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Abby Sato
This is an iheart podcast guaranteed human.
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Robert Evans
Down trainer games on prime video watch the trailer on trainergames dot com season.
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Can be good at fantasy football and at better we understand that that's why we're giving you ten dollars for free.
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Robert Evans
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Better support for the show comes from public the investing platform for those who take it seriously on public you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks bonds options crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with ai if you it all starts with your prompt from renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over twenty percent year over year you can literally type any prompt and put the ai to work it screens thousands of stocks builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the s and p five hundred then you can invest in a few clicks generated assets are like efts with infinite possibilities completely customizable and based on your thesis not someone else's go to public dot com podcast and earn an uncapped one percent bonus when you for your portfolio that's public dot com podcast paid for by public investing brokerage services by open to the public investing inc member finra sipc advisory services by public advisors llc sec registered advisor generated assets is an interactive analysis tool output is for informational purposes only and is not investment recommendation or advice complete disclosures available at public dot com disclosures callzone.
- [02:47]
Robert Evans
Media hey everybody robert evans here and i wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want if you've been listening to the episodes every day this week there's going to be nothing new here for you but you can make your own decisions.
- [03:12]
Mia Wong
Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about how freedom is a joke and our lives are the punchline i am your host mia wong long ago twenty thirteen in a galaxy basically exactly where this one is now jeff bezos the founder of amazon and now a terminal fascist purchased the washington post this was a sign of things to come the danger of the american free press is and has always been that we do not have a free press we have a capitalist press writing and especially reporting is a material product journalists have to eat they have to travel they have to go places they have to meet people all of this requires capital and the problem with all of this requiring capital is that capital is not a neutral entity and the people who possess capital have interests fast forward to twenty twenty as protests and uprisings raged across the united states against the police and white supremacy a battle broke out inside of the new york times newsrooms and editorial staff about the newspaper publishing an opinion piece called send in the troops calling for you guessed it sending in the troops to attack protesters publishers by a member of the american government named tom cotton editors resigned in outrage debates raised across journalists slacks it was the culmination of decades of battles about the direction of politics and race in the united states fought simultaneously in the streets and in the newsroom twenty twenty was a significant danger to the ruling class the actual ideology that was so dangerous it had to be destroyed was this if the premise of twenty twenty is true which is that the us is a structurally racist country founded on slavery and genocide and that reproduces those same violences through the prison system which has legal slavery in it from the structure of the thirteenth amendment and reproduces it again through the police then the american project is indefensible and here there be dragons the ruling class needed to move to stop it and so they created what they would call i guess a new ideology but was really a continuation of centuries old strategies this time rebranded as anti woke one of the avatars of anti woke was barry weiss barry weiss is that the new york times at the time was an ideological diversity hire which is to say affirmative action for white conservatives as affirmative action has only existed in the figments of the minds of conservatives she was given a cozy make work job at the beginning of the trump administration as an opinion staff editor and writer for the new york times she was hired specifically to bring in more trumpian figures into the opinion section and this is and i cannot emphasize this enough this is the fever dream of affirmative action in the conservative mind right and these are going to be a bunch of people who really hate affirmative action but again what they are being given they're being handed by the most important newspaper probably in the entire world you know she was handed a job because she was a fucking right winger now weiss was part of the shall we say conversations at the new york times about again whether or not a newspaper should print a letter from a sitting us representative calling for the deployment of us soldiers against the american people she saw this as an opportunity not to resist a obviously tyrannical program by again a sitting member of the united states government she saw this as her moment to do a grift now in this moment she resigned from the new york times in a huff raving about the quote lack of ideological diversity who had a giant rant about how the twitter is not the masthead of the new york times blah blah blah blah blah blah blah which again i cannot emphasize this enough like that she was brought in as a right wing affirmative action hire in order to appease the demand from like the ruling class i guess for like pro trump people they already had a bunch of right wingers this is completely unhinged but you know she resigns and she does this big press tour in the right wing press trying to talk about how she was canceled and of course none of this ever even happened right we can debate the effect to which cancellation ever was even really a thing or did anything at all but she was not canceled she literally resigned of her own free will she was not forced out she chose to leave in order to pursue a career as a right wing grifter in other fields namely substack where she ran a newsletter that was sort of rebranded as like oh it's a media outlet called the free press it's like no this is barry weiss's substack come on what are we doing here what are we doing here now weiss is not a journalist she is a right wing ideologue she's also a hardline scientist if you want to go into all of the absolutely unhinged shit that bari weiss has said and done over the years all of the just unbelievably islamophobic shit all of the weird racist shit all of the anti immigrant shit that she said there's a very good john oliver thing about her she is part of this story but if we spent this entire episode just talking about how much she fucking sucks we would be here for like two decades now in a jest world none of this would matter at all this would just be a conservative walking off from the free job that she was given by the new york times stomping off at a huff and going to start a substack whatever who cares this is not a jest world this is the united states she now controls one of the most powerful and important news organizations in the united states the story of how she got there is the story of of the future of the american media unfortunately for all of us the story is distressingly simple bari weiss and her outlet i'm using that in immense quotations again this is just a substack was bought out by one larry ellison larry ellison then appointed weiss to be the ideological hatchet woman for his takeover of paramount which owns cbs there was no secret plan there was no weird strategy there was no illuminati cabal behind the scenes it didn't require any effort at all all you have to do in order to install a right wing hack as the editor in chief of cbs news is by the company the results have been devastating i would call what happened resegregation there was a large scale firing of non white employees nbc eliminated the editorial teams for nbc asian america nbc black nbc latino and nbc out nbc out was the queer one they fired gayle king they did some stuff that frankly sounds like a joke i'm just going to read this quote from the root and the cbs news bureau in johannesburg south africa has been shut down with coverage of africa shifting to london that is again they closed the south africa bureau this is a cvs bureau in south africa and moved their coverage of africa from africa to london if a hardline marxist ideologue had written this in nineteen sixty seven no one would have believed them and in the process what they've done here is they've destroyed the npc outlets that were responsible for for doing a whole bunch of coverage for different groups of non white people right nbc blk which nbc black did a whole bunch of very good coverage of the uprising in twenty twenty right nbc asian america did a bunch of good work nbc out was a place where you could occasionally find a trans person who was allowed to write and all of that is gone because one man larry ellison and his son david ellison bought the fucking media company and installed this unhinged right wing hack as their ideological secret police i don't even know what you would call this position the ideological purge executor i guess you could call it of cbs now obviously there are multiple aspects to this we'll talk about larry ellison himself in a second because he is a very important figure but first before we talk about the consolidation of capital into increasing monopolies let's go hear from some of those monopolies products and services let's go we are so back one of the obvious driving factors behind what has become a right wing fascist takeover of the media has been the consolidation of capital into increasing monopolies now it's been a very very famous thing in the us to say that most of american media is controlled by five companies but here's the thing even those five companies those can always be consolidated into fewer and fewer companies right as the companies start to struggle and as any one of them sees weakness in the other ones you get attempts to buy them out and this is what happens with paramount which is again the parent company that owns nbc so the way that it's framed if you read it in the press is oh it was a merger between skydance which was ellison's sort of outlet and paramount but that's not really what happened really what happened was paramount was bought by ellison and skydance and they were merged together after that and this is a problem with the concentration of capital right as capital becomes increasingly more and more concentrated and as there are individual people and also entities that control more and more capital their ability to simply swallow the rest of their competition and consume it increases and this is a significant advantage to the companies who get to swallow this capital they get to absorb all of the intellectual property and so now they have control over over the property regimes that allow them to control cultural production and as a sort of incidental bonus they can take control of the media now it's worth getting into the ellisons themselves now larry ellison back in the halcyon days of twenty twenty was merely the eleventh richest man in the world when he quote participated in a call shortly after the twenty twenty election that focused on strategies for contesting the legitimacy of the vote according to court documents and a participant the november fourteenth call included lindsey graham fox news host sean hannity jay sekalow an attorney for president donald trump and james bopp junior an attorney for true the vote a texas based nonprofit true the vote was a completely unhinged organization dedicated to overturning the twenty twenty election by doing all these weird voter fraud things and they had a strategy call like they're turning a strategy call with a bunch of trump supporters including one larry ellison now again that was back in twenty twenty here in twenty twenty five and now fighting with elon musk for the title of the richest person in the fucking world ellison said and i quote we're going to have supervision every police officer is going to be supervised at all times and if there's a problem ai will report that problem and and report it to the appropriate person citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on now in that intervening time larry ellison is one of the people behind oracle and oracle has benefited enormously as a company that got really in on the cloud storage boom they've benefited enormously from selling a bunch of shit to ai companies larry ellison is also a huge ai supporter a huge backer of ai a huge someone who wants to spread ai and someone who wants to spread ai you know very specifically and this is very important into surveillance technology he is also one of the people who as twenty twenty went on and as the last half decade has come on and as the giant sort of backlash against against the uprising and as his attempt to reassert racism as the dominant ideology of the united states to make sure that capital's hold over this country and that white supremacy's hold over this country would be maintained he has become one of the large drivers of this entire project he's not the only one jeff bezos as we started this program with already owned the washington post in twenty twenty five he went in to very seriously change it jeff bezos on the now fascist twitter and we will get to that in a second too wrote and this was a this was a letter that he was sent to his staff and this is this is the editorial section i'm writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages we are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars personal liberties and free markets we'll cover other topics too of course but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others david shipley who had been his hand picked editor resigned rather than lead the effort it's not like shipley had been like a leftist right but you know i'm going to read another part of this letter quote i offered david shipley who i admire greatly because you know he was the handpicked guy the opportunity to lead this new chapter i suggested to him that the answer wasn't hell yes then it had to be no after careful consideration david decided to step away so okay what was actually happening here he came in was like our board is not fascist enough and if you're not going to make it more fascist then get the fuck out of the way and the guy he had picked to run the editorial board like three years ago went this is unacceptable i cannot be involved in this and left and now the washington post publishes pieces with titles like quote pam bondi's welcome woke rollback the justice department rescinds regulations encouraging racial preferences you know and you can in some ways see all of the things are coming together obviously bezos was a major supporter of the trump administration is a major supporter of the trump administration put a bunch of money into the unhinged trump ballroom and when he says justice department rescinds regulations encouraging racial preferences they're talking about anti discrimination ordinances right that's what they're actually talking about but these people have been so cooked and have stewed so much in the ideology of countering the ideology of twenty twenty that they're now doing all of this reverse racism stuff where they think that if you're not allowed to discriminate that's anti white discrimination and the washington post has been tanking effectively in the wake of a whole bunch of a whole bunch of right wing editorial changes its audience has significantly declined since this a whole bunch of people who subscribed to the post called it in their subscriber count is just absolutely pitiful now the reach has been contracting the paper is going to shit but that doesn't matter because the washington post is not a money making outlet the washington post is a chance to shape the way that the country thinks and it is better that seven people in washington dc who are all identically minded conservatives read the washington post and agree with it than it is for there to be any sort of independence whatsoever from anything on the shop floor or from any of the people writing for it we've also seen in recent months the elimination of teen folk conte nast teen vogue's parent company eliminated teen vogue as an independent outlet teen vogue had been the furthest left of the even sort of mainstream outlets in the us it had carried a bunch of extremely good and radical work on race and gender it was also one of the few outlets with consistent trans writing and of course the other aspect of all of these purges has been unbelievable unhinged transphobia and this was them just destroying what had been a very very important outlet on the left for telling the stories of non white people telling the stories of workers and telling the stories of of trans people and they just destroyed it even though and this is actually very interesting ever since teen vogue had shifted to doing a bunch of leftist coverage and covering the protests against donald trump in his first administration and had gone towards actually talking about labor and talking about struggle and talking about unions and talking about the experiences of people living under white supremacy its readership had exploded but again that doesn't matter because it's bad for donald trump and so we're seeing the ideological tightening consolidation of the media as what had been an outlet that allowed people to talk about shit was just destroyed now speaking about outlets destroying things ideologically hey products and services please don't destroy us woo now as we covered on this show a few weeks ago conde nast also fired several union workers illegally for you know staging a again protected workplace action demanding to know what the fuck was going on with these teen vogue firings and that's another aspect of all of this takeover which is that these outlets just viciously and radically hate and this is this is the ruling class of people who run these outlets viciously hate unions and this is something that's very important to understand in terms of media unions because media unions were also a very powerful force for encouraging diversity because as it turns out workers and this is true i could say this is someone who's part of a media union less racist than the bosses and in fact would like there to be more non white people and don't like it when non white people are discriminated against and this is one of the things that these media unions and the unions in general do is try to help you not get fucking discriminated against on racial grounds so of course a part and parcel of this has been the targeting of the union and that's what we've been seeing at conde nast where they also fired workers who had nothing to do with teen vogue and also one of whom was on the show and is trans and you should go listen to that episode because it's very good but that's another aspect of this right wing consolidation is that media unions are able to push back against the untrammeled power of these fascist billionaires to turn news coverage into whatever the fuck they want and that's what's happened at cbs where they're now doing giant specials with like kirk's widow and all of these just absolutely deranged unbelievably bizarre right wing pieces that they're just sort of airing now and in order to you know stop that shit you need powerful media unions and this is one of the things the ruling class is trying to crush now it's also worth mentioning that these fight wing billionaires are trying to consolidate their hold on social media as well as the traditional media and obviously the largest example of this is elon musk who's purchased twitter and has you know effectively turned twitter into another arm of stormfront it is a just unhinged stew of racism and conspiracy that is now effectively unusable if you don't want to like the most racist shit you've ever seen in your entire life just in every single one of your replies and it's also become a major vector of targeting for the trump administration where what twitter is used for now instead of being a platform that at one time actually was able to play a role as the thing that does resistance as a tool of protesters and as a tool of people who opposed the untrammeled rule of billionaires it's now been converted into just racist slopes and a way to track down anyone who's sort of vaguely center left and just put them in the eyes of the administration so they can be targeted by the state and it's also worth noting that one of the people who helped bankroll the purchase of twitter because elon musk couldn't just purchase it directly was one larry ellison larry ellison is also part of a massive attempt to buy tiktok listeners of the show are probably familiar with the whole extremely weird story about how tiktok was banned last year under the biden administration sort of bafflingly and then trump sort of just broke the law and made it still be usable but has been trying to force tiktok to be sold to american buyers and the conglomerate that's supposed to buy it is a larry ellison thing so he's also attempting to buy tiktok and finally the story we're going to close on is that larry ellison has been doing a hostile takeover bid of warner brothers now warner brothers currently is set to be bought by netflix larry ellison kept on submitting bids to them and his efforts to actually get the purchase to go through were consistently denied but in the wake of that they're attempting to do a hostile takeover bid where they just go to the shareholders directly and try to buy them out at what they claim is a higher share price i'm not going to go into that whole thing it's a fiasco but what is interesting for our purposes is that david ellison who's the guy running paramount who's the guy who's been directly running the ideological purges has met several times with trump and last time they met trump has promised that he would change the coverage of cnn in order to make it better for trump now it's also worth noting that buying cnn is not part of the deal for the warner takeover bid buy netflix right if netflix takes over warner bros they don't get cnn under paramount and larry ellison's deal they would get cnn now even though cnn has done a whole bunch of unhinged shit like having ben shapiro on to do fucking election coverage jesus fucking christ okay trump has still been mad at them for reporting even a tiny bit critically about his administration and trump has been kind of refusing to pick a side directly in terms of the takeover bid for warner brothers and the fight between netflix and paramount but he's now said that he wants to make sure that cnn is sold and that it should get new leadership presumably along the style of what happened with cbs and so this is sort of the final phase of all of this right which is trump administration has the ability to use its quote unquote antitrust power in order to stop one of these two companies from doing this buyout and the trump administration is using the fact that the media is being bought out by his allies in order to try to get people to buy cnn and simply eliminate negative news coverage of him and i don't really think i need to explain why it's extremely bad that the president of the united states could simply order a news outlet to be bought out and then suddenly it's bought out i think it's kind of self explanatory why that's unbelievably bad but that is the situation that we may rapidly find ourselves in because we don't live in anything that even sort of looks like a democracy we live in the dictatorship of capital and the thing about the press under a dictatorship even one that's as decentralized as the dictatorship of capital is that one particularly fascist faction of capital can simply roll in by the media and take control of it and that's the project that we're seeing now but these people are not undefeatable we beat them before we can beat them again and in some ways their project is kind of self defeating in that they have spent a significant amount of time hollowing out people's trust in these institutions and there is an extent to which as bad as all of this is they may simply be taking control of a husk that they had already caused or rot from the inside and meanwhile all of these all of his control of the media that they've been taking has not stopped everyone from fucking hating them and that's the note that i want to leave everyone here on it doesn't matter how much of the media these people buy everyone still hates them we can fight them and we can.
- [28:47]
Andrew Sage
Win.
- [29:00]
Unrivaled Basketball Announcer
Ten athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points.
- [29:10]
Garrison Davis
You.
- [29:10]
Unrivaled Basketball Announcer
Are the fittest of the fit only one of you will leave here with an ifit contract worth two hundred fifty thousand dollars this is where mindset comes in someone called will be eliminated pressure.
- [29:23]
Robert Evans
Is coming down trainer games on prime video january eighth watch the trailer on.
- [29:28]
Unrivaled Basketball Announcer
Trainergames dot com season two of unrivaled basketball is here and the talent is unreal paige beckers nafiza collier kelsey plumb brianna stewart and more are back to redefine the game unrivaled basketball season two sponsored by samsung galaxy tips off january fifth on tnt trutv and hbo max.
- [29:44]
Mia Wong
Nothing in life is free except this.
- [29:46]
Public Investing Sponsor
Free dollar ten that better picks is offering download the better app pick more or less on player stats watch the.
- [29:51]
Mia Wong
Games and win some cash it's that.
- [29:53]
Public Investing Sponsor
Simple must be twenty one or older in a jurisdiction where better picks operates terms and conditions apply better picks sports just got better support for the show comes from public the investing platform for those who take it seriously on public you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks bonds options crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with ai it all starts with your prompt from renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over twenty percent year over year you can literally type any prompt and put the ai to work it screens thousands of stocks builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the s and p five hundred then you can invest in a few clicks generated assets are like efts with infinite possibilities completely customizable and based on your thesis not someone else's go to public dot com podcast and earn an uncapped one percent bonus when you transfer your portfolio that's public dot com podcast paid for by public investing brokerage services by open to the public investing inc member finra sipc advisory services by public advisors llc sec registered advisor generated assets is an interactive analysis tool output is for informational purposes only and is not investment recommendation or advice complete disclosures available at public dot com disclosures.
- [31:12]
Mia Wong
Welcome to jake it abbott here a podcast to boldly ask the question what if a whole bunch of your life wasn't controlled by the bizarre whims of random dictators this is your host mia wong and the last time we saw the blue bottle union they had staged a walkout treated eclipse now they are back again to talk about union shit and yeah with me is alex pine who's the president of blue bottle union and abby sato the secretary treasurer yeah both of you two welcome to the show.
- [31:47]
Alex Pine
Hi thanks for having us both back.
- [31:48]
Abby Sato
On yes thank you so much yeah.
- [31:51]
Mia Wong
I'M i'm really i really i'm really excited to talk about this because the last one i gotta say that was one of the absolute funniest ud things.
- [31:58]
Alex Pine
I'Ve ever heard yeah i still can't get over how dhs got called on us when we tried to file for.
- [32:03]
Mia Wong
Our election so what it like i feel like this is this is one of the things about doing the show is like i'm like about to be five years into this right it's like you think you've seen it all and then just like no just just the most unhinged bullshit you've ever heard in your entire life because like just like the capacity for cruelty and inventiveness of bosses is effectively infinite so they can always find some bullshit to pull that you've never seen before and they love.
- [32:29]
Alex Pine
To do it too yeah this is one of the reasons why we unionize to begin with is just because bosses can be petty tyrants yeah and sometimes it seems like the only reason that they got into being a boss is because they want to be a petty tyrant but don't have the soul for politics anyways yeah we unionized last may for anybody that's unaware blue bottle is a so called specialty coffee chain that is owned entirely by nestle yes that one that everyone regards as widely being.
- [33:00]
Mia Wong
Evil yeah see an extremely long episode that i did for example about nestle chocolate and child labor it's great it's child slave labor good stuff we love.
- [33:11]
Abby Sato
Capitalism and their coffee business is truly.
- [33:14]
Alex Pine
No better yeah i mean this is going to get wildly off topic before we even begin but if anybody looks up the ngo coffee watch they do a lot of great reporting and research on the supply chains of coffee specifically nestle's and starbucks and it's all very ugly stuff but blue bottle blue bottle is a specialty coffee chain owned by nestle reunionized all six of their greater boston locations in may of twenty twenty four and this year we added four locations in the east bay area to our union in july hell yeah yeah we also just concluded a multi day strike as an independent union at the end of november so black friday hell.
- [33:54]
Mia Wong
Yeah hell yeah yeah yeah so let's talk about that strike um well actually i guess okay we should we should probably do the run up to what has been happening until we got to that strike i'm getting i'm getting strike.
- [34:05]
Alex Pine
Excited no this is how i've been in my mind since september is just how do we make a strike happen.
- [34:10]
Mia Wong
Hell yeah hell yeah yeah let's talk about what the sort of lead up stuff to the action were and let's talk about what expanding was like yeah.
- [34:21]
Alex Pine
Abby do you want to talk about.
- [34:22]
Abby Sato
The lead up yeah so since we unionized last may we've had multiple staged walkouts in september of last year hell yeah hell yeah one of our union reps at the harvard square location was unjustly fired so we did a walkout over her termination we did a walkout in january of this past year after blue bottle completely refused to negotiate with us over the renovation of the prudential center and a lot of employees were going to be losing out on almost dollar eight in tips an hour which is just right hundreds of dollars a month and the company was like oh well we bargained to an impasse so we're just going to do whatever we want we were like okay well that's not that's not how this works no yeah and then in may of this year we did another walkout when they made the same argument that we bargained towards in pass when they tried to.
- [35:14]
Alex Pine
Install security cameras for anybody that's wondering no the cafes in boston did not have cameras in them for the entire time that we were organizing or unionized until we began negotiating the installation of cameras as part of our contract when they felt like they were done talking about cameras with us they declared impasse which they can't do because we were negotiating it as part of the contract so they would have had to get to an impasse on the entire contract before doing it yeah and their lawyer basically said well we weren't getting anywhere with that so we're going to do.
- [35:46]
Mia Wong
It anyways oh god labor law is so fun because it's like like every boss breaks like one hundred million labor laws a second and then kind of nothing happens unless you force it to.
- [36:01]
Alex Pine
Speaking of breaking weird labor laws since we unionized one nice thing that has happened was until may of this year they were negotiating over serious discipline so final written warnings or terminations with us in effect what this means is that they would sit down with us and just talk about why they felt like terminating someone was justified until they said we're not going to do anything else aside from fire them but because of an nlrb ruling with starbucks at the end of april their lawyer said that they were done with that and they felt that they had no legal obligation to continue doing it oh fun yeah which is a break from past practice and we have in writing them committing to negotiating over serious discipline with us so less than a week after they say we're not going to bargain over discipline with you anymore they fire one coworker of ours and our store immediately walked out over it hell yeah hell yeah yeah i continue to be proud of that walkout specifically because it wasn't planned and because it was over something that is pretty technical labor law wise just the fact that they didn't negotiate over the termination that's that wrong yes.
- [37:10]
Mia Wong
That'S like girl who's read a bunch of weird labor history this thing feels like a thing for fucking weird laboratory i think it reminds me of is that there was this thing in i think it was zir gora in spain during like the twenties and thirties where it was like this hyper militant labor like union like labor town but they had a whole thing where they refused to strike over like improving economic conditions because they were like this is bourgeois reformism and they would only strike over political stuff hell yeah but if you arrested like one person like the whole fucking city would go out and it's.
- [37:40]
James Stout
Like this.
- [37:43]
Mia Wong
Yeah no we could just call we could just fucking instantly get us get a fucking walkout to happen over just like over like them with like kind of technical labor stuff like this rocks we love to see it.
- [37:55]
Abby Sato
Yeah i was on the floor that day that our coworker was fired and i remember i went on my ten minute break after she was fired and there's like a pond behind our store and i was literally throwing rocks into the pond and i was like this sucks so bad and i'm so angry and then i was like wait we're unionized i was like wait a minute we have a union and i go back into the store and i was like hey guys if we don't walk out right now then what is the point yeah and everyone was like yeah actually if we don't walk out right now what is the point hell yeah hell yeah and then we all walked out and it was it was really.
- [38:29]
Mia Wong
Beautiful actually that's so sick that's so beautiful i don't know there's some kind of metaphor for like you walking in being like the first the rock hitting the pond and the first ripples going out and the whole thing oh absolutely doing the strike but like i don't know it's gorgeous i love it that fucking rules congratulations hell yeah one of.
- [38:48]
Abby Sato
My favorite things to say is that union is friendship and friendship is unions and when your friend gets fired you should be able to walk out yeah.
- [38:56]
Mia Wong
Yeah fuck that like like seriously yeah.
- [39:01]
Alex Pine
And on the whole we've had a i think pretty successful year especially because i want to stress this we're independent so for all the walkouts that we've done we've been able to replace the wages of baristas oh that's really sick if anybody listening to this wants to help us be able to do more walkouts you can go to tinyurl dot com bbiu dash strike will be in the description hell yeah because at this point the companies realize that they can't break our solidarity in any meaningful way by resorting to scare tactics or delaying and so now they've just resorted to straight up firing people because yeah like it's kind of like a break glass here in case of emergency thing where they're like we're all out of ideas what do we do yeah yeah just.
- [39:43]
Mia Wong
Start trying to fire everyone and and.
- [39:45]
Alex Pine
That'S what they've done yeah most recently all the stores in both boston and the east bay area went on a four day strike this november because the company illegally fired abby executive board member named nora and an organizer of ours in the east bay named ashley for all incredibly petty reasons i don't know if you want to speak more to.
- [40:07]
Abby Sato
Why you were fired abby yeah so on the record i was fired because i wore green pants what i wore green pants like three weeks prior to me being fired and let me tell you there's nothing worse than waking up at four thirty to go to your opening shift at your stupid cafe job to then clock in and be immediately hit with separation forms because you wore green pants three weeks ago what you.
- [40:40]
Alex Pine
Must understand what a serious infraction it is to wear green pants of course.
- [40:43]
Abby Sato
I mean clearly the green pants that i've been wearing for the better part of two years yeah firing abby was.
- [40:48]
Alex Pine
Generous actually she should have been put to death for the crime of wearing green pants of course most likely like.
- [40:55]
Mia Wong
This is like fudgeing medieval like yeah you pissed off the monarch by like you wore a color of pants that was like unfavorable to the eye of the king and now he's like having you drawn in quarter like what is.
- [41:06]
Abby Sato
This like yep i wore green pants in front of my manager therefore i should not be able to make my.
- [41:12]
Mia Wong
Rent yeah it's absolute gibberish that that might be the all time dumbest fiery reason i've ever heard like what is.
- [41:21]
Abby Sato
Oh yeah it's just so egregious because the managers know that i have a great rapport with all my co workers i'm friends with all of my co workers and they were like h how can we you know make one of our long standing employees who is good at their job you know get fired so green pants was the reasoning which.
- [41:43]
Mia Wong
And just like the idea of your employer being able to control what color of pants you wear is like is a thing that just on a fundamental level would not be accepted with any other kind of authority that's everyone immediately recognizes wait what the fuck that's completely unhinged why should someone have the ability to tell you like no you have to wear this color pants or you can't pay your rent and you can't.
- [42:06]
Abby Sato
Eat oh yeah no and this is.
- [42:09]
Alex Pine
Kind of the despotism of management that we were just talking about isn't it yeah and this is the thing that in bargaining sessions for a contract their side is very interested in maintaining we've said multiple times that we want a better dress code policy or at the very least we don't want to waive our right to be able to wear union memorabilia on the floor and because he doesn't have any better ideas their lawyer can only think to shoot that down by talking about how he doesn't you know wear his sexuality on his shirt or what yeah yeah well because he was like why don't you want to be able to waive your right to wear union memorabilia on the floor and we said we want to be able to show pride that we're unionized and we want to be able to have more freedom for expression huh because it's despotic to be able to to have that level of control over what somebody does yeah and then he said you know well i don't wear my sexuality on my shirt and then realized that it was maybe inappropriate to say that so then he talked about how he doesn't wear his daughters on his shirt which it's a more convoluted point yeah well because he's proud of his kids i guess what are we doing.
- [43:17]
Mia Wong
Here i just come on we gotta have better arguments than this like.
- [43:23]
Abby Sato
No this guy is really full of bad.
- [43:25]
Alex Pine
Arguments if you yeah if you want to hear bad arguments you should sit down on the bargaining session where their lawyer goes on kind of incomprehensible tirades about how the free market in the aggregate will make sure that the best person will get promoted over time or that the company will become more profitable or run with the most efficiency as an enterprise because anything else would be illogical because they wouldn't produce more profit.
- [43:50]
Mia Wong
But what does that have to do with labor law okay someone i know who's a lawyer once told me that like the this this is not like a leftist this is just like she's just like a corporate lawyer once told me that this like the actual secret basis that doesn't exist of all corporate laws that there is actually nothing in the law that says a company has to make more money or that they even have the right to make money like that's that that doesn't exist like that's not a that's not a thing like there's no you don't actually have a legal right to make more money like you simply don't that's just that's not how this works.
- [44:34]
Alex Pine
The thing it.
- [44:35]
Mia Wong
Reminds me of is the anthropologist david graeber wrote about i think he might have been quoting someone else but i can't remember quote he was quoting but he writes about how the relationship between sort of eloquence and violence where the less you have and this is in somewhere in the utopia of rules he writes about how you know people who have access to violence to compel people to do something you don't even have to speak the same language as someone right you can just point a gun at them and you know they have to obey you because you know they have force right but the less ability you have to actually use force to get someone to do something right so if you're a village chief in there's actually a lot of indigenous tribes that were like this but you know you're in like sort of the northeast and you don't actually have the ability to compel people to do things so if you want people to go work in the morning you have to like get up and make a giant show of like oh i'm getting up to work in the morning everyone follow me wow look at how hard i'm working and you have to like convince them through oratory and you know this is like why all these people when when europeans run into them everyone is like holy shit these are like the these are the best orders i've ever encountered because they have to be right but the more power you have the less eloquence you have to have which i think is like you know this is like a donald trump thing right it's like yeah once you've once you've reached this point in the process you know you can just compel people to do things through violence you can just like talk like a fourth grader and it's fine and it doesn't matter because you just have violence and that's what this reminds me of like oh we're the company like we have like we're fucking owned by nestle we have all this money we don't have to make compelling arguments we just have to like have power.
- [46:15]
Alex Pine
Yeah i mean pretty much personally it reads to me as like a way to delay actually talking about any of our demands at the table because if you just eat up all the time then there's no time to talk yeah yeah but that's also really beautiful to think about from a more abstract sense.
- [46:31]
Mia Wong
Yeah well also just companies love fucking with negotiations it's awful i how okay i should just start asking everyone who does negotiations about this but on average how late are their managers to show up to meetings i would say that.
- [46:45]
Alex Pine
Actually both sides are equally late.
- [46:49]
Mia Wong
Well.
- [46:50]
Alex Pine
To the negotiations at least just because getting around the city is so difficult.
- [46:56]
Mia Wong
Oh oh so that's like a transit thing not like a no no we're.
- [47:01]
Alex Pine
Not deliberately showing up late as far as i know yeah you're just we.
- [47:05]
Mia Wong
Just can't get in traffic yeah but there shouldn't they already just be there.
- [47:09]
Alex Pine
Oh yeah well because this is something that's actually been a delay tactic for them is they insist that we need to split the cost equally of a bargaining space what what and again we're independent so they know that we can't on a regular basis commit to that so if you want to donate to our unions that way we can pay to sit down in front of these.
- [47:32]
Mia Wong
People that's completely on yeah having to have the union pay i've never heard of that before that's completely deranged that's.
- [47:40]
Alex Pine
What and we we've even waived our right to meet in a neutral space so we've asked if they would be willing to meet in the office of their legal representation or if they'd be willing to meet in the office of our legal representation and they've said no to both because supposedly despite being the second largest union avoidance firm in the world they've said that their office doesn't have adequate space to hold us but then rental space in the city is so fucking expensive that there's no feasible way to rent a space for eight hours for two days you know once a month yeah which has meant that we've ended up in some strange places so college conference rooms city hall we work why yeah we know this is.
- [48:29]
Mia Wong
Pretty dark this is the most deeply unserious company i have ever encountered like.
- [48:35]
Alex Pine
There'S all kinds of things like that that they've employed in the past year to attempt us making significant progress with negotiating and it wasn't until november this year that they finally gave us a counter on economics after we told them we would file a bad faith bargaining charge if they didn't hell yeah do you want to guess what their counter so for reference our union's requesting dollar thirty an hour for baristas because that's a living wage according to the mit living wage calculator do you want to guess what blue bottle said they would give us eighteen um no well actually strangely yes they said right now we make eighteen an hour but they said they'll keep it the same and they want to retain the rate to change it whenever they want they're they're making a floor they're they're committing to a floor that they i then tried to ask if they've ever in their history decreased wages and they're like no i don't see why we would ever do that and i'm like oh so then this floor is bullshit actually their baseline.
- [49:37]
Mia Wong
For negotiations is our starting position is.
- [49:40]
Alex Pine
Nothing yeah and this is a year after negotiating with them so far yeah.
- [49:44]
Mia Wong
It'S like a year and it's like okay like i mean at that point it's like yeah i don't know like it our our starting position is we should have your house like like this is like this is like equally like come on like you having their house is a more reasonable demand than our basic negotiating position is nothing like what are we doing here.
- [50:05]
Alex Pine
No idea just.
- [50:08]
Mia Wong
God yeah i mean insert obligatory line here about how after you win an election the most common way for you to fail is bargaining the first contract and companies know this they will just do bullshit for several years to attempt to not have you get a contract it sucks yeah yeah fuck them it's.
- [50:25]
Abby Sato
Their whole strategy i mean the whole like union avoidance of it all is they're just trying to like wait us out and then fire people who are involved and just like in their words like let turnover do its natural work but it's like isn't this specialty coffee don't you want people who are good at their jobs i've watched some of my new co workers pull a shot that i wouldn't feed to a dog.
- [50:46]
Alex Pine
Like i've seen her manager do the.
- [50:50]
Mia Wong
Same oh absolutely why look you can't expect managers to know how to do things that's not their job my manager.
- [50:58]
Abby Sato
Let me tell you i used to have to open with her like three times a week and she has this very beautiful habit of as she's dialing espresso and also she does this while she's counting cash she will have her phone open on tiktok and then scroll through i have this one horrific memory it was six am and she was going through an entire tiktok story time series for forty five minutes and the whole story time was going on and every time it was an introduction of like i don't even remember what it was about i think it was like she was like oh this is my story of being like a mob boss's wife and i had to listen to that for forty five minutes while opening.
- [51:37]
Mia Wong
Yeah i think you you should you should legally be allowed to have her car probably yeah that too yes our start our starting demand is the more you every time you piss us off we get another one of your houses.
- [51:51]
Abby Sato
For every tiktok watched on the clock that's a dollar towards me yeah like.
- [51:58]
Mia Wong
What are we doing here they're owned.
- [51:59]
Alex Pine
By nestle but i don't think that there's enough money in the world that would be able to give you that abby i'm so sorry i know i.
- [52:05]
Abby Sato
Don'T think i'll ever receive fair compensation.
- [52:07]
Alex Pine
You'D really piss off the the modern monetary theory people because they'd be like no even we can't account for this.
- [52:14]
Abby Sato
No one can account for the emotional.
- [52:16]
Mia Wong
Damage we ran out of data in our federal reserve database oh god to.
- [52:26]
Alex Pine
Recap so in the past year we've done multiple walkouts unionized four locations in the east bay area and then after abby was fired for bullshit reasons along with two other organizers we went on a four day strike which included both cities and we've done this entirely as an independent union against a company that is owned by nestle yeah and interestingly just because i'd be remiss to not mention this the day that we ended our strike there was a article published in reuters which was the most vibe based reporting that i've ever seen where it said nestle explores sale of blue bottle coffee sources say where there's three unnamed sources incredible that all say that nestle is considering or looking into selling blue bottle coffee but interestingly says here quote one source said nestle could decide to sell the cafes but retain the brand's intellectual property to continue selling the.
- [53:19]
Mia Wong
Products end quote what are we doing.
- [53:21]
Abby Sato
Here this is like yeah yeah i.
- [53:25]
Alex Pine
Mean it's interesting as a tell because personally i think it's just a scare tactic yeah yeah like i could consider walking into traffic i could be looking into my options for how fast a car would hit me but that doesn't.
- [53:36]
Mia Wong
Mean anything union considering expropriating the mansion nestle ceo's like we're an exploratory committee sources say.
- [53:49]
Alex Pine
Yeah i don't think they'd publish that in reuters but it's interesting that they would even say that because like the entire value that blue bottle offers nestle is to be able to put the brand onto you know nespresso pods or whatever and also just very weird timing with the strike ending the same day it comes out yep yep.
- [54:07]
Abby Sato
Yep they are so scared they really are they are scared shitless and they don't know what to do about it and they're breaking glass left and right trying to to maintain power but it's like alex said earlier like the solidarity that we have between our coworkers it just cannot be broken by management and even after they fired me and two of our other organizers people still went out on the picket line we kept five out of the six cafes closed in boston and the only reason one of them could stay open is because all of the managers banded together to keep the prudential center open i would.
- [54:45]
Mia Wong
Hate to go worst coffee ever since.
- [54:48]
Abby Sato
I don't think a single latte went out correctly that day but hey you know at least at least they can still collect their nine dollars per latte.
- [54:55]
Mia Wong
So if if you got food poisoning on the dates of the strike getting served manager coffee if you had a.
- [55:05]
Abby Sato
Bad experience during the strike at the prudential center just know that that was not union made coffee and we would never do that to you.
- [55:23]
Robert Evans
I think.
- [55:23]
Mia Wong
It'S really beautiful that yeah y' all just kept doing this even though they're just doing this constantly and it's like no we're just gonna keep fighting them and they're going to get so scared that they're leaking to the press that we're thinking about selling the thing like it just oh we're a lot further.
- [55:41]
Alex Pine
Along than i thought we would ever get yeah i thought they were gonna fire us the day after we did the first walkout last year which is you know i thought all the more reason to try then yeah but really it's not tough for people that we work with to realize that they're getting a bad deal and that the reason that the job sucks is because they don't get paid enough to live in the city like i think most baristas at blue bottle see something like sixty percent of their income going towards rent because jesus yeah we did a survey on this let me double check to make sure that i have the facts right but yeah this this is from you know march so it's a little bit old data we'll do another survey soon but most blue bottle baristas are rent burdened spending more than thirty percent of their income on rent the median rent paid by blue bottle employees being one thousand and forty five dollars which is the equivalent of one hundred and fifty new orleans style iced coffees that it's one of the best selling drinks they have yeah no i know for one hundred fifty nolas you too can pay the median rent by a paid by a barista oh my gosh and then on average it's sorry forty six percent of their income going towards rent with roughly a third of baristas paying over sixty percent oh my god when we told all these facts to their lawyer at a bargaining session and he just said that maybe the reason that we were all struggling to make ends meet was because we were paying for too many streaming services yeah i know like it's an entirely he knows it's.
- [57:12]
Mia Wong
Bullshit did they just get like a right wing shit poster to be their lawyer like is this like is this like fudgeing like is this is like the fail sudden clone of rudy giuliani like is this going to start melting off what are we doing here like come on.
- [57:30]
Alex Pine
I i i wish i could tell you i don't know what their strategy with saying obviously false things is but they love to do it.
- [57:37]
Mia Wong
It'S so great you know okay fuck it i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna read this quote i was gonna use this for a different episode and i did it so all right fuck it this is i'm gonna read this line from dan olsen's documentary in search of flat earth which is like probably the best thing that's ever been done about flat earth because they believe that power belongs to those with the greatest will to take it and what greater sign of will than the ability to overwrite the truth their will is a hammer they are using to beat reality into a shape of their choosing a simple world where reality is exactly what it looks like through their eyes devoid of complexity devoid of change where they are right and their enemies are silent they are trying to build a flat earth that's just this shit they're just like no you we can say whatever the we want because we think the weakness this is an expression of just power even though we know that we're lying and you know that you're lying i.
- [58:34]
Alex Pine
Mean if you want to talk about expression of power you should read their management's rights clause sorry they're so called management's rights clause oh god let me see if i can pull that up so just to clarify so management's rights is a clause that can be found in some union contracts because of collaborationists within unions in the fifties deciding that they actually didn't want to go for complete worker control of the means of production they just wanted to collaborate with management in order to get a better deal for wages i'm not going to comment on the history of that but that's why they feel like they can include this in negotiations right now we haven't agreed to any management's rights but quote is agreed that the management of the company's business and the direction of its working forces are vested exclusively in the company and that the company retains all rights that it had before the execution of this agreement unless a rate is clearly contracted away in this agreement by language that is specific and unambiguous these retained company rates include but are not limited to the following the right to direct and supervise the work of its employees the right to hire promote demote transfer and to discipline or discharge employees the right to create or eliminate jobs and to determine wage rates for newly created or materially modified jobs the right to determine training requirements and provide training to employees the right to uniform and attire standards the right to plan direct and control operations the right to determine products to be sold services and products to be procured used and or distributed the right to determine the type and quantity of machines equipment location of cafes the right to determine the amount and quality of work needed the right to determine schedules of cafe operations the right to determine the number of employees needed the right to determine the work schedule of employees the right to lay off employees or relieve employees from work because of lack of work the right to discontinue or introduce new or improved methods operating practices and cafes the right to change the content of jobs and the qualification for such jobs and the right to establish modify and enforce work rules of conduct or policies and discipline employees who violate such rules or policies the right to establish modify oh jesus christ i forgot and enforce i haven't.
- [60:33]
Abby Sato
Read this in a while and i forgot how bad it is wow because.
- [60:38]
Alex Pine
Basically what they're saying is we want to be able to control everything that you do and this is our they never say where they believe this right comes from they all make like an argument from naturalism where like we are vested by the universal power of management to be able to do this they don't make any historical argument for it where oh this is you know because of the contracts that have been negotiated since the fifties something that's fairly standard and we think that we have the right to because of like long standing precedent they just think that they should be able to control fucking everything yeah which is not unsurprising for nestle yeah.
- [61:11]
Mia Wong
Yeah well and i think there's there's a lot of very very abstract theoretical debate you run into if you're like instead of doing shit you're like in theory circles about like oh is like is capital its own autonomous entity or is it like a thing that's like costly in like relation to like the actions of workers and it's like okay read something like this and it's like oh no they are so worried that they're going to have to react to what their workers are doing that they and they are already doing this right like this is you know you mean this is this goes back to the whole like we're leaking to the media we're going to sell the company thing that they're doing where it's like no actually like these people are so not like easily but if you are organized at all it becomes so clear to them that they actually oh no wait hold on they're responding to us like they're not just purely the only thing that gets to like drive history forward and decide literally everything about your life the moment you like try to claw it away from them they see how fragile it is and they're like no no no actually we gotta spell out the fact that we get a dress you in whatever clothes we want you to wear and it's like okay this is like a thing that only exists if you do not resist them at all but like no if you if you fucking fight them they have to fucking write all this shit down that they think they've always been able to do and it's ridiculous and to hear.
- [62:33]
Abby Sato
It all in a bullet form like literally just a bullet list like every single aspect of my life and everything that i've ever loved or thought was important to me in a list of what they think they can control is just crazy and then we have to go back and say okay well do you see how off base you are yeah and then they make us sound like the crazy ones for wanting to live a good life and be able to like you know make ends meet.
- [62:59]
Alex Pine
Pay less than sixty percent of our income towards rent yeah yeah take a vacation maybe yeah one other thing that i think is a great point about how it's actually capital responding to the organization of baristas people workers whatever is they haven't done it recently but last summer they sent a very long winded and angry email about all the bargaining updates and press that the union was getting.
- [63:26]
Abby Sato
They'Re so mad at me that i'm good at my job.
- [63:31]
Alex Pine
And and then this past summer after we did two walkouts in fairly quick succession in response to two different things they attempted to accuse us of an intermittent striking just because they were so scared they didn't know what else to do to try and be like you didn't own me i'm not mad please don't put in the news that i'm mad their lawyer even said in a bargaining session later on that he had a less than seventy five percent chance of ever winning that argument at the board oh my god but they were just so mad that we walked out twice in may that they tried to claim that it was unprotected but that they were being benevolent by not disciplining anyone for it god and they haven't really given much of a response to our multi day strike yet aside from their lawyer emailing us earlier this week to ask us for our entire legal justification for why the terminations of abby nora and ashley were illegal and what legal justification do we have to say that they're negotiating a contract in bad faith which is like the nlra yeah yeah like.
- [64:40]
Mia Wong
What are we doing here oh god yeah so what's coming up next for y' all what's the next stage if.
- [64:47]
Alex Pine
You or anybody that you know either works at a blue bottle or wants to apply to a blue bottle to help organize it please reach out to us by email at bluebottleunionmail dot com if you want to support our independent unionism and help us remain independent and be able to go on multiple day strikes which clearly piss off our nestle overlords you can donate to us at tinyurl dot com forward slash bbius strike unless or until we have a contract or they reinstate abby nora ashley and fingers crossed hopefully not myself we're calling on a boycott of all blue bottle coffee products hell yeah i have no idea what the overlap between it could happen here listeners and blue bottle customers is you'd be surprised but no i'm.
- [65:34]
Mia Wong
Sure there's a lot of them out there i don't know look judging by the shit i have heard from our listeners i love you all some of you are on some wild shit and some of you are not the people you would expect to be so.
- [65:49]
Alex Pine
Yeah so don't buy blue bottle if some of the things that we've said about the bargaining sessions sounds too absurd to be true to you then you can go to bluebottle union dot org and under the tab for baristas you can read every bargaining update where we publish all of the proposals that the company has given us so far you can read the shit that they make us read in the bargaining sessions yeah so that's what's next in like the next month or so there's other things that we're working on that we can't talk.
- [66:16]
Mia Wong
About yet hell yeah hell yeah love this yeah i'm trying so hard not to just read half the ender speech authority is the mask of fear tyranny is brittle.
- [66:30]
Abby Sato
If there ever were a time to read it there's no time.
- [66:33]
Mia Wong
Like the present you know what fuck it we're just we're doing it we're doing it the imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural tyranny requires constant effort it breaks it leaks authority is brittle oppression is the mask of fear remember that and know this the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the empire's authority and then there will be one too many one single thing will break the siege remember this try and that's my message to you all you can fight your own bosses too and you can beat them and you can watch them running around in terror like chickens with their head cut off and you can get shit from them that they never would have wanted to give you in the first place.
- [67:32]
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Mia Wong
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Robert Evans
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Mia Wong
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- [70:00]
Andrew Sage
So there's a revolution long forgotten that was tucked in a corner of the caribbean for those outside of the region it's probably quite far from mind you know when most people think of caribbean revolutionaries they think of cuba but at the time the rise and fall of the grenada revolution was everything hello and welcome to it could happen here i'm andrew sage your trinidadian host of it could happen here and i'm.
- [70:30]
James Stout
Joined by james your american british co host american british yeah i don't really know how to say that like which.
- [70:40]
Andrew Sage
Order should that hyphen be in yeah.
- [70:42]
James Stout
Yeah i don't know which way i'm supposed to hyphenate because we don't hyphenate white people which is a very american thing but yeah glad to be here i always enjoy learning more about this part of the world from you i'm.
- [70:58]
Andrew Sage
Glad i'm glad and you know as we speak i'm hearing helicopters overhead and no it's really a reminder of the times that we are living in last night there were quite a few stealth helicopters flying overhead quite close to the ground about three of them wow all the lights were off so it's seems to be a ramping up an escalation in some ways or just a continuation of the existing military presence yeah geez and as we're talking about military presence in the us which is something that i spoke about on this podcast before if you go and check it out we're here to discuss the very recent history positive and negative of my northern neighbor grenada so i don't want to bog anyone down with too many facts but it's important to get an idea of the context so grenada is the southernmost in the grouping of caribbean islands known as the windward islands it's a country composed of grenada the island and a few smaller islands including carriacou and petit mars neat it's long been considered the spice isle as the hilly mainland was and still is home to a lot of nutmeg plantations they currently have a predominantly african population of just over one hundred seventeen thousand sharing a country merely three hundred forty four kilometers or one hundred thirty three square miles for reference the five boroughs of new york city collectively make up seven hundred seventy eight zero point one eight kilometers squared or three hundred point four six square miles so grenada is small you know new york is big but grenada is also quite small you know for reference it's slightly larger than queens but far less populated and far less dense so we're talking small island state par excellence and yet it has sat at the center of one of the most critical events in caribbean history and it might be one of the sites of yet another such incident in light of the united states request to grenada on october ninth to establish a temporary military radar base at the infamous maurice bishop international airport a request which has not yet received a conclusive response more than a month later at the time of me recording this so i thought it apt to finally talk about this moment in history i went to my library and got a copy of grenada revolution and invasion a compendium of essays from various perspectives on the topic arranged by patsy lewis et al that provided the basis of my research particularly the essay by moo collins a canadian poet and novelist i also drew some of the radical background lore from fundy aka joseph edwards an underappreciated autonomous radical healing from jamaica who spoke about the situation in none shall escape all linked in the show notes so i don't want to get too deep into the history prior to what's immediately relevant to today's topic i'll keep things brief a couple hundred amerindians lived in grenada prior to the european invasion human settlement may have been as early as three thousand five hundred bce but most definitely by the second century ce spain upon stumbling upon it claimed it but never settled it england attempted to settle it but was driven out by the indigenous inhabitants and eventually the island was settled and subjugated by the french who engaged in a protracted war against the indigenous between today's grenada dominica and saint vincent of the grandines throughout the seventeenth century you know there's this narrative that the europeans came and they just easily conquered the entirety of the americas and it's important to lay that myth to rest there was of course the very tragic great dying that was responsible for a vast majority of the indigenous population losing their lives to disease in some cases intentionally weaponized by the europeans but despite differences in their weaponry the europeans did not have an easy time conquering the islands or conquering the americas at all in many cases they did not succeed in conquering islands for many decades or centuries of struggle but eventually grenada was established as a colony of over fifteen thousand enslaved africans by seventeen sixty three a year prior in seventeen sixty two britain took over the island from the french as part of the seven years war and the island was formally ceded to britain in seventeen sixty three by eighteen oh seven britain had brought one hundred fourteen thousand slaves to grenada by eighteen thirty eight slavery was abolished in eighteen seventy seven grenada became a crown colony and fast forward a little further under modified crown colony status the wealthiest four percent of grenadians were allowed to vote eric gary founded the grenada united labour party or gulp in nineteen fifty initially as a trade union which led to the nineteen fifty one general strike for better working conditions buildings were set on fire in this time and this is in a broader regional context of radicalism and agitation for independence in the post world war two reality which would intensify after many of the islands had already gained their independence eventually grenada got elections based on universal adult suffrage in nineteen fifty one and eric gary's party gulp won this is before they got independence though in a time when the english speaking caribbean was trying to establish a west indies federation between nineteen fifty eight and nineteen sixty two it didn't succeed jamaica seceded and then trinidad so it fell apart and after the fall of the federation grenada became an associated state in nineteen sixty seven then finally gained full independence from britain in nineteen seventy four again under the leadership of eric gary who became the first prime minister of grenada the late sixties and early seventies were a radical time in general so that's setting the stage for what comes next in grenada the rise of the new dual movement led by maurice bishop you see as fundy found in this time we also had quite a few other confrontations going on across hispanophone francophone dutchone and anglophone caribbean in nineteen sixty five you had the popular revolt in the dominican republic against a military coup that was drowned in blood by the us invasion in nineteen sixty seven you had a spontaneous rebellion of agricultural workers in guadeloupe nineteen sixty eight black folks in bermuda rioted against the racist and colonialist control that dominated the island in nineteen sixty nine there was a violent confrontation against us soldiers by students and workers protesting the us occupation of the panama canal zone curacao was shaken by wildcat strikes of workers riots were employed and unemployed as well labour unrest is breaking out in suriname leading to a general strike antigua had riots strikes and demonstrations over several years jamaica had workers at the western meatpackers establish democratic control of their trade union local taking full control over their union dues and negotiating with their employer without official mediators to manage the sugar workers in the local community directly and of course infamously in nineteen seventy trinidad was shaken up as workers academics and small farmers linked up against the system led by the government of prime minister eric williams and after years of his rule under the sloka and masade dun the people erupted against the neocolonial system despite being ruled by this black leader the hundreds of people in the streets championed black power understanding what was needed was a people's politics in which new institutions could emerge this black power revolution in trinidad was inspired in part by the black civil rights struggle in the united states while also seeking to unite the african and indian populations in trinidad after an attempted mutiny by the army and venezuelan and american gunboats standing by ready to intervene the military surrendered the revolutionary initiative shifted away from the masses and doctor eric williams was saved by nineteen seventy three a few armed guerrillas remained in the hills of trinidad but eventually their struggle was snuffed out by nineteen seventy five in guadeloupe you had wildcat strikes taking place guyana had wildcat strikes against the american and canadian owned bauxite companies suriname had another general strike saint lucia experienced a wildcat strike dominica attempted to seize the british owned castlebruce estates in jamaica there was a wave of appropriations from banks warehouses stores betting shops and more across kingston and demonstrations initiated by students and workers against police brutality and for the release of prisoners and in nineteen seventy nine nicaragua had their revolution against the us allied government while all of this is going on grenada had a population of less than a hundred thousand people it had just become independent under eric gary and eric gary is an interesting fella because you'll see some aspects of him mirrored later on he came to power in nineteen fifty one with the wave of universal suffrage he was twenty nine years old at the time he had previously been a worker organizer in aruba and was expelled from the island for that very reason he spent decades in politics as a champion of agricultural workers but younger generations were not as excited about him they recognized his financial corruption his penchant for rigged elections and of course his use of secret police that were repressive to the people so as grenada is making steps towards becoming independent the people did not want him to be their leader of independence there were strikes against him even before the revolution but see gary was carrying on this tradition that was set up by the british whether he knew it or not he may have had this radical start as a worker organiser but he came to carry on colonial interests you know he started off as a union man but he turned against the workers and even the british at one point had been scared of him as an organiser and had trepidations about him as an independent leader but they still chose him and preferred him at the risk of maybe a more radical version of him leading an independent grenada and then came the new jewel movement now the new jewel movement is actually a combination of two groups you had the movement for assemblies of the people which was founded by maurice bishop a lawyer who had studied in britain and you had the joint endeavour for welfare education and liberation or juul which was founded by howard university economics student unison weidman they were also joined by bernard cord an economics lecturer at ub saint augustine in trinidad and tobago so at first in terms of their politics they really wanted popular assemblies and that sort of thing but actually let me get into the background of the caribbean left you see in the nineteen fifties there was an upheaval you know radicals had been shifting from the sort of stalinism that had become popular in the post world war two era towards a more critical sort of trotskyism or maoism seylor james and george patmore both based in london were already advocating independence for africa and the caribbean rejecting the stalinist idea that liberation should wait until after world war two seylord james is an interesting figure politically to me because while he was ostensibly a trotskyist he was in many ways unorthodox in his approach to those politics yeah clr.
- [83:26]
James Stout
James book trying to remember it's called beyond a boundary or beyond d boundary.
- [83:30]
Andrew Sage
Beyond the boundary yeah it's a great.
- [83:32]
James Stout
Book it's the only book about cricket that i've ever read and thus the only one that i've ever enjoyed not a big cricket appreciate it but as a sports historian that that book was foundational to like how i how i approached my dissertation and like as such i've always had a really soft spot for him as someone who did sports for a living and academia for a living i saw a really positive example of the role that both of those can play in liberation struggles in his writing yeah it's one i'd encourage everyone to read if you're looking for a book his writing is very readable his historical writing which at the time of my life when i was in grad school i very much appreciated someone who wrote something that wasn't self consciously trying to be dense and impenetrable to make them seem intelligent like he's faced his intelligence comes through just fine indeed indeed.
- [84:25]
Andrew Sage
I'Ve had a soft spot for him as well for some time particularly after reading the black jacobins yeah used to.
- [84:32]
James Stout
Assign that one a lot and i.
- [84:34]
Andrew Sage
Would say that the caribbean left at the time also had a bit of a soft spot for him because they were heavily influenced by his writings you know in his nineteen fifty six pamphlet facing reality which was about the hungarian revolution ended up becoming a profound influence on west indian radicals as it had revealed the potential of workers councils and done a lot to expose the authoritarianism of the soviet model yeah this is something that fundy wrote about and highlighted as he's given his sort of discussion of the origins and trajectory of the caribbean left so in the nineteen sixties and seventies radical thought across the caribbean was shaped by these more democratic socialist ideals you had movements like jamaica's young socialist league trinidad's new beginning movement and grenada's new dual movement they were all inspired by james and by grassroots workers councils rather than the typical soviet orthodox yeah of course the caribbean left was not immune to conflict or division there were conflicts between those who were more loyal to stalinist or pro soviet positions and that led to some splits within unions and political movements now initially the neutral movement was leaning in that participatory democratic direction but eventually they ended up going into studying marxism leninism more now really at first they mainly wanted gary out but later they went into marxism leninism and transformed the movement into a proper political party of the vanguard variety in an effort to unseat gary they started building some momentum and immediately faced consequences in nineteen seventy three bishop whiteman and others got beaten up and arrested by gary secret police multiple times bischoff's own father was shot and killed by gary's forces and the high schoolers who were also taking a stand against gary at the time were facing repression and violence now at nineteen seventy four independence was won but sadly under gary and his notorious secret police which were by the way called the mongoose gang now there was already suspicions of potential election fraud and it wasn't helped by the fact that his mongoose gang was known to intimidate people but in nineteen seventy six despite this fraught political landscape bishop won a leadership role as opposition and became known across the country in a country as small as grenada as someone charismatic personable relatable the new jewel movement started to build a reputation for being connected to the people engaged with students engaged with pro bono work in some cases as i mentioned some of them were lawyers and they were youthful they were bringing a youthful energy to the sort of old guard colonial era politics of eric gary and his ilk so the story of how the new jewel movement came into power is actually a bit humorous to me on the thirteenth of march nineteen seventy nine gary went to the un meeting in new york that was happening at the time and as the saying goes when the cats are away the mice will play in this case while the cat was away the new jewel movement pulled off a couple a completely bloodless coup they took control of the army barracks and the radio when they went on the radio and this is the funny part to me they told people to go to police stations and demand that they put up white flags of surrender and the population was so anti gary that they did it they just walked up into the police stations and they're like yeah put up these white flags and the police shut yeah sure that was that that's how the new jewel movement came.
- [88:44]
James Stout
Into power yeah a this is such a fascinating time in history right like i used to teach a class about culture and colonialism back in the day and we would talk a lot about like this time period like the the post windrush period where like caribbean political culture was very influential even in in the metropole right in in britain specifically like this is when we have like ska music and then punk music arriving from that which is a serious political force in the twentieth century it's easy for people to sniff at that or whatever and that's the reason i am the way i am so i guess i have a fondness for it but also the state's capacity for violence and surveillance hasn't caught up to the capacity for mass communication yet and so you have these movements which can mobilize a ton of people and the state isn't like all up in them with informers and like it can either respond as the soviet union did in hungary right with tanks that's where we get the word tanky from or it can crumble like by people turning up and telling the cops to surrender like it's just a fascinating like little two three decade period in history before the state i guess recovers its advantage in terms of violence and surveillance yeah i marvel at.
- [90:14]
Andrew Sage
This time because i mean they didn't have the social media and stuff to connect people and you know advertise they were having this this protest or this action or this whatever yeah but the networks were still there you know they were organic and they were motivated by a genuine sense that an alternative was actionable yeah you know i think we have this sort of twenty first century malaise of cynicism it's like that was tried before you know yeah every time we look at something we could just say oh that was tried before and they failed when we look back at history the people who try those things they didn't know if it was going to work out or not they just tried it i wouldn't be surprised if i was a fly on the wall on the day of this coup if the new jewel movement guys were just like wait what that actually works yeah exactly not to take away from their planning and organization and the genuine grassroots support that they had is still a.
- [91:19]
James Stout
Swing yeah totally at some point you have to roll the dice right and see how it goes like in this.
- [91:26]
Andrew Sage
Case they rolled a critical success i'd.
- [91:28]
James Stout
Say yeah yeah it's a natural twenty the dungeons and dragons turn so i'd really like to nerd out in this period this is like the heyday of pirate radio right where you have people broadcasting but like outside of state control and it's a really interesting time for culture and music like ska music explicitly explicitly begins in an anti racist way right like it calls itself two tone in music because bands were often look multiracial and it's really interesting that we have this whole cultural movement which owes a lot to the windrush generation but like you said it's questioning the both capitalist and also marxist orthodoxies in a way that i really wish i mean a lot of people do today don't get me wrong but i wonder if we could tell those people now that you'd have people who were like dedicated vanguard marxists again like you know it just seems sad in a way yeah.
- [92:31]
Andrew Sage
I mean i think we could say the same thing about a lot of people's current politics i'm sure a few went back in the past and were like you know people are actually trying to be trad wives right now in twenty twenty five you want to talk to the women who had like no ability to open a bank account and we're trying to escape financial abuse domestic abuse all these different things and they're like oh you know there's actually a whole internet trend of like yeah your husband should control all your finances actually yeah i mean of course that kind of sentiment never went away but it's popularization definitely debunks i think this sort of notion that that progress quote unquote is something that is inevitable or irreversible.
- [93:16]
James Stout
Yeah definitely yeah that's very i mean you can even travel across the world and share that i can only imagine how that would be received in rojava right to tell the friends in the women's movement that there are western women who aspire to be trad wives i mean i'm sure they're aware they have the internet but yeah yeah it's certainly yeah this idea that we can only progress and move in one direction yeah.
- [93:37]
Andrew Sage
That'S how the new jewel movement came into power and upon getting to that position they established the people's revolutionary government or prg which is led now by the prime minister of grenada maurice bishop they were considered legitimate of course because they did have the people's mandate but they opted not to solidify that legitimacy with an election and they also went on to ban other parties so in the next episode i want to get into what exactly they did when they were in power in broad strokes all their hits and misses with the economy and politics over the course of their four years and how it culminated in an internal split multiple killings and a us invasion but if you want the details on how all that played out you'll have to tune in next time we'll get into the outcome of the prg the flaws the revolution its downfall and where grenada stands today but before we wrap up any final thoughts james.
- [94:47]
James Stout
I feel like i just had lots of them i don't know yeah this is a fascinating period and like now as much as there ever has been it's a vital time for us to study this right like as the person who's taught in american schools and universities this one doesn't come up very much it's certainly not like in the required teaching syllabi in anywhere that i've taught and i think as we return to monroe doctrine two point zero or whatever we're doing the united states is doing in the western hemisphere right now it's vital to understand the role it has played in suppressing progressive political movements in.
- [95:28]
Andrew Sage
The last century yeah i think as you mentioned it's not really in the typical history and historical accounts that it's taught to students i think i marvel sometimes at that's exactly how empire functions yeah the ax forgets what the tree remembers as the famous say it so something like the us's operations in grenada or anywhere else in the world in all the many places they have intervened i may not even muster a passing mention a sentence even in a historical class in a history class in the united states and yet it is pivotal to the histories and self identities up to the present day of entire regions and peoples you know it may be a footnote if so much in the standard curriculums in the united states but it's one of the most recent and raw incidents of violence and trauma that take place in the caribbean yeah absolutely and in our independent history yeah when.
- [96:35]
James Stout
Trump was first assuming office this time there was a brief moment when they were talking about returning to colonizing panama if you can cast your mind that.
- [96:44]
Andrew Sage
Far back he has flooded the zone quite successfully but i do recall that.
- [96:49]
James Stout
Yeah i had been in panama two months before that and i think the united states a large portion of the population either doesn't know or has forgotten that like independence from american sort of neocolonialism is integral to panamanian identity like i don't think they'd realized quite how unwilling to accept going back to that panamanian people were yeah it was a.
- [97:11]
Andrew Sage
Long struggle yes to you know eke out independence i mean even now there's you know us neocolonialism is alive and well in panama in many ways yeah but what gains they have gained is you know something they're not willing to.
- [97:26]
James Stout
Lose yeah absolutely and yeah i mean the united states deports people through panama the biden administration sent its secretary of homeland security to the inauguration of the panamania president the us funds panamanian deportations did under the biden administration including of people who have no criminal record like we have effectively externalized our border regime to panama in the way that we've also done to the dominican republic and haiti right like i guess what i'm saying is i don't want people to think that this is a one off that like either the trump stuff is a massive leap from previous policy it's a change in scale not in kind or that that the united states hasn't done this before and has some history of doing this in the western hemisphere.
- [98:19]
Andrew Sage
Indeed so on that rather depressing note we'll leave it here for it could happen here but you can join us for the next episode when we will get into exactly what took place in grenada and where grenada stands today till then or power to all the people peace.
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- [101:24]
Andrew Sage
Hello and welcome to it happen here i'm andrew sage your host and i'm joined by james again.
- [101:31]
James Stout
Excited to be here again enjoyed our.
- [101:33]
Andrew Sage
Last episode yes another host of ikarapneh there are two of us so james is american british or british american depending on how we want to order that yeah yeah and i'm trinidadian as you may or may not be able to tell but in trinidad there are actually a lot of grenadians and descendants of grenadians between our islands there's been a lot of population exchange mostly in one direction but we're here to talk about a notable point in the history for my neighbouring island grenada if you missed part one you should go and give it a listen the gist is that after drawn out efforts to gain independence grenada finally did so in nineteen seventy four but unfortunately under the rule of eric gerry an oppressive fixture of politics that the people wanted out the underdog the new dual movement led by maurice bishop pulled off a bloodless coup while geary was at a un meeting in new york and thus the people's revolutionary government was formed led by prime minister maurice bishop they managed to stay in power from nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty three so today we're talking about what they did in that time and what happened next including the infamous us invasion that is so often a footnote of history and its aftermath on the people of grenada that lasts up to this day once again the research for this episode leans on revolution and invasion by patsy lewis et al along with none shall escape by joseph edwards aka fundy so fresh off the victory of the new jewel movement the temperature of the populace was varied but excited you had people who had genuine revolutionary aspirations people who were passionately anti imperialist and then the people who just wanted better healthcare and education and didn't really care where or who it came from and on that note i would say that it's something that often flies under the radar or escapes awareness in the discourse because the most passionate the most invested the most prominent voices are all that we tend to hear the vast majority of people pretty much go with the flow you know they keep their heads down their focus tends to be on their immediate needs their immediate interests and you have the ideologues in every camp and of every persuasion who are aiming to push the country in a particular direction but at least at this point in time there was an ambivalence towards the how the political how much of the population they just needed to see the results and for a lot of people in the present day the change the revolution whatever you want to call it isn't going to come from an ideological transformation well worded argument or arrangement of prose it's going to come from a lived experience where their life has improved in some way in some form or fashion by action by a project that actually puts the change into practice and so that's really what the new jewel movement had been about from the beginning being part of the community being part of the people taking part in you know supporting them which is why they had the popular mandate and then once they got into power a lot of their efforts were focused on indeed trying to actually put into place an alternative for all the flaws that it may have had and i'll get to that shortly and that they did you know they organized a center for popular education they organised teacher training and sought to make secondary schools and colleges more accessible to people they introduced maternity leave for women yes although notably party members who were women were pressured to come back to work immediately after having children so again we'll get to those flaws yeah there was still inequality in pay between men and women but the new jewel movement did make efforts to mandate equal pay and to engage in some changes toward addressing the inequality between men and women in the country however a revolution was still needed within the revolution as it has tended to be across these revolutions you know across these years usual stuff women were still doing the most of the housework and both sexes were expected to take part in political engagement so you had women in the party in the new jewel movement but it was a sort of an expectation of equality in some respects like yeah come out to work even though you just had children because everybody else is coming out to work yeah and yet it was like oh yeah y' all can keep on doing the housework we're not gonna take on our load there.
- [106:47]
James Stout
Yep that's funny i finished my book recently but i have a chapter on gender and there's this a communist militant in spain who was fighting at the front line but also they were saddled with that double burden right because women were expected to be the ones amongst especially amongst the communists who cooked and cleaned in addition to fighting but she has this famous line where she says i didn't join the military to die with a dishcloth in my hand.
- [107:17]
Andrew Sage
That'S.
- [107:17]
James Stout
A classic yeah it's a good one i like it a lot yeah yeah.
- [107:22]
Andrew Sage
But flaws with engaging with gender aside there were of course other things the new jewel movement was doing that was positive you know they encouraged agricultural diversification and local food production moving away from that sort of exclusive or near exclusive dependence on nutmeg production that had defined the colonial period you know they got rid of the old westminster style parliamentary system in favor of a one party system with some elements of mass democracy now the degree to which that democracy actually empowered people is debatable but there were you know efforts on the record you know they organized public meetings to discuss the national budget they set up workers and youth and women's in farmers organizations and unfortunately even though bishop was influenced by clar james he continued to pursue the sort of hierarchical leadership common in caribbean politics and so even with these alternative organizations you had that kind of hierarchy but i think that is to be expected from any movement besides anarchism yes so i can't say i'm surprised they closed the independent newspaper torchlight after an article highlighting a rastafarian protest against lack of representation in government so there were efforts to ensure that grenada moved towards secularism but freedom of the press was not something that was particularly high in terms of priorities and there were still prejudices against religious groups and movements like the rastafarians that had yet to be addressed you know these things aren't dealt with overnight but i think when all you have is a hammer everything can sort of look like a nail yeah they didn't do anything too drastic in the economic sphere for the most part they left people's private businesses alone they implemented some state enterprises and they implemented some cooperative enterprises so a fairly standard mixed economy a mixed economy that can to varying extent be found throughout the caribbean whether they had a revolution or not but they did establish cooperative and friendly relations with cuba which was a real thorn on the side.
- [109:53]
James Stout
Of the united states yeah he didn't.
- [109:57]
Andrew Sage
Like them and now this is i would say from nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty so their first two years in powell people were nervous sighted you know they were hopeful of the genuine decolonization and positive change taking place but the excitement part of the nervous itement started to die down by nineteen eighty one the people's revolutionary government prg became increasingly militaristic as time went on they organized militias and armed people they were essentially preparing for a gary counter coup but also potential cia involvement the police were replaced with military personnel and i think this is the trap that a lot of these projects end up falling into this concern about the enemy within and the enemy without leads these revolutionaries to cannibalize themselves you know the revolutionary potential and excitement gets curtailed because there's so much fear dominating that some enemy is going to attack some violence is going to take place that they need to prepare for and so you over you militarize and you militarize and you steer the course of the project away from its original intentions to a point where it's not even recognizable to the people who initiated it yeah you know i'm not saying that they weren't right to be wary of us intervention history has demonstrated as much but it was something that the people of the country were becoming increasingly concerned about because it's a small country and it's uncommon you know it's strange it's unusual it's unnerving to see militias marching down your street now the new jewel movement was starting to become more focused on establishing a vanguard core the more they oriented themselves toward marxism leninism so like i mentioned before they were making this shift away from the sort of popular mass democracy that people like clara james was talking about the more they read and they studied the works of marxism lenders and there were people within the party who became more and more convinced again remember they're in positions of power this point in time so you're in positions of power and you're reading theoretical justifications for why you need to be in power you know you'll stand by those theoretical justifications because it lines up with your interests your self interests to you know further your position of power and the continuation of your role as an authority as a leader and so this vanguard corps that they were pursuing it ended up creating a hierarchy of in group and out group you had the people who were in the vanguard the people who were out the vanguard who didn't get picked who didn't make the cut you know it felt snubbed and this was facilities and it was fostering this an air of secrecy that people in the country were beginning to resent and lose trust in because imagine you're going from this sort of popular engagement with the people as you you know take part in these efforts to push gary out of power then you have this sort of secrecy you have this sort of militarism that is starting to remind people a bit of the exact gary government that they wanted out then two major events took place in nineteen eighty one there was a bombing under the stage of a rally that killed some youths and there was a car ambushing as well both of these incidents were blamed on counter revolutionaries in the country that famous buzzword that famous catchphrase that famous justification for any and every response yeah so it further pushed the country and really the whole society into this culture of suspicion and repression and also resentment for the new jewel movement the new jewel movement wasn't responsible for the bombings but you can imagine people were probably saying when they were at the parlor by the grocery you know out by the bar down the street they're saying you know at least they didn't have any bombings under gary you know at least they didn't have these car ambushings under gary gary wasn't nice but we didn't have terrorist attacks and the sort of transparency and engagement people were accustomed to was starting to evaporate the new jewel movement was starting to be seen by some as a secret society and if your society is already small right just about one hundred thousand people yeah having a secret society within that small society where everybody knows everybody that's not good especially when the revolution is so new so nascent you need people's trust and especially as well because people were not ideologically for marxism leninism most of them that is they weren't ideologically for marxism leninism they weren't ideologically neutral movement advocates they just wanted eric gary out and they wanted improvements their living conditions yeah they didn't have a particular political ideology they were committed to and in this time you know the caribbean is part of the rest of the world the caribbean is paying attention has to pay attention to what's happening in the rest of the world and especially with their northern neighbor the united states of america and it's very infamous at that point in time we're talking late seventies early eighties cold war rhetoric that people are getting in the media the american media was still very and continues to be very prominent in terms of what caribbean people consume because we are english speaking the americans are english speaking and they have far more resources so their media comes to us and a lot of the narratives that caribbean people get come at least in part from american narratives so these cold war era narratives about communism as a scare word was something that had yet to be addressed through actual demonstration of what communism could actually be for people you know people weren't won over on communism yet it was still unfamiliar and in this time you really needed people who were open who were accommodating who were showing people what it meant in practice who were you know sort of disarming these notions that could serve as obstacles towards people's buy in into the struggle i'm seeing this as a non marxist lenness i'm putting myself in those shoes if i'm trying to get people invested in this convinced of this that sort of secrecy it doesn't push things in a.
- [116:51]
James Stout
Positive trajectory yeah it's easy for the population to perceive that you've replaced one elite with another elite right especially in post colonial movements when when we do this exactly it's a transparent one for.
- [117:04]
Andrew Sage
One you know yeah i mean not to say that people didn't see the differences no yes correct they weren't aware of the nuances they could tell the difference between an eric gehry and a maurice bishop they can tell the difference between you know one form of politics and another it's not that they were just ready to turn court immediately i mean some of them still had the fresh wounds of the trauma being inflicted by eric gary yeah but it's because of that trauma that they were also sensitive to the potential of new traumas yeah call it paranoia call it earnest and right thinking suspicion but they were wary of what was taking place yeah and you know what didn't help it didn't help that okay so you know how some people they read like one or two theory books and they start walking around like their head is three times bigger than it is they started walking around this kind of inflated sense.
- [118:01]
James Stout
Of self importance yes i'm very familiar with that kind of person yeah unfortunately.
- [118:06]
Andrew Sage
That'S exactly what started taking place among some members of the party they're reading all these books all these thick books from russia and germany and marx and lenin and all these people and they're starting to carry themselves in a particular way yeah with a level of arrogance and know it allness and and this is worsened in a society where remember we are fresh out of colonialism none of our independent nations are even a hundred years old yet much of the population still remember that colonial period and much of the population like i mentioned before needed changes to the education system because they didn't have educational opportunities so you had this vast educational inequality right and then you have this new jewel movement and some of its members are talking to you like you're stupid yeah because you didn't get to go to primary school you didn't read all the thick books that they read or you didn't get to go to secondary school or you didn't get to go to university and so you don't know all the big words and and you haven't read all the thick texts that they have read and it could rub people.
- [119:16]
James Stout
The wrong way yeah yes right yeah like there can be too much theory i think there often is too much theory especially when it creates this idea right that reading is what distinguishes one as a revolutionary right as opposed to doing or just knowing and caring and it's a downfall of many movements indeed.
- [119:42]
Andrew Sage
I think if you're coming from the background that some of these new jewel movement members were coming from you need to put in that extra effort not to dumb things down per se you still want to respect people's intelligence but you have to be aware of the dynamic it's something that i myself have to work on you know because i think there's a sort of curse of knowledge where you read so much that you take for granted what you know you know you read to a point where you almost forget that this is not common knowledge or this word may be unfamiliar to a lot of people and you really have to be cognizant of it especially as you're approaching people and make sure you're talking to them in their language they don't feel as though you're carrying yourself too big for.
- [120:26]
James Stout
Your britches yeah definitely like the people who write the thick books can't be lure like milieu you know they can't be there i've used a stupid word but like if those are the people with whom you're sort of conversing in your head and then you begin to to speak in that language to people who aren't familiar with it it just sounds weird yeah like it it's yeah as you say you get too big for your bridges and you sound pompous.
- [120:53]
Andrew Sage
If you're not careful exactly exactly and so for the you know big shot lawyer okay i'm a little tongue in cheek as i say this for big shot lawyers like maurice bishop and big shot economics lecturers like bernard cord and some of the other folks that had been part of the core of the party they had to approach the people in a particular way and they were successful in doing so under eric gehry and as they were part of the opposition but things were shifted also at the turn of the eighties we had a lot of moves against suspected counter revolutionaries imprisonment without trial so imagine again people thinking this is what the mongoose gang two point zero yeah the fear was starting to overtake the society was starting to become cannibalizing as i said so by the time we get to nineteen eighty three we find ourselves with a people bereft of the early days of hope in a house divided which famously cannot stand unbeknownst to the public there were tensions between maurice bishop and bernard cord since at least nineteen eighty two and cord wasn't even part of the central committee of the neutral movement anymore for a while but within the vanguard the party members still preferred cord to bishop cord was seen as more intellectually equipped to lead with his knowledge of theory they started calling bishop egotistic and counter revolutionary and i have to say i love the double edged sword of these kind of willy nilly thought terminating cliches because they can be used by you and then they could be used against you in a snap of.
- [122:41]
James Stout
Your fingers yeah it goes back to your thing about hammers and nails that.
- [122:46]
Andrew Sage
You mentioned before indeed so eventually the party decided to bring qord on as co leader with bishop originally bishop agreed but this started to create tensions things managed decently but after a while bishop was starting to push back against the co leadership arrangement and the party started seeing it as him favouring his own ascendancy over the collective unity and so then he went to germany he left the country on a trip don't worry there wasn't another coup this time at least not yet but he went to germany on a trip came back there was not a welcome party for him womp womp things were coming to a head the party did not have his back anymore he could feel it but he did know that the people still had his back remember he knows he's charismatic he knows people love him and so all of a sudden this is in nineteen eighty three by the way a rumor was swirling that cord wanted to kill bishop yeah it's a dangerous rumor you know it shatters this facade of a united front that had carried the revolution that carried the government for so long but since most people loved bishop as he rightfully assumed in fact they were on a first name basis with him that's cool they weren't saying prime minister bishop your honorable prime minister bishop it was hey maurice like that.
- [124:08]
James Stout
Boy maurice yeah that's always a good sign like it's one of the positive marks of the revolution in rojava is that everyone is a friend and everyone's referred to generally by their first name and it's always kind of i've seen enough read enough about revolutions opposing a revolutionary hierarchy so that's always a good.
- [124:30]
Andrew Sage
Sign i feel like yeah so meanwhile you had kord who people didn't have the same kind of relationship with you know as far as they're concerned he's an enemy now because of that rumor yeah and the party actually suspected that it was bishop that started the rumor in fact his own personal bodyguards suspected it but bishop himself denied it whether he did or did not start the rumor we don't know but the party was insulted by his movements and put him under house arrest what what what gasp y' all can't see james right now but he just did this shocked.
- [125:13]
James Stout
Facial expression yeah like a shocked pikachu.
- [125:16]
Andrew Sage
And that's how the people were feeling they're like what a prime minister arrested you could do that that's a thing yeah so you see the vanguard with all its secrecy at this point in time was operating on information that was not made available to the people and the people were pissed at the party now yeah the cracks in this political arrangement with essentially a secret society on top were starting to show the people generally speaking regardless of what the party wanted wanted maurice bishop they wanted their boy maurice but the party was not interested in what people wanted the day is nineteenth of october nineteen eighty three the pro maurice bishop new jewel movement leaders government ministers and a mass demonstration of people rolled up to bishop's house to set him free there were guards of course assigned to keep him in house arrest but those guards stood down they refused to shoot at the people so the crowd of people walked to fort rupert now fort rupert wasn't always fort rupert used to be fort george in fact after the revolution ended it again became known as fort george but fort rupert was named fort rupert after maurice bishop's father who was killed by eric garry as you may recall so they get there but the majority of the new jewel movement who were like i said backers of bernard cord were at another fort nearby then boom three armored trucks pull up from the fort of cord to rupert's fort fort rupert they start firing into the crowd people running all over the place whole bunch of people died whole bunch people scattered this event is a trauma for grenadians even to this day by the way yeah so the court loyalists pull up and line up bishop unison whiteman who was the minister of foreign affairs norris bain who was the minister of health and was actually not part of the neutral movement and jacqueline kreft who was the minister of education they lined them up against the wall and shot them summary execution others including trade unionists businessmen and high schoolers were also killed at fort rupert jeez right after this the military curfew curfew was announced on radio grenadians were told to lock their doors violators of curfew were to be shot on sight a couple of days later as people mourned their dead the news came that the united states will invade grenada if this was a hbo series i feel like that'll be the end of the penultimate episode yeah so just to give you a bit of context on the us's position the united states did not like the way that cuba and the soviets and grenada were becoming close even though grenada was technically non aligned like much of the world was trying to stay out of the hairs of the us and the ussr in their cold war but grenada and the grenadians represented a serious risk they were black that's a big risk they were english speaking there were english speaking black people close to the border of the united states of america as african americans were engaged in their own struggle for liberation in the us as honorys bishop noted i mean that's the threat that there could be communication collaboration between these groups a demonstration of an alternative close to the united states with ease of communication with the united states so the united states invasion was always a potential outcome but here it was flexing power in its fair in its backyard the party rounded up a bunch of people to join them in defending the revolution but most people were traumatised they ran and they hid wherever they could some regardless of whether they liked the new jewel movement at that point in time or not stood ready to defend their island from invasion but many more were hidden and scared and there were also others who out of revenge for the revolution that betrayed them betrayed the revolution by expressing their support for the invasion now me personally that's something i would never do i don't care how much i disagree with any government that i'm under i wouldn't co sign the invasion of my country by an empire but i can understand the reasoning or the emotional position that some people were in at that point so the us's claim by the way for their invasion was that they were there to rescue american students who were in grenada so they're there to rescue these students from these commies perfect american students weren't under any actual threat obviously nobody was mining them or threatening them or anything but they always have to have some kind of story right yeah so twenty fifth of october nineteen eighty three america's boots land on the ground joined later by the military personnel of barbados and jamaica there were more deaths mostly in grenadians but also some cubans who were there working on the new international airport an airport that later became known as maurice bishop international airport an airport that just over a month ago the united states requested to use for its military operations in the region the united states kept the media out of the island for two days after the invasion they were sure to curate an image of the communist threat they wanted to paint a picture for the media to tell our story back at home about how yeah they were actually preparing to work with the soviets as a staging ground to attack the united states so this invasion was the first overt as opposed to covert use of force since vietnam the party in power at the time needed an easy win so party members this is neutral movement party members were imprisoned an interim government was established by grenadians living abroad and the revolution was over let's talk aftermath the fall of the new jewel movement and the people's revolutionary government of grenada led to the disintegration of the workers party of jamaica it nearly destroyed caricom the caribbean community as a united bloc as jamaica and trinidad sided with the us in their invasion while countries like trinidad stood against the invasion that was a split in caricom that took years to recover from and i think most crucially the fall of the new jewel movement led to the death in all but name of the caribbean left from distrust from infighting and from this resolute enforcement of the new colonial model for all the flaws that the revolution had it was a representation of an alternative that something else could be done besides business as usual and that alternative first felt in fighting and then its fate was sealed by a belligerent invasion and so the caribbean left not to say it's actually entirely dead there are still figures from that era there are still people who carry progressive or revolutionary politics but it's haiti its golden age is no more and that is in part as a result of that us invasion and within grenada the bodies of those killed were never found in some cases the families of those killed or of the party members may even still be divided to this day you know you can imagine how they must feel the sort of social and political divisions that came out of that kind of action who sided with cord who sided with bishop who sided with the us who stood against who brought whose actions were responsible for the us coming if the revolution never happened then the us wouldn't have come these people wouldn't be dead blame game accusations political conflicts all of that you know it's very easy to breeze over the deaths of people in historical events as just numbers as just statistics you know it doesn't even click you know because i don't think our brains can fully handle that much trauma at once so we compartmentalize it in a way we package it in something that's a bit more digestible when you hear figures of even just two people dead that's two people two entire human beings with lives interests passions relationships connections future snuffed out and in a country like grenada i'm a small country hundred thousand people and i mean i'm from trinidad right which has a population of about one point four million people and it still feels like you know somebody who knows somebody the networks are so tight and it's even tighter knit network wise in a grenada or a tobago you know we're talking neighbors relatives split into sides cousins blaming cousin friend killing friend a decolonization never fully began and never fully completed there are social splits on the perspective on what took place you had the bishop was good crowd the bishop was bad crowd the bishop was bad but the revolution was good crowd the revolution was bad but bishop was good crowd you get all sorts of interpretations of these kinds of traumatic historical events yeah and the outcome to this day is you know fair unhealed open wounds the youth the passionate radical youth of yesteryear keeping their heads down and out of politics today unfortunately very little has been done in grenada to deal with the traumas of the invasion besides an attempted truth and reconciliation commission which failed miserably due to a couple different obstacles an unwillingness to reconcile among some the continued incarceration of certain individuals unrecovered remains anger towards entire sectors of the population at the execution of bishop and others and so in the years that have followed there's been a subdued political consciousness among much of the population they have risen to the challenge of the us inviting themselves to set up shop in maurice bishop international airport there were many actions taking place in grenada to speak up and to stand against that intervention but for the most part the populace has been disengaged from the sort of radical passion that you saw in that time period and it didn't help of course that pretty much right after the revolution you had a series of natural disasters in september of two thousand four after being hurricane free for forty nine years the island was hit by hurricane ivan a category three hurricane that resulted in thirty nine deaths and the damage or destruction to ninety percent of the island's homes in two thousand five which is the following year hurricane emily a category one hurricane struck the island and killed a person in twenty twenty four hurricane beryl struck the island of carriacou and so we're already dealing with the environmental instability of being a caribbean island but now you also have to deal with the political and social instability of such a traumatic incident before we close i do want to get into some of the critiques that i had of this project you know i'm not the type of person to look at these historical moments no matter my allegiance to the espoused politics of the people in them and want to paint them in a narrow or simplistic brush you know i think i see that tendency across all groups yeah definitely you know to the marxist lennox will talk about these revolutions in a very fawning and agitating way then you also have the anarchists who talk about you know the spanish civil war they talk about the paris commune they talk about these different projects as if they were as if they weren't serious flaws in their structure and their analysis and their methodology is worth addressing you know it's very easy for nostalgia to take.
- [139:11]
James Stout
Over yeah definitely like something i think about a lot like i translated a piece for the strangers in a tangled wilderness zine a few months ago maybe even a year ago now by an anarchist fighter who'd fought in the international group of the daruti column who went by several names charles riddle with his birth name but he has this whole thing about how anarchists tend to write hagiographies which is the life of a saint right they've tried to make the spanish civil war into these exemplary saintly people as opposed to actually looking at the mistakes people made and his stance is that like his friends died for nothing if we don't learn anything and so if we don't acknowledge the very real compromises and mistakes and failures then they have been defeated right and they all died for nothing but if at least we can learn from it then at least there's something we can take going forward which is something i always thought was a great way of phrasing something kind of like quite an admirable way of of looking at something that he himself participated in and it was obviously a defining and a very traumatic experience of his life yeah it's something.
- [140:23]
Andrew Sage
That i've rallied against that sort of great man approach to history yeah but i suppose that brings me to my first critique which is something that plagues grenada both before during and after its revolution when you have a political culture dependent on a maximum leader or a personality cult or just a grouping around her personality whether that's bishop or gary or cord for one it's a continuation of the colonial politics of the british in that sort of governor position and it also i think leads to a contempt towards common people whether it starts out that way or not it eventually leads to makes its way into that direction i still see personality politics rear in its ugly head in trinidad even though we've been independent for even longer you know nineteen sixty two as opposed to grenada's nineteen seventy four but the result of that kind of politics is you know ideological and policy splits are either non existent or secondary to personality loyalties familial ties and in some cases ethnic loyalty the united national congress the unc the party in power in trinidad right now party responsible for our current position is a personality cult led by current prime minister talent for sabase and she's only one of many examples of this sort of party first leader first approach to politics that we see in the region a baggage that we see in the region i know with radical politics it's sad because you expect to do away with that kind of stuff but the revolution in my view had a lack of decolonization away from the authoritarian tendencies of colonial rule that i think is why there was such an appeal in leninist thought and rule to begin with because it's a lot easier to approach you know it doesn't unpack the psychology of colonialism or unpack how gehry's rule may have shaped their own approach to politics that another politics might that another anti politics might and so they carried on this elitist authoritarian personality based politics you know despite having a youthful beginning bishop was twenty nine when he started a new jewel movement which is the same age that gary was when he got into politics i know one could make a movie of the mirrors and their histories but despite his youthful beginning the youth carried on the mistakes of their forbearers they betrayed the excitement of people power that people had for the revolution just as they betrayed the excitement of people power that people had for independence and they continued a consciousness of deference to hierarchy again i don't want to draw one to one comparisons between gary and bishop i recognize their stark differences in their politics and in their engagement with the people of grenada they were not the same but in some ways they did rhyme i would wrap up i suppose with bundy's sort of critique of grenada's revolution which is what i just echoed this continued consciousness of a deference to hierarchy a genuine revolution depends on people taking direct responsibility not waiting for leaders or stages of development not waiting on guidance being empowered themselves that sort of tired leninist gradualism and bureaucratic control gets regular people no closer to actually having a sense of autonomy and control over their lives and as fundy emphasizes especially in small caribbean societies participatory local self managed systems are entirely feasible in closing fundy suggested that grenada's revolution failed because it moved away from this principle of immediate collective self management and deliberately chose hierarchy and from that hierarchy came a sense of eroding trust came a sense of secrecy became a sense of secret societies and i created a culture of secrecy opposed to transparency that led to its downfall as i mentioned it was gossip a rumor of somebody trying to kill bishop that got this ball rolling so today i want to appeal directly to caribbean radicals of all stripes to learn to earnestly learn from the canadian revolution i want to appeal not just to caribbean radicals but to radicals all across the world all across our listenership it is critical in times when the means of intervention and the means of disruption and division and co optation are more powerful than ever that you engage in the sort of dissipation of leadership that you engage in grassroots and dispersed empowerment that you maintain an anti authoritarian ethos that cannot be co opted by a charismatic power but you take an approach to organization that does not lend itself to the vulnerabilities of hierarchy that you consider moving like mycorza that you take on networks and free associations rather than the sort of ex marxist spot bullseye centralized parties and the power struggles that ensue from them from that thirst for power that led to so many downfalls for the revolutionary imagination before we wrap up i just want to ask james if you have any thoughts no i think.
- [146:33]
James Stout
That'S very eloquent the way you said it we have to build systems and ways of organizing relating to one another that don't allow this to happen right we have to be very conscious like you say of where it has happened and i think the only way that we understand the value of that is through studying history but studying it from a place like you were saying right i get death as a statistic or a number until it's a person and i think if we can study history from a place of empathy i guess and solidarity rather than this would never happen to me or like you said oversimplifying in a way that i think doesn't help and sometimes i think we do it to kind of absolve ourselves from similarity to think like oh how close could i be to this it's one of the things i don't like about academic history but if we are people who are interested in making the world better than we have to learn from all the other people all over the world who tried to make the world better and especially from the ones who didn't succeed yeah because we don't want to do that again.
- [147:44]
Andrew Sage
Exactly and the times they are changing yes indeed we have to approach that with our due diligence you know the strategies that were more relevant or more practical in particular contexts may not be relevant or practical in your context yeah very much.
- [148:03]
James Stout
So all right yeah that was great.
- [148:07]
Andrew Sage
Thank you andrew to all our listeners thank you so much for tuning in i hope that you can look at our region with clearer eyes and vigilance in the ways that history repeats and rhymes until next time all power to all the people peace.
- [148:40]
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- [151:09]
James Stout
All right i'm doing the intro.
- [151:10]
Robert Evans
What up crackers and crackettes is that good perfect can we say that i.
- [151:15]
James Stout
Think so okay do you have a non binary cracks krakems i think i.
- [151:20]
Mia Wong
Think i'm definitionally not a cracker the one non cracker on this show i.
- [151:28]
Robert Evans
Just wanted to use the word crackettes i understand it's not appropriate that's reasonable welcome to ed yeah thanks robert we should just we should cut hot air.
- [151:38]
James Stout
Sorry james no let's just keep doing.
- [151:40]
Robert Evans
It do the intro this is it.
- [151:42]
James Stout
Could happen here executive disorder our weekly newscast covering what is happening in the white house the crumbling of our world and what this means to you i am james stout and i'm joined today by robert evans and mia wong and sophie sophie is also here and this episode we are covering the week of december eleventh to december seventeenth the week before the week that is christmas that's.
- [152:08]
Robert Evans
Right baby so i hope you've done your shopping i hope you got me a gift because i pay attention to which of our listeners do and do not buy me presents yeah so do.
- [152:18]
James Stout
I you will never find me and.
- [152:21]
Robert Evans
You shouldn't try that's right and it's currently hanukkah happy hanukkah oh happy hanukkah.
- [152:26]
James Stout
That'S right yes happy hanukkah oh yeah.
- [152:28]
Robert Evans
Happy hanukkah all the holidays have a yeah kwesi kwanzaa have a solemn dignified tet all the holidays have a good one of them happy winter solstice which is happy solstice more unhappy solstice it's kind of a bittersweet holiday yeah super saturnalia you know super saturnalia is a good one.
- [152:52]
James Stout
So holidays are nice but we're gonna talk about some things that are less nice today the government yes the government and specific parts of the government let's start with some some headlines garth amidst has obtained information about ice being able to enter private parts of new york city shelters without a judicial warrant or being able to obtain private information about residents despite both of these in theory being prohibited by sanctuary city laws in new york right this happened at least five times the way gotham has found this is by making a public records request for incident reports which is a clever use of public record law nice one the city is already aware of both jail and police officers violating these laws and i think this is a good example of how people think of sanctuary city laws as like inassailable but in fact sanctuary laws be they cities state whatever jurisdiction are very often violated and it's good to see that being reported on more last week we talked about faustino pablo pablo right the guy who had been sent to guatemala despite the fact that he had protections under the convention against torture for being returned there the government has returned him to the us which is good that is a rare good immigration story yay yeah you love to see it it did really bum me out to see that like there were dozens of articles on him being sent there right and i couldn't find anything any reporting on him being returned which is kind of like we should be happy for these people we should yeah we don't get many wins and we should take them yeah we should be happy that this guy is not being likely to be tortured at least it is still possible for them to remove him to a third country right that is not outside the realm of possibility but right now he's not in a place where a judge adjudicated he was likely to be tortured and that is good good and trump has designated fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction which is great.
- [154:50]
Mia Wong
What are we doing here like.
- [154:56]
Andrew Sage
I.
- [154:56]
James Stout
Am trained as a historian and i probably should remind you that we have been down this road before with the weapons of mass destruction and i hope this is not leading where it did last time but i am very worried.
- [155:12]
Robert Evans
That it might yeah yeah it's one of those things i'm both we'll see we'll know before this episode ends whether or not i'm wrong tucker carlson stated recently that a source has told him the presidential announcement coming up is trump declaring war right that we're doing a war with venezuela full on not just some airstrikes and stuff just not to minimize illegal airstrikes in the sea or on venezuelan soil so i don't know if i think that that's the likeliest thing it just seems like such a huge jump but also at this point there's a whole armada blocking off venezuela from the rest of the world and trump put out a statement saying that their oil is our oil and belongs rightly to american companies oh wow very very possible very possible that we're about to go to war with them i'm certainly not i don't know what's gonna happen yeah all i'm white knuckling it like everybody else yeah that fucking sucks.
- [156:10]
James Stout
I didn't know the thing about their oil being ro but yeah it's amazing.
- [156:13]
Robert Evans
I'Ll read the exact quote to you james this is from a trump truth social post which has twelve point four thousand retruths and forty seven thousand likes venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in the history of south america it will only get bigger and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before until such time as they return to the united states of america all of the oil land and other assets assets that they previously stole from us the illegitimate maduro regime is using oil from these stolen oil fields to finance themselves drug terrorism human trafficking murder and kidnapping for the theft of our assets and many other reasons including terrorism drug smuggling and human trafficking the venezuelan regime has been designated a foreign terrorist organization therefore today i'm ordering a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of venezuela the illegal aliens and criminals that the maduro regime has sent to the united states during the weak and inept biden administration are being returned to venezuela at a rapid pace yada yada yada yeah all of our oil land and other assets have to be returned to the united states which like he's talking about oil that american companies have had at points like contracts to exploit but he's phrasing it as like their land and oil is our land and oil which yeah that's.
- [157:23]
James Stout
A very colonial way of phrasing like.
- [157:25]
Mia Wong
A contract one hundred percent again a.
- [157:28]
Robert Evans
Lot of times you know i would be like okay well i don't know if if war is the most reasonable thing to expect when the president's posting shit like that it's very reasonable to be like i think we might go to war i think he might be about to invade venezuela i don't know what's going to happen but you're no longer being like a kooky conspiracy theorist to be like well maybe he's about to try to take over venezuela maybe.
- [157:52]
James Stout
That is what's coming yeah i don't understand how in that instance they would continue to get venezuela to accept kept people it's the us is removing that's one of the question the sticking points that i see maybe he's found a third country right they've they've been very fond of finding third countries i guess i should explain a little bit about oil leaving venezuela just so like people are aware of that so like robert read the the truth sounds like something someone says in church doesn't it yeah yeah here we are so they're talking about blockading sanctioned oil tankers not necessarily every tanker that enters venezuela is sanctioned i believe chevron has some contracts chevron tankers should be cruising yeah there's a lot of chevron yeah that shouldn't be an issue right they should be able to go back and forth they're not sanctioned it's the venezuelan state oil company which in english i guess you would say pdvsa is a joseph you say.
- [158:50]
Robert Evans
It english okay yeah yeah yep what.
- [158:53]
James Stout
Venezuela has done previously and this is not by any means unique to venezuela but this is generally how many of these regimes that are kind of in the ambit of venezuela i'm talking about iran and russia here have avoided sanctions and sanctioned entities so far is by using what are called ghost ships i will link to an explainer on this what they will do is use the names and identifiers of vessels that have been scrapped they will change the flags of vessels often to these small island nations for whom allowing ships to use their flag is kind of a source of income right and they will often use these to go out into international waters and then offload cargo in this case oil rate so this happens pretty frequently with venezuelan vessels it was one such vessel called the skipper that the us coast guard boarded i think last week as we're recording this yeah sure that is how venezuela has previously been evading these sanctions right and iran does this too russia does this too they also do things like spoof their location or turn off their they have like a locator beacon that ships are supposed.
- [160:03]
Robert Evans
To use the transponder yeah yeah so.
- [160:06]
James Stout
Like this is fairly common practice but obviously the way to stop that is a physical blockade right like that's not going to be possible if these if the us is effectively like inspecting ships leaving venezuela right or sort of keeping a very close eye on them so that will end and with that will end a very important source of income for the maduro regime if they keep.
- [160:27]
Mia Wong
Doing this yeah now obviously one of the sort of issues we're trying to work out what is going to happen here especially before whatever speech trump is about to give is that we're trying to figure out state policy from trump posting right yeah there's a lot of this that is enormously incoherent so okay the thing about designating the government of venezuela as a foreign terrorist organization is one of the weirdest things i've ever seen and this was also unhinged the closest thing we've ever really gotten to that i guess was the irgc yeah and maybe you could go back and say the khmer rouge but like they weren't really a government by that point so this is not this is not a designation that has ever been given to a government before right it doesn't make any sense to give it to a government it doesn't make sense to give it to this government i mean you know even if you're working within the logic of counterterrorism which is just you know unhinged murderous imperialism to begin with but all of the reporting on this has been assuming that the blockade will be of you know like of these specifically sanctioned oil tankers however comma the thing about the foreign terrorist organization designation is that it does things and one of the things that that foreign terrorist organization designation does is that if you do business with a with a foreign terrorist organization you are now immediately on the line for material supportive terrorism.
- [161:53]
James Stout
Charges like chevron so business yes there.
- [161:56]
Mia Wong
Are lots of countries like like facebook.
- [161:59]
Robert Evans
Does business i'm fine with the us military carrying out airstrikes on chevron executives and their property let's be clear about that i would salute the red white and blue if we dropped some hellfires on that c suite.
- [162:15]
Mia Wong
Yeah i don't know this is all very weird my understanding of the fto designation process is that how it's supposed to work is that the president proposes it and then the secretary of state and secretary of the treasurer i think have to approve it and then there's a seven day period where congress has an opportunity to say no and then it goes up so right now we should be theoretically in the seven day window but it's also really unclear what the administration has actually been doing because again we're being governed by post yeah like it's so.
- [162:49]
James Stout
It'S not announced as an executive action on whitehouse dot com and i think normally it goes there and then the seven day comment congressional period commences then it's not in the federal register either right now all we have is a.
- [163:04]
Mia Wong
Truth yeah and this is the problem is that this is sort of the calvin ball war in that they're using the names of actual legal categories and things that have material effects in the world but they're just posts and i want to be very clear about this even just doing a blockade on these sanctioned vessels is an act of war yeah that's very deliberately an act of war it is an act of imperial aggression it is morally wrong it is also unbelievably illegal under the war powers act and this has actually gotten a response from democrats in congress there's been a few measures cbs is reporting this there's been a few measures to stop the president from starting a war here i'm going to quote cbs a second measure from democratic rep jim mcgovern in massachusetts would remove the armed forces quote from hostilities with or against venezuela that have not been authorized by congress mcgovern's resolution could face the best chance of potential adoption since it has three gop co sponsors reps marjorie taylor greene of georgia thomas massie of kentucky and don bacon of nebraska bacon says he would also vote in favor of meeks's measure bacon's taking a very weird line here of he needs congressional approval and also i support him doing this so purely.
- [164:25]
James Stout
A procedural objection yeah it's a i.
- [164:28]
Mia Wong
Want my war but i want congress to have a little shred of power yeah so i think it's also worth noting what exactly is going on here i'm someone who's on the record as talking about how political economy in latin america and american imperialism is usually slightly more complicated than they just want a resource but but they just want a.
- [164:48]
Robert Evans
Resource here yeah this one this one.
- [164:51]
Mia Wong
Really is no like so so like like like bolivia for example every everyone thinks that the whole coup in bolivia was about lithium and it wasn't yeah i'm very mad about this it was not if you look at the people if you look at camacho if you look at people who were actually running that coup they were all bolivian agro barons because a huge part of what was going on there was a rebellion by the sort of agribusiness like agricultural elite who joined with parts of a reactionary middle class okay but this is not that venezuela has the world's largest oil reserves but there are significant problems extracting the oil right many of these problems stem from the two thousand two two thousand three opposition general strike this is back after hugo chavez was elected so in two thousand two there was a coup against chavez that failed and was sort of overturned famously but later that year there was also a sort of opposition general strike that lasted from like late two thousand two to early two thousand three and a huge part of that general strike was oil workers specifically and it was very specifically one of the things about the structure of oil production is that there are a bunch of very very highly paid and highly skilled technical workers who are very very loyal to the oil companies themselves and who are very loyal to who are sort of tend to be very right wings these people went on strike and sort of got fired en masse oil production requires both a huge amount of heavy capital and a bunch of highly skilled workers and if you don't have both of those things then you can't do oil extraction and this has sort of been a recurring problem for the entire time both sort of fugal chavez and maduro has been in office is that they haven't had the capacity to actually extract a bunch of the oil and also they've refused turn the oil over to more american companies that have already been contracted and it's also.
- [166:37]
Robert Evans
Worth noting there's a lot of talk about like venezuela having the world's largest reserves and a lot of that is like them jinking the numbers by including a lot of like tar sands that would be that no one's going to try to get extract like fuel from because it's too expensive and too much of a pain in the ass it's just not worth it anyway and also.
- [167:00]
James Stout
Their claims to reserves that are not actually part of venezuela at this time.
- [167:03]
Robert Evans
Right right like we're not working with exact with accurate information yeah it's messy.
- [167:10]
Mia Wong
And it's also worth noting that like the oil numbers i mean obviously all oil numbers are political but the oil numbers here are extraordinarily political because these are numbers that are basically used as a pitch by sort of like the opposition to try to get a us backed coup and it's also sort of worth noting that the other thing that's happening here and the reason this is all going to probably cause really significant economic problems and probably humanitarian disaster both in venezuela and probably also in cuba which extensively relies on venezuelan oil to have their economy function is that the venezuelan economy has been really structured around oil in a way that they failed transition out of multiple times the first big one i've done a different episode about this in the neoliberalism series a bunch of years ago but there was a whole bunch of deliberate sabotage by american car companies over the attempt to build a car industry there's a long sort of history of this but it means that both of these countries economies are desperately reliant on oil and the more of this that is cut off the more fucked it's going to get for just everyone in venezuela yeah yeah.
- [168:15]
James Stout
And you can already see how much worse it is it's got from the time i went to venezuela to now they're very vulnerable to changes in crude oil prices right and that has along with corruption and a government which doesn't really give a shit about the material welfare of its people has already made things unsustainably hard for people in venezuela and that will only get worse yeah.
- [168:39]
Mia Wong
So i want to conclude basically on a couple of things one there's that two this is going to cause more waves of migration and refugees fleeing the country both from potential us military strikes and from the economic damage there's been some moves on the international stage with china and mexico expressing support for the venezuelan government shine bomb in mexico has offered to facilitate negotiations immediate negotiations between the us and venezuela it's also kind of worth noting that right before this whole thing there was a giant vanity fair interview with susie wiles who's trump's chief of staff who oh boy this.
- [169:18]
Robert Evans
Is for reuters dubs this we call.
- [169:20]
Mia Wong
Her here god said trump quote wants to keep blowing up boats until maduro cries uncle which is one of the most hideous things i've ever heard yeah it's gangster shit terrorism it's literally terrorism.
- [169:33]
Robert Evans
It'S it's a highway yeah yeah it is it is it is straight up.
- [169:37]
Mia Wong
Structurally unless you reside we are going to keep killing civilians like it's hotchkiss.
- [169:42]
James Stout
Taker shit yeah hideous it's also a fundamental misunderstanding of how the regime operates if that is the case because they don't care if their people kept dying you know i have seen venezuelan people die in the darien gap right because in part their government is incapable of providing for their material needs they don't care like killing some other people with boats is not going to fundamentally change the way that government works because there's only one way it can work yeah.
- [170:09]
Mia Wong
And i think i think there's the one last thing i want to say about this before we head out slash before whatever giant update comes after the.
- [170:15]
Robert Evans
Speech yeah i've got one after you finish here one of the big problems.
- [170:19]
Mia Wong
Here is that people in the administration really do believe this they actually do think that you can knock off the government with airstrikes and no you can't no you can't they thought this about the houthis too it's wrong it's never.
- [170:30]
Robert Evans
Been right it's hideous we just finished doing like a five parter on bastards about like the nuclear doomsday device that also dealt heavily with the work of that italian air force general duhay who was the first guy in nineteen twenty one to be like all you need are bombers nothing else is necessary in militaries now it's nothing but bombers from here and if you have enough bombers no one will ever attack you and this logic has always been wrong and it's also every new generation of like military leaders especially in like air the air power field are like all we need is airstrikes you don't need to send in ground you can accomplish all of your goals all of your power projection just by bombing people or shooting missiles at them them and they're always wrong it doesn't work it's just not.
- [171:17]
James Stout
Effective yeah like i think the trump administration is somewhat i don't want to say high on its own supply they had success in syria with removing the territorial caliphate mostly using us air power.
- [171:30]
Robert Evans
Right there wasn't a big us that was the us part there was still as you know this is a shitload of kurdish fires that is the thing.
- [171:37]
James Stout
Right syrian and yeah yeah eleven twelve thousand kurdish people died to remove the islamic state and more have died since.
- [171:45]
Robert Evans
Right yeah and also a shitload of iraqi soldiers a mix of kurds and largely guys from in and around baghdad but yeah a lot of and a.
- [171:55]
James Stout
Bunch of arab syrians and i don't mean to ethnically gatekeep this at all assyrian people armenians no but a huge.
- [172:03]
Robert Evans
Amount of the effort was guys i mean literally i was in bed with some of these guys a lot of like the fighting tip was like literally dudes with fucking knives and hand grenades clearing buildings in hand to hand combat.
- [172:15]
James Stout
Yeah those were the people who faced danger right like and that's what you need to unfortunately you can't do war with computers yet yeah but yeah i think that that might be where this this belief that and like the marco rubio lobby right the florida cubans who are invested in this kind of of trump corollary to the monroe doctrine right and the idea that they can roll back leftist regimes in like south and central america yep i think that's where a lot of the pressure is coming.
- [172:44]
Mia Wong
From yeah speaking of pressure we are being pressured to go to ads that's.
- [172:49]
Robert Evans
Right beautiful and we're back there's an update i just came across as we're doing this we talked about how tucker is an inside source saying that trump's basically going to declare war there's another article that just came out on stitch snitches by gloria shaw citing a pro trump host on real america's voice who characterized the upcoming oval office address as a pr thing meant basically as an acknowledgement that a lot of trump's voters are frustrated that he keeps talking about like like international issues like venezuela while everything is more expensive for them and they continue to lose their jobs and the economy is shit to quote from that article and this is them quoting a segment from that real america's voice podcast the remarks came during a segment on the water cooler with co host david brody who teased the nine pm eastern address as an elevated effort to regain the narrative on affordability the president is going to be in the oval office tonight nine pm eastern brody said big address to the nation he's elevating this clearly this is to regain the narrative and explain more about the affordability issue in america and what this administration is doing i think they're trying to seize this right off the top and make sure it doesn't get away from them and the claims here is basically like this is trump trying to steal a night march on the twenty twenty six election cycle and reset a lot of what people are talking about around affordability like this argument is that no he's basically acknowledging that it's been kind of a mistake to focus so much on his overseas policies and he really needs to start promising that that golden age is actually going to come for his voters which the numbers don't bear out right like almost no jobs have been added in the us since april there's about seven hundred thousand more people unemployed now than there were in november of twenty twenty four like things aren't.
- [174:45]
James Stout
Good inflation is still wild inflation is real bad food and like the material things that we need are going up in price rise faster than general inflation.
- [174:56]
Robert Evans
Like it's not good and people like on his own side jessica tarlov who's a fox news host of the five quote tweeted a post about how like the hiring recession just with the golden age attached which is like what trump has been saying you know we're going to have a new golden age if you make me president so like the fact that he hasn't done he hasn't followed through on any of his promises to actually improve life for his voters or the economy is starting to hurt and i guess i'm hopeful that that's what it is rather than the marines are about to be in caracas right but i guess we'll see very soon.
- [175:33]
James Stout
Yeah great stuff yeah talking of international stuff trump is doing let's talk about the new travel ban so this this travel ban dropped yesterday that was tuesday so previously had this nineteen country travel ban right right some of that was a complete bar to entry for citizens of those countries or to new visa entries some of it was a partial bar to immigrant visas not to non immigrant visas right they have now expanded this to twenty more countries so totally banned now from getting new visas to enter the usa as citizens of burkina faso mali niger south sudan and syria as well as the palestinian authority the syrian one is particularly wild because al shara just visited the white house there are individual case by case exceptions right it's not that they wouldn't block al shara i'm sure but it's interesting to look at the justifications that they use here what they are basically saying i'll just read a couple of them here to give you an example at least one country lacks mechanisms in hospitals to ensure births are reported and widespread corruption combined with a general lack of vetting and poor record keeping result in any non citizen being able to obtain any civil document from that country particularly if that person is willing to pay a fee or engage an individual that specializes in assisting in such fraud they go on to basically document failures in government bureaucracy they talk about corruption right they talk about places where birth certificates are just written by hand and they talk about places where the government does not control all the territory prevalence of crime places which offer citizenship by investment without physical residence they also talk about some of these countries not being willing to accept their nationals who the us deports and again visa overstay rates which is what they spoke about last time what is getting less reporting or at least was this morning when i looked was that they have removed exemptions which existed for the previous nineteen these include family member visas right so that means that for instance someone who could have themselves become a permanent resident or even a citizen now cannot bring a family member say a spouse a sibling etcetera across even though those people were previously vetted and it appears some there is certain categories of sivs are exempt but i believe not all siv so that's a special immigrant visa right the vast bulk of sivs will be afghan people who worked with the us military in afghanistan the nineteen countries who are now partially restricted i'm just going to read them off angola antigua and barbuda benin cote d' ivoire dominica gabon the gambia malawi mauritania nigeria senegal tanzania tonga zambia and zimbabwe for some reason the first five of these are underlined on the white house website i don't know if someone copied and pasted them across with hyperlinks like i don't know i'm unable to work out why they're not hyperlinked in the document but there doesn't seem to be any explanation like this there's no special set of sanctions for those and they're just in alphabetical order they actually reduced restrictions on turkmenistan because quote suspension of entry into the united states of nationals of turkmenistan as non immigrants on b one b two fm and j visas is lifted because some concerns remain the entry into the united states of nationals of turkmenistan as immigrants remain suspended the last element of this that i want to cover is it would appear to stop international adoption so from the listed countries like all of those thirty nine listed countries which is wild and particularly unfortunate because i know people who adopt children from outside the united states it's a process that takes years and i can imagine it being horrifically traumatic to have it suddenly cut off like this but consciously or unconsciously that is what this executive action appears to do so that is not great it seems that the united states is using this as a kind of cudgel right to encourage those countries to it's kind of a quid pro quo they get what they want they got from turkmenistan apparently then they will remove some of those restrictions otherwise they will continue them so yeah that's not great so judge hannah dugan's trial began this week dugan if you're not familiar she's not the judge in new mexico who was accused of providing firearms to somebody who was not a permanent resident or citizen she is a judge who is accused of allowing a migrant a man named mister flores luis to leave her courtroom from a door that is not the usual door that door led to a private corridor in that private corridor there was one exit to a public area and also a door to a fire escape mister flores ruiz took the exit to the public area he then took a lift down i think to the ground floor with an ice officer he then attempted to run away when ice officers attempted to detain him when he left the lift he was caught and detained so we learned quite a lot in this and it's just been interesting to follow right first of all we see that several of the people who were taking part in the apprehension were reassigned fbia agents this is increasingly common right like all branches of the federal law enforcement have had some of their capacity redirected to doing this right to doing like this this guy i believe had misdemeanors the agents were using signals to communicate they had a group chat called frozen water obviously jesus christ yeah really funny god i hate these people the fbi agent conceded in cross examination that's not an app approved by the fbi but according to one shocking the dhs apparently does approve it according to a cbp agent who was cross examined there which obviously creates an issue for the retention of records right because signal if you're not familiar auto deletes things after a period of time that users can configure it also appears that when one of these dhs agents entered the courthouse court security officers told him that he needed an an escort but then he appears to have proceeded without one in a text to colleagues dhs employee said quote this is gonna be a pain in the dick jesus christ yeah do you what happens it seems like is judge dugan sent them to the chief judge because it didn't have a judicial warrant they said an administrative warrant right another judge testified against judge dugan a judge called judge cervera so judge severa was with judge dugan when they confronted the agents judge dugan wore her judicial robes when confronting them which apparently is not usual it's not usual to wear them out of the courtroom and judge cervera seemed to disapprove of that and then she said quote judge dugan could quote have been more diplomatic and then she said judges shouldn't be helping defendants evade arrest at the same time judge dugan's defence lawyer asked her if she had warned her sister of the ice presence which she had and it appears that her sister had a hearing at the courthouse the next day which judge severa said she was not aware of so there's like a lot still to be unpacked here right this is just the first day this could go on past christmas and into the new year and it probably will but there's been some pretty good reporting on this from a substack called all rise media and i will keep checking in on this and we'll we'll report on it again after.
- [183:35]
Robert Evans
The new year.
- [183:39]
Garrison Davis
Hello this is garrison davis reporting from tokyo unfortunately i was unable to attend the regular executive disorder group recording due to being halfway around the globe so i'm recording my section solo this past week saw two devastating mass shootings back to back on saturday afternoon a mass shooter entered an economics class at brown university in providence rhode island and opened fire with a concealed handgun killing two people injuring nine others all students about thirty minutes after the shooting started the university police announced a suspect was in custody twenty minutes later they retracted that statement then university police reported shots fired in another section of campus which they also later retracted president trump posted on truth social quote i've been briefed on the shooting that took place at brown university in rhode island the fbi is on the scene the suspect is in custody god bless the victims and the families of the victims this too was untrue as the university released a statement about an hour later clarifying that the shooter was not in custody and that over four hundred officers were on the scene to assist in the investigation the next morning providence mayor brett smiley announced that a new person of interest was detained the providence police chief told nbc that they were confident that the suspect was the shooter major news outlets later named this individual though later that evening this quote unquote person of interest was released with the rhode island attorney general saying that the evidence quote now points in a different direction unquote the shooter currently remains unidentified and at large on sunday night in sydney australia a father and son sajid and naveed akram coordinated a targeted attack against jewish people attending a hanukkah event on bondi beach fifteen people were killed in the shooting victims include a ten year old girl and a holocaust survivor twenty four victims remain hospitalized a bystander named ahmed al ahmed a son of syrian refugees charged one of the gunmen and wrestled his gun away ahmed was later shot multiple times but survived and has been labeled a hero by the australian prime minister police say that a vehicle used by the gunman contained homemade islamic state flags and improvised explosive devices the men were not part of an official terror cell though the prime minister says that they were motivated by islamic state extremist ideology counterterrorism officials believe the shooters received quote unquote military style training in the philippines a month before the attack on tuesday self styled online investigators and right wing social media content mills falsely identified the brown university shooter as an lgbtq palestinian studying at the center for middle eastern studies citing gait analysis based on surveillance footage of the unidentified suspect released by police the university removed this queer palestinian student's online profile in an effort to prevent doxing though this itself was used by the online smear campaign as evidence of guilt brown university later published this statement quote in the aftermath of the shooting we've seen a harmful doxing activity directed towards at least one member of the brown university community it's important to make clear that targeting individuals could do irrevocable harm accusations speculation and conspiracies we're seeing on social media and in some news reports are irresponsible harmful and in some cases dangerous for the safety of individuals in our community it is not unusual as a safety measure to take steps to protect an individual's safety when this kind of activity happens including in regard to their online presence as law enforcement officials stated clearly on tuesday afternoon if this individual's name had any relevance to the current investigation they would be actively looking for this individual and providing information publicly unquote on a final note after the holiday break we will be reporting on the indictment against four alleged members of the turtle island liberation front in california regarding a new year's eve bombing plot.
- [188:25]
Robert Evans
We'Re back and we have some news that's going to be really sad for everybody here and it could happen here and just all of you listening which is friend of the pod dan bongino is stepping down from his work as deputy director of the fbi i think it's been a nice vacation for him but you know america needs him in his much more important role whatever podcast he was doing before he got brought in to be deputy director of the fbi you know look if he was podcasting right now they would have caught the mass shooter at brown i think we can all.
- [189:00]
James Stout
Agree on that yeah he'd have put gossip's way through it either that or.
- [189:03]
Robert Evans
Just him not being at the fbi would have made the fbi do their.
- [189:06]
James Stout
Jobs better yeah.
- [189:10]
Mia Wong
Look what we're learning from this is that you can never escape the podcasting minds no matter where else you try to go they will drag you back down oh look if.
- [189:19]
Robert Evans
You make me director of the fbi i promise to stop podcasting and start being the most corrupt director of the fbi we've ever had that's a tough.
- [189:28]
Mia Wong
Challenge but i think you have to.
- [189:30]
Robert Evans
I think i'm up to the task.
- [189:34]
James Stout
Prepared to work at it yeah so.
- [189:37]
Robert Evans
Yeah that's cool i wanted to talk a little bit about an executive order that our beloved president put out very recently some of you may be aware of this but on december eleventh twenty i mean this year twenty twenty five trump released yet another executive order this one titled ensuring a national policy framework for artificial intelligence and basically in this and trump stated that like the reason he's doing this is because it's absolutely critical to the us s future that we be at the top of the game when it comes to ai that we be global leaders in this burgeoning new field he states in the eo these efforts have already delivered tremendous benefits to the american people and led to trillions of dollars of investments across the country certainly haven't but we remain in the earliest days of the technological revolution and in a race with adversaries for supremacy within it trump stated in an interview that he expects ai to be fifty to sixty percent of the us economy in the near future which is nuts maybe that's just because everything else.
- [190:37]
James Stout
Will just go to complete shit you.
- [190:38]
Robert Evans
Know the reality is that like ai is not even close to being that value in terms of like what the economy produces but nearly all of our growth is related and like is tied right now to data center investment so trump absolutely needs ai because without it the country is very obviously in a recession yeah like this is the only thing propping up the image of the economy as not being in the shitter now what does this eo actually do well the the goal of this the statement is that it is the policy of the united states to sustain and enhance the united states's global ai dominance through a minimally burdensome national policy framework for ai this eo will establish an ai litigation task task force within thirty days of this order going out the attorney general is supposed to establish this task force whose responsibility is to challenge state ai laws that are inconsistent with the policy set forward above right that we need to be globally dominant in ai right so this task force is supposed to go out and find state laws that it believes are like an onerous burden on the development of this technology going along with this within ninety days of the order the secretary of commerce is supposed to you do an evaluation of all state ai laws in order to like point out which ones this task force should go after and then the stick that this eo establishes is that if this task force decides that like a state ai law is in violation of our need to be dominant in ai we can restrict state funding to things like the broadband equity access and deployment program right basically they'll cut off federal funding for like broadband access in order to punish state states that try to restrict or in any way shape or form govern what people can use what companies can use ai for and the primary thing this is all about i know we all think about the stuff that like most people have more direct experience with which is like all the slop flooding the internet the disinformation that's continuing to cook the brains of a lot of our peers and elders and just the fact that like it's making certain industries full of hardworking people a lot harder to exist because because companies are just trying to replace quality work with absolute like slop trash yeah but really what this is about and the primary focus of most of these state level laws regulating ai is the housing market right there's a good article in politico about this written by cassandra dumay but she notes that per a national conference of state legislatures analysis in july there were more than forty pending bills across the united states related to just ai in the housing sector and most of these bills are attempting to stop landlords from using different ai programs to coordinate pricing basically there are a couple of different programs the most prominent of which is called realpage and what they do is landlords join these programs and they share information on like what their different properties cost and then the ai knows what everybody is charging and and can suggest that they charge higher prices right yeah now the way that this is supposed to work is that you as a landlord look out at what's publicly available about the prices of your competitors and look at like what your customers are currently willing to bear and then try to set your prices and you know future price increases based on that what realpage is doing is a legal collusion right this is price fixing it's just the ai is doing the actual active price fixing the landlords are just sharing their data and paying a fee to the service and so a bunch of states have tried to stop this because this objectively makes the housing crisis worse i know there's some annoying assholes who come out and be like you shouldn't talk about anything but increasing the supply of housing and like that's that's that's idiot shit yes we need to increase the supply of housing this objectively hurts people these programs objectively increase the price of rent they do damage we should be mitigating or making it impossible for businesses like this to exist anyone who disagrees is just being a dummy new york passed a law in october that banned the use of ai algorithms to allow landlords to do price fixing there's a similar bill in the massachusetts legislation that's making its way forward right now and this is fundamentally what a lot of the opposition to like state level ai regulation is about is that the landlords basically think that this is a great way to make a shitload of money and tech companies are like and we can continue we can make a shitload of money selling them the tools to do this and states are trying to push back on this and like that's fundamentally what a lot of the impetus behind this executive order is is an attempt to stop people from making this even more harmful there is some like in this that politico article they quote from kevin donnelly who's the executive director of the real estate technology and transformation center and he talks about like well actually we're currently using ai to identify buildable lots and promote sustainable construction so that we can actually like reduce some of the costs of housing and all of these bills could you know undermine our ability to improve people's like yeah it's like just fucking go like literally jump off a bridge man fuck you yeah we know that's not how it works we have data on this no this isn't theoretical yeah yeah anytime a landlord.
- [196:00]
Mia Wong
Anytime a landlord says anything or the real estate developer that says anything that suggests the thing they want to do is lower rent they are lying you can tell because they don't fucking lower rents unless like a global pandemic happens yeah like that's not how any of.
- [196:17]
Robert Evans
This works and this has been controversial trump before putting out the eo tried to encourage the passage of a bill through congress that would have done the same thing as the eo right and would have actually had like more force of law behind it basically making it illegal for states to have their own laws regulating ai that didn't pass because even republicans don't really like that idea for one thing states rights is still supposed to be a pretty big part of the party but for another thing there's like a lot of things that conservatives are really unhappy with in terms of ai for example it keeps exposing children to pornography and other things that kids shouldn't be exposed to for another thing there's a lot of american jobs that are going to be lost as a result of or potentially could be lost as a result of ai slop automation of a bunch of industries and so there's there's even a significant amount of resistance among republicans this which is why the bill didn't pass right and trump when he announced this eo basically sat down with like a chunk of the conservatives who were more critical of this this and i think basically bullied them into getting on board and saying no he promised us this won't restrict state levels to like improve safety for children right there's absolutely like no guarantee of that like you just have david sachs who was trump's top ai advisor saying no no none of this is about trying to stop state laws to make kids safer it's just trying to stop state laws that will make rent less expensive yeah there's marjorie taylor greene's come out against this she's basically said that you know this is a violation of states rights it's bullshit steve bannon is in the same place he had a good quote i found in an article by the hill after two humiliating face plants on a must pass legislation now we attempt an entirely unenforceable eo tech bros doing utmost to turn potus maga base away from him while they line their pockets which is essentially accurate.
- [198:11]
James Stout
Yeah he's not right he's got to.
- [198:12]
Robert Evans
Speak stevie ain't wrong about that that so all this is like pretty annoying and fucked up we'll see what actually becomes of this i tend to agree with bannon that it's pretty much unenforceable like the lawsuit the court battles that will come from this is just going to be expensive and time consuming but i actually don't think this is going to work the way they want this is trump making it very clear that he is bought and paid for by the techs and that he understands that he is hanging on by a thread in terms of popularity one of the only things stopping it from getting stopping the situation from getting worse is that ai spending on data centers and shit is propping up the image of the economy right that's what this is all.
- [198:53]
Mia Wong
About yeah and this is something where he can simultaneously shore up his tech base and shore up his landlord base.
- [198:59]
Robert Evans
Yeah which are like yeah it's great.
- [199:02]
James Stout
He'S got left two kinds of guys do like donald trump yeah i guess.
- [199:07]
Robert Evans
There'S an end here where i could i wanted to make a note about something also related to ai which is that there's an incredibly stupid article in vox that came out this week literally the title is like america you've made it very clear that you hate ai but what if it's the only way to restart the idea machine right and this dipshit columnist's argument is that like well we're running out of ideas and ai like human beings can't come up with ideas enough to create growth at the level that the economy needs to be growing and in order to like take humanity into the future really ai is the only way to generate more new ideas and i wanted to look at like what is this based off of and i think i figured out what like the fundamental source of all of this shit is which is back in twenty seventeen there was a research paper put out by the national bureau of economic research by nicholas bloom charles jones john van reenen and michael webb the kind of summary of that article reads as follows in many growth models economic growth arises from people creating ideas and in the long run growth rate is the product of two terms the effective number of researchers and their research productivity we present a wide range of evidence for various industries products and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply right so basically we have more people doing research and we're spending more money on research but that research is translating into economic gain gains at a lower level than ever before right to the point where we're not going to be able to continue to make economic gains like we used to be unless something changes and if you're kind of paying attention to this you might notice that that study which is the underpinning of that vox article and all of these claims that we need ai for ideas really is not actually making an argument that people aren't having more ideas it's making an argument that it is harder to profit from ideas than it used to be right now that is fundamentally different from people not having ideas for one thing it's reducing an idea to something that delivers a return for venture capitalists right that's all an idea is in this it's something that makes money and a lot of great ideas like the post office don't generate a direct profit now obviously it's a net benefit to the economy that we have a post office but the post office runs at a loss right which is why you have state funding for certain things because they're just not going to be the kind of ideas that like a bunch of silicon valley investors want to throw money into right now the other part of the issue here is just a very practical one which is that a lot of the ideas the great ideas last century that were like most correlated with massive gains in productivity stuff like the introduction of vaccines on a wide scale indoor plumbing and electricity on a wide scale scale phones there's not ideas like that that are like that big and that much of a game changer.
- [202:04]
James Stout
Left right the low hanging fruit has.
- [202:06]
Robert Evans
Been picked the low hanging fruit has been picked there's not another the telephone waiting out there we already did that it was the smartphone there's not another indoor plumbing right there's not something that's going to be as much of a sea change for the economy and for the quality of human life as those ideas because those were really big things.
- [202:25]
Mia Wong
Yeah like maybe you could put it something like actually cleaning the air that.
- [202:29]
Robert Evans
We breathe yes but again that's not profitable in a direct way right that's an idea that would have a change that big but there's not a profit incentive for it right so we privatize.
- [202:40]
James Stout
The air robert right subscription model for.
- [202:43]
Robert Evans
Breathing fucking air yeah and there's a lot again i find this whole discussion pattern like it's an example of the fact that like people like this fucking vox article who i don't feel like deserves to be named in the this have been using chatgpt so much that they're no longer thinking they're not really sentient in a meaningful way right like when you when you write something like that it's because your brain has been completely fucking cooked i did find a good article ironically from twenty seventeen from vox eu that is titled ideas aren't running out but they are getting more expensive to find which is making a lot of the claims that like i've made which is that or that i've been bringing up so far in this which is that that it's not that there's a lack of ideas it's that it costs more money to do stuff like that now like the costs because everything's so much more complex the big ideas we're looking at aren't as simple as indoor plumbing they require a lot more computing power they require a lot more people working on them right like we've plucked the low hanging fruit and it ends with a paragraph i find kind of valuable here returning to the oil metaphor we are digging deeper into a trickier part of the rock of course we could be wrong and humanity may have just been chipping away at a particularly hard point that will soon give way creating decades of cheap ideas this is the hope of those who emphasize the revolutionary power of artificial intelligence and the singularity and accumulation of technology that triggers runaway growth at some point in the future although we all enjoy science fiction history books are usually a safer guide to the future in this case history suggests that large increases in research effort are needed to offset its declining productivity and again if you want to have the big ideas and the star trek future that all of these billionaires like elon musk pretend they want what you actually have to do is be willing to put a lot of money into research and development without any promise of a profit your motivation can't be well now we have to get a two hundred percent rate of return on our investments right it has to be well this would improve people's lives and make life more sustainable right like finding solutions to a lot of problems with climate change cleaning the air like dealing with like lack of access to clean water lack of access to basic basic medical care these are not things where doing them means that your company gets an immediate profit and evaluation in the tens of billions of dollars right that's just not the way providing life saving aid to people works but the net value to the global economy would be massive if for example kids weren't going without food and access to clean water and had better access to education and thus were able to go into fields where they become researchers and generate ideas that eventually turn into profit right like these ai fucks aren't talking about ideas they're talking about fracking the human mind right that's what they want to.
- [205:25]
James Stout
Do that's a good way to put.
- [205:26]
Mia Wong
It yeah yeah i think that there's another thing we're saying here too there's a david graeber argument about this where he makes an argument that i think is also very compelling that that part of the decline in the rate of technological change has been the extent to which everyone who was trying to do this stuff is just increasingly dealing with more and more layers of bureaucracy instead of actually doing the thing they're trying to do and you know this this is a huge problem in academia where it's like okay so you have you know you're teaching in academia but you're also spending like a quarter of your time trying to get another job you're spending another quarter of your time dealing with all of the unhinged whatever like accounting that your supervisors have like or like like university management has like put upon you and this is and this is something that's also true for government researchers where there's just like this you know there's been this incredible increase in sort of the amount of bureaucracy they have to jump through and a lot like largely because of the right and because of all of the like weird they do where like they hate government funding so like ah everyone has to like justify their funding literally every ten seconds and i think that's one of the other angles of this and it's something that's only going to get worse because this administration is just fucking annihilating the entire basis of american science yeah they're just killing it the damage that they've done to the pipeline of people that would produce these researchers right with the ways that suddenly like american science postdocs just there's no money for it there's no money for grad students they're killing all of the pathways that would do this and then they're going oh the only solution is the fucking tech boondoggle we've created to the problems that we created by just annihilating the capacity to do science it sucks i hate.
- [207:06]
James Stout
Them if you want to email us you can do so it is coolzonetipson me if you want it to be encrypted you should use a protonmail address.
- [207:15]
Robert Evans
As well they're free all right guys i think that's the podcast listeners haters.
- [207:24]
Mia Wong
Lovers it's our last ed of the.
- [207:26]
Robert Evans
Year friends it's our last ed of the year well i don't know we'll see if those pills come in but.
- [207:31]
Alex Pine
Yeah but i yeah hate you happy holidays happy holidays everybody put a trans.
- [207:39]
Mia Wong
Girl on your couch put a trans girl on your couch girl love it.
- [207:43]
Robert Evans
Or a bed i mean yeah if.
- [207:45]
Alex Pine
You got a bedroom.
- [207:48]
James Stout
Inflatable mattress we.
- [207:50]
Robert Evans
Love those one of those like chairs that leans back to where it's like basically flat yeah not a lazy boy in this instance sure a lot of.
- [207:57]
James Stout
Options a neutral lazy chair yeah an.
- [208:00]
Robert Evans
Inflatable mattress why not yeah why not yeah waterbed a water bed water bed's.
- [208:05]
James Stout
Floors are strong enough because they are.
- [208:07]
Robert Evans
Heavy they're really nice anyway and generally you're not allowed to have them but yes anyways we reported the news arguably.
- [208:16]
Mia Wong
We reported the news.
- [208:22]
Robert Evans
Hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of.
- [208:26]
Mia Wong
The universe it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit.
- [208:33]
Andrew Sage
Our website coolzone media dot com or.
- [208:35]
Mia Wong
Check us out on the iheartradio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can now find find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions thanks for listening.
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