeah, but it will

(21:41):
cost you more just to exist in this town which
is shit now and there's nothing to do, but we're
going to use all the power of the state to
try and extract every penny that you have.

Speaker 3 (21:49):
Lets just squeeze everything out of you.

Speaker 4 (21:51):
Yeah, just a bleak vision going home now. I just
see the continuation of that decline line of like some
of those towns you know where there's no particular reason
for people to live there, and it's where they're from
and it's where their community is. But it's getting harder
and harder for them to live there. And you know,
the industries that used to at least give people a

(22:12):
chance to like have a dignified life there are now gone.
Get the ability of land laws to extract you know,
mega landlords now right, These giant corporations building these generic
homes all over the UK. It's still very much there,
and the state has doubled down on supporting them and

(22:32):
completely refuse to support its own people.

Speaker 3 (22:37):
Yep, in London, as and else where, the state and
the capitalist market of hand in hand to really eraase
our autonomy, our independence, our ability to live and to value. Yeah,

(23:01):
you know, ivan as places like Berlin and Amsterdam and
Copenhagen had some leaps forward where Squadron was concerned, you know,
legalized housing cooperatives and that sort of thing. Particularly in London,
that was the opposite of the case. You know, things
got harder.

Speaker 4 (23:19):
Yeah, Like Britain led the charge in like this kind
of particularly cruel and callous neoliberalism right from the from
the nineties to today, like with absolutely no concern for
the well being of its people. Even Yeah, you would
see it going to continental Europe, you know, compared to
living in Barcelona, which I did later, like squad still existed.

(23:43):
People economically things were equally dire, right, if not worse.
Spain had a really rough time as fifty off two
thousand and eight, but like the communities hadn't been quite
so destroyed by the state as they were in many
areas of the UK.

Speaker 3 (23:58):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I don't want to paint a
completely dark picture of London, right because there is still
and I can struggle, there's still radical social centers. They're
still yeah, yeah, squat, and I mean some squads end
up being temporary, you know, short lived social spaces and centers.
Speceis to help organize or to protest or to you know,

(24:23):
create comment culture.

Speaker 4 (24:24):
But yeah, like it's not Yeah, I mean I've made
London sound like some kind of like blade renal thing,
which is not by any mean that I've not spent
a great deal of my life in London. It's too
much city for me, that's fair. But I do, like
I enjoy visiting friends and their projects there and that
kind of thing. And I think even post COVID there's

(24:45):
been some resurgence. It's difficult. I don't want to suggest
that things are not still extremely difficult for people trying
to make it ends to meet because they are. But
like people are aware of the concept of mutual aid
who may not have been before, and that's been good. Yeah,
there's still our squad to struggle. There is still people
fighting very hard to like live a dignified life and
secure that for other people as well.

Speaker 3 (25:06):
Yeah. Yeah, and that's that's really what I want to highlight.
You know that what Squadron represents really is you know,
you know, both a struggle for necessity but also an
example of where I imagination can take us. You know,
our resistance does not have to take on the same
old forms of protests and to devoid per see. Right,

(25:31):
there are things that we can do as ordinary people,
whether we're black, whether we're gay, whether we're a Bangladesha immigrant,
a veteran, as an ordinary person, you could you can
also you know, take on the right action to create homes,
resist racism, build communities and fight the state.

Speaker 4 (25:52):
Yeah. Like I think about a lot in Greece, right
where anarchists have squatted places that were built for like
the era when people could come from northern Europe to
Southern Europe to spend their money and then avoid the winter.
And since you know, general economic decline that doesn't happen
as much. And now people have squatted those hotels to

(26:13):
allow migrants a dignified place to live, right, Yeah, that's
it's a really beautiful project. It's envisioning another world literally
in the ruins of the old world exactly. I think
it's a really beautiful thing that people do to you know,
take that action to address not just to protest something,
but to say, like the system which deprives people of
even a safe place to live, even the dignity of

(26:35):
being able to sleep in it under a roof at night, Like,
we are going to take action that strikes at the
roots of that to ensure that we give others that
the dignity that they deserve. And that's really special.

Speaker 3 (26:47):
Agreed, Agreed. And I mean I don't want to romanticize
squat in as you know, just a easy way of life.
It certainly is not. But to a quote crime think
the lesson of history is that in times of hows
in deprivation, people squat the empty is the fact that

(27:10):
this has been made illegal. There's not blind people to
the empty buildings or to the use of squat and
as a tactic, the crack speaker in Amsterdam East promotes
the slogan what neat mag khan knogsteats what is not
allowed is still possible forgive my terrible Dutch.

Speaker 4 (27:31):
Yeah mine's not much better. Yeah, I like that slogan
a lot. Like I think the issue of homelessness in
the United States in particular is something that like I
think about a lot because I travel a lot. I
remember sitting in a cafe in Kurdistan and i'd just
been I was outside of just walking around, and some
people invite me to join their dominoes game. So I

(27:53):
was playing dominoes, you know, like practicing my terrible Kurdish,
and these guys were asking me like is it true
that like people, and like they were especially interested in,
like the veterans who have been US soldiers, like sleep
on the street in America, And I was like, yeah,
that's the thing, like and they're like, why, what's the
deal with that. I know the answer is that we

(28:15):
have enough houses for everyone, but we've just treated them
as a commodity to exchange. Right, We've been told that
people can't live there, even though there's space for them
to live, and even though it's actively hurting them living
on the street. Right, it's such a condemnation of the
situation we're in as a society in need.

Speaker 3 (28:33):
It is, what does the future look like? You know,
none of us can really know. Yeah, but maybe we
can sketch some outlines of how we can approach lanues differently.
We could look to the past, and that's common traditions
of the past as inspiration for what might return. And

(28:54):
we could look to our own imagination of what the
future can look like as we refuse domination. We can squat,
of course, to show the cracks in this concept of property.
You know, we can collective eze and collectively organize spaces
for farming or production. You know, we can really, really

(29:17):
could do any number of things. I think the guidance
thread there has to be equity. Yeah, you know, it
has to be recognition that nobody has a right to land.
They don't use that absentee landlordism is something utterly absurd
and can be rejected out right. I think we can
also consider the non human in our approach to land

(29:40):
in the future, you know, considering the the rights and
responsibilities we have toward animals and plants that live in
spaces that you know, should have their own existence beyond
human utility. There will always be conflicts about how we
can use these spaces and also how we might resolve
these disputes. But I think it is clear that whereever

(30:03):
there's somebody who attempts to monopolize land by force, we
can respond adequately. I think the tactic of squatn is
one small, unfinished but necessary step towards a future where

(30:24):
we reject property, where land is shared, where domination is abolished,
where we as a human community and as a living community,
can free decide together how we live on this earth.
We'll just have to see that's it for me or

(30:47):
power to all the people this has When it can
happen here, I'm Andressage. That is James Stout and peace.

Speaker 7 (31:13):
Hello everyone, and welcome to it could happen here. My
name is Dana al Kurd, and I'm a writer, analyst,
and researcher of Palestinian and Arab politics. I'm an associate
professor of political science and a senior non resident fellow
at the Arab Center Washington. I'm recording this on October nineteenth,
twenty twenty five. Negotiators from a number of countries and

(31:35):
Israel were in Cairo recently discussing the next phase of
the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel. Hamas has since
released all remaining Israeli hostages, as well as the bodies
of those who were killed, and Israel has withdrawn from
certain parts of the Gaza strip and started to release
political prisoners as well as the bodies of Palestinians who

(31:56):
have been killed after they were detained since October seventh.
Some of the testimonies from these prisoners is just incredibly
heart to stomach. The degree of the humanization that's been
allowed to take place in these Israeli prisons, the torture
and abuse that they faced is truly truly harrowing. Some

(32:17):
of the Palestinian bodies that have been released are mutilated
with extreme signs of torture. Some were released blindfolded and cuffed,
returned with a noose around their neck. Greta Tunberg, who
was on the flotilla recently trying to break the siege
of Gaza, just also returned from Israeli prison where she
was also abused and stripped and mistreated. She said in

(32:42):
a recent interview, if they do this to a white
person with a Swedish passport. We can only imagine what
they do to Palestinians. And of course we are seeing
this play out before our eyes. In a fair and
just world where international law meant something, there would be
consequences for this. Instead, today I want to talk about
this plan that's been proposed by the Trump administration, the

(33:06):
twenty point piece plan for Gaza. Reportedly, ex UK Prime
Minister Tony Blair has been consulting with Trump and his
son in law slash advisor Jared Kushner for some time
hashing this plan out. We'll get back to him in
a bit, as he's quite the character. This plan, as
the name suggests, has twenty points, but it's a little

(33:27):
light on details. It outlines the return of remaining Israel
hostages very quickly, within seventy two hours. It says the
Gaza strip needs to be quote demilitarized. It talks about
the creation of an international stabilization force, an international security
force to operate on the ground in Gaza with the
eventual withdrawal of Israeli troops, but within a buffer zone,

(33:52):
and this force would consist of soldiers from other countries.
It also talks about the formation of a quote technocratic
a political Palestinian temporary government to run the Gaza Strip
territory until the peace process is concluded. But this temporary
Palestinian government would only be allowed to engage in service provision,

(34:14):
nothing more. That government would also be overseen by a
quote Board of Peace run by Trump himself, his pal
Tony Blair, and other yet unspecified members. There is some
language on the economic development of a quote new Gaza,
and some discussion of initiatives to promote tolerance, essentially to

(34:37):
deradicalize Palestinians. Notably, the plan does not endorse ethnic cleansing
of Palestinians from Gaza, which was wildly a serious thing
on the table for a few months that Trump endorsed,
but what it does say is still pretty insidious. Essentially,
the plan says that a possible pathway to Palestinian self

(34:58):
determination and statehood is conditioned on advances in quote Gaza's
redevelopment and a quote Palestinian authority reform program that is
faithfully carried out. Only then, the plan says, quote, conditions
may finally be in place for a credible pathway to
Palestinian self determination and statehood. Basically, if the Palestinians do good,

(35:23):
if they comply with the International Security Force, if they
take orders from the Board of Peace and quote reform
the PA in some way, and what that means is
a really big open question, then maybe their demands for
self determination and statehood will eventually be discussed. As I've
said before on previous episodes, that statehood part is a

(35:46):
bit tricky because statehood means different things to different people. Apparently,
Jared Kushner talked about maybe giving Palestinians a state without
the annoying little detail of actual sovereignty is really prime
minister that signed the Oslo Accords. Yet Zakrabin, which was
the first time Palestinians and Israelis agreed to anything, directly

(36:08):
said after signing that Israel would only ever give Palestinians
something quote less than a state. The international community keeps
recognizing a Palestinian state when the Palestinians don't really have
control of any territory. It's like, is the state in
the room with us now. It's also important to note

(36:28):
here that the plan that Trump is proposing doesn't really
include any Palestinian input, at least meaningfully. The goal from
Israel and the US's perspective is for Hamas to be
removed from the equation altogether. There's some discussion actually still
of whether they will actually disarm or not, because Hamas

(36:48):
has said to the media that it's not considering this.
And as I mentioned, there is this throwaway line about
reforming the Palestinian Authority, but what that means and how
the Palestinian people actually factor in isn't addressed. Here's my
educated guess. When Trump, an Israel, and the international community

(37:10):
say they want to reform the PA, we have to
look at what they've been doing and pushing for in
the past couple of months to understand what that actually means.
So for them, if we look at their track record,
reforming the PA means figuring out an acceptable alternative from
their perspective, to replace the octagenarian Palestinian President Mahamud Abbas,

(37:34):
so that the PA can seem on paper more legitimate
and better positioned to sign away Palestinian rights during future negotiations.
They've already been pushing behind the scenes to set that up.
They pressured Abbas to convene the Palestine Liberation Organization Central Council,
change the bylaws, create a vice president position, and appoint

(37:56):
the guy that's acceptable to the US and Israel to
that role. That man was sena che Palestinian businessman and
former security guy who polls at two percent with Palestinians.
What reforming the PA does not mean it looks like,
is actual democratic reform where Palestinians can choose not only

(38:17):
their president but also on their legislative representatives and on
the PLO legislative body, the National Council. It looks like
reforming the PA doesn't mean all Palestinians will be allowed
to participate if limited elections are held, and it seems
it doesn't mean responding to what Palestinian civil society has
been asking for, which is reforming the PA by reforming

(38:41):
the PLO altogether so that all Palestinians can participate in
the discussion of national liberation. We can guess that the US, Israel,
and the international community quote unquote are unlikely to offer
any of this because they've propped up the PA in
the past and seem on propping up some puppet government

(39:02):
of the PA in the future. But they need the PA,
as some acceptable Palestinian entity to be even tangentially involved
in future negotiations so that they can say, look, the
Palestinians agree to this is legitimate, even if that PA
doesn't represent people. Even if most Palestinians eighty five percent

(39:22):
in the latest poll are dissatisfied with the PA's conduct
and forty two percent support the the solution of the
PA altogether, this is a dangerous game to play. Any

(39:43):
sort of peace process in the future, as impossible as
it seems at this current moment, that isn't predicated on
the complete annihilation of one side of the conflict, will
need some degree of public support. It will need societies
involved in this conflict to buy into the process. Otherwise
you get spoilers, you get political actors engaging in violence

(40:07):
to disrupt the peace process, or you don't really resolve
the underlying issues in an even compromised, satisfactory way and
people get upset and the conflict continues. So, if you
don't include people's buy in, what you're banking on is
being able to suppress people, and what you want isn't

(40:28):
really peace. It's authoritarian conflict management. It's illiberal. It maintains
structural violence in the name of preserving peace. It means
Palestinians wouldn't get the rights they have under international law
the right to self determination, and it means the occupation
in some form doesn't end.

Speaker 8 (40:47):
The thing is.

Speaker 7 (40:47):
This is well understood and it's well understood by the
people involved in this twenty point piece plan for Gaza.
Tony Blair, for example, was Prime Minister of the UK
when the Northern Ireland conflict was being negotiated and settled.
He understood then that public buy in was important. The
Good Friday Agreement, which ended the conflict in Northern Ireland

(41:08):
for the past twenty seven years, had not one, but
two referendums, one for the people of Northern Ireland and
one for the people of the Republic of Ireland. The
process of getting to the Good Friday Agreement also included
all groups militant groups from both sides of the conflict.
This is what it takes for a conflict to be

(41:28):
contained in some shape or form. But for some reason,
when international leaders or ex leaders in the case of
Tony Blair, think about conflicts in the Middle East involving Arabs,
then public buy in, democratic processes, sustainable peace no longer
factor into decision making. The buy in an opinion of

(41:48):
the public matters, But apparently only certain publics. In other conflicts, also,
like the breakdown of Yugoslavia, the perpetrators of genopocidal violence
were held accountable by international They were taken to the Hague.
They faced repercussions, of course, not perfectly, not entirely, not everyone.
Some parties of the conflict that emerged in Bosnia after

(42:10):
were rewarded for their violence. The vision of the Serbian
leadership that committed war crimes in Bosnia came to fruition
to some degree in the form of Republica Serpska today,
which is a semi autonomous region that divides Bosnia Herzegovina.
But nevertheless, the international community at least understood the necessity
of holding perpetrators accountable for violence and war crimes, even

(42:33):
if the execution was incomplete. In this case, there is
no such discussion. A number of human rights organizations and
the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory
have found Israeli leaders President Isaac Hertzog, Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and then Defense Minister Yuav Gallant personally responsible for

(42:54):
the decisions made in Gaza, the decision to engage in
genocide in Gaza, but the ceasefire plan, which they are
billing as a quote peace plan for a new Gaza
and they're trying to make the basis of future negotiations,
says nothing about accountability for crimes committed. Trump, in fact,
went in front of the Kanesset, the Israeli parliament, and

(43:16):
insisted on his support for Prime Minister Nataniahu. He even
got involved in Natanyahu's corruption case that he has domestically
in Israel. Addressing President Isaac hertzog As Kanesse members clapped
and jeered.

Speaker 8 (43:30):
Hey, I have an idea, mister president.

Speaker 3 (43:33):
Why don't you give him a pardon.

Speaker 7 (43:47):
That's what we're dealing with here, Just an audacious, outrageous
display of corruption on so many levels. The fact that
these guys are the guys putting together the so called
peace plan quotes poorly for the sustainability of this ceasefire
agreement beyond the first phase, beyond Israel getting what it
wants the hostages a huge buffer zone that leaves Israel

(44:11):
in control of Gaza's former urban areas, and possibly they
might get the neutralization of Hamas, it's not clear that
this ceasefire agreement can actually advance into a sustainable negotiation
that maintains peace in the long run. It's why scholar
Marika Sosnowski at the University of Melbourne, who studies ceasefire
agreements in particular, calls this a strangle contract. She notes

(44:35):
that Israeli withdrawal, release of hostages, and full aid being
led into Gaza is the quote bare minimum you would
expect both sides to acquiesce to as part of a
ceasefire deal. She expresses concern that this agreement is highly
coercive and that it quote enables the more powerful party
to force the weaker party into agreeing to anything in

(44:58):
order for them to survive. This is in direct contrast
to a bargain between two equal parties that can sustain peace.
She also very rightly notes that Israel could at any
time claim the Palestinians are not abiding by the terms
of the agreement and and the ceasefire, justifying restarting the war.

(45:18):
The Palestinians have no leverage at all in this agreement,
and obviously they can't rely on unbiased international mediation with
the Trump and Kushner and Blairs of the world. At
the helm of this Sisnowski quotes a Palestinian leader from
Yermut Camp and Syria, who said to her quote, if
there is a ceasefire, people know the devil is coming.

(45:41):
I think that captures exactly everyone's fears in this moment.
The Palestinian Civil Defense Agency says forty Palestinians have been
killed in Gaza today October nineteenth. Children have been shot
and killed in the West Bank after the ceasefire agreement.
Israel raided the family homes of Palestinian prisoners in five
districts across the West Bank before releasing them. Nataniehu has
said he won't open the Rafah crossing. These all seem

(46:03):
like Israeli violations to the ceasefire to me, but that's
not how it'll be reported. And because the Trump administration
has twisted the meaning of words, where domination equals peace
and injustice equal stability. Once this happens, I fear very
few will question the premise of this agreement and the
entire peace process to begin with, a peace process for

(46:25):
Palestinians aren't even allowed to participate. No one can be
surprised when this doesn't last, and no one can be
surprised that this cannot be the basis for sustainable peace.
But Hey, I hope I'm wrong. Thank you for listening
to this episode of It Could Happen Here. Here's Hoping
for Justice and Peace.

Speaker 9 (47:02):
Welcome to Ake It Happened Here, a podcast that has
increasingly become about tariffs in the second Trump regime. I
am your host, Miil Wong, and oh boy, it has
been a big few weeks for tariff news. We have
tariff numbers on China that I'm not even going to

(47:25):
bother to actually record right now because by the time
this goes out, the numbers will probably be different. There
are supposed to be major negotiations underway between Trump and
the Chinese government to attempt to come to yet another
trade agreement and stave off yet another round one hundred
percent tariffs. Now, if you want to follow the sort

(47:48):
of blow by blow of what exactly is going on,
I'm going to just sort of refer you to my
section tariff talk on Executive Disorder. However, com we need
to take a deeper look at what structurally is going
on in the global economy that is resulting in the

(48:12):
demand for tariffs in the first place. And I think
the place to go if that's the thing that you're
trying to figure out. And we've talked about the sort
of ideological aspects of this in other episodes. We've talked
about the ways that the sort of politics of fascism,
the politics of anti semitism, the politics of masculinity lead

(48:35):
people towards these extremely ulternationalist policies that are specifically supposed
to sort of protect the domestic blood and soil national
industry and are supposed to protect material goods over services.
But there are things that are happening structurally in the
economy that make it such that people would consider things

(48:59):
like the tariffs that have been happening under this regime
as a solution to things that are kind of structural
problems of the economy specifically. And this is what we're
going to be focusing on today. Over capacity and steel. Now,
some of you may be asking, Mia, why are we
talking about steel over capacity? And I think there's a

(49:21):
few important notes here. One, steel is in some ways
emblematic of American tariff policy. It is I guess you
would call it the most material of the tariffs, in
the sense that it's the one where there's the most
actual direct sort of material forces and direct lobbying groups
asking for these specific tariffs. The American steel industry has

(49:45):
been lobbying to some extent for some measures kind of
like this. Steel is also one of the industries whereas
as tariff rates are fluctuated and got up and down
and whole waves of like Liberation Day, tariffs got put
into place and then removed, and some of them we
got put back into place a little bit. The steel
tariffs were set at fifty percent and they've stayed at

(50:08):
fifty percent since they were set. Basically, there's been a
little bit of variation sort of before the final fix
percent number was arrived at, but the steel tariffs have
been one of the most stable tariffs. And the reason
why it's been this stable if people can think back
all the way to twenty eighteen, which I know that
was a long time ago, but there was a miniature

(50:29):
trade war between the US and China in twenty eighteen,
and significant portions of it were focused on Chinese steel
production specifically, and you know, this is one of the
sort of fights that was had out. Nothing really structurally
changed much from those. There was kind of a back
and forth and then both sides kind of pulled back.

(50:52):
But Comma, that's not happening this time. And what's interesting,
and the reason that I was specifically talking about steel
here is that it's now not just Trump that is
tempting to institute large scale tariffs on steel. The European
Commission for the EU has released a proposal to double

(51:13):
tariffs on imported steel up to fifty percent, which is
matched in the US, and also reduce the amount of
steel that could be imported into the EU without paying
any tariffs at all. And this is actually massive because
this is an example of the EU effectively following US
trade policy for very very similar reasons as the US.

(51:35):
And if we can get to the bottom of what
is going on here, and I promise we will, and
I promise this will go towards something that is explaining
really truly the macro dynamics of the entire global economy
and why it's fucked. If we can actually trace out
what's going on with these steel tariffs, we can do that.

(51:55):
So let's talk about steel. Over Capacity as a concept
is sort of convoluted. You know, you have to sort
of ask the question, what is the quote unquote correct
amount of steel? Because over capacity, you know, implies that
there's capacity to produce steel over the amount that should

(52:16):
be produced. So okay, how do you figure how MU
steel should be produced?

Speaker 4 (52:20):
Eh?

Speaker 9 (52:22):
Very nebulous. It's also very difficult to measure because, okay,
we're gonna try to measure steel over capacity. There's a
lot of ways to do it that rely on things
like utilization rates. Right, So you look at the steel facilities,
you see how much they're being used at. You see
how much you know excess capacity there is, how many
how many factories are sitting empty one percentage of factories,

(52:43):
you know, total outputs being used. This doesn't work because
the utilization rates of these factories of this fixed capital
varies seasonally, for example, and it varies due to not
just the season, but a whole bunch of other factors,
things like you know, labor supply, weather demand pulls, and
of whole munch of other factors. Utilization rates of steel

(53:06):
producing facilities are very rarely at one hundred percent, even
in Marcus where demand at shrip supply. And this makes
it very very difficult to measure China's actual quote unquote overcapacity.
I am not going to even really try to give
numbers because it's extremely subjective. How do I say this

(53:26):
based on the research that I have done. I think
the numbers you normally see in the West are inflated
because they are not accounting for things like the weather,
because it is in the interest of sort of Western
research institutions, but for example, Western financial institutions, specifically steel companies,
and they're sort of like allied China Hawk, you know,

(53:47):
sort of like academics to have the number be as
high as possible. You will also see numbers from people
who are tied to Chinese government, And when I say
tied to, I mean kind of in a loose ideological sense.
In the same way as the China Hawks are, the
Chinahawks tend to actually be more directly connected to the
US government. Their numbers are probably also too low. But
I don't want to give you the impression that I

(54:11):
have a extremely certain understanding of what the exact number
of millions of tons of xsdo production is happening. What
we can sort of agree on is that there does
seem to be some kind of overcapacity in the Chinese economy, right,
and this is something that the Chinese Communist Party also

(54:32):
agrees on. If you go back to a document that
really really few people in the US have ever seen
to have heard of, which is the wonderfully titled Opinions
of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council on
further Promoting the development of Ecological Civilization, which was one

(54:54):
of the founding documentary Chinese environmental policy and the ideological
sort of underpinnings of this thing called ecological civilization, which
is the basis of Chinese environmental policy. One of the
things that they mentioned a lot is specifically overcapacity. Right,
They are actually very concerned about the overcapacity of steal

(55:15):
from an ecological perspective. And this is sort of fascinating
because we'll be looking at some scholars later who are
favorably quoted in Chinese state media's sources describing how there
isn't actually overcapacity because states say different things in different places,
and this is in fact extremely common. But there does

(55:37):
seem to be some kind of overcapacity, and the Chinese
government was to some extent making attempts to reduce it
during this sort of period of trade war. Now, the
other issue we're talking about overcapacity is that overcapacity is
an extremely political issue now, right, It's extremely weird because
the Chinese seal over capacity is like my most niche

(55:58):
thing that I've studied. I've had like a paper on
this sitting in a drive on my computer for over
half a decade. I have never brought it out until now.
But it's become an extremely political topic because the different
theories of stealover capacity have become a basis for a

(56:19):
lot of genuine trade policy. Now. I think a very
very interesting book at Chinese stealover capacity is from the
book Understanding China's over Capacity. She's written by two Chinese
economists that I think is a really interesting literature survey.
This this is around bout twenty eighteen. But I think
what's interesting about it it's from before the period where

(56:43):
everyone in the West had sort of decided what they
think caused Chinese steal over capacity, and so you can
go back. You know, it's not just useful to sort
of go back in time and look at the other
theories that were sort of floating around academia before or
a few of them got specifically selective for ideological purposes. Now,

(57:05):
I mentioned earlier, we'd be talking about some economists. You
don't think that's Chinese steel over capacity is real, that's
these people. I think that part of their thesis is
not very good. I think their survey of the literature
on overcapacity, though, is very good. And one of the
very interesting arguments they make this doesn't argue with a

(57:25):
couple of other economists that has sort of disappeared from
the literature is in argument about, okay, so there's steel
production that's happening that doesn't need to happen. I think
it's pretty fair to say that something is over capacity
if it's producing a bunch of steel that sits there
in rots because no one can sell it, which is

(57:45):
a thing that happens with Chinese steel. And one of
the most interesting theses that has really been abandoned, even
though I think it is actually to a decent extent
explanatory of a lot of very very weird stuff that
happens in Chinese policy circles and a lot of just
very baffling investment decisions, is specifically something about local caudras

(58:11):
and their performance incentives. So, okay, something that's very important
to understand about the structure of the CCP is that
Chinese government institutions are sort of run by these caudras, right,
and so if you are, for example, I don't know
you are the mayor of a mid size city, right,
you get performance evaluations and those sort of yearly performance evaluations.

(58:33):
Sometimes there's less frequents than that, but those those performance
evaluations rank you at sort of how good you're doing
your job. And obviously there's political maneuver rank here too,
But if you do a good job of hitting your targets,
this is your path to advance upwards in the party
and be moved from you know, like sort of running
a small city to like being brought into caudra in

(58:56):
larger cities, and you know, moving your way up the part,
moving national positions. These evaluations are extremely important. You can
also get sort of busted down if your evaluations suck. Again,
there's also what politics are too, But these evaluations actually
do matter. And one of the issues with these evaluations
and these are also policy making implementation tools, right. You know,

(59:19):
the central government can decide what kinds of policies they
want to pursue, and then they can use these codure
evaluations to make people at the sort of local level
who are usually semi autonomous in ways that I think
is not very well understood in the West, these countrare
evaluations are ways to try to ensure that Chinese sort

(59:41):
of local and provincial government policy kind of aligns with
national party policy. And the waiting on these examinations is
such that it has very very weird effects. And what
I'm specifically talking about here is that GDP numbers are
very very important to these codure value and it matters

(01:00:01):
that it's specifically gross domestic product because GDP is a
very very weird number, and there's a lot of stuff
you can do to sort of juice GDP numbers that
aren't really necessarily beneficial to an economy. So you can

(01:00:23):
have a bunch of firms that are basically unprofitable or
doing something that's like not particularly economically or socially useful,
and that can still boost GDP numbers. And one of
the things that happens with this is that you can
boost GDP numbers by making a shit tout of steel
that nobody actually really wants or uses. And because of

(01:00:43):
the priority that's set on GDP numbers specifically, and there's
also a whole bunch of these sort of weird financial
games that you can play that's also played a major
role in the way the Chinese housing bubble has played
out and the way that the government has been unwilling
to sort of you know, and when I say the
government here, I be in both the national governments and

(01:01:05):
also sort of these lower level governments have been unwilling
to sort of let a bunch of debt bubbles that
they've accumulated pop because those things prop up GDP numbers,
and the incentive on the local level is to keep
these numbers up. This used to actually be one of
the things that people would talk about when they talked
about Chinese steal over capacity. But it's complicated, like you

(01:01:26):
can't very very easily explain this to you know, like
a right wing congress person and have them go, oh, yeah, right,
this is unfair to the American market, and so it
kind of has like fallen out of favor and sort
of like the explanation to steal over capacity you see
in places like the New York Times. But I actually

(01:01:46):
think this is one of the things that does, to
some extent cause Chinese steal over capacity. Now do you
know what doesn't cause Chinese steal over capacity? That's right,
it is the products and services that support this podcast.

(01:02:09):
So I wanted to talk about the local quadra explanations,
because I actually think these are kind of important. And
I want to talk about one other argument that's also
not really used much that used to be a lot
more common, which is an argument that Chinese economist makes

(01:02:32):
that one of the reasons that there's overcapacity in Chinese
steel production is that upwards wealth distribution leads to lower
levels of consumption and thus over capacity. And so what
is basically means and this is something that I think
is actually also a thing that's the best structural problem
in in the Chinese economies, that the Chinese economy is
extremely highly unequal and wages, you know, like they have

(01:02:56):
risen to some extent, but they're not rising anywhere near
you know, like we've everyone in the US have seen
that famous charge of productivity versus like labor gains, right
like wage gains versus prouctivity increases. Wages in China have
gone up, they have absolutely not kept pace with sort
of productivity growth, and they also absolutely like have not

(01:03:17):
kept pace with the amount of the profit being produced
that is going to a very very small number of
capital owners. And this actually to reach the structural problem,
and this is we're seeing a very similar structural problem
to this in the US, where there is a lot
of consumption that if that money wasn't just all going

(01:03:39):
to a bunch of rich people, people would actually be
spending it on things, And particularly in Chinese context, the
argument was that if if there was a better distribution
of wealth, people would buy more houses, and this would
actually reduce over capacity because suddenly a bunch of the
slack capacity would be being used to like build houses,
except people can't afford the houses. And this is a

(01:04:02):
structural problem that like economists sort of note about for
decades and decades, which is that China has been for
a very long time. The whole thing was that they
were trying to transition into a consumption economy, which is
to say, they were trying to transition into an economy
that was fueled by its own internal consumption. The US
is to a large extent sort of kind of works
like this, where you know, you want to increase the

(01:04:22):
level of consumption and the amount of stuff that people
in your country are buying, and this is a way
to sort of like create a middle income country, right
And China has historically not been able to do this,
and haven't been able to do this because they won't
raise wages. But you know, if they won't actually raised
wages enough to increase people's consumption levels, then you're left
for structural overcapacity because demand is being lowered because people

(01:04:46):
don't have any fucking money. Now, this is another argument
again and I think is also probably correct that is
very much not talked about anymore because the argument that
is used in in sort of understanding what's going on
with Chinese seel capacity is about the Chinese subsidization of
state owned enterprises at the expense of sort of private firms.

(01:05:11):
And the argument here basically said, the state is propping
up a bunch of unprofitable enterprises and they're holding sectors
of the economy that should be you know, taken over
by more efficient private firms, but they can't because they're
being subsidized by the government. And this is sort of true,
but this became a massive geopolitical argument because the argument

(01:05:34):
from the American side, and when you hear anyone talking
about steal of capacity, now this is the argument that
you hear right, which that China is flooding the world
with cheap steel because there's a whole bunch of like
Chinese state own industries or just like Chinese businesses are
just getting money from the Chinese government to produce steel
and they're pumping cheap steel to the rest of the world.
And this is not really I mean, like kind of

(01:05:58):
this is happening, but it's also not the reason why
there's large scale steal over capacity. And of course the
argument is that China isn't competing fairly in the market,
like this is very silly. Markets have never worked without
large scale state quote unquote interference, Like American companies also
get extremely high level subsidization et cetera, et ceteracy, all

(01:06:21):
of US coregn policy. But you know, this is the
political imperative that's behind a lot of the rhetoric coming
out of steel producers and out of the American right
about why there should be terrocists on steel. Now there's
a problem though, which is that all of these arguments

(01:06:43):
are very specific to China.

Speaker 1 (01:06:48):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:06:48):
The argument is that there are specifically steal over capacity
in China because it's something structurally specifically wrong with the
Chinese economy that's like makes it not a free market,
and because of that, China's like unfair competing global market.
And this is why there's so much over capacity of
Chinese steel. This is wrong. There are individual parts of
this where yeah, like there are things where there is

(01:07:10):
excess capacity being produced by quadre evaluations and by to
some extent like so we subsidization. However, Comma, there's a problem.
And the problem here is that over capacity and overcapacity
and steel is not just a Chinese phenomena. It is

(01:07:31):
a global phenomena. It has been a global phenomena for
a long time, and it is largely a product of
the fact that we do not live in a global
economy that can actually support the amount of production capacity
that exists in the world. This has been a problem
really since the seventies, and arguably even since the sixties,

(01:07:54):
where as countries rebuilt from World War Two, and as
some some sort of developments in global capital that we're
going to be sort of like talking about soon happens
that the product of all of this is that production
has And this is kind of the thing that the
sort of fascist right kind of intuitively understands. Production has

(01:08:17):
become zero sum, right, It's very difficult to increase production
in one country without having it, you know, affect production
in the countries there isn't enough demand in the market
to sort of like fuel all of these things. So

(01:08:41):
why is there not enough demand to fuel the amount
of supply that would be that would be necessary to
make there not be over capacity. The answer to this,
in sort of marketing theory is that, as they sort
of put it, over production and under consumption are doubly constructed.
I'm going to read a quote from end Notes, volume two,

(01:09:01):
and then we're going to explain a little bit what
that means. The wage allocates workers to production and at
the same time allocates the product to workers. So what
that means is that under consumption and overproduction are in
effect the same thing, right, Because the way that we
allocate workers to what thing they're going to do, and

(01:09:24):
at the same time allocate products to those workers is
the wage, which is one thing. So overproduction and under
consumption are the same thing, right, and they're caused by
the same structural elements of the wage relation. Now, this
means that the Chinese capacity crisis is actually part of

(01:09:46):
a larger crisis.

Speaker 1 (01:09:48):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:09:49):
You know the thing about the double construction, you know
of overcapacity in unter consumption. Right, the fact that they
are really the two things that's unified in the fact that,
like your wage allocates what kind of productions you're doing
and what you can consume. The fact that both those
things combined are realized in this sort of secular crisis
in what's called Marxist absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.

(01:10:12):
So what the fuck is that the short version is?
Over time in capitalist economies, there's supposed to be an
increase of what's called the organic composition of capital. Basically,
there are composition of capital is a way to measure
how much in the pro labor process. It's like fixed capital,
variable capital, so it's like how much factory is there

(01:10:34):
relative to the amount of worker there is. And Marxist thesis,
which has generally been born out, although we'll talk a
little bit about that more later, is that this composition
is going to increase, and as it increases, accumulation also
needs to increase in order to maintain employment levels. This
is sort of accomplished by things like automation, which reduces

(01:10:57):
the size of the labor force, and thus, to quote
and notes again, as accumulation proceeds, a growing superabundance of
goods lowers the rate of profit and heightens competition. Across lines,
compelling all capitalists to, as Mark said, economize on labor.
So basically what this means is like as as capital

(01:11:18):
gets turned into more capital and larger amounts of capital,
this is the accumulation process. As this continues, right, you
get this massive sort of increasing the amount of goods
that are being produced. Eventually that lowers the rate of
profit in a sector. And eventually what that does is,
you know, in order to sort of economize on labor,
capital increases the amount of automation reduces the amount of

(01:11:41):
people that they need in the labor process. You know,
this is what what's generally known as automation and the
sort of crisis of people getting kicked out of the
draws because of it. As this process is sort of
generalized across sectoral lines across different parts of the economy,
the relative demand for labor decreases and workers are spin
out of the wage re line, which is the fancy
Marxist way to say that become structurally unemployed. And you know,

(01:12:05):
the thing that happens when you get kicked out of
the capitalist wage relation is you get kicked into informal
labor and slums, which you know decreases demand and increase overproduction.
At the same time, over capacity is skyrocketing, right, because
you have increasing numbers of people who have been spat
out the formal economy who no longer have access to
regular wages. The wages they get in the informal economy

(01:12:27):
are less than the ones they would get in the
formal economy. And as we were saying write, access to
like the wage, both determines production and consumption. So if
you lose access to the wage, right, and there's still
more stuff being produced because of automation levels, what you
get is a massive, skyrocketing double increase of overproduction and
under consumption, right, because there's just not enough money to

(01:12:48):
fucking buy the stuff. And the result of this is
a miseration. Everything gets fucking worse. This sort of used
to be an academic argument. It is no longer an
academic argument. It is just the terrain on which economic
policy unfolds. Now. The miseration thesis is this is you know,
as a sort of like general law of capitalist accumulation

(01:13:10):
is called has been argued about constantly. There have been
ways that has been avoided. One of the biggest ways
traditionally has been by capitalism sort of transforming goods into services.
So for example, like the operative example of this is
the transition in the US from rail lines to cars
on something that points out, So you know, you get

(01:13:30):
these new industries that are both labor or capital intensive.
By replacing train with car, you know, you can absorb
huge populations of workers as well as incorporate the peasantry
into the industrial economy by sort of like converting these
things into services. This has sort of been what the
economy has been increasingly converted into a service based economy
of various kinds. That's kind of what's happening now, you know,

(01:13:52):
and you and you can see this process that work
in the Chinese economy back when it was you know,
really growing in the nineties and two thousands. But you know,
once the peasantry had been absorbed as sort of both
a new market and a new labor force with lower
cost of production because wages are cheaper for a bunch
of structural reasons, the old tendencies of capital set in.

(01:14:13):
And so what happens inside of China was what was
happening everywhere else in the world, which is that as
labor saving technology begins to be implemented and you know,
a bunch of services refused to be turned into new
goods to like bolster the ranks industrial working class. You know,
you get what's happened in the US, which is this
this full transition to service economy shit that doesn't actually

(01:14:35):
really grow. And you know, if if you look, if
you look at Chinese growth rates, like they've been slowing
for a decade, actually a little bit longer than a decade.
And so you know, as China was integrated to the
global economy, it too became caught in this cycle of
industrial booms where you know, you get an industrial boom
where you have a country with favorable exchange rates, the
stallar that inevitably sets off, you know, the economies of

(01:14:58):
the bad end of the exchange rate to collapse as
they're forced to bear the way to global lower capacity.
As as I've mentioned one hundred billion times on this show,
it is the one thing I will make sure every
it could happen here listener will be able to explain
the Plaza Accords and the Reverse Plaza Cords. You know,
but this is sort of this is sort of what

(01:15:19):
the Reverse Plazai Cords and the Plaza Cords were about,
was the US. This is the last time the US
tried to, you know, use its just sort of like
pure political power and military might to be like, eat shit,
I'm going to force all of your countries to fuck
with your currency so that our manufacturing economy will come back.
And again, the US did that successfully and the Japanese

(01:15:40):
economy collapsed because we'd needcap Japanese economy to do it right.
And to some extent, Trump is attempting the farce as
farce version of this with with these steel teriffs. Right
to some extent, these tariffs are his attempts to pull
the Reagan maneuver of Okay, we can just like force
other countries to lower their capacity and increase our capacity

(01:16:01):
at their expense. The problem is that, again, this production
is zero sum, and if you do this, it will
annihilate the rest of the global economy. And this is
the sort of context behind all of the stuff that
we've been seeing for the last like thirty years, which
that actual profit rates have been collapsing for ages, and

(01:16:25):
right now we're in the middle of a just unbelievably
hideously staggeringly massive bubble that is maintaining the sort of
last like fake vestiges of economic growth where billions and
billions and billions of dollars have been sunk into all
of this AI bullshit, and it's you know, like the

(01:16:46):
tech driven AI is a significant specifically, specifically the AI
stuff is a significant portion of total US economic growth.
If you want to listen to why that's all going
to go to shit, turn on effectively literally any episode
of COOLSI and Media's own Exitron's podcast Better Offline and

(01:17:06):
you will you will hear a lot about this. But
you know, this has been that, like tech has been
sort of the escape strategy of the United States. Traditionally,
it's going to implode, it's going to do tremendous damage
to everyone. But in the remains of that, and in
this world in which profit rates are declining, and in
this world in which increasing portions of the population are

(01:17:28):
being spat out of the capitalist production cycle, in which
increasing percentages of the world population are being kicked into
an informal economy, and in this world of generalized overproduction
under consumption, what's happening is that there is an enormous
effort to get everyone to think that this is because

(01:17:48):
of very specific tendencies of like the bad government over there,
right that you know, over capacity and steel. Oh, it's
just because the like the evil communist government in China
is cheating at capital by giving their companies money, and
so we're gonna do tariffs on them instead of that.
And again, like it's easier for these academics to make
this argument because there is kind of stuff going on, right,

(01:18:10):
because there is this sort of cadure evaluation stuff, because
there is to some extensi a subsidization of steel production.
They can present this boogeyman to sort of pin what
is really a global overproduction and under consumption crisis onto
just you know, it's just as government we don't like.
And then you can sort of implement these ultranationalists tariff policies.

(01:18:35):
It's a way of deflecting the blame from capitalism onto
another country and using nationalism to paper over the actual
economic contradictions of capital. And if you want to escape that,
it's not enough to sort of just get rid of
Trump and go back to the previous retrade regime. You
have to actually structurally change the thing at the center

(01:18:59):
of all of this, which is the wage relation.

Speaker 1 (01:19:01):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:19:02):
You have to fundamentally change the fact that this economy,
the entire economy, is based on there being classes of
people who make money from owning things, and that there's
an entire class of people whose labor is stolen every
single day so that those other people can make money
by owning things who do all of the actual work.

(01:19:23):
And that's what's actually fundamentally at stake here. It is
this question of are we going to continue to do
tariff bullshit or are we going to take power from
the people who caused all of this? From Trump, from
Elon Musk, from all of the billionaires, from feel from

(01:19:44):
all of the tech billionaires that funded them, from all
of the Republican Party Cook Breathern networks. Are we going
to destroy these people completely by getting rid of the
social relations of capital that make this all possible. Or
are we going to to sit here and let them
continue to produce AI videos of them shitting all over

(01:20:06):
us while they take all of our money and commit
an ethnic cleansing and continue to fund genocides abroad.

Speaker 4 (01:20:29):
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the show. It's me James
today and I'm very lucky to be joined again by
eric A Mesa, who's the Borderlands coordinator for the Sierra Club. Eric,
how are you doing.

Speaker 1 (01:20:39):
I'm doing okay, Jans.

Speaker 4 (01:20:40):
Thanks for us for the invitation, Yeah, thank you for
joining us. Sadly, we don't have a lot of good
stuff to talk about right now. It's pretty difficult time
in the borderlands. But maybe we could start off with
something that I've reported on briefly in our weekly news show.
The Border Patrol is currently soliciting comment for its plans

(01:21:00):
to build for the wall through the out Tide Mountain
Wilderness and other areas west of Tikati, right, could you
explain a little bit about what they're proposing and what
consequences that will be.

Speaker 1 (01:21:12):
Yeah, well, hi, everybody so happy to be here and
not so happy to be sharing the news. But so
what the announcement was recently by the Border Patrol, especially
on the San Diego area, is the announcement of the
approximately nine point seven miles of new border barrier system

(01:21:33):
and on top of that, over fifty one miles of
what they call now system attributes and this is going
to Kabacuche impact on the area. This is going to
be about two point nine miles west of the Cut
port of entry, going through an area that it is

(01:21:54):
very remote mountain region and some of people and this
are more familiar than I am. I've actually never been,
but I've been talking to some of the local organizations,
the new humanitarian aid in the region, and I know
the Tekate Peak is in that area, and then you

(01:22:15):
start going west into these beautiful mountains that are also
the birthplace of the Tepana River. That's exactly the area
where it's going to go. So right now, CVPS accepting
comments and asking people in the community what kind of
concerns do they have concerns in regards of the environmental
impacts of a project like this, what kind of social

(01:22:39):
and economical impacts? So they open up this section on
their website with an email address where people can share
some of these concerns. As you mentioned, and part of
an environmental organization, but we also have all kinds of
concerns for a project like this, including the border barrier

(01:23:00):
and the system attributes, which are very poorly described for
what they mean. Some of the things that they mentioned
as system attributes is the increase of lighting, infrastructure, surveillance equipment,
and new roads for access for border patrol vehicles. So
one of the things that we're going to expect that

(01:23:22):
we have seen in other areas is more blasting through
the mountain, especially on areas where the mountains is so
uneven the terrain, there is a lot of heavy machinery
it has to come into those places to start bulldozing
to level the terrain so they can start building this
border wall. So we can expect some of that, and

(01:23:46):
with that come a lot of issues because there's going
to be the need to start drilling wells at the
border to extract the water from mixing the concrete for
the foundation. If there was any road out there, they're
going to probably widen the road two or three times
to allow this. Having machinery to access these remote areas,

(01:24:07):
this is just going to be the beginning, just setting
up the panels. But whenever you go to these places
and start disturbing the native soil, you can expect all
kinds of consequences in regards so invasive species of plants.
You can also expect so floating and removal of native vegetation.

(01:24:31):
In some cases, there is some species that are rare
on the area that having these impacts you know, can
be long lasting for them to be able to recover.
If they're able to do so the area on the
south side of the border, there is also an area
where animals need to be moving back on course, so
species like the native mule deer, a colony that leaves there.

(01:24:55):
There is a mountain lion and other species of mammals
pre much everything that is for inches, why it's not
going to be able to make it do that border
will Yeah. So yeah, we're just raising these concerns and
sharing with the community so they're able to also as well.
And an email to CVP crostoms and water but no

(01:25:17):
and express these concerns and also to remember that these
areas have been sacred size for the indigenous communities Diamond Memorial,
so we might lose some very sacred sides for the
tribes forever.

Speaker 4 (01:25:33):
Yeah, Like I know the topic ta cut the mountain
has been sacred to Kumiai. People believe it's Tuma in Kumiai,
but it's been sacred to them for as you say,
much longer than this has been the United States.

Speaker 1 (01:25:45):
That's correct.

Speaker 4 (01:25:46):
You and I have both seen it in different places.

Speaker 1 (01:25:48):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:25:48):
The damage that the border will does not just to people.
I've seen mule deer running along it like trying to
the clearly trying to find a way through. Right, this
is habitual pathway. There are some areas near, very very
near the boarder, like within one hundred yards of the border,
where there are naturally occurring creeks and little ponds which
will hold water at a time when water can be

(01:26:11):
very hard to come across here. And so I've seen
deer kind of distraught almost trying to get to this
place where they've obviously learned that they can get water,
but now they can't. It's really heartbreaking, on top of
all the other cruelty that it does. I suppose we
should address, Like I'm not sure how much we can
accomplish by the comment period, right, but it has value nonetheless,

(01:26:33):
like trying to do something, I think it has value.
It shows that we didn't let this just happen.

Speaker 1 (01:26:40):
Yeah, that's right. I honestly am not very hopeful from
those common periods because this is not the first time
they're asking the community to provide input, and with past
experiences that we have organized in all other areas, other
segments of the world, even in all states, we haven't
get a response even or an acknowledgment of these concerns.

(01:27:04):
So Dalva itself is really concerning, but I think it
is important that the communities around these areas are aware
about this and they get involved, and that there is
this community sentiment against this abuse of power that the
administration continues to do, and the border lands and using

(01:27:24):
them as the sacrifice zone as these testing grounds for
what can potentially continue to happen or expand not only
on the border but in other series, like we are
seeing with the span of militarization nowadays.

Speaker 4 (01:27:40):
Yeah, definitely, like all the stuff that is really bad
in America right now, like it started at the border,
that's right. People are seeing it in their communities now,
but like we've been seeing it where we live for
a long time. Can we talk a little bit about
there's been some other construction right then, with San Diego
is not the only place right now that there's a
significant Dieditetree allocation to construction a border barrier, and there's

(01:28:03):
more construction east of San Diego.

Speaker 1 (01:28:06):
Right, Yeah, that's that's right. Most of the construction that
is happening right now, it was with all funding that
was from the twenty twenty one funds that were available
since the first Rump administration, So we were hoping that
that was going to be like the end of the funding.

(01:28:26):
But since the proposal and passing of the quote unquote
big beautiful Bill, we've got to remind ourselves that now
the administration has allocated forty six point five billion dollars
for border security, and that includes border barriers and system attributes,

(01:28:50):
so pretty much anything related to border security right now,
they have the funding to do it. They pretty much
out the funding to put a double wall across the
whole US Mexico border. Yeah, so that's that's huge. You know,
In recent days, we got a new wave of contracts
that were awarded. In October ten, we got this announcement

(01:29:12):
that out of this funding, the forty six point five billion,
they are located for a little bit over four billion,
and this will fund them two hundred and thirty miles
of new physical barriers and four hundred miles of surveillance
technology across the US Mexico border from California New Texas.

(01:29:35):
That's and they put up a new section on their
website where there is a map you can navigate. It's
an interactive map that shows every single section of the
border and what they're planning to do with and as
surreal as it sounds, they are planning to double up
the wall. So in some places, in remote areas in

(01:29:58):
the desert, like in organ Pai National Monument or Caveca
Prieta in Arizona. In those areas, there is plans to
build a secondary wall. So on top of the thirty
food barrier that they have, they're planning to do a
second one.

Speaker 4 (01:30:17):
Yeah, we have that semi seedarl right, we have a
double thirty foot barrier.

Speaker 1 (01:30:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:30:21):
The Biden administration used it to corral people seeking asylum.
Right that they kept them in between the two walls
and then denied that they were in detention. I don't
know if we'll see that again, but like I guess
just from my own experience, you know, participating in util
aid along the border, like those remote desert areas are
where people go. When we build wall in Otai, right,

(01:30:43):
when we continue to detain and turn people back in
less remote areas, they will take the risk of going
to a more remote area and forcing people into those
remote areas and then constructing barriers there too, is just
going to cause more deaths. Said, it's not going to
stop people trying to come because there are things that

(01:31:05):
they are living which are terrible, but it will mean
that they get stuck out there in the heat without
water for longer rain.

Speaker 1 (01:31:11):
That's correct game. So exactly what you said people in
San Diego in like the border in Otai, you already
have the double walls, so you know, like having this
hyper mac miilitarized area and how that is going to
expand and the consequences of that is, as you mentioned,
you push people out further more remote areas, and two

(01:31:33):
things happen by doing that. First and most important, more
people die. But also remember that these areas, like these
remote areas were also like semi priestine wildlife environments that
you never had humans moving through before. Now, as people
have been pushed to these remote areas, you have this
human traffic and not only migrants moving through, but you

(01:31:56):
also have the border patrol chasing these migrants. And now
you have border patrol wanting to build new roads to
these wilderness areas. And all of these just gives building
up into what's already a very fragmented landscape. So by
adding all these quote unquote system attributes, because you're pushing

(01:32:17):
and pushing people further and building these doggle walls, it's
just going to end the last of the remaining wildlife
remote migration corridors as well. So the impacts that this
is going to help are huge.

Speaker 4 (01:32:34):
Yeah, yeah, for like all living creatures. As you said,
let's take a break, Eric, we'll come back and talk
about it small. All right, we are back. Let's talk

(01:32:55):
about like how people are organizing right like at this
time time when it does seem really bleak at the
border lands, Like the Trump administration didn't really construct very
much war in its first iteration. It did construct a bit,
but not as much as it wanted to. And you
and I are both very familiar with the consequences that
has had, right Like it has caused more people to die.

(01:33:19):
The Biden administration continue constructing and quote unquote repairing border barriers.
They also pioneered outdoor attention, and like it just seems
like things with whoever gets elected, but more rapidly under
Republicans get worse. What are people able to do? When
We've spoken about this a lot on this show, but
I'd love to hear your perspective too.

Speaker 1 (01:33:40):
It's been hard, honestly as a person working on environmental
issues in the border because definitely, like the losers are
much more than the wind sometimes, so that can be
dis hard to end. Yeah, there has been some glimpses
of hope. I think one of the things that we

(01:34:01):
did here in Arizona that was definitely felt really good
and gave us some hope is when the governor of
Arizona decided to put some chipping containers and make its
own makeshift wall. So a bunch of people really came
together on the community outrage because this was just some

(01:34:21):
really dumb idea and one of the most remote, beautiful
areas where there is not even people moving through and
it was just going to destroy the environment. And the
governor went out there and spent two hundred million dollars
of taxpayers money to buy these shipping containers and build

(01:34:42):
this border wall. So we were actually all the community
came together, We show up out there in the and
stopped the machines and we said no, you're not going
to move any further. And because what they were doing
was actually illegal, we were able to get away with it.
Those chipping containers are gone right now. Still, Arizona taxs

(01:35:06):
payer paid two hundred million dollars to destroy their own
environment just let that same thing we can be using
that money for much better things. So I think that
president and that movement, that sense of community that was
built after that resistance, it is, has continued after that.

(01:35:31):
Like there is a lot of self organized grassroots efforts
going on for border resistance, you know, and that encompasses
humanitarian groups, environmental groups, and we are also organizing nowadays
here in Arizona to do some direct action, try to

(01:35:53):
show up to the center of a valley which is
where the border construction is going, and started raising some
national attach to this issue, trying to invite our politicians,
start invited our our native communities to speak out and
using different methods such as art performance, bring up some

(01:36:14):
different strategies together. You know. Now with the technology that
we have available, is that how can we make these
more mainstream and tell people across the nation what's going
on and these remote areas. You know a lot of
people a lot of connection to this valley, and this
is the headwaters of the Santa Cluz River, the lifeblood

(01:36:36):
of many communities across the southern Arizona. And at the
same time, on the other side of the coin, you know,
there is all the oppression by the government to anything
that is against their will. So a lot of people
feel a little bit afraid of showing up to direct action. Yeah,

(01:36:57):
so it is it's just walking that fine line or
what can we get away with and still be able
to make a ball statement and show opposition without putting
people in danger.

Speaker 4 (01:37:12):
Yeah. Yeah, I think that is something a lot of
people are really worried about. But it is important within
the realm of things that we can do to show
our opposition to this and to stand in solidarity with
the animals and the indigenous people whose sacred spaces are
being defiled, right and with migrants whose lives are being

(01:37:32):
put in danger by this. I wonder, like, I find
it so strange. I guess that like we're at a
time when reporting on migration is becoming like like a
major growth industry. I guess, editors who I could not
get to respond to an email or pick up the
phone for the last four years and now commissioning pieces
of migration. But there still seems to be like a

(01:37:54):
blind spot about the border in the American news media.
I don't know why that is. I don't know if
you have ideas about why there is, But the borderlands
are such a special place for me anyway, you know,
I've spent nearly twenty years of my life here. Some
of my favorite places in the world are near the border.
I think people think of the border as like Santi Zero,

(01:38:16):
but it contains some wonderfully remote and special places. And
I wonder if you have thoughts on why, like the
border isn't something that gets talked about that much on
a national level.

Speaker 1 (01:38:29):
I think it does talk about, but unfortunately the narrative,
the digitian build around it is really negative.

Speaker 4 (01:38:40):
Yeah, that's fair, and of course that's.

Speaker 1 (01:38:42):
With that intention, right, continue to build up this militarized
state or sacrifice zone. And so whenever I talk with
people that is here for the first time, you know,
I do these group presentations for delegations that come from
all over the to experience the Borderlands region, and they're

(01:39:04):
like they have all these perspective, you know, for what
they hear on the news about how horrible this is,
and then they come here and they're like, Wow, people
here is like really nice and we have a great experience,
and I really inspire and it's like coming with this

(01:39:24):
pre fabricated narrative on their minds of this wasteland sacrifice zone,
you know, like and then going out after experience and yes,
some of that, of course, if you go out to
the to the border and experience the wall and the
rolls and rolls of concerts in a wired to make

(01:39:46):
it look like you're in a war zone. Yeah, the
plows what you already have in your mind. You know,
it just keeps building up the intensity. And then you
hear the stories from people, the struggle, from my grants
and stories from back in twenty twenty three when we
have the search of migrants coming and all these things,

(01:40:07):
you know, but at the end, people leaves with glimbs
also like, wow, this place is really beautiful and a
lot of wonderful things are happening, a lot of movements
of people trying to organize and make it a better
place and trying really hard to shift this narrative. You know.
The borlands provide us a good opportunity, you know, because

(01:40:31):
what we see today, like a friend of mine said,
it can get worse, and it's going into that direction. Yeah, yeah,
it's going into that direction. But at the same time,
it gives us an opportunity as a society, you know,
because whatever happens at the border is definitely going to
have a ripple effect in the rest of the country.

(01:40:53):
So we are able to figure out a way to
shift that narrative and look at the border like like
people that lives and experience the word there and the
culture of the beautiful things that the border has to offer.
Then we hope that that's going to help change a
lot of the things that are happening in this country.

(01:41:14):
You know, but we need to start I think organizing
from the bottom up. Yeah, a lot of grassroots therefore
need to be happening, and I think a lot of
media needs to cover this. You know, we usually don't
cover the good stories.

Speaker 4 (01:41:28):
So yeah, yeah, you're right. Like it's funny that the
right does cover the body, right, or that the you know,
the Fox News kind of cardre does cover the body,
Like I don't like the way they cover it, but like,
the only national network guy I will see down there
is the Fox guy for the most part. And the

(01:41:57):
one thing I like to do with my friends, or
like if someone comes to visit, you know, sometimes I
have other independent journalists come visit to walk down to
the border wall, and it seems very bleak, right because
there's this big wall and it's covered in constantina wire,
as you say, and maybe they are Marines or National
Guard or Order patrol or any other leg it's people
with guns right in different uniforms. But then if you

(01:42:20):
turn around, you're in this really special place where you
don't see the people and you just you can appreciate
how beautiful it is. It's also very beautiful that, like
you say, there's so much bottom up organizing, that there's
so much people helping people of all different kinds. And
that's something we also are in twenty twenty three, when

(01:42:41):
Title forty two ended and subsequently the Biden administration detained
people outdoors, like we saw an incredible community response of
all different kinds of people of different political persuasions, different
faith groups, which was a really beautiful thing. Like it's
a thing that a lot of the rest of America
right now I could learn from the government was brutalizing people,

(01:43:03):
and people made that less bad. They kept them safe,
and they'd been a lot more people who didn't make
it throughout all attention if it wasn't for community support,
like I want people to see that. I wonder if
people want to support right, let's say they're not in
the border lands. Can you think of good ways for
them to be in solidarity, for them to even to

(01:43:24):
experience like I know a lot of people who listen
to this have come, like It's really wonderful for me
to meet people when I'm not working, when I'm just
out there in my capacity as someone who cares about
other people, right doing water drops, doing mutul aid with migrants,
or helping people at street release. To hear of people
who listen to this and then decided to come from

(01:43:45):
wherever they were and spend some time here and help, Like,
that's a really a special thing. But you have other
ideas on how people can can be in solidarity and
can come and help.

Speaker 1 (01:43:55):
Yeah, definitely, again this question where we are and from
different people that comes to busy. I usually recommend people
to start with they are, you know, in their own communities,
because there is reflections of border issues in your own community.
There are people that are migrating that are might need

(01:44:18):
some help. There are people that shelters and all these
or just kind of only get involved with your local
whatever you're passionate about. You know, it doesn't really have
to be an environmental issue, but we are remember and
social justice and environmental justice is the same thing.

Speaker 10 (01:44:38):
Yeah, we really like whatever you're passionate about, just getting involved,
But I think the worst thing that we can do
right now is just doing in order the fact that
we are in a bad spot, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:44:52):
I think a lot of people just want to continue
writing their comfort song wave and it's that it's gonna end,
you know. And I think we need to not only
think about ourselves, but we need to think about the
generations coming ahead of us. And I think it's especially
for the people that us already had the opportunity to

(01:45:16):
somehow live a life, you know, but there are somes
that are about to start a journey, and I think
it's our responsibility to make it the best as we
can for them as well. So whatever you're passionate about,
and if you really want to and you're passionate about
order related issues and you're not able to come, try
to support, you know, like financial help is, you know,

(01:45:39):
we like it or not. We're in a capitalist society
and we work with financial support. So a lot of
these events that we're creating, a lot of these outreach
that we're doing a lot of the people, like new
generations that need jobs, that are wanting to join, like
let maybe a non profit work or create the own

(01:46:00):
movement or doing something related that's going to help the community. Yeah.
So for those if you are able, those are really
good ways to get involved and make them change.

Speaker 4 (01:46:10):
Yeah, definitely, Like there's a lot of things you can do,
as you say, and I think it does help to
build that networks of caring for people everywhere. Like, we
want to live in a world where people take care
of one another, and to do that, we have to
start it everywhere. It's not like the border is the
only place where bad things are happening. I know we
draw a lot of strengths as people who live at
the border from that solidarity, but also from seeing people

(01:46:33):
do their own things wherever they're at. Like that is
how we build a world where systems of oppression of
let's able to oppress people.

Speaker 11 (01:46:42):
So yeah, And one of the things we see here,
most of the decisions taken for the border are not
taken by people from the border. A lot of these
big all these decisions, like for example, Senator of Utah
right now is putting up a bill for.

Speaker 1 (01:47:00):
The boarder to sacrifice a lot of public lands for
new roads, and like new military installations. So it's like
people from Utah are not directly on the border, but yeah,
they can also send letters and comments or both these
senators out, you know, and somebody that really cares for

(01:47:21):
the environment.

Speaker 4 (01:47:23):
Yeah, if you're in Utah, your senator has been advocating
to sell off the public lands that you own. That
has said that, I mean their native land. It's all
native land. It should be returned to its original custodians.
But in the meantime, you own it and at least
all of us can access it until Mike Lee gets
his chance to sell it all off to his buddies
in real estate. And like, you could be an extremely

(01:47:44):
conservative person and we could disagree on a lot of shit,
and I think we could find unity on that. Like,
I do not understand how there is a constituency that
wants to take land from the public domain and turn
it into a military basis and or or fields and
mcmhonsions for rich people to have as their second home.
Like that should be it's a thing that everyone agrees on.

(01:48:07):
And like he didn't stick the landing on it the
first time in the reconciliation. The quote unquote, big beautiful
Bill but I think that's a really good area towe
engage people, folks who might not be like, yeah, I
will show up for migrants. I think a lot of people.
They could be people who enjoy the outdoors, people who
just care about the environment, the Hook and Bullet crowd, like,

(01:48:28):
there are a lot of people even if they don't
quote unquote use public lands, like we all benefit from
being there and future generation to benefit from them remaining
un developed in a in a substantial way.

Speaker 1 (01:48:40):
That's right.

Speaker 4 (01:48:41):
Sorry, I just went off. And when that guy really
pisses me off. This shit makes me so mad. Coming
from a country that is entirely private land, it is
to see someone being like, yeah, that's a good idea.
It's fucking asinine.

Speaker 1 (01:48:54):
Eric.

Speaker 4 (01:48:54):
I wonder if people want to keep up with the
Sierra Club, keep up with like, how they can the
opposition comments If they want to know more about this
new border construction and the impact would have, where can
they Where can they follow along? Is their website or
social media?

Speaker 1 (01:49:09):
Yeah, James, thanks to you. Yeah, we do have all
of it. We try to engage people where they are,
and we know social media is a powerful tool. We
have a website Circulu Border LANs, people can look up
some of the work that we do there. We are
also active on social media. We are cir Club Borderlands.

(01:49:30):
However you look at it, you're going to find find us.
We're based out of Arizona, but we do organize in
different states, so we're in collaboration with all organizations as
part of a larger coalition. So even if you are
in Texas or New Mexico, feel pretty too, very child
and if you have any concerns ideas things that come

(01:49:55):
up to your mind that can maakeure the border of
airplace feel pretty for a feretty to reach out, then
we can collaborate work together on this or LEAs connecting
with some of the local people that are part of
the network. Because we're always looking to make this network bigger.
You know, I think there's trending numbers. I'm going to

(01:50:15):
get more and more people to join this coalition in
the different states. So even if you're not on the
border stages, if you're in DC and you're do lobbying
and you're into policy change, but yeah, come reach out
and you can find us like a central website or
an Instagram account. We also have like a grassroots mid

(01:50:38):
airport right now called Rally for the Valley, and that's
what we're trying to do for the San Rafile Valley
over there. You're going to be able to find updates.
And we created a decentralized website right now there is
called Border Wall Resistance. I invite everybody to take a
look at it. It is full of beautiful pictures of

(01:51:01):
the border. When James and I were talking about how
beautiful this place is, got to that website and you
understand what we're talking about because it's all everts. You know,
the border is so unique on each area. You know,
the border it's not define but Pjuana San Diego or
No Garlands. You know, it is just two thousand miles

(01:51:21):
of wonderlands, so unfortunately separated by in many cases but
this huge metal, dirty food structure.

Speaker 4 (01:51:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:51:32):
Anyways, so that's the website, the social media for Circlub
Borderlands and Grady for the Balance and the Border Resistance.

Speaker 4 (01:51:41):
Yeah, definitely reach out you if you recently found out
that you live within a border enforcement zone and weren't
aware of that, because I know a lot of people
in Chicago and other places have very recently found out
that as far as the state is concerned that they
too are in the borderlands. It would be good to
build some solidarity.

Speaker 1 (01:51:57):
There's trying two terms of the population on these country
leaves on the border of the launch Regent, so because
that includes coastlines and the Great Lakes Great Lakes, so
we're talking about a lot of community.

Speaker 4 (01:52:10):
Well, thank you very much for your time, Eric, We
really appreciate it. It was a good discussion.

Speaker 1 (01:52:14):
Thank you, James, and hoping that continue to be in
touch and continue organizing against all these things. And thanks
so much for the space, and thanks for all your listeners.

Speaker 4 (01:52:26):
Yeah, you're welcome.

Speaker 2 (01:52:46):
Welcome back to a jacktoral dysfunction.

Speaker 12 (01:52:49):
Wait, that's the worst one yet, that's the worst what yet?
Talks We did not think it could get worse, and yes,
here we are.

Speaker 2 (01:52:55):
I knew it could get worse and always get worse.

Speaker 4 (01:52:58):
Oh quitey, nice jobs.

Speaker 12 (01:53:00):
This is it could happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly
newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today,
joined by Ejaculator in Jesus right.

Speaker 2 (01:53:13):
Wow, Garris said, that's much worse. You made it way worse.

Speaker 4 (01:53:18):
How many of those videos have you not watched?

Speaker 2 (01:53:20):
Get I think we're all pretty behind on the required trainings.

Speaker 9 (01:53:24):
Labor conditions are intolerable.

Speaker 12 (01:53:27):
Robert Evans, James Stout, and Mio Wong. This episode, we
are covering the week of October fifteenth to October twenty second,
and a little bit of the week before because we
were off in honor of the government shutdown. We ourselves
took a week.

Speaker 4 (01:53:41):
Off because the CIA stopped paying us.

Speaker 2 (01:53:44):
That's right, that's right. I've always considered us a branch
of the US government, you know, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:53:50):
You and half of the anime people on Twitter. Robert Efens,
We're back.

Speaker 12 (01:53:59):
I don't know, a little bit weird to be doing
this White House Weekly episode knowing that there's actually less
White House than usual there is. Trump has begun demolishing
the East Wing of the White House to build a
privately fund a two hundred and fifty million dollar ballroom,
and I think we should all have a moment of
silence for the East Wing.

Speaker 2 (01:54:16):
Oh I was going to say a moment of celebration,
because now James's people can finally shake hands with the
United States government and destroying large portions of the White House.

Speaker 4 (01:54:27):
Yeah, we sort it was a Volvo excavator to taste,
so we also got these Swedes on board. I guess
sure couldn't even find an American excavator.

Speaker 2 (01:54:36):
Sad we don't make things in this country anymore.

Speaker 12 (01:54:39):
Yeah, that's because we're still waiting for the tariffs to
get fully fully enacted.

Speaker 1 (01:54:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:54:43):
Yeah, once we get that Swedish tariff on.

Speaker 12 (01:54:46):
We are almost four weeks now into the government shutdown
and there's not really a clear end in sight, and
SNAP Benefits food stamps are set to run out in
a little over a week on November first, Mia, Did
you want to say something on this.

Speaker 9 (01:55:03):
Yeah, So we've been seeing sort of tech start to
go out to people who are on food assistants in
various states. There's one circulating from Minnesota that is saying
that the food part of SNAP Benefits are going to
shut down in a few days on November first, when
the funding shuts down. This is a critical lifeline for

(01:55:23):
food for an extremely large number of people, and this
is also coming in a period where food banks are
already being stressed by just the other cuts to SNAP
and other food assistance programs that have already taken place.
So yeah, we're coming to a very very critical moment

(01:55:45):
in terms of wide scale food insecurity in this country
for a whole bunch of the most vulnerable people in
the country. And yeah, this is a good moment for
if you have actual access to food, which is which
is a very very bleak thing to be saying, but

(01:56:07):
you know, something is going to have to try to
pick up the slack or a bunch of people aren't
going to eat, right, and that's probably going to have
to be us, because it's first fuck not going to
be the government.

Speaker 4 (01:56:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:56:20):
Well, and yeah, it's just the people's need to eat
is inelastic.

Speaker 4 (01:56:24):
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, Just to put some numbers on it,
like SNAP in twenty four was forty one point seven
million people, which is about twelve percent of the US population. Yeah,
this is a massive cliff.

Speaker 2 (01:56:36):
I mean, it's particularly bad in certain states. For example, Oregon,
you know where I live, is set to lose about
three quarters of a million people's SNAP benefits. There are
like four million people in the state.

Speaker 1 (01:56:50):
Yep, yep.

Speaker 9 (01:56:52):
And it's also like those people are also disproportionately non
white and disapportionate, weir and very disapportion of the trans Yeah. Yeah,
and this is something that if straight up the shutdown
continues and we don't see s nota benefit's payout, this
could also be a major source of instability because you know,
the thing that happens very quickly when suddenly forty million

(01:57:16):
people don't have food is bread riots. What is going
to happen with that is deeply unclear, but yeah, we're
heading into an extremely bleak time.

Speaker 2 (01:57:25):
If you're looking at predictors of violent instability in countries, yeah,
mass starvation is about top of the list.

Speaker 1 (01:57:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:57:32):
Yeah, yep.

Speaker 9 (01:57:33):
Particularly bread riots usually are in sort of the modern era,
happens with two or three hundred percent increases in food prices,
usually as a result of sort of imass structural adjustments.
But if there was going to be another one, this
would be it.

Speaker 1 (01:57:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:57:48):
Yeah, So it's worth sort of being prepared on both
ends in terms of feeding people and also yeah, with
whatever was going to happen with this cuts out.

Speaker 4 (01:57:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (01:58:00):
Meanwhile, during during all of this, during the shutdown and
during snaps taking clock, Trump wants his Justice Department to
pay himself two hundred and thirty million dollars in compensation
for damages coming from past investigations into him.

Speaker 2 (01:58:18):
Seems fair.

Speaker 12 (01:58:19):
Trump claims that he will give this money to quote
unquote charity. Seems real clear what that means, what charity
that will be, how that will really qualify as a
charitable donation. But he is currently seeking two hundred and
thirty million dollars of government money to be paid back
to himself. In the end, it will be him making
the final call on this, which he says he feels

(01:58:41):
strange about.

Speaker 2 (01:58:42):
Okay, well, it's good.

Speaker 4 (01:58:43):
You know, he's an honest man, you know, it's great.

Speaker 9 (01:58:46):
Yeah, yeah, we we've just fully entered the looting the
storehouse is part of the regime.

Speaker 4 (01:58:52):
Yeah, they taking a very British approach.

Speaker 2 (01:58:55):
Looting is putting this too mildly.

Speaker 9 (01:58:59):
Yeah, if you see the article about the plans to
let AI companies apply to get old weapons grade plutonium
to fuel the nuclear.

Speaker 2 (01:59:06):
Reactors, seems fine. And that's what I trust Sam Altman
weapons grade plutonium. He's gonna use that safely.

Speaker 9 (01:59:13):
Yeah, hopefully the air bubble collapses before they get.

Speaker 2 (01:59:20):
You know what a great attitude to approach having weapons
grade plutonium is move fast and break grace.

Speaker 4 (01:59:27):
Oh god, this is great. It's this week we're announcing
the start of KOD's force.

Speaker 1 (01:59:32):
AI.

Speaker 2 (01:59:32):
There we go, bring it on.

Speaker 12 (01:59:37):
God breaking breaking news, US sanction has been placed against
two of Russia's largest oil companies in an effort to
pressure the Ukraine Russia piece deal, which Putin just backed
out of negotiations from as there was plans for him
and Trump to meet, So that just happened.

Speaker 2 (01:59:57):
Sexy not sexy. So I think one of the first
things we want to cover right now, just because this
is maybe the number one thing I'm seeing people talk
about on social media right now is there have been
articles written about ICE's new weapons budget. Famously, their budget
is increased, missing like seven hundred percent. A huge amount
of that's being spent on, you know, bonuses in order

(02:00:20):
to get people to join, cash payments and whatnot, as
well as pretension bonuses, but a lot more of it's
being spent on weapons. And right now the number one
thing I'm seeing people freak out about is the supposed
idea from these documents that ICE is purchasing guided missiles
and chemical weapons. I have heard people say this is Ice,

(02:00:40):
which is obviously Trump's SS, you know, making their own
vaffen ss, which were the armed units of the SS.
I'm seeing a lot of shit like this spread, and
as Jamee is going to tell you, none of that's true.

Speaker 1 (02:00:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:00:51):
I mean, the fact that ICE has a massive increase
in budget and is buying a shit little weapons is true.
But they're not guided missiles.

Speaker 12 (02:00:57):
ICE doesn't heat guided missiles.

Speaker 4 (02:01:00):
We're not getting a death heead ICE unit.

Speaker 12 (02:01:02):
Come on at the next Canal Street ICE raid, they're
going to be launching heat seeking missiles into Chinatown.

Speaker 2 (02:01:09):
I'm not saying this isn't a problem, but it's not
what people are saying it is. Yeah, sorry, James, all right.

Speaker 4 (02:01:14):
The source of its claim is a substack page called
Popular Information run by a guy called Juddlygum, and he
has claimed in this piece, I'm just going to quote
the ICE post purchase, quote chemical weapons, and quote guided
missile warheads and explosive components. I guess the main thrust
of the piece was looking at the fact that ICE
spent nine million dollars on geistly ar pattern rifles. Border

(02:01:38):
Patrol spent more than twice that he appears to have
missed that in his reporting. This reporting is extremely dishonest,
To put it mildly, it's either deliberately misleading or massively incompetent.
The piece in question doesn't link to the individual contracts, which,
like on the face of its bad form, right, if
you're going to be talking about contracts, your contracts are

(02:01:58):
in the public domain. Just linked to them. The piece
doesn't do that. I went on USA spending dot gov
and I filtered by contracts that have been awarded by ICE.
I gave a date range. The date range are pertained
to the things being discussed in the article. And then
I filtered by the product or service code for chemical
weapons and guided missile warheads. Right, two different products or

(02:02:20):
service codes. Product or service codes are like these, these
four digit codes that exist in federal procurement right to
put things into buckets basically, and I found the contracts.
The contract very clearly states the guided missile quote unquote contract.
The contract with the guided missile product or service code
very clearly states it is for multiple distraction devices. Yeah,

(02:02:43):
it's a contract with a company called Quantico Tactical. I
did call them yesterday, something that again any competent reporter
should do before publishing a piece that does not appear
to have been done by the substat guy. They gave
me an email. I sent it email more than twenty
four where hours ago, requesting commental clarification, didn't receive a
response at the time of us going to press. If

(02:03:06):
I hit back from them before we release this, I
will let you all know the chemical weapons. It was
as spray. It was fab spray, right.

Speaker 2 (02:03:15):
And a distraction device by the way, folks, this is
something like like a sonic grenade, which sounds crazy, but
it's a grenade that makes a loud noise to distract
people to bang. The flash bang is also a distraction
device when you used the way that they use in riots.
You know, it's a little bit of a different thing
when you're using one to like breach bang and clear
a door or something. But like when you're throwing a

(02:03:35):
flash bang at a riot, it's a distraction device because
the goal is you've got a bunch of people moving
towards an area you want to stop them from You
distract them by an explosion, you know.

Speaker 4 (02:03:45):
Yeah, and it's distracting.

Speaker 9 (02:03:46):
Yeah, it's also and this is you know, one of
the one of the frustrating elements about this is that
Ice has been using a whole bunch of these to
blow down people's doors. It's really horrible.

Speaker 2 (02:03:55):
There are problems. It's problems that they're buying all this.

Speaker 9 (02:03:58):
And no one is talking about it because everyone's focused
on this.

Speaker 2 (02:04:01):
When James put up their initial research just on a
Blue Sky and Twitter, I shared it and people were like,
it's still a problem they've got that they're getting all
buying all these new weapons. Do you not care about?

Speaker 1 (02:04:12):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (02:04:12):
I care about that. You're not talking about that. Yeah,
we care about the talking about a fantasy.

Speaker 4 (02:04:18):
And like it is bad that Ice has flash bangs
and pepper spray, right, I have personally broadcasts how they exists.
Like you can go back only a few months and
here Ice flash bangs on this podcast, like recorded by
me in person. We know they fucking have them because
they were throwing them at me.

Speaker 1 (02:04:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:04:36):
I've lost count of how many have hit me directly.

Speaker 1 (02:04:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:04:39):
Yeah, we've got at least seventy five percent fucking federal
government flash bang impact. You know. Like, I want to
take a second guess to talk about incentives here, because
this really pisses me off. And I think that the
way we build trust in the media is through openness,
and I think that we do that better than most
and I'm going to try and do that here just
so you know, none of us make any extra money

(02:05:02):
if more people download this podcast, at least not directly. Right,
we do not have a direct incentive to make fantastical
claims that will lead to people downloading our podcast and
being afraid that is not true for people who have
these substick outlets, right, Like, I mean, I'll let me clarify.
We do have a direct financial interest in there being traffic,

(02:05:24):
right because that is that's how we make our money,
right like, and that's how we justify getting raises and stuff. So,
like everyone in media, if more people listen to our stuff, like,
we do have a financial interest in that, But you're
not checking week to week to see if we're getting
if what we're doing is bringing us in more direct money,
right Like, That's just not the way our thing works. Yeah,

(02:05:47):
And when people are on their own they're doing these
subsc out there is a very real incentive to do that, right.
We also have a team here. We fact check each other.

Speaker 12 (02:05:56):
We do our best. We fuck up sometimes, yeah, yeah,
we fuck up. Sometimes we're honest about it. When we
do right, we acknowledge it. Yeah, we acknowledge when James
makes mistakes.

Speaker 2 (02:06:05):
Thank you, guys, you're the least You're the least mistake
person here.

Speaker 4 (02:06:11):
I'm extremely careful about that ship. Well, I've stood on
my fucking pedestal enough about this. But yeah, it's bad
right that things that I saw buying that ICE is
really buying. Yeah, are samu automatic ars, more clocks, a
lot of soft body armor, red dot sites quote unquote
crowd control munitions. Right, sort of spending you see from

(02:06:31):
a special forces unit that are very not special like
police agency, right, Like that's just spending, like they have
an open check book.

Speaker 2 (02:06:39):
Like ICE is continuing to buy the same weapons with
which they have been hurting people the entirety almost of
the twenty first century, and they're hurting more people now
and will be hurting even more people in the future
because they will have even more money. And that's bad.
And you don't like, what would they even do with
a guide missing?

Speaker 4 (02:07:01):
It doesn't make sense. On the Facebook, it's sixty one grand. Yeah,
the fuck do you think you're getting for sixty one
grand from a company in quantic?

Speaker 2 (02:07:08):
Have you tried buying guided missiles in this economy?

Speaker 1 (02:07:11):
People?

Speaker 4 (02:07:12):
It's just ludicrous, man, What the fuck. They think they're
going like like Tomahawk, I know, like a strawberry picking facility.
Like it's ludicrous, it's fucking ridiculous, a chemical weapon.

Speaker 2 (02:07:25):
I mean, you can talk about substack and they're being
fucked up things about the company. But like, I honestly
I think that I don't think it's overstated, but I
think people focus on that extind of like, well, yeah,
which which of them aren't? What where is the non
nazi social media company that has any kind of reach?

Speaker 1 (02:07:41):
You know?

Speaker 2 (02:07:42):
But that's really not even the point I care to make.
What I will say, the problem here is not even
just that like when people are working for an audience
like that, we're week to week, however many people are
donating and whatnot kind of can incentivize you to follow
certain rabbit holes and push certain things. I think one

(02:08:02):
of the bigger problems is that what you have is
a generation a very of the most talented and successful
journalists in terms of their skill of like writing and
their ability to build an audience that follows them. Those
people have all moved to a platform where they by
default don't have an editor yea, and like every journalist

(02:08:24):
worth they're sold I've had my fights and frustrations with
editors at a variety of publications, and sometimes they're knowing,
and sometimes editors suck, and sometimes publications a big part
of what they're doing is just trying to water down
your shit. But that's not the only thing editors do.
A major thing editors do is point out, Hey, I
get that you're really into this, and I get that

(02:08:45):
you find this compelling, but as an objective observer, I'm
seeing this hole in this hole in this hole, and
you need to, for example, hall these people and make
sure that this because it doesn't look like this is
actually a guided It looks like somebody just fucked up
putting in a code. We need to check on this
so we can state it to a point of certainty.

(02:09:07):
That's what an editor should be doing, right.

Speaker 4 (02:09:11):
Yeah, even if they're responsible journalist, like I wouldn't have
submitted that piece to an editor without having checked that first.
Like sure, it took me five minutes to call them.
I should add that the PSC's in question for grenades
and war heads are one digit different, right again.

Speaker 2 (02:09:25):
Right, which is which is what happened here?

Speaker 4 (02:09:27):
It certainly looks that way.

Speaker 2 (02:09:28):
Yeah, yeah, and again this is why. Part of how
responsible journalism is supposed to work is that you never
have just one eye on a story, because every journalist
will inevitably miss things if you're doing that right, that's
why you are supposed to The idea is to have

(02:09:49):
multiple eyes on a thing so that oh, hey it
looks like you skipped over this, or hey it just
occurred to me. I have this question that is not
being answered, and you make a couple of phone calls,
throw in another sentence, and then that's that's a thing
that we're answering, a thing we're accounting for. And if
you don't have that, the work isn't as good.

Speaker 4 (02:10:07):
Yeah. No, look, I'm not saying there were not things
to be.

Speaker 2 (02:10:09):
Afraid of that are No one's saying yeah, But I.

Speaker 4 (02:10:12):
Want people to be afraid of the right thing, so
like they're not gonna lob you people.

Speaker 12 (02:10:17):
I don't think we're really going to be safe until
there's an iron dome over every Home Depot Gartson.

Speaker 2 (02:10:23):
I've been saying that for years. But that's also because
I would like to start a limited missile war against
the Home Depot Corporation. But I've been get taking lows
money for years yeah, on.

Speaker 4 (02:10:35):
Behalf of flows. Yeah, I'm on teammates hardware. So I'll
see you on the battlefield, Robert.

Speaker 2 (02:10:39):
At least we don't have any Harbor Freight people.

Speaker 4 (02:10:42):
Actually actually a massive Harbor Freight guy. He just says
that Harbor fray like literally literally behind me.

Speaker 2 (02:10:49):
I mean, then I think about Harbor Freight is buying
one thing and then returning it exactly eleven months after
buying it once you've broken it, and.

Speaker 4 (02:10:56):
Just having a perpetual whatever.

Speaker 1 (02:10:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (02:10:59):
Yeah, everything that I bought from Harbor Freid has started smoking.

Speaker 2 (02:11:03):
Everything breaks that you buy from Harbor Freight, but the
return policy is amazing.

Speaker 1 (02:11:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:11:07):
The question is will it break before or after you've
used it enough to justify buying something more expensive, And.

Speaker 12 (02:11:12):
The answer is yes, James, can you do a product
and service code ad break kids?

Speaker 1 (02:11:18):
Sure?

Speaker 12 (02:11:19):
Based on your investigation here and Adam, you can keep
this in you can you can show them how the
sauce is made here. Yeah, it's just in terms of
honesty here we go. Okay, right, give me give me
a second here. I got to think of something good.

Speaker 4 (02:11:31):
You fucked it. I was just gonna do talking products
and services and you ruined it. Garrison. If you are
in the market for a distraction advice, guided warhead or
chemical weapon, let's hope that you get an advert for
one of those in this commercial break. That's right, people,

(02:12:01):
welcome back to the Iranian regime. I hope you got
what you wanted.

Speaker 2 (02:12:06):
Yes, this podcast is the only podcast entirely supported by
the Ayatola. And yeah, uh praise him.

Speaker 12 (02:12:16):
The CIA and the IOTOLA have finally unique had.

Speaker 4 (02:12:19):
The clasp hands me both from Robert Evans. Legally speaking,
that is a joke. We are not funded by the
Iranian regime. We're all monarching.

Speaker 2 (02:12:29):
Speak for yourself there.

Speaker 3 (02:12:30):
Do you talk about the.

Speaker 12 (02:12:32):
Let's talk about the national card.

Speaker 1 (02:12:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:12:34):
Sure.

Speaker 12 (02:12:35):
On Monday, his past Monday, the Ninth Circred Qard of
Appeals have ruled in favor of the Trump administration, halting
a court order denying the federalization and deployment of the
Oregon National Guard. They had two to one ruling on
a three panel hearing with two trumpet pointed judges. They
called Trump's plan to deploy troops to the Ice Building

(02:12:57):
in Portland a quote unquote measured sponse. Now there is
a second tro preventing out of state National Guard from
deploying to Portland, and this appears to still be in effect,
but its fate is unknown. The Justice Department has requested
the original judge to spend the order, though the Ninth
Circuit itself is considering whether a larger panel should rehear

(02:13:19):
this entire case. Currently, there is no immediate plans for
Oregon National Guard to be deployed, but they do now
have the go ahead, but this is still a developing situation.
But that's an important update there. Let's talk about that
two fifty celebration sing happy birthday. No, happy birthday to
the Marines.

Speaker 2 (02:13:39):
Yes, yeah, oh god, yeah, Happy birth to the Marine Corps.
I hope today you guys get to eat a lot
of crayons.

Speaker 4 (02:13:46):
They'll have a cake which is shaped like a giant crown.

Speaker 9 (02:13:48):
No, it just is made out of giant crown.

Speaker 12 (02:13:50):
And we all remove our tote CoV tattoos. That's going
to be the Marine party.

Speaker 2 (02:13:56):
Get get rid of those scout snipers. It's yet sawst.

Speaker 1 (02:14:03):
But no.

Speaker 12 (02:14:03):
There was the Marines two hundred and fifty a celebration
with JD Vance last week where they did play hell
Diver to music during the celebration.

Speaker 9 (02:14:15):
Was a happy birthday and Fidels.

Speaker 4 (02:14:32):
I'm still not clear what hell Diver is.

Speaker 12 (02:14:34):
Hell Divers is a satirical video game that satirizes a
fascist military that fights for quote unquote democracy against others
so called fascists.

Speaker 9 (02:14:44):
Sorry, managed democracy very important, It's.

Speaker 2 (02:14:48):
True, It's true, yes, managed.

Speaker 12 (02:14:51):
I have heard of it from the news headlines such
as Charlie Kirk shot. But yeah, it's basically like playing
Starship Troopers music over the Marine Corps celebration party. That's
kind of the caliber we're operating in here. Yeah, thank
you for bringing that to my generational understanding.

Speaker 4 (02:15:08):
There you go. Yeah, I appreciate it. Talking to the
Marine Corps two hundred and fiftieth birthday on Saturday, a
one fifty five shells one hundred and fifty five millimeter
Howitzer shell prematurely detonated over the five Freeway outside of Pendleton, right,
not stuff, crazy shit, damaging a cop car that was

(02:15:30):
assigned to JD. Vancy's security detail.

Speaker 2 (02:15:33):
It was literally as soon as they started talking about
how Trump wanted to shoot a missile into fucking Camp
Pendleton and like immediately, yeah, they fuck up and blow
up a car attached to fucking the Vice President's Security Detail.
Amazing stuff.

Speaker 4 (02:15:47):
They did a dress rehearsal on Friday in which they
managed not to detonate any shells over to five. Gavin
Newsom decided to shut the frive on Saturday.

Speaker 2 (02:15:54):
Probably a good call.

Speaker 4 (02:15:56):
Yeah, probably complaining about things shaking I just did. If
you're like, if you're not familiar with the layout there,
I would say that in most places is you go.
Camp Pendleton is a large area that is used by
the Marine Corps for training. It has artillery ranges within it.

Speaker 2 (02:16:11):
The five is the big highway in California. It's the
highway that goes the whole length of the state.

Speaker 4 (02:16:17):
Yeah, you would call it the I five if you
weren't from here, and then we would know that you
weren't from here, so we call it the five. There's
less than a mile of land to the west of
the five, right, so shooting go over to five and
get pretty much shooting from the beach or near the beach,
as opposed to the whole rest of Camp Pendleton, right
where they have artillery ranges. But they wanted to do

(02:16:37):
it over to five. I think they were doing some
kind of simulated landing drill. Not quite sure. What the
landing drill they were doing. But this yet resulted in
the damage done to a HP car and really fucked
up traffic in probably the entirety of southern California. Yeah,
from most of last Saturday.

Speaker 9 (02:16:57):
I do you just want to mention here that there
is historical press in the United States for US accidentally
killing the Secretary of State because a gun they were
firing on a pleasure cruise on a boat, on a
Navy boat blew up. So wow, it was in the
eighteen forties, but we did kill the Secretary of the
Navy and the Secretary of State.

Speaker 12 (02:17:17):
If any Secretary of War could pull this off, it
would be PA.

Speaker 3 (02:17:22):
I believe in him.

Speaker 12 (02:17:23):
Here is a decent chance he will throw one of
those acts straight into Jdvans's leg.

Speaker 4 (02:17:27):
Oh yeah, I forgot about his accident. Yeah yeah, Vans
of course the former Marine.

Speaker 3 (02:17:33):
Oh yeah, that is it.

Speaker 12 (02:17:34):
Wait yeah, yeah, yeah, I totally forgot lance corporal in
the Marine Corps.

Speaker 4 (02:17:39):
Believe he was a a PAO. Public affairs. Yeah, I
want to address DHS's claim to have deportation numbers. DHS
has been throwing out some many big numbers for deportation,
claiming over half a million removed and one point six
million quote unquote self deported. These are inflated numbers. These
include things that people tell away airports and Coastguard inter diictions. Right,

(02:18:03):
they are not removals of people from the interior of
the United States who were residing here. They're like if
someone maybe if someone came with a visa and was
turned around the airport, they're including that as a deportation.

Speaker 1 (02:18:13):
Right.

Speaker 4 (02:18:14):
DHS has stopped publishing a lot of the data that
we previously got under this administration, so we don't have
a lot of hard numbers. But the one point six
million number. This comes from CIS, right, the Center for
Immigration Studies. We've talked about them before. This is a
Tanton funded quote unquote think tank which the SPLC has
adjudicated as a hate group. The CIS data. DHS has

(02:18:35):
been like sharing this since it came out, but it
also seems to be weighing very heavily into whatever algorithm
Musk has put into GROC recently. If you look for
mentions on x the Everything website of the one point
six million number, nearly all of them are GROC repeating it. God,
I don't know if they straight up just said like, yeah,

(02:18:57):
the CIS is your source for information when they were,
you know, pro to be less woke but slightly more
woke than when it called itself Mecha Hitler. But it
seems to be the CIS seems to be heavily weighed
in the Grock algorithm these days, which I thought was interesting.

Speaker 12 (02:19:11):
Yeah, they did get that GROC contract approved a few
months ago.

Speaker 4 (02:19:16):
I think the d just didn't get the number from Grok.
I think they got it from CIS. But nonetheless, like
the reason that that number is still in the side guy,
So I think it's partially because Grok keeps repeating it.

Speaker 12 (02:19:25):
Well, you know it is. It is Groctober, as I've
been saying, Garrison, we have fucking spoken about this. It's
not Groctober angry. The other thing I do want to
mention on a I guess not deportations, but the Department
of State has announced a series of people who have
had their visas revoked for posts surrounding the death of

(02:19:49):
Charlie Kirk. The State Department Twitter account posted a whole
thread on x the Everything app listing various sentences and
sentiments there was in visa's being revoked. Quote Charlie Kirk
was a son of a bitch and he died by
his own rules. VISA revoked. When fascists die, Democrats don't complain,

(02:20:10):
VISO revoked. It from a German national, Resilient National said
that quote Charlie Kirk was the reason for a Nazi
rally where they marched in homage to him, and that
Kirk died too late. Visa revoked. There's like four other
of these for people making statements of that nature.

Speaker 2 (02:20:29):
Yeah, yeah, I think people get the idea.

Speaker 4 (02:20:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (02:20:32):
Following Kirk's death, Rubio to announce he would be looking
for visa holders who made statements following Kirk's death, and
he has followed through on that promise in some other
Charlie Kirk news. A few weeks ago, Turning Point USA
officially announced that they would be producing an alternative halftime
show after it was announced that the Puerto Rican artist

(02:20:54):
Bad Bunny would be performing at the twenty twenty six
Super Bowl. The TPUSA show will be called a Quote
All American Halftime Show celebrating faith, family, and freedom. The
website has a submission form where it asks which genres
should be featured during the show. The options include quote

(02:21:15):
anything in English American classic rock, country, hip hop, pop,
and worship.

Speaker 2 (02:21:24):
I love anything in English as a genre.

Speaker 4 (02:21:26):
Yeah. When I get to Spotify, that's what I put in.

Speaker 2 (02:21:30):
The crowd's gonna riot when someone does Hotel California.

Speaker 12 (02:21:34):
We can really push anything at English. Frankly, we could
go to some pretty crazy places.

Speaker 6 (02:21:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:21:39):
Yeah, I didn't think they've pretady considered the breadth of
that genre.

Speaker 10 (02:21:42):
You know.

Speaker 2 (02:21:43):
I will say how they could get me back on
board is if, in addition to a separate halftime show,
they had a separate Super Bowl in which Ben Shapiro
faces off alone against the Philadelphia Eagles.

Speaker 9 (02:21:55):
Oh that would be so fun.

Speaker 4 (02:21:59):
Yeah, yeah, I would let Ben Shapiro bring some friends.

Speaker 9 (02:22:02):
No, no, I want to see Jalen Hurts physically pick
up Ben Shapiro and see how far he can pass him.
Because I'm pretty I'm pretty.

Speaker 2 (02:22:11):
Good, at least at least sixty.

Speaker 10 (02:22:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:22:13):
That guy Benches. That guy could like bench a small
motor vehicle. Benches Shapiro. Yeah.

Speaker 12 (02:22:24):
More details and performers will be announced later, including how
this will be broadcast, will be streamed online, or they
trying to make a TV deal with someone like you know, Fox,
you know, unclear how this will be broadcast, but it
is something they're going to go through on last thing
we should probably talk about before the break or I
don't know, maybe maybe we could combine this with the

(02:22:44):
section you wanted to talk about Robert on the infiltrations.
But right after our Executive Disorder episode from two weeks ago,
literally like like hours after, on October eighth, right wing
influencers gathered at the White House to discuss with Trump
and cabinet members their theories and carrowing stories of Antifa

(02:23:06):
at this big Antifa roundtable. Yeah, I'm gonna play a
short clip like a few seconds from Jack Pasoba get
in there, noted far right extremist and poster.

Speaker 2 (02:23:19):
Jack Pasobic certainly noted poster.

Speaker 9 (02:23:22):
It's a great guy.

Speaker 1 (02:23:23):
Yeah, Antifa is real.

Speaker 5 (02:23:26):
Antifa has been around in various iterations for almost one
hundred years, in some instances going back to the Weimar
Republic in Germany.

Speaker 12 (02:23:35):
Huh, I wonder, I wonder why it went back to
the Wymar republican Germany?

Speaker 4 (02:23:39):
What what what else was happening at that time in Geminy.

Speaker 12 (02:23:42):
It's very interesting you say that, Jack, Very interesting, Jack,
what other opinions do you have on fimar Republic.

Speaker 2 (02:23:50):
Jack, Yeah, So this is worrisome, right, the fact that
these idiots are getting to speak this close to power
about their theory, which is basically that everyone they don't
like or who has said anything they don't like as
part of a terrorist organization and should be put in
prisoner executed. Like that's the gist of what all of

(02:24:10):
the people at that roundtable believe.

Speaker 12 (02:24:12):
A whole bunch of like, you know, post millennial people,
and you know that that whole that whole right, like
a genre of like you know, right wing antifa journalists, journalistic.

Speaker 2 (02:24:22):
Yes, everyone I don't like equals terrorists. Yes, So that's
really worrisome, And I just I kind of wanted to
make a note here to people that as a result
of stuff like this, in case you somehow have not
been aware of this, we're going to be seeing a
massive ramp up in you know, not just attempts at prosecution,

(02:24:43):
but at attempts to like infiltrate and get gotcha footage
and audio of different left wing and anarchist groups that
are going to be used as pretexts for like further crackdowns.
I would say it's just a time to be aware
of that and be aware of the fact that anytime
you are speaking or at a public event where other

(02:25:05):
people are speaking, you should assume that that's being recorded
and that people will be pulling out the worst parts
they can from it and trying to use that to
destroy people's lives. And I bring that up because there's
been a couple that just really broke today, some potentially
pretty high profile examples of this. One of them is

(02:25:25):
that at a panel for Firestorm Books, they had a speaker,
guy named Eric King, who was convicted of a firebombing.
He's a left wing activist. He spent almost ten years
in prison, at a horrific time in prison, I mean,
just abused by the system and some of the worst
playways possible and is finally out. And Eric did a

(02:25:45):
talk at Firestorm Books and he made basically his statement
that activists need to hurt them where it counts, saying
we can force them to shut the fuck up when
it hurts they're walid enough, or you can find other
ways to hurt them. Now that's not saying anything inherently illegal. Again,
he starts it by saying we can force them to
shut up when it hurts. Their wallet enough, that's talking
about like boycotts and stuff, but the phrase other ways

(02:26:08):
to hurt them is vague enough. That's pretty easy for
these guys to cut stuff out. And I'm looking at
a post by quote end quote investigated analysts for the
Manhattan stut Smith. He's framing this as known ANTIFA firebomber
calls for escalation, and again that's not necessarily an accurate
look at what Eric was saying. But it's easy to

(02:26:30):
pull stuff out like this from something like what appears
to have been a fairly open zoom call that you know,
is not hard for someone to get into and record
and pull something out of to try and make the
case that someone like Eric should be back in prison,
or that Firestorm Books is a party, you know, providing
material support to an extremist organization. And what I'm not

(02:26:53):
trying to do is say like, and so people should
not talk and gather in public because they're going to
be doing this. But you need to be aware that
anything said it's something like this that's in any way open,
and even if you try to make it kind of
more close than this, they will try to get people in.
This is something that is increasingly going to happen, and
so people just need to be You can't you can't

(02:27:14):
just kind of hope that they're not paying attention. You
have to be aware of the fact that they're out
there and they're going to be trying to infiltrate any
sort of thing like this they can to get pretexts
for further crackdowns. And another recent example of this Frontlines
tp USA, which is Turning Point ussays, I mean, it's

(02:27:36):
their version of the actual Frontline journalism show. But they
did an investigation where they went undercover to the Oakland
in Seattle anarchist book fairs, right, and again, there's nothing
wrong with doing those book fairs. I'm sure what they're
doing here is pulling whatever quotes they could grab from

(02:27:56):
people that sound bad out of context and using them.
Tried to make the case that again, these are violent
extremist events that need to be cracked down on. And
I will reiterate I'm not saying don't do book fares.
I'm not saying don't show up at events like this.
I'm saying if you show up, be aware that stuff
like this is going to be happening, that they're going
to be people recording that they're going to be people

(02:28:17):
trying to find what they can to destroy people who
are at these events, and that that's something that needs
to be in your threat model, right in terms of
how you dress when you go there, how visible you are,
and what you're willing to say around people, right, among
other things. I guess what I'm saying is there's some
jokes you shouldn't be making in public at events like

(02:28:39):
this unless you want there to be a high risk
of it coming back to bite you in the ass.

Speaker 13 (02:28:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:28:44):
I think that's that's perfectly reasonable.

Speaker 2 (02:28:47):
Yep.

Speaker 12 (02:28:49):
During the Antifa roundtable panel, this guy named Seamus Brunner
Samus shamous. It says, seem miss guys jeesus. It says,
seems that is we're gonna ask to step you, right.
That's that's a shame, but it says Seamus. The director
of research at the Government Accountability Institute, discussed his theory

(02:29:11):
of how a network of NGOs are funding Antifa. This
is a this is a longer clip, but I think
it's important to look at how they are approaching this,
like how they are approaching this Antifa as an organization.

Speaker 6 (02:29:27):
This is not just a story about violence and chaos.
As you alluded to, mister President, this is a money story.
And at the Government Accountability Institute, my colleague and I,
Peter Schweitzer and my I and our team, we follow
the money and we followed it to the top of
what we call the protest industrial complex Riot Inc.

Speaker 1 (02:29:48):
And we found a network of NGOs.

Speaker 6 (02:29:50):
It's not just the Soros network, the Open Society network,
it's other funding networks, the Arabella funding network, the Tides
funding network, nevill Roy Singham and his network, Foreign cash,
and it's also big left wing funders. Some of them
are not citizens of this country, mister Hans Yorg vis
of Switzerland. They're pouring money into this entire ecosystem. And

(02:30:12):
so I want to share three money facts with you
about what we call Riot Inc. Number One, like any corporation,
Riot Inc. Has many divisions. It doesn't just have the
Antifa boots on the ground division. It has pr divisions,
it has marketing divisions, it has a very well funded
legal division to get these boots on the ground back
on the streets as quickly as possible. But it does

(02:30:33):
have those investors that I mentioned. Number two, we have
identified dozens of radical organizations, not just the decentralized ANTIFA organizations,
but dozens of radical organizations that have received more than
one hundred million dollars from the riot ink investors. These
would be the lawyer groups, These would be the groups
that advocate for calling good honest Americans fascists, etc. And

(02:30:58):
then three, I think the most shocking thing is that
we have found that more than one hundred million dollars
in US taxpayer funding has flowed into these funding networks,
including at least four million dollars to these very groups themselves,
not just ANTIFA types. But there was an event in
Atlanta called Stop Coop City. Over sixty rioters were charged

(02:31:20):
with domestic terrorism. These groups received money for that from
both the billionaire class as well as taxpayer money.

Speaker 12 (02:31:28):
Is unclear what he's talking about in terms of taxpayer
money going to the sixty rico defendants in Atlanta, but
the structure he's talking about, how how this riot inc
concludes not just like Antifa as in you know, people
wearing black hoodies on the streets at a protest, but
like you know, legal support organizations, even like like research

(02:31:49):
organizations that you know advocate calling you know, good honest
American's fascists, right this this could refer to groups like
Media Matters or like Southern Poverty Law Center who do
research into extreme organizations. They could be framing the people
like that as a part of this whole ecosystem, and
that's that's where they could be looking at for sources
of money and funding and like tracking where that money

(02:32:11):
goes is in groups like that. Not obviously you know,
your average black clad ANTIFA protesters. Not it's not receiving
payment for their presence at these at these events. But
this guy went on to claim that quote unquote Riot
Inc Funding Network also supports decentralized crowdfunding platforms which fund

(02:32:32):
organizations like the ELM for John Brown Gun Club and
the Socialist Rifle Association. After he went on this like
three minute long speech, Trump asked him and other attendees
that if they knew anything about like ANTIFA members, funders,
or the organizational structure, to hand over that information to

(02:32:53):
Pam Bondie or Cash Patel and Trump reiterated this multiple
times during the roundtable, asking these you know, policy guys
or quote unquote independent journalists to hand over their information
to the authorities. Here's one version of him making this request.

Speaker 8 (02:33:09):
Do you know the name of any of the funders?
Do you know the names, because if you do, I'd
like you to give them to Cash or Pam. Absolutely well, Christy, yeah,
we'll do as soon as you can. That's all of
you because you probably know the names. After a certain
period of time you tend to find out. But these
are people that do not have good intention for the country,
and that's uh treasons probably, So if you could, if

(02:33:34):
you very important, if you could do that, it would
be great. Nobody would know better than you. You'll figure it.

Speaker 2 (02:33:39):
Out, Ugh share man cool.

Speaker 12 (02:33:44):
During this roundtable, Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, reiterated how
Antifa should be treated like an organized criminal gang and
that law enforcement are going to quote unquote take the
same approach as it does handling foreign drug cartels. It's
a side note the United States has.

Speaker 4 (02:34:02):
Maybe that's what those guided miss repeatedly.

Speaker 12 (02:34:04):
Lodged missiles at what it claims are boats associated with
foreign drug cartels.

Speaker 4 (02:34:12):
I'll just say we have an episode next week about
the ongoing drone campaign in the Caribbean.

Speaker 12 (02:34:18):
Speaking of funders, here's some of.

Speaker 4 (02:34:22):
Ours for the Central Intelligenation.

Speaker 9 (02:34:37):
All right, we are back.

Speaker 4 (02:34:40):
I'm so nice to hear from the products and services
that support this show.

Speaker 9 (02:34:43):
Brought to you.

Speaker 12 (02:34:44):
Buy Safari Land your one stop off God, I wish
we had no. I don't actually starlight is some post
ironic meaning that I should I should occur tails Farlight
is in fact back. I will admit they do make
very nice, nice bulletproof plate. I will say, talking of
things that are very nice, this is a very nice

(02:35:05):
song that I like to listen to in my free time. Sorry,
rocky jazz, rockety jazz.

Speaker 3 (02:35:16):
Goot, Sorry locking.

Speaker 1 (02:35:20):
Rocking jazz, rocking.

Speaker 12 (02:35:23):
Jazz, Bob, It's tariff talk. We're back baby, Yeah yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:35:28):
So literally within twelve hours, I think of the of
the release at night of our last episode of the show,
we got the resumption of the trade war. So specifically,
Trump has announced effectively the full scale resumption of the
trade war where China. This started kind of out of

(02:35:52):
nowhere with Trump administration doing something that I think they
didn't think was very provocative, because I don't quite think
they understood the magnitude of what they were doing. This
basically started with the Trump administration massively increasing export restrictions
to China by changing the rules of what companies are
covered by what's called the Entity List, which is a

(02:36:13):
list of companies that American companies are not allowed to
sell goods and services to. The administration moved this to
include any company that is fifty percent or more owned
by a company on the export list. We've discussed on
the show before that a significant part of the structure
of Chinese corporate conglomerates are held together by a bunch
of different companies, you know, having partial ownership by the

(02:36:34):
same holding companies, which is what sort of binds companies
and conglomerates together and integrates them into the management structure
of the conglomerates. This is how Chinese state owned enterprises work.
Being state owned enterprise literally means that you are partly
or completely owned by a holding company run by SASSAK,
which is the State Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission
of the State Council. Because every name of the CCP

(02:36:55):
is like that. So this shifts to anything that's fifty
percent or more owned by a company on the list
is actually a massive export restriction, and the Chinese government
took this as okay, we're starting the trade war again,
so very quickly there's a whole bunch of different tat
things that we're not going to track the order of
because they kind of don't matter. But on October tenth,

(02:37:16):
Trump made a Twitter post where he said that he
was going to implement a one hundred percent tariff and
also a software restriction thing we'll talk about later. Those
are supposed to go into effect on the first. He's
also been talking in the last week about bringing tariffs
up to one hundred and fifty percent. We don't have
any kind of formal executive order on that. This was

(02:37:37):
to some extent in response to China implementing massive restrictions
on the export of rare earth metals. These are crucial
to basically any kind of of advanced manufacturing industrial manufacturing applications,
everything from chips, electric cars at jet fighters. These are
set to take effect on December first. I'm going to
read this from the New York Times to get an

(02:37:59):
undersetting of how large these moves are. China refines ninety
nine percent of the world's prosium, a kind of rare
earth metal that is used in chips to preserve magnetic
stability even when they become hot. In the last few years,
Nvidia and other semi conductor manufacturers have changed the materials
used in electricity management devices called capacitors, which is a

(02:38:19):
really funny way to describe a capacitor, by the way,
but on chips to make them more heat resistant. The
capacitors are made from ultra pure dysprosium, which is extremely
difficult to refine. A single refinery in Wushi, near Shanghai
produces the entire world's supply, so prove New York Times.
These export restrictions include any good that is produced with

(02:38:42):
these rare earth metals, and require foreign companies operating in China,
like for example, Samsung or any of the sort of
South Korean or Taiwanese chip manufacturers to acquire export licenses
to sell them to any other country that's not China.
That is a absolutely massive restriction on export goods and

(02:39:04):
also again a whole bunch of critical minerals that both
the American military apparatus relies on and the American tech
apparatus relies on. AI chips need a whole bunch of
these things, so you know, in the middle of this process,
the US also started charging Chinese built ships for docking

(02:39:24):
at US ports, which China retaliated by imposing docking fees
for American ships. I'm gonna gain read from New York
Times here. The new rules are the most stringent for
Chinese shipping companies, which for the most part, cannot avoid
the levies. HSBC, an investment bank, estimated that Costco not
that Costco different one, a large Chinese shipping line could

(02:39:45):
pay one point five billion dollars in fees next year,
which the bank said could reduce Costco's operating earnings by
nearly three fourths in twenty twenty six. Again, it's it's
worth it's worth noting that these shipping, these shipping companies
are the backbone of blow trade. They also their margins
are not very good and a significant number of them
basically only didn't go under dream lock during the lockdowns

(02:40:08):
because they effectively lied on their loan applications. And we're
just sort of putting in their revenue as if the
lockdowns weren't happening. So this is all very very fragile
infrastructure that is being you know, attacked, and these these
port fees are already in.

Speaker 12 (02:40:27):
Effect me doing gay cruising on my European trip. Yeah,
I like global trade, all right.

Speaker 9 (02:40:33):
I continue, Oh god, Okay, So we also got to
report today this is this is Wednesday, the twenty seconds
this is being reported, So who fucking knows what will
be happening by the time this episode comes out. But
on Wednesday we got to report from Reuters about the
other one of the other options that Shrum administration is
considering for these massive sort of trade attacks on China.

(02:40:58):
So I said, I said earlier when I talked about
the one hundred percent tariff, Trump also mentioned a software
export ban. So perb Reuters, what's being considered here, and
again we have note we have very few concrete details
about this. This hasn't been formally announced. My guests is

(02:41:18):
that it's being leaked to Reuters by the administration, but
I just don't know. But what they're considering, basically is
a version of the sanctions that effectively Biden applied to
Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, which restricts the export
of any product maade with US software. This would be
probably the most significant developments of the entire trade war.

(02:41:41):
And so these are all incredibly significant escalations. A bunch
of the stuff is set to go into effect on
November first, which is very very soon now. In theory,
Trump and Chijianping are supposed to meet at the meeting
of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum in South Korea,
but there's been no formalnouncements of their meeting. Trump that

(02:42:01):
he was going to go to China and early next year,
but that's again next year. The American one hundred percent
tariff again November first. The Chinese export restrictions on rare
earth metals again December first.

Speaker 4 (02:42:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:42:15):
The other issue here is that the actual event starts
on October thirty first, and the first terrorists going to
affect the next day.

Speaker 12 (02:42:23):
Very spooky, very spooky, indeed.

Speaker 9 (02:42:26):
Yeah, And so Trump is mad also about China refusing
to buy American soybeans, the story we've been covering. Yeah,
and you know, he's complaining about the rare earth metal stuff,
and he's complaining about he's still yelling about fence and all.
But it's also worth mentioning one of the fascinating things
is Trump is continuing to piss off even more parts

(02:42:47):
of his base with this stuff. So soybean farmers, which
is again a huge portion of American farmers, are really
mad at him. He's also pissing off cattle ranchers. So
both the soybean farmers and the cattle ranchers are mad
at for giving a bunch of money to Argentina and
not giving them a bunch of money and cutting off
their acts to Chinese markets because Argentina again is selling
a whole bunch of stuff to China. One of the

(02:43:08):
things that they sell to China is beef because Argentina
is a major beef exporter, So they're all really mad
at him for giving Argentina a giant bailout in order
to try to save if they're failing economy under their
unhinged an arco capitalist and president who has annihilated the
economy even more than it was before. And then Trump's

(02:43:29):
response to the cattle ranchers being mad at him was
telling them to lower their prices, which means they're even
more mad at him. So he is systematically alienating two
of what should be his most important basis of support.
And like the cattle industry has been a based Republican
support for I mean since time in memorial. Effectively, the
lumber and vanity tariffs so we mentioned last week have

(02:43:50):
taken effect. Now there's been no rollback of them. And finally,
I want to close on a story that we're going
to be covering more on Monday, which is the continuing
escalation of a sort of conflict between Colombia and the
US after the US murdered about full of what appeared

(02:44:11):
to be Columbian fishermen. Yes, Columbia has recalled its ambassador
and in the US has said that it is going
to eliminate all foreign aid and impose a tariff, the
size of which they haven't given a consistent number. Four
And this is, you know, very much could look like
a pretty massive reorientation of American policy around Columbia, which

(02:44:35):
has traditionally been an American ally and we've ran desk
squads out of there for a very very long time. Yeah,
and that has been the lightning round rapid fire trade
war coverage because oh boy, yeah, yay, we've tariff talked
all right.

Speaker 12 (02:44:53):
Before we close, I don't want to talk a little
bit about one of the news stories this week about
a US political figures being like Nazism. No, not the
main candidate, and no, not that other Republican staffer who
had a swastika in his cubicle. The political story that

(02:45:15):
leaked messages from the New York Young Republican telegram chat,
which already tells you that it's going to be problematic
the fact that they have a telegram chat. But The
Political reported that this chat contained messages about putting political
opponents in gas chambers, loving Hitler, as well as plenty
of anti semitism, talking about raping their enemies, and hundreds

(02:45:37):
of uses of homophobic and racistlers. The chair of the
New York State Young Republicans, Bobby Walker, allegedly called rape
epic and wrote in the chat quote if we ever
had a leak of this chat, we would be cooked
on quote New York Republican Elease Stephanic first denounced this

(02:45:57):
chat after the report, though later called the Politico piece
a quote unquote hit job. The Matt Walsh side of
the online right condemned those who leaked the chats, neglecting
to discuss the substance of the chat itself, while Vance
largely dismissed the affair, writing on x the Everything app

(02:46:19):
quote I refused to join the pearl clutching when powerful
people call for political violence unquote. Vance falsely referred to
this as a college group chat when TEA members were
as old as forty years old. A day later, while
guesting on The Charlie Kirk Show, Jade Vance continued to
push back on the seriousness of this story and play

(02:46:41):
defense by repeatedly referring to the grown men involved, who
are in their twenties and forties as kids and young boys.

Speaker 13 (02:46:49):
Somehow they got their hands on something like twenty eight
thousand messages in someat group chat of I think twelve
people that nobody's.

Speaker 2 (02:46:56):
Ever heard of.

Speaker 13 (02:46:57):
But they decided to just publish every single thing in
the chat, whatever they found that they thought was the
most salacious, and I think ten years ago there would
have been a very different response to it. But people
are starting to learn from this, and the vice president
is one of the reasons why I'm sorry.

Speaker 14 (02:47:13):
Focus on the real issues, don't focus on what kids
say in group chats. But there's another angle to this
that I just have to be honest about. I mean,
I'm like an old guy at this one. I'm forty
one years old, I have three kids. You know, I
grew up in a different world, right where not most
of what the stupid things that I did when I
was a teenager and a young adult, they're not on
the Internet, Like I'm going to tell my kids, especially

(02:47:35):
my boys, don't put things on the internet.

Speaker 2 (02:47:38):
Like, be careful with what you post.

Speaker 14 (02:47:40):
If you put something in a group chat, assume that
some scumbag is going to leak it in an effort
to try to cause you harm or cause your family harm.
But the reality is that kids do stupid things, especially
young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes, like that's what
kids do. And I really don't want us to grow
up in a country where a kid selling a stupid joke,

(02:48:01):
telling a very offensive, stupid joke is caused to ruin
their lives. And at some point we're all going to
have to say enough of this, bs. We're not going
to allow the worst moment and a twenty one year
old's group chat to ruin a kid's life for the
rest of time. That's just not okay. Like we live
in a digital world. This stuff is now extin stone online.

(02:48:23):
We're all going to have to say, you know what, no, no, no,
we're not doing this. We're not canceling kids because they
do something stupid in a group chat. And if I
have to be the person who carries that message forward,
I'm fine.

Speaker 12 (02:48:33):
With it, right once again, most of these guys are
like in their thirties. These guys are our adults. You know,
the New York Young Republicans is not a whole bunch
of kids. These are young like political in political years,
because everyone who runs the country is quasi geriatric. Self
proclaimed theocratic fascist Matt Walsh said, quote, the right doesn't

(02:48:56):
stick together. That's our biggest problem.

Speaker 4 (02:48:58):
By far.

Speaker 12 (02:48:59):
Conservatives are quick to denounce each other, jump on dog piles,
disavow attack their allies. I said a few weeks ago
that we all need to band together in the wake
of Charlie's death, and the answer I got back from
a lot of people on the right was basically no, well, okay,
then guys, we'll just lose. Instead, the left will keep
up the United Front and defend their guys no matter what. Well,

(02:49:23):
we keep throwing each other to the wolves at every opportunity.
Great plan. Unquote. Shapiro did beef a bit with Walsh
on one of their daily Wire group podcasts regarding the
substance of these chats. Shapiro did seem more concerned at
the growing anti Semitic and not see fascistic element of

(02:49:45):
the Republican Party whereas Walsh is does not care about
that at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, not a problem
for a self proclaimed theocratic fascist Matt Walsh. So that's
that's one side of this whole political story that I
wanted to talk about. You should just read the political piece.
I'm sure lots of people have. It got pretty popular
a few days ago. But I find the sort of

(02:50:07):
I mean, I would have called it like the dissident
right reaction, but when you have the vice president as like, yep,
the guy leading the charge on this type of stuff,
it's not really distanct Like there is a large number
of Republicans who are condemning the contents of this chat,
but you do have the vice president of the country
playing defense for it, yeah, and for the people involved.

Speaker 9 (02:50:27):
And I think this is actually a very important thing
about what the structure of the Republican Party is right now,
which is these kind of low levels like staffers, right,
the young Republican people, and these are a bunch of
people who are also making White House policy. You know,
Stephen Miller is you know, the guy who's doing a
whole bunch of a whole bunch of the sort of
ethnic cleansing deportation policy right now are just Nazis. They're

(02:50:50):
just Nazis. And every time one of these group chats
comes out, it looks like this. And that's a really
significant factor in why American politics looks like this, which
is that like the the people who are entering the
Republican Party right now, who are like their sort of
youth wing quote unquote, are these people and we're seeing
their policies get enacted.

Speaker 3 (02:51:10):
It fucking sucks.

Speaker 12 (02:51:12):
I mean it's often baked in this like post ironic,
like like joking way, where you know, obviously the Nazi
some people in these circles say, obviously the Nazis themselves
are bad, but we're using this as like a memetic signifier. Yeah,
for like nationalism and for all of these things. Now
there is a fair number of people who just will
straight up defend the Nazis absolutely, but I think it's

(02:51:33):
it's it goes beyond, like like this isn't German national socialism,
Like it goes, it goes, it goes beyond to like
they're using Nazism as a meme for their political project,
and memes get used a lot in these types of
safe spaces where people can joke around. So you see
that very clearly here, but you also see it on

(02:51:54):
like the DHS Twitter account you use, you see the
same kind of like post ironic stuff, like a few
weeks ago they we're fucking moon Man posting. You can
google that one if you want to. We don't have
time to explain, but that's a very old like internet
nazi dog whistle. Yeah, and you know we've I've talked
a decent bit about my feelings on like focusing a

(02:52:15):
lot on like the DHS Twitter dog whistles. But yeah,
it is it is in invoking of this stuff for
this like mimetic like archetypal context that they surround themselves in.

Speaker 9 (02:52:26):
Yeah, and then you know, doing the actual thing, which
is going out and rounding up a whole bunch of
doing these Ice rights now white people and yeah, like.

Speaker 12 (02:52:35):
The ICE recruiting ads are like the clearest example of
using this type of memetic imagery for their actual political
project and then to act the thing physically. And it's
it's very clear there because there's very little disconnect. It's
an immediate transference.

Speaker 4 (02:52:49):
Yeah, it's a very straight line.

Speaker 12 (02:52:51):
Yeah, James want to close us up on the Great
State of Alaska.

Speaker 4 (02:52:56):
Yeah, I'm talking about something and it's a great in Alaska.
But we normally do your fundraiser at the end, so
I wanted to put this here for those of you
who are not aware, because this has really got enough coverage,
in my opinion, A massive storm, in fact, the remnants
of a typhoon slammed into the west coast of Alaska,
leaving more than a thousand people without shelter along the

(02:53:16):
Yukon Coskoquim River. These are Alaska Native villages, and their
inhabitants are now climate refugees at the very start of winter,
right in the coldest place in the United States. These
villages are very remote. I spend some time earlier this
year in Alaska Native village, not here in the interior,
just in the Quichan territories. But these guys are really

(02:53:41):
only accessible by small planes or by boats, which will
make their recovery even harder.

Speaker 1 (02:53:49):
Right.

Speaker 4 (02:53:49):
They're people who have lived by the ocean or by
the river for as long as people have lived in
the Americas, tens of thousands of years.

Speaker 1 (02:53:57):
Right.

Speaker 4 (02:53:58):
A few months ago, the Trump canceled the twenty million
dollar ground for flood protection, which would have covered Kipnook.
One of these villages, Kipnook now and functioning doesn't exist.
Houses were torn off their foundations.

Speaker 12 (02:54:11):
Right.

Speaker 4 (02:54:11):
There are multiple videos of people's whole houses floating away.
It's not just an instance of neglect or even a
single failure here, It's an example of decades of ignoring
the voices of Indigenous people, especially Alaska Natives, when they
tell us that the climate crisis is real and that
it's already here. Right. When the media looks at climate change,

(02:54:35):
they tend to want to look at data they can
measure in terms of numbers, right, according to the model
of Western science. But I would argue that the experience
of Indigenous people who have lived on the land for
as long as human beings have lived anywhere on this
continent and have watched the changes and seen this disaster unfold,
should be a warning to all of us that the
climate crisis is already here. I reached out to some

(02:54:58):
Alaska Native friends to ask where to donate, and they
shared a page which will be in the show notes
of the show. So if you're able to help, I
think that's very important thing to do. Recovery for these
people with this federal government, with being as remote as
they are, will be horrifically difficult. Right now, many of
them are living in anchorage right Like I said, they're

(02:55:20):
going into the winter and then they don't have a
place to live. It's an unmitigated disaster. So if you're
able to help, I think it would be very much appreciated.
Before I go, I will say that if you would
like to email us, you can use our proton mail address,
cool Zone Tips at proton dot me. If you send
from a proton mail address and it's encrypted from one

(02:55:41):
end to the other end.

Speaker 12 (02:55:43):
We reported the news.

Speaker 2 (02:55:45):
We reported the news. Hey, We'll be back Monday with
more episodes every week from now until the heat death
of the Universe.

Speaker 15 (02:56:01):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for It Could Happen here, listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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