It Could Happen Here Weekly 178

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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 that asks the question, what happens when the people who are trying to help put things back together

are also being exploited in the process?

I am your host, Mia Wong, and today we are going to be talking about a union

that is attempting to do exactly that.

And with me to discuss this are Jess and Jesus,

who are mentors for Friends of the Children PDX

and members of the Friends PDX Union Network.

Yeah, Jess, Jesus, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having us.
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I'm really happy to talk to you both because I think this is a very, very unique and interesting union, especially, you know, talk about especially right now.
But to get people sort of rolling, can you explain what Friends of the Children is and what it is that you two do? Yeah. So Friends of the Children is, it's a national organization.
It's a nonprofit, but there are individual chapters throughout different cities. We work out of Portland, which is the founding chapter and also the largest one.
Some of the language I'll say that is like used from the website and from like the mission statement that really encompasses what our role is and also how it is told to like our community partnerships and the families and youth that we work with is that we are committing to youth when they are typically around kindergarten age level and they're being paired with a mentor and they will have a mentor until they graduate the program. So that usually ends up being a

total of 12 and a half years. And that like within that, we were doing a lot of like individualized

care and support. We work with them in the schools.
We work with them outside the schools.

We help them get into extracurriculars. We help them with like social emotional regulation, developing relationships with other youth in the program, and really just like being a consistently reliable human being.
And one of the big like pillars of our organization is the commitment to long-term, which sometimes can be an issue when you

are facing a lot of high turnover as an organization. We both have eight kids on our roster as do most mentors.
And within that, we have youth. I personally have youth that have been assigned to me that have just started in the program, meaning that they were like maybe first grade when I was assigned to them.
And then I also have youth that are middle school level that have had several different mentors in the past. Some that have stayed there for maybe a few years.
And like sometimes there's ones that have been there for months. Yeah.
If I can add to that, the kids we work with,

they're enrolled into the program because they have some risk factors in their lives that would lead them to needing a little bit of extra support and help. So we work with a lot of kids that come from immigrant families, from families that have, you know, single parent households, foster care families and kids, kids that like, unfortunately, are likely to face some challenges that our society and the way it's built up will deal to them.
And our goal is to help them through those challenges, just be there for them so that they have a chance of, you know, graduating high school or entering adulthood without having, you know, having had kids or facing like the justice system. It's kids that we love dearly, that we work with in the similar way as like, you know, a program like Big Brothers, Big Sisters, but we are paid mentors, which is the big difference right we're not volunteer based we are employees

basically social workers for all of the families that we work with it's honestly like it's a great job and i think right now especially like super necessary um because things are falling apart yeah yeah and yeah just adding like one that made me think of how within the work like i think social work is a very apt choice of words because we are paired with the youth and it doesn't like stop there like we work like we work with the families we also work with like the siblings too because sometimes you'll have a youth that maybe is the only child in that family that for whatever reason got a mentor and then you support also I mean it's a choice but I would say that most mentors definitely opt in to being there for siblings and family members in the household and making sure that they're also showing up for the caregivers to, yeah, help them create a loving home. Yeah.
And I mean, you know, I think that you can, you can look at this and see how it's supposed to work structurally. And, you know, you were talking about like, I mean, this is supposed to be a like over a decade long commitment to these kids, right? That ideally you're working with the same person

and you're forming really deep emotional attachments

because you can't not do that

if you're doing this kind of work.

But then also,

in order for that to work,

I think you can see this to the outside.

It's like, in order for this to work,

this has to be a job that you could stably do for a decade yeah yeah which i will say we do and i want to do i want to give so many props to one of our mentors who has stayed for for 12 years and has graduated their youth but of all of her of all of our co-workers i believe it's only one that has currently been able to do that and has stayed there as long as I have yeah yeah and the truth of the fact like yeah a for any job 12 and a half years yeah is a really long time right I mean six years is a really long time and with this job we're like, we're an emotional sponge for a lot of things. Right.
So, um, our kids go through everything that you could imagine. Um, and, and within that, like everything good and everything bad that you could imagine.
Um, and our job a lot of times is like, we can't solve the things that are affecting these kids, but we can take in some of those negative feelings and that grief, that anger, we can take it in and almost like dissolve it a little bit, right? But within that, it can affect us so

much.

And that's where, yeah, the sustainability

part of 12 and a half years

in this job, that

is a lot.

And we need a lot for

that to

at all be possible.

Yeah, I mean, there's this

way in which you're effectively like what what this job is is like you're the person who is trying to like mitigate the impact of like all like literally all of the structural systems of violence that exist in this entire country and how like how they're just sort of like targeted down on these kids and your job is to like try to like protect them as much as possible and that's unbelievable amount of like physical and emotional labor and then also like i don't know it seems pretty bad that there's only been one co-worker who's been able to graduate their kids like and just to clarify for history that's been in like our time yeah yeah i don't know if like over the 30 years i hope that other people have but yeah in recent years it's only been the one and also like yeah this is a job where you are not necessarily able to like undo the systems at play but but trying to support them. And like we as mentors are inevitably also facing those systems against ourselves.
And like one of the reasons that I think people gravitate towards this job is their empathy because they have those shared experiences. One of the things that is kind of heavy in the culture of friends is being asked your why when you start.
Like, why did you choose friends? And for a lot of people, it is because of wanting to be the person that they needed when they were going through those periods of time. So there's bound to be like a lot of like reactivation of feelings inside yourself that I think we all, like, I want to say like every mentor I've worked with does an incredible job of like handling that and like taking good care of themselves.
But it is definitely something that like takes a lot of regulation. And I think empathy is one of the greatest skills in this job but it also yeah it also then leads to us needing greater needs of self-care and things like that yeah and like i mean i guess like to put this in perspective for like people listening to this is like okay your job is to be the person like in the friend group who like manages like when someone's like having an emotional crisis like you have to like help them and deal with it and that is your job for like eight kids like the worst shit in the world like jesus christ oh good lord it's it's honestly like like hearing this it's always really helpful to hear someone's outside perspective of our job.
Right. Because we get so, so into it, so into the muck of like what this job can be.
And I think like overall, like, like social work, it's not just like our, our job, but like, I'm sure other social workers and people in care industries, like we have that like continuous, like vicarious trauma that makes us forget like how how our job is sometimes and then um it's helpful to hear other people mention it because it's like yeah wow our job is kind of crazy um and the work we do is like really important and really important for society and also yeah like it it's hard, yeah, like it, it's hard. It's hard work.
It's, it's hard and it doesn't like really have an end point. Like we have the hours we work with kids and then we have the hours we think about them and the things going on in their lives.
And sometimes it's like sweet things. Like a lot of times it's sweet things where I'll see something and be like, oh my gosh, you know who would love that? And like things like that are like, oh, great idea.
Or, oh, let's go see this movie. And a lot of times it's like worrying though too.
And knowing that there is only so many things we can control. And some things we just have to be the person that's there as they have to go through something.
Which, yeah, it's hard because we also obviously develop such loving relationships with these kids. It's hard to see kids that you care about so much that sometimes the most you can do is just be there.
Yeah, it definitely is a job that to some degree is sort of always with you yeah we have a joke about this with this job where it's like like if you do what you love and you'll never be free for a single second of your entire life because you're just always on yeah it's so true yeah as you say this i i worked till like 9.30 last night because I was like, you know what?

I'm enjoying this so much hanging out with my guys.

So I'm just going to keep working.

Yeah, yeah.

So speaking of keeping working, we need to go to ads.

And then we will come back and talk about the ways in which this job that requires an incredible amount of structural support to keep people there for like over a decade is failing to do that. And we are back.
So, okay, now that we've sort of talked about what this is, let's talk about the actual union, which is the thing.

Yeah.

Yeah. So can you talk about sort of how did organizing for this union start and what were the sort of issues that could have brought everyone to be like, okay, we need to do this? Yeah, for sure.
So we first brought about our petition to unionize in March of 2023. So that was two years ago, a long time ago, right? But the work for unionization, obviously the organizing behind And it started like much before that, when I first joined friends it was in september of 22 and i knew that the work had already been like happening the summer before what was the catalyst was post covid uh a obviously a lot of people left given what covid did to a lot of industries and especially care work.

But then likewise, a lot of people were fired and were many would say like fired without like a full on like due process. that included a program manager who, you know, was really listening to friends and advocating for the mentor role.
And they were let go, which spurred a lot of people to want to start organizing. Some of the issues that we face, the pay, obviously, within social work in general and nonprofit work, it's never going to match up and never going to really be as good as the cost of living, especially here in portland but the pay compared to like all of the emotional work and all the work that we do was just not there and not sustainable um it's why people were not like able to stick around because frankly we were looking at the same issues that our families were facing of like you know, food insecurity and needing to like get food stamps or like needing like rental and like housing assistance because our pay was just not up to par.
Those are a few of the issues. Jess, I don't know if you have other thoughts.
Yeah, I think you touched on a lot of of them i think it's hard to stay in this job

if you are looking to have a family there's been issues yeah with pay with insurance with other sorts of things that have led to mentors leaving rather than like staying there even if they like really wanted to stay there just wouldn't necessarily allow for them to have maybe like the life they wanted. And also just honoring, I think with like bereavement leave and critical issue leave has been areas that haven't really been addressed.
We have had very tragic things happen in our working community with the families and that have drastically, the well-being of mentors and staff members alike. Yeah.
And I mean, you know, this is a job that structurally is designed to be a kind of like, like again, if the goal is to have one person from like kindergarten to until they like like a graduating high school, right? like that is something that requires like 1950s 1960s style Fordism like you have one job for decades and the only way you can do that is if people are incredibly well supported and it's like the fact that it's like okay you're trying to do this but you're not paying people enough money to fucking afford food like what the hell like jesus christ yeah it's just like yeah oh my god like yeah or even i'm i mean it's still something that we're fighting but like our our workplace like doesn't provide health insurance for dependents which I think is like

really ironic given how much we care

for kids and then some of our

mentors and other co-workers that have kids

like have to spend

so much money on health insurance for their own personal

kids. Friends of some of

the kids apparently.

That's how this works. The kids they pick.

Yeah.

Yeah and honestly like big picture thinking like the reason why we like started this whole unionizing project was because we care so much about our kids right um like i when i first started working at friends like i i think was the first mask mentor to be hired in a fairly long time after a lot of firings of other mass mentors and two of the youth that actually it's more than two of the youth, but the first two youth that I was matched up with, they hadn't had a mentor for over two years, which is a really long time long time. Like when you, you know, are five, six years old, and you're used to one person consistently picking you up every single week and hanging out with you and spending time with you for several hours for six or seven years.
And then like next day next week maybe even that same day you find out like oh you no longer have a mentor and you're not going to have a mentor for two more years because people keep leaving people aren't wanting to apply for this job because the pay isn't high enough right that then That then like creates like a lot of issues with the kids that we're dealing with. It's not like we are these like saviors or like anything like along those lines, right? But when someone has consistent support and then that support is lost for a long time, especially when you're a young kid where it's been the majority of of your life you've been having that consistent support that then creates like a lot of trust issues and like overall like attachment issues that a youth could face and for me that was the main thing like working with these kids and having to like regain that trust was something that's like still to this day is like really emotionally like daunting and I like I will keep saying this I love my kids so much like I like can't stop thinking about them and I want to be with my kids until they graduate which would mean me staying at this job for another eight years, which it a long time right but i i want to do that so i want to you know get paid have time off when one of my sadly this is something that did occur where you've passed away that i worked with and like didn't have time off to like really grieve that um hard stuff and i just want to be able to stay there till they're done with the program yeah and it's like there's just i mean just like a litany of horrors where it's like one it's like you know like when there is like it's it's it's not you know like turnover in a normal job sucks and but this is like when there's turnover because people can't afford to live their lives it's like you're just like ripping a hole in these kids like the fabric of their social lives and then also it's like yeah one of these kids that is literally your job to care for dies is you just have to fucking go to work the next day like it is so hideous and it's just like yeah yeah yeah no like it makes sense that like yeah people are organizing because it's like you know like this organization is just systemically failing both the people they're trying to help and the people whose job it is to like help them and yeah yeah yeah i think one of the things that is like hardest to see while like working there is the ways in which this like job that you do like that like i care so much about and love doing but like seeing this like institution in a way be like part be part of the problem because if we aren't like having it so that employees feel supported in the way that they need to like life happens sometimes people leave and like move and get a different job for various reasons but a lot of the times it's it's because it's not sustainable and it's really hard to leave and like it's a heartbreaking thing because I like I want to graduate many of my youth and it is something that I think about of like how feasible is that like I want to do it and like also okay then that means I got to be frugal and all these other ways or etc and yeah and working with youth that have already kind of experienced loss and wanting to continue to show up for them the job itself feels so sacred and like I feel so lucky to be in these kids lives and I think just a lot of the turnover has been out of like lack of sustainability for yourself, like for your well- um yeah yeah and I mean the turnover numbers were pretty wild I think one time we calculated it and mentors were it was like a 40 something percent like turnover rate for mentors yeah and and a lot of that happened because in this two- year time period where we've been fighting for a contract, they also froze wage increases.
So I've had the same the same wage for the past two years, two and a half years that I've been working here. You know, in that same time period, inflation has been critiqued, crazy and and rent for me and it's about to get worse it's about to get so much worse yeah yeah which which you know gladly now we've had this fight and we're at the two-year mark and not at the zero year and not yeah looking forward to two more years of doing this.
But yeah, it's,

it's been hard to sustain this when everything is increasing in price and our

wages are completely stagnant.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So let's take one more ad break and then we will come back to talk about.

Yeah.

How, how unionization efforts are going. And yeah.
We are back. Yes.
Let's talk about how this campaign is going. So you said you've been in bargaining for two years? So we had our petition for recognition on march 23rd 2023 so that was over two years ago and then our yeah yeah our employer didn't formally recognize us but through the process of like voting we got over 93 percent wow that's an incredible that's incredible it's super great and it's also like wow we all really needed yeah um and like there were some other barriers including like not being formally recognized like um we also had management contest a few positions that i believe most if not all we were able to successfully have be part of our unit and then we didn't have our first bargaining session until September of 2023 so like almost six months I think if I did the math right after we formally presented our letter for recognition.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And like throughout that process.

So now it has been like,

Jesus is quite good at keeping track of it.

But I think as of today,

we're about at 580 days of bargaining.

God.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's been a long one and it hasn't been,

it's been like also a choppy journey where there has been delays in scheduling, delays in just getting different articles back in time. One of the biggest ones obviously was compensation.
And I think, I can't quite remember the period of time, but we presented it over a year ago, I think, maybe. Oh my God.
I could be wrong. And it took several, several, several months for us to get anything back from management, which, yeah, was a big bummer amongst other things.
It sucks. It sucks.
like and obviously that's the one that we have yet to finalize um like as yeah as we're talking right now yeah it is insurance and compensation are still our last two articles left yeah and some of the like the difficult things I mean, when you are working on a project, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised given really when these conversations started, if we're looking at over 900 or 1,000 days of really talking about this. But then when you're dealing with bargaining for 580 days, it's exhausting it is so exhausting we have regular meetings that

we attend to that uh our bargaining meetings were specifically scheduled outside of work hours so that like the people on our bargaining team and other union members would have to put in that extra time outside of our 40 hour week. Yeah.
And within that, like the hardest part is when you directly confront, right. Your managers and your bosses about like the rights and the things that you need.
So much of it like boils down to respect, right. And your respect as like a worker and the value that you have as a worker in your organization and when there is the pushback on that it honestly is like for me at times was debilitating right when you're doing this work and your workplace is stretching things out for so long yeah And you're pouring your heart out on your kids, like really trying to do the best.
That response from our, you know, our supervisors and managers, like it really was hard. It was hard for me.
It was hard for other union organizers in our workplace. And it was hard for our workers where we started thinking like, dang, like, what is the value that we have like in this workplace? What is the value that we intrinsically have in the work that we're doing with our kids? It's a lot.
And it's a lot when you're facing all these systems that our kids are facing and like taking those things in and then are trying to change those systems, finally able to try to change those systems.

And we learned that like, oh, wait, like the place that we're working is actually part of these systems too. Um, and it's doing the same things that we're like fighting to have our kids like have better lives.
Like we're facing it right now from inside the house. Um, yeah.
Yeah. I wanted to add in to, yeah, very much realizing that like our management is also in a way operating, you know, maybe like a corporation, which isn't the hope you would have for a nonprofit.
And one of the steps we had to take as a union was filing a UOP, so unfair labor practice, which cited, like I had mentioned before, like delays in scheduling and also regressive bargaining, which just means that like the way in which they were presenting things would have lessened our like quality of conditions. So definitely not what you want to be getting, not what you want to be handed across from the bargaining table.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Within this process, we're currently hourly workers, but they tried to change us to hourly workers.
Oh, my God. Which, again, we're always working.
You know, we're always working. So unless you want to pay me for 24 hours.
You know, you're talking about like, yeah, that they're behaving like a corporation. It's like, oh, yeah, this is exactly what like my employer did to me, which is like, like, what are the largest media companies in the world? And they dragged out negotiations for two years.
And like, you know, you're talking about this like just like, oh, they're like the feeling of disrespect where they're just not getting stuff back to you and it's like i remember you know like we'd be sitting there for a bargaining meeting and they wouldn't and they would be an hour late and they'd be an hour late because they hadn't like bothered to beforehand spend time drafting out what their responses were going to be so they were frantically trying to get it done before we were there and we're all just sitting there for literally an hour waiting for them to show up and it's like okay there are people in this unit whose job is to stand next to car bombs like and you can't show up on time to your to this to this meeting that you have known was going to happen for weeks like yeah it's just i say this every single episode of these episodes like this is an incredibly common youtube blessing tactic is draw out the first contract because that's that's like the second point where unions fail after, like, the, after you get, like, recognition votes is, like, here.

Yeah, for sure.

You know, like, I mean, I think to some extent we expect corporations to do this, but it's, like, okay, this is an NGO that's, like, the point of which is supposed to be, like, helping underprivileged youth.

And then they're, like, we're going to turn around and we're going to screw over different underprivileged youth. Like, it sucks.
Yeah, and I think that's like, for me, one of the things that just like mess with my mind the most is that like, we're not selling a product, right? We're not trying to like get revenue or anything along those lines, right? So like our job is a job that we actually like fully love and like want to stick around like not not just for our own like financial you know peace and like our own like financial security like we want to stick around this job because we care about the job and you know that's not to like like other you know businesses and other workplaces that unionize a lot of times people want to do that because they want financial security right um and i think for a lot of ngos non-profits and care work like we unionize because we want to stick around both because of financial security right but also because we just like care so much about the work that we're doing. And to be faced with actions by our workplace that, you know, tried to dissuade us from that, try to like, you know, in a sense, like it felt like stopping us from wanting to stick around like that again really hard really hard and i think like a really like psychologically hard part that comes with unionizing in the care work field in the like non-profit space yeah like this isn't a job that people are going to take for the money.
But we do need to be receiving like equitable pay and benefits so that we stay at this job. Like this, by all means, and like still like this is the same way I feel about it to this day.
I remember like reading the little like job description for this role and was like, oh, this is dude. This is like my dream job.
This is like a hundred percent what I want to spend my, my energy towards. Yeah.
And yeah, I think that's a huge part of why we were able to get like that 93% and to have also like routine support for different actions and stuff is just because we have people that care so much about wanting to stick around. Yeah.
And that's the thing that NGOs, you know, and you see this in abortion work, you see this in, like you see this in nursing, you see this in all of these different fields. Like that's the thing that these NGOs use to exploit people.
It's the basic human empathy and love and care that we have for the people who we're caring for. And these people are like, aha, look at this.
These people, they care about the thing that they're doing. We can underpay them and overwork them.'s like why is there just to work like this like it's just oh what a terrible way to design an economic system yeah it's just good lord oh let's talk a little bit about like you know what kinds of organizing things you all have been able to do and the kinds of things you've been able to accomplish by you know working together even in these really kind of like i don't know structurally difficult conditions yeah we've had um we've had a multitude of different actions over the past you know over the past 580 days um i think one of our one of our biggest ones um by far which was i think also was just one of our beautiful in a way, was November of last year.
We did an info picket. And it was one of those things too where it was very well planned out, but also even with the best of planning.
midway through it we had a shift location um based off of just changing information we were getting and we had one of our like little bits is because our union is called fun a lot of our um posters were spongebob themed so instead of imagination you know it's compensation um and yeah and i think it's indicative of like also how much people that work with us are playful and sweet and why we are good at our jobs of working with kids. And yeah, we had very high turnout.
I think we had 40 something people within our own organization that showed up for that. We've done smaller actions, too just asking for community support.
Like we've had caregivers write letters of support to different people in management. We've also done a few pack the rooms for bargaining sessions, like especially when there have been times that have felt like there's been some semblance of stalling.
Yeah, those are just some of them. Hey, to chime in with others.
Yeah, within that, and I think like an interesting thing about nonprofits, our revenue comes from donors, right? So we have to play this like fun game of like, okay, how do we communicate with our donors, right? So that we make sure that they know that like, you know, this is part of like what they're donating to, but then within that also like, you know, ask for money as well, right? Because we do want, you know, better pay and better benefits, right? So we've contacted donors and we'll still plan to do that with both that ask of like support the union and support our organization, right? Because the thing that we care about the most is the work that we do with our kids and for that to happen uh we want our organization to like stay afloat truly right yeah some of the wins that we've gotten um i mentioned earlier that uh they were trying to have us be hourly workers i mean that was a big campaign that we were fighting back on for a long time. It's also what precipitated the ULP filing.
I made too many buttons. That said...
You could never have too many buttons. Yeah, truly.
That said, I work 40 plus hours a week because one of the people on the bargaining team for management at the bargaining table asked if we even work 40 hours a week while we were talking about this. And that's like one of those instances that I mean, like, yeah, wow, that's like a little disrespectful and like really bites.
So we all were wearing these pins regularly we you know we signed a strike pledge

where we had like 80 something percent of the unit say that like if we came to voting for a strike

people would strike and the big win was like okay great we get to stay as salaried workers because

they walk back on that on that threat we are time off we have a time off contract or agreement now that like some of my co-workers that have been around a long time once the contract gets ratified they'll have like two more weeks of time off hell yeah hell yeah because they haven't they've been around for seven years and they're still at the same amount of time off basically that i'm at and that i've been at since the beginning um yeah and when it comes to wages like we're still figuring that out but some of the gains that we are potentially looking at is like incredible like i looked at the numbers yesterday of like what hopefully given like where we're at right now in in the agreements like what i would hopefully get and i straight up like teared up looking at the number because it felt like such a big change uh in my financial status right and yesterday like as i said i worked till 9.30pm with my kids, probably because I had this like massive, like weight of, you know, this financial doom that I'm looking at, somewhat lifted at the hope of the wins that we might get from this contract. So it's been incredibly hard, incredibly long, way too long.
And all of it is so it's going to be so worth it. Right.
I hope that's something that the listeners really get that like, this is hard work, but in the end, like is, is the change that we were hoping for, you know? Yeah. And recently, one of the things that we did do just like a run through of just to kind of boost morale since bargaining has gone on for so long was compile all the wins that we have so far just through TAs.
So still tentative, but yeah, it did map out a lot of huge things. One of the things we do a lot in this job is drive.
And we don't have many things in policy about cleanings or repairs when something happens in your car with a youth.

Like say they throw up.

It happens with kids. Like that isn't necessarily something that would have been like covered.
We would have had to just pay for that cleaning ourselves. And like mileage is a huge thing where one of our potential like big wins is that we'll get like full mileage covered rather than having to like deduct time from like this illusion of having an office where we were to have to minus some mileage in whatever way made sense with where our buildings were located despite even if our kids were like totally somewhere else where we were picking them up it definitely wasn't like the most sensible way for us to be like being fully reimbursed for what we were doing yeah and those are all huge wins that we do have like obviously compensation and insurance are two of the biggest that we're still working on i think recently like almost within this week, we've started to tip in a way that feels like we may be close to having a contract soon, which I do want to say, like, you know, as inspiration to everybody out there that works for a nonprofit, like unionize.
And you know what? You might, it might fare well for you. I have hope for everybody.
and like right now I think a lot of my coworkers are starting to have hope again. Because I do think, like you said, it is totally a manipulation tool to have it drawn out so long.
And yeah, it is exhausting to be basically stalled in your wage for two and a half years. But we are gaining some traction again, which I do think is something that we're still being cautious with just because right now it does feel like management is working with us a little bit more.
But I also think that there are reasonings around that. We're about to have in a few weeks our biggest fundraiser for our work because like like Jesus said, we are majority donor-based.
And I do think there's an appeal to management to have a contract by then. It adds to the whole, we're doing good work and we treat our employees well.
I hope that that is something then that is fulfilled by them in an honest way, not just a superficial way. because we are still pushing for a little bit more right now and have bargaining coming up next week.
So yeah, I'm really hoping that what they're showing us isn't just performative, that we really might be able to get to a point where there is something that is truly good for us because we're all ready. We're all ready for a contract yeah i as as you know as someone who got our contract like it doesn't it doesn't magically solve everything but like my god does that should make your life better like it is it is absolutely worth it yeah okay so how can people support y'all both sort of locally here and then just like broader because most people are not here honestly most of our like people in like management positions information is public if you want to email them and support go for it um also just like encouraging either your workplace if you work in kind of a social work setting or like you know if you know people that are because this whole field of work takes such a toll on people and it is the most necessary work and i think it's really easy to fall into the mindset of i'm doing this for the greater good not you know not for money not for these things but like you also deserve to feel okay and taken care of and have the things you need to be saying.
Yeah. Hey, Cece, anything else you want to add? Yeah.
I mean, I would add that we have an Instagram, right? That's friends, PDX Union Network. It's a mouthful, but...
We'll link that in the description. Yeah, great.
And then within that, if you're in Portland, make sure to follow us and pay attention to what we're posting. Because hopefully we do not have to get to a point in striking, especially the place that we're at right now with our contract.
But in truth like we're looking at 580 days and that is quite a long time yeah and then also like if if listeners do have the ability to donate if they could donate some funds for friends of the children portland and somehow in their notes be like i support the union like i think that could also be a really interesting way to show the support that like our supporters have like for both the work that we're doing on the youth level but then also like in the union side of things too um there's been a lot of like communication of like oh this is really going to impact like the development side of our organization and like all of the things that like our fundraising team is going to have to do to like meet these which again i think yeah that would be more true if like our executive director wasn't making like what like five times as much money as i am uh jesus christ yeah uh but yeah showing that support like it doesn't have to be a lot but showing our our bosses just how much like the populace like is is supporting our unionization efforts like that that would be really dope too and and then also like it impacts our kids like our kids like that's the truth of it all like i want my kids to have the best life that they could possibly have um and sadly we live in a world where money really dictates that um yeah yeah yeah yeah so those are we will we will have links in the description to all of that and yeah thank you to both so much for coming on the show and i hope i hope you win and yeah i hope you get to go back to caring for these kids and not and also while not having to worry about like being able to live your lives thank you me so much yeah. Thank you so much for having us.

Yeah, of course.

Honestly, it's been great talking about the work because it is really important work and I'm happy we get to do it. Yeah, it's wonderful.

And yeah.

And so this is, yeah, this has been It Could Happen Here.

And yeah, also go unionize your workplace.

You can do it.

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That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash itcould. Hello and welcome to the show it's me james today and i am joined by garrison davis hi garrison hello hello garrison has just uh said some words about something that's happening on social media that i don't understand uh and it's made me feel very old that's what's's happening today in my world.
It's very sad.

We're gathered here today to talk about the earthquake in Myanmar. I think most of you will probably have been made aware of the earthquake.

It's somewhat odd that corporate media has really not reported on the revolution

in any substantial way since 2021.

But the earthquake apparently justified a lot of networks sending people to Myanmar for the first time. Very amusingly, people DMing me on Blue Sky and Twitter asking how to get a visa from the Burmese hunter, which is not a thing I have ever done.
The last communication I had with them came in the form of a car bomb that they set off near to a place where we were. But if you're

not aware, the earthquake happened on the 28th of March of this year, just before one in the

afternoon. It was the biggest earthquake in Myanmar since 1912, and it registered 7.7 on

the Richter scale, which is huge. Because it's very hard for foreign journalists to get a visa

to enter Myanmar. The initial reporting focused on Bangkok and the damage done in Thailand.
But the epicenter was in Surgang, which is near Mandalay. Mandalay is the second biggest city in Myanmar.
And that was where the worst of the destruction happened. Almost every street in Mandalay has collapsed buildings.
It's a little difficult for us to get a sense of the exact scale of the damage because the junta refuses to allow... Some media has been allowed in.
The BBC, I saw, sneaked somebody in. It's very difficult for media to move and report freely.
And in addition to this, the junta has continued its practice of cutting off internet for people in people in Myanmar. Even during emergency situations? Yes, especially during emergencies.
They've cut it off as a response to this because I guess they perceive it to be something that makes them look weak. This is a tendency that the hunters displayed before.
So in 2008, Cyclone Nagus affected Myanmaryama and killed over 130 000 people and they blocked international aid they said that people didn't need the quote chocolate bars that the u.s and other countries were trying to deliver and that they could exist by like hunting frogs in ditches was their suggestion i don't think people realize like how far down the north korea scale the the burmese hunter is but like they're very worried that any interaction with the outside world specifically with like i guess western neoliberal powers will be damaging for their ability to control the population.

So for that reason, we don't know how many people have died, right?

From what I've heard on the ground, the death toll is substantially higher than the 3,600 number being reported.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimated that an earthquake of that magnitude in that region would kill between 10,000 and 100,000 people.
Obviously, that's quite a big kind of delta there. What I can tell you is that I've heard firsthand that there are some parts of Mandalay and Sagan where the stench of rotting bodies is so powerful that people have stopped returning to their homes.
There have been so many aftershocks that people are still sleeping in the street because they're worried about the damage structures falling down. The UN has an estimate of 17 million people across 57 townships.
Townships are like the administrative districts that are used in Myanmar, have been affected with over 9 million people facing severe hardship.

And of course, this is all compounded by the fact that there were already 20 million people in Myanmar who needed humanitarian assistance.

And there are about 3.5 million internally displaced people as a result of the fighting

that's happened after the revolution.

So it really came at a pretty difficult time in a place where the government is not willing.

They said after the earthquake they wanted international aid but they've as we'll see later in this script they've uh they've only accepted it from certain countries i spoke to a friend who has family in mandalay yesterday he told me that they the way they're assessing the damage is using like open source intelligence they're trying to look in the backgrounds of people's videos on facebook to like work out if if their childhood homes fell down right they were using satellite imaging software when i spoke to them yesterday to try and ascertain if their families were okay they told me or sagang has very famous pagodas and the pagodas are all on a hill apparently a lot of those pagodas have fallen down and even the hill itself is like listing so there's been like massive cultural damage as well another way in which the damage was compounded by Myanmar's politics was the quake strike like I said at 1 p.m on a Friday right which is Friday prayers this happened during Ramadan specifically the day before Idul Fittah, which is a very busy day for mosques, if you're not aware. Successive governments of Myanmar since the 1960s have refused to allow even basic maintenance for mosques.
That means that these buildings were in great states of disrepair. In Myanmar, there is an ultra-nationalisthist movement which has been embraced to a great degree by the junta but also limited even like the national league for democracy which was the relatively neo-liberal aligned party uh that had previously been in power in myanmar or somewhat in power i suppose um ultra-nationalist buddhist monks like asin murathu and his 969 movement have kind of condemned anything that they did as as making them pro-muslim and they have this essentially they have a great replacement theory right that muslims are trying to come in through bangladesh to replace buddhists in myanma yeah lots of people here have this like very orientalist perspective of like buddhism tm as this like you know like like like peaceful blah blah blah blah and like you know like buddhism like every religion has a variety of sex yes and the buddhist national sex uh can be particularly nasty yeah i mean as vicious as any other people i'm sure will be familiar with the rohingya genocide and like there are a lot of monks that supported that including where rathu is the most notable one but there are plenty more right and they're part of this i mean he's he's literally explicitly expressed like how much he looks up to the english defense league jesus yeah yeah like these are people who like they are part of this this global nativist movement people's orientalism i think sometimes stops them seeing that or appreciating that this extends outside of like white global north countries um yeah one thing that i did think that really touched me in the days after the earthquake was young buddhist bama people of the majority ethnicity reaching out to me and being like hey man this happened in friday prayers during ramadan and it has devastated muslim population like thousands of people hundreds of mosques have gone and thousands of people are trapped in the rubble and like no one's talking about it why is no one talking about it this is terrible and like it would have been inconceivable to hear young bama buddhist people so concerned with the well-being of like them Muslim countrymen before the coup in 2021.
This was a country that had been manufacturing consent for genocide against its Muslim minorities for four or five years by that point, right? Specifically on Facebook, there's a Behind the Bastards episode on this. You can also listen if you're new to the show.bert and i have made two scripted series about the revolution in myanmar which will include in the show notes but like that change to a real genuine solidarity and care between these two groups was really touching in the like moments after the earthquake and the days after the earthquake when we come back i want to talk a little bit more about the revolution and i want to talk about how the revolution has been responding to this and the impact it's had on the revolution we are back and of course the revolution hasn't stopped because of the earthquake.
The conflict is still ongoing, and the PDFs and their allied ethnic resistance organizations are still fighting against the Hunter. In fact, within an hour of the earthquake, the Hunter began using paramotors to drop bombs on Hangu village in Sugang.
This has been a thing that they've started to do recently in a sense i guess it's a good sign because it shows that maybe like that like their jets and other aircraft are in a poor state of repair or that they're struggling to keep enough of them airborne initially i wondered if they were using the paramotors because their runways had been damaged but that doesn't't seem to be the case. They've been airstriking just as much as they ever did, which is unfortunate.
Satellite images or reports from my sources on the ground suggest that they're able to continue carrying out bombing rates at a pretty similar rate from when they did before. Despite this, the National Unity Government, which is kind of the shadow government, composed mostly of people who are elected and then deposed by the coup in 2021 and the pdf who in theory are commanded by the national unity government called a two-week ceasefire right after the earthquake to allow for like a humanitarian pause the three brotherhood alliance which is an alliance of the three most powerful ethnic resistance organizations in Myanmar, also called what they called a humanitarian pause for a month.
In both cases, they said they wouldn't undertake offensive operations, but they would defend themselves, right? Because I think they had a sense that the junta wasn't going to stop attacking them. The junta did declare its own ceasefire on April 3rd, and the Kachinia Dependents Army, which is another ethnic resistance organization, followed shortly thereafter.
Notably, that ceasefire from the Hunter came the day after its troops fired on a Chinese Red Cross convoy, which is not a great look for them. No, never loved to see that.
Yeah, we don't love to see people firing on the Red Cross. This is especially bad for the Hunter because China has been growing closer and closer to the Hunter and supporting it.
China's had this weird back and forth relationship with the revolution. At times it supported the revolution, it seems like, specifically supporting the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, which is a group that broke off the Communist Party of Burma in the 1980s.
Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

There's also the United War State Army, which isn't part of the revolution,

which has the strongest relationship with the PRC,

and they're just chilling.

They haven't really entered the conflict.

It's called straight chilling, by the way, James.

Straight chilling?

Yeah, there you go.

That's how you say it.

I've marked myself out yet again.

Straight chilling, the United War State Army. Thank you, Harrison.
Actually, I spoke to some cadres from the Burmese Communist Party recently. The Communist Party of Burma re-entered after 2021.
And they're not focusing on proselytizing the Maoist gospel to people. They're focusing on fighting the hunter and developing alliances.
And it's interesting to see where that will go, given Marcus Leninist Maoism is definitely not the majority ideology of the revolution. Most people are committed to some form of federal democracy, which, when you speak to different fighters, varies from, like, we want what you guys have in the US, to something more akin to the democratic confederalism that people might be familiar with in russia china is competing with russia in myanmar so both of them are interested in in supporting the hunter right like and obviously both their ideologies are far from liberatory that they're interested in propping up a totalitarian state so we have seen both russia and china send support to the hunter send like rescue teams after the earthquake meanwhile the u.s offered two million dollars which i was kind of surprised they offered anything that is low-key surprising considering yeah mark rubio right yeah well i think rubio is more of a like a slightly

rubio is a neocon yeah i guess like it makes sense mark rubio like five years ago yeah it

doesn't make sense like post like you say to being gutted they're like oh you're still doing

that kind of stuff huh yeah there's like a weird like mix of things because because yes like a

traditional neocon style rubio this this tracks but all of the movements that the

I'm going to go we would normally expect. And at the same time they did it, three USAID workers, at least three, I should say, three that I'm aware of, were laid off.
Like literally they received emails telling them that they no longer had a job while they were on the ground assisting earthquake survivors. Department of Government Efficiency.
Strikes again. Highly efficient.
We'll send you the money and then also pull out our own people who I guess are supervising how the money is spent or would be. It definitely shows a strategic shift in the region.
China, Russia. China obviously is interested in Myanmar because of its rare earth metals, because of jade.
China has traditionally had a lot of jade trade with Myanmar. and then because it controls a large amount of seafront, which China wouldn't want to fall into what it would see as someone with adversarial interests.
Russia is still interested in just kind of projecting itself as a global power, even as it continues to shrink every day in terms of its global ability to project power. But there are both chinese and russian assistants helping the the myanmar hunter now meanwhile the u.s doesn't seem to give a shit what happens here now like this is kind of not that the biden administration was doing very much either but at least we had usaid and usip was very invested in myanmar and actually did a really good job of kind of almost like being the foreign affairs, not branch, but like they explained the revolution to the world.
Like whenever a journalist wanted to understand the revolution in Myanmar, it was USIP they went to. Obviously, all the contacts I have at USIP have now been doged, which is a shame.
So despite the ceasefire, right? I said they fired on these Chinese troops,

the Hunter has in fact not stopped bombing earthquake-struck areas since the earthquake. Madeleine PDF, who I'm in contact with, they're the revolutionary forces in the area that was most affected by the earthquake.
On April 7th, told me that they're aware of 10 airstrikes in their area of operations. since the earthquake a three-month-old baby and a 10-year-old child were killed in an air raid on Naikav village in Papun Township.
That was in Karen State. On April 10th, they bombed a school, something that the junta likes to do a lot.
They dropped two 500-pound bombs on a food court. They then circled back and dropped another bomb on the people responding to and giving aid to the people they'd initially bombed in the food court.
By food court here, just to clarify, I'm not talking about like at the shopping mall. I'm talking about like a market where people can buy like prepared food, right? They've killed, as best I can collate from various sources, at least 72 people and injured about 100 people in addition to thousands who died after the earthquake there are also reports that hunter quote-unquote recruiters here are engaging in forced conscription in the disaster zone i read of at least one person who was on a search and rescue team that they were a trained search and rescue volunteer right so they were moving rubble to rescue people and they were forcibly conscripted while they were doing that.
Obviously that's had a chilling effect on people going out to help others, right? What the hunter is not doing is rescuing its citizens. The military is detested in most of Myanmar, even in the areas that it controls.
And its failure to even try and trap people rescued under the rubble won't help this. There was a video that went viral recently of Hunter troops, literally a line of soldiers rescuing bricks.
They've gone to a collapsed building and they're inspecting the bricks to see if the bricks are whole and then passing them down the lines and stacking them up. Don't worry, the bricks are safe.
Yeah, the bricks are safe. The people are not.
It was genuinely infuriating to see it. I can't imagine for people who have lost family members how that must feel.
Even rescue workers, like I said, have been forcibly conscripted. Equality Myanmar has noted more than 100 cases of forced conscription since the earthquake.
Myanmar has a conscription rule, a law, so anyone, men and now women between certain ages can be forcibly conscripted into the Hunter's army. So they're just finding people displaced from the earthquake and forcing them.
Yeah, it's people who have been hiding in their homes, who now don't have homes to hide it. Or people who came out in order to save their neighbours.
And now they're forcing them to be to fight for them just as the hunter did with cyclone nargis they've also delayed and in cases blocked aid a team came from france to assist in a search and rescue they spent 24 hours sitting in an airport waiting for their visa to be approved and then they spent one day working search and rescue efforts before being told that search and rescue efforts had now finished and they were to go home they traveled around the entire world didn't save a single life abundance it's great presumably because the hunter wanted to placate china a taiwanese team was straight up refused entry into myanmar they taiwan had a search and rescue team that they were willing to send who could have saved people's lives and that they weren't allowed to enter. All tourist visas have been suspended, so it's not like the hunter is overwhelmed with visa applications, but they're not allowing search and rescue teams to enter from countries I guess they're not politically aligned with.
This kind of horrific indifference to human suffering has characterized Atatmador for decades,

and it's really unlikely to change as it grows even more desperate

and it loses even more territory.

It's just going to clamp down harder and harder on its people.

B1, in the liberated areas,

aid is being mobilized using the mutual aid structures

which have existed for decades

in the absence of the state.

In significant and growing parts of Myanmar,

people are relying on each other

instead of the government for aid, and that has its benefits, right? Like people have been out rescuing people from the rubble, but they're also desperately short of resources. I spoke to Mandalay PDF rescue team at the first week of April and they literally sent me, they have a notebook of a list of like, we've run out of gauze.
We've run out of tourniquets, we've run out of adhesive dressings, we've run out of elastic bandages, right? They're like the little nuts and bolts of saving people's lives they run out of. We did a fundraising campaign for them through Behind the Bastards.
We raised nearly $2,000, which is great. So they're restocking their supplies, which is fantastic.
But that's just one township all across the country. People are struggling for the basic supplies that they need to save lives the military has also blocked aid and medicine from entering their areas right so the military controls a lot of roadblocks and it uses its control of those roadblocks to stop aid and medicine often it's kind of hoarding it in the capital city which is nepedor if people aren't familiar nepedor is a city that the gunter built for itself to govern from.
It means seat of kings. Also in Nepidore right now is the US aid agency Samaritan's Purse.
Are you familiar with Samaritan's Purse, Garrison? I don't think so. It sounds vaguely familiar, but all of these humanitarian organizations all have the same four words that they shuffle around in different ways so yeah yeah yeah samaritan's purse perhaps most famous for being run by franklin graham okay yes yes i do know what this is and who this is yes yeah having all their volunteers sign like a statement of faith and being extremely homophobic for some reason samaritan's purse is establishing a field hospital in napidor right now they're going to force people to convert to evangelical christianity before they give services like they do in some cases yeah uh or just leave them like they did in afghanistan if they're not christian i cannot work out for the life of me what the fuck they're doing because like the hunter has made a consistent policy of bombing christians in miyama right Karen and Kareni state, there are a lot of Christian people.
On Christmas Day, the Hunter bombed people going to services because it knew that Christians would be going to services at churches, right? The Kareni Christians this year, I saw celebrated Christmas in caves because they were so afraid of being bombed, right? Like I have no logical leap you have to make bizarre yeah it's and they're like they're not even at the uh in sagang the only people the only international aid i'm aware of that was able to make it to sagang was a malaysian team who were able to save some lives unfortunately there were really strong rains this week and that made all the collapsed structures even more unstable. And the Malaysian team I saw have now returned home.
We're going to take another ad break here, and when we come back, we will talk about what you can do to help. All right, and we're back.
First i want to i guess have some good news uh despite everything the military has still been taking massive losses the all burma students democratic front uh captured remaining hunter positions in indoor they're all both students democratic front are a group that's been around since 1988 right and they have armed up and re-entered the revolution since 2021 one of the things that they captured on monday was a underground japanese field hospital from world war ii which i guess had been like a entrenched position i guess they're not covered technically by the ceasefire but there was a unit under the national unity government's command that operated with them and from what i understand this began as a defensive action they'd surrounded the hunter i think it's called yeah japan cave hill they'd surrounded them on japan cave hill for a long time and then the hunter obviously seeing the earthquake and everything thereafter decided that like now was the time for them to break out of this encirclement they did not break out they took a fat L and uh as a result they've all been captured now meanwhile in Chinland if people haven't listened to the episode I did a couple of weeks ago with Azad from the anti-fascist internationalist front I was just going back and listening to that to understand Chinland but the AIF and a lot of their allied forces from the chinlan defense force and the chin brotherhood had a significant victory in capturing the rest of the hunters positions in falam last week and i think it's very much like on the table that we will see the whole of chinlan liberated in the next few months or by the end of the year which would be great to see so people are wondering like what they can do to help right and i think it's a very valid question because i saw today that the the un was meeting with the hunter in neipador and i just have no faith that any money that goes to the hunter is going to get to people who need it yeah no absolutely not you cannot like they want them to die that like that i don't know they're like evil why yeah yeah they are literally genocidal they have done a genocide like that has been prosecuted international criminal court like i have no understanding why people continue to like international organizations continue to funnel money to them other than because like they have a status quo bias, I guess. So don't be doing that.
But there are groups who are making a really big difference. And one of them that I wanted to highlight, and Robert and I both are very familiar with their work from the last time that we were overreporting, is Community Partners International.
CPI are really cool because they work by empowering members of the local community to be health volunteers, as opposed to dropping in some doctors from America or doctors from the United Kingdom or whatever. And then when those people leave, they take their skills with them.
CPI, the thing is to educate folks within the community so that they can take care of one another and i saw that cpi has a matching donations thing right now which is pretty cool uh so like if you donate someone else will match your donation and that will double the amount that uh that you receive otherwise i will provide a list of mutual aid funds that have been shared with me most of of them are like GoFundMes or things like that. I'll put it all in the show description.
They've all been vetted. And like, I know people are sometimes reluctant to give to GoFundMes and they'd rather give to like a 501c3 or an organization which has a little bit more, I guess, like online presence.
In this case, you have to understand that like a lot of orgs

just aren't operating in the liberated areas.

The two that I'm aware of are CPI and Free Burma Rangers.

I spoke to Dave from Free Burma Rangers.

They're trying to get to as many people as they can as well.

That would be another great place to donate.

And I would include a list of vetted GoFundMes.

If you want to have a

look through those and see if any of them kind of speaks to you more you can do that too what this will mean for the future of myanmar we don't know yet right we have really no sense of how many people have died of what it's done to the hunter's ability to control those areas but until the revolution has a way to stop planes bombing people we will continue to see the same dynamic right of the hunter losing terrain on the ground pulling back its soldiers and then bombing civilians in the areas that it's lost that is its game plan it's continuing to get more drones from china it's it's getting aircraft munitions and jet fuel from china and until there is an embargo on jet fuel and munitions to the hunter then we will see this same pattern continue right they lose terrain they bomb a school they lose terrain they bomb a hospital again it's the same stuff that israel is doing um and they of course previously been armed by israel as well uh but we don't see as much solidarity for the people of burma and if you want to stay in touch with what's happening on the ground i think the irawardy i double r a w a ddy does a really good job of doing daily summaries right now so i would suggest checking out what's happening there and of course we'll keep you updated on developments in the spring

revolution as they come

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This is It Could Happen Here. I am not going to El Salvador.
It's not going to happen. No way.
No thank you, Mr. President.
I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by James Stout.
Hi, Garrison. We're here to talk about possibly the most upsetting thing I've seen in American politics in the past six months to maybe even, I don't know really had hit me for like the past few years like yeah what happened on monday in the oval office was is kind of the most black pill i've ever been which is not a great way to start an episode yeah it like it made me feel like i i found 2023 very hard like going out and seeing people freezing in the desert and then coming home and seeing jim b ice cream on the timeline but like this was different.
This was so like blatant. There's like a level of like intentional depravity that you're reminded of more blatantly.
Yeah and like Bukele's trolling of everyone. Yes.
So we're going to be talking about an Oval Office meeting between President

Trump and El Salvador President

Bukele.

I guess I could learn his first name.

Naib Bukele?

There you go. You know he's Palestinian

Salvadorian. Are you fucking serious?

No, his dad's an imam.

I don't even have time for that.

This is just fucking...

I'm sorry if anyone's driving and has had an accident upon hearing that. So, as you probably know, recently the United States government has sent upwards of 300 people, immigrants, to the El Salvador Terrorism Confinement Center, this prison black site that people never return from.
I guess I could point to, for a pop culture reference, which feels a little bit in bad taste, but you could point to the prison in the TV show Andor as being a very comparable facility, frankly. Except they turn off the lights in Andor.
They do not turn off the lights in Seacott lights run all the time they put 10 to 20 people per cell it's pretty bad jameson has done episodes on seacott in the past we'll probably keep doing more the lights thing by the way was a specific policy change by bukele there was a particularly violent weekend in el salvador as a result, he stopped letting people who were detained for gang crimes go outside and stopped building windows into the prison and just put the lights on. Like as a way of punishing, I guess, the gangs by punishing the people who were detained there.
Yeah, they can't go outside. They stay in their cell for almost 24 hours a day.
They might occasionally get 30 minutes outside, but that's not even confirmed because no one's even allowed inside to see what's going on in there. And we've sent upwards of 300 immigrants there, the vast majority of which have no criminal record.
Even if you do have a criminal record, being renditioned to a foreign prison camp is still bad. but this is something that Trump hopes to expand on greatly and they are

currently a foreign prison camp is still bad. But this is something that Trump hopes to expand on greatly.
And they are currently defending their ability to do so in the courts since it has been learned that a few people sent there may have been partially sent by accident. But the Trump administration is refusing to return these people and is instead still trying to convince the public that these are dangerous terrorists that deserve to be disappeared.
So let's kind of start with that main case. The case that's receiving the most public attention right now is of a Maryland man named Kilmer Abrego Garcia, who's the subject of a district court case that has been sent up to the Supreme Court and then sent back to the district court on whether this man can be returned home to his

U.S. citizen wife and child.
And then on Monday, April 14th, in the Oval Office meeting, President

Bukele said that he will not return this Maryland immigrant with protected legal status back to the

United States, who ICE admits was sent to CECOT based on a quote-unquote administrative error. Bukele said, quote, how can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? Of course I'm not going to do it.
The question is preposterous, unquote. The El Salvador president also balked at the idea of releasing Garcia from CICOT since he can't have a quote-unquote terrorist free in his country and lying about Garcia being a criminal.
I am going to play a few clips in this episode because I think it is necessary to listen to these people actually say the words that they are saying in the tone that they're saying them and the exact phrasing on these I think is actually pretty important right now. So unfortunately, you are going to have to hear the voices of a few people who you might not rather hear from, including the president of El Salvador.
So I'll play this first clip. Can President Bukele weigh in on this? Do you plan to return him? Well, I'm supposed to suggest that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right? How can I smuggle, how can I return him to the United States? Like, I smuggle him into the United States, or what are you? Of course, I'm not going to do it.
It's like, I mean, the question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don't have the power to return him to the United States.
So you can release him inside of Solomon. Yeah, but I'm not releasing, I mean, we're not very

fond of releasing terrorists into our country.

We just turned the murder capital of the world

into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere, and you want

us to go back into the

releasing criminals so we can go back to being

the murder capital of the world. That's not

going to happen. Well, they'd love

to have a criminal released into it.

I mean, there's a fascination.

They would love it.

These are sick people. It's just insane.
Like, the whole pretense of any, like, serious engagement with reality there is just gone. Yeah, and they're both, like, miming that neither of them have the ability to make any kind of deal between each other to send people back, even though they have the ability to make a deal to send people there.
Yeah, as they sit in the same room. The whole time Bekele is talking, Trump has like this like a growing smirk on his face.
As Bekele is talking about this preposterous notion of smuggling a U.S. immigrant back into the United States, despite a Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of this immigrant back into the country.
The whole smuggling framing is obviously absurd with him saying, like, I don't have the power to return him to the United States. All he needs to do is release him from Seacott and the U.S.
can fly him back, right? Just as we flew him to El Salvador. Like, the two heads of state are sitting right next to each other.
They could agree to do this at any time. But now everyone's pretending that suddenly they don't have the power to undo what they seemingly had the power to do in the first place.
Like Bukele has ruled, and we're going to do a whole episode on Bukele and like his rise to power and then his use of power. But like he's ruled under a state of exception for years in El Salvador, which allows him to detain people without warrants, without trials, right? And like it's that state of exception that is now the norm there.
And that's kind of what he seems to be referring to, right? Like we just get to lock people up. Why would I not do that? In effect, they are arguing that every single human being that is sent to CECOT by the United States is unable to ever leave the prison alive.
Yeah. That's basically what they're saying.
They're saying both parties, both Trump and Bukele, are unable to have someone who's been sent there returned. So they're just saying no one's able to do anything.
They're just stuck there until they die yeah and like this is part of the design of secot uh the person who runs like the secot like security has said that they do not intend in any person ever being released from secot you are not designed to get out you are stuck there forever no one's ever left there yeah it's just where you get disappeared and that's that's all that's all that it is and I think part of why they're so unwilling to send Garcia back is because then you have someone the first person who's ever gotten out and can talk about what it's actually like in there when you don't have like a christy gnome and propaganda cameras pointed at at the prison bars yeah, Bukele is very reticent to release anyone for that reason and like there are plenty of allegations and like i think it looks like time magazine has published this it's not hugely controversial that he he made deals with gangs in the past in el sablo right to get them to reduce the murder rate and like he certainly wouldn't like to hear that testified to certainly not in the united states court right so like he doesn't want people to be released from there either. Like you say, they don't want anyone to be able to go to any international human rights courts and testify as to what happened to them there.
So it's kind of in his interest to never have anyone be released. It's not just also, I guess, like in his interest, he's also being paid, right? $20,000 per detainee per year by the United States right now.
So he also has a financial interest in keeping people in there. Even this per year deal makes, now kind of makes zero sense because both of them are arguing that there's no way to send anyone back.
Right. So like, it's not that it's even like, oh, they're only going to be there for one year.
It's like, they're just there. And who knows if they're going to still be alive by the time that some of these people

would be able to get out,

whether that's through the miraculous

Donald Trump impeachment of 2026,

which will never happen,

or however.

These people, they are just stuck there

because he's not going to release them into his country.

We are seemingly unable

to take anyone back from there. We are seemingly unable, uh,

to take anyone back from there.

I think unwilling,

right?

Like,

like the U S is theoretically able.

It's argued that we're unable as,

as,

as people,

as people get into more after this ad break.

Okay. We are back.
One thing that we've seen across the Trump administration the past 80 days or so, something that we saw very evident in this meeting, is that whenever a single person is asked a question about the outrageous, possibly illegal, possibly not, but just immoral or evil things that are being done. The first instinct is always to pass the buck on to someone else.
We saw this a lot with Signalgate, how it was always someone else's fault. No single person could get hammered down of being like, okay, you are the person that's going to be accountable for this.
And throughout this Oval Office meeting, eventually they started taking questions from journalists and reporters and propagandists who were in the room. And you saw this trend of, you know, if someone asks Trump about what's going on, he passes the buck to Stephen Miller, who passes the buck to Bukele, who then passes the buck to Mark Rubio.
And it's like this big circle of like, everyone's just talking around each other because no one really has the authority to speak on what's going on or how to fix this problem because they don't see it as a problem. So instead, they just talk in a circle.
And I think Miller was one of the most effective at this. And unfortunately, we're going to play the longest clip in this episode, just under two minutes, from Stephen Miller, where he lays out the Trump admin's thought process and strategy behind what they are doing.
And I apologize for this, but it is useful to hear from Himmler too. So here we go.
With respect to you, he's a citizen of El Salvador. So it's very arrogant even for American media to suggest that we would even tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizens as a starting point.
As two immigration courts found that he was a member of MS-13, when President Trump declared MS-13 to be a foreign terrorist organization, that meant that he was no longer eligible under federal law, which I'm sure you know, you're very familiar with the INA, that he was no longer eligible for any form of immigration relief in the United States. So he had a deportation order that was valid, which meant that under our law, he's not even allowed to be present in the United States and had to be returned because of the foreign terrorist designation.
This issue was then, by a district court judge, completely inverted, and a district court judge tried to tell the administration that they had to kidnap a citizen of El Salvador and fly him back here. That issue was raised to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said the district court order was unlawful and its main components were reversed 9-0 unanimously, stating clearly that neither Secretary of State nor the President could be compelled by anybody to forcibly retrieve a citizen of El Salvador from El Salvador who again is a member of MS-13, which as I'm sure you understand, rapes little girls, murders women, murders children, is engaged in the most barbaric activities in the world, and I can promise you if he was your neighbor, you would move right away.
So you don't plan to ask for anything? But the Supreme Court is asking to... And what was the ruling in the Supreme Court, Steve? Was it 9 to nothing? Yes, it was a 9-0.
In our favor. In our favor, against the district court ruling, saying that no district court has the power to compel a foreign policy function of the United States.
As Pam said, the ruling solely stated that if this individual at El Salvador's sole discretion was sent back to our country, that we could deport him a second time. No version of this legally ends up with him ever living here because he is a citizen of El Salvador.
That is the president of El Salvador. Your questions about the court can only be directed to him.
So there's a lot there. I.
I think I'm going to start with, I can promise you, if he was your neighbor, you would move right away. And I think that is really the heart of what this Trump administration is doing.
Like it's appealing to this most basic, like suburban crime panic fear racism of, well, if he was your neighbor, you wouldn't want him living next to you. Yeah, like a Vagosa neighborhood kind of.
Well, just completely lying about the context of this case. Yeah.
With Miller saying it's arrogant, suggests that we, the most powerful country in the world, or used to be before the tariffs, can tell El Salvador how to handle its citizens, falsely claiming that immigration courts deemed him a member of MS-13, which just is not true, talking about kidnapping him from Seacott to return him to the United States, as if ICE didn't just kidnap hundreds of people with no criminal records and send them to a foreign gulag, and then also lied about the Supreme Court ruling, saying they found the district court order to return garcia unlawful and grossly mischaracterizing the scope of what the supreme court ruling was and how it was sent back to the district court to work with the details on what facilitate the return actually means and again i think like the the one of the most telling parts is is how he ends, quote, no version of this ever ends up with him living here. And yeah, they're going to look for any way to make this test case work, right? And if they can do this to someone with protected legal status, who is not a terrorist, who is not an actual MS-13 gang member, right? This is kind of ideal for them because that means they can paint anybody as a foreign policy threat enough to be sent to a foreign gulag.
Then at the very end of the clip, he passes the buck off to Bukele to have him answer this question. Again, perfectly laying out their strategy.
There's a lot to break down in what Milit said. It's also just kind of interesting, Cam Miller like amongst the press he's not one of the people like sat on the couches supposed to be giving the press conference right he just kind of wades in to i guess like like offer this opinion and kind of like uh be the kind of embassy of this of their response i guess in in a sense yeah i think crucially like abrigo garcia's protection was from being returned to to El Salvador right because he had been harassed by gang members when leaving El Salvador and when living in El Salvador he's lived in the states since 2011 and he left El Salvador to flee harassment and abuse from gang members yeah the gangs that he's been accused of being a part of but like it, it then follows that like, it would be legal for them to deport him to a third country, right? And that is the path that they've followed with all the Venezuelan migrants, right? They've accused him of being members of Trenderagua.
I have not seen a compelling case made that any of them are yet. I'm sure people from Trenderagua have come to this country, but no, they have not provided any evidence that the people they have sent to Seicot are those people.
No, we said like 14 people are accused of some kind of violent crime, like murder or rape. And the other 275 do not have a criminal record whatsoever.
Yeah, and the bulk of this is reliant on some kind of idea that they have entirely created from fiction, that there are tattooing practices when one enters Tren de Aragua. And for them, even if they can't be returned to Venezuela, they feel like they have this end round, which is, okay, we'll send them to Osalbador.
But for the Salvadorians, that's a different question, right? And that is what they're trying to find here. And that is worrying because the case here that is getting the most publicity that seems to be the one that the Supreme Court has taken up

is about the Salvadorian man.

And I hope that doesn't mean that the ship has sailed for the Venezuelans, right?

That essentially they don't have a case.

Because that was the vast bulk of them.

I think there was something like 60 Salvadorian citizens and the rest Venezuelans.

No, hundreds of people have been forgotten in this. After Miller's rant there, Mark Rubio jumped in to state that, quote, no court in the United States has the right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States, unquote.
And Stephen Miller hopped back in to talk about this Supreme Court case that they're falsely saying they won nine to zero, which is not how that case went. And they start talking more broadly about what can be allowed if it has to do with the foreign policy of the United States and how the courts don't have the ability to intervene in that process.
No, the foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the president of the United States, not by a court. And no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States.
It's that simple. End of story.
And that's what the Supreme Court held, by the way, to Marco's point. The Supreme Court said exactly what Marco said, that no court has the authority to compel the foreign policy of the United States.
We want a case 9-0, and people like CNN are portraying it as a loss, as usual, because they want foreign terrorists in the country who kidnap women and children. Part of what I find so disturbing about this idea of, you know, no habeas corpus, no due process, if you aren't on foreign soil, is that like this idea of the courts having no jurisdiction over foreign policy decisions means that as long as you, whether you're a citizen, whether you're a permanent resident, a documented or undocumented immigrant, as long as you are forcibly removed from the United States soil, your rights and your due process has been forfeit, and the U.S.
has neither the obligation nor sometimes the ability to return you to U.S. soil if that is their foreign policy interest.
And this is such a troubling, broad concept that the portions of the courts are kind of allowing them to claim right now. And the complete removal of due process is like slowly getting encroached upon at first with undocumented immigrants and green card holders.
But as we will see in the next section, they are also absolutely going to be targeting u.s citizens yeah i think like we should just point out obviously the court is not conducting the foreign policy of the united states it's ruling on the legality of the action taken by the president which is exactly what it's supposed to do yeah and as it relates to your rights for due process if you are in the united states. Yeah, yeah.
Like every single US person, right?

US person would be anybody who resides in the US,

be they documented or documented migrant citizen,

what have you, like has a stake in this.

We're going to go on break and then come back to discuss

the expansion of the CECOT detention program

and the possible targeting of U.S. citizens.
Okay, we're back. So on April 7th, a few weeks ago, while on Air Force One, President Trump told reporters that he would be, quote-unquote, honored president of El Salvador to take U.S.
citizens, quote unquote, American grown and born criminals, and put them in Seacot, the terrorism confinement center prison black site, saying, quote, why should it stop just at people that cross the border illegally? Unquote. A few days later, the White House press secretary reiterated that this is something that Trump is discussing both publicly and privately.
And later, during the April 14th Oval Office meeting, Trump said that if Salvador was to build more of these torture mega prisons, the United States would, quote unquote, help them out. If the Trump administration could disappear more American immigrants and U.S.
citizens to these prison black sites. Are you willing to pay for those facilities to be open if new ones were going to be built? I'd do something.
We'd help them out. They're great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don't play games.
I'd like to go a step further. I said it to Pam.
I don't know what the laws are. We always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they're not looking.

That are absolute monsters. I'd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country.

But you'll have to be looking at the laws on that, Steve, okay? So this is just the start of a long process that is going to be deeply troublesome and worrying. And again, this is something that they keep talking about.
I think they're still looking for some kind of legal justification or they're looking for something that maybe, if not allows for this, explicitly prohibits this in a way that they can't get around. Yeah, did you notice he called out Miller? He said, you'll have to look at the laws on that, Steve.
Obviously, Miller is not the Attorney General. He also did mention Attorney General Pan Bondi, who's also looking into this option right now.

Right. But Miller is often credited with being the kind of mastermind behind Title 42, right, which was an extremely obscure piece of public health law that was then mobilized by the first Trump administration to immediately return migrants to Mexico without giving them their right to an asylum hearing.
right and like that's what i'm wondering if they're going for again like like steve miller

has been very good at this at finding obscure justifications in the United States federal law for for shit that they want to do I think this is why they're definitely trying to stretch this foreign policy claim as far as they can that if it's if it's outside U.S. soil there's a limited way U.S.
courts can actually interfere or undo things that have already been done. And again, the idea that we're going to fund the construction of even more of these El Salvador mega prisons just to house American grown and born criminals as well as immigrants.
We're just funding gulag camps on foreign soil to send the undesirables to. And no matter how much Trump talks about how we're only going to send quote unquote like American criminals there, as we've seen with with Seacott so far, like, no, like they the majority of people they are sending do not have criminal criminal histories.
I don't think anyone can trust the Trump administration's definition of what is and isn't criminal to this extent anymore. Later in the same meeting, Trump reiterated the same idea about sending U.S.
citizens who his administration deems criminals to this foreign black site. Here's another clip.
Just a follow-up question on clarification. You mentioned that you're open to deporting individuals that aren't foreign aliens, brought criminals to El Salvador.
Does that include potentially U.S. citizens, fully naturalized in the area? If they're criminals and if they hit people with baseball bats over their head that happen to be 90 years old, and if they rape 87-year-old women in Coney Island, Brooklyn.
Yeah. Yeah.
That includes them. Why do you think there's special category of person? They're as bad as anybody that comes in.
We have bad ones, too. And I'm all for it.
We have others that we're negotiating with, too. But no, if it's if it's if it's a homegrowngrown criminal i have no problem he's really obsessed with this baseball bats thing i don't quite know what that's about it seems like a specific case that he's referring to maybe it's something he remembers like 30 years ago like it really got stuck in his head right but also later he says that they're negotiating with other countries to send US citizens to, not just El Salvador.
Yeah, I mean, they've

sent migrants, third country migrants to Panama before, right? And detained them there. Honduras, I believe, is building a prison that's not dissimilar to Secot.
I'm guessing this will be their sort of way of courting allies in the hemisphere, because they'll sort of pay them a relatively large amount in order to attempt to offshore people they don't like. Yeah, and again, as we've seen the past few years, and increasingly so now, the effort to label activists or people who are vocally opposed to the United States foreign policy,

the United States and the state of Israel, deeming them terrorists.

And then by extension, if you charge them with a crime, then criminals, the idea that

they can be housed in a place like Seacott now with very, very limited to no due process.

The whole due process question is still very up in the air for how they're going to handle

that aspect. But you can't just take this as like, oh, you know, that's just Trump talking like, no, this is something they really want to do.
And it's like one of the freakiest things that I've seen in like domestic US politics in a long time. Earlier, Trump was recorded half whispering to Bekele, telling him that El Salvador needs to build five more Seacott-style torture prisons

to house U.S. citizens, as Trump says, homegrown criminals.

Bukele replies that they will have enough room,

and then the entire Oval Office laughs.

Yeah, they said homegrowns are next.

The homegrowns. You've you gotta build about five more places

yeah that's fair

it's not big enough

it's the bleakest clip I've like ever

seen before

talking about homegrowns are next

gotta build five more places oh we have enough space

everyone laughs and then Trump shows off

the new gold frames

for the portraits in the Oval Office yeah it's like a dinner party joke for them it might just be worth noting that like every totalitarian regime has housed its dissidents outside of the imperial core right like like germany totally did this in the east right russia sent people to siberia for a russia soviet union union creating creating these like stateless zones where like the regular laws of your of your like fatherland state do not apply right and where the the horrors are so far from the populace that the populace can't really grasp them yeah no this is like elementary school stuff it says like the first thing you learn about is concentration camps and gulags and how that's like this symbol of evil and now it's something you laugh about in the oval office to send home groans to five disappearing torture camps yeah and like just to be like even clearer i guess what what distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison is that there is no due process right people are sent there because of who they are, not because of what they did. Like if you're a Venezuelan man who may or may not have a tattoo.
Yeah, like we are, I don't know what it will take for some people to realize what's happening here. And like the president of El Salvador is so on board for this.
Yeah, I mean, he doesn't hide from that reputation, right? He embraces it. His Twitter for a while had world's coolest dictator in the bio.
I don't know if it still does. And both him and Trump have openly aligned themselves with quote-unquote nationalism and nationalists.
They're openly saying this. Trump said, dictator on day one, that wasn't just a rhetorical device.
That was literal. This is what he's doing.
The El Salvador president told Trump,

you have 350 million people to liberate.

But to liberate 350 million people,

you have to imprison some.

And he followed that up by saying that he is

eager to help with that.

In fact, Mr. President,

you have

350 million people to liberate.

But to liberate

350 million people, you have to imprison some. That's the way it works, right? You cannot just free the criminals and think crime is going to go down magically.
You have to imprison them so you can liberate 350 million Americans that are asking for the end of crime and the end of terrorists. Many can be done.
I mean, you're doing it already. So I'm really happy to be here, honored, and eager to help.
This whole, like, liberation through imprisonment thing is elementary school stuff here. You don't have to have a PhD in the history of the 1930s to have someone tell you that, like, liberation of the chosen nation by purging of the undesirables is fascist shit.
But, like, I'm here with one if that's what you need you know like this is textbook stuff like garrison's saying like this is not debatable like i know we spent the last four years debating is trump a fascist or not i don't think that matters hugely right like this is a fascist thing it's so much more disturbing that now according to like polls like half around half the population maybe a little bit less just agree with the current way that deportations are happening and trump's immigration policy like on a completely like flat basis and if you spend any time on on x the everything app watching videos of the of these press conferences it's full of of people just like cheering this on completely like completely blankly i think that's a very skewed sample of people who totally paid for elon musk's of course of course but like the number of people yeah it's real humans saying like these are real people who just just completely completely blankly think this is a this is this is a net good and like this is those people are unreachable you cannot come back from that like you is there no coming back from that. If you believe that the way deportations are currently happening is fair, just, and right, I cannot understand you as a human anymore.
That is so divorced and alien. You've gone past the point of no return, right? Liberals who shield their eyes from the whores at the border, I don't agree with that but in some ways i can like understand it the open like cheering on of this right is like a whole is a whole other level yeah it's not like i can't bear to see i'm gonna ignore it because it'll cause me to confront the no the contradictions it's i'm seeing it i'm watching it and i think it's fucking great the last thing i'm gonna i'm gonna play here a cnn reporter asked trump if he would obey a Supreme Court order to return someone to the United States.
Instead of answering this question, Trump attacked the reporter and complained about how she wasn't praising him for deporting criminals. Well, Mr.
President, you said that if the Supreme Court said someone needed to be returned, that you would abide by that. You said that on Air Force One just a few days ago.
And they said that it must be facilitated.

Why don't you just say, isn't it wonderful that we're keeping criminals out of our country?

Why can't you just say that?

Why do you go over and over?

And that's why nobody watches you anymore.

You know, you have no credibility.

Please go ahead.

Yeah.

Mad.

Very textbook authoritarian, like blanket stuff. There's nothing to commentate about that.
It just is what it is. I guess we do have some breaking news because we're recording this on Tuesday.
James, do you want to, in possibly five minutes or less, fill us in about the update from the district court on Garcia's case, since it was sent back to the district court from the Supreme Court last week regarding his possible facilitated return to the United States? Right, so much of this has hinged over what facilitate means, right? Like they found a legal concept that they can argue ad nauseum, and in this case it's the word facilitate. The DOJ didn't present any new information today but we see that like there's some hopeful things from district court judge and then it kind of all goes up in flames but uh i think chinis is x-i-n-i-s is how the name is spelled i believe it's chinis i said that every day that he's there is a day of further irreparable harm and then she talks about about the process being at the roots of the Constitution, right? She's ordered for like two weeks more of discovery, which is going to mean that both sides have more time to repair their cases, right? She wants people to testify in front of the court.
So the administration has argued that facilitating his return would consist of them allowing him to enter the United States

if Bukele released him

and possibly providing a flight

for that to happen,

but not, crucially,

ensuring his release from Secod, right?

And so anything else

subsequent to that doesn't matter.

Junis said that, like,

their interpretation of the word

flies in the face

of the plain meaning of the word.

A quote,

when a wrongfully removed individual is, and then I'm adding to the quote here, I guess, or context. She means when a wrongfully removed individual is taken outside the US, it's not so cut and dried that all you have to do is remove obstacles domestically.
She also said, quote, to the Department of Justice here, you made your jurisdictional arguments, you made your venue arguments, you made your arguments on the merits. You lost.
This is now about the scope of the remedy, right? This is a case that Miller is claiming they won. That's pretty unequivocal for a justice.
However, she does not seem to think that it is within her power to request his return from El Salvador. So she's calling for things to move quickly, right? They want to conduct depositions by the 23rd of April.
She said, quote, cancel vacations, cancel other appointments. I'm usually pretty good about it.
Not this time. I'm going to be available if you need to do it odd hours or weekends.
That's what I'm talking about. Anything short of a judge saying you have to go to Secot, remove him from the cell, put the plane and bring him back to america it's going to be interpreted by the trump administration to mean that they don't have to do that yeah they're going to weasel their way around it the same way you heard steven miller weasel his way around every question and with uh with with truth being used as a as a flexible medium yeah to shape a sculpture of their choosing.

And like,

they've done that,

the word facilitate,

I think most people who are first language

English speakers

have a fairly good grasp

of what that means.

And it doesn't mean like

remove barriers domestically.

That's what they've gone for.

The only way

that he is getting out

is a majority

Supreme Court decision

that is extremely explicit

that directs

the Trump administration to go to El Salvador and remove him from that prison. I haven't seen anything to indicate that we're getting that anytime soon.
And as the judge said, every day he's there, irreparable harm is done to him. And that's where we're at right now, with people arguing over the definition of a word as hundreds of people are locked up, having done nothing wrong in a giant torture prison.
And this is not the only person who we believe was quote-unquote mistakenly sent. There's reporting today coming out of Documented New York.
Yeah, good outlet, by the way. A father of a 19-year-old legal immigrant from Brooklyn.
This 19-year-old with no tattoos was kidnapped off the streets of New York. The quote from his father reads, The officers grabbed him and two other boys right at the entrance to our building.
One said, No, he's not the one. Like they were looking for someone else.
One officer, to be clear. Correct.
Yeah. But the other officer said, take him anyway, unquote.
And now this father, exactly a month later, is still looking for his missing son who has disappeared into an El Salvador torture prison. Yeah, Jesus.
Like I've said before on this show, one of the things that i learned in the darien gap was how much people can care about their kids and like this shit that i saw people do to ensure their kids have a better life like broke my heart in a way that war hasn't that like anything else i've seen in my life hasn't and it's like honestly really hard for me to hear stuff like that and and like not react just being really sad or really angry like it's fucking brutal things are looking a lot more grim in my mind than they were when we recorded that should you leave the united states episode i i still think the things i i said there i i stand by and I stand by the only recommendation I have is to create

options for yourself. And I think those options should be created as soon as possible, especially if your citizenship is a topic of debate, according to the United States government.
But even that will not keep you safe, as we've talked about today. And your options include creating networks to take care of one another right like the things that will probably affect more of you than direct state violence are economic downturns are recessions right things like this like those are things that you can take care of one another through and like you should plan to do that too you should you should think about how you're going to pay your bills how you're going to feed each other how you're going to take care of your medical needs uh because i don't think that the world is going to want to keep doing business with a country that that acts like this and both economically and in terms of its conduct towards migrants so So like your plans don't have to be to leave.

Like your plans should also include what to do if things get really bad,

like in an economic sense.

I'm not going to tell you what that means,

but it's all the stuff we've already talked about, right?

It's mutual aid.

It's all the basic preparedness stuff that is not as big and scary

as leaving the country, but is nonetheless like vital.

Thank you. basic preparedness stuff that is not as big and and scary as leaving the country but is nonetheless like vital we will continue to report on the garcia case other court cases regarding these 300 people rendition to el salvador and secot in the next few weeks yeah just finish up, as things continue to get worse,

people keep reaching out to us,

which we appreciate.

If you would like to,

you can email us coolzonetips

at proton.me.

We will read it.

We might not get back to you.

Your email is not end-to-end encrypted

unless the email that you're sending from

is also encrypted.

But you can reach out to us there.

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Welcome to Zaked Appentier, a podcast increasingly well-named as the days go on. I am your host, Mia Wong, and it occurs to me over the course of the many, many, many, many, many Union episodes we've done in this podcast, we haven't really done much coverage of just straight up how do you do a strike.
So today we are going to be covering a pretty long running strike. We're going to say how many days it's been going.
It's unclear when this episode is going to come out. So who fucking knows how long it'll be when you hear it.
But yeah, with me to talk about this strike is Spencer Jordan, who is a rank and file member of the Urban Orr Workers Union. Spencer, welcome to the show.
Hey, thank you so much for having me. Yeah.
Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you about this. So this is, what day is it today? I should know this.
April 15th. As of April 15th, you've been on strike for 25 days.

Yeah, that's just about right. Yeah, it started on the 22nd of March.
We held our strike vote like a solid 12 days before we actually went out on the picket line and won that strike vote with 14 yeses, a single no, and I think four abstentions.

That's pretty good.

Yeah, so 93 93 of those voting voted yes yeah which good good ratios good ratios i think like typically you want at least like mid 70s if we're gonna do this kind of thing but you know as listeners to, hopefully understand by now, you can't just like call a strike and have it happen. You know, you have to do a whole bunch of organizing.
So I want to kind of start at the dynamics of the organizing of how this shop got going because this is a pretty small shop from the sounds of it. And yeah, so do you want to talk a bit about what the basic process of getting this organizing started was like and what the sort of like social mapping looked like and stuff like that? Yeah, so the organization process started around like a year and a half before we actually had our unionization vote, which was actually, we had the vote in March and we got our win on april 7th two years ago so we actually just had our union two-year birthday oh happy birthday but yeah so preceding that was like like i said about a year and a half of organizing that involved you know the typical thing of like one-on-one conversations with like all the staff making the, you know, color-coded spreadsheet and everything, which all of this was not my purview.
I'm a lot more involved now than I was at the start of the process. And I was approached by like one of our lead organizers really shortly after being hired just to kind of you know read the dipstick as to like my sentiments about it and whatnot i was pretty on board right away i mean you know like i'm from the bay area so there are there are only two types of people from the bay area we wouldn't be having one of them on the show yeah exactly exactly so i'm of the latter type so you know being pro-union is isn't uh isn't like a foreign thing to my background uh-huh uh-huh you know you don't look like a tech worker yeah especially like my family's from the midwest and everything so there's yeah my uh my aunt actually just learned that she was like a clerk working for the railroads back in the day when like railroad jobs were still like a big thing you could have anyways.
But yeah, so I had had my like own sort of like just observations of like, Whoa, like what's, what's going on in the workplace. Aside from like my own, just like predilection to thinking, you know, you know more worker power is better yeah also kind of seeing like some of the factors that precipitated it like for instance like when i was hired here i was hired in my interview uh it was the one of the owners and the manager of my department um my department being salvage and recycling department of Urbanor, which is kind of like not super public facing.

We go to the dump and like root around through the garbage like aionis or whatever to get stuff for the store. but uh that manager you know he was there in the interview and we got to uh

the portion where the owner

explained what at will employment is oh and she and she went so we're at will here so um sam well sam was my manager sam well how long have you been here 21 years he's there hands folded on the table yes

what at will means is

it could be tomorrow I could say

you know, Samwell, it's been a great 21 years. I really appreciate all the work you've done.
Today's your last day. Why would you say that? And he has to sit there and go, Jesus Christ.
And then she says, of course, likewise, tomorrow Samwell could come to me and say hey Mary Lou it's been 21 years I've enjoyed it I'm quitting so you know the sort of sword over his neck is being cast as somehow equal to him not being like indentured yes what are we doing here this also? This also just, I mean, like, you know, yeah, on the basic level. Yeah.
It's like, okay, your opponent, I guess they are your opponent. Your boss, your boss can just instantly fire you for any reason whatsoever for any amount of time.
And then also you could quit the job. And then secondarily, just as a management management tactic like i are you like trying to piss off your support and it's like what what i have never had a boss like just do that in a hiring meeting what yeah i mean have you have you worked at like a like a like a sort of, like mom and pop quote unquote business? Yeah.
I mean, that, that, that's probably, that's probably why, because I've usually had like larger E my shitty jobs have either been like government jobs or like, like larger companies. So there was less of the, like, I heard a line recently that I wish I remember where it was from.
It might be a line from Trek like one of the Ferengi rules treat your employees like family exploit them ruthlessly which I like that's a traditional line in business especially in small business it's no stranger here yeah that question of like wanting to piss off your subordinates or whatever it's no stranger here. Yeah, that question of wanting to piss off your subordinates or whatever.

I don't know if pissing off is necessarily the concern,

but ownership here, definitely,

I've gotten the impression that they enjoy showing their power.

And I've gotten the impression that the sort of uncertainty and my mom would call it jockeying for position that you have to do is a dynamic. I really can't say they, honestly, because the other owner, he hasn't been very active in the business since my hiring.
But at least Mary lou yeah tends to lean on that's kind of like the uh the special quality that you get with like a small business and organizing in a small workplace is that like you know you can see sort of in their public communications the way that like the zucks and bezoses and the rest of them feel about their employees. And, you know, you can get a sense of perhaps how they might act towards their employees if they like interacted with them on a daily basis.
But in a small business setting, you really get a keen view into how like the power of the employer mixes very readily with um a person's like predilection towards discipline predilection towards like personal what would you call it personal battling almost yeah well and and it's and it's also like it's inescapable in a way that it isn't with like you know if you're dealing with people who are you know you're at a larger company you're not dealing with the person like there's an old chinese expression that's like heaven is high and the emperor is far away so you know it's like you know like a lot of times you're dealing with okay yeah there is like you know your zuckerberg is there but he's's like, he never interacts with you. But with this, it's like, no,

the small business tyrant is right there

in your face all the time.

And all of the weird petty shit that they want to do

and all of this sort of like, you know,

and I would say this isn't just like a unique thing

of like small business owners,

like people in all positions,

like in all portions of like the class society

have in them kind of like the capacity for cruelty. And there's just just people like that but they don't normally have the ability to just do it to you directly in your face and that's yeah and that's like that's you know this is what you've been talking about is like yeah you have like these small business tyrants like every suddenly in in the same way that's like i don't know you're dealing with one of the random King Louys, and you're in the court,

and suddenly just like, the fact that this

guy doesn't like people going to the bathroom means

that everyone around him doesn't get

a shit, right? It's just like,

yeah, it's just this weird

deal. Yeah, no, exactly.
It's like,

it's actually an argument that

she's deployed

in her Reddit correspondence,

which has been

seemingly a pretty active part of

her spare time that she's not spending

I'm just kidding. she's deployed in her Reddit correspondence, which has been seemingly a pretty active part of her spare time that she's not spending at the bargaining table with us, made this comparison of like, this isn't a question about oligarchs or whatever.
And it's true. The small businessman is not an oligarch, but the small business is a microcosm of the larger capitalist social order.
And while the small business man might not have the scope of power of the oligarch or the actual capital resources of an oligarch, the behavior certainly rhymes, at least.

Yeah, and again, it's like, it's a lot of it is about, it's just how much power you have access to, right? Like, lots of people can be like this, but only the few, the proud, the small business tiger get to do it. Yeah, totally.
And, you know, ultimately, the employer, wherever they are, they're in this privileged position of being able to, you know, you spend most people more than like a third of your life at work. Yeah.
The employer has this unique power to dictate what that third of your life looks like. You know? Yeah.
We talk about, I mean, shit, we don't. People are not so much talking about democracy writ large in the U.S.
in the same way now that they used to.

But, you know, you talk about this idea of living in a democracy, but democracy ends at the shop door. Yeah, and the kind of power that these people have is something that these people get to control when you can go to the bathroom, what clothes you wear, literally what you can do, what you can say at any given time.
If you employed the exact level of control that your boss has over you on a state, it would be a totalitarian state. And yet, everyone seems to think that this think that this is sort of like you know and this is an argument i've been making about like trump is that like yeah this is this is this is what sort of trump and elon and like that whole cadre and and you know and if you want to go into the sort of ideologues behind it too this is what people like peter thiel want when when they say run the government like a business what they mean mean is that they want to import the pure tyranny of the workplace and expand it into the entire political system so that their pure totalitarian corporate rule can't be challenged.
Yeah, I mean, wasn't it Mussolini who coined the term the corporate state? Probably, although it would not surprise me if it was like some other fascist theorist and Mussolini just started saying it because, yeah. But yeah, like that's, you know, that's a substantive thing here.
And what this also means is that like, even in ways that are sort of hard to see, like a fight over democracy in the workplace, right, is a part is a part of the larger struggle against all of all the thing that's happening. Because if, you know, if we're going to survive this and if we're going to make sure that we don't all live in a world where like, if you say the wrong thing, you can be sent to a prison camp.
Democracy, if you want this to survive, is going to have to march into like into the lair of the beast. It is going to have to go into the source of this tyranny itself, which is the workplace, and it's going to have to crush it there.

Yeah, I mean, you said it very aptly there, like the corporate structure mirrors the totalitarian structure. And, you know, not only does fighting the corporate structure at the level of labor make sense in that, right, labor is what enables the flow of capital that sustains the totalitarian state.
But also, like you said, you're addressing the structure in its, I don't know i almost think of it as like the you know like grendel's mother in the fan or whatever and like like you know the the the authoritarian thing is like uh is like grendel maybe and like grendel's mother is like this capitalist hierarchical structure. Yeah.

You know, you take it on with an insistence on workplace democracy as kind of Libby as that sounds.

Okay, speaking of capitalist totalitarianism, here are the ads that we are required to run by our corporate overlords.

Oh, beautiful, beautiful.

Let's hear them. And we are back.
So let's get back a little bit towards the more concrete parts of the union, although I do have more to say eventually at some point about the way that sort of labor liberalism co-opted democracy in the workplace from like, you know, the old sort of like anarchist idea of workers control. right but okay so one thing i wanted to talk about before we sort of get into the more formal stuff

about uh about the strike is i was i'm really interested to hear you talk about what the process of kind of onboarding you to get more involved in the union is.

because this is something that like okay every functional

union wants to do this

like if your union is not trying

to bring people like

its members like more to get more

involved in the union and become more of the people

becoming like core organizers and becoming

you know like union is not trying to bring people like its members like more to get more involved in the

union and become more of the people becoming like core organizers and becoming you know like the people who are doing your bargaining people are doing anything like your union is there's weird shit about it and you should probably like be looking into that but it's pretty hard so yeah can you talk a bit about the process of like how you were brought in and what sort of worked and what didn't?

Well, I think ultimately like the easiest thing is a sort of ramping up degree of like responsibility within the organization right so like at the start i would come to some of the meetings i would miss some of them i would be oh, I'm fucking so busy with whatever is going on in my life. And, you know, I was supportive and sort of involved, but, you know, I wasn't like, I mean, I certainly wasn't doing things like this.
And, you know, eventually, one, we kind of persisted as a union over a longer period of time the necessity of involvement became more like obvious to me right and that's that's a hard ask you know like you're organizing you want momentum and you want yeah you want to be able to change your conditions for the better as soon as possible. Yeah.
And with Urbanor, you know, lots of workplaces that need unionization have high turnover, right? And Urbanor is no different. And so I saw, you know, like some of the more committed elements of the bargaining unit be fired or quit or whatever.
And, you know, they would be replaced with other people and you have to begin the work of organizing over again. And with some of them, you succeed with something you don't.
You know, you have different dynamics. I feel like the hiring procedures may have changed a little bit after one election.
But, you I can't say that for certain. So, the sort of necessity of keeping that flame going, especially after we had won the election, we were in contract bargaining for a long period of time, made me feel like a sort of sense of, I need to be more active in this because like this is an important

struggle and like yeah i see our like main organizers taking on like a fuckload of work and like needing more voices at the table needing more more uh needing more people to be more involved and so like i you know volunteered to like run for treasurer i was the only candidate yeah um but theoretically i could have been voted down they could have been like i don't know about spencer um and you know like ended up having like a little bit more direct responsibilities like i was like receiving some of the donations to our strike

fund once we started fundraising for the strike and keep track of those and you know put them in a special bank account and then eventually take that money get it to like the the iww branch uh hand it hand a big check to dino um that kind of stuff and just like having like little things to be doing

like Spurs involvement

other people you know

they That kind of stuff. And just having little things to be doing, like Spurs involvement.
Other people became responsible for parts of social media outreach, graphics, stuff like that. and also giving people the opportunity

to leverage

their individual connections

within the workplace, because every workplace is

cliques and groups and subgroups and all that. Um, to leverage those connections in like service of bettering everyone's conditions.
So like to a certain degree, I've, I've been like important as like an envoy to my particular department. Cause it's our job takes us away from the job site or like

from like the main the main work site often and stuff like that so there's less of a direct avenue for communication there yeah so i can say that's my experience yeah as far as organizing goes like i'm i'm easy you know i was already i was already believing in it yeah and like there are others that it's been harder.

I will say

though that the Yeah. extremely cohering force yeah which isn't to say that like necessarily you want your unionization to come to a strike but perhaps like raising a sort of consciousness of like the fact that like you are ultimately like in conflict with the boss yeah the boss doesn't want you to unionize the boss doesn't want you to force concessions out of them and that like as a union we are taking on this like responsibility to look after each other's interests yeah and to like support each other like tangibly in terms like what we do and also intangibly in terms of like the kind of conversations we have around like morale planning and stuff like that you know to succeed together i think those are like really potent cohering

forces and you know it helps to have a good uh a good opponent you know the boss is the best organizer and at urban or it's you don't go along without coming head to head with like the with conflict with ownership

or with like ownership

through the mediator of management. Like, although like support for the union might be divided a bit at the workplace.
One thing that's pretty universal is like frustration with ownership. Yeah.
So, okay.

Speaking of a frustration with ownership, it is time for us to go to ads one last time.

Oh, beautiful.

But then after we come back, strike, strike, strike, strike, strike, strike, strike. Just after this message.
Oh, God. Okay, we are back from a bunch of people who almost assuredly do not want you to go on strike, but...
Yeah, so let's get into the process of how you actually organize a strike. Yeah, let's start from just like the very beginning.
What are the kinds of things that were happening that, you know, made people think that you needed to do this in the first place? So the strike itself is a result, specifically like, this is a ULP strike. So it's in response to something that falls under the category of unfair labor practice, according to the National Labor Relations Act.
And it's, you know, backed up by charges filed with the board, as opposed to like what's called an economic strike, which is a strike that is specifically about economic issues of the workplace. So the specific ULP that's being cited for our strike is bad faith bargaining

and for us with what that's looked like is two years of completely stalled negotiations where yeah we are basically being faced with a take it or leave it offer of the status quo in the vast majority of our proposals.

Yeah.

Bargaining is very, very slow.

And... status quo in the vast majority of our proposals.
Yeah.

Bargaining is very, very slow, and ownership has held tightly to the offense at us having unionized it all, which to my understanding is pretty typical of small workplaces. ownership takes it very personally

and that

personal feeling of

betrayal or whatever becomes like a stumbling block in the negotiation process. I know that was the case with Moe's, another bookshop in Berkeley that also unionized with the IWW.
Hell yeah. So, you know, we've had our whole proposal on ownership's table for a year and a half now.

We had started with bargaining proposal by proposal.

They said, well, how can we possibly agree to any of this without understanding the full context, especially the economic context?

Oh, my God.

And so we gave them a full proposal and they said, oh, my God, how do you expect us to read all of this in time to bargain this is way too much how are we going to evaluate this all oh my god we gotta do a proposal by proposal um so it's been really unclear to us if ownership has even actually like read the entirety of our collective bargaining agreement that we put on their desk yeah i know that in the past lawyers have the lawyers have said things like oh my my eyes glazed over when i read your email so i missed such and such part of it it's literally your job yeah yes you have one job yeah you would think like a lawyer would have like a little bit more than beyond beyond like a tweet, tweet sized reading capacity. But well, they give anyone law degrees.
Yeah. Or like ownership saying like, well, I just thought it was so ridiculous.
I didn't feel the need to read all of it. Stuff like that.
Oh my God. So these readers, bad faith bargaining.
Yeah, that's bad by like the standards of like, normal it takes two years to do a fucking contract because they're just not doing shit. Like, good lord.
Usually, in those long contract negotiations, by two years at least there's, like, been some progress. Yeah, they've read the proposals.
Like, yes, okay, will your boss show up to your meeting an hour and a half late because they didn't bother to look through the proposals until literally right at the time the meeting was going to start? Yes, but will they have done it? Usually, yes! Mm-hmm. Oh, God.
In fact, in the sort of company propaganda where they're claiming that this bad faith bargaining charge has no grounds, They're like, ownership has come to 25 to 30 bargaining sessions. Neglecting to mention, there have been somewhere in the range of 50 to 60.
They just showed up to half of them? Maybe they've showed up to more than half. I don't want to be libelous.
But still, at the point at which you are failing to show up for any bargaining session, I think you can... Look, I have always advocated that if management doesn't show up to a bargaining session, you should just be allowed to take the company because clearly they're not serious about it.
But... Hey, you know, they've been talking about a worker co-op for 20 years.
Non-reformist reforms. But yeah but yeah so those kind of things and then like finally like one of the bigger precipitating factors is like we've been trying to bargain over economics ownership has implied a lot of times that they cannot afford to pay what we're asking they say it'll ruin the company they say the company will go bankrupt they say it's unsustainable they say this and that and then when they get to the table they say we have never and will never argue inability to pay because the thing is is that to say inability to pay right it uh obligates you to furnish information and prove that and they for whatever reason do not, do not want to furnish financial information.

So these have been some of the sticking points and that's why we've been out on the picket

line for about three weeks now.

Still waiting for them to come to the table.

God damn it.

So, okay, let's talk about the process of how the discussions went for doing this.

What did those sort of look like and how did you sort of, you know, just plan this thing out? Well, I guess the process towards like deciding that it needed to come to a strike was like you know, that is a sort of thing that builds over a long period of time. You know, you see ownership doing bad faith bargaining, you go what more conciliatory approaches can we take first? You we try this? Can we try offering this? Can we try this display of good faith? Can we offer this compromise? One of the things that was a big part was of some of the, not exactly contract-related discussions, but ownership has been talking for a long time about a co-op transition that has never happened.

You know, it's been 20 years.

And, you know,

now that we've unionized,

they're like,

our people who we were talking to

about doing the co-op thing,

they don't work with unions.

And so the only way

that there were going to be a co-op

is if the union goes away.

And so in response to that,

we said, well,

we're totally open to a transition

to a co-op that involves the union.

And here is such and such organization.

It was our lead negotiator

Thank you. And in response to that, we said, well, we're totally open to a transition to a co-op that involves the union, and here is such and such organization.
It was our lead negotiator who actually provided me information somewhere, the name of the organization, but here's such and such organization that actually specifically deals with union co-op workplace transitions, was not received with interest. so it's like you master this catalog of bad faith bargaining and you end up in your strategy discussions with the whole unit testing the wires of like when is too much what's our red line that we need to take more direct action and what that began with for us was first well if we're gonna have a if we're going to have a strike, we need funds for it.
The IWW is an organization that affords its unions a lot of freedom and a lot of mutual support and solidarity is not an organization with a huge amount of money. And so we did start with trying to get a sense of what we could get from the branches reserve.
And we moved on from that to how we were going to fundraise and stuff like that. So we held informational pickets that had donations.
We sold shirts, posters, stuff like that. We held like a big strike fundraiser.
Hell yeah. I think something around like a month in advance of our, or it was maybe like a month and a half in advance of our, of our strike.
We also gave management like a courtesy notice about, so they could pass it on to ownership,

saying, hey, we've started a fundraising for a strike,

in the hopes that being aware that we're taking active preparations to go on strike would facilitate bargaining.

Sometimes it works.

I've seen it before.

I've seen it before.

Sometimes it works.

Yeah.

And sometimes, you know, sometimes you end up on a podcast talking about how it didn't you never know until you try yeah you never know um but we did yeah we did give them that sort of uh early warning and our readiness to strike kind of like depended then on like where we were at in the fundraising process yeah so we continue soliciting donations reaching out to various organizations in the area that are you know pro labor you know we've talked to like dsa and whatever because you know they have their like uh workplace organizing committee yeah i think it's it's EWOC. Yeah.
Yeah.

And various other, you know,

yeah, organizations that are pro-labor.

And once we got to a point where we felt like we were reasonably,

like, prepared to sustain

a open-ended strike,

because that's what we're doing.

This is a strike with no set end date.

Then we announced our intention to hold a strike vote.

We held our strike vote.

Strike vote passes.

The ownership was made aware at the bargaining session

before the strike vote.

So it was like the Monday before the strike vote,

which is on, I think, I guess Saturday.

So in total, it was like around maybe like two weeks and change

that they knew like definite possibility. Pass the strike vote.
12 days later, the strike begins with unfortunately no bargaining in between. Good Lord.
Yeah. The whole way you hope that they'll come to the table.
You hope that they will come to their senses. Yeah.
Take it. Take the risk seriously.
Take the the risk seriously and unfortunately this is not what's happened here yeah and i think part of that is maybe an age thing here ownership is is in their 80s and they've pretty consistently held the view that like the union is like a bunch young people who don't know what the hell they're talking about you know even though

like

I that like the union is like a bunch of young people who don't know what the hell they're talking about you know even though like the age range of our union spans the age range of the workplace we've got people in their 50s and 40s and 30s and 20s you know which is of course the problematic group the young radicals yeah so there's there's been this sort of patronizing attitude that i think has resulted in like a real strategic failure on their part to seriously prepare for the strike or you know bargain to avoid it yeah one more fundraising thing that i just i just want to mention this for people if you're if you're trying to fundraise for your own thing something that's actually we've had a lot of success with up in portland is getting bands to do benefit shows so like because it's portland right like the local hardcore scene has a lot of bands that you know are just supportive of stuff and we've done this for a whole bunch of different causes and this is this this this can also be a good way to just sort of do fundraising things that are fun and also raise morale because yeah you're doing the show yeah i was i was i was hoping to have that be more of a thing with our fundraiser but uh yeah it can be hard to organize sometimes yeah the people i knew were didn't get quite the response i was hoping from the community. If you are a hardcore band, if you are a band in Berkeley,

there's still time i believe in you that is that is totally a uh a good option what we did but we ended up doing there was music but it's also like one of our organizers is really into cooking you like did like a barbecue thing yeah uh sold, stuff like that. And had a raffle.
A raffle is a great way to fundraise. For us, we like raffled off like stuff we have.
But honestly, you can even do like a straight monetary raffle is still a great fundraising tool, you know, where everyone puts in money. The winner, the top three winners or whatever get a certain percentage of the total pool and the rest of the pool is to the cause.
It's really simple, really effective. It's not good, but there is a reason why a whole bunch of state education budgets are funded by the lottery.
It does work. The people love to gamble.
Much better. Mia says, having turned off her lunch, her path of exile to lunch break to come to this interview.
It's pretty such cases. Okay, so let's, speaking of, I guess this is something that's been tied into all of what we've been saying been saying here, but yeah, let's talk about, you know, sort of maintaining the strike when it starts and sort of, yeah, what have been the processes of like keeping morale up and keeping people engaged and yeah.

yeah i mean definitely when you go into a strike you want to go in with a militant core group you want to basically be sure that everyone is committed to holding the line

until a collective decision is made. Otherwise, you don't want people like peeling off.
That's really bad PR for your strike. Yeah.
Yeah. And like the bosses will grab on that.
So like, for instance, like, you know, we have some people who are respecting our picket line, but chose not to pick it with us, which is fine, as far as I'm concerned. But the issue with that PR-wise is that now the bosses are saying, and they're like tallying up of who's working and who's not working, they're counting them as working.
You know, they're like, oh, there's only whatever. They've been saying eight people.
I think it's more like nine or ten who are on the picket line but the rest is the rest of the employees are working they count themselves as employees in that count of course um and they count these these people who are not crossing the picket line but not on it also as among that that count of the rest of the employees that are working what What? And they've had the opportunity to really inflate that count

because in a sort of, you know, classic move,

really all the moves are classic.

You know, you read your organizing books and you're like,

can it happen here?

And it does.

So like, we got a lot of new assistant managers

after we won our election.

So right now, like the composition of the workplace, right?

Got 34 people, 15 managers.

I really wonder when we're going to see the day where you have companies that have six, like, non-managers and 55 managers.

Like, I feel like we're not that far out.

Well, we're leading the charge here.

We have a department that's two people, a manager and assistant manager's the manager managing oh god so yeah you know they're they've they've had these particular angles to you know sort of do their propaganda from and i mean honestly i think a big part of uh again the boss is the best organizer and like a thing that keeps you committed on the line is like reading all this bullshit they say about you and knowing otherwise and being able to talk to each other and be like have you seen this isn't this crazy like what the hell yeah um also you know is uh this is where the sort of like seeds of organizing all the way that you start all the way back at the beginning of your union campaign become you know they show themselves is like really important again because like the start right anyone will tell you is just like getting to know people like being like you know being on like a hey how's it going kind of level you know and having like a personal rapport with the people you're on the line with is vital just in the sense that you know obviously like you know each other you're sort of friends you're gonna be more likely to stick up for each other but also like you're out there nine hours walking in a circle with these people yeah you know you gotta you gotta have positive strong relationships with them you want to be able to have the kind of rapport where like you can talk to people about like what they're feeling anxious about you know like where they're worried in like the strike strategy like you know you need to have that like trust between each other that you can have like an open dialogue about how it feels to be on the picket line because you're not going to maintain morale if ever if like everyone feels like they've got things they gotta hold in about it like yeah there's room to be like shit like are they gonna close the business like and what are we gonna do and like sort of like talk through that from a from a place beyond like you know like what you're not letting speak into a crowd of a million people or whatever you're just like two people yeah going through a stressful experience together yeah yeah and you have to actually grapple with that in a way that's not the sort of like weird corporate like we got to improve morale things like that's not what that means it means like you know it means actually grappling and engaging with people's feelings and how and what they need in a moment and yeah and their fears and their concerns and yeah you can't just sort of brush them aside you have to actually grapple with it because that's that's that's what doing this stuff means yeah exactly having like these authentic conversations with people because like like yeah that's like a totally great point you bring up there. The HR speak, that's the boss's tool.
And it's the boss's tool to divide and create disunity. So you can't lean on that model for morale within your union.
It just creates distrust. Yeah, and I've seen that happen with unions where it's like you guys did not do a good job of like talking to people about this and like yeah and it can be really disruptive to attempts to do this but on the other hand if you do it well it's like it's the most powerful single thing that you can like possibly do which like forging relationships that are based on like the actual experience of having gone through struggle together and having had to like literally had to face your feels on the picket line yeah yeah like ideally you know the union is a is a community and it's a community of interest right it's a community of of work interest but it is ideally a community it's not a family right and it's uh certainly not not not a family in the way that the bosses will tell you the workplaces but it is a community and and it's a community in the way that that an employer's idea of a community is fundamentally like incompatible with yeah there's this vicki osterwalt line that I think about a lot from her book in Defensive Looting where she talks about how I feel like it was Ferguson that this is about where like the police chief is talking about the damage to the community and they keep saying our Walmart.
It's like going into a Walmart and buying something is not a community right like you know they like that like those those kind of relations are not actual community relations but when the bosses talk about community that's what they mean they mean like like our collective community walmart they mean preserving the relation of extraction that they have yeah and we are you know using the same word and reading something literally so radically different than that and you have to make sure in your in in in the way that you're acting that that radically different meaning is clear yeah and yeah it's funny you bring that up because that's just bringing to mind like you see the difference in those attitudes like when you're out there on the picket line like interact because you know our picket line a really pivotal part of it because there are so many managers in there that they're able to maintain this like skeleton crew is the community outreach part is like talking to every single person who's coming up and being like hey how's it going i've been on strike such such and such long this is what's up please don't cross our picket line um and you know i've noticed you get this real funny situation where there are the people who are like i've shopped here for 20 years you don't know what the hell you're talking about i don't know you and i have to be like well i'm normally at the dump getting the merchandise you're buying but um and who attribute the entire attribute everything they like about the business to the bosses

and then there's the other part of the community

that is coming by frequently

and like hanging out with us on the picket line

you know I pet the dog and we chat about what's going on

they're like how's the strike going?

they're like you know I know it's been rough on you guys for such and such

and like these people are our shoppers too too right but they like yeah they it highlights that like sort of divide in like what you think of as like can you give your responsibility to your community because like these people also love urban or come here all the time but they recognize that like it's the workers at urban or that create it every day. Yeah.
And it is a company that was founded by an individual. The individual still owns it.
He did found it with his labor and all that. He did the labor back when it was only a few people and stuff like that.
But ultimately, a business, like any sort of social phenomenon has to be

constantly recreated in order to exist yeah yeah and like the people who do the work that makes it more than just like a room full of garbage are us and yeah a lot of a lot of the like regulars recognize that and a lot of them uh you know flip me off as they cross the big line whatever I think this is a good place to sort of

start coming to a close of on this is a fundamental question about what the nature of our society is going to be right like is is the fundamental nature of our society that a community is a bunch of people who buy things and a bunch of people who make money from you buying things and to make money from the labor that you do, right? And then take credit for the labor and take credit both financially for the labor and in public for the labor, right?

is that going to is our society going to just be a bunch of pure commercial relations where a bunch of people get very very rich off the waiver of everyone else in the society

and get to rule them as sort of like these petty tyrant kings or is it going to be a society where the people who produce the society control it right and that society is a democratic society is an egalitarian society is a society where people are free to do the things that they need to do and people are free to you know have a life where they can fucking pay for their groceries right we're like you know where they're where they're not forced to go to the market for all the things that they need to to live where you can survive in a way that doesn't involve like subjecting yourself to just a tyrant for like a third of your life yeah where where like the place that you spend like a third yeah a third of your life is a place where you actually have like dignity yeah dignity and freedom and where you know where you don't have to go home after at the end of the day of making your boss money worrying about whether you're going to be able to eat or not and it's and that's also a society that does not involve again on at the very highest level, you getting thrown into prison camps because your god king hates you.

And we can do this.

We can live in that society.

Yeah.

The demands are not that crazy. No.
And that's like the thing that we've encountered over and over again is this constant push and pull of people saying that like the expectation of bettering our conditions whether it be like us on the picket line just trying to get like a stable wage and just cause employment and stuff like that or whether it be you know those larger societal changes that like you're talking about you just butt up against these people who who have such like a paucity of imagination about what's possible yeah and like about the legitimacy of trying to make something better the legitimacy of saying sure i can subsist on this but you know there's so much more that's possible yeah so i maintain that there's something more that's possible yeah i i i think it's possible too and that that's that's That's the thing about this world, right? Is that our enemies have figured out that it actually can change. That's why they have to fight so hard.
Yeah, but the thing is, the fact that it can change for the worse also means that it can change for the better. Oh, beautiful stuff.
Okay, where can people find your strike fund? We'll also put it in the description. Oh, yeah, great.
So it's on GoFundMe. i'll send you the link and it'll be down there um but also people can hit up our union instagram it's uh urban or workers with underscores between the words urban underscore or underscore worker that we've got the link to like strike fund and also hey if you're if you're in in Berkeley you can sign up for a picket shift and you get to enjoy

listening to me discourse for nine hours

instead of one.

It's great. It's fun.
Pickets are cool

and good. If you haven't been on one you should go on one.

They're great. They're great.

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This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis.
Today, I'm joined by Dr. James Stout and Reverend Dr.
The Honorable Robert Evans. That's right.
That's right. Reverend Dr.
The Honorable Evans, who is currently hacking up a fucking lung. No idea why.
I feel otherwise fine. Well, I'm sure you feel otherwise fine due to this great week in American history we've all been through together.
Yeah. Which started with a meeting between President Donald Trump and El Salvador President Bukele on Monday morning in the Oval Office, where they discussed the possibility of the United States helping to build more CECOT-style facilities to disappear U.S.
citizens and immigrants that the Trump administration deems criminals or terrorists. Yes.
I mean, I keep getting asked, is this the panic moment? And I don't think panic is particularly productive, but like, yeah, this is the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is happening.
The president's talking about sending citizens overseas to a concentration camp. Honestly, I'm on the verge of thinking it's okay to call it a death camp but we just don't have the data yet there's some very concerning satellite shots that appear to show piles of bodies yeah that's from march of 2024 yeah yeah i mean yeah but it won't have gotten better no no yeah yeah so i don't i don't know this is this is about as bad as it could be folks folks.
We're in it. During that meeting, both President Bukele and the Trump cabinet argued that there is simply no way for people sent to CECOD to ever return to the United States.
Coming up with a whole bunch of absurd reasons for why that is impossible due to foreign policy and safety of both El Salvador and the United States. Me and James did a whole episode on this earlier this week that you can check out on the It Could Happen Here feed.
I'm going to move on to an update on the student crackdowns. So ICE has targeted a third green card holder for deportation based on pro-Palestinian activism.

Mohsen Maroui is a Palestinian from the West Bank who has lived in the U.S. with a green card for a decade.
While studying philosophy at Colombia, he co-founded the Colombia-Palestinian Student Union in 2023 with Mahmoud Khalil. Marui was arrested by ICE last Monday, April 14th, at his citizenship interview in Vermont.
Now, after Khalil was arrested last month, Marawi went into hiding, and he suspected that this citizenship interview could be a honeypot, but decided to go anyway after waiting a long time for this appointment. His lawyers quickly filed a habeas corpus petition arguing his detention is unlawful and violates the First Amendment.
A U.S. district judge issued an order hours later that he was, quote, not to be removed from the United States or moved out of the territory of the district of Vermont pending further order of this court.
Zionist doxing accounts targeted Marawi in recent weeks. I'm going to play, actually, this two-minute clip of Marawi talking.
This is from December of 2023 on the program 60 Minutes. What was your initial reaction when you heard about the Hamas attack on October 7th? I could not believe what my eyes were seeing, where I see Hamas members getting into settlements and so on.
But also the first moment I saw that, I put my hand on my heart. And I started praying, knowing that there will be a huge level of revenge from the Israelis.
And I was praying that this will not be the result, because it would be disastrous. The night of the rally, I believe someone in the crowd said something very anti-Jewish, not just anti-Israeli, but anti-Jewish.
Yes, this was a walkout on November 9th. And a person who is not affiliated with Colombia, we've never seen him, we don't know who is this guy, comes down the stairs yelling, death to Jews.
I was shocked and I walked directly to the person and I told him, you don't represent us because this is not something that we agree with. And directly what I've done, I took the megaphone and I gave a speech and I said, we here are conscious, educated students and we know how to separate right from wrong.
And what this guy has said is wrong. What this guy has said is clearly anti-Semitic against Jews.

Anti-Semitic.

To be anti-Semitic is unjust. Is unjust.
And the fight for the freedom of Palestine and the fight against anti-Semitism go hand in hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Yeah, I mean, he said everything that would make him a respectable protester, at least based on like what the fucking dims were saying last year.
Like there's nothing in there that's pro-Hamas. There's nothing in anything I can tell this guy has done that is advocacy towards terrorism.
But obviously that's not what matters. What matters is they have the ability to get him out and they're doing that because of his speech.
He took a step back from protests in March of 2024 during the second wave of student protests at Columbia. I believe he didn't, isn't he like a member of the University Buddhist Club? Yes, part of why he took a step back was to focus on his role in the Buddhist Club for I think the past two years he has been participating in that on campus.
Yeah. He told CBS News the day before he was detained, quote, if my story will become another story for the struggle to have justice and democracy in this country, let it be, unquote.
Like other students who've been targeted and arrested, he's not been charged or accused of any crime, but the State Department has deemed him a threat to foreign policy. Yeah, hard to see how, but I think as we're seeing it, that doesn't really matter.
Yeah. Now, last Friday, a Louisiana judge ruled in favor of the Trump administration to allow the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, upholding the government's argument that the rarely used Cold War era statute of the Immigration and Nationality Act allows for the Secretary of State to deport aliens that pose, quote, adverse foreign policy consequences.
The only, quote unquote, evidence presented in court was a two-page memo written by Mark Rubio that alleges that Khalil's presence in the country threatens, quote, U.S. policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States based on information provided by the DHS, ICE, and Homeland Security investigations regarding the participation and roles of Khalil in anti-Semitic protests and disruptive actions which foster a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States, unquote.
So there's no real evidence in this document. It is just Mark Rubio's opinion for two pages, and this is the only evidence that ever has been held in court that resulted in the judge ruling in the government's favor.
A lot of what we're seeing here is the natural conclusion to what was happening with like Vance last year talking about Haitian immigrants and admitting like, yeah, it's not literally true, but like it's true to how we feel. So it's like fine for us to spread this lie.
Like they're just declaring these people terrorists and even attempting to get evidence for that claim. They certainly have no need to.
I'm seeing coverage on Fox particularly that's just repeatedly framing this as the left is angry that a terrorist got deported. Right, yeah.
This is the mean, this is the same stuff that we saw at the RNC,

where they referred to students

as terrorists,

like just completely,

completely flatly.

Like every single person

at a college campus

who is upset about a genocide

or criticizes the state of Israel,

that person is a terrorist.

Lawyers for Khalil

have until April 23rd

to file an appeal

to halt the deportation,

and they plan to file

an asylum case on his behalf.

A separate habeas petition case

Thank you. Lawyers for Khalil have until April 23rd to file an appeal to halt the deportation, and they plan to file an asylum case on his behalf.
A separate habeas petition case is playing out in a New Jersey court. This week, NBC News reviewed over 100 pages of documents from the federal government and Khalil's legal team containing information about his immigration process, work experience, and activism.
These documents showed that the government used unverified tabloid reporting against Khalil and contained contradictory information. Yep.
So essentially using New York Post-style publications as a pretext for ICE to execute arrests against people who are green card holders, legal permanent residents of the United States. We're going to go on break and come back to talk about Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. Finally, finally, something fun.
All right, we're back. I'm going to robert evans for an update on everyone's favorite roadkill consumer yes yes rfk jr he's not just strapping the carcass of a dead whale to the head of his truck and driving down the highway now he is well kind of launching a genocidal campaign against people with autism.

Kind of doing a national eugenics program. Yeah.
Kind of calling a large group of people in this country useless eaters. Jesus Christ.
Yeah, fuck hell. And the gist of what's happening is they just had a new quote unquote study come out that looked at like apparently rising autism rates.
And again, I've covered this a lot. The reason why rates of autism are increasing, every credible scientist agrees, is because we're looking for it more.
And so we're finding more of it. And we have a broader understanding of what it is.
RFK Jr. is obsessed with the idea, the image of autism as a disease that is spreading due to an environmental contagion.
And he is trying to make the case that this is a calamity. He has promised, the most recent promise he made is that by September, the government will release exhaustive studies that will identify the environmental causes of autism.
And he made a statement, autism destroys families. More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children.
These are children who should not be suffering like this. He has called autism a preventable disease, which it is not.
While there is evidence that some of the factors that can be relevant in autism expressing are environmental, the vast majority of it seems to be genetic. There is no evidence, and there have been repeated studies studies that has anything to do with vaccines.
He's posited a couple of other theories as to what causes it, including mold and diet. And these are largely based on what are already kind of quack, both autism treatments and quack autism causes that are popular within the biomedical movement, the experimental biomedical movement, which is the fake autism medical industrial complex that we covered recently on the Behind the Bastards.
One of the things I think is really worrying about the language that Kennedy is using is how similar it sounds to a lot of what you were seeing in the early 1930s out of the Nazi state. What we know of as the Holocaust, which is generally a term, generally primarily when people use that term, they are talking about the mass killing of Jews and other ethnic minorities in Central Europe by the Nazi state.
That got a lot of its start. And there's a couple of different places got its start.
Obviously, the wild concentration camps and the political concentration camps are in that heritage. But when it comes to the actual mass killing of people, the very origin of that was in getting rid of the disabled, right? The term that was used in Nazi propaganda for these people was useless eaters.
And this is the first time that the Nazis tested out gassing, right, in large numbers. and he hasn't used literally the term useless eaters, but he talks a lot about,

one of the terms he uses is severe autism, right, which is not the term that is popularly used now for people who have kind of profound autism, I think is the preferred term for people who do have a significantly higher degree of like disability as a result of their autism or that correlates with their autism, right? As opposed to the vast majority of people who can be diagnosed as somewhere on the spectrum who are able to live independently, right? And Kennedy sort of does the thing that is very common within this community of sort of, number one, correlating that to everybody with autism, and talking about it as if it is a disaster that justifies any kind of response because the people who have profound autism aren't real people in his eyes. He made a statement, quote, these are kids who will never pay taxes.
They'll never hold a job. They'll never play baseball.
They'll never write a poem. They'll never go out on a date.
Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. We have to recognize we are doing this to our children.
And first off, having taught a lot of kids with profound autism, yes, they can play baseball. Like a number of them held jobs.
Now, do a lot of them need assisted living? Sure. But like, number one, that's always been the case.
There's no evidence that people with this kind of autism, that there's any sort of raise in this, right? What's raised is the number of people who are being diagnosed, right? And he's using this kind of scare term, right? This idea that like, parents, you need to be frightened that something is going to steal your children from you. In order to justify the dehumanization of everyone with autism, as well as radical biomedical experimental procedures that are going to do harm at scale to lots of kids.
One of his favorite new terms is epidemic denial, which is the term that he's using for people who say that this is not an epidemic. This is something that we're now screening for more.
He's kind of repurposing the language of vaccine denial and whatnot as a denial that this is sort of an immediate crisis that needs to be hit, which I find interesting. Also, co-opting COVID-conscious language.
Yeah, yeah. The way he and his group were referred to during COVID, he's now using in the same fashion yeah and it's interesting his initial promise was that like by september we'll know why autism rates are on the rise that's not really a thing you can't make science work that way like you can't guarantee that like you said we already know because people are seeking out diagnoses like because, because we have better awareness of it now.
But he's kind of altered that recently being like, no, we'll have some answers by September. And, you know, we're going to get those answers by removing the taboo so that doctors won't get gaslit by blaming autism on vaccines or, you know, mold exposure or the like.
so that's what we can look forward to in the near future from our good friend RFK Jr.

who definitely doesn't pay taxes or write poems. I just want to make that clear.
I don't think either of those are particularly good bars for whether or not you're a human being, but he for sure doesn't do either. Also, frankly, I know way too many autistic people who write poems.
Oh, tons of them. gonna say yeah the writing poem things was a really fucking the poet laureate of Washington state since 2023 is a woman with autism so yeah like I writing poems nonsense extremely common activity for for my fellow my fellow autism people out there okay okay RF okay, RFK Jr.
Again, but he was talking about people with what he calls severe autism, but he also doesn't ever care to specify his language because there's no benefit. That's not a real medical term.
Yeah, and there's no benefit to his ideology in acknowledging that, well, most people who get diagnosed with autism may need some accommodations it's a difference right it's a difference in the way your mind works but they're fine like they're living healthy happy lives yeah i talk slightly differently in the cool zone work chat uh which is kind of the extent of it for me yeah that's the extent of it but that is certainly an aspect. Speaking of the Department of Health and Human Services, they released a report page on their website for you, the vigilant citizen to report trans minors receiving healthcare.
Finally. Another one of these snitching hotlines this time on a federal government website that I'm sure will only get real complaints sent to it and not the B-movie script and not repeatedly the B-movie script yeah speaking of trans people I do have a few updates on some of the transgender stuff during that meeting between President Bukele and Trump,

they went on a small tangent about trans people

where Trump said that he actually doesn't like

talking about, quote unquote, men in women's sports

because he wants to wait and save that issue

to use for the next election.

Amazing.

Yeah.

I'm going to play the clip.

And I don't like talking about it

because I want to save it for just before the next election. I said and i don't like talking about it because i want

to save it for just before the next election i said when people don't even talk about it because they'll change and well but i watched this morning there was a congressman fighting to the death for men to play against women in sports that's like super interesting uh like very clear insight

into how like

Trump sees

like the trans

sports issue and treats it as this like election winning superpower. And like certainly he is directing like the DOJ and with his executive orders.
Like he still is targeting trans people, especially trans people like in school. So it's not that he's treating this as like a hands-off issue to ensure that it can remain a hot button thing for the next election.
But I think in his mind, he doesn't want to stop Democrats from caring about this issue in a way. The more that they fight for it, in his mind, is what gives him ammunition for the next election,

whether he's going to run for a third term

or just Republicans, like MAGA stuff in general.

But I think that it is an interesting look

into his personal insight on this issue.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice

just announced on Wednesday, April 16th,

that they are suing Maine's Department of Education

for not complying with Trump's anti-trans executive order by continuing to allow trans people to compete in sports, claiming that they are, quote, failing to protect women in women's sports, unquote, which they say violates Title IX. the suit aims to get an injunction to force Maine to strip away rights from trans

people in schools to take away

two winning titles from

trans school athletes

and our suit aims to get an injunction to force Maine to strip away rights from trans people in schools, to take away two winning titles from trans school athletes, and are considering to quote-unquote retroactively pull all funding that Maine has received. Maine's Attorney General Aaron Frey said on Wednesday, quote, our position is further bolstered by the complete lack of any legal citation supporting the administration's position in its own complaint.
While the president issued an executive order that reflects his own interpretations of the law, anyone with the most basic understanding of American civics understands that the president does not create law nor interpret law, unquote. So Maine, and specifically the Maine governor, are adamant that this is going to be

an issue that's only going to be settled in the courts and in fact challenged Trump at a recent

meeting to see you in court over this issue. We are going to go on break and then return to close

out this episode of Executive Disorder. Okay, we are back.

I'm now going to throw to myself and Mia

to discuss tariff talk in a future recording. Taree, don't like it.
Rocky Casper, Rocky Casper. Taree, don't like it.
Rocky Casper, Rocky Casper. Welcome to Tariff Talk, the talk where I talk to you about the turf tariffs.
So, all right, the big thing that happened last week in tariffs was that Trump exempted smartphones and electronics, there's a whole suite of electronics that are exempted from the 145% turf tariffs from Liberation Day. Now, there was still a 20% tariff on all these electronic goods from the earlier round of tariffs.
In one of the initial rounds, there was a whole thing where he put a bunch of tariffs on. I'm so confused, though, because I thought it's 10% tariffs for non-Chinese companies.
Yeah, but... Okay, so here's the thing, right? China? Is it additional or...? Okay, so what's happening with these is that

in the very, very first round of tariffs that went out,

there was a 20% tariff on all Chinese goods.

And so the Liberation Day tariffs,

and then the subsequent retaliatory tariffs,

pushed all goods to...

Now, like what, 250%?

No, okay, we're going to get the 250%.

That number's bullshit.

Okay.

But we're at 145% tariff from the Liberation Day stuff. But that also had included an earlier 20% tariff.
And you see why reporting about this is so fucking hard, right? So that was stacked on top of that other tariff. So he's removed the Liberation Day tariffs, but there still are 20% tariffs on all iPhones and all the electronic goods that are still in effect.

So the tariff rate for those goods is now 20 instead of 145.

But this is where things get even more murky.

So even before the exemptions for the semiconductor stuff had been released, Trump had been talking about imposing a bunch of tariffs specifically on semiconductors from all countries, which is going to like, again, if this is just also if you want to just kneecap your entire economy, you put in a tariff on all semiconductors from other countries, which is what this is looking like. It's possible the levels are going to be that high anyways.
It's again worth pointing out that there's a bunch of of the parts of this production process that basically can only be done in taiwan which will presumably have these new tariffs on them we don't know what they're going to be yet they're coming in who fucking knows but so it seems like they're these tariffs are being withdrawn for now due to market sort of backlash but probably they will come back at some point in the future. We're not we're not 100% sure.
There's also another thing I want to mention where so the number that you said, the 250% tariff thing. So Trump tweeted that out, but that's fake.
What that is, is that there are a couple of items. And I mean, when I say a couple, I mean, like we're talking like single single-digit items.
Like, things like medical syringes that already had, like, 100% tariffs on them. The 145% tariffs stack on top of all tariffs that were already in effect.
So there's, like, three or four items already had 100% tariffs on them. So when you stack the 145 on top of them, they're 250%.
But again, it's like three things, right? So, like so like that's fake on the other hand like substantively and this is something that a lot of people have been talking about the difference between 145 and 245 like it isn't that relevant because at 145 you stop doing trading so it's you know the numbers at this point are just sort of in comedy levels but yeah so that's what's going on with the 250 number people have been going around from it's it's not real it's still 145 for all non-electronics goods 24 electronics there's also been a bunch of sort of china's been doing retaliatory stuff for a little bit and they've been ramping up this program to restrict u.s access to rare earth elements that are necessary for a whole bunch of advanced engineering and particularly sort of defense projects now this is something that could genuinely devastate the american defense sector um trump's plan for this is that he's threatening to use the trade expansion act in 1962 to impose even more devastating tariffs now it is genuinely unclear to me like what is he it to imposing a thousand percent tariff like you need to buy these goods like you say that mia and yes he probably will he probably will like like two weeks ago a thousand percent tariffs would have been a joke but no they might they might legitimately do a thousand percent tariffs why not there's also been the beginnings of on the us and sort of export restrictions from chip exports to china and countries like nvidia and amd and this is a fucking big rip to the the big rip to the fucking ai people eat shit get fucked yeah so like so that that's roughly the state of of the tariffs right now more more bullshit will happen We'll be back on Tariff Talk next week with another round of unbelievably hideous turf tariff shit. But I want to move on to one more thing, which is things that have been happening at the NLRB.
So the NLRB, for people who are not regular listeners to the show, is the National Labor Relations Board. They were in charge of a whole bunch of things related to negotiations between like employers and unions are the people who certify union elections they they handle uh unfair labor practices disputes and doge effectively broke into the nlrb and has seized a whole bunch of information that they shouldn't have npr broke the story and has been doing a lot of good coverage of it.
So it came in, right? They technically had some kind of like order saying that they're supposed to be able to come in and do this stuff. And they set up and they disable all of the security stuff and all of the sort of like logs and all of the sort of stuff that's supposed to like verify what someone's doing on a computer system.
They go in and disable all of them. They delete all traces of what they do.
And this is a big deal because the NLRB has a lot of extremely sensitive data. It has extremely sensitive data on unions.
It has a lot of extremely sensitive trade data on private companies. Now, the NLRB person who blew the whistle on this to NPR described how, so he complains about his superiors about Doge, again, just sort of breaking into this fucking office and just stealing all of this data.
So he notices this program that they're building that's literally just called Backdoor, which is, again, what you would do if you were literally running a hack, right? And we'll come back to that in a second. So the N complains to a superior to like hey these doge people are just like stealing all the data from this and then like the next day someone from doge tapes to his door pictures of him and his dogs with like a threatening thing on it like drone footage of him and his dog like walking, which is so fucking weird i i don't even know i don't even so yeah that's that's extremely alarming um this is this is they're they're just blatantly threatening a whistleblower yeah so so the other reason that this is really concerning is that so a lot of the corporate media is focused on the fact that there's a lot of trade information in there there's's also a lot of very personal information about unions, about union strength, about size, about tactics, about the history of negotiating things, about just where unions are and who's in them.
And it's deeply unclear what Doge is going to do this information, but it's not good. and again and i need to emphasize this so i talked to friend of the show maya arson crime w

about this who is someone who knows a lot about hacking. And I said to it, OK, so this is what you would do if you were if you were just straight up like hacking the NLRB, right? Like these are the things you would do.
And they went, yeah, pretty much. So it's great.
It's great. Yeah.
The Doja just stole a bunch of information. Who knows what's going to happen to it? Who knows what's going to happen with their escalation of attacks on whistleblowers? But things bad.
Things continue to go bad. Well, thank you for that uplifting story, Mia, about Doge breaking into and stealing data from the NLRB and posting overhead drone photos of people's houses who threatened the Doge supremacy.
We're back. Thank you, future Garethson and future Mia.
So it's my role here to update you on the board of fascism, right? And that's what I'm here to do. Where I want to start this week is in the Roosevelt Reservation.
This is something that's been reported on a little bit. It's reeked largely by people who maybe only found out about it this week and looked at a Wikipedia page and wrote a story.
The Roosevelt Reservation is a 60-foot easement that runs along the southwestern border of the United States from the coast of San Diego all the way to New Mexico. It doesn't cover the Texas border.
I've written about it before for the Sierra Club and for Drilled News four or five years ago, and I'm going to include a link to the Sierra Club piece in the show notes. The Drilled piece is down now.
They don't have that print side anymore. It was established in 1907 by Teddy Roosevelt, and it was transferred for three years from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Defense by the Trump administration in 2019 using an executive order.
This year, in 2025, all of the Roosevelt reservation that is not part of federal reservation land was placed on the Department of Defense jurisdiction. A lot of reporting seems to have missed this exemption for federal reservation land, which makes up a significant part of the border, especially in Arizona, right, in the Tornodham Reservation.
I'm going to quote from the language of the executive order here. Quote, To provide for the use and jurisdiction by the Department of Defense over such doesn't limit to the Roosevelt Reservation.

It seems to include other federal land, right, which could include national monuments, national parks,

the BLM and the national forests, all of which exist along the border. The Trump administration this week also obtained waivers.
The waivers waive dozens of laws that have been limiting construction in the San Diego sector. I'd like to quote a little bit from that Sierra Club piece that I wrote because I think the aspect of the damage done to the sacred space of indigenous people is being completely overlooked by the legacy media in this, not perhaps surprisingly.
So one of the laws waived with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was enacted by Congress in 1990 to protect and safely relocate native burial sites when construction takes place on sensitive sites.
The tribe in question should be consulted, and in the event remains or other archaeological objects are found, construction should be altered so as not to disturb the site. In the areas of San Diego where they are digging, what's called midden soil has been found.
Midden soil is soil that contains evidence of cremated human remains, right? In this case of Kumeyaay people. With this waiver, they don't have to comply with NAGPRO, Native American Graves Protection and Relocation Act, which means that they can continue digging through what are literally people's ancestors' graveyards.
Here's another quote from that 2020 story. If this were another country's government destroying a region's holy land the u.s would go to war and the people would feel it justified activist thomas barber told sierra but it happens here at home in front of us and we just turn away yep we sure do turn away seems to be most of what we do these days yeah it's not even what bugs me it's like not so much of folks you know not doing anything i get that it's overwhelmingly horrible at the moment it's that this doesn't even get reported yeah big outlets with a massive budget who are supposed to have a border reporter who's never fucking set foot on the border doesn't take the time to talk to the indigenous people who's land the border crossed right like doesn't take the time to hear their concerns doesn't take the time to think about when you dig 30 feet into this ground to build your border wall that's 12 000 years of someone's history how do they feel about that and like that is a failing of the legacy media has been a failing for a long time and it will continue to be one for a long time and pisses me off yep i guess to talk more broadly then about this militarization of the roosevelt reservation and other public land there's been some speculation about what this might mean i don't think that you're going to see soldiers pointing their guns at the southern border and shooting anyone who comes across i do think it's likely a lot of the people who have been deployed to Southern border so far are MPs, military police, right? And it's possible that those MPs will be able to detain people and potentially charge them with trespassing on a military installation.
That would just be another string to the bow of their attempt to rapidly deport people because they already have many other kind of options through executive order of doing that which they're already implying right it might also make it easier for them to waive some of these other laws and to construct more surveillance equipment in the abrigo garcia case which we've covered for several weeks now the supreme court has unanimously asked the united states government to, quote, facilitate his return. The US government has embarked upon a unique definition of the word facilitate, which it feels like means allowing him to enter the country and providing transport if El Salvador releases him.
Bukele refused to release him, saying that doing so would be to, smugler terrorists into the United States. Garrison and I did a whole episode about this yesterday that you can listen to.
Today, Senator Chris Van Hollen went to San Salvador, right, capital of El Salvador, if you're not aware. He met with the vice president because Bukele is still out of the country.
Van Hollen held a press conference right afterwards that I watched right before we recorded this in the press conference van holland basically said that he'd asserted to the vice president of el salvador there was no evidence nor any conviction of being a member of ms13 and he asked the vp why he was holding mr abrigo garcia and the vp said because the u.s is paying us to hold him yeah which yeah they won't even lie yeah no he's yeah he's not lying that's that's why they're doing it I believe that yeah I mean credit to this Maryland senator for like being the only one to do something and it's not enough and it's just one person there are 300 people there right they're not even going for the hundreds of other innocent people are there it's one guy but at, but at least he's doing something. The rest of the Democrats are collectively, I don't know, like voting for Trump's nominees.
He asked to meet with Mr. Abrego Garcia and was told that they needed more time.
He said, I'll come back next week. They said they don't know if they can organize it in a week.
He asked if he could call him. They said they didn't know if they could facilitate a call.
They said maybe the US embassy would have to be the one that requests that. So he has now requested that the embassy request that he be allowed to call Mr.
Abrego Garcia and Mr. Abrego Garcia be allowed to speak to his wife.
Garrison and I spoke about how it's not in the interest of the government in El Salvador to have people leave this prison and testify to the conditions that are in it. No one has ever left this prison.
That we're aware of, yeah, that no one who's been detained there has left. Yeah.
The government wouldn't give him a date when he could meet Mr. Abrego Garcia or when he would be likely able to make a call.
And a separate case, Judge Boesberg, who we've spoken about before as well, Judge Boesberg was the judge who issued a tentative restraining order on the rendition of people to El Salvador, which the government then ignored, has found probable cause that the administration is in contempt of court. What does this mean? It doesn't mean, despite what you have seen on your timeline, that this will mean these people will be brought home.
When they're found in contempt, they have two options, right? They can purge themselves of the contempt and the way they would do that would be by providing habeas not by bringing all these people home at least not yet right yeah or they could present the people

who are responsible and then either an attorney could be appointed by the doj to prosecute them

i guess i don't quite know how that work in systems or the judge himself can appoint an attorney

to prosecute them for criminal contempt again like at least the guy's trying i guess like

Thank you. oga to prosecute them i guess i don't quite know how that work in systems or the judge himself can appoint an attorney to prosecute them for criminal contempt again like at least the guy's trying i guess like no i mean like i got nothing to say against him right now like this is what they all should be doing he went there he's true he's something and he's not mincing his words he's saying that this man was disappeared no yeah and he's he's asserting that like they need to listen to the court they are supposed to listen to the court.
Judge Ginez, who is a judge on the district court that had its case sent to the Supreme Court for review in the Abrego-Garcia incident also, quoted the Merriam-Webster dictionary and said that the government's understanding of the word facilitate flew in the face of the common understanding of the word. Again, I've seen it asserted like oh legal experts could disagree meanwhile you've got the actual judge in the actual case being like no this is what the dictionary says your definition is ludicrous i would caution people to be very careful looking at like blue check legal experts on x.com or people on blue sky oh god there has been so much misleading stuff about immigration law and the laws in these particular two cases and about the resort reservation actually just be really careful where you're getting your information especially on immigration law from maybe go back and check what that person was doing in 2023 when thousands of migrants were detained in outdoor detention camps because i've seen so much misinformation and people understandably who aren't expert in this because it's extremely complicated are likely to be taken advantage of by people who are grifting off what is a moment when a lot of us are afraid and a lot of us are uncertain so to be very careful what you're what you're reading out there all right i think that's all for us today on It Could Happen Here.
Yeah, I think that's our new erectile executive dysfunction episode. Erectile order.
All right, well, we're fucking done. Go away.
We reported the news. We reported the news.
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And no, those were not raisins.

Amazon Pharmacy.