Al Zone 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.

Welcome to it could happen here, a podcast about how freedom is a joke in our lives are the punchline, I am your host, Mio Wong.

Long ago, twenty thirteen, in a galaxy basically exactly where this one is now.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and now a terminal fascist, purchased the Washington Post.

This was a sign of things 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 raised across the United States against the police and white supremacy.

A battle broke out inside of the New York Times newsrooms and editorial staff about the newspaper publishing an opinion piece called send in the Troops calling for You've Guessed It, Sending in the troops to attack protesters, published by a member of the American governments named Tom Cotton.

Editors resigned in outrage.

Debates raised a class journalist slacks.

It was the culmination of decades of battles about the direction of politics in race in the United States, fought simultaneously in the streets and in the newsroom.

Twenty twenty 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 we branded as anti woke.

One of the avatars of anti woke was Barry Weiss.

Barry Weiss was that the New York Times at the time was an ideological diversity hire, which is to say, affirmative action for white conservatives, as affirmative action has only existed in the figments of the minds of conservatives.

She was given a cozy make work job at the beginning of the Trump administration as an opinion staff editor and writer for The New York Times.

She was hired specifically to bring in more Trumpian figures into the opinion section.

This is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, this is the fever dream of affirmative action in the conservative mind right.

And these are going to be about to people who really hate affirmative action.

But again, what they are being given.

They are being handled by the most important newspaper probably in the entire world.

You know, she was handed a job because she was a fucking right winger.

Now, Weiss was part of the shall we say, conversations at the New York Times about again whether or not a newspaper should print a letter from a sitting US representative calling for the deployment of US soldiers against the American people.

And she saw this as an opportunity not to resist a obviously tyrannical program by again, a sitting member of the United States government.

She saw this as her moment to do a grift.

Now, in this moment, she resigned from The New York Times in a huff raving about the quote lack of ideological diversity.

Who had a giant rant about how the Twitter is not the masthead of the New York Times blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, which again I kind of emphasize this enough.

Like the she was brought in as a right wing affirmative action higher in order to appease the demand from the ruling class.

I guess for like pro Trump people, they already had electra right wingers.

This is completely unhinged.

But you know, she resigns and she has this big press to her in the right wing press trying to talk about how she was canceled, and of course none of this ever even happened.

Right.

We can debate the effect to which cancelation ever was even really a thing or did anything at all, But she was not canceled.

She literally resigned of her own free will.

She was not forced out.

She chose to leave in order to pursue a career as a right wing griff for another fields, namely Substack, where she ran a newsletter that was sort of rebranded as like, oh, it's a media outlet called the Free Press.

It's like, no, this is Barry Weiss's Substack.

Come on, what are we doing here?

What are we doing here?

Now?

Weiss is not a journalist.

She is a right wing idea logue.

She's also a hardline Zionist.

If you want to go into all of the absolutely unhidded shit that Barry Weiss has said and done over the years, all of the just unbelievably somophobic shit, all of the weird racist shit, all of the anti immigrant shit that she said, there's a very good John Oliver thing about her.

She is part of this story.

But if we spent this entire episode just talking about how much he fucking sucks.

We would be here for like two decades now.

In a just world, none of this would matter at all.

This would just be a conservative walking off from the free job that she was given by The New York Times, stomping off at a huff and going to start a sub stack whatever.

Who kicks.

This is not a just world.

This is the United States.

She now controls one of the most powerful and important news organizations in the United States.

The story of how she got there is the story of the future of the American media.

Unfortunately, for all of us, the story is a stressingly simple Barry Weiss and her outlet.

I'm using that in immense quotations.

Again, this is just a sub stack was bought out by one Larry Ellison.

Larry Ellison that appointed Weiss to be the ideological hatchet woman for his takeover of Paramount, which owns CBS.

There was no secret plan, there was no weird strategy, there was no Illuminati cabal behind the scenes.

It didn't require any effort at all.

All you have to do in order to install a right wing hack as the editor in chief of CBS News is by the company.

The results have been devastating.

I would call what happened to resegregation.

There was a large scale firing of non white employees.

NBC eliminated the editorial teams for NBC Asian America, NBC Black, NBC Latino, and NBC Out.

NBC Out was the queer one.

They fired kal King.

They did some stuff that frankly sounds like a joke.

I'm just going to read this quote from the Root and the CBS News bureau in Johannesburg, South Africa has been shut down with coverage of Africa shifting to London.

That is again, they closed the South Africa Bureau.

This is a CBS bureau in South Africa and moved their coverage of Africa from Africa to London.

If a hardline Marxist ideologue had written this in nineteen sixty seven, no one would have believed them.

And in the process, what they've done here is they've destroyed the NBC outlets that were responsible for doing a whole bunch of coverage for different groups of not white people.

Right, nbcblkh's MC Black did a whole bunch of very good coverage of the uprising in twenty twenty right, NBC Asian America did a bunch of good work.

NBC out was a place where you could occasionally find a transperson who was allowed to write.

And all of that is gone because one man, Larry Allison and his son David Allison, 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 here from some of those monopolies, product services.

Let's go we are so back.

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 company start to struggle, as any one of them sees weakness in the other ones, you get attempts to buy them out.

And this is what happens with Paramount, which is again the parent company that owns NBC.

So the way that it's framed, if you read it in the presss oh, it was a merger between Skydance, which was Ellison's sort of outlet, and Paramount.

But that's not really what happened.

Really, what happened was Paramount was bought by Ellison and sky Dance and they were merged together after that.

And this is a problem with the concentration of capital.

Right as capital becomes increasingly more and more concentration, as there are individual people and also entities that control more and more capital, their ability to simply swallow the rest of their competition and consume it increases.

And this is a significant advantage to the companies.

To get the swallow of this capital, they get to absorb all of the intellectual property, and so now they have control over the property regimes that allow them to control cultural production, and as a sort of incidental bonus, they can take control of the media.

Now it's worth getting into the Ellisons themselves.

Now, Larry Allison, back in the halcyon days of twenty twenty, was merely the eleventh richest man in the world when he quote participated in a call shortly after the twenty twenty election that focus on strategies for contesting the legitimacy of the vote.

According to court documents and a participant, the November fourteenth call included Lindsey Graham, Fox News host Sean Hannity, Jay Seklau, an attorney for President Donald Trump, and James Bob Junior, an eternity for True the Vote, a Texas based nonprofit.

True the Vote was a completely unhanged organization dedicated to overturning the twenty twenty election by doing all these weird voter fraud things.

And they had a strategy call, like the attorney in a strategy call with a bunch of Trump supporters, including one Larry Ellison.

Now again that was back in twenty twenty.

Here in twenty twenty five and now fighting with Elon Musk for the title of the richest person in the fucking world.

Ellison said, and I quote, We're going to have supervision.

Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person.

Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on now in that intervening time.

Larry Ellison is one of the people behind Oracle, and Oracle has benefited enormously as a company that got really in on the cloud storage boom.

They even benefited enormously from selling a bunch of shit to AI companies.

Lara.

Ellison is also a huge AI supporter, a huge back of AI, a huge someone who wants to spread AI, and someone who wants to spread AI, 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 and to make sure that capitals hold over this country and that white supremacies hold over this country would be maintained, he has become one of the large drivers of this entire project He's not the only one.

Jeff Bezos, as we started this program with, already owned the Washington Post in twenty twenty five, he went in to very seriously change it.

Jeff Bezos on the now fascist Twitter and we will get to that in a second.

Two wrote and this was a This was a letter that he sent to his staff, and this is this is the editorial section.

I'm writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.

We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars, personal liberties and free markets.

Will cover other topics too, of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.

David Shipley, who had been his handpicked editor, resigned rather than lead the effort.

It's not like Shipley had been like a leftist, right but you know, I'm going to read another part of this letter.

Quote I offered David Shipley, who I admire greatly because you know he was the Hambick guy, the opportunity to lead this new chapter I suggest.

I said to him that the answer wasn't hell yes, that it had to be no.

After careful consideration, David decided to step away.

So okay, what was actually happening here he came in was like, our board is not fascist enough, and if you're not going to make it more fascist, then get the fuck out of the way.

And the guy he had picked to run the editorial board like three years ago, when this is unacceptable.

I cannot be involved in this.

And left and now Washington Post publishes pieces with titles like quote Pam Bondi's welcome woke rollback.

The Justice Department rescinds regulations encouraging racial preferences, you know, and you can in some ways see all of the things that are coming together.

Obviously, Bezos was a major supporter of the Trump administration, is a major support of the Trump administration.

Put a bunch of money into the unhinged Trump ballroom.

And when he says Justice resins regulations encouraging racial preferences, they're talking about anti scrim nation ordinances, right, That's what they're actually talking about.

But these people have been so cooked and have stewed so much in the ideology of countering the ideology of twenty twenty that they're they're now doing all of this reversed racism stuff where they think that if you're not allowed to discriminate.

That's anti white discrimination.

And the Washington Post has been tanking effectively in the wake of a whole bunch of a whole bunch of writ wing editorial changes.

Its audience has significantly declined since this.

A whole bunch of people who subscribed to the Post called it in their subscriber count is just absolutely pitiful.

Now the reach has been contracting.

The paper is going to shit.

But that doesn't matter because the Washington Post is not a money making outlet.

The Washington Post is a chance to shape the way that the country thinks.

And it is better that you know seven people in Washington, DC, who are all identically minded conservatives read the Washington Posts and agree with it than it is for there to be any sort of independence whatsoever from anything on the shop floor from any of the people writing for it.

We've also seen in recent months the elimination of teen Folgue Conte Nasty.

Teenvogue's parent company eliminated Team Vogue as an independent outlet.

Teen Vogue had been the furthest left of the even sort of mainstream outlets in the US.

It had carried a bunch of extremely good and radical work on race and gender.

It was also one of the few outlets with consistent trans writing.

And of course, the other aspect of all of these purges has been unbelievable on hinge transphobia.

And this was them just destroying what had been a very very important outlet on the left for telling the stories of non white people, telling the stories of workers, and telling the stories of trans people.

And they just destroyed it.

Even though, and this is actually very interesting, ever since teen Vogue had shifted to doing a bunch of leftist coverage and covering the protests against Donald Trump in his first administration and had gone towards actually, you know, talking about labor and talking about struggle and talking about unions and talking about you know, the like, the experiences of people living under white supremacy.

Its readership had exploded.

But again that doesn't matter because it's bad for Donald Trump.

And so we're seeing the ideological tightening consolidation to the media as what had been an outlet that allowed people to talk about shit was just destroyed.

Now, speaking about outlets destroying things ideologically, Hey, product and services, please don't destroy USOO.

Now, as we covered on this show a few weeks ago.

Conde Nasts also fired several union workers legally for you know, staging a again protected workplace action, demanding to know what the fuck was going on with these teen Vogue firings.

And that's another aspect of all of his takeover, which is that these outlets just viciously and radically hates and this is the ruling classes people who run these outlets viciously hate unions.

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

And this is one of the things that these media unions and that unions in general do is try to help you not get fucking discriminated against on racial grounds.

So of course a part and partial of this has been the targeting of the union and that's what we've been seeing at conte Nast, where they also fired workers who had nothing to do with teen Vogue and also of whom was on the show and is trans and you should go 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 right 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 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, you know, vector of targeting for the Trump administration, where what Twitter is used for now, instead of being a platform that at one time actually was able to play a role as a thing that does resistance, as a tool of protesters, and as a tool of people who opposed, you know, the untraveled rule of billionaires, it's now been converted into just racist slop and a way to track down anyone who's sort of vaguely centered left and just put them in the eyes of the administration so they can be targeted by the state.

And it's also worth noting that one of the people who helped bankroll the purchase of Twitter because Elon Musk couldn't just purchase it directly, was one Larry Ellison.

Larry Ellison is also part of a massive attempt to buy TikTok.

Listeners of the show are probably familiar with the whole extremely weird story about how TikTok was banned last year under the Biden administration sort of bafflingly and Trump sort of just broke the law and made it still be usable, but has been trying to force TikTok to be sold to American buyers.

And the conglomerate that's supposed to buy it is a Larry Ellison thing, so he's also attempting to buy TikTok.

And finally, the story we're were to close on is that Larry Ellison has been doing a 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 as a fiasco, but what is interesting for our purposes is that David Allison, who's the guy running Paramount, who's the guy who's been directly running the ideological purges, has met several times with Trump, and last time they met, Trump has promised that he 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 by Netflix.

Right if Netflix takes over Warner Bros.

They don't get CNN.

Under Paramount and Larry Ellison's deal, they would get CNN now, even though CNN has done a whole bunch of unhandshit like having Ben Shapiro on to do fucking Electron coverage.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Okay, Trump has still been mad at them for reporting even a tiny bit critically about his administration.

And Trump has been kind of refusing to pick a side directly in terms of the takeover bid for Warner Brothers in the fight between Netflix and Paramount, but he's now said that he wants to make sure that CNN is sold and that it should get new leadership, presumably along the style of what happened with CBS.

And so this is sort of the final phase of all of this, right, which is trumpministration has the ability to use is quote unquote anti trust power in order to stop one of these two companies from doing this buyout, and Trump administration 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 a 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't beat them again.

And in some ways their project is kind of self defeating in that they have spent a significant amount of time hollowing out people's trust in these institutions, and there is an extent to which as bad as all of this is, they may simply be taking control of a husk that they had already caused a rot from the inside.

And meanwhile, all of these, all of his control of the media that they've been taking has not stopped everyone from fucking hating them.

And that's the note that I want to leave everyone here on.

It doesn't matter how much of the media these people buy, everyone still hates them.

We can fight them and we can win.

Welcome, take it up at here a podcast boldly asked the question what if a whole bunch of your life wasn't controlled by the bizarre whims of random dictators.

This is your host, Mia Wung And the last time we saw the Blue Bottle Union they had stage to walk out treated Eclipse.

Now they are back again to talk about union shit and Yeah with me is Alex Pine, who's the president of Blue Bottle Union, and Abby Sadow, the secretary treasurer.

Yet both of you two, Welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks for having us both back on.

Guys, thank you so much.

Yeah, I'm really really, I'm really excited to talk about this because the last one, I gotta say that was one of the absolute funniest things I've ever heard.

Yeah, I still can't get over how DHS got called on us when we tried to file for our election.

So uninche like, I feel like this is this is one of the things about doing the show is like I'm like about to be five years into this, right, It's like you think you've seen it all and then just like no, just just the most unhinged bullshit you've ever heard in your entire life, because like, just like, the capacity for cruelty and inventiveness of bosses is effectively infinite, So they can always find some bullshit the pull that you've never seen before, and they love to do it too.

Yeah.

This is one of the reasons why we unionized to begin with, is just because bosses can be petty tyrants.

Yeah, and sometimes it seems like the only reason that they got into being a boss is because they want to be a petty tyrant but don't have the soul for politics anyways.

Yeah, we unionized last May.

For anybody that's unaware, Blue Bottle is a so called specialty cough that is owned entirely by Nesslie.

Yes, that one that everyone regards as widely being evil.

Yeah.

See an extremely logged episode that I did, for example, about Niceleie chocolate and child labor is great.

This child slave labor good stuff.

We love capitalism, and.

Their coffee business is truly 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 Nestli's and Starbucks's, and it's all very ugly stuff.

But Blue Bottle, Blue Bottles, especially the coffee chain owned by Neslei.

We unionized all six of their Greater Boston locations in May 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 yeah yeah, yeah yeah.

So let's talk about that strike.

Well, actually, I guess okay, we should.

We should probably do the run up to what has been happening until we go after that strike.

I'm getting I'm getting strike excited.

This is how I've been in my mind since September.

It is just how do we make a strike happen?

Yeah, hell, yeah, Yeah, let's talk about like what the sort of lead up stuff to the action war and let's talk about like.

Yeah, what expanding was, Like, yeah, Abby, do you want to talk about the lead up?

Yeah.

So since we unionized last May, we've had multiple stage walkouts.

In September of last year, yeah, one of our union wraps at the Harvard Square location, well unjustly fires, we did a walk out over her termination.

We did a walkout in January of this past year after Blue Bottle completely refused to negotiate with us over the renovation of the Poudential Center and a lot of employees were going to be losing out on almost eight dollars in tips and is just fright hundreds of dollars a month.

And the company was like, oh, well, we bargained to an impasse, so we're just going to do whatever we want.

We were like, okay, well that's not that's not all this works.

No, yeah, And then in May of this year, we did another walkout when they made the same argument that we bargained towards impass when they tried to install security cameras.

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 impass, which they can't do because we were negotiating it as part of the contract, so they would have had to get to an impass on the entire contract before doing it.

Yeah, and their lawyer basically said, well, we weren't getting anywhere with that, so we're going to do anyways.

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.

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 a break from past practice.

And we have been 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.

Which 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 fun.

That wrong.

Yes, that's like girl who's read a bunch of weird labor history.

This thing feels like a thing for a fucking weird labor history.

The thing it reminds me of is that there was this thing in I think it was sibber Gora in Spain.

She like the twenties and thirties where it was like this hyperbilitant labor like union like labor Town, but they had a whole thing where they refused to strike over like improving economic conditions because they were like, this is bourgeois reformism and they would only strike over political stuff.

Oh yeah, but if you arrested like one person, like the whole fucking city would go out.

It's like this lot like yeah, no, we could just call.

We could just fucking instantly get get a fucking walk out to happen over just like over like them fucking with like kind of technical labor stuff like this rocks.

We love to see it.

Yeah.

I was on the floor that day that our coworker was fired, and I remember I went on my ten minute break after she was fired, and there's like a pond behind our store, and I was literally throwing rocks into the pond and I was like this sucks so bad and I'm so angry.

And then I was like, wait, we're a unionized.

I was like, wait a minute, we have a union.

And I go back into the store 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?

Yeah?

Hell yeah.

And then we all walked out and it was it was really 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 rip the rock hitting the pond in the first ripples going out and the whole thing.

Oh absolutely, that's I don't know, that's gorgeous.

I love it.

That fucking rules.

Congratulations.

Tell yeah.

One of my favorite things to say is that union is friendship, and friendship is unions, and when your friend gets fired, you should be able to walk out.

Yeah.

Yeah, fucked that, like seriously here.

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

Oh that's really sick.

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

Hell yeah.

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

They're like, we're all out of ideas.

What do we do?

Yeah, it's just start trying to fire everyone.

And 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 straight it's November because the company illegally fired Abby executive board member named Nora and an organizer of ours in the East Bay named Ashley for all incredibly petty reasons.

I don't know if you want to speak more to why you 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 point 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 must.

Understand what a serious infraction it is to wear green pants.

Of course, I mean clearly the green pants that I've been wearing for the better part of two years.

Yeah, firing Abby was generous.

Actually she should have been put to death for the crime of wearing green pants.

Of course, most likely this is.

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

Like, yep, I wore green pants in front of my manager, therefore I should not be able to make my rent.

Yeah, it's absolutely gibberish that that might be the all time dubbest fiery reason I've ever heard, Like what is.

Oh yeah, it's just so egregious because the managers know that I have a great rapport with all my coworkers.

I'm front all of my coworkers, and they were like, hmm, how can we, you know, make one of our long standing employees who is good at their job, you know, get fired?

So green pants was the reasoning, which.

And just like the idea of your employer being able to control what color of pants you wear is like is a thing that just on a foot of mental level would not be accepted with any other kind of authority that everyone immediately recognizes.

Wait, what the fuck that's completely unhinged.

Why should someone have the ability to tell you like, no, you have to wear this color pants, or you can't pay your rents and you can't eat oh yeah no.

And this is kind of the despotism of management that we're just talking about.

Isn't it.

Yeah.

And this is the thing that in.

Bargaining sessions for a contract, their site is very interested in maintaining.

We've said multiple times that we want a better just code policy, or at the very least, we don't want to wave our right to be able to wear a union memorabilia on the floor.

Uh huh.

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 wave your right to wear a union memorabilia on the floor, and we said, we want to be able to show pride that we are unionized, and we want to be able to have more freedom for expression.

Uh huh.

Because it's despotic to be able to have that level of control over what somebody does.

Yeah, and then he said, you know, well, I don't wear my sexuality on my shirt, and then realize that it was maybe inappropriate to say that, So then he talked about how he doesn't wear his daughters on.

His shirt, which it's a more convoluted point.

Yeah, well, because he's proud of his kids.

I guess what are we doing here?

Just come on, we gotta have better arguments than.

This, Like, no, this guy is really full of bad arguments.

Yeah, if you want to hear bad arguments, you should sit down on the bargaining session where their lawyer goes on kind of incomprehensible tie rades about how the free market in the aggregate will make sure that the best person will get promoted over time, or that the company will become more profitable or run with the most efficiency as an enterprise, because anything else would be illogical because they wouldn't produce more profit.

But what does that have to do with labor?

Yes, there's actually this is okay, So when I know who's a lawyer once told me that, like the this is this is not like a leftist this is just like she's just like a corporate lawyer once told me that this is like the actual secret basis that doesn't exist of all corporate laws, that there is actually nothing in the law that says a company has to make more money or that they even have the right to make money.

Like that's that that doesn't exist, Like that's not it.

That's not a thing, Like there's no, you don't actually have a legal right to make more money, like you simply don't.

That's just that's not how this works.

The thing that reminds me of is the other pollet is David Graeber wrote about.

I think you might have been quoting someone else, but I can't remember who was quoting.

But he writes about how the relationship between sort of eloquence and violence where the less you have and this isn't somewhere in the hope of rules.

He writes about how you know people who have a access to violence to compel people to do something, you don't even have to speak the same language as someone.

Right, you can just point a gun at them and you know they have to obey you because you know they have force, right, But the less ability you have to actually use force to get someone to do something right.

So if you're a village chief in there's actually a lot of conditionous tribes that were like this, but you know you're you're in like sort of the Northeast, and you don't actually have the ability to compel people to do things.

So if you want people to go work in the morning, you have to like get up and make a giant show of like, oh, I'm getting up to work in the morning.

Everyone follow me.

Wow, look at how hard I working.

And you have to like convince them through oratory.

And you know this, this is like why all these people when when Europeans run into them, everyone is like, holy shit, these are like the these are the best orders of every encountered because they have to be right.

But the more power you have, the less eloquence you have to have, which I think is like, you know, this is like a Donald Trump thing, right, It's like, yeah, what what you've what you've reached disappoint in the process.

You know, you can just compel people do things through violence.

You can just like talk like a fourth grader and it's fine and it doesn't matter because you just have violence.

And that's what this reminds me of it, like, oh, we're the company like we have like we're fucking owned by nasty We have all this money.

We don't have to make compelling arguments.

We just have to like have power.

Yeah, I mean pretty much.

Personally, it reads to me as.

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.

Yeah.

Well, also, just companies love fucking with negotiations.

It's awful.

I how okay, I should just start asking everyone who does negotiations about this.

But on average, how late should their manages to show up to meetings?

I would say that actually both sides are equally late well to the negotiations, at least just because getting around the city is so difficult.

Oh oh, so that's it's.

Like a transit thing, not like a no, no, we're not deliberately showing up ly as far as I know.

Yeah, we just can't get in traffic.

Yeah, but there should they already just be there?

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 hate to sit down in front of these people.

That's completely on it.

Yeah, having to have the union pave I've never heard of that before.

That's completely deranged, that's what.

And we we've even waived our right to meet in a neutral space.

Uh huh.

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 is meant that we've ended up in some strange places, so college conference rooms, city hall, we work what Yeah.

Really know, this is the most deeply unserious company I have ever encountered, Like, 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 they're counter So, for reference, our union's requesting thirty dollars an hour for bristas because that's a living wage according to the MIT living wage calculator.

Do you want to guess what Bluebottle said they would give us eighteen?

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 I then tried to ask if they've ever in their history decreased wages.

Uh huh, and they're like, no, I don't see why we would ever do that, And like, oh, so then this floor is bullshit.

Actually, their baseline for negotiations is our starting position is nothing.

Yeah, and this is a year after negotiating with them so far.

Yeah, a year.

It it's like okay, like I mean at that that point, it's like, yeah, I don't know, like fucking are our starting position is we should have your house?

Like this is like this is like equally come on, like you having their house is a more reasonable demand than our basic negotiating position is nothing, Like what are we doing here?

Oh?

No idea?

Just god?

Yeah, I mean it answered obligatory line here about how after you win an election.

The most common way for UNI to fail is bargaining the first contract.

And companies know this.

They will just do bullshit for several years to attempt to not have you get a contract.

It sucks.

Yeah, yeah, fuck them.

It's their whole strategy.

I mean, the whole like union avoidance of it all is they're just trying to like wait us out and then fire people who are involved and just like in their words, like let turnover do its natural work.

It's like, isn't this specialty coffee?

Don't you want people who are good at their jobs.

I've watched some of my new coworkers pull a shot that I wouldn't feed to a dog like the same.

Oh absolutely, why Look, you can't expect managers to know how to do things that's not their job.

My manager, let me tell you.

I used to have to open with her like three times a week.

And she has this very beautiful habit of as she's dialing espresso and also she does as well, she's counting cash, she will have her phone open on TikTok and then scroll through.

I have this one horrific memory.

It was six am and she was going through an entire TikTok storytime series for forty five minutes.

And the whole story time was going on, and every time it was an introduction of like I don't even remember what it was about.

I think it was like She's like, oh, this is my story of being like a mob boss's wife.

And I had to listen to that for forty five minutes while opening.

Oh yeah, I think you should you should legally be allowed to have her car.

I think I should have her house probably yeah too.

Yes, it's like our starting our starting demand is the boy.

Every time you pissed offs off, we get another one of your houses.

Look for every TikTok watched on the clock.

That's a doll towards me per hour.

Yeah, what are we doing here?

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

I'm so sorry.

No, I don't think I'll ever receive fair compensation.

You can really piss off the modern monetary theory people because they'd be like, no, even we can't account for this.

No one can account for the emotional damage.

We ran out of data in our federal reserve god to recap.

So in the past year, we've done multiple walkouts, unionized four locations in the East Bay area, and then, after Abbey was fired for bullshit reasons, along with two other organizers, we went on a four day strike which included both cities.

And we've done this entirely as an independent union against a company that is owned by Nesli.

Yeah, and interestingly, just.

Because I'd be remiss to not mention this, the day that we ended our strike, there was an article published in Writers which was the most vibe based reporting that I've ever seen, where it said Nesli explores sale of blue bottle coffee.

Sources say where there's three unnamed sources incredible that all say that Neslie is considering or looking into selling Blue Bottle coffee, but interestingly says here quote once source said Neslie could decide to sell the cafes but retain the brand's intellectual property to continue selling the products.

End quote, what are we doing here this?

Yeah?

Yeah, I 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 mean anything.

You didn't considering appropriating the mansion, like we're an exploratory committee.

Sources say, yeah, I don't think they'd publish that in writers, but uh, it's.

Interesting that they would even say that, because is like the entire value that Blue Bottle offers Nestlie is to be able to put the brand onto you know, nespressopods or whatever.

And also just very weird timing with the strike ending the same day comes out.

They are so scared, they are scared shitless and they don't know what to do about it, and they're breaking last left and right, trying to maintain power.

But it's like Alex said earlier, like the solidarity that we have between our coworkers, it just cannot be broken by management.

And even after they fired me and two of our other organizers, people still went out on the picket line.

We kept totally.

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

I hate to go.

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

So if you got food poisoning and the the strike for good getting certain manager coffee.

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

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

We're a lot further along than I thought we would ever get.

I thought they were going to fire us the day after we did the first walkout last year, which is you know, I thought all the more reason to try then.

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 barista is a rent burden, spending more than thirty percent of their income on rent, the median rent paid by Blue Bottle employees being one thousand, forty five dollars, which is the equivalent of one hundred and fifty Nora Lean style iced coffees.

That it's one of the best selling drinks they have.

Yeah, no, I know, for one hundred and fifty Nola, So you two can pay the median rent by paid by Barista and then on average it's sorry forty six percent of their income going towards rent, with roughly a third of Barristas paying over sixty percent.

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 this bullshit?

Did they just get like a right wing ship post to their lawyer?

Like?

Is this just like?

Is this like fucking like?

Is this like the fail Sun clone of Rudy Giuliani?

Like is this gonna start melting off?

What are we doing here?

Come on?

I wish I could tell you.

I don't know what their strategy with saying obviously false things is, but they love to do it.

It's so great, you know.

Okay, fuck it, I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna read this quote.

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

And 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 the shit.

They're just like, no, fuck you, we can say whatever the fuck we want because we think the week is this is an expression of just power, even though we know that we're lying, and you know that you're lying.

Is I mean, if you.

Want to talk about expression of power, you should read their management's rights clause.

Sorry, they're so called management's rights clause.

Oh god, let me see if I can pull that up.

So just to clarify, So, management's rates is a clause that can be found in some union contracts because of collaborationanists within unions in the fifties deciding that they actually 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 rates, but quote, it is agreed that the management of the company's business and the direction of its working forces are vested exclusively in the company, and the company retains all rights that had before the execution of this agreement unless a rate is clearly contracted away in this agreement by language that is specific and unambiguous.

These retained company rates include, but are not limited to, the following examples.

The right to direct and supervise the work of its employees.

The right to hire, promote, demote, transfer, and too discipline or discharge employees.

The right to create or eliminate jobs, and to determine wage rates for newly created or materially modify jobs.

The right to determine training requirements and provide training to employees.

The right to uniform and higher standards, the right to plan, direct, and control operations, 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 and force.

And I forgot how bad it is.

Wow, Because basically what they're saying is we want to be able to control everything that you do, and this is our They never say where they believe this right comes from.

They on make like an argument for naturalism, where like we are vested by the universal power of management to be able to do this.

They don't make any historical argument for it, where oh, this is you know, because of the contracts that have been negotiated since the fifties, something that's fairly standard, and we think that we have the right too because of like long standing president.

They just think that they should be able to control fucking everything.

Yeah, which is not unsurprising for Nesley.

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

And it's like, okay, read something like this and it's like, oh no, they are so worried that they're going to have to react to what their workers are doing that they and they are already doing this right like this is you know, this is this goes back to the whole like worre's leaking to the media, We're going to sell the company thing that they're doing.

Where it's like no, actually, like these people are so not like easily, but if you were organized at all, it becomes so clear to them that they actually, oh no, wait, hold on, they're responding to us like they're not just purely the only thing that gets to like drive history for and decide literally everything about your life.

The moment you like try to claw it away from them, they see how fragile it is, and they're like, no, no, no, no, Actually, we got to spell out the fact that we got to fucking dress you and whatever clothes we want you to wear.

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

And to hear it all in a bullet form, like in literally just a bullet list, like every single aspect of my life and everything that I've ever loved or thought was important to me in a list of what they think they can control.

It's just crazy.

And then we have to go back and say, okay, well, do you see how off base you are?

Yeah, And then they make us sound like the crazy ones for wanting to live a good life and be able to, like, you know, make ends.

Meet, pay less than sixty percent over and come towards rent.

Yeah.

Yeah, let's 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 Barista's people workers whatever is.

They haven't done it recently, but last summer they sent a very long winded and angry email about all the bargaining updates and press that the union was getting.

They're so mad at me that I'm good at my job.

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

To do, to try and be like, you didn't own me, I'm not mad please some pot in the news that I met.

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're 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 we have to say that they're negotiating a contract in bad faith, which is like the NLRA.

Yeah, yeah, Like what are we doing here?

God?

Yeah?

So what's coming up next for y'all?

What's the next stage?

If you or anybody that you know either works at a Blue Bottle or wants to apply to a Blue Bottle to help organize it, please reach out to us by email at Blue Bottle Union at gmail dot com.

If you want to support our independent unionism and help us remain independent and be able to go on multiple day strikes which clearly piss off our NESTLEI overlords, you can donate to us at TinyURL dot com forward slash BBIU dash strike unless we're until we have a contract or they reinstate, Abby, Nora, Ashley, and fingers crossed, hopefully not myself.

We're calling on a boycott of all Blue Bottle coffee products.

Helly, I have no idea what the overlap between it could happen here listeners and.

Customers, you'd be surprised.

But I'm sure there's a lot of about there.

I don't know.

Look, judging by the shit I have heard from our listeners, I love you all.

Some of you are on some wild shit if some of you are not the people you would expect to be, so yeah, So don't buy Blue Bottle.

If some of the things that we've said about the bargaining sessions sounds two absurd to be true to you, then you can go to Bluebottle Union dot org and under the tab for Buristas you can read every bargaining update, where we publish all of the proposals that the company has given us so far.

You can read the shit that they make us read in the bargaining sessions.

Yeah, so that's what's next in like the next month or so.

There's other things that we're working on that we can't talk about yet.

Hell yeah, hell.

Yeah, love this.

I'm trying so hard not to just read half the end or speech Authority is the massive Tyranny is brittle.

If there ever were a time to read it, there's no time 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.

Terity requires constant effort.

It breaks, it leaks.

Authority is brittle.

Oppression is the mask of fear.

Remember that, and know this.

The day will come when all these skirmishes, in battles, these moments of defiance, will have flooded the banks of the empire's authority, 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.

Wall.

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

So there's a revolution long forgotten that was tucked in a corner of the Caribbean.

Those outside of the region, it's probably quite far from mind.

You know.

When most people think of Caribbean revolutionaries, they think of Cuba, but at the time the rise and fall of the need a revolution.

What's everything?

Hello, and welcome to ikea happen Here.

I'm Andrew Siege.

You're a Trinadian host of ikapen here, and I'm joined by.

James, your American British co host.

American British.

But yeah, I don't really know how to say that, Like.

Which order should that hyphene been?

Oh yeah, yeah, I don't know which way which way I'm supposed to hyphenate, because we don't hyphenate white people, uh, which is a very American thing.

But yeah, glad to be here.

I always enjoy learning more about this part of the world from you.

I'm glad.

I'm glad.

And you know, as we speak, I'm hearing helicopters overhead.

And no, it's really a reminder of the times that we are living in.

Last night there were quite a few stealth helicopters flying overhead, quite close to the ground, about three of them.

Wow, all the lights are off.

So it's it seems to be a ramping up and escalation in some ways, or just a continuation of the existing military presence.

Jeez.

And as we're talking about military presence, in the US, which is something that I spoke about on this podcast before you go and check it out.

We're here to discuss the very recent history, positive and negative, of my northern neighbor, Grenada.

So I don't want to bog anyone down with too many facts, but it's important to get an idea of the context.

So Grenada is the southernmost in the grouping of Caribbean islands known as the Windward Islands.

It's a country composed of Grenada, the island, and a few smaller islands, including Kariaku and Petimasnet.

It's long been considered the Spice Isle, as the hilly mainland was and still is home to a lot of nutmeg plantations.

They currently have a predominantly African population of just over one hundred and seventeen thousand, sharing a country merely three hundred and forty four kilometers squared or one hundred and thirty three square miles.

For reference, the five boroughs of New York City collectively make up seven hundred and seventy eight point eighteen kilometers squared or three hundred point four to six square miles.

So Grenada is small, you know, New York is big.

But Grenada is also quite small, you know.

For reference, It's slightly larger than Queen's but far less populated and far less dense.

So we's talking small island state par excellence.

And yet it has sat at the center of one of the most critical events in Caribbean history, 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 apps to finally talk about this moment in history.

I went to my library and got a copy of Grenada Revolution and Invasion, a companium of essays from various perspectives on the topic arranged by Patty Lewis at al that provided the basis of my research, particularly the essay by Miil Collins, a Grenadian poet and novelist.

I also drew some of the radical background law from Fundy aka Joseph Edwards, an underappreciated autonomous radical healing from Jamaica who spoke about the situation in non shall escape or linked in the show notes.

So I don't want to get too deep into the history prior to what's immediately relevant today's topic.

Oh keep thinks brief A couple hundred Ammerindians lived in Grenada prior to the European invasion.

Human settlement may have been as early as thirty five hundred BCEE, but most definitely by the second century CE.

Spain, upon stumbling upon it, claimed it but never settled it.

England attempted to settle it, but was driven out by the indigenous inhabitants, and eventually the island was settled and subjugated by the French, who were engaged in a protracted war against the indigenous between today's Grenada, Dominica and Saint Vincent of the Grandians throughout the seventeenth century.

You know, there's this narrative that the Europeans came and they just easily conquered the entirety of the Americas, and it's important to lay that myth to rest.

There was, of course, a very tragic great dyeing that was responsible for a vast majority of the indigenous population losing their lives to the disease in some cases intentionally weaponized by the Europeans, but despite differences in their weaponry, the Europeans didn't have an easy time conquering the islands, or conquering the Americas at all.

In many cases they did not succeed in concrete islands for many decades or centuries or struggle, but eventually Crenado was established as a colony of over fifteen thousand slaved Africans by seventeen sixty three.

A year prior, in seventeen sixty two, Britain took over the island from the French as part of the Seven Years' War, and the island was formally ceded to Britain in seventeen sixty three.

By eighteen oh seven, Britain had brought one hundred and fourteen thousand slaves to Grenada.

By eighteen thirty eight, slavery was abolished.

In eighteen seventy seven, Grenada became a Crown colony, and fast forward a little further.

Under modified Crown colony status, the wealthiest four percent of Canadians were allowed to vote.

Eric Geary founded the Grenader United Labor Party or GULP in nineteen fifty, initially as a trade union, which led to the nineteen fifty one General Strike for better work than conditions.

Buildings were set on fire in this time, and this is in a broader regional context of radicalism and agitation for independence in the post World War II reality, which would intensify after many of the islands had already gained the independence.

Eventually, Grenada got elections based on universal adult suffrage in nineteen fifty one and Eric Gary's party gulp on.

This is before they got independence, though, in a time when the English speaking Caribbean was trying to establish a West Indies Federation between nineteen fifty eight and nineteen sixty two.

It didn't succeed.

Jamaica succeeded, and then chernad so it fell apart, and after the fall of the federation, Grenada became an associated state in nineteen sixty seven, then finally gained full independence from Britain in nineteen seventy four, again under the leadership of Eric Gary, who became the first Prime Minister of Grenada.

The late sixties and early seventies were a radical time in general, so that's set in the stage for what comes next in Grenada.

The rise of the New Jewel movement led by Maurice Bishop.

You see, as FUNDI found.

In this time, we also had quite a few other confrontations going on across the Spanaphone, Francophone, Dutch of Phone and Anglophone Caribbeans.

In nineteen sixty five you had the popular revolt in the Dominican Republic against the military coup that was drowned in blood by the US invasion.

In nineteen sixty seven, you had a spontaneous rebellion of agricultural workers in Guadelup.

Nineteen sixty eight, black folks in Bermuda rioted against the racist and clueless control it dominated the island.

In nineteen sixty nine, there was a violent confrontation against US soldiers by students and workers protesting the US occupation of the Panama Canal Zone.

Kurisau was shaken by wildcatch, strikes of workers, riots by employed and unemployed as well.

Labor unrest is breaking out in Surinam, leading to general strike.

Antiga had riots, strikes and demonstrations over several years.

Jamaica had workers at the Western Meatpackers established democratic control of their trade union local, taking full control over their union dues and negotiating the employer without official mediators to manage the sugar workers and the local community directly, and of course infamously.

In nineteen seventy Triniad was shaken up as workers, academics and small farmers linked up against the system led by the government of Prime Minister Eric Williams, and after years of his rule under the Sloga and Master Day Done, the people erupted against the new or colonial system.

Despite being ruled by this black leader, the hundreds of people in the streets championed black power, understanding what was needed was a people's politics in which new institutions could emerge.

This black power revolution in Trindad was inspired in part by the black civil rights struggle in the United States, while also seeking into unite the African and Indian populations in Trinad.

After an attempted mutiny by the army and Venezuela and American gun boats standing by ready to intervene, the military surrendered.

The revolutionary initiative shifted away from the man and doctor Derk Williams was saved.

By nineteen seventy three, a few armed gorillas remained in the hills of Trinidad, but Eventually, their struggle was snuffed out.

By nineteen seventy five, in Guadeloupe had wildcat strikes taking place.

Guyana had wildcat strikes against the American and Canadian owned Boux Side companies.

Surinam had another general strike.

Saint Lucia experience with wildcat strike.

Dominica attempted to seize the British owned Castle Bruce Estates.

In Jamaica, there was a wave of appropriations from banks, warehouses, stores, batting shops and more cross Kingston and demonstrations initiated by 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 one hundred thousand people.

It had just become independent under Eric Geary and are Gary's an interesting fella because you'll see some aspects of him mirrored later on.

He came to power in nineteen fifty one with the wave of universal suffrage.

He was twenty nine years all at the time.

He had previously been a worker organizer in Aruba and was expelled from the island for that very reason.

He spent decades in politics as a champion of agricultural workers.

But younger generations were not as excited about him.

They recognized his financial corruption, his pensiont for rigged elections, and of course his use of secret police that were repressive to the people.

So as greators making steps towards becoming independent, the people did not want him to be the leader of independence.

There were strikes against him even before the ravation.

But see Gary was karen on this tradition that was set up by the British.

Whether he knew it or not, he and may have had this radical start as a worker organizer, but he came to carry on colonial interests.

You know.

He started off as a union man, but he turned against the workers, and even the British at one point had been scared of him as an organizer and had trepidations about him as an independent leader.

But they still chose him and preferred him at the risk of maybe a more radical version of him leading an independent grenader.

And then came the New Dual Movement.

Now the New Jewel movement is actually a combination of two groups.

You had the movement for assemblies of the People, which was founded by Maurice Bishop, a lawyer who had studied in Britain.

And you had the joint endeavor for welfare education and the or a Jewel which is founded by Howard University economic student Unison Whitman.

They were also joined by Bernard Cord, an economics lecturer at UIs in Augustin in Trinando, Tobago.

So at first, in terms of their politics, they really wanted popular assemblies and that sort of thing.

But actually, let me get into the background of the Caribbean left.

I see in the nineteen fifties there was an upheaval.

You know, radicals had been shifting from the sort of Stalinism that had become popular in the post War two era towards a more critical sort of Trotskyism or Maoism see lar James and George Patmore, both based in London, were already advocating independence for Africa and the Caribbean, rejecting the Stalinist idea that liberation should wait until after World War Two see.

R.

James is an interesting figure politically to me because while he was ostensibly a Trotskyist, he was in many ways unorthodox in his approach to those politics.

Yeah, Cela James's book Trying to Remember.

It's called Beyond a Boundary or Beyond the Boundary.

Beyond the Boundary.

Yeah, it's a great books.

The only book about cricket that I've ever read, and that's the only one that I've ever enjoyed.

Not a big cricket appreciate it, but as a sports historian that that book was foundational to like how I how I approached my dissertation, and like as such, I've always had a really like a soft spot for him as someone who you know, did sports for a living in academia for a living.

I saw like a really positive example of the role that both of those can play in like liberation struggles in his writing.

Yeah, Yeah, it's when I'd encourage everyone to read if you're looking for a book.

It's like his writing is very readable, in his historical writing, like which I at the time of my life, when I was in grad school, I very much appreciated someone who wrote something that wasn't like self consciously trying to be dense and impenetrable to make them seem intelligent faced.

His intelligence comes through just fine.

Indeed, Indeed, I've had a soft spot for him as well for some time, particularly after reading The Black Yakabins.

Yeah, he used to assign that one a lot.

And I would say that the Caribbean left at the time also had a bit of a soft spot for him, because they were heavily influenced by his writings, you know, in his nineteen fifty six pamphlet Face and Reality, which was about the Hungarian Revolution, ended up becoming a profound influence on Westerndian radicals as it had revealed the potential of workers' counsils and done a lot to expose the authoritarianism of the Soviet model.

This is something that Bundy wrote about and highlighted as he's given his sort of discussion of the origins and trajectory of the Caribbean Left.

So in the nineteen sixties and seventies, radical thought across the Caribbean was shaped by the more democratic socialist ideals.

They had movements like Jamaica's Young Socialist League, Trindad's New Beginning Movement, and Creator's New Duel Movements.

They were all inspired by James and by grassroots workers' councils rather than the typical Soviet orthodoxy.

Of course, the Caribbean left was not immune to conflict or division.

There were conflicts between those who were more loyal to stylists or pro Soviet positions, and that led to some splits within unions and political movements.

Now, initially the New Dual Movement was leaning in that participatory democratic direction, but eventually they ended up going in to studying Marxism Leninism more not really at first they mainly wanted Gary out, but later they went into Marxism Leninism and transformed the movement into a proper political party of the vanguard variety.

In an effort to unseat Gary.

They started building some momentum and immediately based consequences.

In nineteen seventy three, Bishop Whiteman and others got beaten up and arrested by Gary's secret police multiple times.

Bishop's own father was shot and killed by Gary's forces.

Wow and the high schoolers were also taking a stand against Gary at the time, were facing repression and violence.

Now, in nineteen seventy four, independence was one, but sadly under Gary and his notorious secret police, which were by the way, called the Mongoose Gang.

Now, there was already suspicions of potential election fraud, and it wasn't helped by the fact that his mongoose gang was known to intimidate people.

But in nineteen seventy six, despite this for a political landscape, Bishop won a leadership role as opposition and became known across the country in our country as small as as grenader, as someone charismatic, personable, relatable.

The New Jeal movement started to build a reputation for being connected to the people, engage with students, engage with pro bono work.

In some cases, as I mentioned, some of them are lawyers, and they were youthful.

They're bringing a youthful energy to the sort of old god colonial era politics of Eric Gary and his ILK.

So the story of how the New jew Movement came into power is actually a bit humorous to me.

On the thirteenth of March nineteen seventy nine, Gary went to the UN meeting in New York that was happening at the time, and as the saying goes, when the cat's away, the mice will play.

In this case, while the cat was away, the New Dual Movement pulled off a coup, a completely bloodless coup.

They to control of the army, barracks and the radio.

When they went on the radio, and this is the funny part to me, they told people to go to police stations and demand that they put up white flags of surrender.

And the population was so anti geary that they did it.

Wow, they just walked up in civilize stations and they're like, yeah, put up these white flags, and the police shid.

Yeah, sure that was that.

That's how the neudeal movement came into power.

Yeah, a, this is such a fascinating time in history, right, Like I used to teach a class about culturing colonialism back in the day, and we would talk a lot about like this time period, like the post wind Rush period where like Caribbean political culture was very influential even in the metropoli, right in Britain specifically, Like this is when we have like scar music and then punk music arriving from that, which is a serious political force in the twentieth century.

Like it's easy for people to let sniff at that whatever.

But and that's the reason I am the way I am so like, I guess I have a fondness for it.

But also like the state's capacity for violence and surveillance hasn't caught up to the capacity for mass communication yet.

And so you have these movements which can mobilize a ton of people and the state isn't like all up in them with informers and like.

It can either respond as a Soviet Union did in Hungry right, with tanks that's where we get the word tanky from, or it can crumble like by people turning up of the cops to surrender.

Like.

It's just a fascinating, like little to three decade period in history before the state I guess recovers its advantage in terms of violence and surveillance.

Yeah, I'm of that this time because I mean they didn't have the social media and stuff to connect people and you know, advertise they were having this this proof test or this action or this whatever.

Yeah, but the networks were still there.

You know, they were organic and they were motivated by a genuine sense that seriative was actionable.

Yeah.

You know, I think we have this sort of twenty first century malays of cynicism.

It's like that was tried before, you know.

Yeah, every time we look at something, we could just say, oh, that was tried before, and they failed.

When we look back at history, people who tried those things.

They didn't know if it was going to work out or not.

They just tried it.

I wouldn't be surprised if I was a fly on the wall on the day of the school if the neudual movement guys were just like, wait, what that actually worked?

Yeah, exactly, Like not to take away from their plan and an organization and you know, the genuine grassroots support that they had.

It's still a swing.

Yeah, totally.

At some point you have to roll the dice right and see how it goes, Like in this case.

The role of critical success, I'd see, yeah, yeah, it's.

A natural twenty the dragon's term.

So I'd really like to ned out in this period.

This is like the heyday of pirate radio, right where you have people broadcasting but like outside of state control.

And it's a really interesting time for culture and music.

Like scar music explicitly explicitly begins in an anti racist way, right, Like it calls itself two tone of music because bands were often look multi racial, and like, it's really interesting that we have this whole cultural movement which owes a lot to the wind Rush generation.

But like you said, it's questioning the both capitalist and also Marxist orthodoxies in a way that I know I really wish.

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

Yeah, I mean I think we could say the same thing about a lot of people's current politics.

I'm sure if you went back in the past and were like, you know, people are actually trying to be trod wives right now in twenty five you want to talk to the woman who had like no ability to open a bank account, and we're trying to escape financial abuse, to rest abuse, all these different things, and they're like, oh, you know, there's actually a whole internet a trend of like, yeah, your husband should control all your finances.

Actually yeah, I mean, of course that kind of sentiment never went away, but it's popularization definitely debunks.

I think this sort of notion that that progress quote unquote is something that is inevitable or irreversible.

Yeah, definitely, Yeah, that's right.

I mean you can even travel across the world and I can only imagine how that would be received in Russia ava right to tell their friends in the women's movement that there are Western women who aspire to be tradwife.

I mean, I'm sure they're aware they have the Internet, but yeah, it's certainly yeah, this idea that we can only progress or move in one duration.

Yeah, that's how the New Droal movement came into power, and upon getting to that position, they established the People's Revolutionary Government or PRG, which is led now by the Prime Minister of Grenader Maurice Bishop.

They were considered legitimate, of course, because they did have the people's mandate, but they opted not to solidify that legitimacy with an election, and they also went on to ban other parties.

So in the next episode, I want to get into what exactly they did when they were in power in broad strokes, all they hit and miss with the economy and politics over the course of their four years, and how it culminated in an internal split, multiple killings, and a US in vision.

But if you want the details and how all that played out, you'll have to tune in next time.

We'll get into the outcome of the PRG, the flaws, the revolution, it's downfall, and where Grenia stands today.

But before we wrap up, any final thoughts, James.

I feel okay, Yeah, I just had lots of them.

I don't know.

Yeah, this is a fascinating period and like now, as much as there ever has been, it's a vital time for us to study this rightly.

As the person who's taught in American schools and universities, this one doesn't come up very much.

It's certainly not like in the required teaching syllabi in anywhere that I've taught.

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

Yeah, I think, you know, as you mentioned, it's already in the typical history and historical accounts that it's taught to students.

It's just I think I'm marveled sometimes at you know, that's that's exactly how empire functions.

Yeah, you know, the acts forgets what the tree remembers is the famous say it so something like the US's operations and Grenada or anywhere else in the world, in all the many places they've intervened, I may not even muster a passing mention and a sentenence even in a historical class, in a history class the United States, And yet it is pivotal to the histories and self identities up to the present day of entire regions and people's You know, it may be a footnote, if so much, in these curriculums in the United States, but it's one of the most recent and raw incidents of violence and trauma thats take place in the Caribbean.

Yeah.

Absolutely, and they're not independent history.

Yeah.

When Trump was first assuming office this time, there was a brief moment when they were talking about returning to colonizing Panama.

If you can cast your mind that far back, he has flood.

The zone quite successfully.

But I do recall that.

But yeah, I had been in Panama two months before that.

And I think the United States, a large portion of the population either doesn't know or is forgotten that, like independence from American sort of neo colonialism, is integral to Panamanian identity.

Like I don't think they'd realized quite how unwilling to accept going back to that Panamanian people.

Were, Yeah, there's a long struggle, yes, to eke out independence.

I mean even now there's you know, US New Kleans, Somemos alive and well in Panama in many ways.

Yeah, but what gains they have yain is you know, something they're not well then to lose.

Yeah, absolutely, And yeah, I mean the United States supports people through Panama.

The Biden administration sent its Secretary of Homeland Security to the inauguration of the Panamanian president.

The US funds Panamanian deportations did under the Biden administration, including 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 you know, the United States hasn't done this before, and it has some history of doing this in the Western hemisphere.

Indeed, so on that rather depressing note, Yeah, well we'll leave it here for it could happen here, but you can join us for the next episode, when we will get into exactly what took place in Grenada and where Grenada stands today.

Till then we'll power to all the people peace.

Hello, and welcome to it could happen here.

I'm Andrew Sage, your host, and I'm joined by James again.

Excited to be here again.

I enjoyed the last episode.

Yes, another host of it could happen here.

There are two of us, so James's American and British or British America and how we want to order that?

And I'm Trinidadian, as you may or may not be able to tell, but in Trinidad there are actually a lot of Grenadians and descendants of Grenadians.

Between our islands.

It has been a lot of population exchange, mostly in one direction.

But we're here to talk about a notable point in the history for my neighbor in Ireland, Grenada.

If you missed part one, you should go and give it a listen.

The gist is that, after drawn out efforts to gain independence, Grenada finally did so in nineteen seventy four, but unfortunately, under the rule of Eric Geary, an oppressive fixture of politics that the people want it out.

The underdog, the New Jewel Movement, led by Maurice Bishop, pulled off a blood less coup while Gary was at a UN meeting in New York, and thus the People's Revolutionary Government was formed, led by Prime Minister Marie Bishop.

The managed to stay in power from nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty three.

So today we're talking about what they did in that time and what happened next, including the infamous US invasion that is so often a footnote of history and its aftermath on the people of Grenada that lasts up to this day.

Once again, the research for this episode leans on Grenada Revolution and invasion by Pati Lewis at Al along with None Should Escape by Joseph Edwards aka fundly So.

Fresh off the victory of the New Jewel Movement, the temperature of the populace was varied but excited.

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

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, allthough 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 idea logues in every camp, but of every persuasion who are aiming to push the country in a particular direction.

But at least at this point in time, there was an ambivalence towards the how, the political how much of the population they just needed to see the results.

And for a lot of people in the present day, the change, the revolution, or whatever you want to call it, isn't going to come from an ideological transformation, well worded argument or arrangement of you know, prose.

It's going to come from a lived experience where their life has improved in some way, in some form or fashion, by action by a project that actually puts the change into practice.

And so that's really what the New Dual Movement had been about from the beginning.

Being part of the community, being part of the people, taking part in, you know, supporting them, which is why they had the popular mandate.

And then once they got into power, a lot of their efforts were focused on, indeed, trying to actually put into place and alternatives for all the flaws that it may have had and not get to that shortly, and that they did, you know, they organized the Center for Popular Education, they organized teacher training, and sought to make secondary schools and colleges more accessible to people.

They introduced maternity leave for women, yes, although notably party members who were women were pressured to come back to work maybe after having children.

So again we'll get to those flaws.

There was still an equality in pay between men and women, but the New Dual Movement did make efforts to mandate equal pay and to engage in some changes toward addressing the inequality between men and women in the country.

However, a revolution was still needed within the revolution, as it has tended to be across these revolutions, you know, across these years usual stuff.

Women were still doing the most of the housework and both sexes were expected to take part in political engagement.

So you had women in the party in the New Dual Movement, but it was a sort of an expectation of equality in some respects, like yeah, come out to work even though you just had STrenD because everybody else is coming on to work.

And yet it was like, oh, yeah, you can keep on doing the housework.

We're not gonna take on our load there.

Yep, it's funny.

I finished my book recently, but they have a chapter on gender, and there's this a communist militant in Spain who was fighting at the front line.

But also they would saddled with that double burden, right because women were expected to be the ones amongst, especially amongst the communists, who cooked and cleaned in addition to fighting.

But she has this famous line where she says, so I didn't join the military to die with a dish cloth in my hand, which that's great.

Yeah, it's a good one.

I like it a lot.

Yeah, yeah, But flaws with engaging with gender aside.

There will of course, other things the usual movement was doing that was positive.

You know, they encouraged agricultural diversification and local food production, moving away from that sort of exclusive or ne exclusive dependence on nutneg production.

Then I defined 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 and farmers organizations, and unfortunately, even though Bishop was influenced by Celar James, he continued to pursue the sort of hierarchical leadership common in Caribbean politics.

And so even with these alternative organizations, you had that kind of hierarchy.

But I think that is to be expected from any movement besides anarchism.

Yeah, so I can't say I'm surprised.

They closed the independent newspaper Torchlights after an article highlighting Erastoferian protest and lack of representation in government.

So there were efforts to ensure that Brener moved towards secularism, but freedom of the press was not something that was particularly high in the priorities, and there were still prejudices against religious groups and movements like the Rastiferians that had yet to be addressed.

You know, these things aren't dealt with overnight.

But right, I think when all you have is a hammer, everything can sort of look like a nail.

Yeah, they didn't do anything too drastic in the economic scale.

For the most part.

They left people's private businesses alone.

They implemented some state enterprises, and they implemented some cooperative enterprises, So a fairly standard mixed economy, a mixed economy that Canterverian extents be found throughout the Caribbean weather they had a revolution or not.

But they did establish cooperative and friendly relations with Cuba, which was a real thorn on the side of the United States.

Yeah, he didn't like them.

And now this is I would say from nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty so their first two years in power, people were nerva sited, you know, they were hopeful of the genuine decolonization and positive change taking place.

But the excitement, part of the NEUVA sitement started to die down by nineteen eighty one.

The People's Revolutionary Government PRG became increasingly militaristic as time went on.

They organized militias and armed people.

They were essentially preparing for a Geary counter coup, but also potential CIA involvement.

The police were replaced with military personnel.

And I think this is the trap that a lot of these projects end up falling into.

This concer about the enemy within the enemy without leads these revolutionaries to cannibalize themselves, you know, the revolutionary potential and excite ones that's curtailed because there's so much fear dominating that some enemy is going to attack, some violence is going to take place that they need to prepare for.

And so you over your miilitarize, ru militarize, and you stare the course of the project away from its original intentions to a point where it's not even recognizable to the people who initiated it.

Yeah, you know, I'm not saying that they weren't right to be wary of US intervention.

History has demonstrated as much.

But it was something that the people of the country were becoming increasingly concerned about because it's a small country and it's uncommon, you know, just unusual.

It's unnerving to see militia's marching on your street.

Now, the Mutual movement was starting to become more focused on establishing a vanguard core, the more they oriented themselves toward Marxism lenders, so like I mentioned before, they were making this shift away from the sort of popular mass democracy that people like see Lar James was talking about.

The more they read and they studied the works of Marxism lenders, and there were people within the party who became more and more convinced.

Again, remember the end positions of power this point in time, so in positions of power, and you're reading theoretical justifications for why you need to be in power.

You know you will stand by those theoretical justifications because it lines up with your interests, your self interests to you know, further your position of power, and the continuation of your role as an authority, as a leader.

And so this vanguard call that they were pursuing, it ended up creating a hierarchy of in group and outgroup.

You had the people who were in the vanguard the people who were out of the vanguard who didn't get picked, We didn't make the cut.

You know, it felt snubbed.

And this was facilities and it was fostering this an air of secrecy that people in the country were beginning to resent and lose trust in.

Because imagine you going from this sort of popular engagement with the people as you you know, take part in these efforts to push Gary out of power.

Then you have this sort of secrecy, you have this sort of militarism.

They're started to remind people a bit of the exact Geary government that they wanted out.

Then two major events took place in nineteen eighty one.

There was a bombing under the stage of a rally that killed some mutes, and there was a car ambustion as well.

Both of these incidents were blamed on counter revolutionaries in the country.

That famous buzzworth, that famous catchphrase, that famous justification for any and every response.

Yeah.

So it further pushed the country and really the whole society into this culture of suspicion and repression and also resentment for the New Dual movement.

The New Jeal movement wasn't responsible for the bombans, but you can imagine people were probably saying when they were at the parlor by the grocery, you know, out by the bar down the street, they're saying, you know, at least they didn't have any bombits under Gary.

You know, at least didn't have these combitions under Gary.

Gary wasn't nice, but we didn't have terrorist attacks.

And the sort of transparency and engagement people were accustomed to were starting to evaporate.

The New Dual movement was starting to be seen by some as a secret society.

And if your society is already small, right, just about one hundred thousand people, Yeah, having a secret society within that small society where everybody knows everybody, that's not good, especially when the revolution is so new, so nationed.

You need people's trust, and especially as well because people were not ideologically for Marxism Leninism, most of them, that is, they were't ideologically for Marxism Leniness and they were ideologically neutral movement advocates.

They just wanted Eric Garry out and they wanted improve once their living conditions.

They didn't have a particular political ideology.

They were committed too.

And in this time, you know, the Caribbean is part of the rest of the world.

The Cribbean is paying attention, has to pay attention to what's happening in the rest of the world, and especially within northern neighbor the United States of America, and it's very influenced at that point in time.

We're talking the late seventies early eighties Cold War rhetoric that people are getting in the media.

The American media was still very and continue to be very prominent in terms of what Cribbean people consume because we are English speaking.

The Americans and English speaking, and they have far more resources, so their media comes to us, and a lot of the narratives that Caribbean people get come in a recent part from American narratives.

So these Cold War era narratives about communism as a scare word was something that had yet to be addressed through actual demonstration of what communism could actually be for people.

You know, people weren't worn over on communism yet, it was still unfamiliar, and in this time you really needed people who were open, who were accommodating, who were showing people what it meant in practice, who were, you know, sort of disarming these notions that could serve as obstacles towards people's buying into the struggle.

I'm saying this as a non Marxist Lendness.

I'm putting myself in those shoes.

If I'm trying to get people invested in as convinced of this, that sort of secrecy it doesn't push things in a post the trajectory.

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

Yeah, I mean not to say that people didn't see the differences.

Yes, correct, they went away the nuances.

They could tell the difference between an Eric Gary and a more respecial They can tell the difference between you know, one form of politics and another.

It's not that they were just ready to court immediately.

I mean some of them still had the fresh wounds of the trauma being inflicted by Eric Garry.

Yeah, but it's because of that trauma they were also sensitive to the potential of new traumas.

Ye call it paranoia, call it unesst and and right thinking suspicion.

But they were they were wary of what was taking place.

Yeah, and you know it didn't help.

It didn't help that.

Okay.

So you know some people they read like one or two theory books and they start walking around like their head is three times bigger than it is.

They start walking around this kind of inflated sense of self importance.

Yes, I'm very familiar with that kind of person.

Yeah, Unfortunately, that's exactly what started taking place among some members of the party.

They're reading all these books, all these thick books from Russia and June and Marx and Lenin and all these people's and they're starting to carry themselves in a particular way.

Yeah, with a level of arrogance and nowhere to illness.

And you know, and this is we're in a society.

We remember, we are fresh out of colonialism.

You know, none of our independent nations or even one hundred years old.

Yet much of the population still remember that colonial period.

Yeah, and much of the popular, like I mentioned before, needed changes the education system because they didn't have educational opportunities.

So you had this vast educational inequality, right, and then you have this new jeal movement and some of its members are talking to you like you're stupid.

Yeah, because you didn't get to go to primary school, you didn't read all the thick books that they were, or you didn't get to go to secondary school, or you didn't get to go to university, and so you don't know all the big words and you haven't read all the thick texts that they have read.

And it could rub people the wrong way.

Yeah, yes, right, Yeah, there can be too much theory.

I think that often is too much theory, especially when it creates this idea right that reading is what distinguishes one as a revolutionary right as opposed to doing or just knowing and caring, and it did a downfall of many movements.

Indeed, I think if you're coming from the background that some of the this neutual movement members were coming from, you need to put in that extra effort not to dumb things down per se.

You still want to respect people's intelligence, but you have to be away of the dynamic.

It's something that I myself have to work on, you know, because I think it's a sort of curse of knowledge where you read so much that you take for granted what you know.

You know, you read to a point where you almost forget that this is not common knowledge or this word may be unfamiliar to a lot of people, and you really have to be cognizant of it, especially as you approaching people and make sure you're talking to them in their language.

They don't feel as though they're carrying yourself too big fabriages.

Yeah, definitely, like the people who write the thick books can't be your like milieu.

You know, they can't be there.

I've used a stupid word.

But like, if those are the people with whom you're sort of conversing in your head, and then you begin to speak in that language to people who aren't familiar with it, just sounds weird.

Yeah, like it's yeah, as you said, you get too big for your bridges, and you some pompous if you're not.

Careful exactly exactly, and so for the you know, big shot lawyer again all the time, and she kind of as I say this, for big shot lawyers like Marie Bishop and a big shot economics lecturers like Bernard Cord and some of the other folks that had been part of the core of the party, they had to approach to people in a particular way, and they were successful in doing so under Eric Garry and as they were part of you opposition.

But things were shifted also the two in the of the eighties, we had a lot of moves again suspected counter revolutionaries, imprisonment without trial.

To imagine again, people are thinking, this is what the monk who's gang two point zero?

Yeah, the fair was starting to overtake, the society was starting to become cannibalizing.

As I said, so by the time we get to nineteen eighty three, we find ourselves with the people bereft of the early days of hope, in a house divided, which famously cannot stand unbeknowns to the public, there were tensions between Maurice Bishop and Bernard Cord since at least nineteen eighty two, and Chord wasn't even part of the central Committee of the Neutral Movement anymore for a while, but within the vanguard the party members still preferred Cord to Bishop.

Cord was seen as more intellectually equipped to lead with his knowledge of theory.

They started calling Bishop egotistics and counter revolutionary.

And I have to say, I love the double edged sword of these kind of willingly thought to meet and cliches, because they can be used by you and then they could be used against you.

In a staple of his fingers.

Yeah, I did.

It goes back to your finger, hammers and nails that you mentioned before.

Indeed, so eventually the party decided to bring Court on as co leader with Bishop.

Originally Bishop agreed, but this started great tensions.

Things managed recently, but after a while Bishop was turned to push back against the co leadership arrangement, and the party started seeing it as him favoring his own ascendancy over the collective of unity and son.

He went to Germany.

He left the country on a trip.

Don't worry.

There was none of the coole this time, at least not yet.

When he went to Germany on a trip, came back, there was not a welcome party for him.

Things were coming to her head.

The party did not have his back anymore.

He could feel it.

But he did know that the people still had his back.

But he knows he's charismatic, he knows people love him, and so all of a sudden, this is in nineteen eighty three, by the way, a rumor was swollen that Cord wanted to kill Bishop.

Yeah.

It's a dangerous rumor, you know.

It shatters this facade of a united front that had carried the revolution.

They had carried the government for so long.

But since most people loved Bishop, as he rightfully assumed, in fact, they were not for this name basis with him.

That's cool.

They weren't seeing Prime Minister Bishop, your honorable Prime Minister Bishop.

It was hey, Maurice, like that boy, Maurice.

Yeah, that's always a good sign.

Like, it's one of the positive marks of the of the Revolutionarjava, right, is that everyone is a friend and everyone's preferred to germanly by their first name, and it's always kind of yeah, I've seen enough read enough about you know, revolutions supposing a revolutionary hierarchy.

So that's always a good sign, I feel like.

Yeah.

So, meanwhile, you had Cord who people didn't have the same kind of relationship with.

Yeah, you know, as far as they're concerned, he's an anemino because of that rumor.

Yeah, and the party actually suspected that it was Bishop that started the rumor.

In fact, his own personal bodyguards suspected it, 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.

Right now?

But he did this shocked.

Like a shot, And that's that's that's.

How the people were feeling it, Like what prime minister arrested?

You could do that, That's the thing.

So you see, the Vanguard, with all that secrecy at this point in time, was operating on information that was not made available to the people.

And the people who were pissed at the party.

You know, the cracks in this political arrangement with essentially a secret society on top, were starting to show.

The people, generally speaking, regardless of what the party wanted, wanted Maurice Bishop.

They wanted the boy Maurice, but the party was not interested in what people wanted.

The day is nineteenth of October nineteen eighty three.

The pro Maurice Bishop usual movement, leaders, government ministers, and a mass demonstration of people rolled up to Bishop's house to set him free.

There were gods, of course, assigned to keep him in house arrest, but those gods stood down.

They refused to shoot at the people.

To the crowd of people walked to Fort Rupert.

Now Fort Rupert wasn't always Fort Rupert used to be Fort George.

Fact, after the revolution ended it again became known as Fort George.

But Fort Rupert was named Fort Rupert after Maurice Bishop's father, who was killed by Eric Garry, as you may recall.

So they get there, but the majority of the Neudual movement, who were, like I said, backers of Thenard Cord, were at another fort nearby, then Boom three, armored trucks pull up from the Fort of Cord to Rupert's Fort Rupert Rat.

They start firing into the crowd, people running all over the place.

Hoo.

One people died, who one people scattered.

This event as a trauma for Grenadians even to this day.

By the way, So the Cord loyalists pull up and line up Bishop Unison Whiteman, who was the Minister of Foreign Affairs, nor Spain, who is the Minister of Health and was actually not part of the NEU dual movement, and Jacqueline Kreft, who is the Minister of Education, then line them up against the wall and shot them summary execution.

Others including trade unionists, businessmen, and high schoolers were also killed at Fort Rupert.

Right after this, the militaryvery curfew was announced on radio.

Grenadians were told to lock their doors.

Violators of curfew were to be shot on site.

A couple of days later, as people more wanted their dead, the news came that the United States will invade Grenada.

If this was a HBO series, I feel like that would be the end of the pronouncement episode.

So just to give you a bit of context on the US's position, the United States did not like the way that Cuba and the Soviets and Grenada were becoming close, even though Grenada was technically non aligned.

Like much of the world, was trying to stay out of the hairs of the US and the USSR in their cold wor Yeah, but Grenada and Grenadians represented a serious risk.

They were black, That's a big risk.

They were English speaking.

There were English speaking black people close to the border of the United States of America as African Americans were engaged in their own struggle for liberation in the US.

As rich Bishop noted, I mean 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.

Most people were traumatized.

They ran and they hid wherever they could.

Some, regardless of whether they liked the Nu jeal movement at that point in time or not, stood ready to defend their island from invasion, but any more were hidden and scared.

And they were also others who, out of revenge for the revolution that betrayed them, betrayed the revolution by expressing their support for the invasion.

Now, me personally, not something I would never do.

I don't care how much I disagree with any any government that I'm under, I wouldn't co sign the invasion of my country by an empire.

But I can understand the reasoning or the emotional position that some people were in at that point.

So the US's claim, by the way, for the invasion was that they were there to rescue American students who were in Grenada, so that they are to rescue these students from these these communes.

Perfect American students wouldn't ender any actual threat.

Obviously, nobody was mining them or threatening them or anything.

But 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 pay into picture for the media to tell us story back at home about how yeah, they were actually repairing to work with the Soviets as a stage in ground to attack the United States.

So this invasion was the first overt as opposed to covert use of force since Vietnam.

The party in power at the time needed an easy win, so party members this says Neudual Movement party members were imprisoned.

An interim government was established by Grenadians living abroad, and the revolution was over a stock aftermath, the fall of the Usual Movement and the People's Revolutionary Government of Grenada led to the disintegration of the Workers Party of Jamaica.

It now destroyed Cara com the Caribbean community as a united block as Jamaica I'm sure and Dad decided with the US in the invasion, while countries I trainedad stood against the invasion.

That was a split in Cara com that took years to recover from, and I think most crucially, the fall of the utual movement led to the death in all but name of the Caribbean Left, from distrust, from infighting, and from this resolute enforcement of the new colonial model.

For all the flaws of the revolution had it was a representation of an alternative that something else could be done besides business as usual.

And that alternative first felt in fighting, and then its fate was sealed by a belligerent invasion.

Yeah, and so the Caribbean Left not say it's actually entirely dead.

There are still figures from that era.

There are still people who carry progressive or revolutionary politics, but it's Haiti it's goal and age is no more.

And that is in part as a result of that US invasion.

And within Grenader the bodies of those killed were never found.

In some cases, the families of those killed or of department members may even still be divided to this day.

You know, you can imagine how they must feel, these sort of social and political divisions that came out of that kind of action.

Who sided with Cord, who sided with Bishop, who sided with the US?

Who stood against who brought whose actions were responsible for the US come in.

If the revolution never happened, then US wouldn't have come they seople wouldn't be dead.

Blame game, accusations, political conflicts, all of that.

You know, it's very easy to breeze over the deaths of people in historical events as just numbers.

That's just statistics.

You know, it doesn't even click, you know, because I think, I don't think our brains can fully handle that much trauma at once.

So we we could partmentalize it in a way, we package it in something that's a bit more digestible.

When you hear figures of you know, even just two people, that that's two people, two entire human beings with lives, interests, passions, relationships, connections, future snuffed out.

And in a country like Grenada, from a small country, one hundred thousand people, and I mean I'm from Trinad, right, which has a population of about one point four million people, and it still feels like you know somebody who knows somebody.

The networks are so tight.

It's even tighter net network wise in a Grenader or a Tobago.

You know, we're talking neighbors, relatives split into sides, cousin, blaming cousin, friend killing friend, a decolonization never fully began and never fully completed.

Their social splits on the perspective on what took place, you had the Bishop was good crowd, 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 on auto politics.

Today.

Unfortunately, very little has been done in Grenada to deal with the traumas of the invasion, besides an attempted truth and Reconciliation commission, which failed miserably due to a couple of different obstacles, an unwillingness to reconcile, amongst they continued incarceration of certain individuals, unrecovered remains, anger towards entire sectors the population at the execution of Bishop and others, and so in the years that have followed, there's been a subdued political consciousness among much of the population.

They have risen to the challenge of the US inviting themselves to set up shop in marich Bishop International Airport.

There were many actions taking place in Grenada to speak up understand against that intervention.

But for the most part, the property of this has been disengaged from the sort of radical passion that you saw in that time period.

And it didn't help, of course that pretty much right after the revolution you had a series of natural disasters.

In September two thousand and four, after being hurricane three for forty nine years, the island was hit by Hurricane Ivan, a Category three hurricane that resulted in three nine deaths and the damage or destruction to ninety percent of the island's homes.

In two thousand and five, which is the following year, Hurricane Emily, a Category one hurricane, struck the island and killed a person.

In twenty twenty four, Hurricane Beryl struck the island of Kararaku.

And so we're already to know the environmental instability of being a Caribbean island, but now I also have to be with the political and social instability of such a traumatic incident.

Before we close, I do want to get into some of the critiques that I had of this project.

You know, I'm not the type of weekson to look at these historical moments, no matter by allegiance to the esposed politics of the people in them, and we want to paint them in a narrow, simplistic brush.

You know, I think I see that tendency across all groups.

Yeah, you know, so the Marx Slenness.

We'll talk about these revolutions in a very fawning and agulating way.

Then you sell the anarchists who talk about, you know, the Spanish Civil War, they talk about the Paris community.

They talk about these different projects as if they were and as if they weren't serious flaws in their structure and the analysis and their methodology.

It's worth addressing.

You know.

It's very easy for nostalgia to take over.

Yeah, definitely, like something I think about a lot.

Like I translated a piece for the Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness zine a few months ago, maybe even a year ago now by an anarchist fighterhood fought in the International Group of the Darruti column who went by several names, Charles Riddle with his birth name, but he has this whole thing about how anarchists tend to write hagiographies like which is the life of a saint?

Right, Like they've tried to make the Spanish Civil War into these like exemplaries saintly people as a opposed to actually looking at the mistakes people made and his stances are like his friends died for nothing if we don't learn anything, and so if we don't acknowledge the very real compromises and mistakes and failures, then they have been defeated, right, and they all died for nothing.

But at at least we can learn from it, then at least is something we can take going forward, which is something I always thought was a great way of phrasing something and quite an admirable way of looking at something that he himself participated in and that was obviously a defining and a very traumatic experience of his life.

Yeah, it's something that I rallied again, that sort of great man of Bruce's history.

Yeah, right, I suppose that brings mean some of my first critique, which is something that plays greater both before, during and after this revolution when you have a political culture dependent on a maximum leader that puts now cult or just a grouping around her personality, whether that's bishop or Gaary or Cord.

For one, it's a continuation of the colonial politics of the British in that sort of governor position.

And it also, I think leads to a contempt towards common people.

Whether it starts out that way or not, it eventually makes its way into that direction.

I still see personality politics rear and it's ugly headed in Trinidad, even though we've been independent for even longer.

You know, nineteen sixty two are opposed to create as nineteen seventy four.

But the result of that kind of politics is, you know, it's ideological and policy splits either nonexistent or secondary to personality loyalties, familiar ties, and in some cases ethnic loyalty.

The United National Congress UN see the Party in Power Internet right now, party responsible for our current position, is a personality cult led by a current prime minister talent subrossessor.

And she's 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 authority and tendencies of colonial rule.

That I think is why there was such an appeal in Leninists thought and rule to begin with, because it's a lot easier to approach, you know, it doesn't unpack the psychology of clonialism or unpack how Gary's rule may have shaped their own approach to politics, that another politics might, that another anti politics might, And so they carried on this elita, authoritaria, and personality based politics despite having a youthful beginning.

Bishop was twenty nine when he started a neutral movement, which is the same age that Gary was when he got into politics.

I know one could make a movie of the mirrors in their histories.

But despite his youthful beginning, the youth carried on the mistakes of their forebears.

They betrayed the excitement of people power that people had for the revolution, just as they betrayed the excitement of people power that people had for independence, and they continue the consciousness of deference to hierarchy.

Again, I don't want to draw one to one comparisons between Gary and Bishop.

I recognize their stark differences and their politics and in their engagement with the people of Grenado.

They were not the same, but in some ways they did rhyme.

I would wrap up, I suppose with Bundy's sort of critique of Grenado's revolution, which I just echo this continued consciousness of a deference to hierarchy.

A genuine revolution depends on people taking direct responsibility, not waiting for leaders or stages of development, not waiting on guidance, being empowered themselves.

That sort of tired Leninist gradualism and bureaucratic control gets regular people no closer to actually having a sense of autonomy and control over their lives.

And as Fundy emphasizers, especially in small Caribbean societies, participatory local self managed systems are entirely feasible.

Inclosing, Fundy suggested that Gredino's revolution failed because it moved away from this principle of immediate collective self management and deliberately chose hierarchy.

And from that hierarchy came a sense of erodent trust, came, a sense of secrecy, became a sense of secret societies, and I created a culture of secrecy, a post transparency that led to its downfall.

As I mentioned, it was gossip a rumor of somebody trying to kill Bishop but got this ball roller.

So today I want to appeal directly to Cribean radicals of all stripes to learn, to learnlessly, learn from the Grenadian Revolution.

I on't appeal not just to Cribian radicals, but to radicals all across.

They will all across our listenership.

It is critical in times when the means of intervention and the means of disruption and division and co optation are more powerful than ever, that you engage in the sort of dissipation of leadership, that you engage in grassroots and disposed in powerment, That you maintain an anti authoritarian ethos that cannot be co opted by a charismatic power.

But you've take an approach to organization does not lend itself to the vulnerabilities of hierarchy that you consider moving like my coruser, that you take on networks and free associations rather than the sort of X Marxist spot Bullsey centralized parties and the power struggles that ensue from them from that thirst for power that led so many downfalls for the revolutionary imagination.

Before I wrap up, I just want to ask James, we have any thoughts.

No, I think that's very eloquent the way you said it, Like we have to build systems and ways of organizing relating to one another that don't allow this to happen.

Right, we have to be very conscious, like you say, of where it has happened.

And I think the only way there'll we understand the value of that is through studying history, but like studying it from a place like you were saying, right, like I get death is a statistic or a number until it's a person.

And I think if we can study history from a place of like empathy, I guess, and solidarity rather than this would never happen to me, or like you said, like oversimplifying in a way that I think doesn't help.

And sometimes I think we do 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.

Exactly, and the times they are a change in Yes, indeed, we have to approach that with our due diligence.

You know, the strategies that were more relevant or more more practical in particular context may be relevant or practical in your context.

Yeah, very much too.

All right, Yeah, that was great, 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 or power to all the people peace?

All right?

What are crackers and crack ats?

Is that good?

Perfect?

Do we say that?

I think?

So?

Okay, do you have a non binary cracks crack thems?

I think I'm definitionly not a cracker.

I just wanted to use the word crack ats.

Yeah, I understand it's not appropriate.

That's reasonable.

Welcome to ed.

Yeah, weich is just we should that, sorry, James, So let's just keep doing it.

Do the intro.

This is it could happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what is happening in the White House, the crumbling of our world, and what this means to you.

I am James Stout and I'm joined today by Robert Evans 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 right, baby, So I hope you've done your shopping.

I hope you've got me a gift because I pay attention to which of our listeners do and do not buy me presents.

Yeah, so do I you will never find me and you shouldn't try.

That's right.

And it's currently Honkah, Happy honkah.

Happy hone right, yes, yeah, happy honekah.

All the holidays have a yeah, quasi Kwanza, 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, it's a good one.

So holidays are nice, but we're going to 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 headlines.

Gothamist has obtained information about ice being able to enter private parts of New York City shelter without a judicial warrant, or being able to obtain private information about residents, despite both of these in theory being prohibited by sanctuary city laws in New York.

Right, it's happened at least five times.

The way Gotham has found this is by making a public records request for incident reports, which is a clever use of public record law nice one.

The city has already aware of both jail and police officers violating these laws, and I think this is a good example of how people think of sanctuary city laws as inassailable, but in fact sanctuary laws be the city's state whatever jurisdiction, are very often violated, and it's good to see that being reported on more.

Last week, we talked about Faustino Pablo Pablo, right, the guy who had been sent to Guatemala despite the fact that he had protections under the Convention against Torture for being returned there.

The government has returned him to the US, which is good.

That is a rare, good immigration story.

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 gig judicated he was likely to be tortured, and that is good good.

And Trump has designated fentanel as a weapon of mass destruction, which is great.

What are we doing here?

Like, I am trained as a historian, and I probably should remind you that we have been down this road before with the weapons of mass destruction, and I hope this is not leading where it did lost time, but I am very worried that it might.

Yeah, yeah, it's 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, like, we're doing a war with Venezuela full on, not just some like air strikes and stuff, just not to minimize a legal air strike in the sea or on Venezuela or soil.

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.

So very very possible, very possible when we're about to go to war with them.

I'm certainly not a I don't know what's going to happen, y'all.

I'm white knuckling it like everybody else.

Yeah, that fucking sucks.

I didn't know the thing about that oil.

It's amazing.

I'll read the exact quote to you, James.

This is from Trump a truth social post which has twelve point four thousand retruths and forty seven thousand likes.

Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in the history of South America.

It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before until such time as they returned to the United States of America all of the oil, land and other assets that they previously stole from US.

The illegitimate Maduro regime is using oil from these stolen oil fields to finance themselves, drug terrorism, human trafficking, murder and kidnapping.

For the theft of our assets, and many other reasons including terrorism, drug smuggling, and human trafficking, the Venezuelan regime has been designated a foreign terrorist organization.

Therefore, today I'm ordering a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of Venezuela.

The illegal aliens and criminals that the Madeira regime has sent to the United States during the weekend and Biden administration are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace.

YadA, YadA, YadA.

Yeah, all of our oil, land and other assets have to be returned to the United States.

Which, like he's talking.

About oil that American companies have had at points like contracts to exploit.

But he's phrasing it is like their land and oil is our land and oil, which yeah, I think that's a very colonial way of phrasing like a contract.

Again.

A lot of times, you know, I would be like, Okay, well, I don't know if war is the most reasonable thing to expect.

When the president's posting shit like that, it's very reasonable to be like, I think we might.

Go to war.

I think he might be about to invade Venezuela.

I don't know what's going to happen, but it's you're no longer being like a kooky conspiracy theorist to be like, well, maybe he's about to try to take over Venezuela, and maybe.

That is what's coming.

Yeah, I don't understand how in that instance they would continue to get Venezuela to accept people.

It's the US is removing.

That's what the sticking points that I see.

Maybe he's found at that country right that they've they've been very fond of finding the countries.

I guess I should explain a little bit about oil leaving Venezuela, just so like people are aware of that.

So like Robert read the truth, someone says in church, doesn't it?

Yeah, yeah, here we are.

So they're talking about like blockading sanctioned oil tankers, not necessarily every tanker that enters Venezuela.

Is sanctioned, like I believe Chevron has some contracts with Chevron.

Tankers should be cruising, Yeah, there's 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 Pdvsavasa Divasa's yeah, yeah, yeah, what Venezuela has done previously, and this is not by any means unique to Venezuela, but this is generally how many of these regimes that are kind of in the ambit of Venezuela I'm talking about Iran and Russia here have avoided sanctions and sanctioned entities so far as by using what A called ghost ships.

I will link to an explainer on this.

What they will do is use the names and identify as the vessels that have been scrapped.

They will change the flags of vessels, often to these small island nations for whom allowing ships to use their flag as kind of a source of income, right, And they will often use these to go out into international waters and then offload cargo, in this case oil.

Right.

So it just happens pretty frequently with Venezuelan vessels.

That was one It was one such vessel called the Skipper that the US Coast Guard boarded I think last week as we're recording this.

Yeah, sure, that is how Venezuela has previously been evading these sanctions, right, And Iran does this too, Russia does this too.

They also do things like spoof their location or turn off their They have like a locator beacon that ships are supposed to use a transpond area.

Yeah, so this is fairly common practice.

But obviously the way to stop that a physical blockade, right, Like, that's not going to be possible if these if the US is effectively like inspecting ships leaving Venezuela, right or sort of keeping a very close eye on them, so that will end and with that will end a very important source of income for the Maduta regime if they keep 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, and there's a lot of this that is enormously incoherent.

So okay, the thing about designating the government of Venezuela as a foreign terrorist organization is one of the weirdest things I've ever seen.

And this was also unhinged.

The closest thing we've ever really gotten to that I guess was the IERGC.

Yeah, and maybe you could go back and say the Khmer Rouge, but like, they weren't really a government by that point.

So this is this is not a designation that has ever been given to a government before.

Right, it doesn't make any sense to give it to a government.

It doesn't make sense to give to this government.

I mean, you know, even if you're working with in the logic of counter terrorism, which is just you know, unhinged murderous imperialism to begin with.

But all of the reporting on this has been assuming that the blockade will be of you know, like of these specifically sanctioned oil tankers.

However, come the thing about the foreign terrorist organization designation is that it does things.

And one of the things that that foreign terrorist organization designation does is that if you do business with a with a foreign terrorist organization, you are now immediately on the line from material support of terrorism charges like Chevron.

So yes, there are lots of countries like Facebook, does.

This fine with the US military carrying out air strikes on Chevron executives and there and their property.

Let's be clear about that.

I would I would salute the had, white and blue if we dropped some hell fires on that C suite.

Yeah, I don't know.

This is all very weird.

My understanding of the FTO designation process is that, well, how it's supposed to work is that the President proposes it, and then the Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasurer I think, have to improve it, and then there's a seven day period where Congress has it an opportunity to say no, and then it goes up.

So right 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 it's not announced as an executive action on White House dot gov, and I think normally it goes there and then the seven day congressional period commences.

Then it's not an a federal rights to either.

Right now, all we have is a truth, so.

Like yeah, like and this is this is the problem is that this is this is sort of the Calvin War in that they're using they're using the names of actual legal categories and things that have material effects in the world, but they're just posts.

And I want to be very clear about this.

Even just doing a blockade on these sanctioned vessels is an active war.

Yeah, like that's an act that's very deliberately an active war.

It is an active imperial aggression.

It is morally wrong.

It is also unbelievably illegal under the War Powers Act.

And this, this is, this has actually gotten a response from Democrats in Congress.

There's been a few measures.

CBS is reporting this has been if there's been a few measures to stop the president from starting a war.

Here, I'm going to quote CBS.

A second measure from Democratic Rep.

Jim mcgovernor in Massachusetts would remove the armed forces quote from hostilities with or against Venezuela that have not been authorized by Congress.

McGovern's resolution could face the best chance of potential adoption since it has three gop CO sponsors.

Rep's Marjory Taylor Green of Georgia, Thomas Massey of Kentucky, and Don Bacon of Nebraska.

Bacon says, you would also vote and vi here Meeks's measure.

Bacon's taking a very weird line here of Keene's in congressional approval.

And also I support him doing this.

So surely a procedural objection.

Yeah, it's a I want my boar, but I want Congress to have a little shred of power.

Yeah, so I think it's alcial work noting what exactly is going on here.

I'm someone who's on the record as talking about how political economy in Latin America and American imperialism is usually slightly more complicated than they just want to resource, but they just want to resource here.

Yeah, this one, this one really is Yeah, no, like so it's only like like like Bolivia, for example, every everyone thinks that that the whole coup Oblivia was about lithium and it yest.

Yeah, I'm very mad about this.

It was not.

If you look at the people of you look at Camato, if you look at people who were actually running that coup, they were all Bolivia agrobarons.

Because a huge part of what was going on there was a rebellion by the sort of agrobusiness like agricultural elite who like joined with parts of like a reactionary every middle class.

Okay, but this is not that Venezuela has the world's largest oil preserves, but there were significant problems extracting the oil right.

Many of these problems stem from the two thousand and two to two thousand and three opposition general strike.

This is back after Hugo Chaves was elected.

So in two thousand and two there was a coup against Chaves that failed and was sort of overturned famously.

But later that year there was also a sort of opposition general strike that lasted from late two thousand and two to early two thousand and three, and a huge part of that general strike was oil workers specifically, and it was very specifically.

One of the things about the structure of oil production is that there were a bunch of very very highly paid and highly skilled technical workers who are very very loyal to the oil companies themselves and who are very loyal to who are sort of tend to be very right wing.

These people went on strike and sort have got fired on mass.

Oil production requires both a huge amount of heavy capital and a bunch of highly skilled workers, and if you don't have both of those things, then you can't do oil extraction.

And this has sort of been a recurring problem for the entire time most sort of fugual Trofas and Majuro has been in office is that they haven't had the capacity to actually extract a bunch of the oil.

And also they've refused to turn the oil over to more American companies that have already been contracted.

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

It's just not worth it anyway.

And also that claims to reserves that are not actually part of Venezuela at this time.

Right right, Like we're not working with exact with accurate information.

Yeah, it's messy.

And it's also worth noting that like the oil numbers, I mean, obviously all oil numbers are political, but the oil numbers here are extraordinarily political because these are numbers that are basically used as a pitch by sort of like the opposition to try to get a US backed too.

And it's also sort of word noting that the other thing that's happening here, and the reason this is all going to probably cause really significant economic problems and probably humanitarian disaster, both in Venezuela and probably also in Cuba, which extensively relies on Venezuelan oil to have their economy function, is that the Venezuelan economy has been really structured around oil in a way that they fail to transition out of multiple times.

The first big one I've done in a different episode about this in the neolipicalis my series a bunch of years ago.

But you know, there was a whole bunch of delivery sabotage by American car companies over then attempt to build a car industry.

There's a long sort of history of this, but it means that both of these countries economies are desperately reliant on oil, and the more of this is just that is cut off, the more fuck it's going to get for just everyone in Venezuela.

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

And that will only get worse.

Yeah, So I want to conclude, basically on a couple of things.

Wonders that too, this is going to cause more waves of migration and refugees fleeing the country, both from potential realist military strikes and form the economic damage.

There's been some moves in the international stage, with China and Mexico expressing support for the Venezuelan government.

Shine Bomber in Mexico has offered to facilitate negotiations and media negotiations from the US and Venezuela.

It's also kind of worth noting that right before the whole thing, there is a giant Vanity Fair interview with Susie Wiles, who's Trump's chief of staff.

Who oh boy, this is for Roiderry Dubbs.

This week Coller here God said, Trump quote wants to keep blowing up boats until Maduro christ Uncle, which is one of the most hideous things I've ever heard.

Yeah, it's gangsters, it's literally terrorism.

It's it's a highway.

Yeah.

Yeah, it is in Australia structurally, unless you resign, we are going to keep killing civilians.

But it's hartshest taker ship.

Yeah.

It's also a fundamental misunderstanding of how the regime operates if that is the case.

So because they don't care if their people kept dying.

I have seen Venezuela and people die in the Darian Gap, right, because in part the government is incapable of providing for their material needs.

They don't care.

Killing some other people with boats is not going to fundamentally change the way that government works, because there's only one way it can work.

Yeah, and I think I think there's the one lat thing I want to say about this before we head out slash, before whatever giant update comes after the speech.

Yeah, I've got one after you finish here.

One of the big problems here is if people in the administration really do believe this, they actually do think that you can knock off the governments with air strikes, and no you can't, No you can't.

I thought this about the Huthies too.

It's wrong, it's never been right.

It's hideous.

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

And this logic has always been wrong.

And it's also every new generation of like military leaders, especially in the air power field, are like, all we need is air strikes.

You don't need to send in ground.

You could accomplish all of your goals, all of your our projection, just by bombing people or shooting missiles at them.

And they're always wrong.

It doesn't work.

It's just not 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.

Right, it wasn't a big US that was the US part.

There was still a this shitload of Kurdish.

But it's the thing.

And yeah, eleven twelve thousand Kurdish people died to remove the Islamic more have died since, right, Yeah.

And also a shitload of Iraqi soldiers, a mix of Kurds and largely guys from in and around Baghdad, but like, yeah, like a lot.

Of and a bunch of Arab Syrians.

And I don't miss it like ethnically geeky this at all Assyrian people Armenian.

No, But like a huge amount of the effort was guys.

I mean literally I was in bed with some of these guys a lot of Like the fighting tip was like literally really dudes with fucking knives and hand grenade.

It's clearing buildings in hand to hand com Yeah, those were the people who faced danger, right, like, and that's what you need to Unfortunately you can't do war with computers yet.

Yeah, but yeah, I think that that might be where this this belief that and like the Marca Rubio lobby, right, the Florida Cubans who are invested in this kind of Trump corrollary to the Monroe doctrine, right, and the idea that they can roll back leftist regimes in uh like South and Central America.

Yep.

I think that's where a lot of the pressure is coming from.

Yeah, speaking of pressure, we are being pressured to go to ads.

That's right, beautiful, and we're back.

There's an update I just came across as we're doing this.

We talked about how Tucker is an inside source saying that Trump's basically gonna clare war.

There's another article that just came out on Stitch Snitches by Gloria Shaw, citing a pro Trump host on Real America's Voice who characterized the upcoming Oval Office address as a pr thing meant basically as an acknowledgment that a lot of Trump's voters are frustrated that he keeps talking about like international issues like Venezuela, while everything is more expensive for them and they continue to lose their jobs and the economy is shit.

To quote from that article, and this is them quoting a segment from that Real America's Voice podcast.

The remarks came during a segment on The water Cooler with co host David Brody, who teas the nine pm Eastern address as an elevated effort to regain the narrative on affordability.

The President is going to be in the Oval Office tonight nine pm Eastern, Brody said, big address to the nation.

He's elevating this clearly, this is to regain the narrative and explain more about the affordability issue in America and what this administration is doing.

I think they're trying to seize this right off the top and make sure it doesn't get away from them and the Claims Series.

Basically, like this is Trump trying to steal an night March on the twenty twenty six election cycle and reset a lot of what people are talking about around affordability.

Like this argument is that now he's basically acknowledging that it's been kind of a mistake to focus so much on his overseas policies, and he really needs to start promising that that Golden Age is actually going to come for his voters, which the numbers don't bear out right, Like almost no jobs have been added in the US since April.

There's about seven hundred thousand more people unemployed now than there were in November of twenty twenty four.

Like things aren't yeah good, Inflation is still wild, Inflation is real bad.

Look food and like the material things that we need are going up in price faster than inflation, Like it's no good, and people like on his own side the thought.

Jessica Tarlov, who's a Fox News host of The Five Quote, tweeted a post about how like the hiring recession just with the golden age attached with which is like what Trump has been saying.

You know, we're going to have a new Golden age if you make me president.

So like the fact that he hasn't done he hasn't followed through in any of his promises to actually improve life for his voters, or the economy is starting to hurt.

And I guess I'm hopeful that that's what it is, rather than the Marines are about to be in Caracas, right, but I guess we'll see very soon.

Yeah, great stuff.

Yeah, talking of international stuff Trump is doing, let's talk about the new travel ban.

So this this travel band dropped yesterday, that was Tuesday.

So it previously had this nineteen country travel ban, right.

Some of that was a complete bar to entry if for citizens of those countries or to new these entries.

Some of it was a partial bar to immigrant visas, not to 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.

A citizens of Bokina, Fosso, Maalini share South Studan, and Syria as well as a Palestinian authority.

The Syrian one is particularly wild because I'll share it justice to the White House.

There are like individual case by case exceptions, right.

Like, It's not that they wouldn't block al Shara, I'm sure, but like it's interesting to look at the justifications that they use here.

What they are basically saying, I'll just read a couple of them here to give you an example, right.

Quote, at least one country lacks mechanisms in hospitals to ensure bursts are reported, and widespread corruption, combined with a general lack of vecking and poor record keeping, result in any non citizen being able to obtain any civil document from that country, particularly if that person is willing to pay a fee or engage an individual that specializes in assisting in such fraud.

They go on to basically document failures in government bureaucracy that they talk about corruption.

Right, They talk about places where birth CTIF forgets are just written by hand.

They talk about places where they government does not control all the territory, prevalence of crime, places which offer citizenship by investment without physical residents.

They also talk about some of these countries not being willing to accept their nationals to the US deports and again visa overstair rates, right, which is what they spoke about last time.

What is getting less reporting, or at least was this morning when I looked, was that they have removed exemptions which existed for the previous nineteen.

These include family member visas right.

So that means that, for instance, someone who could themselves become a permanent resident or even a citizen, now cannot bring a family member, say a spouse, a sibling, etc.

Across even though those people were people see vetied.

And it appears some there is certain categories of SIVs are exempt, but I believe not all SIVs, so that's especially immigrant visa right.

The vast bulk of SIVs will be Afghan people who worked with the US military in Afghanistan.

The nineteen countries who are now partially restricted are I'm just going to read them of Angola, Antigram, Barbuda, Benin Kuttivois, Dominica, Gabon, the Gambia, Malawi, Mauritanian, Nigeria, senegauld Tanzania, Tonga, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

For some reason, the first five of these are underlined on the White House website.

I don't know if some well copied and pisted them across with hyperlinks.

Like I don't know.

I'm unable to work out why that they're not hyperlinked in the document, but there doesn't seem to be any any explanation like this.

There's no special set of sanctions for those and they're just in alphabetical order.

They actually reduced restrictions on Turkmenistan because quote suspension of entry into the United States of Nationals of Turkmenistan as non immigrants on B one, B two FM and jvs as is lifted because some concerns remain.

The entry into the United States of Nationals of Turkmenistan is immigrants remain suspended.

The last element of this that I want to cover is that it would appear to stop international adoptions from the listed countries, like all of those thirty nine listed countries, which is wild and like particularly unfortunate because I know, like people who who adopt children from outside the United States like that is a process that takes years and I can imagine it being horrifically traumatic to have it suddenly cut off like this.

But consciously, unconsciously, that is what this UH executive action appears to do.

So that is not great.

It seems that the United States is using this as a kind of cudgel, right to encourage those countries to It's kind of a quid pro quote.

They get what they want they got from Turkmenistan apparently then that they will remove some of those restrictions otherwise they will continue them.

So yeah, that's not great.

So Judge Hannah Dugan's trial began this week.

Do you know, if you're not familiar, she's not the judge in New Mexico who was accused of providing firearms to somebody who was not a permanent resident or citizen.

She is a judge who is accused of allowing a migrant man named mister Flores Luise to leave her court room from a door that is not the usual door.

That door led to a private corridor.

In that private corridor, there was one exit to a public area and also a door to a fire escape mister Flora's ruiz took the exit to the public area.

He then took a lift down I think to the ground floor with an ICE officer.

He then attempted to run away when ICE officers attempted to detain him.

When he left the lift, he was caught and detained.

So we learned quite a lot in this and it's just been interesting to follow.

First of all, we see that several of the people who were taking part in the apprehension were reassigned FBI agents.

This is increasingly right, like all branches of the federal law enforcement have had some of their capacity redirected to doing this, right, to doing like this.

This guy, I believe had misdemeanors the agents for using signal to communicate.

They had a group chat called frozen water obviously Jesus Christ.

Yeah, really funny.

The FBI agent conceded in crust examination that's not a NAP approved by the FBI, but according to one the DHS apparently does approve it, according to a CBP agent who is crossic damon there, which obviously creates an issue for the retention of records.

Right biggut signal.

If you're not familiar auto deletes things after a period of time that users can configure.

It also appears that when one of these DHS agents entered the courthouse, court security officers told him that he needed an escort, but then he appears to have proceeded without one.

Text to colleagues, as DHS employees said, quote, this is gonna be a pain in the dick.

H So that's that.

Yeah, what happens, it seems like is Judge Dougan sent them to the chief judge because they didn't have a judicial warrant.

It's had an administrative warrant.

Right.

Another judge testified against Judge Dugan, a judge called Judge Severa.

So Judge Severa was with Judge Dugan when they confronted the agents.

Judge Jugan wore her judicial robes when confronting them, which apparently is not usual.

It's not usual to wear them out of the courtroom, and Judge Severa seemed to disapprove of that, and then she said, quote, Judge Dugan could quote have been more diplomatic, And then she said, quote judges shouldn't be helping defendants evade arrest.

At the same time, Judge Dugan's defense lawyer asked her if she had warned her sister of the ice presence, which she had, and it appears to her sister had a hearing at the courthouse the next day, which Judge Severa said she was not aware of.

So there's like a lot still to be unpacked here, right, This is just the first day.

This could go on path Christmas and into the new year, and it probably will.

But there's been some pretty good reporting on this from a substack called all Rise Media, and I will keep checking it on this and we'll report it on it again after the new year.

Hello, this is Garrison Davis reporting from Tokyo.

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the regular Executive Disorder Group recording due to being halfway around the globe, so I'm recording my section solo.

This past week saw two devastating mass shootings back to back.

On Saturday afternoon, a mask shooter 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.

The shooter currently remains unidentified and at large.

On Sunday night, in Sydney, Australia, a father and son Sajid and Navid Akram coordinated a targeted attack against Jewish people attending a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach.

Fifteen people were killed in the shooting.

Victims include a ten year old girl and a Holocaust survivor.

Twenty four victims remain hospitalized.

A bystander named Ahmed al Ahmed, a son of Syrian refugees, charged one of the gunmen and wrestled his gun away.

Ahmed was later shot multiple times, but survived and has been labeled a hero by the Austria Prime Minister.

Police say that a vehicle used by the gunman contained homemade Islamic state flags and improvised explosive devices.

The men were not part of an official terror cell, though the Prime Minister says that they were motivated by Islamic state extremist ideology.

Counter Terrorism officials believed the shooters received quote unquote military style training in the Philippines a month before the attack.

On Tuesday, self styled online investigators in right wing social media content Mills falsely identified the Brown University shooter as an LGBTQ Palestinian studying at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, citing gate analysis based on surveillance footage of the unidentified suspect released by police.

The university removed this Queer Palestinian student's online profile in an effort to prevent doxing, though this itself was used by the online smear campaign as evidence of guilt.

Brown University later published this statement quote in the aftermath of the shooting, We've seen a harmful doxing activity directed towards at least one member of the Brown University community.

It's important to make clear that targeting individuals could do a revocable harm.

Accusations, speculation, and conspiracies were 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.

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.

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, American needs him in his much more important role.

Whatever podcast he was doing before he got brought in to the 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 agree on that.

Yeah, he did a put costing his way through it.

Either that or just him not being at the FBI would have made the do their job.

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 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 challenge.

I think, you know, I think I'm I'm in the task, prepared to work at it.

Yeah.

So, 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 he had 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 were made in the earliest days of the technological revolution and in a race with adversaries for supremacy within it.

Trump stated in an interview that he expects AI to be fifty to sixty percent of the US economy in the near future, which is nuts.

Maybe that's just because everything else will just go to complete shit.

You 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 it is tied right now to data center investments.

So Trump absolutely needs AI because without it the country is very obviously in a recession.

Like this is the only thing propping up the image of the economy as not being in the shitter.

Now, what does this EO actually do well?

The goal of this the statement is that it is the policy of the United State is to sustain and enhance the United States is global AI dominance through a minimally burdened some national policy framework for AI.

This EO will establish an AI Litigation Task Force within thirty days of this order going out.

The Attorney General 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 do an evaluation of all state AI laws in order to point out which ones this task force should go after.

And then the stick that this EO establishes is that if this task force decides that like a state AI law is in violation of our need to be dominant in AI, we can restrict state funding to things like the broadband Equity Access and Ployment program.

Right Basically, they'll cut off federal funding for like broadband access in order to punish states that try to restrict or in any way shape or form govern what people can use what companies can use AI for.

And the primary thing this is all about, I know, we all think about the stuff that like most people have more direct experience with, which is like all the slop flooding the Internet, the disinformation that's continuing to cook the brains of a lot of our peers and elders, and just the fact that like it's making certain industries full of hardworking people a lot harder to exist because companies are just trying to replace quality work with absolute like slop trash yeah, But really, 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 pennings across the United States related to just AI in the housing sector.

And most of these bills are attempting to stop landlords from using different AI programs to coordinate pricing.

Basically, there are a couple of different programs, the most prominent which is called Real Page, and what they do is landlords join these programs and they share information on like what their different properties cost, and then the AI knows what everybody is charging and can suggest that they charge higher prices.

Right 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 Real Page 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 in increasing the supply of housing, and like that that's idiot shit, Yes, we need to increase the supply of housing.

This objectively hurts people.

These programs subjectively increase the price of print.

They do damage.

We should be mitigating or making it impossible for businesses like this to exist.

Anyone who disagrees is just being a dummy.

New York passed a law in October that banned the use of AI algorithms to allow landlords to do price fixing.

There's a similar bill of the Massachusetts legislation that's making its way forward right now.

And this is fundamentally what a lot of the opposition to like state level AI regulation is about.

Is that the landlords basically think that this is a great way to make a shitload of money, and tech companies like and we can continue.

We got to make a shitload of money selling them the tool to do this, and states are trying to push back on this, and like that's fundamentally what a lot of the impetus buying this executive order is is an attempt to stop people from making this even more harmful.

There is some like in this that political article they quote from Kevin Donnelly, who's the executive director of the Real Estate Technology and Transformation Center, and he talks about like, well, actually, we're currently using AI to identify buildable lots and promote sustainable constructions so that we can actually like reduce some of the cost of housing.

And all of these bills, could you know, undermine our ability to impress people's Like yeah, it's just fucking go like literally jump off a bridge, man, Fuck you.

Yeah, no, we know that's not how it works.

We have data on this, yo, This isn't theoretical.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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

Yeah, like that's a how any of this works, and this has been controversial.

Trump, before putting out the EO, tried to encourage the passage of a bill through Congress that would have done the same thing as the EO right and would have actually had like more force of law behind it, basically making it illegal for states to have their own laws regulating AI.

That didn't pass because 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 the AI slop automation of a bunch of industries.

And so there's there's even significant amount of resistance among Republicans this, which is why the bill didn't pass right, and Trump, when he announced this EO basically sat down with like a chunk of the conservatives who are more critical of this and I think basically bullied them into getting on board and saying no, he promised us this won't restrict state levels to like improve safety for children.

Right, there's absolutely like no guarantee of that, Like you just have David Sacks.

It was Trump's top AI advisor saying no, no, none of this is about trying to stop state laws to make kids savor.

It's just trying to stop state laws that will make rent less expensive.

Yeah, there's Marjorie Taylor Green's come out against this.

She's basically said that, you know, this is a violation of states.

Right, it's bullshit.

Steve Bannon is in the same place.

He had a good quote I found in an article by The Hill.

After two humiliating face plants on a must pass legislation, Now we attempt an entirely unenforceable EO tech bros doing utmost to turn Potus magabase away from him while they line their pockets, which is essentially accurate.

Yeah, he's wrong, ain't wrong about that.

So all this is like pretty annoying and fucked up.

We'll see what actually becomes of this.

I tend to agree with Bannon that it's pretty much unenforceable, like the lawsuit, the court battles that will come from this is just going to be expensive and time consuming.

But I actually don't think this is going to work the way they want.

This is this is Trump making it very clear that he has bought and paid for by the tax end, that he understands that he is hanging on by a thread in terms of popularity.

One of the only things stopping it from getting stopping the situation from getting worse is that AI spending on data centers and ship is propping up the image of the economy.

Right, that's what this is all about.

Yeah, and this and this is something where he can simultaneously shore up is tech based and shore up his landlord base.

Yeah, which are like, yeah, it's great, two kinds of guys to like Donald Trump.

Yeah, I guess there's an end here where I could.

I wanted to make a note about something also related to AI, which is that there's an incredibly stupid article in Vox that came out this week.

Case like literally the title is like, America, you've made it very clear that you hate AI, But what if it's the only way to restart the idea machine?

Right?

And this dipshit.

Columnist's argument is that.

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

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 Reenan, and Michael Webb.

The kind summary of that article reads as follows.

In many growth models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas, and then the long run growth rate is the product of two terms, the effective number of researchers and their research productivity.

We present a wide range of evidence for various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply.

Right, So basically, we're we have more people doing research and we're spending more money on research, but that research is translating into economic gains at a lower level than ever before, right to the point where we're not going to be able to continue to make economic gains like we used to be unless something changes.

And if you're kind of paying attention to this, you might notice that that study, which is the underpinning of that Vox article and all of these claims that we need AI for ideas, really it is not actually making an argument that people aren't having more ideas.

It's making an argument that it is harder to profit from ideas than it used to be right now.

That is fundamentally different from people not having ideas.

For one thing, it's reduce using an idea to something that delivers a return for venture capitalists.

Yeah right, that's all an idea is in.

This is something that makes money, and a lot of great ideas like the post office, don't generate a direct profit.

And obviously it's a net benefit to the economy that we have a post office, but the post office runs at a loss, right, which is why you have state funding for certain things, because they're just not going to be the kind of ideas that like a bunch of Silicon Valley investors want to throw money into right now.

The other part of the issue here is just a very practical one, which is that a lot of the ideas, the great ideas last century that were like most correlated with massive gains and productivity, stuff like the introduction of vaccines on a wide scale, indoor plumbing.

And electricity on a wide scale phones.

There's not ideas like that that are like that big and that much of a game changer left, right, the low hanging fruit has been It's the.

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.

Yeah, Like like maybe maybe you could put us something like actually cleaning the air that we breathe.

Yes, but again that's not profitable in a direct way, no, right, like you, Yeah, that's an idea that would have a change that big, but there's not a profit incentive for it.

Right.

We privatize the air of.

It, right, fucking air?

Yeah, and there's a lot I again, I find this, this whole discussion pattern, like it's an example of the fact that like people like this fucking vox article who I don't feel like deserves to be named to this, have been using chat GPT so much that they're no longer thinking.

They're not really sentient in a meaningful way.

Right, Like when you when you write something like that, it's because your brain has been completely fucking cooked.

I did find a good article, ironically, from twenty seventeen from Vox EU that is titled Ideas aren't running out, but they are getting more expensive to find, which is making a lot of the claims that like I've made, which is that or that I've been bringing up so far in this which is that it's not that there's a lack of ideas, that it costs more money to do stuff like that now, like the costs because everything's so much more complex.

The big ideas we're looking at, artist simple is indoor plumbing.

They require a lot more computing power, they require a lot more people working on them, right, Like we've plucked the low hanging fruit, and it ends with a paragraph I find kind of valuable here, returning to the oil metaphor, we are digging deeper into a trickier part of the rock.

Of course, we could be wrong, and humanity may have just been shipping away to particularly hard point that will soon give way, creating decades of cheap ideas.

This is the hope of those who emphasize the revolutionary power of artificial intelligence and the singularity and accumulation of technology that triggers runaway growth at some point in the future.

Although we all enjoy science fiction, history books are usually a safer guide to the future.

In this case, history suggests that large increases in research effort are need to offset its declining productivity.

And again, if you want to have.

The big ideas and the star Trek feature that all of these billionaires like Elon Musk pretend they want, what you actually have to do is be willing to put a lot of money into research and development without any promise of a profit.

Your motivation can't be well, now, we have to get a two hundred percent rate of return in our investments.

Right, it has to be well.

This would improve people's lives and make life more sustainable.

Right, like finding solutions to a lot of problems with climate and cleaning the air, like dealing with like lack of access to clean water, lack of access to basic basic medical care.

These are not things where doing them means that your company gets an immediate profit and evaluation in the tens of billions of dollars.

Right, That's just not the way providing life saving aid to people works.

But the net value to the global economy would be massive if, for example, kids weren't going without food and access to clean water, and had better access to education, and thus we're able to go into fields where they become researchers and generate ideas that eventually turn into profit.

Right, Like, these AI fucks aren't talking about ideas, They're talking about cracking the human mind, Right, that's what they want to do.

It's a good way to Yeah, yeah, I think that there's another thing we're saying here too.

On there's a different, greater argument about this where he makes an argument that I think is also very compelling that part of the decline in the rate of technological change has been the extent to which everyone who was trying to do this stuff is just increasingly dealing with more and more layers of bureaucracy instead of actually doing the thing they're trying to do.

And then you know, this is a huge problem in academia where it's like, okay, so you have you know, you're teaching in academia, but you're also spending like a quarter of your time trying to get another job.

You're spending another quarter of your time dealing with all of the unhinged whatever, like accounting bullshit that your fucking supervisors have, like like like university management has like put upon you.

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

And I think, I think, like that's that's one of the other angles of this, and it's something that's only gonna get worse because this administration is just fucking annihilating the entire basis of American science.

Yeah, they're killing it.

The damage that they've done to the pipeline of people that will produce these researchers, right with with ways that all suddenly like American science post docs.

Just there's no money for it.

There's no money for grad students.

They're killing all of 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.

M h.

It sucks.

I hate them.

If you want to email list you can do so.

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All right, guys, I think that's that's the podcast listeners, haters, lovers.

It's our last e D of the year.

It's our last D.

Of the year.

Well, I don't know.

We'll see if those pills come in, but yeah, but I hate you.

Happy holidays, Holidays, everybody, put a trans girl on your couch.

Put a trans girl on your couch, love it?

Or a bed I mean yeah, if you.

Yeahble mattress one of those like chairs that leans back to where it's like basically flat.

Yeah, not a lazy in sure, a lot of options in neutral lazy each year.

Yeah.

An inflatable mattress why not?

Yeah?

Why not?

Water bed?

A water bed is strong enough.

Because they are heavy, you're not allowed.

To have them.

But yes, Anyways, we reported the news.

Arguably, we reported the news.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

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