It Could Happen Here Weekly 213

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone 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):
Welcome to it could happen here, a podcast about how
freedom is a joke in our lives are the punchline,
I am your host, Mio Wong. Long ago, twenty thirteen,
in a galaxy basically exactly where this one is now.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and now a terminal fascist,
purchased the Washington Post. This was a sign of things

(00:52):
to come. The danger of the American free press is
and has always been, that we do not have a
free press. We have a capitalist press. Writing and especially reporting,
is a material product. Journalists have to eat, they have
to travel, they have to go places, they have to

(01:13):
meet people. All of this requires capital. And the problem
with all of this requiring capital is that capital is
not a neutral entity and the people who possess capital
have interests. Fast forward to twenty twenty, as protests and

(01:33):
uprisings raised across the United States against the police and
white supremacy. A battle broke out inside of the New
York Times newsrooms and editorial staff about the newspaper publishing
an opinion piece called send in the Troops calling for
You've Guessed It, Sending in the troops to attack protesters,

(01:54):
published by a member of the American governments named Tom Cotton.
Editors resigned in outrage. Debates raised a class journalist slacks.
It was the culmination of decades of battles about the
direction of politics in race in the United States, fought
simultaneously in the streets and in the newsroom. Twenty twenty

(02:17):
was a significant danger to the ruling class. The actual
ideology that was so dangerous it had to be destroyed
was this if the premise of twenty twenty is true,
which is that the US is a structurally racist country
founded on slavery and genocide, and that reproduces those same
violences through the prison system, which has legal slavery in it.

(02:42):
From the structure of the Thirteenth Amendment and reproduces it
again through the police. Then the American project is indefensible,
and here there be dragons. The ruling class needed to
move to stop it, and so they created what they

(03:03):
would call, I guess, a new ideology, but was really
a continuation of centuries old strategies. This time we branded
as anti woke. One of the avatars of anti woke
was Barry Weiss. Barry Weiss was that the New York
Times at the time was an ideological diversity hire, which
is to say, affirmative action for white conservatives, as affirmative

(03:26):
action has only existed in the figments of the minds
of conservatives. She was given a cozy make work job
at the beginning of the Trump administration as an opinion
staff editor and writer for The New York Times. She
was hired specifically to bring in more Trumpian figures into
the opinion section. This is, and I cannot emphasize this enough,

(03:48):
this is the fever dream of affirmative action in the
conservative mind right. And these are going to be about
to people who really hate affirmative action. But again, what
they are being given. They are being handled by the
most important newspaper probably in the entire world. You know,
she was handed a job because she was a fucking
right winger. Now, Weiss was part of the shall we say,

(04:15):
conversations at the New York Times about again whether or
not a newspaper should print a letter from a sitting
US representative calling for the deployment of US soldiers against
the American people. And she saw this as an opportunity
not to resist a obviously tyrannical program by again, a

(04:36):
sitting member of the United States government. She saw this
as her moment to do a grift. Now, in this moment,
she resigned from The New York Times in a huff
raving about the quote lack of ideological diversity. Who had
a giant rant about how the Twitter is not the
masthead of the New York Times blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah, which again I kind of emphasize this enough.

(04:58):
Like the she was brought in as a right wing
affirmative action higher in order to appease the demand from
the ruling class. I guess for like pro Trump people,
they already had electra right wingers. This is completely unhinged.
But you know, she resigns and she has this big
press to her in the right wing press trying to

(05:19):
talk about how she was canceled, and of course none
of this ever even happened. Right. We can debate the
effect to which cancelation ever was even really a thing
or did anything at all, But she was not canceled.
She literally resigned of her own free will. She was
not forced out. She chose to leave in order to
pursue a career as a right wing griff for another fields,
namely Substack, where she ran a newsletter that was sort

(05:41):
of rebranded as like, oh, it's a media outlet called
the Free Press. It's like, no, this is Barry Weiss's Substack.
Come on, what are we doing here? What are we
doing here? Now? Weiss is not a journalist. She is
a right wing idea logue. She's also a hardline Zionist.
If you want to go into all of the absolutely

(06:01):
unhidded shit that Barry Weiss has said and done over
the years, all of the just unbelievably somophobic shit, all
of the weird racist shit, all of the anti immigrant
shit that she said, there's a very good John Oliver
thing about her. She is part of this story. But
if we spent this entire episode just talking about how
much he fucking sucks. We would be here for like

(06:22):
two decades now. In a just world, none of this
would matter at all. This would just be a conservative
walking off from the free job that she was given
by The New York Times, stomping off at a huff
and going to start a sub stack whatever. Who kicks.
This is not a just world. This is the United States.
She now controls one of the most powerful and important

(06:45):
news organizations in the United States. The story of how
she got there is the story of the future of
the American media. Unfortunately, for all of us, the story
is a stressingly simple Barry Weiss and her outlet. I'm
using that in immense quotations. Again, this is just a
sub stack was bought out by one Larry Ellison. Larry

(07:10):
Ellison that appointed Weiss to be the ideological hatchet woman
for his takeover of Paramount, which owns CBS. There was
no secret plan, there was no weird strategy, there was
no Illuminati cabal behind the scenes. It didn't require any
effort at all. All you have to do in order

(07:30):
to install a right wing hack as the editor in
chief of CBS News is by the company. The results
have been devastating. I would call what happened to resegregation.
There was a large scale firing of non white employees.
NBC eliminated the editorial teams for NBC Asian America, NBC Black,

(07:53):
NBC Latino, and NBC Out. NBC Out was the queer one.
They fired kal King. They did some stuff that frankly
sounds like a joke. I'm just going to read this
quote from the Root and the CBS News bureau in Johannesburg,
South Africa has been shut down with coverage of Africa
shifting to London. That is again, they closed the South

(08:18):
Africa Bureau. This is a CBS bureau in South Africa
and moved their coverage of Africa from Africa to London.
If a hardline Marxist ideologue had written this in nineteen
sixty seven, no one would have believed them. And in
the process, what they've done here is they've destroyed the
NBC outlets that were responsible for doing a whole bunch

(08:40):
of coverage for different groups of not white people. Right,
nbcblkh's MC Black did a whole bunch of very good
coverage of the uprising in twenty twenty right, NBC Asian
America did a bunch of good work. NBC out was
a place where you could occasionally find a transperson who
was allowed to write. And all of that is gone
because one man, Larry Allison and his son David Allison,

(09:05):
bought the fucking media company and installed this unhinged right
wing hack as their ideological secret police. I don't even
know what you would call this position, the ideological purge executor.
I guess you could call it of CBS. Now, obviously

(09:26):
there are multiple aspects to this. We'll talk about Larry
Ellison himself in a second, because he is a very
important figure. But first, before we talk about the consolidation
of capital into increasing monopolies. Let's go here from some
of those monopolies, product services. Let's go we are so back.

(10:00):
Obvious driving factors behind what has become a right wing
fascist takeover of the media has been the consolidation of
capital into increasing monopolies. Now, it's been a very, very
famous thing in the US to say that most of
American media is controlled by five companies. But here's the thing.
Even those five companies, those can always be consolidated into

(10:23):
fewer and fewer companies. Right as the company start to struggle,
as any one of them sees weakness in the other ones,
you get attempts to buy them out. And this is
what happens with Paramount, which is again the parent company
that owns NBC. So the way that it's framed, if
you read it in the presss oh, it was a
merger between Skydance, which was Ellison's sort of outlet, and Paramount.

(10:47):
But that's not really what happened. Really, what happened was
Paramount was bought by Ellison and sky Dance and they
were merged together after that. And this is a problem
with the concentration of capital. Right as capital becomes increasingly
more and more concentration, as there are individual people and
also entities that control more and more capital, their ability

(11:09):
to simply swallow the rest of their competition and consume
it increases. And this is a significant advantage to the companies.
To get the swallow of this capital, they get to
absorb all of the intellectual property, and so now they
have control over the property regimes that allow them to
control cultural production, and as a sort of incidental bonus,

(11:30):
they can take control of the media. Now it's worth
getting into the Ellisons themselves. Now, Larry Allison, back in
the halcyon days of twenty twenty, was merely the eleventh
richest man in the world when he quote participated in
a call shortly after the twenty twenty election that focus
on strategies for contesting the legitimacy of the vote. According

(11:52):
to court documents and a participant, the November fourteenth call
included Lindsey Graham, Fox News host Sean Hannity, Jay Seklau,
an attorney for President Donald Trump, and James Bob Junior,
an eternity for True the Vote, a Texas based nonprofit.
True the Vote was a completely unhanged organization dedicated to
overturning the twenty twenty election by doing all these weird

(12:15):
voter fraud things. And they had a strategy call, like
the attorney in a strategy call with a bunch of
Trump supporters, including one Larry Ellison. Now again that was
back in twenty twenty. Here in twenty twenty five and
now fighting with Elon Musk for the title of the
richest person in the fucking world. Ellison said, and I quote,

(12:36):
We're going to have supervision. Every police officer is going
to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem,
AI will report that problem and report it to the
appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because
we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on
now in that intervening time. Larry Ellison is one of

(12:57):
the people behind Oracle, and Oracle has benefited enormously as
a company that got really in on the cloud storage boom.
They even benefited enormously from selling a bunch of shit
to AI companies. Lara. Ellison is also a huge AI supporter,
a huge back of AI, a huge someone who wants
to spread AI, and someone who wants to spread AI,

(13:20):
you know, very specifically, and this is very important into
surveillance technology. He is also one of the people who
as twenty twenty went on and as the last half
decade has come on and as the giant sort of
backlash against against the uprising, and as his attempt to

(13:40):
reassert racism as the dominant ideology of the United States
and to make sure that capitals hold over this country
and that white supremacies hold over this country would be maintained,
he has become one of the large drivers of this
entire project He's not the only one. Jeff Bezos, as
we started this program with, already owned the Washington Post

(14:04):
in twenty twenty five, he went in to very seriously
change it. Jeff Bezos on the now fascist Twitter and
we will get to that in a second. Two wrote
and this was a This was a letter that he
sent to his staff, and this is this is the
editorial section. I'm writing to let you know about a
change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to

(14:26):
be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars,
personal liberties and free markets. Will cover other topics too,
of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left
to be published by others. David Shipley, who had been
his handpicked editor, resigned rather than lead the effort. It's
not like Shipley had been like a leftist, right but

(14:48):
you know, I'm going to read another part of this letter.
Quote I offered David Shipley, who I admire greatly because
you know he was the Hambick guy, the opportunity to
lead this new chapter I suggest. I said to him
that the answer wasn't hell yes, that it had to
be no. After careful consideration, David decided to step away.
So okay, what was actually happening here he came in

(15:10):
was like, our board is not fascist enough, and if
you're not going to make it more fascist, then get
the fuck out of the way. And the guy he
had picked to run the editorial board like three years ago,
when this is unacceptable. I cannot be involved in this.
And left and now Washington Post publishes pieces with titles

(15:31):
like quote Pam Bondi's welcome woke rollback. The Justice Department
rescinds regulations encouraging racial preferences, you know, and you can
in some ways see all of the things that are
coming together. Obviously, Bezos was a major supporter of the
Trump administration, is a major support of the Trump administration.
Put a bunch of money into the unhinged Trump ballroom.

(15:54):
And when he says Justice resins regulations encouraging racial preferences,
they're talking about anti scrim nation ordinances, right, That's what
they're actually talking about. But these people have been so
cooked and have stewed so much in the ideology of
countering the ideology of twenty twenty that they're they're now
doing all of this reversed racism stuff where they think
that if you're not allowed to discriminate. That's anti white discrimination.

(16:18):
And the Washington Post has been tanking effectively in the
wake of a whole bunch of a whole bunch of
writ wing editorial changes. Its audience has significantly declined since this.
A whole bunch of people who subscribed to the Post
called it in their subscriber count is just absolutely pitiful.
Now the reach has been contracting. The paper is going
to shit. But that doesn't matter because the Washington Post

(16:42):
is not a money making outlet. The Washington Post is
a chance to shape the way that the country thinks.
And it is better that you know seven people in Washington, DC,
who are all identically minded conservatives read the Washington Posts
and agree with it than it is for there to
be any sort of independence whatsoever from anything on the

(17:04):
shop floor from any of the people writing for it.
We've also seen in recent months the elimination of teen
Folgue Conte Nasty. Teenvogue's parent company eliminated Team Vogue as
an independent outlet. Teen Vogue had been the furthest left
of the even sort of mainstream outlets in the US.
It had carried a bunch of extremely good and radical

(17:25):
work on race and gender. It was also one of
the few outlets with consistent trans writing. And of course,
the other aspect of all of these purges has been
unbelievable on hinge transphobia. And this was them just destroying
what had been a very very important outlet on the
left for telling the stories of non white people, telling
the stories of workers, and telling the stories of trans people.

(17:49):
And they just destroyed it. Even though, and this is
actually very interesting, ever since teen Vogue had shifted to
doing a bunch of leftist coverage and covering the protests
against Donald Trump in his first administration and had gone
towards actually, you know, talking about labor and talking about
struggle and talking about unions and talking about you know,

(18:11):
the like, the experiences of people living under white supremacy.
Its readership had exploded. But again that doesn't matter because
it's bad for Donald Trump. And so we're seeing the
ideological tightening consolidation to the media as what had been
an outlet that allowed people to talk about shit was
just destroyed. Now, speaking about outlets destroying things ideologically, Hey,

(18:33):
product and services, please don't destroy USOO. Now, as we
covered on this show a few weeks ago. Conde Nasts
also fired several union workers legally for you know, staging

(18:58):
a again protected workplace action, demanding to know what the
fuck was going on with these teen Vogue firings. And
that's another aspect of all of his takeover, which is
that these outlets just viciously and radically hates and this
is the ruling classes people who run these outlets viciously
hate unions. And this is something that's very important to

(19:20):
understand in terms of media unions, because media unions were
also a very powerful force for encouraging diversity because, as
it turns out, workers and this is true, I could
say that someone who's part of a media union less
racist than the bosses, and in fact would like there
to be more non white people and don't like it
when non white people are discriminated against. And this is

(19:41):
one of the things that these media unions and that
unions in general do is try to help you not
get fucking discriminated against on racial grounds. So of course
a part and partial of this has been the targeting
of the union and that's what we've been seeing at
conte Nast, where they also fired workers who had nothing
to do with teen Vogue and also of whom was
on the show and is trans and you should go

(20:03):
listen to that episode because it's very good. But that's
another aspect of this right wing consolidation is that media
unions are able to push back against the untrammeled power
of these fascist billionaires to turn news coverage into whatever
the fuck they want. And that's what's happened at CBS,
where they're now doing giant specials with like Kirk's Widow

(20:27):
and all of these just absolutely deranged, unbelievably bizarre right
wing pieces that they're just sort of airing now. And
in order to you know, stop that shit, you need
powerful media unions, and this is one of the things
the ruling class is trying to crush. Now. It's also
worth mentioning that these right wing billionaires are trying to

(20:47):
consolidate their hold on social media as well as the
traditional media. And obviously the largest example of this is
Elon Musk, who's purchased Twitter and has you know, effectively
turned Twitter into another arm of Stormfront. It is a
just unhinged stew of racism and conspiracy that is now
effectively unusable if you don't want like the most racist

(21:09):
shit you've ever seen in your entire life, just in
every single one of your replies. And it's also become
a major, you know, vector of targeting for the Trump administration,
where what Twitter is used for now, instead of being
a platform that at one time actually was able to
play a role as a thing that does resistance, as
a tool of protesters, and as a tool of people

(21:30):
who opposed, you know, the untraveled rule of billionaires, it's
now been converted into just racist slop and a way
to track down anyone who's sort of vaguely centered left
and just put them in the eyes of the administration
so they can be targeted by the state. And it's
also worth noting that one of the people who helped

(21:51):
bankroll the purchase of Twitter because Elon Musk couldn't just
purchase it directly, was one Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison is
also part of a massive attempt to buy TikTok. Listeners
of the show are probably familiar with the whole extremely
weird story about how TikTok was banned last year under
the Biden administration sort of bafflingly and Trump sort of

(22:14):
just broke the law and made it still be usable,
but has been trying to force TikTok to be sold
to American buyers. And the conglomerate that's supposed to buy
it is a Larry Ellison thing, so he's also attempting
to buy TikTok. And finally, the story we're were to
close on is that Larry Ellison has been doing a

(22:35):
hostile takeover bid of Warner Brothers. Now Warner Brothers currently
is set to be bought by Netflix. Larry Ellison kept
on submitting bids to them, and his efforts to actually
get the purchase to go through were consistently denied. But
in the wake of that, they're attempting to do a
hostile takeover bid where they just go to the shareholders

(22:55):
directly and try to buy them out at what they
claim is a higher share price. I'm not going to
go into that whole thing as a fiasco, but what
is interesting for our purposes is that David Allison, who's
the guy running Paramount, who's the guy who's been directly
running the ideological purges, has met several times with Trump,
and last time they met, Trump has promised that he

(23:18):
would change the coverage of CNN in order to make
it better for Trump.

Speaker 4 (23:22):
Now.

Speaker 3 (23:22):
It's also worth noting that buying CNN is not part
of the deal for the Warner takeover bid by Netflix.
Right if Netflix takes over Warner Bros. They don't get CNN.
Under Paramount and Larry Ellison's deal, they would get CNN now,
even though CNN has done a whole bunch of unhandshit
like having Ben Shapiro on to do fucking Electron coverage.

(23:43):
Jesus fucking Christ. Okay, Trump has still been mad at
them for reporting even a tiny bit critically about his administration.
And Trump has been kind of refusing to pick a
side directly in terms of the takeover bid for Warner
Brothers in the fight between Netflix and Paramount, but he's
now said that he wants to make sure that CNN

(24:05):
is sold and that it should get new leadership, presumably
along the style of what happened with CBS. And so
this is sort of the final phase of all of this, right,
which is trumpministration has the ability to use is quote
unquote anti trust power in order to stop one of
these two companies from doing this buyout, and Trump administration

(24:25):
is using the fact that the media is being bought
out by his allies in order to try to get
people to buy CNN and simply eliminate negative news coverage
of him. And I don't really think I need to
explain why it's extremely bad that the president of the
United States could simply order a news outlet to be
bought out, and then suddenly it's bought out. I think

(24:49):
it's kind of self explanatory why that's unbelievably bad. But
that is the situation that we may rapidly find ourselves
in because we don't live in anything that even sort
of looks like a democracy. We live in the dictatorship
of capital. And a thing about the press under a dictatorship,
even one that's as decentralized as the dictatorship of capital,

(25:11):
is that one particularly fascist faction of capital can simply
roll in by the media and take control of it.
And that's the project that we're seeing now. But these
people are not undefeatable. We beat them before, we can't
beat them again. And in some ways their project is
kind of self defeating in that they have spent a
significant amount of time hollowing out people's trust in these institutions,

(25:35):
and there is an extent to which as bad as
all of this is, they may simply be taking control
of a husk that they had already caused a rot
from the inside. And meanwhile, all of these, all of
his control of the media that they've been taking has
not stopped everyone from fucking hating them. And that's the
note that I want to leave everyone here on. It

(25:56):
doesn't matter how much of the media these people buy,
everyone still hates them. We can fight them and we
can win. Welcome, take it up at here a podcast

(26:19):
boldly asked the question what if a whole bunch of
your life wasn't controlled by the bizarre whims of random dictators.
This is your host, Mia Wung And the last time
we saw the Blue Bottle Union they had stage to
walk out treated Eclipse. Now they are back again to

(26:41):
talk about union shit and Yeah with me is Alex Pine,
who's the president of Blue Bottle Union, and Abby Sadow,
the secretary treasurer. Yet both of you two, Welcome to
the show. Hi, thanks for having us both back on. Guys,
thank you so much. Yeah, I'm really really, I'm really
excited to talk about this because the last one, I
gotta say that was one of the absolute funniest things

(27:03):
I've ever heard.

Speaker 5 (27:05):
Yeah, I still can't get over how DHS got called
on us when we tried to file for our election.

Speaker 3 (27:09):
So uninche like, I feel like this is this is
one of the things about doing the show is like
I'm like about to be five years into this, right,
It's like you think you've seen it all and then
just like no, just just the most unhinged bullshit you've
ever heard in your entire life, because like, just like,
the capacity for cruelty and inventiveness of bosses is effectively infinite,
So they can always find some bullshit the pull that

(27:32):
you've never seen before, and they love to do it too. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (27:36):
This is one of the reasons why we unionized to
begin with, is just because bosses can be petty tyrants. Yeah,
and sometimes it seems like the only reason that they
got into being a boss is because they want to
be a petty tyrant but don't have the soul for
politics anyways.

Speaker 3 (27:52):
Yeah, we unionized last May.

Speaker 5 (27:54):
For anybody that's unaware, Blue Bottle is a so called
specialty cough that is owned entirely by Nesslie. Yes, that
one that everyone regards as widely being evil.

Speaker 3 (28:06):
Yeah. See an extremely logged episode that I did, for example,
about Niceleie chocolate and child labor is great. This child
slave labor good stuff. We love capitalism, and.

Speaker 4 (28:17):
Their coffee business is truly no better.

Speaker 3 (28:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (28:21):
I mean, this is going to get wildly off topic
before we even begin. But if anybody looks up the
NGO Coffee Watch, they do a lot of great reporting
and research on the supply chains of coffee, specifically Nestli's
and Starbucks's, and it's all very ugly stuff. But Blue Bottle,
Blue Bottles, especially the coffee chain owned by Neslei. We
unionized all six of their Greater Boston locations in May

(28:43):
of twenty twenty four, and this year we.

Speaker 3 (28:46):
Added four locations in the East Bay area to our
union in July. Hell yeah yeah.

Speaker 5 (28:51):
We also just concluded a multi day strike as an
independent union at the end of November, so Black Friday.

Speaker 3 (28:59):
Hell yeah yeah, yeah yeah. So let's talk about that strike. Well, actually,
I guess okay, we should. We should probably do the
run up to what has been happening until we go
after that strike. I'm getting I'm getting strike excited. This
is how I've been in my mind since September. It
is just how do we make a strike happen? Yeah, hell, yeah, Yeah,

(29:19):
let's talk about like what the sort of lead up
stuff to the action war and let's talk about like.

Speaker 5 (29:24):
Yeah, what expanding was, Like, yeah, Abby, do you want
to talk about the lead up?

Speaker 3 (29:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (29:29):
So since we unionized last May, we've had multiple stage walkouts.
In September of last year, yeah, one of our union
wraps at the Harvard Square location, well unjustly fires, we
did a walk out over her termination. We did a
walkout in January of this past year after Blue Bottle

(29:51):
completely refused to negotiate with us over the renovation of
the Poudential Center and a lot of employees were going
to be losing out on almost eight dollars in tips
and is just fright hundreds of dollars a month. And
the company was like, oh, well, we bargained to an impasse,
so we're just going to do whatever we want. We
were like, okay, well that's not that's not all this works. No, yeah,

(30:12):
And then in May of this year, we did another
walkout when they made the same argument that we bargained
towards impass when they tried to install security cameras.

Speaker 3 (30:21):
For anybody that's wondering.

Speaker 5 (30:22):
No, the cafes in Boston did not have cameras in
them for the entire time that we were organizing or unionized,
until we began negotiating the installation of cameras as part
of our contract. When they felt like they were done
talking about cameras with us, they declared impass, which they
can't do because we were negotiating it as part of
the contract, so they would have had to get to

(30:44):
an impass on the entire contract before doing it. Yeah,
and their lawyer basically said, well, we weren't getting anywhere
with that, so we're going to do anyways.

Speaker 3 (30:53):
God, labor law is so fun because it's like like
every boss breaks like one hundred million labor laws a second,
and then kind of nothing happens unless you force it to.

Speaker 5 (31:06):
Speaking of breaking weird labor laws, since we unionized, one
nice thing that has happened was until May of this year,
they were negotiating over serious discipline, so final written warnings
or terminations with us. In effect, what this means is
that they would sit down with us and just talk
about why they felt like terminating someone was justified until

(31:27):
they said we're not going to do anything else aside
from fire them. But because of an NLRB ruling with
Starbucks at the end of April, their lawyer said that
they were done with that and they felt that they
had no legal obligation to continue doing it. Oh fun yeah,
which a break from past practice. And we have been

(31:47):
writing them committing to negotiating over serious discipline with us.
So less than a week after they say we're not
going to bargain over discipline with you anymore, they fire
one coworker of ours, and our store immediately walked out
over it.

Speaker 6 (32:00):
Hell yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:01):
Which yeah.

Speaker 5 (32:02):
I continue to be proud of that walkout, specifically because
it wasn't planned and because it was over something that
is pretty technical labor law wise.

Speaker 3 (32:10):
Just the fact that they didn't negotiate over the termination.
That fun. That wrong. Yes, that's like girl who's read
a bunch of weird labor history. This thing feels like
a thing for a fucking weird labor history. The thing
it reminds me of is that there was this thing
in I think it was sibber Gora in Spain. She
like the twenties and thirties where it was like this
hyperbilitant labor like union like labor Town, but they had

(32:31):
a whole thing where they refused to strike over like
improving economic conditions because they were like, this is bourgeois
reformism and they would only strike over political stuff. Oh yeah,
but if you arrested like one person, like the whole
fucking city would go out. It's like this lot like yeah, no,
we could just call. We could just fucking instantly get

(32:52):
get a fucking walk out to happen over just like
over like them fucking with like kind of technical labor
stuff like this rocks. We love to see it. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (33:01):
I was on the floor that day that our coworker
was fired, and I remember I went on my ten
minute break after she was fired, and there's like a
pond behind our store, and I was literally throwing rocks
into the pond and I was like this sucks so
bad and I'm so angry. And then I was like, wait,
we're a unionized. I was like, wait a minute, we
have a union. And I go back into the store

(33:21):
and I was like, hey, guys, if we don't walk
out right now, then what is the point?

Speaker 3 (33:25):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (33:25):
And everyone was like yeah, actually, if we don't walk
out right now, what is the point?

Speaker 3 (33:30):
Yeah? Hell yeah.

Speaker 4 (33:32):
And then we all walked out and it was it
was really beautiful.

Speaker 3 (33:34):
Actually, that's so sick. That's so beautiful. I don't know
there's some kind of metaphor for like you walking in
being like the first rip the rock hitting the pond
in the first ripples going out and the whole thing.
Oh absolutely, that's I don't know, that's gorgeous. I love it.
That fucking rules. Congratulations. Tell yeah.

Speaker 4 (33:53):
One of my favorite things to say is that union
is friendship, and friendship is unions, and when your friend
gets fired, you should be able to walk out.

Speaker 1 (34:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (34:01):
Yeah, fucked that, like seriously here.

Speaker 5 (34:06):
Yeah, And on the whole, we've had a I think
pretty successful year, especially because I want to stress this,
we're independent, So for all the walkouts that we've done,
we've been able to replace the wages of baristas.

Speaker 3 (34:17):
Oh that's really sick.

Speaker 5 (34:18):
If anybody listening to this wants to help us be
able to do more walkouts, you can go yes tinywurl
dot com forward slash bbu dash strike will be in
the description.

Speaker 3 (34:27):
Hell yeah.

Speaker 5 (34:28):
Because at this point, the companies realize that they can't
break our solidarity in any meaningful way by resorting to
skear tactics or delaying, and so now they've just resorted
to straight up firing people because yeah, like it's kind
of like a break glass here in case of emergency
thing where.

Speaker 3 (34:45):
They're like, we're all out of ideas. What do we do? Yeah,
it's just start trying to fire everyone.

Speaker 4 (34:50):
And that's what they've done.

Speaker 6 (34:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (34:52):
Most recently, all the stores in both Boston and the
East Bay area went on a four day straight it's
November because the company illegally fired Abby executive board member
named Nora and an organizer of ours in the East
Bay named Ashley for all incredibly petty reasons. I don't
know if you want to speak more to why you

(35:13):
were fired Abby.

Speaker 4 (35:14):
Yeah, so on the record, I was fired because I
wore green pants. What I wore green pants like three
weeks prior to me being fired. And let me tell you,
there's nothing worse than waking up at four point thirty
to go to your opening shift at your stupid cafe job,

(35:36):
to then clock in and be immediately hit with separation
forms because you wore green pants three weeks ago.

Speaker 3 (35:43):
What you must.

Speaker 5 (35:45):
Understand what a serious infraction it is to wear green pants.

Speaker 4 (35:48):
Of course, I mean clearly the green pants that I've
been wearing for the better part of two years.

Speaker 5 (35:52):
Yeah, firing Abby was generous. Actually she should have been
put to death for the crime of wearing green pants.

Speaker 4 (35:56):
Of course, most likely this is.

Speaker 3 (36:00):
Some like fucking medieval like, yeah, you pissed off the
monarch by like you wore a color of pants that
was like unfavorable to the eye of the king, and
now he's drawn and quarter Like what is this bullshit?

Speaker 4 (36:12):
Like, yep, I wore green pants in front of my manager,
therefore I should not be able to make my rent.

Speaker 3 (36:18):
Yeah, it's absolutely gibberish that that might be the all
time dubbest fiery reason I've ever heard, Like what is.

Speaker 4 (36:27):
Oh yeah, it's just so egregious because the managers know
that I have a great rapport with all my coworkers.
I'm front all of my coworkers, and they were like, hmm,
how can we, you know, make one of our long
standing employees who is good at their job, you know,
get fired? So green pants was the reasoning, which.

Speaker 3 (36:48):
And just like the idea of your employer being able
to control what color of pants you wear is like
is a thing that just on a foot of mental
level would not be accepted with any other kind of
authority that everyone immediately recognizes. Wait, what the fuck that's
completely unhinged. Why should someone have the ability to tell
you like, no, you have to wear this color pants,

(37:10):
or you can't pay your rents and you can't eat
oh yeah no.

Speaker 5 (37:13):
And this is kind of the despotism of management that
we're just talking about.

Speaker 7 (37:17):
Isn't it.

Speaker 6 (37:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (37:18):
And this is the thing that in.

Speaker 5 (37:20):
Bargaining sessions for a contract, their site is very interested
in maintaining. We've said multiple times that we want a
better just code policy, or at the very least, we
don't want to wave our right to be able to
wear a union memorabilia on the floor.

Speaker 6 (37:33):
Uh huh.

Speaker 5 (37:33):
And because he doesn't have any better ideas, their lawyer
can only think to shoot that down by talking about
how he doesn't, you know, wear his sexuality on his
shirt or what.

Speaker 4 (37:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (37:44):
Yeah, Well, because he was like, why don't you want
to be able to wave your right to wear a
union memorabilia on the floor, and we said, we want
to be able to show pride that we are unionized,
and we want to be able to have more freedom
for expression.

Speaker 3 (37:56):
Uh huh.

Speaker 5 (37:57):
Because it's despotic to be able to have that level
of control over what somebody does. Yeah, and then he said,
you know, well, I don't wear my sexuality on my shirt,
and then realize that it was maybe inappropriate to say that,
So then he talked about how he doesn't wear his
daughters on.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
His shirt, which it's a more convoluted point.

Speaker 5 (38:15):
Yeah, well, because he's proud of his kids.

Speaker 3 (38:20):
I guess what are we doing here? Just come on,
we gotta have better arguments than.

Speaker 4 (38:26):
This, Like, no, this guy is really full of bad arguments.

Speaker 5 (38:32):
Yeah, if you want to hear bad arguments, you should
sit down on the bargaining session where their lawyer goes
on kind of incomprehensible tie rades about how the free
market in the aggregate will make sure that the best
person will get promoted over time, or that the company
will become more profitable or run with the most efficiency
as an enterprise, because anything else would be illogical because

(38:54):
they wouldn't produce more profit.

Speaker 3 (38:55):
But what does that have to do with labor? Yes,
there's actually this is okay, So when I know who's
a lawyer once told me that, like the this is
this is not like a leftist this is just like
she's just like a corporate lawyer once told me that
this is like the actual secret basis that doesn't exist
of all corporate laws, that there is actually nothing in
the law that says a company has to make more

(39:17):
money or that they even have the right to make money.
Like that's that that doesn't exist, Like that's not it.
That's not a thing, Like there's no, you don't actually
have a legal right to make more money, like you
simply don't. That's just that's not how this works. The

(39:40):
thing that reminds me of is the other pollet is
David Graeber wrote about. I think you might have been
quoting someone else, but I can't remember who was quoting.
But he writes about how the relationship between sort of
eloquence and violence where the less you have and this
isn't somewhere in the hope of rules. He writes about
how you know people who have a access to violence

(40:01):
to compel people to do something, you don't even have
to speak the same language as someone. Right, you can
just point a gun at them and you know they
have to obey you because you know they have force, right,
But the less ability you have to actually use force
to get someone to do something right. So if you're
a village chief in there's actually a lot of conditionous

(40:23):
tribes that were like this, but you know you're you're
in like sort of the Northeast, and you don't actually
have the ability to compel people to do things. So
if you want people to go work in the morning,
you have to like get up and make a giant
show of like, oh, I'm getting up to work in
the morning. Everyone follow me. Wow, look at how hard
I working. And you have to like convince them through oratory.

(40:44):
And you know this, this is like why all these
people when when Europeans run into them, everyone is like,
holy shit, these are like the these are the best
orders of every encountered because they have to be right.
But the more power you have, the less eloquence you
have to have, which I think is like, you know,
this is like a Donald Trump thing, right, It's like, yeah,
what what you've what you've reached disappoint in the process.
You know, you can just compel people do things through violence.
You can just like talk like a fourth grader and

(41:06):
it's fine and it doesn't matter because you just have violence.
And that's what this reminds me of it, like, oh,
we're the company like we have like we're fucking owned
by nasty We have all this money. We don't have
to make compelling arguments. We just have to like have power. Yeah,
I mean pretty much. Personally, it reads to me as.

Speaker 5 (41:22):
Like a way to delay actually talking about any of
our demands at the table, because if you just eat
up all the time, then there's.

Speaker 3 (41:29):
No time to talk. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (41:31):
Yeah, but that's also really beautiful to think about from
a more abstract sense.

Speaker 3 (41:36):
Yeah. Well, also, just companies love fucking with negotiations. It's awful.
I how okay, I should just start asking everyone who
does negotiations about this. But on average, how late should
their manages to show up to meetings?

Speaker 5 (41:49):
I would say that actually both sides are equally late
well to the negotiations, at least just because getting around
the city is so difficult. Oh oh, so that's it's.

Speaker 3 (42:03):
Like a transit thing, not like a no, no, we're
not deliberately showing up ly as far as I know. Yeah,
we just can't get in traffic. Yeah, but there should
they already just be there?

Speaker 5 (42:14):
Oh yeah, Well, because this is something that's actually been
a delay tactic for them, is they insist that we
need to split the cost equally of a bargaining space.

Speaker 3 (42:24):
What what?

Speaker 5 (42:26):
And again, we're independent, so they know that we can't
on a regular basis commit to that. So if you
want to donate to our unions that way, we can
hate to sit down in front of these people.

Speaker 3 (42:37):
That's completely on it. Yeah, having to have the union
pave I've never heard of that before. That's completely deranged,
that's what.

Speaker 5 (42:46):
And we we've even waived our right to meet in
a neutral space.

Speaker 3 (42:52):
Uh huh.

Speaker 5 (42:52):
So we've asked if they would be willing to meet
in the office of their legal representation or if they'd
be willing to meet in the office of our legal representation,
and they've said no to both because supposedly, despite being
the second largest union avoidance firm in the world, they've
said that their office doesn't have adequate space to hold us.
But then rental space in the city is so fucking

(43:13):
expensive that there's no feasible way to rent a space
for eight hours for two days.

Speaker 3 (43:20):
You know, once a month.

Speaker 5 (43:22):
Yeah, which is meant that we've ended up in some
strange places, so college conference rooms, city hall, we work
what Yeah.

Speaker 3 (43:32):
Really know, this is the most deeply unserious company I
have ever encountered, Like, there's all.

Speaker 5 (43:41):
Kinds of things like that that they've employed in the
past year to attempt us making significant progress with negotiating.
And it wasn't until November this year that they finally
gave us a counter on economics after we told them
we would file a bad faith bargaining charge if they didn't. Hell, yeah,
do you want to guess what they're counter So, for reference,

(44:04):
our union's requesting thirty dollars an hour for bristas because
that's a living wage according to the MIT living wage calculator.
Do you want to guess what Bluebottle said they would
give us eighteen?

Speaker 4 (44:15):
No?

Speaker 5 (44:16):
Well, actually, strangely yes, they said, right now we make
eighteen an hour. But they said they'll keep it the
same and they want to retain the rate to change
it whenever they want. They're they're making a floor. They're
they're committing to a floor that I then tried to
ask if they've ever in their history decreased wages. Uh huh,
and they're like, no, I don't see why we would

(44:37):
ever do that, And like, oh, so then this floor
is bullshit.

Speaker 3 (44:41):
Actually, their baseline for negotiations is our starting position is nothing.

Speaker 5 (44:46):
Yeah, and this is a year after negotiating with them
so far.

Speaker 3 (44:49):
Yeah, a year. It it's like okay, like I mean
at that that point, it's like, yeah, I don't know,
like fucking are our starting position is we should have
your house? Like this is like this is like equally
come on, like you having their house is a more
reasonable demand than our basic negotiating position is nothing, Like
what are we doing here?

Speaker 8 (45:09):
Oh?

Speaker 6 (45:11):
No idea?

Speaker 3 (45:13):
Just god? Yeah, I mean it answered obligatory line here
about how after you win an election. The most common
way for UNI to fail is bargaining the first contract.
And companies know this. They will just do bullshit for
several years to attempt to not have you get a contract.
It sucks. Yeah, yeah, fuck them.

Speaker 4 (45:30):
It's their whole strategy. I mean, the whole like union
avoidance of it all is they're just trying to like
wait us out and then fire people who are involved
and just like in their words, like let turnover do
its natural work. It's like, isn't this specialty coffee? Don't
you want people who are good at their jobs. I've
watched some of my new coworkers pull a shot that

(45:50):
I wouldn't feed to a dog like the same.

Speaker 3 (45:55):
Oh absolutely, why Look, you can't expect managers to know
how to do things that's not their job.

Speaker 4 (46:02):
My manager, let me tell you. I used to have
to open with her like three times a week. And
she has this very beautiful habit of as she's dialing
espresso and also she does as well, she's counting cash,
she will have her phone open on TikTok and then
scroll through. I have this one horrific memory. It was
six am and she was going through an entire TikTok

(46:24):
storytime series for forty five minutes. And the whole story
time was going on, and every time it was an
introduction of like I don't even remember what it was about.
I think it was like She's like, oh, this is
my story of being like a mob boss's wife. And
I had to listen to that for forty five minutes
while opening.

Speaker 3 (46:41):
Oh yeah, I think you should you should legally be
allowed to have her car. I think I should have
her house probably yeah too. Yes, it's like our starting
our starting demand is the boy. Every time you pissed
offs off, we get another one of your houses.

Speaker 4 (46:56):
Look for every TikTok watched on the clock. That's a
doll towards me per hour.

Speaker 3 (47:02):
Yeah, what are we doing here?

Speaker 5 (47:04):
They're owned by Nestli, But I don't think that there's
enough money in the world that would be able to
give you that, Abbey.

Speaker 3 (47:09):
I'm so sorry.

Speaker 4 (47:10):
No, I don't think I'll ever receive fair compensation.

Speaker 5 (47:12):
You can really piss off the modern monetary theory people
because they'd be like, no, even we can't account for this.

Speaker 4 (47:19):
No one can account for the emotional damage.

Speaker 3 (47:23):
We ran out of data in our federal reserve god
to recap.

Speaker 5 (47:31):
So in the past year, we've done multiple walkouts, unionized
four locations in the East Bay area, and then, after
Abbey was fired for bullshit reasons, along with two other organizers,
we went on a four day strike which included both cities.
And we've done this entirely as an independent union against
a company that is owned by Nesli.

Speaker 3 (47:51):
Yeah, and interestingly, just.

Speaker 5 (47:53):
Because I'd be remiss to not mention this, the day
that we ended our strike, there was an article published
in Writers which was the most vibe based reporting that
I've ever seen, where it said Nesli explores sale of
blue bottle coffee. Sources say where there's three unnamed sources
incredible that all say that Neslie is considering or looking

(48:14):
into selling Blue Bottle coffee, but interestingly says here quote
once source said Neslie could decide to sell the cafes
but retain the brand's intellectual property to continue selling the products.

Speaker 3 (48:25):
End quote, what are we doing here this?

Speaker 4 (48:29):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (48:30):
Yeah, I mean it's interesting as a tell because personally,
I think it's just a scare tactic.

Speaker 7 (48:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (48:34):
Yeah, Like I could consider walking into traffic. I could
be looking into my options for how fast a car
would hit me, But that doesn't mean anything.

Speaker 3 (48:43):
You didn't considering appropriating the mansion, like we're an exploratory committee.
Sources say, yeah, I don't think they'd publish that in writers,
but uh, it's.

Speaker 5 (48:58):
Interesting that they would even say that, because is like
the entire value that Blue Bottle offers Nestlie is to
be able to put the brand onto you know, nespressopods
or whatever. And also just very weird timing with the
strike ending the same day comes out.

Speaker 4 (49:13):
They are so scared, they are scared shitless and they
don't know what to do about it, and they're breaking
last left and right, trying to maintain power. But it's
like Alex said earlier, like the solidarity that we have
between our coworkers, it just cannot be broken by management.
And even after they fired me and two of our

(49:34):
other organizers, people still went out on the picket line.

Speaker 3 (49:37):
We kept totally.

Speaker 4 (49:38):
Five out of the six cafes closed in Boston and
the only reason one of them could stay open is
because all of the managers banded together to keep the
Credential Center open.

Speaker 3 (49:50):
I hate to go.

Speaker 4 (49:52):
Say I don't think a single latte went out correctly
that day, but hey, you knowast at least they can
still collect their nine dollars per latte.

Speaker 3 (50:00):
So if you got food poisoning and the the strike
for good getting certain manager coffee.

Speaker 4 (50:10):
If you had a bad experience during the strike at
the Podential Center, just know that that was not union
made coffee, and we would never do that to you.

Speaker 3 (50:28):
I think it's really beautiful that, yeah, y'all just kept
fucking doing this even though they're just doing this bullshit constantly,
and it's like, no, we're just going to keep fighting them,
and they're going to get so scared that they're leaking
to the press that we're thinking about selling the thing,
like it.

Speaker 5 (50:46):
We're a lot further along than I thought we would
ever get. I thought they were going to fire us
the day after we did the first walkout last year,
which is you know, I thought all the more reason
to try then.

Speaker 3 (50:56):
Yeah, but really, it's not.

Speaker 5 (50:58):
Tough for people that we work with to realize that
they're getting a bad deal and that the reason that
the job sucks is because they don't get paid enough
to live in the city. Like I think most baristas
at Blue Bottle see something like sixty percent of their
income going towards rent. Because Jesus, Yeah, we did a

(51:18):
survey on this. Let me double check to make sure
that I have the.

Speaker 3 (51:23):
Facts right.

Speaker 5 (51:24):
But yeah, this this is from you know, March, so
it's a little bit old data. We'll do another survey soon.
But most Blue Bottle barista is a rent burden, spending
more than thirty percent of their income on rent, the
median rent paid by Blue Bottle employees being one thousand,
forty five dollars, which is the equivalent of one hundred
and fifty Nora Lean style iced coffees. That it's one
of the best selling drinks they have. Yeah, no, I know,

(51:46):
for one hundred and fifty Nola, So you two can
pay the median rent by paid by Barista and then
on average it's sorry forty six percent of their income
going towards rent, with roughly a third of Barristas paying
over sixty percent.

Speaker 3 (52:00):
Oh my god.

Speaker 5 (52:01):
When we told all these facts to their lawyer at
a bargaining session and he just said that maybe the
reason that we were all struggling to make ends meet
was because we were paying for too many streaming services. Yeah,
I know, Like it's an entirely he knows this bullshit?

Speaker 3 (52:18):
Did they just get like a right wing ship post
to their lawyer?

Speaker 4 (52:21):
Like?

Speaker 3 (52:22):
Is this just like? Is this like fucking like? Is
this like the fail Sun clone of Rudy Giuliani? Like
is this gonna start melting off? What are we doing here?
Come on? I wish I could tell you.

Speaker 5 (52:36):
I don't know what their strategy with saying obviously false
things is, but they love to do it.

Speaker 3 (52:42):
It's so great, you know. Okay, fuck it, I'm gonna
I'm gonna I'm gonna read this quote. I was gonna
use this for a different episode and I didn't, so
all right, fuck it, this is I'm gonna read this
line from Dan Olson's documentary In Search of Flat Earth,
which is like probably the best thing that's ever been
done about flat Earth, because they believe that power belongs
to those with the greatest will to take it. And

(53:04):
what greater sign of will than the ability to overwrite
the truth. Their will is a hammer they are using
to beat reality into a shape of their choosing a
simple world where reality is exactly what it looks like
through their eyes, devoid of complexity, devoid of change, where
they are right and their enemies are silent. They are
trying to build a flat Earth.

Speaker 8 (53:26):
That's just the shit.

Speaker 3 (53:27):
They're just like, no, fuck you, we can say whatever
the fuck we want because we think the week is
this is an expression of just power, even though we
know that we're lying, and you know that you're lying.
Is I mean, if you.

Speaker 5 (53:40):
Want to talk about expression of power, you should read
their management's rights clause. Sorry, they're so called management's rights clause.
Oh god, let me see if I can pull that up.
So just to clarify, So, management's rates is a clause
that can be found in some union contracts because of
collaborationanists within unions in the fifties deciding that they actually

(54:03):
didn't want to go for complete worker control of the
means of production. They just wanted to collaborate with management
in order to get a better deal for wages.

Speaker 3 (54:09):
I'm not going to comment on the.

Speaker 5 (54:10):
History of that, but that's why they feel like they
can include this in negotiations. Right now, we haven't agreed
to any management rates, but quote, it is agreed that
the management of the company's business and the direction of
its working forces are vested exclusively in the company, and
the company retains all rights that had before the execution
of this agreement unless a rate is clearly contracted away
in this agreement by language that is specific and unambiguous.

(54:32):
These retained company rates include, but are not limited to,
the following examples. The right to direct and supervise the
work of its employees. The right to hire, promote, demote, transfer,
and too discipline or discharge employees. The right to create
or eliminate jobs, and to determine wage rates for newly
created or materially modify jobs. The right to determine training
requirements and provide training to employees. The right to uniform
and higher standards, the right to plan, direct, and control operations,

(54:54):
the right to determine products to be sold, services and
products to be.

Speaker 3 (54:57):
Procured, used, and or distributed.

Speaker 5 (54:59):
The right to determine the type and quantity of machines, equipment,
location of cafes. The right to determine the amount and
quality of work needed. The right to determine schedules of
cafe operations. The right to determine the number of employees needed.
The right to determine the work schedule of employees. The
right to lay off employees or relieve employees from work
because of lack of work. The right to discontinue or
introduce new or improved methods operating practices and cafes. The

(55:21):
right to change the content of jobs and the qualification
for such jobs. And the right to establish, modify, and
enforce work rules of conduct or policies, and discipline employees
who violate such rules or policies. The right to establish, modify, Oh,
Jesus Christ and force.

Speaker 4 (55:39):
And I forgot how bad it is.

Speaker 5 (55:41):
Wow, Because basically what they're saying is we want to
be able to control everything that you do, and this
is our They never say where they believe this right
comes from. They on make like an argument for naturalism,
where like we are vested by the universal power of
management to be able to do this. They don't make
any historical argument for it, where oh, this is you know,
because of the contracts that have been negotiated since the fifties,

(56:05):
something that's fairly standard, and we think that we have
the right too because of like long standing president. They
just think that they should be able to control fucking everything. Yeah,
which is not unsurprising for Nesley.

Speaker 3 (56:16):
Yeah, yeah, Well, and I think there's a lot of
very very abstract theoretical debate you run into if you're like,
instead of doing shit, you're like in theory circles about
like oh is like is capital its own autonomous entity
or is it like a thing that's like costantly in
like relation to like the actions and workers. And it's like, okay,

(56:37):
read something like this and it's like, oh no, they
are so worried that they're going to have to react
to what their workers are doing that they and they
are already doing this right like this is you know,
this is this goes back to the whole like worre's
leaking to the media, We're going to sell the company
thing that they're doing. Where it's like no, actually, like
these people are so not like easily, but if you

(57:01):
were organized at all, it becomes so clear to them
that they actually, oh no, wait, hold on, they're responding
to us like they're not just purely the only thing
that gets to like drive history for and decide literally
everything about your life. The moment you like try to
claw it away from them, they see how fragile it is,
and they're like, no, no, no, no, Actually, we got to spell
out the fact that we got to fucking dress you

(57:22):
and whatever clothes we want you to wear. And it's like, okay,
this is like a thing that only exists if you
do not resist them at all, but like, no, if
you fucking fight them, they have to fucking write all
this shit down that they think they've always been able
to do, and it's ridiculous.

Speaker 4 (57:38):
And to hear it all in a bullet form, like
in literally just a bullet list, like every single aspect
of my life and everything that I've ever loved or
thought was important to me in a list of what
they think they can control. It's just crazy. And then
we have to go back and say, okay, well, do
you see how off base you are? Yeah, And then
they make us sound like the crazy ones for wanting

(58:00):
to live a good life and be able to, like,
you know, make ends.

Speaker 3 (58:04):
Meet, pay less than sixty percent over and come towards rent.

Speaker 7 (58:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (58:07):
Yeah, let's take a vacation maybe.

Speaker 6 (58:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (58:11):
One other thing that I think is a great point
about how it's actually capital responding to the organization of
Barista's people workers whatever is. They haven't done it recently,
but last summer they sent a very long winded and
angry email about all the bargaining updates and press that
the union was getting.

Speaker 4 (58:32):
They're so mad at me that I'm good at my job.

Speaker 5 (58:36):
And then this past summer, after we did two walkouts
in fairly quick succession and response to two different things,
they attempted to accuse us of an intermittent striking, just
because they were so scared they didn't know what else.

Speaker 3 (58:48):
To do, to try and be like, you didn't own me,
I'm not mad please some pot in the news that
I met.

Speaker 5 (58:55):
Their lawyer even said in a bargaining session later on
that he had a less than seventy five percent chance
of ever winning that argument at the board.

Speaker 3 (59:02):
Oh my god.

Speaker 5 (59:04):
But they were just so mad that we walked out
twice in May that they tried to claim that it
was unprotected, but that they're being benevolent by not disciplining
anyone for it.

Speaker 3 (59:14):
God, And they.

Speaker 5 (59:17):
Haven't really given much of a response to our multi
day strike yet, aside from their lawyer emailing us earlier
this week to ask us for our entire legal justification
for why the terminations of Abby, Nora and Ashley were
illegal and what legal justification we have to say that

(59:38):
they're negotiating a contract in bad faith, which is like
the NLRA.

Speaker 3 (59:43):
Yeah, yeah, Like what are we doing here? God? Yeah?
So what's coming up next for y'all? What's the next stage?

Speaker 5 (59:52):
If you or anybody that you know either works at
a Blue Bottle or wants to apply to a Blue
Bottle to help organize it, please reach out to us
by email at Blue Bottle Union at gmail dot com.
If you want to support our independent unionism and help
us remain independent and be able to go on multiple
day strikes which clearly piss off our NESTLEI overlords, you

(01:00:12):
can donate to us at TinyURL dot com forward slash
BBIU dash strike unless we're until we have a contract
or they reinstate, Abby, Nora, Ashley, and fingers crossed, hopefully
not myself.

Speaker 3 (01:00:26):
We're calling on a boycott of all Blue Bottle coffee products.

Speaker 5 (01:00:29):
Helly, I have no idea what the overlap between it
could happen here listeners and.

Speaker 3 (01:00:35):
Customers, you'd be surprised. But I'm sure there's a lot
of about there. I don't know. Look, judging by the
shit I have heard from our listeners, I love you all.
Some of you are on some wild shit if some
of you are not the people you would expect to be,
so yeah, So don't buy Blue Bottle.

Speaker 5 (01:00:56):
If some of the things that we've said about the
bargaining sessions sounds two absurd to be true to you,
then you can go to Bluebottle Union dot org and
under the tab for Buristas you can read every bargaining update,
where we publish all of the proposals that the company
has given us so far. You can read the shit
that they make us read in the bargaining sessions. Yeah,

(01:01:16):
so that's what's next in like the next month or so.
There's other things that we're working on that we can't
talk about yet.

Speaker 6 (01:01:21):
Hell yeah, hell.

Speaker 3 (01:01:22):
Yeah, love this. I'm trying so hard not to just
read half the end or speech Authority is the massive
Tyranny is brittle.

Speaker 4 (01:01:36):
If there ever were a time to read it, there's
no time like the present.

Speaker 3 (01:01:40):
You know what, Fuck it, We're just we're doing it.
We're doing it. The imperial need for control is so
desperate because it is so unnatural. Terity requires constant effort.
It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the
mask of fear. Remember that, and know this. The day
will come when all these skirmishes, in battles, these moments
of defiance, will have flooded the banks of the empire's authority,

(01:02:02):
and then there will be one too many, one single
thing will break the siege. Remember this, try and that's
my message to you.

Speaker 8 (01:02:11):
Wall.

Speaker 3 (01:02:12):
You can fight your own bosses too, and you can
beat them, and you can watch them running around in
terror like fucking chickens with their head cut off, and
you can get shited from them that they never would
have wanted to give you in the first place.

Speaker 7 (01:02:40):
So there's a revolution long forgotten that was tucked in
a corner of the Caribbean. Those outside of the region,
it's probably quite far from mind. You know. When most
people think of Caribbean revolutionaries, they think of Cuba, but
at the time the rise and fall of the need
a revolution. What's everything? Hello, and welcome to ikea happen Here.

(01:03:06):
I'm Andrew Siege. You're a Trinadian host of ikapen here,
and I'm joined by.

Speaker 6 (01:03:12):
James, your American British co host.

Speaker 7 (01:03:16):
American British.

Speaker 6 (01:03:18):
But yeah, I don't really know how to say that, Like.

Speaker 7 (01:03:20):
Which order should that hyphene been?

Speaker 6 (01:03:22):
Oh yeah, yeah, I don't know which way which way
I'm supposed to hyphenate, because we don't hyphenate white people, uh,
which is a very American thing. But yeah, glad to
be here. I always enjoy learning more about this part
of the world from you.

Speaker 7 (01:03:38):
I'm glad. I'm glad. And you know, as we speak,
I'm hearing helicopters overhead. And no, it's really a reminder
of the times that we are living in. Last night
there were quite a few stealth helicopters flying overhead, quite
close to the ground, about three of them. Wow, all

(01:03:58):
the lights are off. So it's it seems to be
a ramping up and escalation in some ways, or just
a continuation of the existing military presence.

Speaker 3 (01:04:10):
Jeez.

Speaker 7 (01:04:12):
And as we're talking about military presence, in the US,
which is something that I spoke about on this podcast
before you go and check it out. We're here to
discuss the very recent history, positive and negative, of my
northern neighbor, Grenada. So I don't want to bog anyone
down with too many facts, but it's important to get

(01:04:33):
an idea of the context. So Grenada is the southernmost
in the grouping of Caribbean islands known as the Windward Islands.
It's a country composed of Grenada, the island, and a
few smaller islands, including Kariaku and Petimasnet. It's long been
considered the Spice Isle, as the hilly mainland was and

(01:04:54):
still is home to a lot of nutmeg plantations. They
currently have a predominantly African population of just over one
hundred and seventeen thousand, sharing a country merely three hundred
and forty four kilometers squared or one hundred and thirty
three square miles. For reference, the five boroughs of New
York City collectively make up seven hundred and seventy eight

(01:05:14):
point eighteen kilometers squared or three hundred point four to
six square miles. So Grenada is small, you know, New
York is big. But Grenada is also quite small, you know.
For reference, It's slightly larger than Queen's but far less
populated and far less dense. So we's talking small island
state par excellence. And yet it has sat at the
center of one of the most critical events in Caribbean history,

(01:05:38):
and it might be one of the sites of yet
another such incident in light of the United States request
to Grenada on October ninth to establish a temporary military
radar base at the infamous Maurice Bishop International Airport, a
request which has not yet received a conclusive response more
than a month later at the time of me recording this,

(01:05:59):
so I thought it apps to finally talk about this
moment in history. I went to my library and got
a copy of Grenada Revolution and Invasion, a companium of
essays from various perspectives on the topic arranged by Patty
Lewis at al that provided the basis of my research,
particularly the essay by Miil Collins, a Grenadian poet and novelist.

(01:06:20):
I also drew some of the radical background law from
Fundy aka Joseph Edwards, an underappreciated autonomous radical healing from
Jamaica who spoke about the situation in non shall escape
or linked in the show notes. So I don't want
to get too deep into the history prior to what's
immediately relevant today's topic. Oh keep thinks brief A couple

(01:06:42):
hundred Ammerindians lived in Grenada prior to the European invasion.
Human settlement may have been as early as thirty five
hundred BCEE, but most definitely by the second century CE. Spain,
upon stumbling upon it, claimed it but never settled it.
England attempted to settle it, but was driven out by
the indigenous inhabitants, and eventually the island was settled and

(01:07:07):
subjugated by the French, who were engaged in a protracted
war against the indigenous between today's Grenada, Dominica and Saint
Vincent of the Grandians throughout the seventeenth century. You know,
there's this narrative that the Europeans came and they just
easily conquered the entirety of the Americas, and it's important
to lay that myth to rest. There was, of course,

(01:07:29):
a very tragic great dyeing that was responsible for a
vast majority of the indigenous population losing their lives to
the disease in some cases intentionally weaponized by the Europeans,
but despite differences in their weaponry, the Europeans didn't have
an easy time conquering the islands, or conquering the Americas
at all. In many cases they did not succeed in

(01:07:52):
concrete islands for many decades or centuries or struggle, but
eventually Crenado was established as a colony of over fifteen
thousand slaved Africans by seventeen sixty three. A year prior,
in seventeen sixty two, Britain took over the island from
the French as part of the Seven Years' War, and
the island was formally ceded to Britain in seventeen sixty three.

(01:08:14):
By eighteen oh seven, Britain had brought one hundred and
fourteen thousand slaves to Grenada. By eighteen thirty eight, slavery
was abolished. In eighteen seventy seven, Grenada became a Crown colony,
and fast forward a little further. Under modified Crown colony status,
the wealthiest four percent of Canadians were allowed to vote.

(01:08:35):
Eric Geary founded the Grenader United Labor Party or GULP
in nineteen fifty, initially as a trade union, which led
to the nineteen fifty one General Strike for better work
than conditions. Buildings were set on fire in this time,
and this is in a broader regional context of radicalism
and agitation for independence in the post World War II reality,

(01:08:58):
which would intensify after many of the islands had already
gained the independence. Eventually, Grenada got elections based on universal
adult suffrage in nineteen fifty one and Eric Gary's party
gulp on. This is before they got independence, though, in
a time when the English speaking Caribbean was trying to

(01:09:19):
establish a West Indies Federation between nineteen fifty eight and
nineteen sixty two. It didn't succeed. Jamaica succeeded, and then
chernad so it fell apart, and after the fall of
the federation, Grenada became an associated state in nineteen sixty seven,
then finally gained full independence from Britain in nineteen seventy four,
again under the leadership of Eric Gary, who became the

(01:09:41):
first Prime Minister of Grenada. The late sixties and early
seventies were a radical time in general, so that's set
in the stage for what comes next in Grenada. The
rise of the New Jewel movement led by Maurice Bishop.
You see, as FUNDI found. In this time, we also
had quite a few other confrontations going on across the Spanaphone, Francophone,

(01:10:05):
Dutch of Phone and Anglophone Caribbeans. In nineteen sixty five
you had the popular revolt in the Dominican Republic against
the military coup that was drowned in blood by the
US invasion. In nineteen sixty seven, you had a spontaneous
rebellion of agricultural workers in Guadelup. Nineteen sixty eight, black
folks in Bermuda rioted against the racist and clueless control

(01:10:26):
it dominated the island. In nineteen sixty nine, there was
a violent confrontation against US soldiers by students and workers
protesting the US occupation of the Panama Canal Zone. Kurisau
was shaken by wildcatch, strikes of workers, riots by employed
and unemployed as well. Labor unrest is breaking out in Surinam,
leading to general strike. Antiga had riots, strikes and demonstrations

(01:10:49):
over several years. Jamaica had workers at the Western Meatpackers
established democratic control of their trade union local, taking full
control over their union dues and negotiating the employer without
official mediators to manage the sugar workers and the local
community directly, and of course infamously. In nineteen seventy Triniad

(01:11:11):
was shaken up as workers, academics and small farmers linked
up against the system led by the government of Prime
Minister Eric Williams, and after years of his rule under
the Sloga and Master Day Done, the people erupted against
the new or colonial system. Despite being ruled by this
black leader, the hundreds of people in the streets championed

(01:11:32):
black power, understanding what was needed was a people's politics
in which new institutions could emerge. This black power revolution
in Trindad was inspired in part by the black civil
rights struggle in the United States, while also seeking into
unite the African and Indian populations in Trinad. After an
attempted mutiny by the army and Venezuela and American gun

(01:11:54):
boats standing by ready to intervene, the military surrendered. The
revolutionary initiative shifted away from the man and doctor Derk
Williams was saved. By nineteen seventy three, a few armed
gorillas remained in the hills of Trinidad, but Eventually, their
struggle was snuffed out. By nineteen seventy five, in Guadeloupe
had wildcat strikes taking place. Guyana had wildcat strikes against

(01:12:18):
the American and Canadian owned Boux Side companies. Surinam had
another general strike. Saint Lucia experience with wildcat strike. Dominica
attempted to seize the British owned Castle Bruce Estates. In Jamaica,
there was a wave of appropriations from banks, warehouses, stores,
batting shops and more cross Kingston and demonstrations initiated by

(01:12:40):
students and workers against police brutality and for the release
of prisoners. And in nineteen seventy nine Nicaragua had their
revolution against the US Allied government. While all of this

(01:13:01):
is going on, Grenada had a population of less than
one hundred thousand people. It had just become independent under
Eric Geary and are Gary's an interesting fella because you'll
see some aspects of him mirrored later on. He came
to power in nineteen fifty one with the wave of

(01:13:24):
universal suffrage. He was twenty nine years all at the time.
He had previously been a worker organizer in Aruba and
was expelled from the island for that very reason. He
spent decades in politics as a champion of agricultural workers.
But younger generations were not as excited about him. They
recognized his financial corruption, his pensiont for rigged elections, and

(01:13:47):
of course his use of secret police that were repressive
to the people. So as greators making steps towards becoming independent,
the people did not want him to be the leader
of independence. There were strikes against him even before the ravation.
But see Gary was karen on this tradition that was

(01:14:08):
set up by the British. Whether he knew it or not,
he and may have had this radical start as a
worker organizer, but he came to carry on colonial interests.
You know. He started off as a union man, but
he turned against the workers, and even the British at
one point had been scared of him as an organizer
and had trepidations about him as an independent leader. But

(01:14:31):
they still chose him and preferred him at the risk
of maybe a more radical version of him leading an
independent grenader. And then came the New Dual Movement. Now
the New Jewel movement is actually a combination of two groups.
You had the movement for assemblies of the People, which
was founded by Maurice Bishop, a lawyer who had studied

(01:14:54):
in Britain. And you had the joint endeavor for welfare
education and the or a Jewel which is founded by
Howard University economic student Unison Whitman. They were also joined
by Bernard Cord, an economics lecturer at UIs in Augustin
in Trinando, Tobago. So at first, in terms of their politics,

(01:15:15):
they really wanted popular assemblies and that sort of thing.
But actually, let me get into the background of the
Caribbean left. I see in the nineteen fifties there was
an upheaval. You know, radicals had been shifting from the
sort of Stalinism that had become popular in the post
War two era towards a more critical sort of Trotskyism

(01:15:37):
or Maoism see lar James and George Patmore, both based
in London, were already advocating independence for Africa and the Caribbean,
rejecting the Stalinist idea that liberation should wait until after
World War Two see. R. James is an interesting figure
politically to me because while he was ostensibly a Trotskyist,

(01:15:59):
he was in many ways unorthodox in his approach to
those politics.

Speaker 6 (01:16:04):
Yeah, Cela James's book Trying to Remember. It's called Beyond
a Boundary or Beyond the Boundary.

Speaker 7 (01:16:10):
Beyond the Boundary.

Speaker 6 (01:16:11):
Yeah, it's a great books. The only book about cricket
that I've ever read, and that's the only one that
I've ever enjoyed. Not a big cricket appreciate it, but
as a sports historian that that book was foundational to
like how I how I approached my dissertation, and like
as such, I've always had a really like a soft
spot for him as someone who you know, did sports

(01:16:34):
for a living in academia for a living. I saw
like a really positive example of the role that both
of those can play in like liberation struggles in his writing. Yeah, Yeah,
it's when I'd encourage everyone to read if you're looking
for a book. It's like his writing is very readable,
in his historical writing, like which I at the time
of my life, when I was in grad school, I
very much appreciated someone who wrote something that wasn't like

(01:16:56):
self consciously trying to be dense and impenetrable to make
them seem intelligent faced. His intelligence comes through just fine.

Speaker 7 (01:17:04):
Indeed, Indeed, I've had a soft spot for him as
well for some time, particularly after reading The Black Yakabins.

Speaker 6 (01:17:11):
Yeah, he used to assign that one a lot.

Speaker 7 (01:17:14):
And I would say that the Caribbean left at the
time also had a bit of a soft spot for him,
because they were heavily influenced by his writings, you know,
in his nineteen fifty six pamphlet Face and Reality, which
was about the Hungarian Revolution, ended up becoming a profound
influence on Westerndian radicals as it had revealed the potential

(01:17:37):
of workers' counsils and done a lot to expose the
authoritarianism of the Soviet model. This is something that Bundy
wrote about and highlighted as he's given his sort of
discussion of the origins and trajectory of the Caribbean Left.
So in the nineteen sixties and seventies, radical thought across

(01:17:58):
the Caribbean was shaped by the more democratic socialist ideals.
They had movements like Jamaica's Young Socialist League, Trindad's New
Beginning Movement, and Creator's New Duel Movements. They were all
inspired by James and by grassroots workers' councils rather than
the typical Soviet orthodoxy. Of course, the Caribbean left was

(01:18:20):
not immune to conflict or division. There were conflicts between
those who were more loyal to stylists or pro Soviet positions,
and that led to some splits within unions and political movements. Now,
initially the New Dual Movement was leaning in that participatory
democratic direction, but eventually they ended up going in to

(01:18:42):
studying Marxism Leninism more not really at first they mainly
wanted Gary out, but later they went into Marxism Leninism
and transformed the movement into a proper political party of
the vanguard variety. In an effort to unseat Gary. They
started building some momentum and immediately based consequences. In nineteen

(01:19:05):
seventy three, Bishop Whiteman and others got beaten up and
arrested by Gary's secret police multiple times. Bishop's own father
was shot and killed by Gary's forces. Wow and the
high schoolers were also taking a stand against Gary at
the time, were facing repression and violence. Now, in nineteen

(01:19:25):
seventy four, independence was one, but sadly under Gary and
his notorious secret police, which were by the way, called
the Mongoose Gang. Now, there was already suspicions of potential
election fraud, and it wasn't helped by the fact that
his mongoose gang was known to intimidate people. But in

(01:19:47):
nineteen seventy six, despite this for a political landscape, Bishop
won a leadership role as opposition and became known across
the country in our country as small as as grenader,
as someone charismatic, personable, relatable. The New Jeal movement started
to build a reputation for being connected to the people,

(01:20:08):
engage with students, engage with pro bono work. In some cases,
as I mentioned, some of them are lawyers, and they
were youthful. They're bringing a youthful energy to the sort
of old god colonial era politics of Eric Gary and
his ILK. So the story of how the New jew

(01:20:35):
Movement came into power is actually a bit humorous to me.
On the thirteenth of March nineteen seventy nine, Gary went
to the UN meeting in New York that was happening
at the time, and as the saying goes, when the
cat's away, the mice will play. In this case, while
the cat was away, the New Dual Movement pulled off

(01:20:57):
a coup, a completely bloodless coup. They to control of
the army, barracks and the radio. When they went on
the radio, and this is the funny part to me,
they told people to go to police stations and demand
that they put up white flags of surrender. And the
population was so anti geary that they did it. Wow,
they just walked up in civilize stations and they're like, yeah,

(01:21:18):
put up these white flags, and the police shid. Yeah,
sure that was that. That's how the neudeal movement came
into power.

Speaker 6 (01:21:25):
Yeah, a, this is such a fascinating time in history, right,
Like I used to teach a class about culturing colonialism
back in the day, and we would talk a lot
about like this time period, like the post wind Rush
period where like Caribbean political culture was very influential even
in the metropoli, right in Britain specifically, Like this is

(01:21:50):
when we have like scar music and then punk music
arriving from that, which is a serious political force in
the twentieth century. Like it's easy for people to let
sniff at that whatever. But and that's the reason I
am the way I am so like, I guess I
have a fondness for it. But also like the state's
capacity for violence and surveillance hasn't caught up to the

(01:22:16):
capacity for mass communication yet. And so you have these
movements which can mobilize a ton of people and the
state isn't like all up in them with informers and like.
It can either respond as a Soviet Union did in
Hungry right, with tanks that's where we get the word
tanky from, or it can crumble like by people turning

(01:22:39):
up of the cops to surrender.

Speaker 7 (01:22:40):
Like.

Speaker 6 (01:22:41):
It's just a fascinating, like little to three decade period
in history before the state I guess recovers its advantage
in terms of violence and surveillance.

Speaker 7 (01:22:52):
Yeah, I'm of that this time because I mean they
didn't have the social media and stuff to connect people
and you know, advertise they were having this this proof
test or this action or this whatever. Yeah, but the
networks were still there. You know, they were organic and
they were motivated by a genuine sense that seriative was actionable.

Speaker 4 (01:23:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:23:19):
You know, I think we have this sort of twenty
first century malays of cynicism. It's like that was tried before,
you know. Yeah, every time we look at something, we
could just say, oh, that was tried before, and they failed.
When we look back at history, people who tried those things.
They didn't know if it was going to work out
or not. They just tried it. I wouldn't be surprised
if I was a fly on the wall on the

(01:23:41):
day of the school if the neudual movement guys were
just like, wait, what that actually worked? Yeah, exactly, Like
not to take away from their plan and an organization
and you know, the genuine grassroots support that they had.
It's still a swing.

Speaker 6 (01:24:00):
Yeah, totally. At some point you have to roll the
dice right and see how it goes, Like in this case.

Speaker 7 (01:24:06):
The role of critical success, I'd see, yeah, yeah, it's.

Speaker 6 (01:24:09):
A natural twenty the dragon's term. So I'd really like
to ned out in this period. This is like the
heyday of pirate radio, right where you have people broadcasting
but like outside of state control. And it's a really
interesting time for culture and music. Like scar music explicitly
explicitly begins in an anti racist way, right, Like it

(01:24:32):
calls itself two tone of music because bands were often
look multi racial, and like, it's really interesting that we
have this whole cultural movement which owes a lot to
the wind Rush generation. But like you said, it's questioning
the both capitalist and also Marxist orthodoxies in a way

(01:24:53):
that I know I really wish. I mean a lot
of people do today, don't get me wrong, but I
wonder if we could all those people now, that you'd
have people who were like dedicated vanguard mark shifts again,
like you know, it just seems say sad noise.

Speaker 7 (01:25:11):
Yeah, I mean I think we could say the same
thing about a lot of people's current politics. I'm sure
if you went back in the past and were like,
you know, people are actually trying to be trod wives
right now in twenty five you want to talk to
the woman who had like no ability to open a
bank account, and we're trying to escape financial abuse, to
rest abuse, all these different things, and they're like, oh,

(01:25:33):
you know, there's actually a whole internet a trend of like, yeah,
your husband should control all your finances. Actually yeah, I mean,
of course that kind of sentiment never went away, but
it's popularization definitely debunks. I think this sort of notion
that that progress quote unquote is something that is inevitable

(01:25:54):
or irreversible.

Speaker 6 (01:25:56):
Yeah, definitely, Yeah, that's right. I mean you can even
travel across the world and I can only imagine how
that would be received in Russia ava right to tell
their friends in the women's movement that there are Western
women who aspire to be tradwife. I mean, I'm sure
they're aware they have the Internet, but yeah, it's certainly yeah,
this idea that we can only progress or move in
one duration.

Speaker 7 (01:26:16):
Yeah, that's how the New Droal movement came into power,
and upon getting to that position, they established the People's
Revolutionary Government or PRG, which is led now by the
Prime Minister of Grenader Maurice Bishop. They were considered legitimate,
of course, because they did have the people's mandate, but

(01:26:41):
they opted not to solidify that legitimacy with an election,
and they also went on to ban other parties. So
in the next episode, I want to get into what
exactly they did when they were in power in broad strokes,
all they hit and miss with the economy and politics

(01:27:01):
over the course of their four years, and how it
culminated in an internal split, multiple killings, and a US
in vision. But if you want the details and how
all that played out, you'll have to tune in next time.
We'll get into the outcome of the PRG, the flaws,
the revolution, it's downfall, and where Grenia stands today. But

(01:27:22):
before we wrap up, any final thoughts, James.

Speaker 6 (01:27:27):
I feel okay, Yeah, I just had lots of them.
I don't know. Yeah, this is a fascinating period and
like now, as much as there ever has been, it's
a vital time for us to study this rightly. As
the person who's taught in American schools and universities, this
one doesn't come up very much. It's certainly not like
in the required teaching syllabi in anywhere that I've taught.

(01:27:49):
And I think as we return to like Monroe Doctrine
two point zero or whatever, whatever we're doing the United States,
it's doing in the Western hemisphe right now, it's vital
to understand the role it has played in suppressing progressive
political movements in the last century.

Speaker 7 (01:28:10):
Yeah, I think, you know, as you mentioned, it's already
in the typical history and historical accounts that it's taught
to students. It's just I think I'm marveled sometimes at
you know, that's that's exactly how empire functions. Yeah, you know,
the acts forgets what the tree remembers is the famous
say it so something like the US's operations and Grenada

(01:28:33):
or anywhere else in the world, in all the many
places they've intervened, I may not even muster a passing
mention and a sentenence even in a historical class, in
a history class the United States, And yet it is
pivotal to the histories and self identities up to the
present day of entire regions and people's You know, it

(01:28:55):
may be a footnote, if so much, in these curriculums
in the United States, but it's one of the most
recent and raw incidents of violence and trauma thats take
place in the Caribbean.

Speaker 3 (01:29:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:29:11):
Absolutely, and they're not independent history.

Speaker 6 (01:29:14):
Yeah. When Trump was first assuming office this time, there
was a brief moment when they were talking about returning
to colonizing Panama. If you can cast your mind that
far back, he has flood.

Speaker 7 (01:29:25):
The zone quite successfully. But I do recall that.

Speaker 6 (01:29:29):
But yeah, I had been in Panama two months before that.
And I think the United States, a large portion of
the population either doesn't know or is forgotten that, like
independence from American sort of neo colonialism, is integral to
Panamanian identity. Like I don't think they'd realized quite how
unwilling to accept going back to that Panamanian people.

Speaker 7 (01:29:49):
Were, Yeah, there's a long struggle, yes, to eke out independence.
I mean even now there's you know, US New Kleans,
Somemos alive and well in Panama in many ways. Yeah,
but what gains they have yain is you know, something
they're not well then to lose.

Speaker 6 (01:30:07):
Yeah, absolutely, And yeah, I mean the United States supports
people through Panama. The Biden administration sent its Secretary of
Homeland Security to the inauguration of the Panamanian president. The
US funds Panamanian deportations did under the Biden administration, including

(01:30:28):
of people who have no criminal record, Like, we have
effectively externalized our border regime to Panama in the way
that we've also done to the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Right, Like,
I guess what I'm saying is I don't want people
to think that this is a one off that like
either the Trump stuff is a massive leap from previous policy.

(01:30:50):
It's a change in scale, not in kind, or that
that you know, the United States hasn't done this before,
and it has some history of doing this in the
Western hemisphere.

Speaker 7 (01:30:59):
Indeed, so on that rather depressing note, Yeah, well we'll
leave it here for it could happen here, but you
can join us for the next episode, when we will
get into exactly what took place in Grenada and where
Grenada stands today. Till then we'll power to all the

(01:31:19):
people peace. Hello, and welcome to it could happen here.

(01:31:40):
I'm Andrew Sage, your host, and I'm joined by James again.

Speaker 6 (01:31:46):
Excited to be here again. I enjoyed the last episode.

Speaker 7 (01:31:49):
Yes, another host of it could happen here. There are
two of us, so James's American and British or British
America and how we want to order that? And I'm Trinidadian,
as you may or may not be able to tell,
but in Trinidad there are actually a lot of Grenadians

(01:32:11):
and descendants of Grenadians. Between our islands. It has been
a lot of population exchange, mostly in one direction. But
we're here to talk about a notable point in the
history for my neighbor in Ireland, Grenada. If you missed
part one, you should go and give it a listen.
The gist is that, after drawn out efforts to gain independence,

(01:32:32):
Grenada finally did so in nineteen seventy four, but unfortunately,
under the rule of Eric Geary, an oppressive fixture of
politics that the people want it out. The underdog, the
New Jewel Movement, led by Maurice Bishop, pulled off a
blood less coup while Gary was at a UN meeting
in New York, and thus the People's Revolutionary Government was formed,

(01:32:56):
led by Prime Minister Marie Bishop. The managed to stay
in power from nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty three.
So today we're talking about what they did in that
time and what happened next, including the infamous US invasion
that is so often a footnote of history and its
aftermath on the people of Grenada that lasts up to

(01:33:17):
this day. Once again, the research for this episode leans
on Grenada Revolution and invasion by Pati Lewis at Al
along with None Should Escape by Joseph Edwards aka fundly So.
Fresh off the victory of the New Jewel Movement, the
temperature of the populace was varied but excited. You had

(01:33:38):
people who had genuine revolutionary aspirations, people who were passionately
anti imperialists, and then the people who just wanted better
health care and education and didn't really care where who
it came from.

Speaker 3 (01:33:51):
And on that note, I.

Speaker 7 (01:33:53):
Would say that It's something that often flies under the
radar or escapes awareness in the discourse because the most passionate,
the most invested, the most prominent voices, allthough we tend
to hear, the vast majority of people pretty much go
with the flow. You know, they keep their heads down,

(01:34:14):
their focus tends to be on their immediate needs, their
immediate interests. And you have the idea logues in every camp,
but of every persuasion who are aiming to push the
country in a particular direction. But at least at this
point in time, there was an ambivalence towards the how,

(01:34:34):
the political how much of the population they just needed
to see the results. And for a lot of people
in the present day, the change, the revolution, or whatever
you want to call it, isn't going to come from
an ideological transformation, well worded argument or arrangement of you know, prose.

(01:34:59):
It's going to come from a lived experience where their
life has improved in some way, in some form or fashion,
by action by a project that actually puts the change
into practice. And so that's really what the New Dual
Movement had been about from the beginning. Being part of
the community, being part of the people, taking part in,

(01:35:21):
you know, supporting them, which is why they had the
popular mandate. And then once they got into power, a
lot of their efforts were focused on, indeed, trying to
actually put into place and alternatives for all the flaws
that it may have had and not get to that shortly,
and that they did, you know, they organized the Center

(01:35:42):
for Popular Education, they organized teacher training, and sought to
make secondary schools and colleges more accessible to people. They
introduced maternity leave for women, yes, although notably party members
who were women were pressured to come back to work
maybe after having children. So again we'll get to those flaws.

(01:36:05):
There was still an equality in pay between men and women,
but the New Dual Movement did make efforts to mandate
equal pay and to engage in some changes toward addressing
the inequality between men and women in the country. However,
a revolution was still needed within the revolution, as it

(01:36:27):
has tended to be across these revolutions, you know, across
these years usual stuff. Women were still doing the most
of the housework and both sexes were expected to take
part in political engagement. So you had women in the
party in the New Dual Movement, but it was a
sort of an expectation of equality in some respects, like yeah,

(01:36:50):
come out to work even though you just had STrenD
because everybody else is coming on to work. And yet
it was like, oh, yeah, you can keep on doing
the housework. We're not gonna take on our load there.

Speaker 6 (01:37:02):
Yep, it's funny. I finished my book recently, but they
have a chapter on gender, and there's this a communist
militant in Spain who was fighting at the front line.
But also they would saddled with that double burden, right
because women were expected to be the ones amongst, especially
amongst the communists, who cooked and cleaned in addition to fighting.

(01:37:25):
But she has this famous line where she says, so
I didn't join the military to die with a dish
cloth in my hand, which that's great. Yeah, it's a
good one.

Speaker 3 (01:37:35):
I like it a lot.

Speaker 7 (01:37:36):
Yeah, yeah, But flaws with engaging with gender aside. There
will of course, other things the usual movement was doing
that was positive. You know, they encouraged agricultural diversification and
local food production, moving away from that sort of exclusive
or ne exclusive dependence on nutneg production. Then I defined

(01:37:56):
the colonial period. You know, they got rid of the
old Westminster style parliamentary system in favor of a one
party system with some elements of mass democracy. Now, the
degree to which that democracy actually empowered people is debatable,
but there were, you know, efforts on the record. You know,

(01:38:19):
they organized public meetings to discuss the national budget. They
set up workers and youth and women's and farmers organizations,
and unfortunately, even though Bishop was influenced by Celar James,
he continued to pursue the sort of hierarchical leadership common
in Caribbean politics. And so even with these alternative organizations,

(01:38:42):
you had that kind of hierarchy. But I think that
is to be expected from any movement besides anarchism. Yeah,
so I can't say I'm surprised. They closed the independent
newspaper Torchlights after an article highlighting Erastoferian protest and lack
of representation in government. So there were efforts to ensure

(01:39:05):
that Brener moved towards secularism, but freedom of the press
was not something that was particularly high in the priorities,
and there were still prejudices against religious groups and movements
like the Rastiferians that had yet to be addressed. You know,

(01:39:27):
these things aren't dealt with overnight. But right, I think
when all you have is a hammer, everything can sort
of look like a nail. Yeah, they didn't do anything
too drastic in the economic scale. For the most part.
They left people's private businesses alone. They implemented some state enterprises,

(01:39:50):
and they implemented some cooperative enterprises, So a fairly standard
mixed economy, a mixed economy that Canterverian extents be found
throughout the Caribbean weather they had a revolution or not.
But they did establish cooperative and friendly relations with Cuba,
which was a real thorn on the side of the
United States.

Speaker 6 (01:40:11):
Yeah, he didn't like them.

Speaker 7 (01:40:12):
And now this is I would say from nineteen seventy
nine to nineteen eighty so their first two years in power,
people were nerva sited, you know, they were hopeful of
the genuine decolonization and positive change taking place. But the excitement,
part of the NEUVA sitement started to die down by

(01:40:34):
nineteen eighty one. The People's Revolutionary Government PRG became increasingly
militaristic as time went on. They organized militias and armed people.
They were essentially preparing for a Geary counter coup, but
also potential CIA involvement. The police were replaced with military personnel.
And I think this is the trap that a lot

(01:40:56):
of these projects end up falling into. This concer about
the enemy within the enemy without leads these revolutionaries to
cannibalize themselves, you know, the revolutionary potential and excite ones
that's curtailed because there's so much fear dominating that some

(01:41:20):
enemy is going to attack, some violence is going to
take place that they need to prepare for. And so
you over your miilitarize, ru militarize, and you stare the
course of the project away from its original intentions to
a point where it's not even recognizable to the people
who initiated it. Yeah, you know, I'm not saying that
they weren't right to be wary of US intervention. History

(01:41:45):
has demonstrated as much. But it was something that the
people of the country were becoming increasingly concerned about because
it's a small country and it's uncommon, you know, just unusual.
It's unnerving to see militia's marching on your street. Now,

(01:42:07):
the Mutual movement was starting to become more focused on
establishing a vanguard core, the more they oriented themselves toward
Marxism lenders, so like I mentioned before, they were making
this shift away from the sort of popular mass democracy
that people like see Lar James was talking about. The
more they read and they studied the works of Marxism lenders,

(01:42:29):
and there were people within the party who became more
and more convinced. Again, remember the end positions of power
this point in time, so in positions of power, and
you're reading theoretical justifications for why you need to be
in power. You know you will stand by those theoretical
justifications because it lines up with your interests, your self

(01:42:51):
interests to you know, further your position of power, and
the continuation of your role as an authority, as a leader.
And so this vanguard call that they were pursuing, it
ended up creating a hierarchy of in group and outgroup.
You had the people who were in the vanguard the

(01:43:12):
people who were out of the vanguard who didn't get picked,
We didn't make the cut. You know, it felt snubbed.
And this was facilities and it was fostering this an
air of secrecy that people in the country were beginning
to resent and lose trust in. Because imagine you going
from this sort of popular engagement with the people as
you you know, take part in these efforts to push

(01:43:34):
Gary out of power. Then you have this sort of secrecy,
you have this sort of militarism. They're started to remind
people a bit of the exact Geary government that they
wanted out. Then two major events took place in nineteen
eighty one. There was a bombing under the stage of
a rally that killed some mutes, and there was a
car ambustion as well. Both of these incidents were blamed

(01:43:57):
on counter revolutionaries in the country. That famous buzzworth, that
famous catchphrase, that famous justification for any and every response. Yeah.
So it further pushed the country and really the whole
society into this culture of suspicion and repression and also
resentment for the New Dual movement. The New Jeal movement

(01:44:19):
wasn't responsible for the bombans, but you can imagine people
were probably saying when they were at the parlor by
the grocery, you know, out by the bar down the street,
they're saying, you know, at least they didn't have any
bombits under Gary. You know, at least didn't have these
combitions under Gary. Gary wasn't nice, but we didn't have

(01:44:39):
terrorist attacks. And the sort of transparency and engagement people
were accustomed to were starting to evaporate. The New Dual
movement was starting to be seen by some as a
secret society. And if your society is already small, right,
just about one hundred thousand people, Yeah, having a secret

(01:45:01):
society within that small society where everybody knows everybody, that's
not good, especially when the revolution is so new, so nationed.
You need people's trust, and especially as well because people
were not ideologically for Marxism Leninism, most of them, that is,
they were't ideologically for Marxism Leniness and they were ideologically

(01:45:25):
neutral movement advocates. They just wanted Eric Garry out and
they wanted improve once their living conditions. They didn't have
a particular political ideology. They were committed too. And in
this time, you know, the Caribbean is part of the
rest of the world. The Cribbean is paying attention, has
to pay attention to what's happening in the rest of
the world, and especially within northern neighbor the United States

(01:45:48):
of America, and it's very influenced at that point in time.
We're talking the late seventies early eighties Cold War rhetoric
that people are getting in the media. The American media
was still very and continue to be very prominent in
terms of what Cribbean people consume because we are English speaking.
The Americans and English speaking, and they have far more resources,

(01:46:10):
so their media comes to us, and a lot of
the narratives that Caribbean people get come in a recent
part from American narratives. So these Cold War era narratives
about communism as a scare word was something that had
yet to be addressed through actual demonstration of what communism
could actually be for people. You know, people weren't worn

(01:46:33):
over on communism yet, it was still unfamiliar, and in
this time you really needed people who were open, who
were accommodating, who were showing people what it meant in practice,
who were, you know, sort of disarming these notions that
could serve as obstacles towards people's buying into the struggle.

(01:46:54):
I'm saying this as a non Marxist Lendness. I'm putting
myself in those shoes. If I'm trying to get people
invested in as convinced of this, that sort of secrecy
it doesn't push things in a post the trajectory.

Speaker 6 (01:47:07):
Yeah, it's easy for the population to perceive that you've
replaced one elite with another elite, right, especially in post
colonial movements, when when we do this exactly so it's
a transparent word for one, you know.

Speaker 7 (01:47:20):
Yeah, I mean not to say that people didn't see
the differences. Yes, correct, they went away the nuances. They
could tell the difference between an Eric Gary and a
more respecial They can tell the difference between you know,
one form of politics and another. It's not that they
were just ready to court immediately. I mean some of
them still had the fresh wounds of the trauma being

(01:47:42):
inflicted by Eric Garry. Yeah, but it's because of that
trauma they were also sensitive to the potential of new traumas.
Ye call it paranoia, call it unesst and and right
thinking suspicion. But they were they were wary of what
was taking place. Yeah, and you know it didn't help.
It didn't help that. Okay. So you know some people

(01:48:05):
they read like one or two theory books and they
start walking around like their head is three times bigger
than it is. They start walking around this kind of
inflated sense of self importance.

Speaker 6 (01:48:17):
Yes, I'm very familiar with that kind of person.

Speaker 7 (01:48:20):
Yeah, Unfortunately, that's exactly what started taking place among some
members of the party. They're reading all these books, all
these thick books from Russia and June and Marx and
Lenin and all these people's and they're starting to carry
themselves in a particular way. Yeah, with a level of
arrogance and nowhere to illness. And you know, and this

(01:48:43):
is we're in a society. We remember, we are fresh
out of colonialism. You know, none of our independent nations
or even one hundred years old. Yet much of the
population still remember that colonial period. Yeah, and much of
the popular, like I mentioned before, needed changes the education
system because they didn't have educational opportunities. So you had

(01:49:07):
this vast educational inequality, right, and then you have this
new jeal movement and some of its members are talking
to you like you're stupid. Yeah, because you didn't get
to go to primary school, you didn't read all the
thick books that they were, or you didn't get to
go to secondary school, or you didn't get to go
to university, and so you don't know all the big
words and you haven't read all the thick texts that

(01:49:28):
they have read. And it could rub people the wrong way.

Speaker 6 (01:49:32):
Yeah, yes, right, Yeah, there can be too much theory.
I think that often is too much theory, especially when
it creates this idea right that reading is what distinguishes
one as a revolutionary right as opposed to doing or
just knowing and caring, and it did a downfall of

(01:49:54):
many movements.

Speaker 7 (01:49:56):
Indeed, I think if you're coming from the background that
some of the this neutual movement members were coming from,
you need to put in that extra effort not to
dumb things down per se. You still want to respect
people's intelligence, but you have to be away of the dynamic.
It's something that I myself have to work on, you know,
because I think it's a sort of curse of knowledge

(01:50:18):
where you read so much that you take for granted
what you know. You know, you read to a point
where you almost forget that this is not common knowledge
or this word may be unfamiliar to a lot of people,
and you really have to be cognizant of it, especially
as you approaching people and make sure you're talking to
them in their language. They don't feel as though they're

(01:50:40):
carrying yourself too big fabriages.

Speaker 6 (01:50:42):
Yeah, definitely, like the people who write the thick books
can't be your like milieu. You know, they can't be there.
I've used a stupid word. But like, if those are
the people with whom you're sort of conversing in your head,
and then you begin to speak in that language to
people who aren't familiar with it, just sounds weird. Yeah,
like it's yeah, as you said, you get too big

(01:51:05):
for your bridges, and you some pompous if you're not.

Speaker 7 (01:51:08):
Careful exactly exactly, and so for the you know, big
shot lawyer again all the time, and she kind of
as I say this, for big shot lawyers like Marie

(01:51:28):
Bishop and a big shot economics lecturers like Bernard Cord
and some of the other folks that had been part
of the core of the party, they had to approach
to people in a particular way, and they were successful
in doing so under Eric Garry and as they were
part of you opposition. But things were shifted also the
two in the of the eighties, we had a lot

(01:51:49):
of moves again suspected counter revolutionaries, imprisonment without trial. To
imagine again, people are thinking, this is what the monk
who's gang two point zero? Yeah, the fair was starting
to overtake, the society was starting to become cannibalizing. As
I said, so by the time we get to nineteen
eighty three, we find ourselves with the people bereft of

(01:52:10):
the early days of hope, in a house divided, which
famously cannot stand unbeknowns to the public, there were tensions
between Maurice Bishop and Bernard Cord since at least nineteen
eighty two, and Chord wasn't even part of the central
Committee of the Neutral Movement anymore for a while, but
within the vanguard the party members still preferred Cord to Bishop.

(01:52:34):
Cord was seen as more intellectually equipped to lead with
his knowledge of theory. They started calling Bishop egotistics and
counter revolutionary. And I have to say, I love the
double edged sword of these kind of willingly thought to
meet and cliches, because they can be used by you
and then they could be used against you. In a

(01:52:56):
staple of his fingers.

Speaker 6 (01:52:57):
Yeah, I did. It goes back to your finger, hammers
and nails that you mentioned before.

Speaker 7 (01:53:03):
Indeed, so eventually the party decided to bring Court on
as co leader with Bishop. Originally Bishop agreed, but this
started great tensions. Things managed recently, but after a while
Bishop was turned to push back against the co leadership arrangement,
and the party started seeing it as him favoring his
own ascendancy over the collective of unity and son. He

(01:53:25):
went to Germany. He left the country on a trip.
Don't worry. There was none of the coole this time,
at least not yet. When he went to Germany on
a trip, came back, there was not a welcome party
for him. Things were coming to her head. The party
did not have his back anymore. He could feel it.

(01:53:46):
But he did know that the people still had his back.
But he knows he's charismatic, he knows people love him,
and so all of a sudden, this is in nineteen
eighty three, by the way, a rumor was swollen that
Cord wanted to kill Bishop. Yeah. It's a dangerous rumor,
you know. It shatters this facade of a united front

(01:54:07):
that had carried the revolution. They had carried the government
for so long. But since most people loved Bishop, as
he rightfully assumed, in fact, they were not for this
name basis with him.

Speaker 6 (01:54:16):
That's cool.

Speaker 7 (01:54:17):
They weren't seeing Prime Minister Bishop, your honorable Prime Minister Bishop.
It was hey, Maurice, like that boy, Maurice.

Speaker 6 (01:54:24):
Yeah, that's always a good sign. Like, it's one of
the positive marks of the of the Revolutionarjava, right, is
that everyone is a friend and everyone's preferred to germanly
by their first name, and it's always kind of yeah,
I've seen enough read enough about you know, revolutions supposing
a revolutionary hierarchy. So that's always a good sign, I

(01:54:45):
feel like.

Speaker 4 (01:54:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:54:48):
So, meanwhile, you had Cord who people didn't have the
same kind of relationship with. Yeah, you know, as far
as they're concerned, he's an anemino because of that rumor. Yeah,
and the party actually suspected that it was Bishop that
started the rumor. In fact, his own personal bodyguards suspected it,

(01:55:10):
but Bishop himself denied it. Whether he did or did
not start the rumor, we don't know. But the party
was insulted by his movements and put him under house arrest.

Speaker 6 (01:55:22):
What what.

Speaker 7 (01:55:25):
Right now? But he did this shocked.

Speaker 6 (01:55:30):
Like a shot, And that's that's that's.

Speaker 7 (01:55:32):
How the people were feeling it, Like what prime minister arrested?
You could do that, That's the thing. So you see,
the Vanguard, with all that secrecy at this point in time,
was operating on information that was not made available to
the people. And the people who were pissed at the party.
You know, the cracks in this political arrangement with essentially

(01:55:54):
a secret society on top, were starting to show. The people,
generally speaking, regardless of what the party wanted, wanted Maurice Bishop.
They wanted the boy Maurice, but the party was not
interested in what people wanted. The day is nineteenth of
October nineteen eighty three. The pro Maurice Bishop usual movement, leaders,

(01:56:21):
government ministers, and a mass demonstration of people rolled up
to Bishop's house to set him free. There were gods,
of course, assigned to keep him in house arrest, but
those gods stood down. They refused to shoot at the people.
To the crowd of people walked to Fort Rupert. Now
Fort Rupert wasn't always Fort Rupert used to be Fort George. Fact,

(01:56:45):
after the revolution ended it again became known as Fort George.
But Fort Rupert was named Fort Rupert after Maurice Bishop's father,
who was killed by Eric Garry, as you may recall.
So they get there, but the majority of the Neudual movement,
who were, like I said, backers of Thenard Cord, were

(01:57:06):
at another fort nearby, then Boom three, armored trucks pull
up from the Fort of Cord to Rupert's Fort Rupert Rat.
They start firing into the crowd, people running all over
the place.

Speaker 3 (01:57:22):
Hoo.

Speaker 7 (01:57:22):
One people died, who one people scattered. This event as
a trauma for Grenadians even to this day. By the way,
So the Cord loyalists pull up and line up Bishop
Unison Whiteman, who was the Minister of Foreign Affairs, nor Spain,
who is the Minister of Health and was actually not
part of the NEU dual movement, and Jacqueline Kreft, who

(01:57:43):
is the Minister of Education, then line them up against
the wall and shot them summary execution. Others including trade unionists, businessmen,
and high schoolers were also killed at Fort Rupert. Right
after this, the militaryvery curfew was announced on radio. Grenadians
were told to lock their doors. Violators of curfew were

(01:58:07):
to be shot on site. A couple of days later,
as people more wanted their dead, the news came that
the United States will invade Grenada. If this was a
HBO series, I feel like that would be the end
of the pronouncement episode. So just to give you a
bit of context on the US's position, the United States

(01:58:30):
did not like the way that Cuba and the Soviets
and Grenada were becoming close, even though Grenada was technically
non aligned. Like much of the world, was trying to
stay out of the hairs of the US and the
USSR in their cold wor Yeah, but Grenada and Grenadians

(01:58:51):
represented a serious risk. They were black, That's a big risk.
They were English speaking. There were English speaking black people
close to the border of the United States of America
as African Americans were engaged in their own struggle for
liberation in the US. As rich Bishop noted, I mean

(01:59:14):
that's the threat that there could be communication, collaboration between
these groups, a demonstration of an alternative close to the
United States with ease of communication with the United States.
So the United States invasion was always a potential outcome,
but here it was flexing power in its fair in

(01:59:37):
its backyard. The Party rounded up a bunch of people
to join them in defending the revolution. Most people were traumatized.
They ran and they hid wherever they could. Some, regardless
of whether they liked the Nu jeal movement at that
point in time or not, stood ready to defend their
island from invasion, but any more were hidden and scared.

(01:59:59):
And they were also others who, out of revenge for
the revolution that betrayed them, betrayed the revolution by expressing
their support for the invasion. Now, me personally, not something
I would never do. I don't care how much I
disagree with any any government that I'm under, I wouldn't

(02:00:19):
co sign the invasion of my country by an empire.
But I can understand the reasoning or the emotional position
that some people were in at that point. So the
US's claim, by the way, for the invasion was that

(02:00:40):
they were there to rescue American students who were in Grenada,
so that they are to rescue these students from these
these communes. Perfect American students wouldn't ender any actual threat. Obviously,
nobody was mining them or threatening them or anything. But

(02:01:00):
they always have to have some kind of story, right, Yeah,
So twenty fifth of October nineteen eighty three, America's boots
land on the ground, joined later by the military personnel
of Barbados and Jamaica. There were more deaths, mostly in Grenadians,
but also some Cubans who were there working on the

(02:01:21):
new International Airport, an airport that later became known as
Maurice Bishop International Airport, an airport that just over a
month ago the United States requested to use for its
military operations in the region. The United States kept the

(02:01:43):
media out of the island for two days after the invasion.
They were sure to curate an image of the communist threat.
They wanted to pay into picture for the media to
tell us story back at home about how yeah, they
were actually repairing to work with the Soviets as a

(02:02:03):
stage in ground to attack the United States. So this
invasion was the first overt as opposed to covert use
of force since Vietnam. The party in power at the
time needed an easy win, so party members this says
Neudual Movement party members were imprisoned. An interim government was

(02:02:25):
established by Grenadians living abroad, and the revolution was over
a stock aftermath, the fall of the Usual Movement and

(02:02:46):
the People's Revolutionary Government of Grenada led to the disintegration
of the Workers Party of Jamaica. It now destroyed Cara
com the Caribbean community as a united block as Jamaica
I'm sure and Dad decided with the US in the invasion,
while countries I trainedad stood against the invasion. That was
a split in Cara com that took years to recover from,

(02:03:10):
and I think most crucially, the fall of the utual
movement led to the death in all but name of
the Caribbean Left, from distrust, from infighting, and from this
resolute enforcement of the new colonial model. For all the
flaws of the revolution had it was a representation of

(02:03:32):
an alternative that something else could be done besides business
as usual. And that alternative first felt in fighting, and
then its fate was sealed by a belligerent invasion. Yeah,
and so the Caribbean Left not say it's actually entirely dead.

(02:03:55):
There are still figures from that era. There are still
people who carry progressive or revolutionary politics, but it's Haiti
it's goal and age is no more. And that is
in part as a result of that US invasion. And
within Grenader the bodies of those killed were never found.

(02:04:19):
In some cases, the families of those killed or of
department members may even still be divided to this day.
You know, you can imagine how they must feel, these
sort of social and political divisions that came out of
that kind of action. Who sided with Cord, who sided
with Bishop, who sided with the US? Who stood against

(02:04:40):
who brought whose actions were responsible for the US come in.
If the revolution never happened, then US wouldn't have come
they seople wouldn't be dead. Blame game, accusations, political conflicts,
all of that. You know, it's very easy to breeze
over the deaths of people in historical events as just numbers.
That's just statistics. You know, it doesn't even click, you know,

(02:05:04):
because I think, I don't think our brains can fully
handle that much trauma at once. So we we could
partmentalize it in a way, we package it in something
that's a bit more digestible. When you hear figures of
you know, even just two people, that that's two people,
two entire human beings with lives, interests, passions, relationships, connections,

(02:05:31):
future snuffed out. And in a country like Grenada, from
a small country, one hundred thousand people, and I mean
I'm from Trinad, right, which has a population of about
one point four million people, and it still feels like
you know somebody who knows somebody. The networks are so tight.
It's even tighter net network wise in a Grenader or

(02:05:53):
a Tobago. You know, we're talking neighbors, relatives split into sides, cousin,
blaming cousin, friend killing friend, a decolonization never fully began
and never fully completed. Their social splits on the perspective
on what took place, you had the Bishop was good crowd,

(02:06:16):
the Bishop was bad crowd. The Bishop was bad, but
the revolution was good crowd. The revolution was bad, but
Bishop was good crowd. You get all sorts of interpretations
of these kinds of traumatic historical events. Yeah, and the
outcome to this day is, you know, fair, unhealed, open wounds,

(02:06:38):
the youth, the passionate radical youth of yesteryear, keeping their
heads down on auto politics. Today. Unfortunately, very little has
been done in Grenada to deal with the traumas of
the invasion, besides an attempted truth and Reconciliation commission, which
failed miserably due to a couple of different obstacles, an

(02:06:58):
unwillingness to reconcile, amongst they continued incarceration of certain individuals,
unrecovered remains, anger towards entire sectors the population at the
execution of Bishop and others, and so in the years
that have followed, there's been a subdued political consciousness among

(02:07:19):
much of the population. They have risen to the challenge
of the US inviting themselves to set up shop in
marich Bishop International Airport. There were many actions taking place
in Grenada to speak up understand against that intervention. But
for the most part, the property of this has been

(02:07:40):
disengaged from the sort of radical passion that you saw
in that time period. And it didn't help, of course
that pretty much right after the revolution you had a
series of natural disasters. In September two thousand and four,
after being hurricane three for forty nine years, the island

(02:08:02):
was hit by Hurricane Ivan, a Category three hurricane that
resulted in three nine deaths and the damage or destruction
to ninety percent of the island's homes. In two thousand
and five, which is the following year, Hurricane Emily, a
Category one hurricane, struck the island and killed a person.
In twenty twenty four, Hurricane Beryl struck the island of Kararaku.

(02:08:24):
And so we're already to know the environmental instability of
being a Caribbean island, but now I also have to
be with the political and social instability of such a
traumatic incident. Before we close, I do want to get
into some of the critiques that I had of this project.
You know, I'm not the type of weekson to look

(02:08:45):
at these historical moments, no matter by allegiance to the
esposed politics of the people in them, and we want
to paint them in a narrow, simplistic brush. You know,
I think I see that tendency across all groups. Yeah,
you know, so the Marx Slenness. We'll talk about these
revolutions in a very fawning and agulating way. Then you

(02:09:07):
sell the anarchists who talk about, you know, the Spanish
Civil War, they talk about the Paris community. They talk
about these different projects as if they were and as
if they weren't serious flaws in their structure and the
analysis and their methodology. It's worth addressing.

Speaker 4 (02:09:24):
You know.

Speaker 7 (02:09:25):
It's very easy for nostalgia to take over.

Speaker 6 (02:09:27):
Yeah, definitely, like something I think about a lot. Like
I translated a piece for the Strangers in the Tangled
Wilderness zine a few months ago, maybe even a year
ago now by an anarchist fighterhood fought in the International
Group of the Darruti column who went by several names,
Charles Riddle with his birth name, but he has this

(02:09:48):
whole thing about how anarchists tend to write hagiographies like
which is the life of a saint? Right, Like they've
tried to make the Spanish Civil War into these like
exemplaries saintly people as a opposed to actually looking at
the mistakes people made and his stances are like his
friends died for nothing if we don't learn anything, and

(02:10:09):
so if we don't acknowledge the very real compromises and
mistakes and failures, then they have been defeated, right, and
they all died for nothing. But at at least we
can learn from it, then at least is something we
can take going forward, which is something I always thought
was a great way of phrasing something and quite an
admirable way of looking at something that he himself participated

(02:10:31):
in and that was obviously a defining and a very
traumatic experience of his life.

Speaker 7 (02:10:36):
Yeah, it's something that I rallied again, that sort of
great man of Bruce's history. Yeah, right, I suppose that
brings mean some of my first critique, which is something
that plays greater both before, during and after this revolution
when you have a political culture dependent on a maximum

(02:10:58):
leader that puts now cult or just a grouping around
her personality, whether that's bishop or Gaary or Cord. For one,
it's a continuation of the colonial politics of the British
in that sort of governor position. And it also, I
think leads to a contempt towards common people. Whether it

(02:11:21):
starts out that way or not, it eventually makes its
way into that direction. I still see personality politics rear
and it's ugly headed in Trinidad, even though we've been
independent for even longer. You know, nineteen sixty two are
opposed to create as nineteen seventy four. But the result
of that kind of politics is, you know, it's ideological

(02:11:42):
and policy splits either nonexistent or secondary to personality loyalties,
familiar ties, and in some cases ethnic loyalty. The United
National Congress UN see the Party in Power Internet right now,
party responsible for our current position, is a personality cult
led by a current prime minister talent subrossessor. And she's

(02:12:06):
only one of many examples of this sort of party first,
leader first approach to politics that we see in the region,
a baggage that we see in the region. I know,
with radical politics, it's sad because you expect to do
away with that kind of stuff. But the Revolution, in

(02:12:29):
my view, had a lack of decolonization away from the
authority and tendencies of colonial rule. That I think is
why there was such an appeal in Leninists thought and
rule to begin with, because it's a lot easier to approach,
you know, it doesn't unpack the psychology of clonialism or
unpack how Gary's rule may have shaped their own approach

(02:12:51):
to politics, that another politics might, that another anti politics might,
And so they carried on this elita, authoritaria, and personality
based politics despite having a youthful beginning. Bishop was twenty
nine when he started a neutral movement, which is the
same age that Gary was when he got into politics.

(02:13:14):
I know one could make a movie of the mirrors
in their histories. But despite his youthful beginning, the youth
carried on the mistakes of their forebears. They betrayed the
excitement of people power that people had for the revolution,
just as they betrayed the excitement of people power that
people had for independence, and they continue the consciousness of
deference to hierarchy. Again, I don't want to draw one

(02:13:38):
to one comparisons between Gary and Bishop. I recognize their
stark differences and their politics and in their engagement with
the people of Grenado. They were not the same, but
in some ways they did rhyme. I would wrap up,
I suppose with Bundy's sort of critique of Grenado's revolution,

(02:13:59):
which I just echo this continued consciousness of a deference
to hierarchy. A genuine revolution depends on people taking direct responsibility,
not waiting for leaders or stages of development, not waiting
on guidance, being empowered themselves. That sort of tired Leninist

(02:14:19):
gradualism and bureaucratic control gets regular people no closer to
actually having a sense of autonomy and control over their lives.
And as Fundy emphasizers, especially in small Caribbean societies, participatory

(02:14:39):
local self managed systems are entirely feasible. Inclosing, Fundy suggested
that Gredino's revolution failed because it moved away from this
principle of immediate collective self management and deliberately chose hierarchy.
And from that hierarchy came a sense of erodent trust, came,

(02:14:59):
a sense of secrecy, became a sense of secret societies,
and I created a culture of secrecy, a post transparency
that led to its downfall. As I mentioned, it was
gossip a rumor of somebody trying to kill Bishop but
got this ball roller. So today I want to appeal

(02:15:21):
directly to Cribean radicals of all stripes to learn, to learnlessly,
learn from the Grenadian Revolution. I on't appeal not just
to Cribian radicals, but to radicals all across. They will
all across our listenership. It is critical in times when
the means of intervention and the means of disruption and

(02:15:46):
division and co optation are more powerful than ever, that
you engage in the sort of dissipation of leadership, that
you engage in grassroots and disposed in powerment, That you
maintain an anti authoritarian ethos that cannot be co opted

(02:16:08):
by a charismatic power. But you've take an approach to
organization does not lend itself to the vulnerabilities of hierarchy
that you consider moving like my coruser, that you take
on networks and free associations rather than the sort of
X Marxist spot Bullsey centralized parties and the power struggles

(02:16:32):
that ensue from them from that thirst for power that
led so many downfalls for the revolutionary imagination. Before I
wrap up, I just want to ask James, we have
any thoughts.

Speaker 6 (02:16:48):
No, I think that's very eloquent the way you said it,
Like we have to build systems and ways of organizing
relating to one another that don't allow this to happen. Right,
we have to be very conscious, like you say, of
where it has happened. And I think the only way
there'll we understand the value of that is through studying history,

(02:17:08):
but like studying it from a place like you were saying, right,
like I get death is a statistic or a number
until it's a person. And I think if we can
study history from a place of like empathy, I guess,
and solidarity rather than this would never happen to me,
or like you said, like oversimplifying in a way that
I think doesn't help. And sometimes I think we do

(02:17:31):
it to kind of absolve ourselves from similarity, to think like, oh,
how close could I be to this? It's one of
the things I don't like about academic history. But if
we are people who are interested in making the world better,
than we have to learn from all the other people
all over the world who tried to make the world better,
and especially from the ones who didn't succeed. Yeah, because

(02:17:56):
we don't want to do that again.

Speaker 7 (02:17:59):
Exactly, and the times they are a change in Yes, indeed,
we have to approach that with our due diligence. You know,
the strategies that were more relevant or more more practical
in particular context may be relevant or practical in your context.

Speaker 6 (02:18:17):
Yeah, very much too. All right, Yeah, that was great,
Thank you Andrew.

Speaker 7 (02:18:23):
To all our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in.
I hope that you can look at our region with
clearer eyes and vigilance in the ways that history repeats
and rhymes. Until next time or power to all the
people peace?

Speaker 3 (02:18:59):
All right?

Speaker 6 (02:19:00):
What are crackers and crack ats? Is that good? Perfect?
Do we say that?

Speaker 3 (02:19:05):
I think? So?

Speaker 6 (02:19:06):
Okay, do you have a non binary cracks crack thems?

Speaker 3 (02:19:10):
I think I'm definitionly not a cracker.

Speaker 2 (02:19:18):
I just wanted to use the word crack ats. Yeah,
I understand it's not appropriate.

Speaker 3 (02:19:22):
That's reasonable.

Speaker 6 (02:19:23):
Welcome to ed. Yeah, weich is just we should that, sorry, James,
So let's just keep doing it. Do the intro. This
is it could happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast
covering what is happening in the White House, the crumbling
of our world, and what this means to you. I
am James Stout and I'm joined today by Robert Evans

(02:19:44):
and Mia Wong and Sophie. Sophie is also here, and
this episode we are covering the week of December eleventh
to December seventeenth, the week before the week that is Christmas.

Speaker 2 (02:19:58):
That's right, baby, So I hope you've done your shopping.
I hope you've got me a gift because I pay
attention to which of our listeners do and do not
buy me presents.

Speaker 6 (02:20:08):
Yeah, so do I you will never find me and
you shouldn't try. That's right.

Speaker 1 (02:20:13):
And it's currently Honkah, Happy honkah.

Speaker 8 (02:20:15):
Happy hone right, yes, yeah, happy honekah. All the holidays
have a yeah, quasi Kwanza, have a solemn, dignified tet.

Speaker 6 (02:20:26):
All the holidays have a good one of them.

Speaker 1 (02:20:28):
Happy Winter Solstice, which.

Speaker 2 (02:20:29):
Is happy Solstice more unhappy Solstice. It's kind of a
bittersweet holiday. Yeah, Super Saturnalia.

Speaker 6 (02:20:37):
You know, it's a good one.

Speaker 8 (02:20:42):
So holidays are nice, but we're going to talk about
some things that are less nice today.

Speaker 6 (02:20:47):
The government, Yes, the government and specific parts of the government.
Let's start with some headlines. Gothamist has obtained information about
ice being able to enter private parts of New York
City shelter without a judicial warrant, or being able to
obtain private information about residents, despite both of these in
theory being prohibited by sanctuary city laws in New York. Right,

(02:21:10):
it's happened at least five times. The way Gotham has
found this is by making a public records request for
incident reports, which is a clever use of public record
law nice one. The city has already aware of both
jail and police officers violating these laws, and I think
this is a good example of how people think of
sanctuary city laws as inassailable, but in fact sanctuary laws

(02:21:35):
be the city's state whatever jurisdiction, are very often violated,
and it's good to see that being reported on more.
Last week, we talked about Faustino Pablo Pablo, right, the
guy who had been sent to Guatemala despite the fact
that he had protections under the Convention against Torture for
being returned there. The government has returned him to the US,
which is good. That is a rare, good immigration story.

(02:22:01):
It did really bum me out to see that, Like
there were dozens of articles on him being sent there, right,
and I couldn't find anything any reporting on him being returned,
which is kind of like, we should be happy for
these people. We should. Yeah, we don't get many wins
and we should take them. Yeah, we should be happy
that this guy is not being likely to be tortured.
At least it is still possible for them to remove

(02:22:23):
him to a third country, right, that is not outside
the realm of possibility. But right now he's not in
a place where a gig judicated he was likely to
be tortured, and that is good good. And Trump has
designated fentanel as a weapon of mass destruction, which is great.

Speaker 3 (02:22:40):
What are we doing here?

Speaker 6 (02:22:42):
Like, I am trained as a historian, and I probably
should remind you that we have been down this road
before with the weapons of mass destruction, and I hope
this is not leading where it did lost time, but
I am very worried that it might. Yeah, yeah, it's

(02:23:05):
it's one of those things.

Speaker 2 (02:23:06):
I'm both we'll see, we'll know before this episode ends
whether or not I'm wrong. Tucker Carlson stated recently that
a source has told him the presidential announcement coming up
is Trump declaring war, right that, like, we're doing a
war with Venezuela full on, not just some like air
strikes and stuff, just not to minimize a legal air
strike in the sea or on Venezuela or soil.

Speaker 6 (02:23:30):
I don't know if I.

Speaker 2 (02:23:31):
Think that that's the likeliest thing. It just seems like
such a huge jump. But also, at this point there's
a whole armada blocking off Venezuela from the rest of
the world, and Trump put out a statement saying that
their oil is our oil and belongs rightly to American companies.

Speaker 8 (02:23:49):
So very very possible, very possible when we're about to
go to war with them. I'm certainly not a I
don't know what's going to happen, y'all. I'm white knuckling
it like everybody else.

Speaker 6 (02:24:00):
Yeah, that fucking sucks. I didn't know the thing about
that oil.

Speaker 3 (02:24:03):
It's amazing.

Speaker 2 (02:24:03):
I'll read the exact quote to you, James. This is
from Trump a truth social post which has twelve point
four thousand retruths and forty seven thousand likes. Venezuela is
completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in the
history of South America. It will only get bigger, and
the shock to them will be like nothing they have
ever seen before until such time as they returned to
the United States of America all of the oil, land

(02:24:25):
and other assets that they previously stole from US. The
illegitimate Maduro regime is using oil from these stolen oil
fields to finance themselves, drug terrorism, human trafficking, murder and kidnapping.
For the theft of our assets, and many other reasons
including terrorism, drug smuggling, and human trafficking, the Venezuelan regime
has been designated a foreign terrorist organization. Therefore, today I'm
ordering a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil

(02:24:46):
tankers going into and out of Venezuela. The illegal aliens
and criminals that the Madeira regime has sent to the
United States during the weekend and Biden administration are being
returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace. YadA, YadA, YadA. Yeah,
all of our oil, land and other assets have to
be returned to the United States.

Speaker 6 (02:25:01):
Which, like he's talking.

Speaker 2 (02:25:03):
About oil that American companies have had at points like
contracts to exploit. But he's phrasing it is like their
land and oil is our land and oil, which yeah,
I think that's a very colonial way of phrasing like
a contract.

Speaker 3 (02:25:17):
Again.

Speaker 2 (02:25:18):
A lot of times, you know, I would be like, Okay, well,
I don't know if war is the most reasonable thing
to expect. When the president's posting shit like that, it's
very reasonable to be like, I think we might.

Speaker 4 (02:25:28):
Go to war.

Speaker 8 (02:25:29):
I think he might be about to invade Venezuela. I
don't know what's going to happen, but it's you're no
longer being like a kooky conspiracy theorist to be like, well,
maybe he's about to try to take over Venezuela, and maybe.

Speaker 6 (02:25:42):
That is what's coming. Yeah, I don't understand how in
that instance they would continue to get Venezuela to accept people.
It's the US is removing. That's what the sticking points
that I see. Maybe he's found at that country right
that they've they've been very fond of finding the countries.
I guess I should explain a little bit about oil

(02:26:04):
leaving Venezuela, just so like people are aware of that.
So like Robert read the truth, someone says in church,
doesn't it? Yeah, yeah, here we are. So they're talking
about like blockading sanctioned oil tankers, not necessarily every tanker
that enters Venezuela. Is sanctioned, like I believe Chevron has
some contracts with Chevron. Tankers should be cruising, Yeah, there's

(02:26:28):
a lot of Chevron. Yeah, that shouldn't be an issue, right,
they should be able to go back and forth. They're
not sanctioned.

Speaker 8 (02:26:33):
It's the Venezuelan State Oil Company, which in English, I
guess you would say Pdvsavasa Divasa's yeah, yeah, yeah, what
Venezuela has done previously, and this is not by any
means unique to Venezuela, but this is generally how many
of these regimes that are kind of in the ambit
of Venezuela I'm talking about Iran and Russia here have

(02:26:55):
avoided sanctions and sanctioned entities so far as by using
what A called ghost ships.

Speaker 6 (02:27:01):
I will link to an explainer on this. What they
will do is use the names and identify as the
vessels that have been scrapped. They will change the flags
of vessels, often to these small island nations for whom
allowing ships to use their flag as kind of a
source of income, right, And they will often use these

(02:27:23):
to go out into international waters and then offload cargo,
in this case oil.

Speaker 3 (02:27:28):
Right.

Speaker 6 (02:27:28):
So it just happens pretty frequently with Venezuelan vessels. That
was one It was one such vessel called the Skipper
that the US Coast Guard boarded I think last week
as we're recording this. Yeah, sure, that is how Venezuela
has previously been evading these sanctions, right, And Iran does
this too, Russia does this too. They also do things
like spoof their location or turn off their They have

(02:27:51):
like a locator beacon that ships are supposed to use
a transpond area. Yeah, so this is fairly common practice.
But obviously the way to stop that a physical blockade, right, Like,
that's not going to be possible if these if the
US is effectively like inspecting ships leaving Venezuela, right or
sort of keeping a very close eye on them, so

(02:28:12):
that will end and with that will end a very
important source of income for the Maduta regime if they
keep doing this.

Speaker 4 (02:28:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:28:20):
Now, obviously one of the sort of issues we're trying
to work out what is going to happen here, especially
before whatever speech Trump is about to give, is that
we're trying to figure out state policy from Trump posting, right, Yeah,
and there's a lot of this that is enormously incoherent.
So okay, the thing about designating the government of Venezuela
as a foreign terrorist organization is one of the weirdest

(02:28:42):
things I've ever seen. And this was also unhinged. The
closest thing we've ever really gotten to that I guess
was the IERGC. Yeah, and maybe you could go back
and say the Khmer Rouge, but like, they weren't really
a government by that point. So this is this is
not a designation that has ever been given to a

(02:29:03):
government before. Right, it doesn't make any sense to give
it to a government. It doesn't make sense to give
to this government. I mean, you know, even if you're
working with in the logic of counter terrorism, which is
just you know, unhinged murderous imperialism to begin with. But
all of the reporting on this has been assuming that
the blockade will be of you know, like of these
specifically sanctioned oil tankers. However, come the thing about the

(02:29:27):
foreign terrorist organization designation is that it does things. And
one of the things that that foreign terrorist organization designation
does is that if you do business with a with
a foreign terrorist organization, you are now immediately on the
line from material support of terrorism charges like Chevron. So yes,
there are lots of countries like Facebook, does.

Speaker 2 (02:29:49):
This fine with the US military carrying out air strikes
on Chevron executives and there and their property.

Speaker 6 (02:29:56):
Let's be clear about that.

Speaker 8 (02:29:58):
I would I would salute the had, white and blue
if we dropped some hell fires on that C suite.

Speaker 3 (02:30:05):
Yeah, I don't know. This is all very weird. My
understanding of the FTO designation process is that, well, how
it's supposed to work is that the President proposes it,
and then the Secretary of State and Secretary of the
Treasurer I think, have to improve it, and then there's
a seven day period where Congress has it an opportunity
to say no, and then it goes up. So right

(02:30:27):
now we should be theoretically in the seven day window,
but it's also really unclear what the administration has actually
been doing because again we're being governed by post. Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:30:38):
Like it's so it's not announced as an executive action
on White House dot gov, and I think normally it
goes there and then the seven day congressional period commences.

Speaker 6 (02:30:50):
Then it's not an a federal rights to either. Right now,
all we have is a truth, so.

Speaker 3 (02:30:56):
Like yeah, like and this is this is the problem
is that this is this is sort of the Calvin
War in that they're using they're using the names of
actual legal categories and things that have material effects in
the world, but they're just posts. And I want to
be very clear about this. Even just doing a blockade
on these sanctioned vessels is an active war. Yeah, like

(02:31:17):
that's an act that's very deliberately an active war. It
is an active imperial aggression. It is morally wrong. It
is also unbelievably illegal under the War Powers Act. And this,
this is, this has actually gotten a response from Democrats
in Congress. There's been a few measures. CBS is reporting
this has been if there's been a few measures to

(02:31:38):
stop the president from starting a war. Here, I'm going
to quote CBS. A second measure from Democratic Rep. Jim
mcgovernor in Massachusetts would remove the armed forces quote from
hostilities with or against Venezuela that have not been authorized
by Congress. McGovern's resolution could face the best chance of
potential adoption since it has three gop CO sponsors. Rep's

(02:32:00):
Marjory Taylor Green of Georgia, Thomas Massey of Kentucky, and
Don Bacon of Nebraska. Bacon says, you would also vote
and vi here Meeks's measure. Bacon's taking a very weird
line here of Keene's in congressional approval. And also I
support him doing this.

Speaker 6 (02:32:14):
So surely a procedural objection.

Speaker 3 (02:32:17):
Yeah, it's a I want my boar, but I want
Congress to have a little shred of power. Yeah, so
I think it's alcial work noting what exactly is going
on here. I'm someone who's on the record as talking
about how political economy in Latin America and American imperialism
is usually slightly more complicated than they just want to resource,
but they just want to resource here. Yeah, this one,

(02:32:41):
this one really is Yeah, no, like so it's only
like like like Bolivia, for example, every everyone thinks that
that the whole coup Oblivia was about lithium and it yest. Yeah,
I'm very mad about this.

Speaker 7 (02:32:51):
It was not.

Speaker 3 (02:32:52):
If you look at the people of you look at Camato,
if you look at people who were actually running that coup,
they were all Bolivia agrobarons. Because a huge part of
what was going on there was a rebellion by the
sort of agrobusiness like agricultural elite who like joined with
parts of like a reactionary every middle class. Okay, but
this is not that Venezuela has the world's largest oil preserves,

(02:33:12):
but there were significant problems extracting the oil right. Many
of these problems stem from the two thousand and two
to two thousand and three opposition general strike. This is
back after Hugo Chaves was elected. So in two thousand
and two there was a coup against Chaves that failed
and was sort of overturned famously. But later that year
there was also a sort of opposition general strike that

(02:33:34):
lasted from late two thousand and two to early two
thousand and three, and a huge part of that general
strike was oil workers specifically, and it was very specifically.
One of the things about the structure of oil production
is that there were a bunch of very very highly
paid and highly skilled technical workers who are very very
loyal to the oil companies themselves and who are very
loyal to who are sort of tend to be very

(02:33:56):
right wing. These people went on strike and sort have
got fired on mass. Oil production requires both a huge
amount of heavy capital and a bunch of highly skilled workers,
and if you don't have both of those things, then
you can't do oil extraction. And this has sort of
been a recurring problem for the entire time most sort
of fugual Trofas and Majuro has been in office is

(02:34:17):
that they haven't had the capacity to actually extract a
bunch of the oil. And also they've refused to turn
the oil over to more American companies that have already
been contracted.

Speaker 2 (02:34:26):
And it's also worth noting there's a lot of talk
about like Venezuela having the world's largest reserves, and a
lot of that is like them jinking the numbers by
including a lot of like tire sands, that would be
that no one's going to try to get extract like
fuel from because it's too expensive and too much of
a pain in the ass.

Speaker 6 (02:34:47):
It's just not worth it anyway. And also that claims
to reserves that are not actually part of Venezuela at
this time.

Speaker 2 (02:34:53):
Right right, Like we're not working with exact with accurate information.

Speaker 3 (02:34:59):
Yeah, it's messy. And it's also worth noting that like
the oil numbers, I mean, obviously all oil numbers are political,
but the oil numbers here are extraordinarily political because these
are numbers that are basically used as a pitch by
sort of like the opposition to try to get a
US backed too. And it's also sort of word noting
that the other thing that's happening here, and the reason

(02:35:19):
this is all going to probably cause really significant economic
problems and probably humanitarian disaster, both in Venezuela and probably
also in Cuba, which extensively relies on Venezuelan oil to
have their economy function, is that the Venezuelan economy has
been really structured around oil in a way that they
fail to transition out of multiple times. The first big

(02:35:42):
one I've done in a different episode about this in
the neolipicalis my series a bunch of years ago. But
you know, there was a whole bunch of delivery sabotage
by American car companies over then attempt to build a
car industry. There's a long sort of history of this,
but it means that both of these countries economies are
desperately reliant on oil, and the more of this is
just that is cut off, the more fuck it's going

(02:36:02):
to get for just everyone in Venezuela.

Speaker 6 (02:36:04):
Yeah, yeah, and you can already see how much worse
it's got from the time I went to Venezuela to
to now, like, they're very vulnerable to changes in crude
oil prices, right, and that has, along with corruption in
a government which doesn't really give a shit about the
material welfare of its people, has already made things unsustainably

(02:36:26):
hard for people in Venezuela. And that will only get worse.

Speaker 3 (02:36:28):
Yeah, So I want to conclude, basically on a couple
of things. Wonders that too, this is going to cause
more waves of migration and refugees fleeing the country, both
from potential realist military strikes and form the economic damage.
There's been some moves in the international stage, with China
and Mexico expressing support for the Venezuelan government. Shine Bomber

(02:36:50):
in Mexico has offered to facilitate negotiations and media negotiations
from the US and Venezuela. It's also kind of worth
noting that right before the whole thing, there is a
giant Vanity Fair interview with Susie Wiles, who's Trump's chief
of staff. Who oh boy, this is for Roiderry Dubbs.
This week Coller here God said, Trump quote wants to

(02:37:13):
keep blowing up boats until Maduro christ Uncle, which is
one of the most hideous things I've ever heard. Yeah,
it's gangsters, it's literally terrorism. It's it's a highway.

Speaker 4 (02:37:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:37:26):
Yeah, it is in Australia structurally, unless you resign, we
are going to keep killing civilians. But it's hartshest taker ship. Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:37:33):
It's also a fundamental misunderstanding of how the regime operates
if that is the case.

Speaker 6 (02:37:38):
So because they don't care if their people kept dying.

Speaker 8 (02:37:40):
I have seen Venezuela and people die in the Darian Gap, right,
because in part the government is incapable of providing for
their material needs.

Speaker 6 (02:37:50):
They don't care. Killing some other people with boats is
not going to fundamentally change the way that government works,
because there's only one way it can work.

Speaker 3 (02:37:59):
Yeah, and I think I think there's the one lat
thing I want to say about this before we head
out slash, before whatever giant update comes after the speech.

Speaker 6 (02:38:06):
Yeah, I've got one after you finish here.

Speaker 3 (02:38:08):
One of the big problems here is if people in
the administration really do believe this, they actually do think
that you can knock off the governments with air strikes,
and no you can't, No you can't. I thought this
about the Huthies too. It's wrong, it's never been right.

Speaker 7 (02:38:21):
It's hideous.

Speaker 2 (02:38:23):
We just finished doing like a five parter on bastards
about like the nuclear doom state device that also dealt
heavily with the work of that Italian Air Force General Duhey,
who was the first guy in nineteen twenty one to
be like, all you need are bombers, nothing else is
necessary in militaries now it's nothing but bombers from here,
and if you have enough bombers, no one will ever

(02:38:43):
attack you. And this logic has always been wrong. And
it's also every new generation of like military leaders, especially
in the air power field, are like, all we need
is air strikes. You don't need to send in ground.
You could accomplish all of your goals, all of your
our projection, just by bombing people or shooting missiles at them.

(02:39:04):
And they're always wrong. It doesn't work. It's just not effective.

Speaker 6 (02:39:08):
Yeah, Like I think the Trump administration is somewhat I
don't want to say high on its own supply. They
had success in Syria with removing the territorial Caliphate, mostly
using US air power.

Speaker 8 (02:39:20):
Right, it wasn't a big US that was the US part.
There was still a this shitload of Kurdish.

Speaker 3 (02:39:27):
But it's the thing.

Speaker 6 (02:39:28):
And yeah, eleven twelve thousand Kurdish people died to remove
the Islamic more have died since, right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:39:36):
And also a shitload of Iraqi soldiers, a mix of
Kurds and largely guys from in and around Baghdad, but like, yeah,
like a lot.

Speaker 6 (02:39:45):
Of and a bunch of Arab Syrians. And I don't
miss it like ethnically geeky this at all Assyrian people Armenian.

Speaker 8 (02:39:51):
No, But like a huge amount of the effort was guys.
I mean literally I was in bed with some of
these guys a lot of Like the fighting tip was
like literally really dudes with fucking knives and hand grenade.

Speaker 6 (02:40:02):
It's clearing buildings in hand to hand com Yeah, those
were the people who faced danger, right, like, and that's
what you need to Unfortunately you can't do war with
computers yet. Yeah, but yeah, I think that that might
be where this this belief that and like the Marca
Rubio lobby, right, the Florida Cubans who are invested in

(02:40:23):
this kind of Trump corrollary to the Monroe doctrine, right,
and the idea that they can roll back leftist regimes
in uh like South and Central America. Yep. I think
that's where a lot of the pressure is coming from.

Speaker 8 (02:40:35):
Yeah, speaking of pressure, we are being pressured to go
to ads. That's right, beautiful, and we're back. There's an
update I just came across as we're doing this. We

(02:40:56):
talked about how Tucker is an inside source saying that
Trump's basically gonna clare war. There's another article that just
came out on Stitch Snitches by Gloria Shaw, citing a
pro Trump host on Real America's Voice who characterized the
upcoming Oval Office address as a pr thing meant basically
as an acknowledgment that a lot of Trump's voters are

(02:41:18):
frustrated that he keeps talking about like international issues like Venezuela,
while everything is more expensive for them and they continue
to lose their jobs and the economy is shit. To
quote from that article, and this is them quoting a
segment from that Real America's Voice podcast. The remarks came
during a segment on The water Cooler with co host
David Brody, who teas the nine pm Eastern address as

(02:41:39):
an elevated effort to regain the narrative on affordability. The
President is going to be in the Oval Office tonight
nine pm Eastern, Brody said, big address to the nation.
He's elevating this clearly, this is to regain the narrative
and explain more about the affordability issue in America and
what this administration is doing. I think they're trying to
seize this right off the top and make sure it
doesn't get away from them and the Claims Series.

Speaker 2 (02:41:57):
Basically, like this is Trump trying to steal an night
March on the twenty twenty six election cycle and reset
a lot of what people are talking about around affordability.
Like this argument is that now he's basically acknowledging that
it's been kind of a mistake to focus so much
on his overseas policies, and he really needs to start

(02:42:18):
promising that that Golden Age is actually going to come
for his voters, which the numbers don't bear out right,
Like almost no jobs have been added in the US
since April. There's about seven hundred thousand more people unemployed
now than there were in November of twenty twenty four.
Like things aren't yeah good, Inflation is still wild, Inflation
is real bad. Look food and like the material things

(02:42:42):
that we need are going up in price faster than inflation,
Like it's no good, and people like on his own
side the thought. Jessica Tarlov, who's a Fox News host
of The Five Quote, tweeted a post about how like
the hiring recession just with the golden age attached with
which is like what Trump has been saying. You know,
we're going to have a new Golden age if you

(02:43:03):
make me president. So like the fact that he hasn't
done he hasn't followed through in any of his promises
to actually improve life for his voters, or the economy
is starting to hurt. And I guess I'm hopeful that
that's what it is, rather than the Marines are about
to be in Caracas, right, but I guess we'll see
very soon.

Speaker 6 (02:43:23):
Yeah, great stuff. Yeah, talking of international stuff Trump is doing,
let's talk about the new travel ban. So this this
travel band dropped yesterday, that was Tuesday. So it previously
had this nineteen country travel ban, right. Some of that
was a complete bar to entry if for citizens of
those countries or to new these entries. Some of it

(02:43:45):
was a partial bar to immigrant visas, not to not
to non immigrant visas.

Speaker 7 (02:43:50):
Right.

Speaker 6 (02:43:51):
They have now expanded this to twenty more countries, so
totally banned now from getting new visas to enter the USA.
A citizens of Bokina, Fosso, Maalini share South Studan, and
Syria as well as a Palestinian authority. The Syrian one
is particularly wild because I'll share it justice to the
White House. There are like individual case by case exceptions, right. Like,

(02:44:13):
It's not that they wouldn't block al Shara, I'm sure,
but like it's interesting to look at the justifications that
they use here. What they are basically saying, I'll just
read a couple of them here to give you an example, right. Quote,
at least one country lacks mechanisms in hospitals to ensure
bursts are reported, and widespread corruption, combined with a general
lack of vecking and poor record keeping, result in any

(02:44:35):
non citizen being able to obtain any civil document from
that country, particularly if that person is willing to pay
a fee or engage an individual that specializes in assisting
in such fraud. They go on to basically document failures
in government bureaucracy that they talk about corruption. Right, They
talk about places where birth CTIF forgets are just written

(02:44:57):
by hand. They talk about places where they government does
not control all the territory, prevalence of crime, places which
offer citizenship by investment without physical residents. They also talk
about some of these countries not being willing to accept
their nationals to the US deports and again visa overstair rates, right,

(02:45:18):
which is what they spoke about last time. What is
getting less reporting, or at least was this morning when
I looked, was that they have removed exemptions which existed
for the previous nineteen. These include family member visas right.
So that means that, for instance, someone who could themselves
become a permanent resident or even a citizen, now cannot

(02:45:39):
bring a family member, say a spouse, a sibling, etc.
Across even though those people were people see vetied. And
it appears some there is certain categories of SIVs are exempt,
but I believe not all SIVs, so that's especially immigrant
visa right. The vast bulk of SIVs will be Afghan
people who worked with the US military in Afghanistan. The

(02:46:04):
nineteen countries who are now partially restricted are I'm just
going to read them of Angola, Antigram, Barbuda, Benin Kuttivois, Dominica, Gabon,
the Gambia, Malawi, Mauritanian, Nigeria, senegauld Tanzania, Tonga, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
For some reason, the first five of these are underlined

(02:46:24):
on the White House website. I don't know if some
well copied and pisted them across with hyperlinks.

Speaker 3 (02:46:29):
Like I don't know.

Speaker 6 (02:46:30):
I'm unable to work out why that they're not hyperlinked
in the document, but there doesn't seem to be any
any explanation like this. There's no special set of sanctions
for those and they're just in alphabetical order. They actually
reduced restrictions on Turkmenistan because quote suspension of entry into
the United States of Nationals of Turkmenistan as non immigrants

(02:46:51):
on B one, B two FM and jvs as is
lifted because some concerns remain. The entry into the United
States of Nationals of Turkmenistan is immigrants remain suspended. The
last element of this that I want to cover is
that it would appear to stop international adoptions from the
listed countries, like all of those thirty nine listed countries,

(02:47:12):
which is wild and like particularly unfortunate because I know,
like people who who adopt children from outside the United
States like that is a process that takes years and
I can imagine it being horrifically traumatic to have it
suddenly cut off like this. But consciously, unconsciously, that is
what this UH executive action appears to do. So that

(02:47:36):
is not great. It seems that the United States is
using this as a kind of cudgel, right to encourage
those countries to It's kind of a quid pro quote.
They get what they want they got from Turkmenistan apparently
then that they will remove some of those restrictions otherwise
they will continue them. So yeah, that's not great. So

(02:47:57):
Judge Hannah Dugan's trial began this week. Do you know,
if you're not familiar, she's not the judge in New
Mexico who was accused of providing firearms to somebody who
was not a permanent resident or citizen. She is a
judge who is accused of allowing a migrant man named
mister Flores Luise to leave her court room from a
door that is not the usual door. That door led

(02:48:20):
to a private corridor. In that private corridor, there was
one exit to a public area and also a door
to a fire escape mister Flora's ruiz took the exit
to the public area. He then took a lift down
I think to the ground floor with an ICE officer.
He then attempted to run away when ICE officers attempted

(02:48:41):
to detain him. When he left the lift, he was
caught and detained. So we learned quite a lot in
this and it's just been interesting to follow. First of all,
we see that several of the people who were taking
part in the apprehension were reassigned FBI agents. This is
increasingly right, like all branches of the federal law enforcement

(02:49:05):
have had some of their capacity redirected to doing this, right,
to doing like this. This guy, I believe had misdemeanors
the agents for using signal to communicate. They had a
group chat called frozen water obviously Jesus Christ. Yeah, really funny.

(02:49:25):
The FBI agent conceded in crust examination that's not a
NAP approved by the FBI, but according to one the
DHS apparently does approve it, according to a CBP agent
who is crossic damon there, which obviously creates an issue
for the retention of records. Right biggut signal. If you're
not familiar auto deletes things after a period of time

(02:49:46):
that users can configure. It also appears that when one
of these DHS agents entered the courthouse, court security officers
told him that he needed an escort, but then he
appears to have proceeded without one. Text to colleagues, as
DHS employees said, quote, this is gonna be a pain
in the dick. H So that's that. Yeah, what happens,

(02:50:11):
it seems like is Judge Dougan sent them to the
chief judge because they didn't have a judicial warrant. It's
had an administrative warrant.

Speaker 3 (02:50:18):
Right.

Speaker 6 (02:50:19):
Another judge testified against Judge Dugan, a judge called Judge Severa.
So Judge Severa was with Judge Dugan when they confronted
the agents. Judge Jugan wore her judicial robes when confronting them,
which apparently is not usual. It's not usual to wear
them out of the courtroom, and Judge Severa seemed to
disapprove of that, and then she said, quote, Judge Dugan

(02:50:43):
could quote have been more diplomatic, And then she said,
quote judges shouldn't be helping defendants evade arrest. At the
same time, Judge Dugan's defense lawyer asked her if she
had warned her sister of the ice presence, which she had,
and it appears to her sister had a hearing at
the courthouse the next day, which Judge Severa said she

(02:51:05):
was not aware of. So there's like a lot still
to be unpacked here, right, This is just the first day.
This could go on path Christmas and into the new year,
and it probably will. But there's been some pretty good
reporting on this from a substack called all Rise Media,
and I will keep checking it on this and we'll
report it on it again after the new year.

Speaker 9 (02:51:29):
Hello, this is Garrison Davis reporting from Tokyo. Unfortunately, I
was unable to attend the regular Executive Disorder Group recording
due to being halfway around the globe, so I'm recording
my section solo. This past week saw two devastating mass
shootings back to back. On Saturday afternoon, a mask shooter

(02:51:52):
entered an economics class at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island,
and opened fire with a concealed handgun, killing two people
injuring nine others, all students. About thirty minutes after the
shooting started, the university police announced a suspect was in custody.
Twenty minutes later, they retracted that statement. Then university police

(02:52:14):
reported shots fired in another section of campus, which they
also later retracted. President Trump posted on truth social quote,
I've been briefed on the shooting that took place at
Brown University in Rhode Island. The FBI is on the scene.
The suspect is in custody. God bless the victims and
the families of the victims. This too was untrue, as

(02:52:38):
the university released a statement about an hour later clarifying
that the shooter was not in custody and that over
four hundred officers were on the scene to assist in
the investigation. The next morning, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley announced
that a new person of interest was detained. The Providence
police chief told NBC that they were confident that the

(02:52:59):
suspect was the shooter. Major news outlets later named this individual,
though later that evening this quote unquote person of interest
was released, with the Rhode Island Attorney General saying that
the evidence quote now points in a different direction. The
shooter currently remains unidentified and at large. On Sunday night,

(02:53:23):
in Sydney, Australia, a father and son Sajid and Navid
Akram coordinated a targeted attack against Jewish people attending a
Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach. Fifteen people were killed in
the shooting. Victims include a ten year old girl and
a Holocaust survivor. Twenty four victims remain hospitalized. A bystander

(02:53:46):
named Ahmed al Ahmed, a son of Syrian refugees, charged
one of the gunmen and wrestled his gun away. Ahmed
was later shot multiple times, but survived and has been
labeled a hero by the Austria Prime Minister. Police say
that a vehicle used by the gunman contained homemade Islamic
state flags and improvised explosive devices. The men were not

(02:54:10):
part of an official terror cell, though the Prime Minister
says that they were motivated by Islamic state extremist ideology.
Counter Terrorism officials believed the shooters received quote unquote military
style training in the Philippines a month before the attack.
On Tuesday, self styled online investigators in right wing social

(02:54:30):
media content Mills falsely identified the Brown University shooter as
an LGBTQ Palestinian studying at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies,
citing gate analysis based on surveillance footage of the unidentified
suspect released by police. The university removed this Queer Palestinian
student's online profile in an effort to prevent doxing, though

(02:54:54):
this itself was used by the online smear campaign as
evidence of guilt. Brown University later published this statement quote
in the aftermath of the shooting, We've seen a harmful
doxing activity directed towards at least one member of the
Brown University community. It's important to make clear that targeting
individuals could do a revocable harm. Accusations, speculation, and conspiracies

(02:55:16):
were seeing on social media and in some news reports
are irresponsible, harmful, and in some cases dangerous for the
safety of individuals.

Speaker 3 (02:55:23):
In our community.

Speaker 9 (02:55:24):
It is not unusual as a safety measure to take
steps to protect an individual's safety when this kind of
activity happens, including in regard to their online presence. As
law enforcement officials stated clearly on Tuesday afternoon, if this
individual's name had any relevance to the current investigation, they
would be actively looking for this individual and providing information publicly.

(02:55:46):
On a final note, after the holiday break, we will
be reporting on the indictment against four alleged members of
the Turtle Island Liberation Front in California regarding a New
Year's Eve bombing plot.

Speaker 2 (02:56:15):
We're back and we have some news that's going to
be really sad for everybody here, and it could happen
here and just all of you listening, which is friend
of the pod. Dan Bongino is stepping down from his
work as Deputy.

Speaker 6 (02:56:28):
Director of the FBI.

Speaker 2 (02:56:31):
I think it's been a nice vacation for him, but
you know, American needs him in his much more important role.

Speaker 8 (02:56:38):
Whatever podcast he was doing before he got brought in
to the deputy director of the FBI.

Speaker 2 (02:56:45):
You know, look, if he was podcasting right now, they
would have caught the mass shooter at Brown. I think
we can all agree on that.

Speaker 6 (02:56:51):
Yeah, he did a put costing his way through it.
Either that or just him not being at the FBI
would have made the do their job.

Speaker 3 (02:57:00):
Look, what we're learning from this is that you can
never escape the podcasting minds. No matter where else you
try to go, they will drag you back down.

Speaker 2 (02:57:08):
Oh look, if you make me director of the FBI,
I promise to stop podcasting and start being the most
corrupt director of the FBI.

Speaker 6 (02:57:16):
We've ever had.

Speaker 3 (02:57:17):
That's a tough challenge.

Speaker 8 (02:57:19):
I think, you know, I think I'm I'm in the task,
prepared to work at it.

Speaker 6 (02:57:26):
Yeah. So, yeah, that's cool.

Speaker 2 (02:57:29):
I wanted to talk a little bit about an executive
order that our beloved President put out very recently. Some
of you may be aware of this, but on December eleventh,
twenty I mean this year, twenty twenty five, Trump released
he had another executive order, this one titled Ensuring a
National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence. And basically in this

(02:57:51):
and Trump stated that like, the reason he's doing this
is because it's absolutely critical to the US's future that
we be at the top of the game when it
comes to AI, that we be global leaders in this
burgeoning new field. He states in the EO, these efforts
have already delivered tremendous benefits to the American people and
led to trillions of dollars of investments across the country.

(02:58:12):
Certainly haven't, but we were made in the earliest days
of the technological revolution and in a race with adversaries
for supremacy within it. Trump stated in an interview that
he expects AI to be fifty to sixty percent of
the US economy in the near future, which is nuts.
Maybe that's just because everything else will just go to
complete shit.

Speaker 3 (02:58:28):
You know.

Speaker 2 (02:58:30):
The reality is that like AI is not even close
to being that value in terms of like what the
economy produces, but nearly all of our growth is related
and like it is tied right now to data center investments.
So Trump absolutely needs AI because without it the country
is very obviously in a recession. Like this is the
only thing propping up the image of the economy as

(02:58:52):
not being in the shitter. Now, what does this EO
actually do well? The goal of this the statement is
that it is the policy of the United State is
to sustain and enhance the United States is global AI
dominance through a minimally burdened some national policy framework for AI.
This EO will establish an AI Litigation Task Force within
thirty days of this order going out. The Attorney General

(02:59:12):
is supposed to establish this task force, whose responsibility is
to challenge state AI laws that are inconsistent with the
policy set forward above. Right, that we need to be
globally dominant in AI. Right, So this task force is
supposed to go out and find state laws that it
believes are like an onerous burden on the development of
this technology. Going along with this, within ninety days of

(02:59:34):
the order, the Secretary of Commerce is supposed to do
an evaluation of all state AI laws in order to
point out which ones this task force should go after.
And then the stick that this EO establishes is that
if this task force decides that like a state AI
law is in violation of our need to be dominant

(02:59:54):
in AI, we can restrict state funding to things like
the broadband Equity Access and Ployment program. Right Basically, they'll
cut off federal funding for like broadband access in order
to punish states that try to restrict or in any
way shape or form govern what people can use what
companies can use AI for. And the primary thing this

(03:00:16):
is all about, I know, we all think about the
stuff that like most people have more direct experience with,
which is like all the slop flooding the Internet, the
disinformation that's continuing to cook the brains of a lot
of our peers and elders, and just the fact that
like it's making certain industries full of hardworking people a
lot harder to exist because companies are just trying to
replace quality work with absolute like slop trash yeah, But really,

(03:00:41):
what this is about, and the primary focus of most
of these state level laws regulating AI is the housing market.

Speaker 4 (03:00:49):
Right.

Speaker 2 (03:00:50):
There's a good article in Politico about this, written by
Cassandra Dumay, but she notes that per a National Conference
of State Legislatures analysis in July, there were more than
forty pennings across the United States related to just AI
in the housing sector. And most of these bills are
attempting to stop landlords from using different AI programs to

(03:01:11):
coordinate pricing. Basically, there are a couple of different programs,
the most prominent which is called Real Page, and what
they do is landlords join these programs and they share
information on like what their different properties cost, and then
the AI knows what everybody is charging and can suggest

(03:01:32):
that they charge higher prices.

Speaker 6 (03:01:34):
Right now.

Speaker 8 (03:01:36):
The way that this is supposed to work is that you,
as a landlord, look out at what's publicly available about
the prices of your competitors and look at like what
your customers are currently willing to bear, and then try
to set your prices and you know future price increases
based on that. What Real Page is doing is a
legal collusion, right, This is price fixing it's just the

(03:01:56):
AI is doing the actual active price fixing. The landlords
are just sharing their data and paying a fee to
the service. And so a bunch of states have tried
to stop this because this objectively makes the housing crisis worse.
I know there's some annoying assholes who come out and
be like, you shouldn't talk about anything but in increasing
the supply of housing, and like that that's idiot shit, Yes,

(03:02:16):
we need to increase the supply of housing.

Speaker 6 (03:02:18):
This objectively hurts people.

Speaker 2 (03:02:20):
These programs subjectively increase the price of print. They do damage.
We should be mitigating or making it impossible for businesses
like this to exist. Anyone who disagrees is just being
a dummy. New York passed a law in October that
banned the use of AI algorithms to allow landlords to
do price fixing. There's a similar bill of the Massachusetts
legislation that's making its way forward right now. And this

(03:02:43):
is fundamentally what a lot of the opposition to like
state level AI regulation is about. Is that the landlords
basically think that this is a great way to make
a shitload of money, and tech companies like and we
can continue. We got to make a shitload of money
selling them the tool to do this, and states are
trying to push back on this, and like that's fundamentally

(03:03:06):
what a lot of the impetus buying this executive order
is is an attempt to stop people from making this
even more harmful. There is some like in this that
political article they quote from Kevin Donnelly, who's the executive
director of the Real Estate Technology and Transformation Center, and
he talks about like, well, actually, we're currently using AI

(03:03:26):
to identify buildable lots and promote sustainable constructions so that
we can actually like reduce some of the cost of housing.
And all of these bills, could you know, undermine our
ability to impress people's Like yeah, it's just fucking go
like literally jump off a bridge, man, Fuck you. Yeah, no,
we know that's not how it works. We have data
on this, yo, This isn't theoretical.

Speaker 6 (03:03:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:03:48):
Yeah. Anytime a landlord, anytime a landlord says anything or
to real estate developer that says anything that suggests the
thing they want to do is lower rent, they are
lying and tell because they don't fucking lower rents unless
like a global pandemic happens.

Speaker 2 (03:04:05):
Yeah, like that's a how any of this works, and
this has been controversial. Trump, before putting out the EO,
tried to encourage the passage of a bill through Congress
that would have done the same thing as the EO
right and would have actually had like more force of
law behind it, basically making it illegal for states to
have their own laws regulating AI. That didn't pass because

(03:04:27):
even Republicans don't really like that idea. For one thing,
states rights is still supposed to be a pretty big.

Speaker 3 (03:04:33):
Part of the party.

Speaker 2 (03:04:35):
But for another thing, there's like a lot of things
that conservatives are really unhappy with in terms of AI.
For example, it keeps exposing children to pornography and other
things that kids shouldn't be exposed to.

Speaker 6 (03:04:47):
For another thing, there's a lot of.

Speaker 2 (03:04:48):
American jobs that are going to be lost as a
result of or potentially could be lost as a result
of the AI slop automation of a bunch of industries.
And so there's there's even significant amount of resistance among
Republicans this, which is why the bill didn't pass right,
and Trump, when he announced this EO basically sat down
with like a chunk of the conservatives who are more

(03:05:10):
critical of this and I think basically bullied them into
getting on board and saying no, he promised us this
won't restrict state levels to like improve safety for children. Right,
there's absolutely like no guarantee of that, Like you just
have David Sacks. It was Trump's top AI advisor saying no, no,
none of this is about trying to stop state laws

(03:05:32):
to make kids savor. It's just trying to stop state
laws that will make rent less expensive. Yeah, there's Marjorie
Taylor Green's come out against this. She's basically said that,
you know, this is a violation of states. Right, it's bullshit.
Steve Bannon is in the same place. He had a
good quote I found in an article by The Hill.
After two humiliating face plants on a must pass legislation,
Now we attempt an entirely unenforceable EO tech bros doing

(03:05:55):
utmost to turn Potus magabase away from him while they
line their pockets, which is essentially accurate. Yeah, he's wrong,
ain't wrong about that. So all this is like pretty
annoying and fucked up. We'll see what actually becomes of this.
I tend to agree with Bannon that it's pretty much unenforceable,
like the lawsuit, the court battles that will come from

(03:06:17):
this is just going to be expensive and time consuming.
But I actually don't think this is going to work
the way they want. This is this is Trump making
it very clear that he has bought and paid for
by the tax end, that he understands that he is
hanging on by a thread in terms of popularity. One
of the only things stopping it from getting stopping the
situation from getting worse is that AI spending on data

(03:06:39):
centers and ship is propping up the image of the economy. Right,
that's what this is all about.

Speaker 3 (03:06:44):
Yeah, and this and this is something where he can
simultaneously shore up is tech based and shore up his
landlord base.

Speaker 8 (03:06:50):
Yeah, which are like, yeah, it's great, two kinds of
guys to like Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 (03:06:55):
Yeah, I guess there's an end here where I could.
I wanted to make a note about something also related
to AI, which is that there's an incredibly stupid article
in Vox that came out this week. Case like literally
the title is like, America, you've made it very clear
that you hate AI, But what if it's the only
way to restart the idea machine?

Speaker 4 (03:07:16):
Right?

Speaker 2 (03:07:17):
And this dipshit. Columnist's argument is that.

Speaker 8 (03:07:20):
Like, well, we're we're not running out of ideas and AI,
like human beings can't come up with ideas enough to
create growth at the level that the economy needs to
be growing, and in order to take humanity into the future, really,
AI is the only way to generate.

Speaker 6 (03:07:36):
More new ideas.

Speaker 2 (03:07:38):
And I wanted to look at, like, what is this
based off of? And I think I figured out what,
like the fundamental source of all of this shit is,
which is Back in twenty seventeen, there was a research
paper put out by the National Bureau of Economic Research
by Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, John Van Reenan, and Michael Webb.

(03:07:59):
The kind summary of that article reads as follows. In
many growth models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas,
and then the long run growth rate is the product
of two terms, the effective number of researchers and their
research productivity. We present a wide range of evidence for
various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is
rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. Right, So basically,

(03:08:20):
we're we have more people doing research and we're spending
more money on research, but that research is translating into
economic gains at a lower level than ever before, right
to the point where we're not going to be able
to continue to make economic gains like we used to
be unless something changes. And if you're kind of paying
attention to this, you might notice that that study, which

(03:08:40):
is the underpinning of that Vox article and all of
these claims that we need AI for ideas, really it
is not actually making an argument that people aren't having
more ideas. It's making an argument that it is harder
to profit from ideas than it used to be right now.
That is fundamentally different from people not having ideas. For
one thing, it's reduce using an idea to something that

(03:09:02):
delivers a return for venture capitalists. Yeah right, that's all
an idea is in. This is something that makes money,
and a lot of great ideas like the post office,
don't generate a direct profit. And obviously it's a net
benefit to the economy that we have a post office,
but the post office runs at a loss, right, which
is why you have state funding for certain things, because

(03:09:22):
they're just not going to be the kind of ideas
that like a bunch of Silicon Valley investors want to
throw money into right now. The other part of the
issue here is just a very practical one, which is
that a lot of the ideas, the great ideas last
century that were like most correlated with massive gains and productivity,
stuff like the introduction of vaccines on a wide scale,

(03:09:43):
indoor plumbing.

Speaker 6 (03:09:44):
And electricity on a wide scale phones.

Speaker 8 (03:09:48):
There's not ideas like that that are like that big
and that much of a game changer left, right, the
low hanging fruit has been It's the.

Speaker 2 (03:09:57):
Low hanging fruit has been picked. There's not another the
telephone waiting out there. We already did that. It was
the smartphone. There's not another indoor plumbing, right. There's not
something that's going to be as much of a sea
change for the economy and for the quality of human
life as those ideas, because those were really big things.

Speaker 3 (03:10:15):
Yeah, Like like maybe maybe you could put us something
like actually cleaning the air that we breathe.

Speaker 8 (03:10:20):
Yes, but again that's not profitable in a direct way, no, right,
like you, Yeah, that's an idea that would have a
change that big, but there's not a profit incentive for it.

Speaker 3 (03:10:30):
Right.

Speaker 6 (03:10:30):
We privatize the air of.

Speaker 2 (03:10:31):
It, right, fucking air? Yeah, and there's a lot I again,
I find this, this whole discussion pattern, like it's an
example of the fact that like people like this fucking
vox article who I don't feel like deserves to be
named to this, have been using chat GPT so much
that they're no longer thinking. They're not really sentient in
a meaningful way. Right, Like when you when you write

(03:10:54):
something like that, it's because your brain has been completely
fucking cooked. I did find a good article, ironically, from
twenty seventeen from Vox EU that is titled Ideas aren't
running out, but they are getting more expensive to find,
which is making a lot of the claims that like
I've made, which is that or that I've been bringing
up so far in this which is that it's not
that there's a lack of ideas, that it costs more

(03:11:16):
money to do stuff like that now, like the costs
because everything's so much more complex. The big ideas we're
looking at, artist simple is indoor plumbing. They require a
lot more computing power, they require a lot more people
working on them, right, Like we've plucked the low hanging fruit,
and it ends with a paragraph I find kind of
valuable here, returning to the oil metaphor, we are digging

(03:11:37):
deeper into a trickier part of the rock. Of course,
we could be wrong, and humanity may have just been
shipping away to particularly hard point that will soon give way,
creating decades of cheap ideas. This is the hope of
those who emphasize the revolutionary power of artificial intelligence and
the singularity and accumulation of technology that triggers runaway growth
at some point in the future. Although we all enjoy
science fiction, history books are usually a safer guide to

(03:11:58):
the future. In this case, history suggests that large increases
in research effort are need to offset its declining productivity.

Speaker 6 (03:12:04):
And again, if you want to have.

Speaker 2 (03:12:05):
The big ideas and the star Trek feature that all
of these billionaires like Elon Musk pretend they want, what
you actually have to do is be willing to put
a lot of money into research and development without any
promise of a profit. Your motivation can't be well, now,
we have to get a two hundred percent rate of
return in our investments. Right, it has to be well.
This would improve people's lives and make life more sustainable. Right,

(03:12:29):
like finding solutions to a lot of problems with climate
and cleaning the air, like dealing with like lack of
access to clean water, lack of access to basic basic
medical care. These are not things where doing them means
that your company gets an immediate profit and evaluation in
the tens of billions of dollars. Right, That's just not
the way providing life saving aid to people works. But

(03:12:50):
the net value to the global economy would be massive if,
for example, kids weren't going without food and access to
clean water, and had better access to education, and thus
we're able to go into fields where they become researchers
and generate ideas that eventually turn into profit. Right, Like,
these AI fucks aren't talking about ideas, They're talking about

(03:13:12):
cracking the human mind, Right, that's what they want to do.

Speaker 3 (03:13:15):
It's a good way to Yeah, yeah, I think that
there's another thing we're saying here too. On there's a different,
greater argument about this where he makes an argument that
I think is also very compelling that part of the
decline in the rate of technological change has been the
extent to which everyone who was trying to do this
stuff is just increasingly dealing with more and more layers

(03:13:38):
of bureaucracy instead of actually doing the thing they're trying
to do. And then you know, this is a huge
problem in academia where it's like, okay, so you have
you know, you're teaching in academia, but you're also spending
like a quarter of your time trying to get another job.
You're spending another quarter of your time dealing with all
of the unhinged whatever, like accounting bullshit that your fucking

(03:13:58):
supervisors have, like like like university management has like put
upon you. And this is and this is something that's
also true for government researchers, where there's just like this,
you know, there's been this incredible increase in sort of
the amount of bureaucracy they have to jump through it
like largely because of the right and because of all
of the like weird shit they do, where like they
hate government fundings, so like ah, everyone has to like
justify their funding literally every ten seconds. And I think,

(03:14:21):
I think, like that's that's one of the other angles
of this, and it's something that's only gonna get worse
because this administration is just fucking annihilating the entire basis
of American science. Yeah, they're killing it. The damage that
they've done to the pipeline of people that will produce
these researchers, right with with ways that all suddenly like
American science post docs. Just there's no money for it.
There's no money for grad students. They're killing all of

(03:14:42):
the pathways that would do this, and then they're going, oh,
the only solution is the fucking tech boondoggle we've created
to the problems that we created by just annihilating the
capacity to do science.

Speaker 1 (03:14:54):
M h.

Speaker 6 (03:14:55):
It sucks.

Speaker 3 (03:14:56):
I hate them.

Speaker 6 (03:14:57):
If you want to email list you can do so.
It is cool zwn tips at proton dot me. If
you want it to be encrypted, you should use a
proton matadress as well. They're free.

Speaker 8 (03:15:07):
All right, guys, I think that's that's the podcast listeners, haters, lovers.

Speaker 3 (03:15:15):
It's our last e D of the year.

Speaker 6 (03:15:17):
It's our last D.

Speaker 3 (03:15:19):
Of the year.

Speaker 6 (03:15:19):
Well, I don't know. We'll see if those pills come in,
but yeah, but I hate you.

Speaker 8 (03:15:26):
Happy holidays, Holidays, everybody, put a trans girl on your couch.

Speaker 1 (03:15:30):
Put a trans girl on your couch, love it?

Speaker 6 (03:15:33):
Or a bed I mean yeah, if you.

Speaker 8 (03:15:38):
Yeahble mattress one of those like chairs that leans back
to where it's like basically flat. Yeah, not a lazy
in sure, a lot of options in neutral lazy each year.

Speaker 6 (03:15:49):
Yeah. An inflatable mattress why not? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (03:15:51):
Why not?

Speaker 6 (03:15:52):
Water bed? A water bed is strong enough. Because they
are heavy, you're not allowed.

Speaker 4 (03:16:01):
To have them.

Speaker 1 (03:16:01):
But yes, Anyways, we reported the news.

Speaker 6 (03:16:05):
Arguably, we reported the news.

Speaker 2 (03:16:12):
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 1 (03:16:18):
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.

Speaker 3 (03:16:29):
You listen to podcasts.

Speaker 1 (03:16:31):
You can now find sources for It Could Happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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