It Could Happen Here Weekly 76

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compiletion 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 got to be nothing new here for you. But
you can make your own decisions. I did eat a

(00:27):
whole sleep oreos in front of a seven eleven today
and was scalded by a ten year old. It was
for medical reasons. Okay, how am I going to introduce?
How do we need to start? That's the start, we
already got it. Okay, yeah, we'll do the oreos yep,
ten year old children? Okay, I guess yeah, yeah, yeah,
this is where it works. And today everyone, because it's Monday,

(00:50):
we are starting something that we like to call shitty
Mas Monday. I don't know as we'll actually let us
put shitty in the in the in the title. They
might might we'll get that. That's that's what we're calling it.
That's what we're calling it on the I can't stop
us here. It would be funnier if it just had
like ten seconds of bleep and then it was like
a mayor's Monday, like I'd said, some truly unfathomable shit. Okay,

(01:13):
so we've noticed that across America right there are a
lot of mayors who ran and were elected as liberals, progressives,
certainly as Democrats, but tend to have governed in a
particularly shitty and terrible way that doesn't really have any
material difference from a Republican mayor, but like the way
that they post on Instagram is a little bit different.

(01:35):
So I guess that is nice. And we're starting with
the town I live in, which is San Diego, and
with the mayor we have, who is Todd Gloria. The
people might have heard of Todd Gloria, and last year
we did we did an episode with several people who
work with an housed people in San Diego, mutual Aid
workers advocates, and they spoke a lot about Tod Gloria.
Not in gloing terms, but we spoke about Tod Gloria.

(01:57):
So we're going to talk about his record on homeless,
and we're going to talk about his life a little bit,
and then we're going to look at sort of the
promises he made when he was elected, I guess, and
the things that he's done, which it will shock you
to hear, are not the same things. And we're also
going to talk about his hip hop video. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Bunnily really yeah he did. He did Return of the Mac,

(02:21):
but hilariously changed it to Todd Gloria is Back. Oh yeah, no.
If you want to see some problematically sinking, you're going
to Yeah, ok, brace yourself. Did a local newspaper had
a headline that called it the cringiest video ever, which
rare win for local media. Everyone's in a while local

(02:44):
news does one good thing. Yeah yeah, yeah, occasionally, like
like like a stopped clock there, yeah exactly. Yeah yeah,
all right. So when Todd Gloria talks about his early life,
he talks about being the son of a maid in
a gardener, and it's a way I think of distinguishing
himself from the very few elites who have held power
in the city for a very long time, people whose

(03:04):
names are on every building. But his dad's LinkedIn profile
tell us a little bit of a different story. According
to his own LinkedIn account, Phil Glorier A sixty four
has been in the aerospace industry for many years, including
as a production controller at General Atomics, who people might
remember as a manufacturers of the Predator and Reaper drones.
Oh yeah, so it's a slightly different story, right, It's

(03:26):
different from maiden a gardener. Prior to working at General Atomics,
fil Gloria works for fourteen years the supervisor at United
Technologies and other errors space and technology company. Gloria has
clarified later that his parents didn't work in those specific fields,
that the son of a maiden a guidener thing recently,
but they did when he was born, so he wasn't

(03:46):
He's not. Yeah, I don't, that's bullshit. Like I could.
I I could take this argument and argue that, like
I am the child of like a pancake maker and
a dishwasher, like this is yeah, yeah, it's like it's
it's sort of classic like this classic politicians, right, like

(04:06):
like telling enough of the truth for it not to
be a lie, but but maybe not telling the whole truth.
And like I know, like like my folks worked in
agriculture when I was a kid. They still do, but
like they also worked very hard you know to like
provide for me and get a better place in life,
and I wouldn't want to run them down by denigrating
the work that they did, but hey, I don't want

(04:27):
to be a mayor either. Um yeah, it's also like also, like,
you know, you don't get to do your fucking like
burnishing working class credentials, and then your dad worked for
a fucking like like yeah, yeah, none of my parents
have ever made a Reaper drone, so I guess I
do have that in my favor. It is an extremely
San Diego story. In twenty twenty, to San Diego Union

(04:51):
Tribune wrote he was running. So the San Diego story
that allowed his mother a hotel maid and his father
a gardener, to work hard and afford a home doesn't
end with their generation. That story seemed to admit the
glaring reality that San Diego is one of the least
affordable cities in the world right now, and it's housing
as unaffordable as ever has been, and it's got worse

(05:11):
since tog Gloria became mayor. So who is tog Gloria.
He's an enrolled member of the Tlinget hyda Indian tribe
of Alaska. He was born and raised in San Diego
and graduated from the University of San Diego with a
bachelor's degree in history and political science. He began his
career to San Diego's Health and Human Services Agency, and
then he worked with Congresswoman's Susan Davis, who became his mentor.

(05:33):
He was elected to the city Council in two thousand
and eight and two and twelve and served as interim
mayor from August twenty thirteen to March twenty foty. He
was also elected to the California State Assembly in twenty
sixteen and twenty eighteen, and he chose not to seek
reelection for the Assembly when he launched his campaign for
mayor in twenty twenty. So he's done the kind of

(05:54):
the sort of the climb up of offices that you
see a lot of these folks do, right, And I'm
sure that he has admissions to run for further office.
That would be my guests. So in twenty twenty he
was elected mayor of San Diego. He became our first
gay mayor, our first mayor of color, our first indigenous mayor.
So it was a lot of first for us, and
it is good to have a gay indigenous mayor, right

(06:16):
like if we're going to have a mayor. You didn't know.
It's nice to it's a position, it's over to more people.
But unfortunately he hasn't done a lot else to encourage
up with social mobility. He made a big push for
private sector housing building as opposed to subsidize public housing,
and he promised police reform. In a twenty twenty op
ed for The Union Tribune, Lauria wrote, we watched in

(06:37):
horror as George Floyd was killed by four Minneapolis police officers.
Mister Floyd and other victims of excessive force by law
enforcement demand that we revisit, reconsider, and reimagine how police
operate in our community and how we expect them to
interact with the public. It's time we work together to
create a more just system of policing. The primary responsibility

(06:58):
of government is protected people, all people. Many of us
don't feel safe or protected, particularly our black community, so
it seems like like a pro at least reform statement, right.
He went on to say, whether it's our mental health
crisis or a homelessness crisis, we resort to the same solution.
Send the police and arrest people. We have to stop

(07:19):
severely penalizing some people for minor missteps and invest in
lifting people up from difficult situations. I will need to
put a pin in that. As we talk about his politics,
it will shock you to hear that he's done exactly that.
He also wrote, the rapidly expanding and secretive use of
digital surveillance of our community members is unconstitutional and it

(07:39):
should end. Again. Put a pin in that as we
get back to discussion of the cameras that we're putting
on street lights in San Diego. So In a PDF
of his plan to end homelessness, which has been removed
from his campaign website but were sank represerved by our
friends at Voice of San Diego, Gloria wrote, no more
criminalizing the existence of San Diego's poorest and residents. He

(08:01):
also told right wing news station KUSI that San Diego
cannot claim to be America's finest city, or even a
great city where thousands of people live, unsheltered and dying
on our streets. It's time to stop the band aids,
the temporary solutions, and bad policy from city hall on
this issue, he said, As mayor, my administration will prioritize
ending chronic homelessness. I will focus the city's energy and

(08:22):
resources on results oriented programs proven to get homeless individuals
off the street, connected to services, and back on their feet. Now,
to be fair, while it is tru one, is that
anything Okay, Like any person who was running from mayor
is a system out could lying to you about what
they're going to do. The second thing is, if you
ever hear someone say the words results oriented, it is
time to grab like the largest saber you have and like, yeah,

(08:47):
get to work. Oh yeah, and as we'll discover the
results that he has oriented towards. Somewhat disappointing for folk.
I was going to say for all of us hashtag
for all of us is his campaign slogan. It's yeah,
it's just it's very cringe and I don't know will it.

(09:07):
It's very sad when we see the impact of this
for like the least fortune of people in San Diego
and then like it, it is very funny, but when
you see how this plays out on the street, So
it's also very sad. You know what is also very
funny kind of sad mia the coin So yeah, yeah, yeah,

(09:30):
it's a Ronald Reagan silver coins that pay for my
friends to get hormones so please enjoy these adverts. Thank
thank you Ally Ronald Reagan for funding HRT. Yeah, thanks
for Ronnie. All Right, we're back and we're talking about
Todd Gloria, san Diego's mayor, and we've just before the

(09:53):
break we talked about like his promises, right, so let's
see how he did on those promises. I want to
start with January nine, twenty tw one, told Gloria taken
office a few days before. If you can cost your
mind back, then there have been a significant event at
the Capitol a couple of days before Proud Boys, theo
Nazis ether assorted Chuds decided to visit San Diego. Three

(10:13):
days after they visited the capitol, anti fascists assembled shows
them they weren't welcome, and the police responded by declaring
the anti Fascis assembly illegal, escorting the Chuds around Pacific
Beach as they did various crimes, and trying to shoot
me in the dick with pepper balls. Garrison's just smirking,
I thought, Gloria, the guy who ran on police reform,
had this to say. Mayor Gloria spoke candidly about what

(10:37):
happened at the Capitol and how that's reverberating around the
country after seeing what happened in Washington on Wednesday. What
are you doing out on our streets supporting that mess right, racism, fascism,
anti democracy? Why would you choose to be out there,
Gloria says, despite his feelings, San Diego supports peaceful protests
of all kinds. But on Saturday, police say three people

(11:01):
were arrested and five officers suffered minor injuries. We're asking
for the public's assistance and helping us identify some of
those folks, but we were not able to apprehend yesterday
to make sure that how to account all these are
people on both sides of the debate, both sides, Yeah,
both sides. So some of you remember some other people
have caught out people on both sides the debate. So

(11:22):
I think the most blatant sort of thing he did
with regards to the police comes after Derek Shovin the
copy murdered George Floyd was convicted of murder. I guess
a few you can probably remember where you were that day.
I can remember I was, and it was at the
very least after an entire summer of protest right it

(11:43):
was like the smallest token instance accountability, but I guess
at least it was something. And in that moment told Gloria,
who was looking at that same thing that nearly everyone
was looking at in this country that day. Right. He
thought about what he wanted to do, and he decided
that rather than talking to black organizers who have been
the street for almost a year and have been peppable

(12:03):
and tear gassed and mace and never stop demanding justice,
he was instead going to call the cops and in
such many such cases, yeah yeah, and checked out the
video that the verdict wasn't making them sad. What he
did was took over the entire police like scanner radio
thing and delivered a message to the cops, which I've
got audio of here. Collie. This is Mere Todd Gloriam.

(12:27):
I want to address each and every single one of
you who nobly serve our great city. Today's verdict is
just the beginning of building a deeper trust with our community.
Justice reserved today against someone who does not represent you,
or US, or our department, or who we are as
a nation. So I want you to hear from me today.

(12:49):
I know who you are. You are people who helped
complete strangers on the worst day in their life. You
are people who believe in collaboration, in community. You're who
put your lives on the line every single day to
protect this city. I and the people of sand are
grateful for your dedication and your service. With today's decision made,

(13:11):
there's now time for all of us to come together,
to heal and to move forward. Please take care of yourself,
of each other. You know the people of this great city.
Be safe. Everybody. Has anyone ever said the words to
move forward and not be like not just be an
absolute dipshit. It sounds like it was written by an
ai y. Yeah, if you had a chat GPT for

(13:34):
a liberal mayor, it wouldn't look hugely different to what
liberal mayor's statements. Yeah yeah, chat GPT right, liberal mayor
writing a ponto the cops. Now it's time to heal
and come together as a community. Yeah, stop you black
lives mattering. It's it's scary. Yeah. Yeah, it was extremely

(13:55):
cringe like, especially when you consider how it differs from
what he was saying just a few months ago. And
that again, like this was about a man who murdered
someone and that somebody in it was an STPD who
killed the person, but somebody in San Diego died in
similar circumstances with someone doing a carotid restraint on them.
A few days before this, Gloria also proposed a budget.

(14:16):
In his budget, he proposed that we cut library hour
significantly and lay off one hundred and fifty three library employees,
but give the police nineteen million dollars more than a
previous year. The previous year, I probably don't have to
remind people, is a year in which San Diegans had
turned up in droves at zoom council meetings to urge
the city to do the exact opposite of this. Let's

(14:36):
check in on that surveillance claim he made. You remember
that he said it was unconstitutional, right, So, on the
second of this year, told Gloria in a shocking vault
fast tweeted streetlight cameras and license plates readers can be
helpful public safety tools. You know, just because he thinks
it's unconstitution or doesn't mean he doesn't think it's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(14:56):
he's once again been held back from protecting your people,
San Diego by that pesky constitution. The city pass strong
privacy protections last year and now it's time for at
San Diego PD to use this technology to keep us safe.
Public meetings to get this done start soon. So yeah,
these street lights, they were deactivated in twenty twenty, but

(15:18):
they had previously been introduced and build us a way
to assess traffic patterns, but in fact, they never assessed
traffic patterns. Yeah, yeah, this will shock you. They put
thousands of cameras and microphones on our streets, including one
outside a planned parenthood facility, you know, for traffic. You know,
the funniest part about this, this was literally the thing

(15:42):
about doing traffic science was this was literally Tom Cruise's
cover story and like one of the early Mission Impossible movies.
So that's what we have next. Is it fucking scientology
coming for San Diego. Yeah, it'll it'll shock you to
hear that we stopped using these for very reasonable people

(16:03):
had very reasonable concerns in twenty twenty that you know,
it's not a good idea for the cops to be
able to see and hear everything that you do, to
be able to read your license plate and see everywhere
that you go. Beton wants some back and if people
actually want to follow the discussion about having them back,
because every single time, like every single public meeting, there's
someone and they'll stand up and have a vehement like
position pro cameras, and then it'll turn out that they

(16:25):
are like a prosecutor at the DA's office, or in
one instance, there was a prosecutor in one instance who
insisted he was there in his personal capacity. But like
the lieutenant for Sauron is defending the surveillance cameras that
are being posted around Middle Earth. Curious this, this guy

(16:47):
whose name is not Big Brother, is here to advocate
for having cameras in your home. The king of the
new surveilance for a crash. But he's wearing a a
fake mustache, so you can't tell who he is. So
let's look at what he said about stopping criminalizing homelessness, right,
and this is a big, big issue. In San Diego.

(17:08):
We have a massive and growing unhouse population because our
rents are exceptionally high and our waits are not, so
the number of unhoused people has increased in the Gloria
so of death on the street, which hit a record
of five hundred and seventy four in the county last year.
So that's think it's more than one person dying every
single day in the streets. Right. He's opened some shelters,

(17:30):
but some scouters are scheduled to close. The shelter beds
and traditional transitional housing provided have failed to grow at
the same rate as the young house population. Let's haven't
stopped him taking photos and claiming every single one. It's
a huge step forward. We also continue to build what
it called congregate shelters, which don't give people privacy, right,
which don't give them A lot of people might not

(17:53):
want to go into a congreate shelter, into effectively a dormitory,
and there are a number of reasons why you might
not want to do that, and yet that's what we're building.
There are also some other sort of single lot composity shelters,
but nowhere near enough. He's been a huge backer of
something called California's Care Court. Are you guys familiar with
the care Court at all? No? No, this shit is dystopian.

(18:13):
This could be a whole episode. Maybe one day it
will be CARE stands for community assistance, recovery and empowerment,
which I have a feeling that this is not going
to be about empowerment. Yeah, when it's empowering someone Garrison,
but it's not empowered to people we might want to empower.
What it is in practice, it's a massive expansion of

(18:35):
force conservatives ship. So I'm going to quote from Human
Rights Watch here. Human Rights Watch said the plan promotes
a system of involuntary coerced treatment enforced by an expanded
judicial infrastructure that will, in practice simply remove unhoused people
with perceived mental health conditions from the public eye without
effectively addressing those mental health conditions. Jesus, Yeah, it's pretty bad.

(18:58):
It's it doesn't provide money for mental health services. It
takes money that's already existing in the budget and puts
it across to court mandated treatment. It doesn't provide housing,
which the multiple studies share that Housing First's approach a
housing first approach is a way to solve homelessness. Instead,
it allows for a broad range of people, which include

(19:20):
family members, first responders including cops and outreach workers, the
public guardian, service providers, and the director of the county
Behavioral Health Agency, to refer individuals to the jurisdiction of
the court to take away their autonomy and liberty. It
very broadly covers people it describes to having schizophrenia, spectrum
or other psychotic disorders. Under this system, judges can force

(19:42):
people into treatment and housing. If they don't comply, they
can be forced into conservatorship. Now, obviously evidence doesn't support
the conclusion that involuntary outpatient treatment it's more effective than
intensive voluntary outpatient treatment, and indeed it does show that
involuntary coercive treatment is harmful. But it isn't really about
people with mental health. It's about keeping a house people
where they can't be seen. And Human Rights Watch claims

(20:05):
that this violates due process and international human rights conventions.
And yet the quote Glory and Gavin you some to
be fair, who I'm sure we'll run for president soon,
have been cheer leading this and it's I'm surprised it
hasn't got more press coverage internationally and nationally. Sorry, because
it's a massive assault on personal freedoms, right, and it's

(20:26):
extremely easy to effectively say that somebody quote unquote need
to mental health, help force them into conservatorship. And if
they're not willing to attend these treatments, so they're not
able to attend these treatments, so they're not willing to
go into the housing that they are assigned. Let's say
that they don't want to live in in congret at housing,
right or something like that, Or they're in housing with
someone who they don't feel comfortable or safe with them,

(20:47):
they could be forced into conservatorship and effectively lose all
their liberty. Right. Yeah, it's pretty bad. It's a new
and exciting way of criminalizing homelessness effectively. And like I said,
it doesn't provide housing, it doesn't provide funding for behavioral healthcare.
It just directs existing funding to court mandated programs. So

(21:07):
I could pick hundreds of other examples of this tod
glorious stuff, but I want to pick one more to
focus on, and it's something that I think it gets
a little bit like inside politics, grifty stuff, but it
like it has ruined a good number of careers in
San Diego politics. And I'm really heavily indebted to that

(21:30):
plan certain Voice of San Diego for their reporting on this.
But let's start by talking about public restrooms. So I
think most of us are going to agree that like
having a safe place to shit and wash your hands
is a pretty basic human right, but in San Diego
it's something that not everyone has so since two thousand four,

(21:50):
grand jury reports have warned the city's inadequate public restroom
infrastructure could become a public health threat. That's what happened
in twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen when a hepatip itis
a swept through the city, sickening five eighty two people
and killing twenty. So after the heapet, yeah, it's not
a thing that like you expect, right and like like

(22:10):
on the left coast in America's find a city. Most
Americans will not encounter, thankfully, hepatitis in their lifetime and
sadly made this isn't our only hepatitis outbreak, so that's great.
Oh no, And so after the hep A outbreak, the
city stopped locking restrooms at night, which had done previously,
but that changed with the COVID pandemic when the facilities

(22:33):
were temporarily closed and some have since not returned to
twenty four seventh service. Following this, a twenty twenty one
Shigella outbreak second at least forty one homeless residents, most
of whom were staying in Central San Diego, further shed
light on the city's restroom issues. Much as this was
dealt with in a great report by Bella Ross in
the Voice of San Diego, to which Gloria commented, the

(22:55):
goal here isn't to add as many permanent public restrooms
as possible. The goal is to help get unsheltered residents
off the streets and into safe, sanitary shelter and permanent housing.
Like I don't quite know where he was going for here,
but not having a place to shit is an everyone issue.
This isn't just an unhoused issue, right, Like everybody poops,

(23:19):
and not all of us live in houses and have
giant offices in city Hall downtown. And so it was
this bizarre kind of gas lighting approach, like we fundamentally
have an issue with access to bathrooms and to try
and like reframe this as another issue where he's also failing.
Was It's kind of indicative of their response, but also

(23:40):
very bizarre. Where the city has installed new bathrooms, they're
often installed by private groups as part of development projects,
which is great, right, A good old a public private
partnership has never gone wrong before. So it will shock
you to hear that these private groups are responsible for
maintaining and securing these facilities. And this means that they're
often a lot. So despite literal human shit being all

(24:03):
over downtown and people are being forced to endure the
massive a dignity of having nowhere to poop. In December
twenty twenty two, researched by stsu's Project for Sanitation Justice
found that less than half of the city's permanent restrooms
could be considered truly open access, and that just two
permanent facilities were available around the clock, seven days a week.
Gloria has later acknowledged that city has an issue, but

(24:26):
he's chosen to blame residents. I just need folks to
quit acting a fool in these bathrooms. I mean, it's
not just a homeless population, it's everybody, he said in
an interview. In February twenty twenty three, nearly five years
after the last outbreak, San Diego County again began recording
an uptake and hepatitis say cases, which is great, Right,

(24:49):
We're back to where we started. Much of this reporting
was met with absolutely unhinged responses on Twitter from some
of Glorious staff. They called themselves a todd squad that sucks. Yeah, yeah,
it's pretty bad. So not tour responses come from Dave
Roland who left the old weekly City Beak for a
job in PR and Rachel Lane, who she's tuggs I

(25:11):
think ahead of public relations. She spent June of twenty
twenty posting about black Lives Matter, whilst also doing volunteer
public relations to work for the cops. Wow, amazing, Yeah
yeah here public relations. Yeah yeah, yeah, like there there
there's there's like a there's like a joke on like
there's this like a sort of pejorative label for the okay,

(25:32):
so on Chinese Twitter, there's this there's a joke of
calling people unpaid five cent army, which is like army
is like or well, the number of sense changes over time.
But it's like there there used to be a thing
where like you could get paid by the government to
get like like to to to like that you get
paid pro post to like posts. Wow, whatever fucking shit
the Chinese government wanted to like have posts on. But

(25:56):
this person's actually literally an unpaid but like actual usually
literally like volume cheer. Yeah, volunteer public relations for the cops,
Like what the fuck is this bullshit? Oh yeah, it
was really a magical public when I sent that PRRA email, Yeah, yeah,

(26:19):
I think she framed it as like helping the community
and the police talk to one another in a difficult time.
The future is the giant boot stamping on your faces
when people volunteer to paint the boot. Yes, yeah, yeah,
yeah it is a rainbow boot. Yeah, I mean you

(26:40):
can you can find their feed. Some of the attacks
on myself and some of my colleagues are like incredibly
petty and unprofessional and also quite nerving when you consider
the huge amounts of taxpair money that are wasted on
their salaries which pay them to post. And again, this
is a town where people die because they don't have
a place to take a shit. But but we're paying

(27:01):
people to get into Twitter beef. You know. It's it's
also it's it's also really cool that like the the
sort of two axes of American politics are you can't
use the bathroom because you're trans, and you can't use
the bathroom because you don't own one. And then sometimes
they just coverage and it's the same yeah yeah, yeah,
locking yeah, that's the hands clasping meme locking trans people

(27:25):
out of the bathroom. All right, So now we're about
to get to Todd Squad's finest hour, which is when
they use city resources and work time to make a
video of them singing Return of the Mac. Only it
wasn't Return of the Mac. It was Todd Gloria's back
and yeah, I'm going to make you all watch it.

(27:54):
So that was that was? Was he walking through a
city hall? Yeah? Was the first part him walking to
a security line at the airport. Yeah, which is funny.
That's a security line to get into city hall. Yeah, okay, okay,
have you have you never been to a city hall before?
Mine didn't have that? Certainly does now Chicago, Yes, it

(28:19):
certainly has that. Now my local town one didn't. Are
they are they saying that the mayor lied to the city?
Is that what they're saying? They Yeah, the previous math
Oh the okay, wasn't he the previous mayor? Only for
a little bit of time then he he was entering Math. Okay,

(28:44):
they're blake. Oh my god, I believe you when you said,
why is on me? One guy? That was like twelve guys. Yeah,
it feels like it's gone on for like forty minutes. Yeah,
if stalin grad there's a point where they come in
dressed as flavor flav but I think it's here and anyway,

(29:05):
one of them's wearing a medallion that just says Cocks
on it. The egg Glory is wearing a medallion here
we can probably no note, hang on here he is
again he said, franchise. That's some cops. What is the
leg of the ground circle? I think their heads touching.

(29:30):
There's a person with the cocks medallion. Again, this is okay.
So is one of the worst things that people showed
up with the chain that it was like an SD
for San Diego. When it first comes on to screen,
it really looks like a swassica the Padres logos. That's like, yes,

(29:54):
now shitty asked to go. The Padres did a different genocide,
and it should it be a conflict with the other genocide.
I'm guessing this is like a sports thing or something. Yeah, yeah,
yeah they are the sports ball team. That's what I
thought baseball to be specific. M very proud of him. Yeah,
but yeah, as you'll have noticed, one of the most

(30:16):
cringe things that has ever fucking happened. Yeah, it's pretty bad, right,
like like it's it's it's pretty crushing when like, like
I have personally known people who have died on our
streets and also my Merria is making return of the
Mac videos dressed as Flavor Flavor. So I think we're

(30:40):
mostly done. I want to talk about one more thing,
because no review of San Diego politics will be complete
without a mention of the giant monument to Griff that
is one on one Ash Street? So what is one
on one Street? In twenty sixteen, San Diego leased a
downtown high rise hoping to house city employees. It turned
out that building was riddled with asbestos. And it turns

(31:02):
out the city knew it is riddled when it started
to lease the building. Yeah. Yeah, And then it will
shock you to know that they deny this at first.
But in the agreement to lease to own the building,
it says Bayer acknowledges that the building contained asbestos and
that SEMPRA has maintained an asbestos monitoring and handling program.

(31:23):
So eventually, in twenty nineteen they managed to move staff
in after a renovation that ballooned in cost. In twenty twenty,
they were forced to evacuate the building because of the asbestos.
Since then, DA's investigation has been opened into Jason Hughes,
who publicly represented himself as a volunteer advisor to the city,
according to Voice of San Diego, but unbeknownst to the city,

(31:46):
collected nine point four million dollars from Cistero, who owned
one on one ashtreet. The City Attorney's office alleged but
could not prove that the city's former top bureaucrat, Chris Michael,
ordered City Information Technology Star to purge record tied to
the one on one as Street debarcle last year so
they can improve that she paid to records. But what
they do know that she did was pass a confidential

(32:08):
legal document to Corey Briggs, a candidate for the city attorney.
NBC reported that the memo included a footnote, which Eliot
and others later decried as fabricated. In the footnote, they
claimed that Elliot's office made an effort to shield Gloria
from an outside probe at the one on one Ash
Street debarcle. The footnote suggested an interview with Gloria might
have clarified why the city decided to go forward with

(32:30):
the Ash Street lease, given Gloria's skepticism about a similar
past deal. So it's not clear if this If this
footnote was real or fabricated like then it's alleged it
was fabricated, which it's bizarre, like this whole sort of weird, corrupt,
corrupt thing is resigned. It may this may well not
be true. To be clear, during this time, Dorian Hargrove,

(32:52):
who was a reporter, obtained some of those records, faced
legal threat of prosecution from the city attorney and lost
his job for obtaining those records. So far, the city
has poured more than sixty million into one oh one Street,
roughly the same amount of this annual library budget. It's
only occupied the office space. Yeah, it's great, it's absolutely into.

(33:13):
This has been occupied for like less than a couple
of months for the five years since the city acquired it.
Are they do? Do? Do do? Do we know what
their ties to like the contractors who are doing the
renovations are, and that will be an interesting thing. I
actually don't know that. Yeah, because that that's like that
that's that's that's like that's the classic Illinois griff. Yeah.

(33:37):
You just keep keep renovating a building, keep getting donations
from the from the contractors, well or or or the
contractors are just your friends and so that's okay, Yeah,
keep the money around. Yeah, well they're not doing any
more contracting on it here because the city agreed to
buy the building, which needs one hundred and fifteen million
million dollars in repairs, for eighty six million last year. Yeah,

(34:00):
it's good stuff. Amazing yep. This week, the UT reported
at San Diego's top real estate official did not seek
input from her staff or a view internal files before
recommending a city buy out the one or one as
Street lease. They also reported that in a confidential memo
to the city Auditor's office, anonymous employees wrote, the City

(34:20):
of San Diego should be aware of the level of
waste and abuse that is occurring within the Real Estate
and Airport Management Department, which has led to a toxic, hostile,
revenue wasting, and unproductive work environment. Which is great. Yep.
This is a San Diego we wanted hashtag for all
of us. So this is a lot of inside San

(34:43):
Diego politics, right. So it's a lot of lists of
things and promises made and promises broken. But I want
to come back to the fact that this is a
guy who ran for Mare on a ticket the push
compassion and a relative liberal set of policies, and he's
done the exact opposite in his time in office, he
ran as a progressive downe very well to differentiate himself
policy wise from mayor's like Republican Kevin Fulkner. Obviously, we're

(35:04):
just cracking the lid on some of these policies here.
He's consistently chosen to suppund it, to fund and support
the police over the people of the city. He's consistently
moved to make it harder to live on the streets
and harder to get off the streets, and he's consistently
chosen photo opportunities over real of governance for the city.
His pr people spend hours bashing mutual aid workers like
Michael who he had a guest on the show on Twitter,

(35:26):
and wasting taxpayer money doing it. Just this week, he
welcomed right wing maniac Rishi Sunac, who actually as Prime
Minister of the UK. Despite the fact that people haven't
noticed to our city and San Diego State University researchers
released a report saying negative interactions with police are driving
black people who are experiencing homelessness away from services and
housing opportunities. This is what we got from a mayor

(35:47):
who positioned himself as a progressive and as governed as
a Rainbow Republican. So yeah, that's I would say. That's
all I have to say about Todgloria. If you follow
me on Twitter, you'll know that it's not the case,
and I will continue to have more to say about Gloria.
But yeah, it's really sad. It's deeply sad. And like
I said, it's funny. The crnty Mutic music video is funny.

(36:09):
We'll linked to it in the show notes, but it's
it's also really deeply troubling that this has real impacts
for real people who are already down on their luck
and you know, living on the streets or experiencing you know,
over aggressive policing. All the things that he said he
would fix have just got worse. And yeah, it sucks.

(36:29):
So thanks for listening to me why and about my
city everyone, And yeah, again, my apologies for traumatizing you
further with that video. It's fine. Next week. Next week,
we're well okay. So we would have been doing Chicago's
own version of this exact same person, which is Lloyd Lightfoot,
except to the surprise of absolutely zero people who live

(36:50):
in Chicago and everyone who doesn't live with Chicago, Lightfoot
didn't make it out of her fucking primary. So we're
Insteady Gore be doing Chicago's once in future while not
once potentially future mayor Paul Vallas, who absolutely sucks ass.
So stay tuned for that in another week when I
get a yell about Paul Vallas and inflict some truly

(37:11):
horrific bullshit on all of you. Very excited to get
my revenge. All right, well, I would look forward to
seeing Paul Vallas's hip hop video. Carriston's just sitting there
background of dying. This is this is, this is worse
than anything anything the Daily Wire can throw at me.
Should we just pivot to more come content? Garrisons, Okay,

(37:37):
this has been naken. Happen year. You can find us.
It happened here pot on Twitter, Instagram. But we're gonna
leave before one of us dies. Hello and welcome. It

(38:01):
could happen here with me Andrew of the YouTube channel
andrewism and today I'm joined by Miya and care Hello. Hello, Hello, Hello,
and I want to talk about cities because I very
recently published a video on Sulapunk City Planet. I mean,
I don't know what you're all going to hear this podcast,

(38:22):
but I did recently publish it, and you can check
that out of my channel. And I thought i'd share
a bit about a bit more about one particular historical
urban planet movement that I talk about in that video,
and that is Ebanez A. Howard's Garden Cities movement and
his book Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Are all familiar with either, No,

(38:50):
I don't think so. Yeah, so Ebane's a Howard side note,
by the way, I don't know who looks at a
child and names them Ebanez Howard. But he presented this
idea of the garden city concept in eighteen ninety eight
in a book called Tomorrow, A Peaceful Path through Real Reform.

(39:11):
Later he republished in nineteen or two under the name
of Garden Cities or Tomorrow, And take notes in the
title of the book of the use of reform and
peaceful path because it does highlight a noticeable lack within
Howard's vision that will discuss later. He wants to provide
access to the benefits of both town living and a

(39:33):
country living. As he describes, a town and country are
like magnets drawing people to them, you know. So, according
to him, town offers vibrant society and opportunity and transportation,
but it lacks the beauty of nature. It has pollution
and has crowded, it has disease. I mean this is
Victoria and era cities. He's talking about place what stink.

(39:58):
In contrast, country and country offers the space and the
beauty of nature and it's abundance, but it lacks society
and it can feel isolated and it really spread out.
So you wanted to create a hybrid of both concepts,
a third magnet of town country the combined the benefits
of both. I believe the secret Sorry I have to help.

(40:21):
I've jump in here and make a secret secret thing. Yes, yes,
thank you, yeah, country, but a secret third thing. We
fulfilled our we fulfilled our contractual obligations. One joke. All right,
I'm going to side optical, Andrew, you take it from here. So, yeah,
a secret third thing. How I would believe that the

(40:41):
ideal living conditions for people of all economic backgrounds could
be created by establishing these town country cities with very
specific parameters run by strong government institutions. In Ebenezer Howard's context, again,
no offense to the Ebanese as the world, but jeez,

(41:02):
I can't. I can't let go of those amplications. I
think I think we need to bring back the name Ebenezer.
Actually it's it's it's been too long since I've seen
an infant named Ebenezer, meaning I've never seen one. I
think I feel like we should see more. Just absolutely absurd.
All the timing names. What do you what do you
call the baby? Do you call them ebby or something like?

(41:24):
How do you call the baby Ebenezer? The baby's name?
Why would you you call it the baby's name? You
could call it Niza, you could eventually call it weezak
horrible nickname is awful? Oh yeah, that is okay. I'm
here on the amplications. I do never I never want

(41:45):
to hear that again. Yeah, I digress Howard's writing. I
just gonna call them Howard Howard's Rights in Journey Industry
Revolution was in response to well, the industrial Revolution, you know,
his response to the urban slums, the pollution, the lack
of access to the countryside, and much of his book
is dedicated the idea that cities as they existed in

(42:08):
his time were not sustainable in the long run. By
the middle of the nineteenth century, over half of Britain's
population lived in towns, and in nineteen hundred that proportion
had resuned over three quarters. But English towns and cities
presented social environmental problems of an unprecedented scale, and much

(42:29):
of Britain's history in that period could be connected with
the efforts to ameliorate the frightening conditions that a lot
of people lived in. When it comes to the design,
Howard wanted to create these highly structured, carefully laid out
communities to provide the best conditions possible for every kind

(42:50):
of person he saw. He wanted to put just like
large areas of land from aristocratic owners as a setting
up garden cities that would house up to thirty two
thousand people in individual homes on six thousand acres. And
that whole vision of individual homes is I think it
belies a limitation the imagination there, but it's it's someone

(43:13):
understandable considering the historical conditions of the time where people
were living in these overcrowded slums and stuff. And the
dream was really to have a home of your own
that you didn't have to crowd out, it didn't be crowded,
you couldn't have to share with others. But anyway, I
think a sustainable city should trade the sprawl that single

(43:34):
family homes generate for more dense development. For the most part.
That is, but I digress once again. That's not all
his plan entailed. His garden cities would also include a
huge public garden with public buildings like a town hall,
lecture halls, theaters, and a hospital. An enormous arcade called

(43:57):
the Crystal Palace, not arcade as video game, where residents
would browse a covered market and enjoy a winter garden,
neighborhoods with cooperative kitchens and shared gardens, schools, playgrounds and churches, factories, warehouses, farms, workshops,

(44:18):
and access to a train line. In its ideal form,
the garden city would become a network of smaller garden
cities built around the larger central town. The idealized vision
of the garden city contained very specific utopian elements, like
small communities planned on a concentric pattern that woul accommodated housing, industry,

(44:41):
and agriculture, surrounded by green belts that would limit their growth. Now,
there's a diagram that he did up for his book
that has been popularized that represents like a sort of
a concentric circle design, but he didn't believe that that
necessarily had to be the shape of the garden city.

(45:01):
He still wanted the city to be adapted to local
layout somewhat, and these elements of garden city design were
all into dependent you know. He wanted strong community engagement,
he wanted community ownership of land. Although he wasn't a socialist,
mind you. He was a Georgist. Oh god, wait, that

(45:25):
explains it. That explains so much about all of his politics.
Of course he was a Georgeist. Yeah, quite an interesting
crew of characters. He wanted mixed ten years homes and
homes and types that were generally affordable, you know. To
go on another digression, I find Georgis Owe to be

(45:47):
such an interesting fixation of a philosophy. It's like, you know,
looking all the problems in society, and you know what,
we need a land tax. That'll salt thing. I mean,
obviously that's something. All it is to the to the

(46:09):
that political philosophy, that economic approach. But I just found
I just find it every time I think about it.
I find it funny that it was just really like
the whole movement was basically this one like um tax proposal.

(46:31):
It's really that was the whole focus of it. Yeah,
it's really funny too because it has one of the
sort of largest like collapses of any ideology ever. Like
this is like it was just a very like very
it was. It was a big It was a big ideology.
You know. It literally helped to develop the the board

(46:54):
game Monopoly, you know what. It's like, it was a
huge thing. This is something I've actually been looking into
a lot of it. I've been trying to track down
some of the original like nineteen twenties copies of Monopoly
that's more based on the second game. Yes, I've been
trying to find the ones that were like pre pre
pre Parker Brothers UM, and I've I've I found I

(47:15):
found a few a few. I found a few like
two months ago, but before I could order them, it
was sold to somebody else on eBay. So I've been
trying to track down another another one in the U
in the past two months, and it's been a bit
more challenging, just because I'm kind of a Monopoly freak. Yeah,
it's um. It's really interesting to see how um that

(47:39):
game was developed and then changed over time, and how
hasbur was stepped in. Isn't Hasbro Poker Brothers without stepped in?
And did there do so I'm kind of basically rewrote
with the history of the board game entirely. Yeah, but anyway,

(48:04):
elements to the garden city strong community engagement, communitytionship with land,
mixed tenure homes, homes in type so generally affordable, a
wide range of local jobs with easy commuting distances of homes,
well designed homes with gardens combining the best of town
and country, and green infrastructure that enhances a natural environment
with strong cultural, recreational and shopping facilities in addition to

(48:28):
integrated and accessible transportation. It's not all sunshine and roses, though.
I mean you could look at the sort of the
cream washing elements of the garden city design, and even
in the time they were criticized. I mean, they were

(48:50):
praised for being an alternative to the overcrowed industrial cities,
but they were also criticized for damage in the economy,
being destructive to the beauty of nature, and being in convenient.
You know, they weren't able to be Furthermore, because they
had this sort of top down design philosophy, they weren't

(49:10):
able to truly reflect the natural and organic developments of
a town or a country, you know, so secretly thing
couldn't do either other things that the original two stuff
could do. And then of course you have the mustached

(49:31):
man himself, Marie book Chin, stepping in in the limits
of the city to evaceorate the idea of the garden City.
He talks about how howards scheme was basically a system
of benevolent capitalism that presumed to avoid the extremes of

(49:52):
communism and individualism, and as a result, his entire book
was quote permeated by an underlying assumption. So typically British
that are compromised going to be struck between an intrinsically
irrational material reality and a moral ideology of high minded
conciliation microsh Yeah, I feel like the most brutal part

(50:19):
of that is just the typically British like, yeah, I
mean anything learning. Look at really the plan that Howard had,
you know, the offices and industrial factories and shopping centers
that he intended to provide the Garden city with. Those
spaces are battlegrounds of conflicting social interests. You know, there's

(50:40):
alienated labor, their income differences, their disparities of work, time
and free time. All that conflict is not addressed just
because you make a pretty city. You know, there's no
resolution to the problems created under a capitalist factory office
or shopping center to just because you have a nice

(51:02):
transit system and a green belt. I feel like some
of some of these same problems crop up on some
of the solar punk stuff online as well. I mean
we've an attacked him definitely greenwashing throughout the solar punk
aesthetic and stuff. But yeah, I mean it is it
is an interesting, an interesting, interesting aspect that keeps propping up,

(51:23):
and it's just intriguing that it like dates back over
a hundred years ago, like this same exact thing. Yeah, exactly,
and funny enough, you know, his garden cities. We even
fallen short of utopias that were thought of before his time,

(51:44):
you know, like I'm not even just utopias, but also
actual historical political experiments that you know, try to address
various social problems, you know, like unlike the Greek polis,
which had some basis of face to face democracy, Howard
just had a central council and a department structure based

(52:08):
on elections, Unlike in Thomas More's utopia, there's no proposal
for rotating agricultural and industrial work. Unlike the Paris Commune
of eighteen seventy one, which was established long before Howard
wrote his book, he had no sort of incorporation of

(52:30):
that sort of political experimentation in the garden city development.
The criticism really is how superficial a lot of Howards
ideas are, right, Like, there's just a lack of social
analysis analysis in fear of just design. Yeah, Georgism, Like

(52:51):
sure it would probably be like better than what we
have now. Well yeah, but but it by no means
like fixes all of the systemic issue. It's like Amsterdam, right,
I would rather have capitalism while riding a bike. But
Bookchin also talks about how these communities do not encompass

(53:11):
the full range of possibilities a human experience. Again quote
because you know Bookchin is Loki a boss. Right, Neighborliness
is mistaken for organic social intercourse and mutual aid. Well
manicured parks for the harmonization of humanity with nature, the
proximity of workplaces for the development of a new meaning

(53:32):
for work and its integration with play. An eclectic mix
of ranch houses, slab like apartments, and bachelor type flats
for spontaneous architectural variety, shopping, marked plazas in a vast
expanse of lawn for the agora, lecture halls for cultural centers,
hobby classes for vocational variety, benevolent trusts, so municipal councils

(53:54):
for self administration. One can add endlessly to this list
of misplays. Criteria for community that save to off your
skate rather than clarify the high attainment of the urban tradition. Indeed,
the appearance of community serves the ideological function of concealing
the incompleteness of an intimate and shared social life. Again, boom,

(54:19):
you know, and people are brought together. You know, they
have all these conveniences in these pleasant trees, but they're
still culturally impoverished. They're still atomized, they still deal this
stark reality of capitalism in the spaces that they're they're
gonna inevitably spend most of their day at work. Like

(54:40):
it's nice that the city is well designed, but how
much of it are you going to get to see
if you still have to go to work for eight
hours plus a day. I mean, if there anything at
least you know, the commune will probably be shorter, but
that's about it. And that's if you get a job
in the city itself. This is interesting because in some ways,

(55:01):
the invention of the suburb in the in the years
after this kind of tried to solve for this issue
while also just doing it in an incredibly racist way.
Like you can you can you can see the invention
of the suburb of trying to create these little nestled
communities but also getting away from the the the urban center,

(55:22):
which was seen as this like scary place full of
people who were non white. So you have like this
white flight thing that developed this notion of the suburbs,
which in some ways kind of does this, but in
a in a much worse way. Actually, it makes it
makes the idea of the garden city look like a

(55:43):
much better alternative to what the suburbs did. And it's
it's just interesting that even the version of this that
got implemented was just done in a way that it's
so much more dystopian and depressing. Yeah, I mean, and
Booked Chin addresses that that comparison to the suburbs as well. Right.
He says, in the best of cases, the new towns

(56:03):
differ from suburbs, primarily because job commuting is short and
most services can be supplied within the community itself. In
the worst of cases, they are essentially bedroom suburbs of
the metropolis and add enormously to its congestion during working hours.
I can't, I can't believe book beat me to the
punch on this one. I'm devastated. This is the first

(56:29):
time booktions ever has has ever has ever beaten me.
This is this is this is really terrible. So but
despite some of these flaws and criticisms, how it was
passionate about his idea, all right, I mean he published
the books. He also organized like he's actually he's not
sitting on Twitter, right, He's actually doing something about his ideas.

(56:53):
So he organized this Garden City Association in eighteen ninety
nine in England to promote the ideas of social justice,
economic efficiency, beautification, health and well being in the context
of City Planet. That Garden City Association later became the
Town and Country Planet Association, which still exists to this day.

(57:14):
Women played a very active role and continue to play
very active role in the organization. I mean, as Howard
says himself in his book, Women's Influences Too often ignored
here that ladies this guy's are feminist. But when the
garden city is built as a chokey will be woman's share.
And the work we found to have been a large one.
Whomen are among our most active missionaries. And so he's

(57:40):
doing some Abdullah now that yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's
liberating life, you know. But yeah, the TCP in the
Town Country Planet Association has continued to campaign for a
new generation of garden city is based on modern modern

(58:00):
Godden City principles. They will cross sector and government influence
policy and legislation. There is awareness through guidance and training.
They promote affordable homes and inclusive, healthy and climate resilient places,
and they try to create texta world barriers, opportunities and
practical solutions necessary to make new garden cities a reality.

(58:26):
They also are genuinely interested in empowering people to have
a real influence over decisions about the environments and to
secure social justice within in between communities, or at least
that is what their website says. Outside of the TCPA,
the idea of godden city definitely sort of rooted itself

(58:49):
and urban planning and the urban planning tradition and it
did sort of feed into this rise of green spaces
within urban landscapes that we now find around the world.
The concept of the garden city is definitely still revisited today,
but it's considerably different from the original idea. It's also

(59:11):
taken the garden city as an inspiration, as an esthetic
inspiration to create greater integration between urban areas and green spaces.
In his time though, going back to the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century, Howard was a successful fundraise again

(59:31):
he was trying to get things going. In the first
years of the twentieth century. He built two garden cities,
Letchworth Garden City and Welwyn Garden City, both in Hertfordshire, England,
and both still exist today. Letchworth was an originally quite successful.
It was first you know, an ancient parish from like

(59:53):
the left hanth century and remained a small rural village
and so the start of twentieth century when the land
was purchased by a company called First Garden City Limited,
which was founded by Howard and supporters, and they went
on to establish the United Kingdom's first roundabout the Solar

(01:00:14):
Shot Circus. A lot of urban like park land and
open spaces, including a green space named after Howard called
Howard Park. But after Howard's passing, the first Garden City
Limited was sort of taken over in nineteen sixty and

(01:00:37):
the company so it changed how the town was managed.
The residents of the local council kind of lost, some
say the original Garden City ideals were reduced, and the
corporation eventually became for the first the company created a

(01:00:57):
corporation transferred ownership to the corporation which is now called
the lech Withth Goden City Cooperation, and then that cooperation
was replaced by a charter will body in the nineteen
nineties called the lech Withth god Cy Heritage Foundation, which
continues to own and manage the estate to this day.
Letchworth was a sort of an interesting experiment. The people

(01:01:17):
who were founded, who helped to found that town, were
very much otherworldly as some people would describe them. They
for example, they had some people describe them as health freaks.
They actually voted on a band to set against the

(01:01:39):
selling of alcohol, a ban on the selling of alcohol
in public premises. Oh boy, so which is I mean
for a British village? Right? In the early nineteen hundreds
to vote against having a pub. Unheard of, right, they

(01:02:00):
eventually create a pub. That pub didn't serve any alcohol.
Bumber bumber, hate to see it. Yeah, but lat truth
was still like a real pioneer, you know. It's approached
to blend in. Town country was used in the Australian
capital Canberra, in hell Rao, in Germany, in Tapanila and Finland,

(01:02:21):
and in Messa parks in that field, and of course
in the other Garden City well win how I had
arranged for that land to be purchased by a company
called Second Gardain City Limited, real creative there. And first
they were gonna call them the City Digs. Well, but
a couple days later they changed their mind, probably because

(01:02:42):
they realized as a dumb name. And then I wasn't
gonna say anything, but yeah, that's not that's not a
great name. Yeah. And so the town is laid out
along these tree line boulevards. It's sort of a new
George and town center. Um. There's a lot of ass
out of parks, as to be expected. And the planners

(01:03:04):
had intended to create the Guarden City to have like
one shop called well Wind Stores, which is basically a
monopoly that all the residents were expected to shop at. Lastly,
I think I want to bring up one final inspiration.
I was about to one on whether I would include
this one or not, but I said, you know what,
I might be entertaining and I might want to talk

(01:03:26):
about it further in the future. A certain character by
the name of Walt Disney. Oh no, this is Epcot.
This is this is this is the experiments or prototypical
city of tomorrow. Yes, this is the Florida Project. Oh no,

(01:03:48):
Disney's Epcot was designed in concentric circles with radius. This
is this is the worst job scare. Oh, but it
should be noted, or rather it should be expected that,
unlike Howard, mister Disney envisioned having a lot of personal

(01:04:11):
control over the day to day management of life in
his city. So really, Epcott was only loosely inspired by
Howard's idea of combining the populace with industry. Um. This
city would have had a hotel at the center with
more than thirty stories and a convention center. There would

(01:04:34):
be an internationally themed town center. Um. There would be
a mega mole. There would be themed restaurants, shops, and attractions.
There would be a monorail, Yeah he was. He was
a car free community advocate of Disney. Yeah. Like, his

(01:05:00):
plan was that nobody would drive in Epcot. Delivery trucks
and other autobiles and other automobiles that needed to enter
the city were to be kept underground. So it's kind
of like a fusion of Ebone's ah what an elon
musk that sucks? That sucks. Yeah. Also, this city would
be climb a controlled with a glass roof. Yes, I mean,

(01:05:26):
And it's funny because like he couldn't even do this properly,
Like he couldn't even build this instead instead of got
turned into like a like a like a bare skeleton
of what his original plan was because Epcot will failed
in so in so many ways, the reason being that
he ended up dying right Yeah. Yes, like even on
his deathbed he was still sketching up designs for Epcot,

(01:05:49):
so he never really got to implement it. Pro life
Dictator dies anyways. Yeah. Actually, like the actual like living
communities in in Disney World Florida are are so different
and in many ways they're they're just like another suburb um,
except you're in a suburb owned by Disney. Yeah, yeah,

(01:06:15):
and I mean it's gonna be a peek into what
life would have been like on the Epcot. Right. Your
home would have been pre fabricated and modular. Certain materials
and technologies could be tested as soon as they were beable.
By the way, why they have nothing against free fab homes,
I think they could be very useful. Um, But Disney's
idea was basically, your home is pre fab so that

(01:06:35):
any time he wanted to install an update on it,
he could. It's great, you know, like the entire city
was basically like a guinea pig for any technologies he
came up with. Um, And so he wants to really
retain absolute control of the city, like they wouldn't even
own anything. Disney alone would own the land so that

(01:06:59):
he and his success, says, can make updates and changes
without ever being snowed down by this pesky thing called
citizens votes and rights and all that. It's funny because
this is actually now under attack by Ron de Santis
in Florida. The sovereignty of Disney may like change a lot,
and I think already stripped it. Yes, But but but how

(01:07:22):
this plays out in actuality as yet to be determined.
But it is funny that this is actually like this
is a very very recent thing, Like it's just like
a week or so. But see what we can see
here is one of the inevitable transitions as as as
we saw in British colonial rule in India, which is
that direct corporate rules always replaced by injurrect corporate rule

(01:07:45):
via the state. Yeah for know which, Yeah, it's in
some ways. We will probably learn that it was better
to live under Disney than Ron de Santis. But that's
not saying much. Next time he opens up a disun
this wild No, no, it's just it's just it's literally

(01:08:07):
just like eighteen gipmo exhibitions. Oh lord, I mean Descenter's
world will just be the United States with descent potential election. True,
sad but true. But let me tell you a bit
more about EPCOT. Right, if you were eighteen or older,
you have to have a job. Also, you don't get

(01:08:29):
to retire. Nobody is allowed to retire. You only get
to stop working if you either die or leave amazing
one way out. Also, he and reason being, he believed
this would prevent slums or ghettos from foreman in any

(01:08:50):
part of his magical city because I mean, if everyone
has a job, then nobody will be struggling to pay
rent or eat. Right. Funnily enough, of course, a lot
of Disney workers today can't afford to pay rental eat.
But hey, the theoretically everybody in Epcot would have their
basic needs met also, though in exchange for that, they

(01:09:14):
wouldn't have any privacy because Epcott was also supposed to
be like a tourist attraction. You know, you look outside,
you win new, and tourists are like looking inside, you
win new. That was a thing that was Epcott, thankfuley
doesn't it wasn't fully implemented. I mean, some people have
said that Singapore is like a dystopian city state run

(01:09:37):
by Disney. But we could talk about that another time.
That's a basic rundown on garden Cities past, present and future.
The idea of it, I think was, you know, notable, admirable,
good effort, but flawed um and because it lacked a

(01:09:57):
strong ideological foundation, economic foundation, an analysis that took into
account the contentions speak within society that uh, you know,
manifests in the urban landscape. And I think it's a
clear oneing that for solo punks and for any people
who are interested in urban planet as a whole. That.

(01:10:20):
You know, aesthetics is not everything, design is not everything.
You know, they asked me some some meat to those, Um,
let's say some meats underneath that flesh. It's a really
weird analogy. But yeah, yeah, no, but like yeah, the
principle of Okay, I'm just gonna I'm gonna, I'm gonna
abandon the Walter Benjamin thing I was gonna do there,

(01:10:42):
but no, try it, keep keep going, keep Benjamin thing
I have. I haven't. I haven't actually read any of
his stuff in like five years. But one of Benjamin's
things was when politics is sort of displaced, you're converted
into aesthetic, it becomes fascism. So don't do that. In fact,
have actual politics and not simply reduce your politics to

(01:11:02):
an esthetic or to aesthetics, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, true, true.
All right, Well that's it for me. You can follow
me on YouTube dot com slash Andrewism, on Twitter at
and his School of Saying True, and on picture dot
com slash Andrewism. You can find us at happen here,

(01:11:23):
pod or cools on media, on Twitter and Instagram. Um,
and you can find me tweeting about my desire to
understand the mechanics of how Disney World operates at Hungry Boutie,
mostly on Twitter. Yeah, welcome to Dick. It happened here

(01:11:54):
the podcast that I am a Wong occasionally hijack talk
about Asian American stuff, and you know, some some so
some some pretty interesting Asian American stuff happened, which is that, Yeah,
there was a sort of massive sweeping cultural victory question
mark for the Asian American community TM when everything ever

(01:12:18):
we're all at once did. Okay, I'm getting conflicting sources
about exactly the record that I said at the Oscars,
but it won seven Oscars, did very well. Everyone is
very happy. Um. Yeah, So I decided that I was
going to use this to talk about some other stuff
that is related to it, and with me to talk
about many things, including sort of the family in patriarchy

(01:12:43):
and Asian American culture and media. Is Tiffany Yang, a
filmmaker from New York. Tiffany Welcome to the show. Hi,
thanks for having me on, Thanks thanks for being on. Um.
So we were for trying to figure out how precisely
we want to sort of start this because you know,

(01:13:04):
there's a lot of sort of angles you can take.
I think that the thing that I want to start
with is well, like a okay, everything, every All it
wants is a very good movie in a lot of ways.
And I think it's sort of it's kind of the
apotheosis of a structure of Asian American media that I've
I've talked about before on this show. Um that I'm

(01:13:26):
gonna I'm gonna run through a brief explanation of what
this is. So something that I, yeah, I've talked about
a bit before that that I think about a lot
is the way in which Asian American media has been
It has a basically a structural form. It has there's

(01:13:47):
a very specific story or set of story structures into
which anything you're trying to tell has to be fit
and and that that series of things is okay. So
you have a small business, you have you have a
bunch of immigrants that come to the US or that
they are well usually they're already in the US and
they're trying to run a small business and they're having
these issues sort of integrating into into sort of like

(01:14:09):
a wide American society, and there's some kind of conflict
in the family, and the TV show or the movie
is about like resolving this sort of conflict. Um. Yeah,
And I think Everything Ever All at Once is like
the best version of this that we've ever gotten in
a lot of ways. But you know, and something I've

(01:14:32):
talked about in a certain New Year's episode is that
there's something about I guess Asian American like the way
our sort of political culture works that makes it so
that this is the only story that we tell. And
you know, I mean you can look at a lot
of the sort of like, sorry, I've been rambling for
a lot, but I want to get this out of
the way before you go further. But you know, like

(01:14:56):
there there's a lot of movies that are like it's
like you know, shows like Fresh off the Boat, like
and Fist is also sort of like almost literally this, right, um,
Like Turning Red is sort of like an emblematic example
of sort of thing that is exactly this, Like Fresh
off the Boat is basically this, right. I think part
of the sort of there's a kind of ideological shell

(01:15:16):
game happening here that's about the family. Everything Ever, All
at Once has a lot of similarities. The Crazy Rich
Asians in ways that are kind of not immediately apparent.
I have finally reached the point TM, but which is
that both everything everywhere all at once in Crazy Rich
Asians ends in exactly the same way, right, which is

(01:15:38):
the the like the the sort of family tension that
has had been sort of building up and playing out
throughout the entire movie, like is resolved and everyone sort
of goes back to being a family. And this is
interesting specifically for Crazy Rich Asians because in the original,
like in the book version of this story, the family shatters.

(01:15:59):
The plot of that movie is this this Asian American
girl is dating like this guy who's from Singapore who
has not told her that he's from like an unbelievably rich,
like Singaporean family, and the story is about him going
about them going to Singapore and realizing that this guy
is unbelievably rich and that his family is just assholes

(01:16:20):
who suck And in the book, like the family like
mistreats both of them really badly, and so they just
leave and they book it and they cut they cut
off the rich family. But in the movie they some
weird thing happens where like the the main character plays
Ma Jung with the guy's mom and like a miracle

(01:16:41):
occurs in the family works out and everything everyone wants.
How's a very similar sort of thing where like the
way this movie ends, and I would just say this,
like I do, I do like this movie a lot,
but the way that it ends is Evelyn, who is
Joy's mom, walks up to her and says, you're fat,
and I don't like that. You gotta tattoo. But also

(01:17:01):
the family is good and like we should work it out,
and then they do, like a baricle occurs, and there's
this sort of running ideology in this which is that
like the family is sort of sort of too big
to fail, like you're you're not allowed to have a
a movie that's about something that's not about the family,

(01:17:22):
or be a movie where you know, like the end
of it is the people walk away from their family
because it's hurt them a lot, right. And I will
also say that sort of Asian American cultural production that
doesn't center the family, it actually just doesn't get read
as being Asian American, right, like I think, I um,

(01:17:44):
I don't know if you've seen this, but like Being
View has this beautiful documentary called Minding the Gap and
it's about like his trauma and his like sort of
youth growing up in a broken home and hanging out
with skateboarding friends, some of whom are like black, and

(01:18:05):
that just never gets talked about as an Asian American film,
even though it's made by an Asian American filmmaker, and
his experience as like someone who actually migrated from China
is such a big part of his story, Like, because
it's not about the sort of family conflict and reconciliation,
it actually doesn't get read as an Asian American film

(01:18:27):
a lot of the time, which to me is interesting.
And yeah, I just wanted to second your point that
like in both of these films, everything everywhere, all at
once and crazy rich Asians, like nothing actually changes. You know,
there's the reconciliation within the family, but nothing about the
family structure changes. Like I think Evelyn her the sort

(01:18:50):
of like conciliatory gesture she gives is like, oh, I'm
your mom, and I would always choose to be with
you in any universe. I forget, like the exact praising
it's been a while since I yea, it's something like that.
It's like, you know, I would still want to be
with you because I'm your mom. And it's like this
very um the families is its own explanation. Yeah, and

(01:19:17):
I think it points to sort of this is the
movie that I think hit the exact limit of this
kind of of this kind of sort of Asian family
politics because in it in in it's in in the
sort of like moment where it needs to justify itself,
it can't. It doesn't have anything. The moment's it's sort

(01:19:40):
of it's it's it's it's it's empty of an actual
like it's it's empty of any sort of like ideological
message about why this should be redemptive, right, like just
you know, and and I think this is something that
like we don't think about enough, which is that like
like okay, if if if your mother hurts you like

(01:20:02):
a lot, right, like them being your mother is not
a redemptive thing. I mean, this is something I've been
thinking about a lot in the context of sort of transness,
and you know, and in the ways that like trans
people like i mean literally get killed by their families,
in the ways that they get you know, kicked out
from their families, and the ways that sort of this

(01:20:28):
this this sort of self justification of it's good because
it is right that like the relationship. Yeah, this is
sort of what you were saying, right, is like it
justifies itself by just like, well, I am your mother.
It's like, well that's not an argument, right, yeah, right,
and it's not enough. Like I think Joyce spunds the

(01:20:49):
whole film like fighting to be seen by her mom,
and in the end, her mom doesn't really give any
reason why she loves Joy, Like there's nothing like specific
to Joy herself as a person. It's just like you're
my daughter, I'm your mother. Of course I love you. Um.

(01:21:10):
And you know, like why should that be something a
queer child settles for, like just this very basic baseline
of acceptance rather than anything that like actually celebrates who
they are as an individual. Yeah, and that's something that
I also wanted to talk about with this is like

(01:21:30):
and this this is not just like the specific thing.
You know, we're talking a lot about the specific movie
because this is like the most recent one that's come out,
and and we're not sort of saying this to like
like there is a lot of like good stuff in
this movie, Like this is the movie like like Joy
is probably the character who is like closest to me
who I have ever seen in anything at any point, right,

(01:21:52):
and like there was something, you know, sort of incredibly emotional,
like I cried a lodger in this movie that was
like incredibly emotional about it, you know, like seeing yourself
in it, Like yeah, yeah. But there's something about the
way that Asian Americans, like especially sort of like cysaid
Asian Americans, think about queerness that that I think is
is you see in this movie, which is that. Okay,

(01:22:16):
so this movie has two queer relationships in it, right
unless you're going to count like the guy in the Raccoon,
which it's funny, but I don't know about that one.
But right, but but you know, the actual like the
actual two sort of like queer relationships are between Joy
and her girlfriends and then between Evelyn and the tax lady.

(01:22:40):
And there's two things that are interesting about that. One
is that both of the both of the characters they're
in relationships with are white and very and this this
is a visit like something that's very very specifically like
pointed out about Joy's girlfriends, and you know, you know
that's the joke is like, well, she's half Mexican, but
She's played throughout the entire hier thing as like an

(01:23:01):
outsider who like doesn't understand what's happening in this sort
of scenes, like doesn't understand the family dynamic, doesn't doesn't
understand his knees and you know, and you see this
again with Okay, so who who have like you know,
they're able to imagine a world in which, like Evelyn,
the main character who has like just been homophobic this

(01:23:21):
entire movie, is in a queer relationship and like, yeah,
like I good for her. But if you look at
who it's with, right, it's it's the character in the
movie who is this tax lady who her thing is
that she is like like she she she she is
like the human representation of the sort of white supremacists,
like capitalist bureaucracy that is, you know, attacking this family

(01:23:44):
and is sort of like driving these people into the ground.
And then she's sort of redeemed by by like love
and queerness. But there's this way that queerness gets positioned,
this outside of asianness, by the way that like the
by the way that the only possible crew relationship that
they can imagine is with a white person, as you know,
as someone who's explicitly marked as an outsider, right, Yeah,

(01:24:11):
I think that's a really good point. Like queerness, It
queerness is like attached to these anxieties over assimilation. Yeah,
from the perspective of like the older generation like evaln
and Gong Gong is like the fear of them being
assimilated too much into this Western culture um, which is

(01:24:33):
just a very it's it's very strange to me that
this is the thing that keeps coming up in like
Asian American narratives and discourses because obviously like Asian like
Asian queer cinema in Asia is like such a powerful
cultural force, and the film makes all these one car

(01:24:54):
why references, and I feel like one car Hi has
made like one of the greatest works the cru cinema
Happy Together um of like recent decades. And so it's
just it's so strange, um how Creus is being positioned
as like an external threat. And I mean, like you know,
you you could you could take a sort of like

(01:25:15):
like the if you if you want to do the
lib analysis of this, like China has had queer rulers
like there has there has the West produced one, like
maybe I possibly at some point maybe but like, you know,
like it's kind of like it's ideologically frustrating, right, like
like you know, you can fall back on the like

(01:25:35):
we know that, like we have records of where people
in China for like five thousand fucking years, right, Like
it's you know, but like I think, I think what's
really interesting about this is that this is something that's
seen as so natural that people writing like even like
like Asian American like writers writing about the film don't
even notice it, like they just they just sort of

(01:25:56):
passively reproduce it. Yeah, And I don't know, I think
it's like I mean, it's deeply frustrating, like being an
Asian queer person, because this is something that like, you know,
the the kinds of right wing nationalism that like are

(01:26:19):
like they you know, like there's a different kinds of
sort of Chinese nationalism, right that will make that will
make this like explicitly make the same argument that like
gay people are like a like a sort of like
I mean, I guess they would have they would have
said it was borgewab, but now it's a sort of
like decadent Western like imposition onto the like onto the
world of Asia. But it's like like no, but then,

(01:26:39):
but then, but you know, you you get these like
sort of like very well credentialed, like progressive like Asian
American writers who are just either implicitly or almost explicitly
making exactly the same argument. Yeah. Yes, And it's also
what the American right wing thing right like they want

(01:27:01):
to China as like if you know, China represents this
like sexual threat of having like the society where everyone
is in their place, you know, like they imagine that
these sort of like traditional gender roles are much more
adhered to in China, which is why it's like we're
on the decline, like China's rising. So it's yeah, it

(01:27:24):
is a very weird idea that nationalists on both sides
are attached to. And it's disappointing that UM Asian Americans
who think of themselves as progressive or even radical kind
of reproduce this unthinkingly. Yeah. I mean one of my
like recent black Pill moments was I don't know if
people remember this, um, but there were there, There was

(01:27:47):
there was someone on Twitter who very kind of famously
got like just like obliterated for saying that. I first,
for saying that like people people shouldn't like canceled. There's
a scription to the New York Times after they like
did the whole thing. They did this whole bullshit that
a few people don't know what the sort of scandal was.

(01:28:07):
So the a bunch of people who'd written for The
New York Times sent them a very very bild letter
saying like, hey, can you guys like fix some obvious
like like not even saying fix, like can you report
on trans issues better here? Or some like glaring short
of mistakes that you made in New York Times through
a hissy fit and got really mad at them and

(01:28:28):
and you know this, this person's reaction was like, oh,
well you can't you like don't cancel your subscription, like
you have to support the news. And it was this
like sort of moment and she she is one of
the hosts of like one of the big progressive ation
American podcasts, and it was like it was just you know,
for me, it was just really sort of like black
pilling moment of like, oh, this is like this is
like what like like you know what like like three three,

(01:28:50):
three seventy five a month. It is what these people
think my life is worth. Like yeah, I don't know,
I think This kind of ideological stuff is very deeply
tied into the way that Nasian Americans have been representing
and thinking about. The family said of recent years, and
but but, but but before before we go into that,

(01:29:11):
do you know when the family is trying to sell
you it is it is the products and services that
supported this podcast. We have to take an ad break.
We will be right, okay, Miah, just out of just
out of curiosity, since I don't have the pleasure of
listening to the ads while we're recording, Like what is
going to play during that? I have no idea, Like,

(01:29:34):
it could be anything. I don't know. It could be
a gold ad, it could be the f While we
haven't had the FBI tried to do it yet, we've
had We've had we've had law unfortunate agencies. We've had
people selling gold Ronald Reagan coins. We've had so I
don't think I've seen that, like since I was a child.
I think they used to have like television commercials. Yeah,

(01:29:58):
they do it on podcast now. Apparently a thing that
I discovered when people sent me thelyp so who look
like maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe they'll do a Thatcher
one and you two can own the the immortal words.
There is no such thing as society. There is only
individuals in the family. Yeah. Wow, well whatever it takes

(01:30:24):
to keep the podcast running. Yeah, so all right, something
I wanted to sort of circle back to is, you know,
I think one of the one of the sort of
one of the things about this kind of Asian American media.

(01:30:45):
You know, you have this this sort of ambivalence of like, like,
who what the sort of queer child is supposed to be?
And you know, like I would say this like it
is a pretty common experience if you are like a
queer child of an Asian family that your family does
fucked up shit. Do you like that's a thing? Um?

(01:31:10):
And this is I wanted to ask you about something
that you've been talking about that I'm sort of interested in,
which is one of the things that I don't know
when you trying to talk about this stuff. There's this
way in which the way we sort of collectively think
about when I say we this is like I guess

(01:31:32):
like a kind of specific Asian American thing, the way
we think about trauma gets involved very quickly. Yeah, And
I was wondering if you talk about that some more. Yeah,
I feel like there's this there are these sort of
like unspoken discursive rules where when you talk about trauma
within an Asian immigrant family, there are like, first of all,

(01:31:58):
it's always intergenerational trauma, right Like you can't talk about
like a queer child experiencing trauma without then like getting
into the fact that, oh, like the parents have experienced
traumatic things like through the process of immigration or like war,
the refugee experience, etcetera, etcetera. And so there's this sort

(01:32:19):
of like economy of trauma where some members within the
family get their trauma treated as more legitimate and others don't.
I think it's like really common to hear this refrain,
which is like, oh, um, second generation immigrants are like
the you know, people like US Asian immigrant children who

(01:32:41):
were born in the West can't possibly know that like
the real trauma that our parents or grandparents went through
because they were the ones who like fled their countries
or experienced war firstand or grew up in poverty. But
then it's also just like when we talk about eight

(01:33:02):
intergenerational trauma, um, there's this sort of like obfuscation of
who is enacting that trauma within the family, right Like
if the intergenerational trauma exists, like who is passing it down?
And so I don't I don't know if I'm articulating

(01:33:23):
myself well on this, but um, yeah, I guess the
essential ideas that I think there's this like mechanism which
kind of um immediately delegitimizes any talk of abuse or
trauma from the perspective of um Asian youth or from

(01:33:48):
the perspective of like the child in the family. Yeah,
and I think I think that's a kind of I
don't know, there's just really baffling, deep unwillingness in a
lot of ways to think about And I think this
is a sort of broader like cultural thing too. But
there's just deep unwillingness to think about the family as

(01:34:08):
a side of violence and as a side of sort
of profound violence. It's like, you know, like it's the
place where the violence that shapes you comes from in
a lot of cases. And I mean, like, I know
a lot of people this has happened to you, has
happened to me to some extent, And there's this real
kind of you know, this is what this is what
I actually really liked about everything everywhere, all at once.

(01:34:31):
It's like it like goes into that in a lot
of ways, Like it is a movie for about ninety
nine tenths of the movie. It is a movie about
how like the people around like how how the people
in your family can hurt you repeatedly, and about the
sort of like the ways that they think about it,

(01:34:52):
the way but you know, there's there's but but but
but but I think this is where this sort of
perspective thing comes into it where like, yeah, we're I think,
like we don't really have a language to sort of
talk about this stuff, and the way the film deals
with it is sort of like you know, is is

(01:35:14):
this kind of like very specific kind of nihilism, which
is like definitely a thing that you can fall into,
right like you know, like that like that that is
definitely a reaction to being traumatized. But it's seen as
like illegitimate and world destroying I think in a lot
of ways because it causes you to sort of like
if if that's your experience of the family, like you're

(01:35:35):
going to leave or you're going to or you're only
going to stay in by force, and so you know,
the movie sort of rejects it. But but you know
there's this way that it's very difficult to talk about
this stuff and about the sort of like long arc
of how people have thought about the family before us. Right,
what's an example of what you mean by like how

(01:35:56):
people have thought about the family before us? Well, I
think I think in the Chinese context in particular, there's
a very there's like there's I mean, if you look
at what was happening in in the sort of rat
like in the in the sort of very radical periods
in Chinese history in the last you know, if you
like last sort of hundred years, you look at sort

(01:36:17):
of what's going on in nineteen twenty five, if you
look at what happens immediately like after the Chinese Revolution,
like there is a real period of like questioning, questioning
patriarchal authority, of questioning like what is the family for?
Like why why are we doing this? And you know,
I think I think the answers they came to were
ultimately unsatisfying, which is that like, well, we need the

(01:36:37):
family around because like we we are, our economy does
not function without uncompensated labor. So the maoists sort of
like attempt to grapple with this fails. But I don't
like as as as as with many things that Maoism
attempt to grappled with, I don't think they were wrong
to look at it. I think their solutions were all terrible.

(01:37:00):
But I think there's this kind of I mean, there's
this reaction. There's there's a kind of older Asian queer reaction,
which I think is like kind of deeply suspicious of
the family, as you know, this thing that has an
enormous amount of potential to sort of inflict violence on
you and sort of de stabilize your life and cut
you off from resources and information. I mean, I was

(01:37:27):
struck by someone else making this comment about how like
in everything everywhere, all at once, you know, they can
imagine like this sort of infinite um number of universes,
but in every single one, the family unit remains the same. Um.
You know, like the social arrangement never changes across all

(01:37:49):
of these different universes. Um. Yeah, I thought that was
a really good point. Um. There's just like the sense
in which a lot of the recent Asian American culture
can't imagine the family as like something that can be transformed.
It just kind of takes it for granted as this

(01:38:10):
like static eternal structure which can't be challenged, and people,
if they find reconciliation or happiness, it needs to be
somehow within that same arrangement. Yeah, And I think a
lot of that has to do with like the thing

(01:38:33):
that we've decided about elders collectively, which is another one
of those things that like is like the legitimacy of
the authority of elders is something that in Chinese revolutionary
history is something that's very much up for debate, and
almost everyone who decided to like take up arms against

(01:38:54):
the state, like almost all of those people were like,
this is messed up. And then you know, I think,
I think partially as a result of how badly sort
of the Maoist project goes, and then also I think
as as as a kind of like explicit part of

(01:39:16):
state policy, there's this way in which that kind of
authority gets reinscribed and any sort of questioning of it
gets gets looked at as like, oh or like a
return to sort of like Maoist egalitarianism or whatever. Which
the thing that I see a lot in the ways
that like not really Asian Americans, but like in the

(01:39:37):
in in in in, I don't know, you see this
in Chinese discourse like a decent amount. I mean, you
see this in kind of um messed up ways and
some of the Asian American discourse from people whose families
never participated directly in the Maose project. You know, they
might have like a lot of people who immigrated here

(01:39:59):
to the u US weren't like they were connected to
the KMT. They were on the nationalist side. There are
people who ideologically were never aligned with um any sort
of socialist project, and you know, Bill Bill, Bill invoke
things like well, you know, this is exactly what my

(01:40:20):
ancestors were fleeing from China. Yeah, and it's like, okay,
like you guys, like I I have really bad news
for you about like what the KMT's ideology was, and
like I feel like this is sort of these are
like the egg monopoly people, right, Yeah, And but I

(01:40:41):
think I think like this has two effects, right, which
is like, on the one hand, those people like that
like specific kind of very weird Chinese anti communist is
sort of incredibly privileged in in the way that like
that stuff's thought about. But then you know, like there
are a lot of people who are in like from

(01:41:04):
like from China who are in the US, like specifically
because of the failure of this project. And this is
something else you talked about in the Atlanta episodes, but
like several of the people like who were killed in Atlanta,
like were there because like liberalization drove them to a
point where like they you know where where they had

(01:41:25):
to work to support their families, and you know, and
and and the the other thing that sort of comes
hand in hand with liberalization is that that and I
don't know, this is something that like people really don't
want to think about, which is that you know, economic

(01:41:47):
at somebody said political liberalization in China came hand in
hand with this massive and transport to the patriarchal project,
which is the one shot policy just sort of slamming
down like a hammer of being of the state, just
being like we're going to just directively like we are
going to directly control your reproductive autonomy. We are going
to you know, we are going to force we sterilize people.
We are going to like would literally just limit the

(01:42:10):
amount of kids you can have. We are going to
make this sort of like giant, I don't know, like
this enormous state intervention into like social reproduction and the
people who were the victims of that, Like you don't
really hear from them much. I mean, like what one
of the stories I'm still just haunted by is that

(01:42:30):
one of the people who died in Atlanta, like her
family refused to bury her, like refused to take her
remains to bury her because like their village was like no,
you you you never married, so you can't be like
buried in the village. And wow. Yeah, and so you know,
like her like she had a funeral in the US
that was attended by no one who knew her because

(01:42:52):
none of her friends could roll up because they get
a rushed by the cops. And you know, there there
were these like there were these kinds of like transnational
linkages of like the violence of people's families that just
disappears from this sort of like narrative of like like
Asian Americans like is the family is this union basis relation? Right?

(01:43:19):
And on that note, did we also want to talk
about how the sort of like focus on the small
business slash family or the family as a small business
obscures some of the class conflicts within the Asian American community,
Like yeah, these very massage workers you're talking about, I
remember in the wake of that Atlanta shooting, a lot

(01:43:39):
of people started they kind of use the massage workers
as like an emblem of the Asian American community more
broadly one in fact, like a lot of the sort
of like more professional class Asian Americans or like the
Asian Americans who get platforms in the media. Um, they

(01:44:02):
aren't like, they aren't from the same class as like
the massage workers are. Um, we heard from like a
lot of small business owners, but those are those are
the same people who like own massage parlors and hire
these exploited workers, who like have undocumented status and who
can thus be like put into much more precarious positions

(01:44:26):
than like you know, US citizens and so um, yeah,
I did you want to talk a bit more about that. Yeah,
I mean I think I think the small business owners
are it's a really sort of interesting and powerful character,
like especially in the US, because it's it's like it's

(01:44:50):
possible to be a small business owner to be really
poor but also not be propertyless. Yeah, and I think
that like the like the specificically like the core of
the American dream is to own property. And you know,
so here is this class you can point out as
like oh, well, we're really poor, but you don't actually
you never have to look at labor relations at all, right,

(01:45:12):
and that that like frees you from having to actually
think about what capitalism is. And and it also lets
you it lets really like the actual sort of like
the real sort of Asian American ruling class, right, like
the actual billionaires, right. And you know there are Asian
American billionaires. There's there's a good number of them. There's
also just a bunch of just Asian billionaires. Because there

(01:45:36):
is a there's just an Asian ruling class. It lets
those people, especially in the US, hide behind the image
of the Citi small business owner, right, and they can
you know, and they can use it the launder their
sort of reputation because like it's in the US, like
being anti small business is like the hardest position you
can possibly take. It is like like it is you

(01:45:58):
you like, I don't I don't know if people remember this. Um,
a friend of mine, Vicky Osterwall, wrote this book called
in Defensive Looting. Oh yeah, yeah, great book. Everyone should
read it. Like they were like sitting US senators were
like like yelling about the book, like like a huge
swasp left left got like unbelievably mad about it. Like

(01:46:20):
a lot of you will probably also get mad about it.
But like, like one of the things that always comes
up with with with looting is like, I you know,
it's like, well, are you gonna loot small businesses? And
it's like, well, actually yeah, Like like in so far
as people looting small businesses, a lot of times it's
the people who work there and it sucks because working
for small businesses is fucking terrible and right, yeah, are

(01:46:43):
people in the community where those like small businesses are
and like our discriminatory towards Yeah, And Vicky makes this
point about this, there's just kind of populism that gets
invoked where you know, one of the police statements about
I think it was about ferguson Um was they're talking
about like they burned down our Walmart and it's like, well,

(01:47:06):
what do you mean our Walmart? Like fucking owned the Walmart,
Like don't get shipped from it, Like everyone who works
on the walmartt's fucked. Everyone has to buy it from
the Walmart. But it's it's just really hollow like populism,
Like it's this thing that like you assemble a community
based around then around the corporation. And I think that's
kind of what's been happening with Like I think it's
the reason why Asian American culture is like like this

(01:47:27):
because it's it's this. It's like, you know, there's there's
this this very hollow like in a lot like like
multinational like populism has been assembled around like the figure
of the small business owner, but it's ultimately like it
doesn't really have ideas other than you should let us
like you should let us make money without being racist.

(01:47:49):
And also the fact like the it has that idea,
and then it has the idea that the family is
good because it is and that's kind of it. Yeah, yeah,
I don't I don't know why. I think there's there's
a lot about well, okay, I would say this, like

(01:48:12):
the the the day people are okay with looting small
businesses is the day the US can actually fall, and
any until before then, like it will it will survive
because that's always the sort of last defense of capitalism
is like what about small businesses? And you will you
will get people who call themselves communists who will be
like no, no, no, actually these are fine. It's like

(01:48:33):
I mmmm mmmmm, Okay, so I wanted to kind of
pivot back around a bit to talk about elders a
bit more because I feel like I kind of sidetracked
us off of that, and I, yeah, I think there's this,
really I don't know, there's been this kind of like

(01:48:54):
rehabilitation of the elder in a way that like was
something that was deeply questioned in periods where it was
kind of like it was more obvious and less and
more socially statable to sort of look at the power
these people have and how much it can suck. H Well, yeah,
I think I noticed this picking up during you know,

(01:49:17):
the sort of like first state of anti Asian attacks
during COVID. I think that's when like a lot of
progressive Asians started invoking the figure of the elder, right,
like our elders are being attacked, Like an attack on
our elders is an attack on our community, Like that

(01:49:39):
sort of thing um where the elder is kind of
like used as a sort of emblem of the innocence
of the Asian American community or what do you like,
what work do you think the elder is doing there
in this discourse? Like why does it have to be
an elder? Like what if you were just saying Asian

(01:49:59):
people being attacked, or like what if it was Asian
youths being attacked? Like what why does it have to
be the Asian elder? Because I think we were talking
about this earlier. Empirically it's not exactly true, right, it
wasn't mostly old people who are victims of these attacks. Yeah,
And I mean I think this is one of the
areas where like the murky, like you know, it's really

(01:50:20):
really hard to get good data on cruise being attacked
because I mean, police reports are obviously incredibly unreliable, right,
and then you know, like they're self collected data, but
the self collected data is not all encompassing it, you know,
it's sort of skewed in its own ways. But yeah,
I think I think there's this way in which, like,

(01:50:44):
I don't know, like I think there's almost as way
in which elder is almost like they're also like like
personally infantilized by it, where it's like the pick as
this sort of like like part of like they used
as a sort of symbol of like people who can't
defend themselves, which partially isn't true. Like there were actually
examples of like Asian elders like defending themselves. But but

(01:51:05):
it does this kind of like and also like the
rates of gun purchase purchases one up with it. I mean,
I know, like just the ncdotally in the Chinese American community,
I knew so many like like elderly Chinese people who
are like, I'm going to go out and buy a
gun though. Yeah, yeah, I think like the way that

(01:51:29):
that thing it was invoked has a lot of sort
of like I don't know, it was it was like
there was this way in which they like they became framed,
is like this is sort of like this is the
apotheosis of like everything that it is to like be
Asian American h and that like that like the fact

(01:51:51):
that that was under attack was this sort of incredible crisis, right,
And I think like I think there's like that as
gears a lot about what was happening, which is that
like if there was one clear trend in the data,
it was that women were being attacked at like a
way higher rate than anyone else. And you know, and

(01:52:13):
this has been a thing that has sort of continued,
which is like I don't know, like there's been more
attacks in the last like few months, right, and it's
it's it's it's been a lot of like young women
getting like young Asian women getting pushed in front of trains,
and people have just really stopped caring, like yeah, to

(01:52:36):
the extent where like it's it's like literally a meme
that you can like watch the cycle of like the
stop API hate like signs coming up and down. Right.
And I don't know, I think I think the elder
part of it kind of like it obscured a lot
of what was actually happening. Yeah. I feel like the
last incident that really made a splash in the media was, um,

(01:53:01):
the murder of Christina Una is that urt I forget
what her last name is, but um, Christina Una leave
um getting murdered in Chinatown And this was already a
year ago. Um, And I haven't really heard anything since,

(01:53:26):
Like I see things in the local news. Um that
where I live in Queens recently had a couple of attacks,
um just a week ago, I think, but it didn't
make the national news or anything. Yeah, And I think

(01:53:46):
the way that the kind of like hierarchy of victimhood
I guess affected that like has had I you know,
I'm not sure it's the biggest like single reason why
everyone has sort of stopped caring. But like I like
I I think the sort of stop api hate like
that moment kind of only happened because there was this

(01:54:09):
sort of backlash against like there's this backlash against Black
Lives Matter and against the insurrection, and people needed another
people needed a kind of like ideologically safe like thing,
like way of demonstrating like how good their politics were
or whatever. But I think it definitely contributed to sort
of why like stuff has been abandoned. And I also

(01:54:37):
wanted to ask, do you see this, this thing, this
stixation on elders um is happening at the same time
that ancestors get invoked a lot in like Asian American literature,
especially queer literature. Um, I'm thinking of authors like Ocean Wong,
Like how did ancestors become such a thing? Yeah, really,

(01:55:00):
I don't know, I really don't understand how that happens.
Like a lot of my ancestors fucking sucked. Like I
don't know, like like I don't know how to sort
of like I don't know. I have this sort of
I don't know, I have this sort of weird sense

(01:55:25):
of the kind of politics at work here, which is
like there's a lot of kinds of politics that I
think can work in for example, in indigenous contexts that
are very very powerful, that don't really work in the
Asian American context where like like our ancestors, Like if
you're a Chinese, right your ancestors did some fucked up shit,

(01:55:46):
Like your ancestors did a lot of jedicides, like you
you like you know, And I think I think that's
something that's actually at the core of the kind of
like right wing Chinese nationalism, which is that like right
when Chinese nationalism is basically about the anger that China
was like ceased to be able to be an empire
because like if you look at the sort of colonization process, right,

(01:56:08):
like the Qing are this very very expansionist like like
sort of militarist imperial state, right like they're they're they're
they're they're like they conquered, like they if they find
a bunch of wars around Tibet, they conquered shing Jun
and they do a genocide, They're like immediately they're pushing south.
They're pushing like they're they're basically pushing like in every

(01:56:30):
direction they could possibly push and then they kind of
like you know, they they hit like a pretty impressive
territorial boundaries, and then their ability to do imperialism gets
kind of halted because suddenly there's other imperial powers like
in the region, and you know, and the sort of
end of this is like they they lose all these

(01:56:51):
wars and you have the start of like you have
the start of the Century of Humiliation and all of
the sort of stuff that happens there. But it's like
the actual thing that they're like the actual thing that
the Century of Humiliation people are humiliated about. Well, I
mean the fact that it's called the Center of Humiliation
and not like I don't know, like the like the
Century of Death or something, which for people who don't

(01:57:13):
know what Century of Humiliation is. Um, So, I think
it's it's I think that the actuals I think it's
like eighteen forty nineteen forty. There's this is sort of
nationalist term around understanding this period in which China is undergoing,
like you know, it is genuinely like like people in
China are like suffering enormous imperial violence. Um Like, I

(01:57:34):
like unfathomable numbers people die in this period this is
like the Opium but basically a period from the Opium
Wars until you know, sort of through the various Japanese
conquests and then sort of ending essentially with the Revolution.
But yeah, I don't know, Like, I think it's interesting
that it's it's understood in the in terms of national humiliation,
in terms of sort of like the loss of disability

(01:57:56):
to do I mean to do imperialism, and instead of
in sort of terms of like the just unfathomable human
suffering that one on. And I think this all of
this sort of comes back to this weird kind of
intensification of nationalism kind of among everyone in the last

(01:58:19):
like especially since twenty twenty. You know, I mean there's
been there's been like a kind of like explicit like
Chinese nationalist terms and parts of left. But I think
I think it's really kind of like hit everyone in
ways that like hasn't really been examined. There's been this

(01:58:39):
kind of difficulty in having a kind of like theoretical
and cultural language to speak about Asian American nous, partially
because well because like the you know, I've talked about
this before, right, but like the term Asian American was
created by like Third worldists, right, many of who are

(01:59:02):
a Maoist someone whom are certain Marxist Lendinness. But like
that that whole language just died. I mean, like you
you know, you know you can still find like Boba
Vankian or whatever, but like the sort of language is
like understanding yourself was part of the Third World. And
like you know, like as as like a liberal national
liberation movement, like that's over. National liberation is basically dead

(01:59:23):
as a politics, like and any and anyone who tried
it after a certain point like just got called sessionists
and now just get murdered horribly. Um. And like you know,
and there's there's obviously also the sort of like China, Vietnam,
Cambodia fighting each other thing that that has this massive
impact on that kind of politics, and it gets replaced
with um, this kind of politics that's based that's you know,

(01:59:46):
it gets sort of replaced by like the Asian civil
rights movement stuff. Right, But like there's there's no but
the things like ASI Rescue is it doesn't have politics,
like as politics are completely incoherent. Like you have of
like you literally have these marches where you have like
old school like camp desk squad guys like marching next

(02:00:07):
to maoists, And it's like why you you can because
it's supposed to be a sort of like panaty logical
thing and over time, like all the all the ideologies
they're supposed to compose, it die. And but but that
meant that like there's there's no like there's no actual
language to sort of talk about the experience because the
two sets of vocabularies that like or like wait like

(02:00:29):
frames of understanding the struggle or just have both kind
of like eire basically collapsed or been discredited. And I
think that leaves this whole and people are trying to
fill the hole by like adopting other people's politics, But
like it doesn't work for us. I don't think, Like

(02:00:50):
I I don't know, like I like, I think people
will disagree with me about the potential of of sort
of ancestor politics and politics of elders, but like, I
don't think it does that much for us. Yeah, I
think the last thing that I do want to say is,
you know, if we've reached the limits of a lot

(02:01:11):
of the politics that we've been seeing here, Um, what
what what kinds of politics and what kind you also
sort of what kind of media do you do? You
do you see as stuff that we can used to
go beyond this, because I think there is a lot
of like like, there are a lot of like people
creating good like queer stuff, not like yeah, actually I

(02:01:40):
think I mentioned this to you. Um. I recently watched
this film called Return to Soul Um. It's by a
director called Davy two, and it's about a French Korean adoptee.
So she was adopted from Korea as a baby, I
mean yeah, as a baby by French parents and grew
up in friends and the film is like kind of

(02:02:02):
a journey of her going back to Korea and meeting
her birth family. But it's like, it's not it doesn't
fall into the same sort of like family natalist politics.
It's very like deeply questioning of of the family and

(02:02:24):
of even like this idea that um, I guess what
the sort of like wayward queer stray Asian child like
needs in order to heal from trauma, Like she doesn't
really have reconciliations with either family, like either her French

(02:02:50):
family that she comes from, like they're very much sidelined
in this film, they just don't play that big of
a role. And then she and then when she goes
to Korea, you know, she has these very like awkward
encounters meeting her birth family because they're like immediately like, oh,
you know, we're so sorry we gave you away. Now
you're back, you could come live with us. And then

(02:03:12):
she's just like hold on, like I don't even know
if I consider you my family. And so it it
seemed to me like to really depart from this like
script that we've become so accustomed to in Asian diasporic
film in a really interesting way, I thought. And it's

(02:03:32):
also a lot about music, Like it's a very moody,
music driven film. It doesn't feel that identitarian. Yeah, I
would recommend everyone to watch it everything every all at once.
Is we have that we have now told the best
version of that story, and I think we can find
you know, I would just like like this is this

(02:03:54):
is a really broad recommendation, but like, go watch One
car Way. This is this, Okay, this is the most
film nerd I'm ever gonna get that doesn't involve I
am I suddenly blanking in the name of the thing. Sorry,
Danel The most film nerd I'm ever going to get
that doesn't involve the Commune de Paris eighteen seventy one
is go watch one Car? Why like they're there? I
don't know. I I think I think there is something

(02:04:16):
to be gained by looking at you know, I mean
they're like looking at Hong Kong cinema looking at I
don't know, I I like good, good Americans have finally
realized that Korean cinema was really good, which is wonderful. Um,
I'm glad, I'm glad. We're, you know, getting to the
place where people realize that it's that like, there's a

(02:04:38):
lot of great stuff going on there. But we know
it is possible for Asians to tell different stories because
all across the world they already are, right like we
we are already telling stories that are different and more
interesting than this. And I think, well then, and I
must typically saying, like, then everything everywell it wants. But
then that then then the specific structure that that the

(02:05:00):
the Asian American movies fallen too, and yeah, people should
go discover them because they're great, and yeah, we can
find new and better kinds of queer joy and yeah, yeah, Tiffany,
thank you so much for joining us and being on.
I don't know why I'm saying us as if there's
more than me here, but yeah, thank you, thank you

(02:05:21):
for being on the show. Yeah anytime. Thank you for
having me on. And it's been a really stimulating conversation. Yeah. Yeah,
this has been naked Happened Here. You can find us
at Happened Here pod on Twitter and Instagram. You can
find Coals on Media at Coals on Media. I hope
it's Cools on Media. I'm actually not one hundred percent suffets.

(02:05:41):
I should know this by now. I simply have not learned.
M Yeah, go go, go, go into the world. B
gad crime. Welcome Dick had Happened Here The show about

(02:06:09):
things following apart and how to put them back together again.
I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today we have a
really exciting episode. We're gonna be talking to a group
of workers from the California Nurses Association, which is specifically
their national Organizing Committee, which is I think better known
to most people. And then you are a national Nurses
United and these people are part of a shift of

(02:06:31):
workers who was for the first time running a rank
and file slate for the Council of Presidents, which is
sort of they're a body that combines the positions of
vice president president in the Union. They're called Shift Change
and so, Eric, do you want to introduce yourself? All right?
My name is Eric Cook. I've been a nurse for
thirty two years. I currently work in the cardiac telemetry floor.

(02:06:57):
And I became a nurse after being a Navy corn
in the First Gulf War and just continued in healthcare
from there. I was originally an alvin and then became
a registered nurse, and I've been on the past three
negotiating teams for Altabates Summit Hospital and I've seen a

(02:07:18):
lot of changes in the attitude and movement of the
union in the past twelve years. So I'm hoping with
John and Raina and Mark to make a change for
our union and our members for the better. Yeah. I'm glad,
glad you could be here to join us. Thank you. Yeah, Rina,

(02:07:41):
do you want to introduce yourself? Hi? There, I'm Rina Lindsay.
I have been a California nurse for over thirteen years,
and out of those thirteen years, eight of them I've
been in Altibate's Medical Center, which was my first union
as an r N how I And also I'm sorry,

(02:08:02):
And also I work in ice you and I've been
there through been there for about seven years wow. And
I've worked with Eric a year prior to that. So
the reason why I became a nurse is a long story,
but the bridge version is at the beginning, I wanted

(02:08:27):
to be a lawyer. So when I went to college
kind of fight. I was dyslexic, so that kind of
backed out. And then I also was a teen mom,
which that's something that a lot of people do not
know about me. And during that whole process, I wanted
to find something that I could be an advocate for

(02:08:49):
people and also know the political side of it. So
nursing became the best benefit. One thing I love about
nursing is you can learn everything about the world to
know about people without going anywhere, So that was the thrill.
And then also being an advocate for the patients I
take care for. In addition to that, you know, knowing

(02:09:13):
my peers and knowing that we all have the similar
struggles when it comes to the systems that we work for.
Doesn't matter which employer you work for, and so being
in the union, it gives you that way of a
contract between you and your employer. And along the way

(02:09:33):
there has been some issues which Eric and I and
John all been experiencing where things do need to change,
and being part of shift change is part where we
have to change of leadership and be more transparent between
the union, the employer, and the people in general. Hell yeah,

(02:10:00):
and yeah, John, do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah? Sure,
I'm John Horonymous. I'm a packy recovery nurse at University
of Chicago. Before that, I was in the medical U
for six and a half years. And then before that,
I was like a associate's degree r END working at

(02:10:22):
the emergency room at holy Cross Hospital. And I also started,
which is funny to me, as an LPN, which is
the same thing as an LVN that Eric did. And
I was a CNA before that. I decided to become
a nurse way back in the day when I was
trying to figure out what I wanted to do after
dropping out of high school, and I was thinking about

(02:10:45):
man and maybe I should become like a history teacher,
and I was like, Oh, why would I want to
go back to this place I hate so much? I
dropped out of it. And I personally got like incredibly
sick with something called ul sort of kalitis, and I
got bunch of surgeries done and got some really amazing
experience being taken care of by nurses, and it became

(02:11:08):
really immediately obvious to me, like I also, like Raina,
wanted to help people. And also I thought that nursing
was like a way where even like for you know, individuals,
I could change someone's day just a little bit for
the better, but also like maybe changed some bigger things.
And so I thought nursing was just like a really

(02:11:28):
great way to do that. Also, it's really fortunate to
be raised by an amazing nurse. My mom was a
nurse and she was always like she's like one of
those people was my hero. And a lot of other
nurses in my family, both men and women, including someone

(02:11:49):
who is like a Kentucky frontier nurses like the first
group of nurse practitioner nurse midwife back in the like
the nineteen forties, back in Kentucky. So I got a
lot of nurses in my family and on this like
incredibly proud to be like paring on all the stuff
that they have been doing for all their years as

(02:12:11):
like nurses, so and like meeting the folks out in California,
like Raina and Eric. It just makes me feel so good,
like we're doing really important stuff in terms of both
our daily practice of being a nurse, but also like
that we can have like this bigger impact on how

(02:12:31):
things are happening in our profession, in the healthcare industry,
and just the broader world. Yeah. Yeah, we've we've talked
like a decent amount on this show now about sort
of the labor issues that have been facing nurses both
actually here and in the UK, and I think a
little bit in a couple of other countries. Yeah, I was.
I was wondering what were the sort of specific things

(02:12:52):
that you all were dealing with, both just in the
profession and then also in the union that got altogether
to run this sleep Okay, So one of the things
that caused us to actually meet, by coincidence was one
of my co workers, told Doordall, who's a Norwegian nurse

(02:13:15):
who's been a nurse here in America for over thirty years.
She contacted labor notes and you know, realizing something was
wrong in our union, she started talking with specifically Sarah
Hughes at labor Notes, and through labor Notes and Sarah,

(02:13:38):
we were able to connect with John and Chicago, and
it was amazing that what we discovered is that our
problems here in California were mimicking what they've experienced in Chicago,
and through Sarah finding out from other diverse communities of

(02:14:01):
nurses in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, New York, in Minnesota
that the same things are happening there under our same union.
And our complaint was through our union, was that we
felt we were being siloed. And of course, when I
say siloed, is actually in our negotiations. We had seventeen

(02:14:23):
facilities negotiating, but we were told that we were not
allowed to communicate with each other. I said, it was
it was forbidden by the federal mediator. Now why this is? Yes, yes,
I know that was my reaction initially too. There were
two other negotiators on the team and it was highly

(02:14:46):
suspicious because the union wanted to put all new nurses
onto the negotiating team, and that was a little bit
of a red flag. There were so many red flags
through this negotiation. I swear I could almost see Lennon's tomb.
That's how many red flags there were. It was amazing

(02:15:08):
to us is that they said the mediator forbade us
from talking to each other, because that was part of
the agreement to have the federal mediator. The three of
us that had previous experience with negotiating just knew that
was the wrong thing. And it took over at least

(02:15:33):
about seven months before we started breaking through to other
tables and communicating with them on text and having our
own zoom conversations with them to convince them that no,
this is a lie. We are allowed to talk to
each other. And we end up finding out that we
were kind of being railroaded into what we considered an

(02:15:55):
agreement that was less than satisfactory for the workers, for
the nurses who have suffered during the pandemic, we could
have gotten probably one of the greatest contracts that any
nursing body had ever received. We had the industry by

(02:16:16):
the throat. We suffered so much, you know, John, everybody
throughout the country, all the nurses suffered, everybody's suffered, but
everybody that was at that bedside during the pandemic. We
it was a horrific experience. It's great when you take
care of people and you heal them. Yes, it's that's

(02:16:38):
a great thing. But the stress and the you know,
the unending anxiety that you felt, and then in the
midst of this, you have a union that short changes
you at a point when we had so much power,
And thank Heavens for Sarah to put us into contact

(02:17:00):
with all these other nurses to realize that it wasn't
just the subter division of the California Nurses Association that
was running things among it was actually it seemed to
be a perceived playbook plan of what they were doing
throughout the country. And I think nobody perceives themselves as

(02:17:24):
doing evil or anything like that. I think they always
think that they're doing it for the better interest of everybody.
But that's what's important about a rank and file movement
is that every nurse, every person in the union is
important and deserves a voice. And we don't need to

(02:17:47):
be gas lit, we don't need to be mistreated by
the union that we pay to represent us. We need
to be marching on the boss. We could have had
an unending euphoria for nurses with a contract. We could

(02:18:10):
have had great staffing, we could have had better pay,
we could have had everything that we wanted to make
our work lives to be the best they could be,
and it seemed our union already had a preplanned agreement
with the corporation. Now they deny that, but it's kind

(02:18:30):
of hard to believe when they had the same agreement
that they were supposedly negotiating in silos, that they weren't communicating.
Each table was supposedly negotiating their own, but it was
the same thing they wanted at every table, and not
all the tables were equal. It was very sad for us.

(02:18:51):
Like I said, this is the third negotiating team. I
was on the first negotiating team I was on. We
lasted over two years negotiating, and we went through nine
strikes and threatened a tenth and until we got an agreement.
So our hospital, obviously it's Altibates Hospital in Berkeley. Our

(02:19:13):
sister hospital Summit Hospital in Oakland, and we have affiliated
with us is the Herrot Campus, which is the the
psychiatric facility. And we have struggled so much through this pandemic,
and it was amazing to us that we came up

(02:19:37):
with less than what we should have gotten. I will
tell you that thanks to Sarah and meeting all these
other nurses. We were able to come back, and I
think through fear and intimidation, our union was forced to
back us and we're able to get economically what we wanted.

(02:19:58):
But like the rest of the country is nurse is,
we wanted better staffing, we needed more more bodies at
the bedside. We're overworked, we're fatigued. Raina worked in the
ICU and they had their own COVID unit there. Um,
I don't think there was enough tums and roll aids

(02:20:19):
to go around for all those nurses. The anxiety and um,
you know, the heart in your throat. And of course
John himself, I don't want to his personal business, but
you know his experience. He has long COVID. So we
we as nurses, have suffered quite a bit and we

(02:20:39):
expected a lot more from our union. Yeah, and I
mean even just on a very basic level, like no
matter what you go through, you have the right for
your union not to light you. Let's see, this is
a very elementary sort of that. That's a really elementary thing. Yeah,
but it's really, um, it's really scary how comfortable some

(02:21:06):
of the people who are paid their wages out of
our dues are with lying to us. I think that's
a thing that like, um, you know, like we're one
of the things we're specifically fighting for is like transparency
and accountability, especially for our staff. And you know, when I,

(02:21:28):
you know, Eric mentioned that I had had long COVID,
I'm finally getting I've been to the point where I'm
like as recovered as I probably ever will be, and
which is great. You know, being recovered from long COVID
is so much better than having long COVID. But you know,
I was always like someone that they came to to
ask for help with like political sorts of issues inside

(02:21:49):
the union, where they would come to me for Medicare
for all or um, you know, speaking around things like
ratio was that sort of stuff. Or they would send
me off to When the Chicago teachers went on strike
in twenty nineteen, I was sent to speak on behalf
of our union for them, and you know, just doing

(02:22:09):
the work of I'm kind of a I'm a bit
of an agitator. And then COVID hit and it was
just a really surreal experience. And my area, the hospital
is one of those places where they basically did everything

(02:22:29):
they could to minimize the amount of surgeries we were
doing initially when the lockdowns were happening for the first
six months of pandemic, and then but they were moving
us into because we are all former ICU nurses, so
I would do my shift a few shifts up in
the medical U than we made a special clean ICU
because we were still getting traumas. A University of Chicago

(02:22:51):
apparently sees more penetrating gunshot and stab wounds than any
other hospital in the United States. Thirty percent of traumas
are are from some sort of violence, which is substantially
higher than anywhere else in the US. And then I

(02:23:12):
got sick, right, and so to me, the union was
like a thing that was like, man, this is nice
to have. I had never worked at any union hospital before.
Getting union raises was like a big step up in
my life, you know. And it was also like, oh, yeah,
our union's progressive, Like I kind of I like most
of the things that it stands for, and I didn't

(02:23:35):
really think of it as someone that needed the union
right to do. The things that unions really kind of
like is the bread and butter of unions, which is
like coming in and like helping you when you need help.
As an individual worker, and you know, when you're not
in the middle of like a contract negotiation, and I
got sick with long COVID and lost. We had negotiated

(02:23:58):
this great you know, like COVID six pay policy, and
management just took that away without like from me, without
really giving any notice or you know, explaination why. And
you sit there trying to get like the help that
you need from your Union's like I'm trying to explain
why it is that like this is a problem for

(02:24:19):
me to our labor rep, who's like our they called
them business agents, labor reps whatever. There are people who
basically are paid out of our dues to kind of
help us in theory like stay organized and be pushing
management to do, you know, to follow the contract. And

(02:24:40):
it got to the point where like my partner who's
like is like literally screaming at the labor repel. I'm
on the phone with the labor rep and she's, you know,
just like what the fuck is your union even doing?
Like why are they not making sure that you're taking
care of And it was like this really like come
to Jesus moment where you're like, oh, yeah, like this
union ship isn't just like you know, platitudes about like

(02:25:02):
we need a ratio bill in Illinois or you know,
Medicare for all or Bernie Sanders. It's like, oh, this
shit is actually like about my material well being and
like my family still hasn't recovered from all that because
they only you know, after an enormous amount of pressure
was put on staff, they finally started looking into it,

(02:25:23):
um and we got you know, payouts for not just me,
but for ten other nurses who had had their COVID
pay like cut, you like, really unjust ways um. And
it really opened my eyes as to like what a
union should be doing. Um. And it really opened my
eyes that maybe there's a problem with how staff interact

(02:25:45):
with us as workers, because like there should be um.
You know, we try and like say, like you know,
there's a service union service business or service unionism, and
then there's rank and value unionism. We had this weird
situation union where they tell us where a rank and
file democratic union, except the staff kind of treat us like,

(02:26:08):
you know, it's a business union. So we get told
one thing, but then we see another thing and like
not that I think that like, uh, it's you know,
the whole point of a union, you kind of pull
together to take care of people who can't necessarily take
care of themselves in that moment, and like, it just
took an enormous amount of effort on my family's part

(02:26:30):
to like get that moving, and it just seemed incredibly
It was just very eye opening for me as a
you know, my experience here in Chicago. No, that that's
really bleak. I mean that that's another thing that you
would you know, you would expect a union like to
just be on top of not not even just a

(02:26:50):
sort of oh well, you asked them and they started
doing it. Like you you would think that, hey, the
people who got COVID doing this job not getting paid
what they're to be getting paid would be like a
priority and not something you have to fight them over.
That is, Oh, that is incredibly krim. I don't know, well,
I haven't a story for you. So my first year

(02:27:13):
working at out debates. Before that, I was working in
Swaller hospitals and they gave you certain packages about your benefits.
So when it was time for me to get my benefits,
I couldn't get my benefits at all because during that
time they were doing it at the yearly. So I said,
is there any way possible at least to get something,

(02:27:34):
because mind you, they are paying for my benefits, I'm
not paying for it anything for it that there should
be a reason because if I had any medical issues,
what would happen? And basically the union was very lackluster
about it. Now, of course I went to the manager,
went to human resources. Basically they basically told me where

(02:27:54):
there's eighteen hundred nurses, and you know what we're going
to do about this issue, and pretty much it was.
It's pretty much disappeared about it. There was nothing I
could do so for that whole year, so I worked
in January of twenty fifteen, I had to wait till

(02:28:15):
the following year to get benefits, to get medical benefits.
J Now, I got everything else, so let be honest,
I got everything else, but the medical benefits is important.
But thank god I don't have any health issues. Thank
god my daughters didn't have any health issues where we
didn't require any help and there wasn't in an emergency.

(02:28:36):
But when I started noticing there were other nurses or
teas that were spirits of the same thing, because a
lot of us got hired within that time, frame. They
weren't telling us these issues, and we would end up
getting these things sooner. And it's all about the transparency,
It's all about our value. And then over the years

(02:28:57):
people always complain on these dudes, why are they're not helping?
Why are not supportive? And when I was actually hired,
they were quick to give you the paperwork to tell
you how to pay this all so they could take
money off your dues. Quicker than what about the history
about the union? Why is the history is? Why is

(02:29:19):
the union important? And what you can do if there's
a grievemance? There was none of that, And to this
day it's still the same thing because I precept new
grads and I tell them about, you know, part of
the union. What he got, Oh I didn't get a booklet,
or oh I didn't hear anything about it, but I
got this paper here so they could take out my dues.

(02:29:42):
That's what pisses me off of anything. Is that part
so so? And then all this stuff dealing with what
Eric has told you, what we've been doing with the
strikes and the negotiations. Me personally, we should done negotiates
it within the first year the pandemic and I think

(02:30:03):
we got everything, but they were quick to say, no,
we're going to get all these facilities all together at
one and so we can all negotiate. And then the
gag order happened, the slam of the gag order, and
I'm like, there is a lot of collusion going on
and that shit needs to stop. So, I mean, things

(02:30:23):
that they don't really tell us, which I think is
really a thing that we want to resolve, is they
don't really inform you of what your union rights are.
You kind of get the initial like here's your wine
garden rights, which means that you have a right to
representation whenever you're being disciplined. But aside from that, there's
very little discussion inside of our union facilities, in particular

(02:30:43):
about the kinds of things that we have as like
union members, what our rights are, what are our rights
within the union, how the union works. So many of
my co workers don't like a big part of our
work is just explore aiming that there's an election happening,
and so you would hear that an election it happened,

(02:31:06):
maybe and you know, you would be like, well, who voted,
I don't know, like and you'd get these like you know,
all of the communication from about the election to us
as the people who are like the you know, the opposition,
has all been in these very like plane plane envelopes
that don't look like anything like it could be like

(02:31:28):
just an anonymous bill you wouldn't know or junk mail.
And so like, you know, as a union member, you
have something called a right to represent representation. So and
every union, every union employee and elected officer is considered
a fiduciary, has a fiduciary obligation to look out for

(02:31:51):
your financial interests, and if they don't do that, it's
called a failure to represent our union. In particular, Spends
had brags internally about never having a They called them
unfair labor practice. Like if a nurse or any worker
in any union decides that their union, you know, did

(02:32:11):
not represent them in their financial interests, they can file
something called an unfair labor practice claim for failure to
represent our union. Is like, they've never had an unfair
labor practice claim. Stick we foy had one of their
unfair labor practice claims and somehow it got like withdrawn
like in this really like sketchy way, and it was

(02:32:33):
like just a random one that we picked to to
see what happened, and so then it got like assigned
like a special like liaison like afterwards, like they're like, oh,
we weren't supposed to do that, like when we contacted
the Department of Labor, We're going to look at that
again and figure out what's going on with this. And
it also turns out when we started doing research, which

(02:32:56):
I think every union member listening to this should know,
every union has to file paperwork. They're legal. There's legally
mandated reporting. So there's things called LM two's and nine
nineties that you can get from the Office of Labor Management.
You google them and they'll figure you can search for
your own union and you get to see the union finances.

(02:33:18):
And we found out that there's like forty two million
dollars that our union chief in the bank account. And
this goes to there was an article it wasn't Jacobin,
I'm not sure about, like the financialization of unions and
for like forty two million dollars, what is that? It's
like and they you know, unions will practice like, oh,
we've got a forty two million dollars war chest, but like,
what are we spending that forty two million dollars on

(02:33:41):
is it to like fight arbitrations and constantly be making
like our like working conditions better and taking fights to
the bosses. It's like, no, Actually, what they're doing is
they're spending that money on settling unfair labor practice claims,
so they don't actually officially stick. So the war chests
and even against the you know, isn't to go to
war against our you know, supposed you know, I mean

(02:34:04):
to go to war against management. It's to go to
war against kind of us. When you think about it,
it's just it's just so wild when you start digging
into this stuff, it's just crazy. Um, Eric, you want
to tell them about the Office of Oakland. Yeah, so
obviously we're in the heart of the empire. Um. You know,

(02:34:24):
I live of just a few miles from the CNA
headquarters and I've been there many times prior to the pandemic, um,
you know, and I have taken part in lobbying in Washington,
DC on behalf of the union. You know, nurses from
all across the country that are in the union go

(02:34:45):
to DC and we lobby for uh, you know, not
only for single payer UH and medicare for all but
you know, individual bills that will benefit nurses across the country,
whether they're in the union or not. And you know,
I'm very familiar with it. I've lobbied in Sacramento, and

(02:35:05):
I've bent to the NNU convention in Minnesota. So I've
met a lot of nurses across our union. In fact,
it's one of the when you do that, that's about
the only time you get to reach out and see
other union members. One of the things I will tell
you that John and I and the person that's not

(02:35:27):
on the call right now is Mark Goodick. He is
an American citizen now, but he was a Canadian nurse
before and he is right now working on our campaign
video to introduce us to a broader audience. And that's
why he's not on the call tonight. We should be

(02:35:50):
intermingling and talking with other nurses across the country. I
should not be siloed here in Oakland and not knowing
that what a nurse is doing in Texas. And yeah,
we need to be part of our pledges that we
need to join hands across this country. Every nurse needs

(02:36:16):
to see. We need to digitalize our contract. We need
to see University of Chicago's contract digitalized. We need to
be sharing our contracts so we know what good things
that maybe they got in Texas, or what good things
they got at the University of Chicago, or what good
things we have in our contract. We need to see

(02:36:36):
that nurses can say, hey, I want that language. We
need to be sharing that. I don't know why it's
not happening or why it's just at the upper tiers
of union management that they see these things, but we
need to be joined together. No more siloing nurses. You know,
altivates the nurses stay in your lane, Kaiser, stay in

(02:37:01):
your lane, University of Chicago staying You're like, no, no no, no, no.
We need to be one fighting body for the betterment
of nurses. Uh doubt. You know, it's amazing when you
find out that we have a beautiful building that the
union purchased in downtown Oakland. Um. You know, they only

(02:37:25):
occupy a few floors of it and they rent out
the rest, and you know what, it is a fabulous
building and it would be great for it to be
a headquarters where we're we're not just fighting and lobbying
for Democratic politicians, but we're actually fighting for nurses at

(02:37:48):
the bedside and that's what you know. Our whole mission
is that we're going to be running for is for
the council presidents. We need to take the macro focus
down to what is happening at the bedside for every
nurse across the country and make the change for the
better for them. And that's the big difference here. I'm

(02:38:11):
all for an activist union and I think and we
have been the union is active, and you know climate
change and you know how the environment affects the community.
These things are important, but it's more important that we
take care of the nurses at the bedside and offer
opportunities for those nurses who want to be involved to

(02:38:34):
make the community better. We need to have those resources
available for them. And if we make nurses lives at
the bedside better, we're going to have more nurses available
to make the community better. And that's what we need
to be working on. It is a it is going
to be a fight. I can't be more more honest

(02:38:59):
than to tell you we are David versus Goliath. We
are four nurses who really have no big national exposure.
But the most important thing we have is that we're
bedside nurses and we know what's important for bedside nurses.

(02:39:21):
I do want to say, like, there's four of us
who are running for the for the council presidents, but
we would not be even talking to you if we
didn't have like at least one hundred nurses all over
like the hospitals that we're based in, like doing the
work of building our campaign. So I do want to

(02:39:42):
point out that, like, because like our slate is like
three white guys and it's Raina, and Raina is like
and we want to make sure that we're not that
it's we made a cho The choice that we made
was not you know, us coming to together as four
individuals being like we should fix the union by ourselves.

(02:40:03):
It was this we keep mentioning labor notes, there's a
healthcare worker chat with a fair number of nurses in
our union. And we noticed that there was an election
coming up. And this is also at the time when
both altbates was having their issues. And then in Cook
County we had a particularly traumatic firing of a very

(02:40:24):
popular staffer who without any without any input from the
local nurses or elected local nurse leadership. And we got
together and we all were like, what are we going
to do this is crazy, and we had people like
we are like, well, who would do Like, we have
this opportunity and if we run as a slate, we

(02:40:47):
can do things like get access to we can send
emails out to other nurses and break down those silos
connect nurses from across the country. And we're like, well,
if we don't do anything, we're kind of stuck in
this kind of like square one. You know, a few
small hospitals talking to each other, not small, but you know,

(02:41:08):
a few hospitals talking to each other, still struggling against
like these kind of silos that have been constructed for
us by staff. And we had a vote and there
was you know, over twenty nurses all together raise their
hands and where like, we could do this with an
imperfect group of people that we recognize asn't like the
fully representative of everyone in the union, but are fully

(02:41:31):
committed to democratizing the union, or we could sit and wait.
And a nurse who had been in the union for
a very long time and she's now retired, said, if
you all don't take this chance, you don't know what
could happen in you know, three years from now union
could be completely different and so two thirds of everyone

(02:41:52):
in that call said it's time to go, and we
don't care. We would rather that you run and take
that swing and maybe get big for all of us.
So a big part of what we're doing is got
like I've got a meeting with you know, Cook County
nurses on Thursday, and they're all basically going to come

(02:42:13):
to me and tell me all the ship that I
need to do for them, not the other way around.
When you're the rank and file leadership, you know, it's
like taking that pyramid and you invert it, right. The
people who are matter the most are the regular bedside nurses,
And all we can do, as like people who step

(02:42:36):
up into that role is we take that. We take
that heat and put ourselves out there so that we
can enact what our coworkers are asking us for. I
literally have co workers walking up to me completely unsolicited.
I'm a very like I'm not walking around telling I
like I told a few people up front in the beginning,
because I was like, all right, you're about to see
my face on some flyers, let me tell you why.

(02:42:59):
But I now have coworkers coming to me and they're like, John,
you've got to tell me what's going on because I
heard a little bit about it and I need to
help you. I'm just like, okay, it's very it's like
it's a little bit like a drug. But I have
to be careful because like I like, I can't let
this whole thing like none of this. We all have

(02:43:19):
to stay humble as they're doing this. Because all four
of us, John, all four of us were volunteering to
help other people to run exactly. We were like, okay,
we're here, you know, John, are raining on myself, We're
here to help you. Guys who's running now, I'm going
to help you. We're gonna help you. And then it's

(02:43:41):
like their crickets, you know, and it's like and it
goes to show exactly what happened. It goes to show
how impoverished the internal democracy of our union is that
people who are leaders already did not feel comfortable or
prepared to take on that kind of leadership role. You know,

(02:44:01):
these are nurses who have been in our union for decades,
who are taking fights to their bosses all the time already,
and they did not feel that they knew enough about
the union. Because there's an intentional I believe like obscuring
of how the union works. And that's like how you

(02:44:23):
end up with a situation where people are like, well,
I guess we're just kicking the door down for all
these people who we know will be doing it better
when when we get it situated so that they can
do it better. It's amazing though, to tell us that
an America and History class, or you have Civics class,
you learn about the US government, right, you know how
it functions, how it runs. But when it comes to

(02:44:46):
our union, we were all asking each other. You know,
we're putting pieces together. Oh wait, I know the council presidents. Yeah, well,
how does this person fit into it? How does the
board fit into this? Well does the election run? How
is it done? We had no We had to search
out the answers. We had to call all sorts of people,

(02:45:09):
and we were only getting bits and pieces. There should
be a clear outline of how you run a democracy
and a union. I mean, it shouldn't even be that difficult.
You know, obviously there'd be specific rules for the union,
but they shouldn't be occluded. They should be you know,
there shouldn't be occulted from the members. We should clearly

(02:45:33):
know how you step forward to be a more of
a contributing member to the union to run and to
serve the others in the union. And that was an
amazing thing that we're finding out amongst each other. It's like, wow,
how how does our union run? I mean, how why

(02:45:54):
is it difficult to find out these things? And I
mean I don't think it's insurmountable for us. I don't
think that should disqualify us. I don't think if we
can step in and do healthcare in a pandemic, we
can very easily learn how to how the union functions
and a quick, a quick little tutorial. I don't think

(02:46:17):
that's going to be a big deal for us. But yeah,
it's pretty amazing if we're talking about democracy and the union.
How is it that it takes I mean to find
the buy laws. We can all tell you it took
a tremendous amount of effort to find the by laws
that are runs by hold on, hold on, let me
tell sorry about the by laws. So we have a

(02:46:40):
nurse in Chicago who decided to make a pain of
themselves about how to get the by laws and then
instead they went to the union, Like I want to
see the by laws. I want to see the by
laws and they were lists like you know, like and
they give them the runaround, and eventually they gave him.
He got personally to the liver envelope that was like

(02:47:02):
a photocopy of a photocopy of photocopy of the by laws.
And it's funny because the legally, the by laws are
all spops to be filed with the federal government. And
like from our pressure and organizing to figure out how
our union worked, they had to publish the newest set
of by laws and on the federal reporting websites. UM.

(02:47:22):
I was in Oakland in twenty nineteen for the Global
Nurse Assembly and there was an after party and it
was a bunch of staffers and like, you know, some
nurses and you know, just chit chatting, and I was like, man,
be really good. I told the story about you know,
like the you know, the nurse you tried to get
by finally got a copy of the by laws to
you know, some of these One of these staffers like, man,

(02:47:43):
it'd be really great if we, you know, could figure
out how are you know, getting hints for other union works,
and just as like good luck with that, and they
just disappeared ways I'm not. Yeah, I mean because because
what we're finding is to add any staff that helped
nurses learn how the union works find themselves out of

(02:48:06):
a job. Like that's what's really that's what really sketches
everyone out is when like people, I mean, you all
can tell tell the story about the staffer who like
got ran afoul. So I will tell you that there
are a lot of great labor reps, a lot of

(02:48:29):
really great people out there. But to tell you that
they would communicate with us, because obviously I told you
I've done all these other actions. So I know a
lot of people and they have my personal number just
because we would. You know, when we're in other cities,
you know, you text each other and hey, we're at

(02:48:49):
this place, now where do we meet you? Etc. So
we were getting texts from some labor reps in the
union saying, you know, you guys need to stand tall.
There are a lot of us supporting you. We can't
come out and publicly support you because we'll get fired. What. So, yeah,

(02:49:10):
so we were getting these texts from the labor reps
saying what they're doing to you is wrong, and they
were you know, we actually got together and we we
wanted to go out on strike in October, and we
were getting this runaround from a group of this I
thought they were it was just an inner cabal. Little

(02:49:33):
did I know that it probably extends throughout the you know,
the organization, but that they were telling us that there
was no need for a strike, and it seemed they
were trying to just pressure us into taking a pretty
low ball contract. And so, uh, we're getting push you know,

(02:49:54):
the good labor reps are texting us like stick it,
stick to it, stick to it. And we actually got
a postcard campaign and we actually drove up to the
executive director's house in Sacramento, knocked on our door and
delivered five hundred some postcards that we organized on our own,

(02:50:14):
not with you know, it wasn't a union driven, it
was just nurses union, nurses driven, and we delivered postcards
saying we want to go out on strike, and the union,
of course still fought us on it, but we were
allowed to go out on strike. And there's a video
of us confronting the executive director at our strike line

(02:50:36):
asking her why we were gagged, why the mediator gagged us,
and she clearly didn't know what was going on. She said,
the mediator wouldn't gag you. Why would they gag you?
So she didn't even know what was going on at
our table. We then got we were contacted and they
we were told, oh my god, they're running around like

(02:50:58):
chickens with their heads at all because they're petrified that
they might use their jobs, that they've been exposed to
what they've been doing to you. And so one of
the labor reps that used to work for us, she
used to be at our hospital, and then she moved
along and she was at Sutter Cilano and her nurses

(02:51:22):
were asking, hey, did you see this video of this
speech Eric made on this you know, at the strike line.
And it was a speech where I kind of excoriated
the union about why they would gag us, that that
wasn't you know, we needed to be united and we
didn't need a union, you know, working behind our back.

(02:51:45):
They needed to stand with us. And so she says, well,
let's see. So she was looking at the video on
her union cell phone and with the negotiators, nurse negotiators
at her hospitals at our Salana who were also in
negotiations with us, that we weren't supposed to talk to

(02:52:06):
because you know, the mediator forbade us. So she's showing
the video and they thought because she was formerly in
our hospital, that she was our inside scoop for all
this information. What I can swear to God and take
a lie detector test. I had one exchange with her

(02:52:28):
during like the twenty one months that we were negotiating,
and it was at a joint Bargaining Council meeting on
zoom where they kept the union kept muting us on
zoom and prevent and preventing us from writing in the
chat because we were saying we want to go out
on strike, we want to go out on strike, and

(02:52:48):
next thing you know, we would find out we couldn't
type in the in the chat. So I texted her
and says, can you see this. I'm trying to write
in the chat and I'm forbidden from writing in the chat.
They muted me, they I can't type in and she goes,
I'm feel for you, buddy, I feel for you. That
was my only exchange with her that caused her and

(02:53:10):
the fact that her nurses asked her to look at
this video with them, that's what cost her her job.
She's it was. It was clearly guilt by association and
the charges were outrageous for her. We had labor reps
leave because they just felt that it was they couldn't

(02:53:32):
live with themselves with what they were doing to the nurses.
It was incredible for them that they're here to work
for the nurses, They're here to work for the most
progressive union in the country, and it was a fraud.
That's been like a big, like consistent problem is that

(02:53:52):
we know that they are busting their own Like the
staff are supposed to have a union. The staff have
their own contract, and that's a normal thing inside unions, right, yeah,
you know, to keep you know, we believe in or
that every worker who you know, works for wages should
be in a union. And we have seen time and
again that like the like the contracts, that they've busted

(02:54:17):
their own unions. So like that they've there was a
slate that was run of nurses in um Our, not
nurses of the staffers. I think it was in twenty
twenty one where they were like trying to get something
together to change you know, things inside you know, how
they relate to their management and and several of those

(02:54:41):
uh staffers were basically illegally fired Jesus. So this is
like I mean, and I know you keep saying Jesus
a lot, but like there's a reason me, you know me,
I wouldn't be running into this sort of situation if
it wasn't like so like out of out of this world.
The stories that we hear, and they're the same. This

(02:55:03):
is what's disturbing, is it? And it's because the union
is baited. Like I was just talking to a lawyer today.
She was looking over the by laws of our union
and she's like, this is set up like a local
like it's one big local union. It's got like a
tiny little committee of people who are making the decisions
that effect or we believe that it's mostly the director

(02:55:27):
non nurse director staff that make the decisions, but these
four people kind of rubber stamp them and that they
make decisions for one hundred and fifty you know, thousands
some on nurses and it's so centralized. You know, this
is one of the things describe as like it's almost

(02:55:47):
irresponsible because you know, we live in you know, you know,
crazy times, and all it takes is one wrong election
or bad decision in Supreme court, and it would literally
our union could be dissolved with like you know, if
they just arrested you know, a handful of people and
uh and froze our bank accounts. And a big part

(02:56:12):
of our goal is to help disperse those resources out
into foster more local leaderships so that any event that
you know, something you know like that terrible happens like that,
we're not caught without anything. Because the way it situated
now is we have this massive concentration of all of

(02:56:33):
the decision making and resources in a very small group
of hands. And most of these people are are not
have never been nurses, or if they've been nurses they've
been you know, out of practice for so long that
they wouldn't know how. I mean, maybe they could put
band aids on. I don't need to, like, I don't
want to disparage anybody. You know, A nurse is a nurse.

(02:56:55):
I know nurses, you know, you learn it and you
learn a lot of things. It's really important, great skill,
but there's something to be in practice. If I you know,
I can walk back into the medical issue I used
to work in, you know now it's going on like
five years and be the same nurse that I was
when I was at the peak of my practice there.
And there's a real key thing too, I think we're

(02:57:17):
all committed. None of us are doing this because we
want to be the face of California Nurses Association National
Nurses United for the next twenty thirty years. We're doing
this because we feel that there's a real value to
there being a continual turnover in leadership, new ideas, people

(02:57:38):
bringing in new energy. We think that nurses should have
the opportunity to work release time so that they could
see how the union works as staffers from the inside
and then go back to the regular jobs. We're doing
everything we can to like I like my job. I
think my job is great. I don't want to leave
my job. But doing what we can to bring our

(02:58:01):
met our mentality as those bedside nurses to the sensibility
of running the union. Because nursing does give you a
lot of really powerful tools, as like you have to
be able to listen to people. We're not listening a
lot tonight, but you know, we've got to talk and
get the word out. Being able to kind of see.

(02:58:22):
A big thing we see is like, you know, you
have a lot of people who will tell youths things
and then they act in a different way. And that's
a big part of nursing practices, being able to understand
what people's real deal is. And you know, it's kind
of that's one of the things where it's real frustrating,
is like we know when people are lying to us,

(02:58:44):
Like I know, we all know when, like the staff
are lying to us. Nurses do have bullshit detectors, that's
for sure. You know. I slept through the class in
nursing school where they teach you how to grow eyes
in the back of your head. The class slept through
where they teach you to get a through arm. And
I really regret sleeping through the class where they teach

(02:59:05):
you how nurse mitosis like being able to asexually reproduce
an extra nurse. But I definitely didn't sleep through the
class where I can learn where I can see when
someone is saying one thing and then but it's like
what they're fucking lying to me? Yeah, And that's a
that's like a constant theme, and that's one of the
things that's driving a lot of our organizing is that

(02:59:26):
a lot of people are tired of just being lied
to by people who were paying their paychecks. And it's
like and it's like they think that we I mean,
we have staff informants, right, we know people inside staff
who are allied with us. We know how they talk
about us when we're not there, they talk about us
like we can't figure this shit out, And it's like, motherfucker,

(02:59:49):
I know how to keep a person alive who like
who shouldn't be alive, Like I know how to walk
a family through like you know, multiple family members with
conflicting opinions through like an end of life discussion, and
along with a doctor who can't really make up his mind,
like you don't think it while I've got you know,
like multiple pressors and like continuous dialysis. You don't think

(03:00:12):
I can't figure out like when you are like telling
us one thing and then another thing's happening. We know
why they're canceling meetings right now. They don't want us
talking to each other where we get that, and this
is kind of like it's it's almost like a feminist
practice of women talking to each other makes men nervous, right,

(03:00:33):
And it's like nurses talking to each other makes management nervous,
and it sure as hell is making our union nervous.
We want our union to be encouraging nurses talking to
each other and not like discouraging it. And anytime someone
is discouraging people from talking to each other who have
similar concerns, that is an immediate you know, like Eric

(03:00:54):
was saying the red flags, it's like this is the
kind of thing that like this is. It's like an
almost an abusive relation. Shift. You know, I would not
be running if it wasn't this intense of a problem
this has been. It could happen here. Join us tomorrow
for part two of the interview, where Shift Change discusses
more of their vision for what the union could be.

(03:01:15):
In the meantime, you can find us on Twitter or Instagram.
That happened here at pod and you can find cool
Zone Media the same places at cool Zone Media. We've
also posted a link in the description to Shift Changes
go fund Me if you want to help support their campaign.

(03:01:43):
Welcome back to it could Happen here. We now continue
our conversation with the team from shift Change enjoy Outside
of the obvious the union is doing landlordism for some reason,
part which is just sort of I can't get over, like, well,
what do you what do your media forty four dollars.
The thing you're doing is being a landlord. But yeah,
I mean it seems like they're you know, like out

(03:02:04):
of one side of their mouth saying this is a
democratic union. In their side of their mouth, they're doing
political purges. They're like doing everything possible to make sure
people don't know how to like democratic process works, which
I think is a pretty like basic precept of democracy
is that if if, if it's impossible to figure out
how the system actually works, it's not it's not it's

(03:02:26):
not actually a democracy in any real sense. Yeah, and
you know, yeah, and this is the thing you're saying
is like they seem they seem to be acting like bosses,
like they're firing people. They get nervous when people start organizing,
which is not a thing that you would think a
union would be ecstatic, and it's like, oh, heir, there's

(03:02:46):
this one wors like organized themselves. I don't know, it's
just I mean, there's a there's a there's a mentality
inside among some people and even among some of the
nurses that like, you know, when people are causing problem
or you know, it's the Yeah, it's it's a very
it's a very perplexing situation to be in, and many

(03:03:09):
of us it's taken us years to really figure it out,
because you don't we all come to work right to
do our job, you know. I don't come to work
to like figure out every like little nuanced thing about
what's going on inside my union. I didn't become a
union nurse because I wanted to be like a hero
union member. I did it because it was down the

(03:03:30):
street and it was a good job, and like I
wanted to be a nurse more than anything in the world.
So you know this, But this is what we do,
and this is why things like labor notes and learning
how your union works is really important. We've been self
educating ourselves. Like it's almost like you have to become
a jail house lawyer, right, yeah, like a yeah, We've

(03:03:52):
been sharing our favorite resources for like how do you
learn about how union works or what your rights are,
and like we're basically taking notes for what we're going
to have to do when we if we get in
power inside the union to educate all the nurses in
our union. One of the things a little too, I
mean every time I talk with people about this, to
try and give little tips and tricks. Don't leave your

(03:04:14):
staff are a loan in at the negotiating table. They'll
tell you everything's going great, go get go, get some dinner,
and you come back. And you can't do regressive bargaining.
You can't unbargain like a thing when someone's been empowered
to decide something for you. And this is where especially
new like new units in hot in countries or parts

(03:04:37):
of the country without strong union culture are finding that
they'll step away from the bargaining table and they'll come back,
and then all these decisions will be made that they
don't have any You can't go back on it. It's
like literally no backsies in like in union negotiations. No.
And so there's no such thing as regressive bargaining. If

(03:04:57):
if if I say that I want a you you
offer a fifty percent increase in fifty cent an hour
increase for floating to another union unit, I can't turn
around and you can't offer me forty five cents the
next go round. You cannot go back if you said

(03:05:20):
fifty percent, it has to be you know, more than
fifty percent on the next offer, or you just say
that's my final offer, so you know the idea of
regressive bargaining is I have to tell you it's amazing,
is that when we negotiate against Sutter in twenty eleven
through twenty thirteen, we had multiple cases of ulps filed

(03:05:44):
for regressive bargaining on their part. They constantly made these
mistakes which we as nurses and the labor reps caught.
And now for us, it's so important that we don't
regressive bargain regressive bargaining on our own members here. We

(03:06:07):
need to be moving forward. We should be making quantum
leaps and bounds as nurses. Well, what we've gone through,
we're supposedly the most trusted profession in the country. I
think it's the past twenty years. The only time we
have not been the most progressive or the most respected

(03:06:29):
profession was in two thousand and one, and you can
obviously guess that it was firemen. It was firemen. But
it's like twenty five years or so in a row
we've been the most trusted profession. It's because, you know,
how can you not trust somebody who's cleaning you up
when you soiled yourself in the bed, who's holding your

(03:06:51):
hand when you're scared. That's why we're the most trusted
profession and we should be the most respected for what
we do. It's just amazing that our union can't carry
us through that. Our union was formed in a revolution

(03:07:11):
that we overthrew and kicked out management nurses and formed
the California Nurses Association, the bargaining part of the organization.
The association broke away from the management part and we
toraled her. It all as a wonderful example somebody who

(03:07:32):
was part of that revolution. And for about twenty over
twenty some years, we were a rapidly progressive union. We
didn't have all the rank and file things that we
should have had in the union, but it was in
the right direction for nurses. And we've kind of made

(03:07:52):
in the past ten years this U turn and the Association,
which I think is bad for nurses. We need to
be going forward and we have new nurses and new
a new generation that is joining the union and they

(03:08:13):
need to be a part of it. And they can't
look at me and say that that old fogy that's
been in the union for thirty some years. You know
that I'll be doing the work for them. They need
to be active in that union and they need to
love the idea of solidarity, you know, out of the
fires of desperation, burn hope and solidarity. It was one

(03:08:35):
of the ladies said, I think Sharon Borrow from Australia,
an Australian labor activists, said that we need to have
every union member. I don't think every one of them
has to be rabbit about it, but they should be
aware that they need to stand tall and support each other,
and not just even they need to support the non

(03:08:59):
union nurses they need to get. We need to get
more nurses unionized. The problem with unions is there's not
enough unions out there. There's not enough people in the unions.
We need to get more nurses unionized and our union
hasn't been able to do that in quite a while.

(03:09:19):
We haven't. We we've been raiding a lot of other unions,
but we need to get out there, uh and get
people in the South unionized. We need to get other
nurses and you know in the Midwest organized that aren't
unionized yet. We have a bigger vision as bedside nurses,

(03:09:39):
and I think that our our national union has I'm
only as strong as the person next to me. I
need support. As John said, yeah, we're four people running
for the Council of Presidents, but behind us, there's there's
so many nurses supporting us. Nurses are texting me all

(03:10:02):
the time, Hey, give me some pliers, give me some buttons.
I want to pass them out. It's it's important for us.
I know we're we're at a disadvantage we don't have.
You know, the people were running against even though it's
illegal for them to have the union promote them, they're

(03:10:24):
obviously going to have that advantage like a city president
because they're going to be in the National Nurse magazine,
going around the country, you know, doing the things they
do as sitting presidents, so they're going to get that
free publicity. I wish the union presidents went around the
country because as far as I know, they've never come

(03:10:44):
here at Chicaca. Yeah, I think the only time we
bet to Chicago's when we had that People Power convention
there and that was my first visit back to Chicago,
and I think ten years was when I went there.
And it's amazing. Is it should be our union should rotate,

(03:11:06):
rotate where they have their their their conventions. They should
we should be all around the country. We should be
going to the south and having conventions so that we
can attract people. Um. I think it's important we need
to make inroads. UM. You know, I know a lot
of it is They're going to say the pandemic, and

(03:11:26):
I think the pandemic did hasten this siloing. Um. And
you know, some of it was a little understandable. But
even when it was evident that they should have come
out of the borough, they never did. And they people
have been saying how tired they are from the pandemic, right, Like,

(03:11:50):
I don't know how they could have been tired. The
union could have been tired when they were just having
zoom calls. No, no, I mean the nurses are saying
that they're tired. Like. But here's what's interesting. This is
a thing that I'm seeing in real time as we're
doing this work, is that nurses who have been exhausted
and some of the most beat down like like nurses

(03:12:12):
who are like in the worst situations here in Chicago,
are tired. But then they hear something interesting is going
on with the union that is actually something that they
have a say in, which is very unusual in our union,
and people get very excited. So I'm having coworkers coming

(03:12:33):
up to me who are the least interested in union
business until maybe it's time for a strike. And you know,
it's interesting because like when we did our strike organizing
in twenty nineteen, the first strike in Chicago's of nurses
in like forty years in Chicago. You know, they kept

(03:12:55):
it would call these small kind of symbolic actions, and
they call them stress tests or structure tests for like,
you know, we're going to do we're going to do
a press conference and you have like you know, a
handful of nurses come out for the press conference, yet
like ten or fifteen nurses to come out, and they're like, oh,
they're all wringing their hands. And then we start started
calling pickets and then we start blowing past our turnout numbers.

(03:13:20):
And then when we did our strike, they were expecting
eight hundred nurses with twelve fourteen hundred nurses, more nurses
than ever been in anyone place in our hospital. Like
it was like a giant party. So it's kind of
like when people have know that there's something that really
has like they has a stake in, right, there's an
infinite amount of energy almost and this election is really

(03:13:45):
kind of like we can't make the buttons fast enough
to give away like they keep people keep coming up
and they're like, here, give me a handful. I've got
coworkers and we're doing there's you know, let's get the
pictures of everyone with their nurse with their with their
shift change buttons shift change, and you know, we're turning

(03:14:06):
that stuff into we're getting ramped up and prepared for
like our social media like outreach, and this is part
of it, is like getting people to see like, hey,
there are people out there who want to do something
different and that put you like as a as a
bedside nurse. This is our opportunity to get you into
the driver's seat of how your union is run, how

(03:14:28):
strikes are called, how we negotiate, Like we want to
have a council of hospitals in contract campaigns. It's just
nurses from negotiating teams so that they can all so
we can coordinate and decide when we want to go
on strike. And it's not someone who's never been a
nurse making that call for us, Yeah, which seems just

(03:14:50):
baffling that you'd have some random person who hasn't been
a nurse making strike decisions to this I mean the
fact that it's not also just there seems like there's
such an enormous gap between the things you would just
basically fundamentally expect a union to be doing and what's
actually happening, which has nothing to do with that, And
it's just the sort of I mean it almost it
seems like like intentional dubobilization. Well, they want to treat

(03:15:13):
us like a spigot, like they want like you can
turn us on and turn us off. You know. The
problem is is that people don't respond to that well,
and you kind of constantly have to be honing your
practice through defending the contract, which is a big thing
that like a lot of my coworkers are just constantly
annoyed that the contract we're not defending. Our chief nurse

(03:15:35):
rep is always annoyed that she can only know scrape
together you know, like four or five people, and you know,
I do it, and I'm not like I'm really good
when I'm in the room with you know, I've my
coworkers think that I do a good job, but you know,
when it comes down to like doing all of the
reading and everything to make sure it's done, I need
you know, It's the thing that I'm always working on

(03:15:56):
and trying to get better at m But you know,
the that is kind of the lifeblood of trade unionism
is like, if you're going to have a contract, you
need to in between contract barting campaigns where you can
go on strike, you need to be constantly probing and
pushing and finding where the weak spots are and keeping
people in the practice of like fighting. And if you

(03:16:19):
do that and you're really effective at it, you can
affect some pretty impressive changes in between contracts. When our
friends was was the labor rep at Cook County, they
went from having maybe like ten people doing like the
rep work to over sixty people doing the rep work.

(03:16:41):
She partnered with a really phenomenal chief nurse rep who
had a family Her dad had been president of a
SEIU local, and they were they had pushed so hard
that they were able to read to open negotiations for

(03:17:02):
attention bonuses, which after you've settled a contract is like
to open something on economics, like on the order of fifteen,
fifteen or ten thousand dollars, retention bonuses is a huge deal. Yeah,
the problem was is that that then they fired her
when she connected us at Cooke County, or the nurses

(03:17:23):
at Coo County with nurses at University of Chicago, and
we started comparing notes with what our staff were like,
and their chief nurse reps started asking the director of bargaining,
who's not a nurse and has never been a nurse,
to say, why is it that we are bringing in
why is my facility bringing in four million dollars worth

(03:17:43):
of dues? And we get like, you know, two hundred
twenty thousand dollars worth maybe of staff, Like what's the deal?
And why is it that we don't spend any money
on arbitration or any of the stuff. They're constantly afraid
of doing anything. And that's when they fired Natalie. And
then and now they're down to they're trying to whittle

(03:18:04):
those those nurses retention bonus negotiations down to like three
thousand and four thousand bucks from like fifteen thousands. You know,
you bring in the right people, and all of a sudden,
management has to like hire in like um an entire
legal extra legal department at cook Anty Health Services. It's

(03:18:24):
not it's not that somebody is not a nurse. That
doesn't matter. Natalie was not a nurse, yet she was
an outstanding example what a labor rep should be. An organizer. Yeah,
I mean she you stand with the workers. I just
I do believe that we need more nurses involved in

(03:18:46):
UH in organizing and inside the union. But I have
no issues with you know, when you have labor reps
like Natalie, that's that's what you need to keep the
union thriving. And unfortunately to cut her down when she
was making inroads to really empower nurses and the union

(03:19:10):
was it's just beyond the pale to make that decision.
Why they made that decision is something that I think
if we won the presidency, we'd want to find out
why was that decision made because the big part of
this is holding the staff accountable is our big thing,
Like we just need to know right now, there's no

(03:19:32):
accountability to So imagine having a job where like if
you are a nurse, Like if we're speaking to our
coworkers right now, imagine being a nurse and no one
ever checking your charting, no one ever checking what a
patient has to say about the care they got. No
one asking a doctor like what you did during a shift, right,

(03:19:53):
No one checking your like to see if like all
of your vital signs are actually really reflected in like
the monitor. That's the situation. Or we're dealing with staff
right now, no one who's outside of their staff bosses
at the director level has they're they're only accountable to
those people, and they are only accountable and they're not

(03:20:13):
actually accountable. They just write like they write everything themselves.
They write their own reports. They get they you know,
they'll take you know, a nurse will come up with
a good idea, they'll run it up the flag pool.
Check out this awesome idea, have, boss. I mean, it
sounds like a downer I guess is like it all

(03:20:35):
sounds very like this is all grim and like depressing.
But the fact is is that we are at a
point now where we see what's going on and what
we need to do. We've been educating ourselves about what
can be done to change the union because the union
is a democratic structure, even in like just the shell
form of it, and as nurses, we've got a lot
of faith that as nurses we can figure this out

(03:20:56):
and come up with a much better, more democratic way
to run our union. And I think it will fundamentally
be a much stronger organization. I think That's the fear
is that somehow we like, you know, some people are like, oh,
you know, you're gonna make it worse. It's like I
don't know that you could make it worse. It's like,
you know, there's the healthcare industry is changing. I think

(03:21:18):
we're seeing this in real time as the healthcare industry
is changing, and we are seeing to the you know,
you have hospitals that come up with the most cutting
edged version of healthcare, like the Universe Chicago, or the
university systems out in California, or maybe like Stanford that's
like the very like the top end of like what

(03:21:41):
healthcare is, and those hospitals are like basically they might
as well be gold mines. And then you've got the
safety net hospitals. And my fear is that the safety
net hospitals they would like to casualize to uber They
keep telling us about, oh, they're going to uberize nursing. Well,
you know, what is it that they're doing to stop

(03:22:01):
you know, over half of the nurses being at Cook
County Health Service from being replaced with agency nurses right now?
Like how long is that going to go until there's
like you know, they go from a bargaining unit of
you know, over fifteen hundred nurses in the union or
seventeen hundred nurses in the union to like, you know,
it could theoretically drop down to you know, a handful

(03:22:22):
of union nurses. And so they like they it's like
an unofficial layoff, right, people quit and they institute a
hiring freeze, and then they don't replace them. They bring
them in as agency nurses because they would rather in
these safety net institutions, not pay benefits, not pay pensions.
You know, our hospital we lost, they took our pension away,

(03:22:43):
and the union didn't do anything to fight that back.
I was in the pension plan for like two years
and then they're like, guess what, no more pensions and
the union to do shit about it, and they could
have done something. I mean, it was like it's because
the contract language is like, well, you get whatever we
offer you. And our teamsters in our facility took like

(03:23:06):
a very like a hundred two to four hundred dollars
buyout to get rid of their pensions, and that was
the end of our pensions for the entire medical center.
And then our union where our staffers are all bought
into the Steelworkers pension, right, they have a pension. They're like, well, John,

(03:23:28):
maybe you'd have to strike six or eight times, which
is what they say whenever they don't want to do anything.
And they certainly aren't telling us about hospitals, like the
folks that all debates who have struck like ten times
to get what it takes. And it's just like, you know, striking.
I think there's this idea that it's scary. I have
co workers who are telling me, John, just tell me
when the next strike is. I can't wait for the
next strike. But we've been through it. We have a

(03:23:50):
lot of coworkers who haven't. Half of our nurses are new,
they've never been through a strike. But you know, you
build a union through strikes, which is the thing that
is a little counterintuitive, especially if you do it the
right way and you're strategic about it. Raina, You've been
real quiet, like what do you think about all this?
That's really number one. I'm a lady, and I don't

(03:24:12):
interject unless I absolutely have to. So to go back earlier,
what was said about how unique are Slate is, well,
it's unique in itself. For one, of course, I kind
of sit with being a female and minority. But you

(03:24:34):
also got to think about the men. Now, there is
not a lot of men in nursing in general, and
I think that's what also they need to look at,
because I heard the criticism about that. But let's flip
the script on this. I mean we individually, as Eric
and John did say before, that we were not here

(03:24:58):
to be a counsel of present. This lay on every
who was actually jumping on it to help other people.
But form you know, I myself and Eric, we've been
knowing each other for what seven six seven years, yeah,
something like that. And yeah, and you know, I have
seen the changes with the union. I feel that the

(03:25:21):
union has been really stagnant. I think our dudes should
be used for community. And now during the pandemic, there
is a lot of nurses are totally burnt out and
they're slowing to realize that nursing is not what I thought.
I did not signed for for this pandemic. I never

(03:25:42):
I've been a nurse for thirteen years. I never knew
that was never thought it was gonna be a pandemic
like this. So it changed your whole spectrum of what
nursing stands and also what we should do to preserve it. Now.
I you know, I look young, but I am a
grandma about to be a full and so one of
them are going to be a nurse one day. And

(03:26:03):
actually one of them is a ten year old. And
he told me, he said, you know, looking at all
my nursing books and looking at you know, all my
medical stuff, and he's looking at me, he said, you
know what, I may want to be a nurse now.
Mind you, two years ago he wanted to be a
race car driver. So it happened. So it kind of

(03:26:24):
inspired me a little bit, like I need to do
more leadership. I mean, I think I'm a natural leader
in itself. It's just how to do it, where to
go And this is just a step for me. I'm
at that age. You know, I need to look behind me,
if all the younger nurses my family and what my

(03:26:46):
young grandchildren, what they may be. And I want to
preserve that. And that's a third reason why I'm standing
to do this. So and my peers, I mean, you work,
any nurse work eight to twelve hours. The facility that
you work with is almost a second home to you.
So you want to stand up with your peers. You know,

(03:27:09):
there shouldn't be no divide. We're all standing for an
employer who has been trying to take benefits away, trying
to take you know, anything that makes it decent for
you to just work, and also is wearing and tearing
on your wellness and your work life balance and just
your whole mental state. So it's so important to really

(03:27:33):
know about your union, about the breakdown of it, about
the history, about everything. You need to keep your employer
accountable and also within the union. Just like nurses have
to be accountable for everything we do, and if we
get in trouble, of course we're going to be reprimanded.
The union needs to also go through the same thing

(03:27:54):
as we do. It's only fair. So that's pretty much
it for me. Any other questions you're reading, are you
have you finished up your copy of Solidary Unionism yet? Arena? Oh,
you mean the rank and File I am on chapter
three has been on. It's been interesting and since I

(03:28:15):
will be going on vacation, well, I am on vacation
right now. I'll be leaving tomorrow. I should be finished
up with that book by then. That's a That's one
thing that like, I don't want anyone to think just
because I can speak about the union in a halfway
intelligible way that I've been studying this for a long time.
A lot of my knowledge about the union is pretty

(03:28:37):
new and recent, and uh, like I got, you know,
I picked up a copy of Stoughton Lens The Rank
and File Labor Law for the rank and Filer. There's
an audiobook of it. It's just a great, like short
little book about everything you need to know to kind
of like exercise your rights and try and stay out
of like trouble. Picked up a copy of you know, uh,

(03:29:02):
Jamie Mccayfleery's No Shortcuts. We've been passing around a copy
of Stoughton Len's Solidary Unionism, and like there's a lot.
And then we went to Labor Notes and like it's
funny because our union sent us to Labor Notes. Like
I've got pictures of me and like other shift change
people that were taken by staff if we were at

(03:29:26):
the Labor Notes conference. The funny thing was that I
was in the talks about how to build a caucus
and how to exercise their democratic rights as one of
the funeral the only nurses in some of those spaces,
and uh, you know, I don't know what they expected
to happen, but the way they're treating this whole thing,
every little thing that we've gotten, the fact that we

(03:29:48):
can send that we were about to be able to
send emails out was the thing that we had to
fight for every step of the way. They gave us
a set of rules that the rules were the most
conservative interpretation of our leagual democratic rights that are set
in federal law. They gave us like the nineteen fifties,
like carpenters union interpretation of like those those rights. They

(03:30:11):
ignored all the case law that we have to be
able to communicate with our coworkers through normal union channel,
like every communication method our union uses to normally communicate
with us legally we should have access to. Now they're
trying to throttle that's like all you can only send
an email communication every fifteen days. It's like you know what,
like you're doing your little whisper campaign like twenty four hours,

(03:30:33):
twenty four seven just by and then you have to
opt into like to communication about the about the election,
like they were trying to keep and they're cutting meetings short,
they're cutting meetings off. They were trying to bury this.
Now we think that they're they're trying to shift gears
because they know that this is a lot more serious
than they thought it was. You know, we're not here

(03:30:55):
to you know, turn the union upside like well, maybe
turn the an upside down is a good way to
think of it, but in a good productive way, not
in a you know, turn it upside down and shake it,
you know, to like, you know, destroy it. We want
to turn it upside down so that it's the way
a real union is supposed to be, is it. People
who are elected into leadership are accountable to the people

(03:31:16):
who elect them. And our goal is to you know,
to make the union like we want to go from
something like you know, Chicago Teachers Union, which is really
powerful and famously like democratic. It wasn't always that way.
It was only focused on very basic stuff, you know,

(03:31:36):
before the women in the Chicago Teachers Union took it
over and changed it for the better. M you know,
that's our goals. We want our union to be to
have that internal, vibrant discussion and debate about how the
union should be working should work because we know that
as nurses that we've got the skills in the capacity
to have an impact on the others are said, we

(03:31:57):
don't think that people who are paid out of our
due should ever be afraid when a nurse opens their
mouth and says I think things could be better or
I don't like how this is happening. Yeah, And I
think I think one more thing I do you kind
of want to add is that you know, you were

(03:32:18):
talking a bit earlier about sort of the risk of stagnation,
and I mean, I think something that people don't want
to hear, is it, like, you know, there's been a
wave of militancy in the last few years, but the
actual union like the actual unionization rate of the US
keeps going down. And I think a big part of

(03:32:38):
that is, you know, like even even in the periods
when unions are really strong, they got into these sort
of bureaucratic patterns where people were busy sort of fighting
their own internal like like busy fighting their own rank
and file, and then when the bosses came for them,
they got destroyed. And I don't know, like it really
seems like a moment where either unions are going to

(03:33:00):
people like you are going to win and you get
these rank and file movements that are changing what the
union is to be what it's supposed to be or
the last remnants of unionism is going to die. And
that's I don't know, Like I mean, it's depressing, but
that's like if you if you just look at the
unionization rich chart, it just keeps going down and down
and down, and every time it seems like it's hit

(03:33:21):
to do low, it's like it finds another way to
go out, which I guess is kind of a room
way to look at it. But I don't know. I mean,
it is very positive to think about how how there's
organizing that's difficult. It's hard to get people to do
some things right. It's difficult to pull people together for

(03:33:44):
you know, um certain types of organizing when they don't
feel like they have a say or a stake in
what's going on. But I will say that like it
has been, it is always eye opening when I watch
my co workers pull together in this thing, and I
think that there's that common experience at work and especially

(03:34:05):
care workers right now, it is like that is driving
us to do different things. There's a reason why we're
having a rank and file movement in our union now
and things aren't just continue like continuing to stagnate I
think that people recognize that their union has to be
fighting for them. I think that's a big thing. People
want the union to fight, not to just kind of

(03:34:28):
like sit there and you know, you know, people get
really frustrated when they feel like their dues are being
taken and they're not seeing that immediate benefit. The immediate
benefit only comes when we pull together and we fight back.
So I think that I totally see what you're saying.
I think a lot of that comes down to people
who get into these positions. And this is why we

(03:34:50):
believe in the principle of like rotation and like and
churning over the leadership as much as possible. Is that
I think when you stay and no one should be
in the position of organize yourself out of a job.
Right if you're doing you're if you're being effective, you're
organizing yourself out of a job. And I have organized

(03:35:12):
out of myself out of some jobs. And right now
I've organized myself out of telling people that there's a
movement and that we've got to participate in it. And
now I'm moving on to other things because I have
like a whole crew of people in my hospital who
are doing that organizing work without me having to do it.
So I think that there's like it's can be little

(03:35:33):
depressing when you look at like the raw numbers, but
I think that a lot of that is Like it's
like if you if your union is clearly not great
and people kind of complain about it, then yeah, no
one's going to want to join it. Like if your
union thinks it's more important to be a landlord or
you know, stash forty two million dollars in the bank,
then it is to invest that money in actually building

(03:35:56):
organizational expertise or you know, building, And I see the unorganized,
like Eric was saying, in places or like right to
work states, which we've won. We have won contracts in
right right to work states. But you have to be looking.
You have to be constantly pushing for it. And if
you can't just take a little win here there and

(03:36:17):
then be excited because you just got another union to
affiliate you like our union does. Like we need to
be working on actually bringing more and more workers into
our union and if we don't do that, it will die.
But um, I think that there's a spirit in the
you know that you know when you come to a
place to work, with coworkers and you face common enemy

(03:36:39):
and common problems, common conditions. You do see what it
can look like when people decide to do something on
their own. You know, to get back to MIA's point
about declining unionism in this country. In order to, you know,
to change this decline in unionism, we need to change

(03:37:00):
who we are as union members. We need to You
know that I'm not a big doctor phil fan, but
he used to say that thing all the time. Well,
how's that working for you? Unions need to take a
look at themselves and say how, how how is this
working for you? We are declining. Why do we continue

(03:37:21):
to do the same thing we're doing over and over again.
We need to change who we are. For example, as
a nurse, a nurse needs to know when they stand
up and speak out that when they stand up they
won't be standing alone, that there'll be somebody around them,
that other nurses are going to be there right behind them,
backing them up. And that goes for any trade. You know,

(03:37:46):
we we can't progress as workers without struggle, and there
will be struggle. We need to march forward. We need
to be able to say everybody that can be any
union should be any union, and we need to expand

(03:38:06):
ourselves as nurses. I mean, I don't want to harp
on it, but this pandemic was devastating for us, and
I obviously no nurses worked remotely. I should say no
bedside nurse worked remotely. I know many of our nurse
managers worked remotely and checked in on us through you know,

(03:38:28):
online things, But for the most part, every nurse, bedside
nurse was at that bedside. It was not it was
not pleasant, it was it was something that I'm sure
many nurses are probably in uh, you know, counseling for
they were that traumatized by it. Many people had lost

(03:38:51):
family members, just like the rest of the public did,
yet they still had to continue to work. I think
as a as a union, we need to change who
we are. And like I said, I don't want to
point fingers or anything that you know, people that are
in the union now or the people are running against

(03:39:14):
I'm sure they're good people, but we have a different
idea and we want to bring a change to how
the union runs. And I think that change will make
us a stronger and better union and I think will
be will have happier nurses and wind up with more
activist nurses who will expand the union. It's going to

(03:39:36):
be a word of mouth. You know, one thing. You
can have the best organization in the world, but the
things that are the best product, but what really makes
your product worthwhile is word of mouth campaigns. People have
to talk about you. People have to say, hey, you
know that California Nurses Association that and then you they're

(03:40:00):
really doing something. I want to be a part of that. Uh,
you know, we need to you know, we've been pressing
on a Medicare for all, single payer and and of
course ratios for everybody, but we need to start organizing
more and all those states where those workers suffer. Because

(03:40:21):
I can tell you this right now. You know, I'd
ever talked about it with John. Our hospital is filled
with nurses from the South and they tell you, oh,
I came to California for the ratios. They need to
fight for those ratios back in Alabama and Mississippi and
all the states they come from. We need to help them,

(03:40:45):
you know, bring unions to the South. You know, the
basic core of right of right to work it was racism.
The racism is what drove right to work. It was
the same people that brought you. Segregation is what brought
you right to work, and uh, you know that's a fact.
Oh and it's important for us that uh you know,

(03:41:08):
we want to be an activist union and I'm not
opposed to that, but we can do that by unionizing
these hospitals and making those nurses bedside lives a lot better. Um,
you know Stouton Lynn. It's funny, is that I always laugh,
you know, John brings it up. I'm from originally from Canton, Ohio,

(03:41:30):
and of course Stoughton Lynn taught I believe it was
at Youngstown State. He was from. He was He spent
the last part of his life after his Vietnam War
activism in Youngstown, in the Youngstown area. And I think
the last book I read by him was Bob Lee's
and Zapatistas. You know, he was talking about the It's

(03:41:52):
a great book. And not many people know about him.
I knew about him in Ohio because you know, you
know social justice work there. Uh you know at Walsh
at that time it was Walsh College and then Walsh University. Now, uh,
you know Joe Turma, the professor there, you know, was

(03:42:13):
often talk about Stoughton Lynn and that's how I you know,
started reading a lot of his works. Um, the things
that he says about rank and file workers is something
that we need to make part of the national conversation.
And we need to get that message out. We need
to to to tone down the big union actions and

(03:42:37):
the big union talk and let's just make it a
nurse's conversation. We always talked about our union about nurses values.
Nurses valuables. Values are invaluable. Uh. They apply to every
walk of life, every trade. And I think that's what

(03:42:58):
we need to do. And I know that's what Mark
would say if he was on the call with us.
I just got a text from him. He's almost finished
with our video, so he's working hard. I mean, the
guy took two weeks of his own time. And that's
another thing. Here we are, we are bedside nurses. He
had to self teach himself how to make pretty high

(03:43:20):
end quality videos. And we're not bought and sold. We
don't hire anybody to do our work for us. We're
doing this ourselves. We're bootstrapping it, as you know what
they call bootstrapping it yourself. Up here. We are bootstrapping
a campaign and a movement. I don't know if we're

(03:43:41):
going to win, we are at least going to make
a hell of an impression on people. And I hope,
whether we win or lose, that impression goes far and
that people listen to what we're saying and demand what
we're staying for. What we want our union to be.

(03:44:03):
We don't want to have an sciu like union. We
don't want to uh like we're paying for services here.
We want a union that listens to us and does
what we want. Um, a nurse shouldn't have to beg
a labor rep to say no. We said no to

(03:44:25):
a last, best and final and our labor rep said no.
This in our professional opinion, this is a good deal.
Well guess guess what, Mia, We got ten percent more
by saying no. And I know that that sounds greedy,
but in reality, um, you know, we do get paid

(03:44:46):
considerably more in California than another place in the country.
But also, to buy a house in a bad neighborhood
is a million and a half dollars, So it's so
it's I have to drive an hour away just get
to work. It is cheaper where I live right now
than it is in the Bay Area. I could not
get a house in the Bay Area at all. And

(03:45:07):
we should be incorporating housing demands into our negotiations as well,
like especially the years gonna be a landlord, Like come on, well, okay,
how about we you know, the first public housing was
really cooperative housing built by unions. Like there's no reason why. Um,
you know these some of these institutions are like incredibly

(03:45:29):
wealthy and building. Uh, you know, if we can we
have the kind of power to bring them to you know,
a screeching halt. We should be able to like, you know,
get the kind of things that we need to live
by in our community, like we should be living where
our patients are anyway. And it's you know, and it's

(03:45:50):
a way of bringing our bringing us ourselves into our
community so that our community is you know that we're
part of our community. Um. And you know, I think
we're I'm just gonna say I'm gonna be waking up
in six hours so that I can go back to work.
And we want to make sure that people know a

(03:46:12):
couple of key things. So there is an election happening.
If you are a nurse in a CNA, California Nurses
Association or National Nurses United and NOC like Hospital, there's
an election happening. Ballots are being mailed out to you
on channel tenth. We expect that they're going to start

(03:46:36):
arriving a day or two after that. We are the
shift Change slate, so the four of us are running
for the Council of Presidents. It's Eric, Raina, John and
Mark And if you want to find us on social media,
we just got our Instagram account. We are called shift
Change and on you. We're on TikTok Now we're going

(03:46:58):
to be releasing some video Shift Change and and You,
And then we're also going to have we've got our
YouTube and Facebook set up as well. Look for us there.
And we've got to go fund maybe because we've got
to buy the materials that we are using to help
organize with. Thankfully, by the sounds of it, our lawyers

(03:47:19):
are going to be working for us for because they
believe in what we're doing. And these are movement lawyers.
These are not right wing people who want to fight unions.
They want unions to be accountable to their workers and
to be strong fighting unions. And that's our main goal
is we think that our union could be one of

(03:47:41):
the most powerful unions in the country if we organize
and fight, and we organize by building our relationships on
trust and solidarity, by constantly working to defend our contract,
and we think that as we build that energy, we
can take that to all the other things that we
think are portness nurses. So we talked about nurses values.
We know those are actually nurses values and not some

(03:48:03):
person who decided that they're going to tag along with
us and ride on our coat tails to you know,
whatever political future that they think they have. You know,
we are you know, this is our union, and we're
going to make it you know, accountable to us so
that we can change the world and change our workplace
and make you know, being a nurse one of those

(03:48:24):
kind of jobs that people aspire to and not something
that they come into for two or three years and
then leave because it's so terrible. So I don't know
what else to say. I'm ready for chift change, Rain,
Are you ready for chift change? Yep? And just like
Nelson Mandela saying I never lose, I either win or

(03:48:45):
I learn. Hell yes, hell yeah, I love this. This
is the stuff I look for. Thank you so much,
Thank you, Mia, thank you, thank you all for being on.
This is great and I really hope you all win
and if we win, bring us back. Yeah. I was
about to say, yeah, give us a report back. We'll

(03:49:07):
tell you, We'll tell you everything that happened, and maybe
if we win, we'll have a nice victory party and
maybe we'll let you come out, you and the rest
of the It could Happen Here crew, Maybe do some
live stuff for us, because I think be a kick
out of that. Every time I hear a nurse say
that I listened to It could Happen Here, a part
of me just like does a little snoopy happy dance. Hey.

(03:49:31):
We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
now until the heat death of the Universe. It Could
Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening,