It Could Happen Here Weekly 178

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Speaker 40 Welcome to Ik It Happened 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.

Speaker 40 I am your host, Mia Wong, and today we are going to be talking about a union that is attempting to do exactly that.

Speaker 40 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 and Zeus, welcome to the show.

Speaker 36 Thank you so much for having us.

Speaker 41 Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 But to get people sort of rolling, can you explain what Friends of the Children is and what it, what it is that you two do?

Speaker 38 Yeah,

Speaker 36 so Friends of the Children is, it's a national organization. It's a nonprofit, but

Speaker 36 there are individual chapters throughout different cities. We work out of Portland, which is the founding chapter and also the largest one.

Speaker 36 Some of the language I'll say that is like used from the website and from like the mission statement that really encompasses.

Speaker 36 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 are 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 are 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 We both have eight kids on our roster, as do most mentors.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And then I also have youth that are middle school level that have had several different mentors in the past.

Speaker 36 Some that have stayed there for maybe a few years. And like sometimes there's ones that have been there for months.

Speaker 3 Yeah, if I can add to that. The kids we work with, they're enrolled into the program because they

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 you know, single parent households, foster care families and kids, kids that like,

Speaker 3 unfortunately, are likely to face some challenges that our society and the way it's built up will deal to them.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 entering adulthood without having, you know, having had kids or facing the justice system.

Speaker 3 It's kids that we love dearly, that we work with in a similar way as like, you know, a program like Big Brothers, Big Sisters,

Speaker 3 but we are paid mentors, which is the big difference, right? We're not volunteer-based. We are employees, basically social workers

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 because things are falling apart.

Speaker 38 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 38 And

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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

Speaker 36 got a mentor. And then you support all I mean, it's a choice,

Speaker 36 but I would say that most mentors definitely opt into 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.

Speaker 36 Yeah.

Speaker 40 And I mean, you know, I think that you can look at this

Speaker 40 and see how it's supposed to work structurally. And, you know, you were talking about like,

Speaker 40 I mean, this is supposed to be a like over a decade long commitment to these kids,

Speaker 40 right? That ideally you're working with the same person and you know, you're forming really deep emotional attachments because you can't not do that if we're doing this kind of work, but then also

Speaker 40 you know,

Speaker 40 in order for that to work, and I think this is, you know, you can see this the outside is like in order for this to work, this has to be a job that you could stablely do for a decade, right?

Speaker 38 Like,

Speaker 38 yeah, yeah,

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 But of all of our, of all of our coworkers, I believe it's only one that has currently been able to do that and has stayed there as long as they have.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.
And the truth of the fact, like, yeah, A, for any job, 12 and a half years is a really long time, right? I mean, six years is a really long time.

Speaker 3 And with this job,

Speaker 3 we're like we're an emotional sponge for a lot of things, right?

Speaker 3 So our kids go through

Speaker 3 everything that you could imagine.

Speaker 3 And within that, like everything good and everything bad that you could imagine.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 We can take it in and almost like dissolve it a little bit, right? But within that, like it can affect us so, so much.

Speaker 3 And that's where, yeah, the sustainability part of like 12 and a half years in this job, like that is a lot.

Speaker 3 And we need a lot for that to like at all be possible.

Speaker 40 yeah i mean like that there's this way in which you're effectively

Speaker 40 like what what what this job is is like

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 And then also, like,

Speaker 40 I don't know, it's pretty bad that there's only been one coworker who's been able to graduate their kids.

Speaker 38 Like,

Speaker 36 just to clarify for history, that's been in like our time. Yeah,

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And also, like, yeah, this is a job where you are

Speaker 36 not necessarily able to like undo the systems at play, but trying to support them. And like we as mentors are inevitably also facing those systems against ourselves.

Speaker 36 And like one of the reasons that I think people gravitate towards this job is their empathy because they have those shared experiences.

Speaker 36 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?

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 handling that and like taking good care of themselves.

Speaker 36 But it is definitely something that like takes a lot

Speaker 36 of regulation. And

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 40 Yeah.

Speaker 40 And like, I mean, I guess like, like, to put this in perspective for like people listening to this, it's 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.

Speaker 38 And that is your job for like eight kids who are going through through like the worst shit in the world like

Speaker 38 Jesus Christ this

Speaker 3 oh good lord it's it's honestly like like hearing this it's always really helpful to hear someone's outside's perspective of our job right because we get so so into it so into the muck of like what this job can be and and i think like overall like um 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,

Speaker 3 how our job is sometimes. And then it's helpful to hear other people mention it because it's like, yeah, wow, our job is kind of crazy.

Speaker 3 And the work we do is like really important and really important for society. And also,

Speaker 3 yeah, like, It's hard. It's hard work.

Speaker 36 It's hard and it doesn't like really have an end point. Like we we have the hours we work with kids and then

Speaker 36 we have the hours we think about them and the things going on in their lives um 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 or like oh great idea or oh let's go see this movie um and a lot of times it's like worrying though too and

Speaker 36 knowing that there is there is only so many things we can control um and some things we just have to be the person that's there as they have to go through something,

Speaker 36 which yeah, it's it's hard because we also obviously like develop such loving relationships with these kids. It's hard to see like kids that you care about so much

Speaker 36 that sometimes the most you can do is just be there. Yeah, it definitely is a job that like to some degree is sort of always with you.

Speaker 40 Yeah, we have a joke about this with this job where it's like like, if it do what you love and you'll never be free for a single second of your entire life.

Speaker 38 It's like,

Speaker 38 because you're just always on.

Speaker 38 Yeah, it's so true.

Speaker 3 Yeah, as you say this, 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.

Speaker 38 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 39 And we are back.

Speaker 40 So, okay,

Speaker 40 now that we've sort of talked about what this is, let's talk about the actual union, which is the thing.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 40 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?

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure. So

Speaker 3 we first brought about

Speaker 3 our petition to unionize in March of 2023.

Speaker 3 So that was two years ago, a long time ago, right? But

Speaker 3 The work for unionization, obviously the organizing behind it had started like much much before that. When I first joined Friends, it was in September of 22.

Speaker 3 And I knew that the work had already been like happening the summer before. What was the catalyst was post COVID,

Speaker 3 A, obviously a lot of people left given what COVID did to a lot of industries and especially care work.

Speaker 3 But then likewise, a lot of people were fired and were many would say like fired without like a full-on like due process.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Some of the issues that we face, like the pay, obviously, like within social work in general and nonprofit work, like it's never going to match up and never gonna really be as good as like the cost of living, especially here in Portland.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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: like, you know, food insecurity and needing to get food stamps or

Speaker 3 like needing like rental and like housing assistance 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.

Speaker 36 Yeah, I think you touched on a lot of them. I think it's hard to stay in this job.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 even if they like really wanted to stay there, it just wouldn't necessarily allow for them to have maybe like the life they wanted.

Speaker 36 And

Speaker 36 also just honoring, I think with like

Speaker 36 bereavement leave and critical issue leave has been areas that haven't really been addressed.

Speaker 36 We have had very tragic things happen in the, in our working community with the families and that have drastically affected. Yeah, the well-being of mentors and staff members alike.

Speaker 40 Yeah. And I mean, you know, this is a job that structurally is designed to be a kind of like,

Speaker 40 like, again, if, if the goal is to have one person from the, from, from like kindergarten to until they like, like a graduating high school, right?

Speaker 40 Like, that is something that requires like 1950s, 1960s style Fordism. Like you have one job for decades.

Speaker 40 And the only way you can do that is if people are incredibly well supported. And it's like

Speaker 40 the fact that it's it's like, okay,

Speaker 40 you're trying to do this, but you're not paying people enough money to fucking afford food.

Speaker 38 Like, what the hell? Like, Jesus Christ. Yeah.
Just like, yeah, oh my God.

Speaker 3 Like, yeah, or even, 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

Speaker 3 really ironic giving how much we care for kids. And then some of our mentors and other coworkers that have kids, like, like have to spend so much money on health insurance for their own personal kids.

Speaker 40 Friends of some of the kids, apparently.

Speaker 38 That's how this works. The kids ain't tick.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 41 And yeah.

Speaker 3 And honestly, like, big, big picture thinking, like, the reason why we

Speaker 3 like started this whole unionizing project was because we care so much about our kids, right?

Speaker 3 Like, I, when I first started working at Friends, like I,

Speaker 3 I think was the first mask mentor to be hired in a fairly long time after a lot of firings of other mask mentors. And two of the youth that

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 40 Jeez.

Speaker 3 Which is a really long time. Like when

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 six or seven years. And then

Speaker 3 just like

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 People aren't wanting to apply for this job because the pay isn't high enough, right? That then like creates like a lot of issues with the kids that we're dealing with.

Speaker 3 It's not like we are these like saviors or like anything like along those lines, right?

Speaker 3 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 your life, you've been having that consistent support, that then creates like a lot of trust issues and like overall like like attachment issues that a youth could face.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And I

Speaker 3 like,

Speaker 3 I will keep saying this. I love my kids so much.
Like I like.

Speaker 3 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's a long time, right? But I want to do that.

Speaker 3 So I want to, you know,

Speaker 3 get paid, have time off when one of my, sadly, this is something that did occur where a youth passed away that I worked with and like didn't have time off to like really grieve that

Speaker 3 hard stuff. And I just want to be able to stay there till they're done with the program.

Speaker 40 Yeah, and it's like there's just, I mean, it's just like a litany of horrors where it's like, one, it's like,

Speaker 40 you know, when there is like,

Speaker 40 it's not, you know, like turnover in a normal job sucks.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 And then also, it's like, yeah, one of these kids that is literally your job to care for dies. Do you just have to fucking go to work the next day? Like,

Speaker 40 it is so hideous and it's just like yeah yeah yeah yeah no like it makes sense that like

Speaker 40 yeah people are organizing because it's like you know like this this organization is just systemically failing both the people they're trying to help and the people whose job it is to like

Speaker 40 help them and

Speaker 38 yeah

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 But a lot of the times times it's, it's because it's not sustainable and it's really hard to leave.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And like, also, okay, then that means I got to be frugal in all these other ways or et cetera.

Speaker 36 And yeah, and working with youth that have already kind of experienced loss and wanting to continue to show up for them.

Speaker 36 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-being um

Speaker 3 yeah yeah and

Speaker 3 i mean the turnover numbers were pretty wild i think one time we calculated it and mentors were

Speaker 3 it was like a 40 something percent like turnover rate for mentors yeah and and a lot of that happened because

Speaker 3 in this two-year time period

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 you know in that same time period inflation has been pretty crazy and and rent for me has done about to get worse

Speaker 38 it's about to get so much worse.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 3 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 mark and not

Speaker 3 looking forward to two more years of doing this. But yeah, it's been hard to sustain this when everything is increasing in price and our wages are completely stagnant.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 40 Yeah, so let's take one more ad break and then we will come back to talk about,

Speaker 40 yeah, how unionization efforts are going. And yeah.

Speaker 40 We are back. Yeah, so let's let's talk about how this campaign is going.
So you said you've been in bargaining for like two years?

Speaker 36 So

Speaker 36 we

Speaker 36 had our petition for recognition on March 23rd, 2023. So that was over two years ago.
And then our

Speaker 36 employer didn't formally recognize us, but through the process of like voting, we got over 93%

Speaker 36 of

Speaker 7 it's also like, wow, we all really need it.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 36 And like there were some other barriers, including like not being formally recognized.

Speaker 36 Like 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.

Speaker 36 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

Speaker 36 formally presented our letter for recognition. Yeah.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 38 God, yeah.

Speaker 36 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

Speaker 36 scheduling, delays in just getting different articles back in time. One of the biggest ones, obviously, was compensation.

Speaker 36 And I think I can't quite remember the period of time, but we presented it over a year ago.

Speaker 38 I think maybe.

Speaker 36 Oh my God. I could be wrong.
And it took like, it took several, several, several months for us to

Speaker 36 get anything back from management,

Speaker 36 which yeah, was a big bummer amongst other things.

Speaker 40 It sucks. It sucks.

Speaker 3 And obviously that's the one that we have yet to finalize.

Speaker 38 Like as

Speaker 38 we're talking right now. Yeah, it is.

Speaker 36 Insurance and compensation are still our last two articles left.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And some of the like the difficult things, I mean,

Speaker 3 when you are working on a project,

Speaker 3 I mean, I wouldn't be surprised given like really when these conversations started if we're looking at like over 900 or a thousand days of like really talking about this but then when you're dealing with bargaining for 580 days, like it's exhausting.

Speaker 3 It is so exhausting. We have regular meetings that we attend to that

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 like for me at times was debilitating right when you're doing this work and your workplace is stretching things out for so long,

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 really

Speaker 3 was hard. It was hard for me, it was hard for other union organizers in our workplace, and it was hard for all of our workers.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And we learned that, like, oh, wait, like the place that we're working is actually part of these systems too.

Speaker 3 And it's doing the same things that we're like fighting to have our kids have better lives. Like, we're facing it right now from inside the house.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 36 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

Speaker 36 hope you would have for a nonprofit.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So, definitely not what you want to be getting,

Speaker 36 not what you want to be handed across from the bargaining table.

Speaker 3 Um, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, within this process, they're currently salaried workers, but they tried to change us to hourly workers.

Speaker 38 Uh, oh my god, yeah,

Speaker 38 which again, like we're always working, you know, we're always working,

Speaker 38 So, unless you want to pay me for 24 hours.

Speaker 40 You know, you're talking about like, yeah, that they're behaving like a corporation.

Speaker 40 It's like, oh, yeah, this is exactly what like my employer did to me, which is like, like, one of, like, one of the largest media companies in the world.

Speaker 40 And they dragged out negotiations for two years.

Speaker 40 And like, you know, you're talking about the sort of like, just like, oh, they're like the feeling of disrespect where they're just not getting stuff back to you.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 And they'd be 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 it 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 is like, this is an incredibly common unit blessing tactic is draw out the first contract because that's that's like the second point where unions fail after like the after after you get like recognition votes is like here yeah for sure you know like i mean i 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 underprivileged youth and then they're like we're going to turn around and we're going to screw over different underprivileged youth like yeah sucks yeah and i think that's like for me one of the things that just like messed with my mind the most is that like,

Speaker 3 we're not selling a product, right? We're not trying to like get revenue or anything along those lines, right?

Speaker 3 So like our job is a job that we actually like fully love and like want to stick around like,

Speaker 3 not just for our own like. financial you know peace and 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

Speaker 3 other you know, businesses and other workplaces that unionize. A lot of times, people want to do that because they want financial security, right?

Speaker 3 Um, and I think for a lot of NGOs, nonprofits, and care work, like we unionize because

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 to be faced with actions

Speaker 41 by our workplace that

Speaker 3 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 workfield and the like nonprofit space.

Speaker 36 Yeah, like this isn't a job that people are going to take for the money

Speaker 36 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 it's 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.

Speaker 36 Yeah.

Speaker 36 And yeah, I think that's a huge part of why we were able to get like that 93%

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 Like that's the thing that these NGOs use to exploit people is, you know, like, I mean, is the basic human empathy and love and care that we have for the people who we're caring for.

Speaker 40 And they're, and these people are like, aha, look at this. Aha, these people,

Speaker 40 they care about the thing that they're doing. We can underpay them and overwork them.
It's like,

Speaker 38 why is their system work like this? Like, it's just,

Speaker 40 what a terrible way to design an economic system. Yeah.
Just, good Lord.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 36 Yeah, we've had

Speaker 36 a multitude of different actions over the past, you know, over the past 580 days.

Speaker 36 I think one of our

Speaker 36 one of our biggest ones by far which was i think also was just

Speaker 36 one of our most beautiful in a way was november of last year we did an info picket and it was one of those things too where it

Speaker 36 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

Speaker 36 and

Speaker 36 we had

Speaker 36 One of our like little bits is because our union is called fun.

Speaker 36 A lot of our

Speaker 36 posters were spongebob themed so instead of imagination you know it's compensation um

Speaker 38 and

Speaker 36 yeah and i think it's indicative of like also how much people that work with us are playful and sweet and why we're are good at our jobs of working with kids um

Speaker 36 and

Speaker 36 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, by just asking for community support.

Speaker 36 Like we've had caregivers write letters of support to different people in management.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 Jesus, chime in with others.

Speaker 3 Yeah, within that, and I think like an interesting thing about nonprofits, our revenue comes from donors, right?

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 you know this is part of like what they're donating to but then within that also like you know ask ask for money as well right because we do want you know better pay and better benefits right um so we've contacted donors and we'll still

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And for that to happen,

Speaker 3 we want our organization to like stay afloat, truly, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, some of the wins that we've gotten, I mentioned earlier that

Speaker 3 they were trying to have us be hourly workers. I mean, that was a big campaign that we like were fighting back on for a long time.

Speaker 3 It's also like what precipitated the ULP filing. I made

Speaker 3 too many buttons.

Speaker 40 You could never have too many buttons.

Speaker 38 Truly.

Speaker 3 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 worked 40 hours a week while we were talking about this.

Speaker 3 And that's like one of those instances that I mean, like, yeah, wow, that's like a little disrespectful and like really bites.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 are time off

Speaker 3 We have a time off contract or agreement now that like some of my my coworkers 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'll we're still

Speaker 3 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 the agreements, like what I would hopefully get.

Speaker 3 And I straight up like teared up looking at the number because it felt like such a big change in my financial status. Right.
And yesterday, like as I said, I worked till 9.30 p.m.

Speaker 3 with my kids, probably because it 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.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 I hope that's something that the listeners really get that like this is.

Speaker 3 hard work, but in the end, like is the change that we are hoping for, you know?

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 36 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 on this job is drive and we don't have many

Speaker 36 things in policy about

Speaker 36 cleanings or repairs when something happens in your car with a youth like say they throw up it happens with kids kids. Like that isn't necessarily something that would have been like covered.

Speaker 36 We would have had to just pay for that cleaning ourselves.

Speaker 36 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 would have to minus some mileage.

Speaker 36 in whatever way made sense with where our buildings were located.

Speaker 36 Despite even if our kids were like totally somewhere else where we were picking them up.

Speaker 36 It definitely wasn't like the most sensible way for us to be like being fully reimbursed for what we were doing.

Speaker 36 And

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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 um and like right now i think a lot of our like 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 Yeah.

Speaker 36 But we are like gaining some traction again, which I do think is something that we're still being, you know, cautious with just because

Speaker 36 right now it does feel like management is working with us a little bit more. But I also think that there are

Speaker 36 reasonings around that. Like we're about to have in a few weeks our biggest fundraiser for our work because like Jesus said, we are majority donor based.

Speaker 36 And I do think there's an appeal to management to have a contract by then. Yeah, it adds to the whole we're doing good work and we treat our employees well.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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

Speaker 36 because

Speaker 36 we're all ready.

Speaker 38 We're all ready for a contract.

Speaker 40 Yeah,

Speaker 40 as someone who got our contract, like it doesn't, it doesn't magically solve everything, but like, my God,

Speaker 38 she made your life better.

Speaker 46 Like, it is, it is absolutely worth it.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 40 Okay, so. How can people support y'all both sort of locally here and then just like broader? Because most people are not here.

Speaker 36 Honestly, most of our like people in like management positions information is public. If you want to email them and support, go for it.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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 like have the things you need to be saying.

Speaker 36 Um, yeah. Hey, Stace, anything else you want to add?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 3 I

Speaker 3 would add that, like, we have an Instagram, right? That's friends PDX Union Network.

Speaker 40 It's a mouthful, but we'll link that in the description.

Speaker 38 Yeah, great.

Speaker 3 And then within that, like, if you're in Portland, like, make sure to like follow us and like pay attention to what we're posting because we, you know, hopefully we do not have to get to a point in striking, especially the place that we're at right now with our contract.

Speaker 3 But in truth, like we're looking at 580 days and that is quite a long time. Yeah.
And then also, like, if listeners do have the ability to donate, if.

Speaker 3 they could donate some funds for Friends of the Children Portland and somehow in their notes be like, I support the union.

Speaker 3 Like, I think that could also be a really interesting way to show the support that

Speaker 38 our

Speaker 3 supporters have, like, for both the work that we're doing on the youth level, but then also in the union side of things, too.

Speaker 3 There's been a lot of like communication of like, oh, this is really going to impact like

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 38 which again

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 38 yeah yeah

Speaker 36 yeah

Speaker 40 yeah so those are we will we will we will have links in the description to all of that and

Speaker 40 Yeah, thank you to both so much for coming on the show. And I hope you win.

Speaker 38 And

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 3 Thank you, Mia, so much.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 36 Yeah, thank you so much for having us.

Speaker 40 Yeah, of course.

Speaker 36 Honestly, it's been great talking about the work because

Speaker 36 it is really important work and I'm happy we get to do it.

Speaker 38 Yeah, it's wonderful.

Speaker 40 And

Speaker 40 yeah, and so this is, yeah, this has been a good happened here. And yeah, also go unionize your workplace.
You can do it. I guarantee it.

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Speaker 4 Hello and welcome to the show. It's me, James, today, and I am joined by Garrison Davis.
Hi, Garrison. Hello.
Hello.

Speaker 4 Garrison has just said some words about something that's happening on social media that I don't understand.

Speaker 4 And it's made me feel very old. That's what's happening today in my world.
It's very sad. We're gathered here today to talk about the earthquake in Myanmar, right?

Speaker 4 I I think most of you will probably have been made aware of the earthquake. Like, it's somewhat odd that corporate media has really not reported on the revolution in any substantial way since 2021.

Speaker 4 But the earthquake apparently

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But if you're not aware, the earthquake happened on the 28th of March of this year, just before one in the afternoon.

Speaker 4 It was the biggest earthquake in Myanmar since 1912, and it registered 7.7 on the Rigda scale, which is huge. Because it's very hard for foreign journalists to get a visa to enter Myanmar.

Speaker 4 A lot of the initial reporting focused on Bangkok and the damage done in Thailand. But the epiceter was in Segang, which is near Mandalay.
Mandalay is the second biggest city in Myanmar.

Speaker 4 And that was where the worst of the destruction happened. Almost every street in Mandalay has collapsed buildings.

Speaker 4 It's a little difficult for us to get a sense of the exact scale of the damage because the hunter refuses to allow some media has been allowed in. The BBC, I saw, like, sneaked somebody in.

Speaker 4 It's very difficult for media to move and report freely. And in addition to this, the hunter has continued its practice of cutting off internet for people in Myanmar, right?

Speaker 7 Even during like emergency situations. Yes,

Speaker 4 especially during emergency. They've cut it off as a response to this because I guess they perceive it to be something that makes them look weak.

Speaker 4 This is a tendency that the Hunter has displayed before. So in 2008, Cyclone Nargis affected Myanmar and killed over 130,000 people.
And they blocked international aid.

Speaker 4 They said that people didn't need the quote chocolate bars that the US and other

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 how far down the North Korea scale the Burmese hunter is. But they're very worried that any interaction with

Speaker 4 the outside world, specifically with like, I guess, Western neoliberal neoliberal powers will be damaging for their like ability to control the population.

Speaker 4 So, for that reason, we don't know how many people have died, right?

Speaker 4 From what I've heard on the ground, the death toll is substantially higher than the 3,600 number being reported.

Speaker 4 The US Geological Survey estimated that an earthquake of that magnitude in that region would kill between 10 and 100,000 people. Obviously, that's quite a big kind of delta there.

Speaker 4 What I can tell you is that I've heard firsthand that there are some parts of Mandalay and Sagang where the stench of rotting bodies is so powerful that people have stopped returning to their homes.

Speaker 4 There have been so many aftershocks that people are still sleeping in the street because they're worried about the damaged structures falling down.

Speaker 4 The UN has an estimate of 17 million people across 57 townships.

Speaker 4 Townships are like the administrative districts that are used in Myanmar have been affected affected with over 9 million people facing severe hardship.

Speaker 4 And of course, this is all compounded by the fact that there were already 20 million people in Myanmar who needed humanitarian assistance.

Speaker 4 And there are about 3.5 million internally displaced people as a result of the fighting that's happened after the revolution. So like it really came at a pretty difficult time in a place where

Speaker 4 the government is not willing.

Speaker 4 They said after the earthquake they wanted international aid, but they've, as we'll see later in this script,

Speaker 4 they've only accepted it from certain countries. I spoke to a friend who has family in Mandalay yesterday.
He told me that the way they're assessing the damage is using open source intelligence.

Speaker 4 They're trying to look in the backgrounds of people's videos on Facebook to work out if their childhood homes fell down.

Speaker 4 They were using satellite imaging software when I spoke to them yesterday to try and ascertain if their families were okay.

Speaker 4 They told me, oh, Sagang has very famous pagodas, and the pagodas are all on a hill. And apparently a lot of those pagodas have fallen down and even the hill itself is like listing.

Speaker 4 So there's been like massive cultural damage as well.

Speaker 4 Another way in which the damage was compounded by Myanmar's politics was the quake struck, like I said, at 1 p.m. on a Friday, right, which is Friday prayers.

Speaker 4 This happened during Ramadan, specifically the day before Idil Fita, which is a very busy day for mosques, if you're not aware, right?

Speaker 4 Successive governments of Myanmar since the the 1960s have refused to allow even basic maintenance for mosques that means that these buildings were in great states of disrepair right in myanmar there is an ultra-nationalist buddhist 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 neoliberal aligned party uh that had previously been in power in myanmar or somewhat in power i suppose um ultra-nationalist buddhist monks like Ashin Murathu and his 969 movement have kind of condemned anything that they did as making them pro-Muslim.

Speaker 4 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 Myanmar.

Speaker 7 Yeah, lots of people here have this like very Orientalist perspective of like Buddhism, TM,

Speaker 7 as this like, you know, like like peaceful blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like, no, like Buddhism, like every religion has a variety of sects.

Speaker 41 Yes.

Speaker 7 And the Buddhist nationalist sects

Speaker 7 can be particularly nasty.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, as vicious as any other, people, I'm sure, will be familiar with Rohingya Genocide.

Speaker 4 Like, there are a lot of monks that supported that, including Warathu, who is the most notable one, but there are plenty more, right? And they're part of this.

Speaker 4 I mean, he's literally explicitly expressed how much he looks up to the English Defense League.

Speaker 7 Jesus.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, like these are people who

Speaker 38 are part of this global nativist movement.

Speaker 4 People's orientalism, I think, sometimes stops them seeing that or appreciating that this extends outside of like white global north countries.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 4 One thing that I did think that really touched me in the days after the earthquake was young Buddhist Burma people of the majority ethnicity reaching out to me and being like, hey, man.

Speaker 4 This happened in Friday Prayers during Ramadan and it has devastated the Muslim population. Like thousands of people, hundreds of mosques have gone and thousands of people are trapped in the rubble.

Speaker 4 And like no one's talking about it. Why is no one talking about it?

Speaker 38 This is terrible.

Speaker 4 And like it would have been inconceivable to hear young Bama Buddhist people so concerned with the well-being of like their Muslim countrymen before the coup in 2021.

Speaker 4 This was a country that had been manufacturing consent for genocide against its...

Speaker 4 Muslim minorities for four or five years by that point, right?

Speaker 4 Specifically on Facebook. There's a behind the the bastards episode on this.
You can also listen.

Speaker 4 If you're new to the show, Robert and I have made two scripted series about the revolution in Myanmar, which we'll include in the show notes.

Speaker 38 But like that change to

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 38 We are back.

Speaker 4 And of course, the revolution hasn't stopped because of the earthquake, right?

Speaker 4 The conflict is still ongoing, and the PDFs and their allied ethnic distance organizations are still fighting against the junter.

Speaker 4 In fact, within an hour of the earthquake, the junter began using power motors to drop bombs on Hangu village in Sugang.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 their jets and other aircraft are in a poor state of repair or that they're struggling to keep enough of them airborne.

Speaker 4 Initially, I wondered if they were using the paramotors because their runways had been damaged, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Speaker 4 Look, they've been airstriking just as much as they ever did, which is unfortunate.

Speaker 4 Satellite images and 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 The Three Brotherhood Alliance, which is an alliance of the three most powerful ethnic resistance organizations in Myanmar, also called what they call a humanitarian pause for a month.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 The junta did declare its own ceasefire on April 3rd, and the Kachin Independence Army, which is another ethnic resistance organization, followed shortly thereafter.

Speaker 4 Notably, that ceasefire from the Hunter came the day after its troops fired on a Chinese Red Cross convoy,

Speaker 4 which is not a great look for them.

Speaker 7 No. Never loved to see that.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 China's had this weird back and forth relationship with the revolution.

Speaker 4 At times, it supported the revolution, it seems like, particularly supporting Burmyanma National Democratic Alliance Army, which is a group that broke off the Communist Party of Burma in the 1980s.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, there's also the United Way State Army, which isn't part of the revolution, which is the

Speaker 4 strongest relationship with the PRC, and they're just chilling. They haven't really entered the conflict.

Speaker 7 It's called straight chilling, by the way, James.

Speaker 4 Straight chillin'.

Speaker 8 Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 4 That's how they used to.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I've marked myself out yet again. Straight chillin'.

Speaker 4 The United War State Army.

Speaker 38 Thank you, Garrison.

Speaker 4 I actually 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.

Speaker 4 They're focusing on fighting the hunter and developing alliances.

Speaker 4 And it's interesting to see where that will go, given... Yeah, Marxist-Leninist Maoism is definitely not the majority ideology of the revolution.

Speaker 4 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 Rojava.

Speaker 4 China is competing with Russia in Myanmar. So both of them are interested in supporting the junter, right? Like, and obviously, both their ideologies are far from liberatory.

Speaker 4 They're interested in propping up a totalitarian state. So we have seen both Russia and China send support to the junter, send like rescue teams after the earthquake.

Speaker 4 Meanwhile, the US offered $2 million,

Speaker 4 which I was kind of surprised they offered anything.

Speaker 7 That is low-key surprising considering

Speaker 7 Mark Rubio.

Speaker 45 Right, yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, I think Rubio is more of a

Speaker 4 slightly... Rubio is a neocon.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I guess like it makes sense Mark Rubio like five years ago. Yeah.
It doesn't make sense like post like you say you'd be gutted. They're like, oh, you're still doing that kind of stuff, huh?

Speaker 7 Yeah, there's like a weird like mix of things because, yes, like a traditional neocon

Speaker 7 style Rubio,

Speaker 7 this tracks, but all of the movements that the Trump administration's been doing more recently, this seems like, seems like some kind of DEI shenanigans, if you'd ask me.

Speaker 4 Yeah, actually, they added another 7 million later.

Speaker 41 9 million.

Speaker 4 Which is, yeah, it's not a lot of money compared to what we would normally expect. And at the

Speaker 4 same time they did it, three USAID workers, at least three, I should say, three that I'm aware of, were laid off.

Speaker 4 Like literally, they received emails telling them that they no longer had a job while they were on the ground assisting earthquake survivors.

Speaker 7 Department of Government Efficiency. Strikes again.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 It definitely shows, though, like a strategic shift in the region. China, Russia.
China obviously is interested in Myanmar because of its rare earth metals, because of jade.

Speaker 4 China has traditionally had a lot of jade trade with Myanmar, and then

Speaker 4 because it controls a large amount of seafront, right? Which China wouldn't want to fall into like what it would see as

Speaker 4 someone with adversarial interests.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But there definitely are both Chinese and Russian assistants helping the Myanmar junta now. Meanwhile, the US doesn't seem to give a shit what happens here now.

Speaker 4 Like this is kind of not that the Biden administration was doing very much either, but at least we had USAID and like 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.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 despite the ceasefire, right, I said they fired on these Chinese troops, the junta has in fact not stopped bombing earthquake-struck areas since the earthquake.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Since the earthquake, a three-month-old baby and a 10-year-old child were killed in an air raid on Nikar village in Papun Township. That was in Karen state.

Speaker 4 On April 10th, they bombed a school, something that the hunter likes to do a lot. They dropped two 500-pound bombs on a food court.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 They've killed,

Speaker 4 best I can collate from various sources, at least least 72 people and injured about 100 people, in addition to thousands who died after the earthquake.

Speaker 4 There are also reports that hunter quote-unquote recruiters here are engaging in forced conscription in the disaster zone.

Speaker 4 I read of at least one person who was on a search and rescue team, like they were a trained search and rescue volunteer, right?

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And its failure to even try and track people rescued on the rubber won't help this. There was a video that went viral recently of hunter troops, like literally a line of soldiers rescuing bricks.

Speaker 4 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 line and stacking them up.

Speaker 7 Don't worry, the bricks are safe.

Speaker 4 Yeah, the bricks are safe. The people are not.

Speaker 4 It was genuinely infuriating to see it.

Speaker 4 And I can't imagine for people who have lost family members how that must feel.

Speaker 4 Even rescue workers, like I said, have been forcibly conscripted. Equality Myanmar has noted more than 100 cases of forced conscription since the earthquake.

Speaker 4 So that's Myanmar has a conscription rule law.

Speaker 4 So anyone, men and now women between certain ages can be forcibly conscripted into the junter'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 right who now don't have homes to hide it yeah or people who came out in order to save their neighbors and now now they're forcing them to be to fight for them just as the junta did with cyclone nagis they've also delayed and in cases blocked aid a team came from france to assist in a search and rescue.

Speaker 4 They spent 24 hours sitting in an airport waiting for their visa to be approved.

Speaker 4 And then they spent one day working in search and rescue efforts before being told that search and rescue efforts had now finished and they were to go home.

Speaker 4 So they traveled around the entire world and didn't save a single life.

Speaker 7 Abundance.

Speaker 38 It's great.

Speaker 4 Presumably because the hunter wanted to placate China, a Taiwanese team was straight up refused entry into Myanmar.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 All tourist visas have been suspended so it's not like the hunter is like 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.

Speaker 4 This kind of horrific indifference to human suffering has characterized the Tatmodor for decades and it's really unlikely to change as it grows even more desperate and it loses even more territory.

Speaker 4 It's just going to clamp down harder and harder on its people.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 Like people have been out rescuing people from the rubble, but they're also desperately short of resources.

Speaker 4 I spoke to Mandalay PDF rescue team the first week of April and they literally sent me a, 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?

Speaker 4 They're like the literal 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

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 The military has also blocked Aiden Medicine from entering their areas, right? So the military controls a lot of roadblocks and it uses its control of those roadblocks to stop Adam Medicine.

Speaker 4 Often it's kind of hoarding it in the capital city, which is Nypidor. If people aren't familiar, Naypidor is a city that the junta built for itself to govern from.
It means seat of kings.

Speaker 4 Also in Napidor right now is the U.S. aid agency Samaritan's Purse.
Are you familiar with Samaritan's Purse, Garrison?

Speaker 7 I don't think so. It sounds vaguely familiar, but all of these humanitarian organizations all have like the same like four words that they shuffle around in different ways.

Speaker 38 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 Samaritan's Purse, perhaps most famous for being run by Franklin Graham. Okay, yeah.

Speaker 7 I do know what this is and who this is, yes.

Speaker 4 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 Naypidor right now.

Speaker 7 Are they going to force people to convert to evangelical Christianity before they give services like they do in some cases?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Because like the hunter has made a consistent policy of bombing Christians in Myanmar, right? In Karen and Kareni State, there are a lot of Christian people.

Speaker 4 On Christmas Day, the Hunter bombed people going to services because it knew that Christians would be going to services at churches, right?

Speaker 4 The Kareni Christians this year I saw celebrated Christmas in caves because they were so afraid of being bombed, right? Like I have no idea what logical leap you have to make.

Speaker 38 Bizarre.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's and they're like, they're not even at the uh in Sagang.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Unfortunately, there were really strong rains this week, and that made all the collapse structures even more unstable. And the Malaysian team I saw have now returned home.

Speaker 4 We're going to take another ad break here, and when we come back, we will talk about what you can do to help.

Speaker 38 All right, and we're back.

Speaker 4 First, I want to, I guess, have some good news.

Speaker 4 Despite everything, the military has still been taking massive losses. The All Burma Students Democratic Front captured remaining junter positions in Indore.

Speaker 4 The All Burma 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.

Speaker 4 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 an entrenched position.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 this began as a defensive action. They'd surrounded the hunter.
I think it's called Japan Cave Hill. They'd surrounded them on Japan Cave Hill for a long time.

Speaker 4 And then the Hunter, obviously seeing the earthquake and everything, thereafter, decided that now was the time for them to break out of this encirclement. They did not break out.
They took a fat L.

Speaker 4 And as a result, they've all been captured now.

Speaker 4 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 would suggest going back and listening to that to understand Chinland.

Speaker 4 But the AIF and a lot of their allied forces from the Chinland Defense Force and the Chin Brotherhood had a significant victory in capturing the rest of the junter's positions in Falam last week.

Speaker 4 And I think it's very much on the table that we will see the whole of Chinland liberated in the next few months or by the end of the year, which would be great to see.

Speaker 4 So people are wondering what they can do to help, right? And I think it's a very valid question because I saw today that the UN was meeting with the Hunter in Naypitor.

Speaker 4 And I just have no faith that any money that goes to the Hunter is going to get to people who need it.

Speaker 7 Yeah, no, absolutely not. You cannot.

Speaker 4 Like they want them to die.

Speaker 4 I don't.

Speaker 7 No, they're like evil.

Speaker 38 Why?

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah. They are literally genocidal.
They have done a genocide

Speaker 4 that has been prosecuted in international criminal court.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So don't be doing that. But there are groups who are making a really big difference.

Speaker 4 And one of them that I wanted to highlight, and Robert and I are both very familiar with their work from the last time that we were over reporting, is Community Partners International.

Speaker 4 CPI are really cool because

Speaker 4 they work by empowering members of the local community to be health volunteers, as opposed to like dropping in some

Speaker 4 like doctors from America, right? Or doctors from the United Kingdom or whatever. And then when those people leave, they take their skills with them.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So like if you donate, someone else will match your donation and that will double the amount that

Speaker 4 you receive. Otherwise, I will provide a list of mutual aid funds that have been shared with me.
Most of them are like GoFundMe's or things like that. I'll put it all in the show description.

Speaker 4 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 like an organization which has a little bit more, I guess, like online presence.

Speaker 4 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, right?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 38 But until...

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 That is its game plan. It's continuing to get more drones from China.
It's getting aircraft, munitions, and jet fuel from China.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 They lose terrain, they bomb a hospital.

Speaker 4 It's the same stuff that Israel is doing, and they've, of course, previously been armed by Israel as well.

Speaker 4 But we don't see as much solidarity for the people of Burma.

Speaker 4 If you want to stay in touch with what's happening on the ground, I think the Irawari, I double-R-A-W-A-D-D-Y, does a really good job of doing daily summaries right now.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 17 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers.

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Speaker 48 All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie.

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Speaker 11 I'm Danny Drejo.

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I was going through a walk in my neighborhood.

Speaker 89 Out of the blue, I see this huge sign next to somebody's house.

Speaker 36 The sign says, my

Speaker 36 neighbor is a Karen.

Speaker 40 No way.

Speaker 13 I died

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Speaker 90 I'm like, I have to know.

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Speaker 88 Listen to Reasonably Shady from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 We're here to talk about possibly the most upsetting thing I've seen in American politics in like the past six months to maybe even, I don't know, viscerally it hit me for like the past few years.

Speaker 7 Like yet what happened on Monday in the Oval Office was

Speaker 7 kind of the most black pilled I've ever been, which is not a great way to start an episode.

Speaker 38 Yeah, it like

Speaker 4 It made me feel like

Speaker 4 I found 2023 very hard, like going out and seeing people freezing in the desert and then coming home and seeing Joe Biden eat ice cream

Speaker 4 on the timeline. But like this was different.
This was so like blatant.

Speaker 7 There's like a level of like intentional depravity that you're reminded of more blatantly. So

Speaker 4 and like Bukele's trolling of

Speaker 38 everyone.

Speaker 7 So we're going to be talking about an Oval Office meeting between President Trump and El Salvador President Bukele.

Speaker 7 I guess I could learn his first name.

Speaker 4 Naeeb Bukele.

Speaker 7 There you go.

Speaker 4 You know, he's Palestinian Salvadorian.

Speaker 40 Are you fucking serious?

Speaker 4 No, his dad's an imam.

Speaker 7 I don't even have time for that.

Speaker 4 This is just fucking.

Speaker 4 I'm sorry if anyone's driving and has had an accident upon hearing that.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 I guess I could point to for a pop culture reference, which feels a little bit in bad taste,

Speaker 7 but you can point to like 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 Seacot.

Speaker 7 Lights run all the time. They put 10 to 20 people per cell.
It's pretty bad. Jameson has done episodes on Seacot in the past.
We'll probably keep doing more.

Speaker 4 The lights thing, by the way, was a specific policy change by Bukele.

Speaker 4 There was a particularly violent weekend in El Salvador, and 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.

Speaker 4 Like as a way of punishing, I guess, the gangs by punishing the people who are detained there.

Speaker 7 Yeah, they can't go outside. They stay in their cell for almost 24 hours a day.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 And we've sent

Speaker 7 upwards of 300 immigrants there, the majority, vast majority of which have no criminal record. Even if you do have a criminal record, being renditioned to

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 since it has been learned that a few people sent there may have been partially sent by accident.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 So let's kind of start with that main case.

Speaker 7 The case that's receiving the most public attention right now is of a Maryland man named Kilmare Albrego-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.

Speaker 7 citizen wife and child.

Speaker 7 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 Seacott based on a quote-unquote administrative error.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 The El Salvador president also bulked at the idea of releasing Garcia from Seacot since he can't have a quote-unquote terrorist free in his country and lying about Garcia being a criminal.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 And the exact phrasing on these, I think, is actually pretty important right now.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 4 Can President Bukele weigh in on this?

Speaker 92 Do you plan to return him?

Speaker 93 Well, I guess I'm supposed to have not suggested that I'll smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right?

Speaker 93 How can I return him to the United States? Like, could I smuggle him into the United States?

Speaker 93 Of course, I'm not going to do it.

Speaker 37 It's like, I mean,

Speaker 93 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.

Speaker 94 You can release him inside of Smith. Yeah, but I'm not releasing.

Speaker 93 I mean, we're not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country.

Speaker 93 I mean, you just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country of 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.

Speaker 93 That's not going to happen.

Speaker 97 Well, they'd love to have a criminal, you know, released into our country.

Speaker 93 I mean, there's a fascination.

Speaker 96 They would love it.

Speaker 97 Yeah, they would.

Speaker 97 These are sick people.

Speaker 40 It's just insane.

Speaker 38 Like, the whole

Speaker 4 pretense of any

Speaker 4 serious engagement with reality there is just gone.

Speaker 7 Well, 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.

Speaker 4 Yeah, as they sit in the same room.

Speaker 7 The whole time Bikali's talking, Trump has like this like a growing smirk on his face as Bikali is talking about this preposterous notion of smuggling a US 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 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 Seacot and the US 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 that suddenly they don't have the power to undo what they seemingly had the power to do in the first place.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 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, like, we just get to lock people up.
Why would I not do that?

Speaker 7 In effect, they are arguing that every single human being that is sent to Seacot by the United States is unable to ever leave the prison alive. Yeah.
Like, that's basically what they're saying.

Speaker 7 They're saying both, both parties, both Trump and Bukele, are unable to have someone who's been sent there returned. So they're just saying, like, like, no one's able to do anything.

Speaker 7 Like, they're just stuck there until they die. And, like, this is part of the design of Seacot.

Speaker 7 The person who runs like the Seacot security has said that they do not intend in any person ever being released from Seacot. You are not designed to get out.
You are stuck there forever.

Speaker 7 No one's ever left there.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 7 It's just where you get disappeared. And

Speaker 7 that's all that it is.

Speaker 7 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 Christina and like propaganda cameras pointed at the prison bars.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Bukele is very reticent to release anyone for that reason. And like,

Speaker 4 there are plenty of allegations.

Speaker 4 And like, I think like Time magazine has published this, it's not hugely controversial, that he made deals with gangs in the past in El Salvador, right, to get them to reduce the murder rate.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So it's kind of in his interest to never have anyone be released.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So he also has a financial interest in keeping people in there.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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, they're just there.

Speaker 7 And like, who knows if they're going to like 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 like, however, like, these people are, they are just stuck there because he's not going to release them into his country.

Speaker 7 We are seemingly unable.

Speaker 7 uh to take anyone back from there i i think i mean unwilling right like like the us is theoretically able it's argued that we're unable as as as as we will get into more yeah after this

Speaker 7 outbreak

Speaker 7 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,

Speaker 7 the first instinct is always to pass the buck onto someone else. We saw this a lot with SignalGate, how it was always someone else's fault.

Speaker 7 No single person could get like hammered down of being like, okay, you are the person that's going to be like accountable for this.

Speaker 7 And throughout this Oval Office meeting, eventually they started taking questions from journalists and reporters and propagandists who were in the room.

Speaker 7 And you saw this trend of, you know, if 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 So instead, they just talk in a circle. And I think Miller was one of the most effective at this.

Speaker 7 And unfortunately, we're going to play the longest clip in this episode, just under two minutes, from Stephen Miller, Miller, where he lays out the Trump admins' thought process and strategy behind what they are doing.

Speaker 7 And I apologize for this, but it is useful to hear from Himmler, too. So

Speaker 7 here we go.

Speaker 96 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.

Speaker 96 Two immigration courts found that he was a member of MS-13.

Speaker 96 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.

Speaker 96 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.

Speaker 96 and had to be returned because of the foreign terrorist designation.

Speaker 96 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.

Speaker 96 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 is I'm sure you understand, rapes little girls, murders women, murders children, is engaged in the most barbaric activities in the world.

Speaker 96 And I can promise you, if he was your neighbor, you would move right away.

Speaker 95 So you don't claim to be a matter of fact. But the Supreme Court is asking to...

Speaker 97 And what was the ruling and the Supreme Court steve? Was it 9-0?

Speaker 96 Yes, it was a 9-0

Speaker 96 in our favor.

Speaker 95 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.

Speaker 95 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.

Speaker 95 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.

Speaker 95 Your questions about it per the court can only be directed to him.

Speaker 7 So there's a lot there.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 4 Yeah, like a Vagosa neighborhood kind of.

Speaker 7 Well, just completely lying about like the context of this case. Yeah.

Speaker 7 With Miller saying it's arrogant to suggest 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.

Speaker 7 Talking about kidnapping him from Seacott to return him to the United States, as if I didn't just kidnap hundreds of people with no criminal records and send them to a foreign gulag.

Speaker 7 And then also lied about

Speaker 7 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 on the details on what facilitate the return actually means.

Speaker 7 And again, I think like the, the, one of the most telling parts is, is how he ends by saying, quote, no version of this ever ends up with him living here.

Speaker 7 And yeah, like they're going to look for any way to like make this test case to work, right?

Speaker 7 And if, and if, and if they, if they can do this to someone with protected legal status who is not a, who is not a terrorist, who is not a actual ms13 gang member right this is this is kind of ideal for them because that means they can paint anybody as uh 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 to bukele to

Speaker 7 to have to have him answer this question again perfectly laying out their strategy There's a lot to break down in what Miller said.

Speaker 4 It's also just kind of interesting how Miller is like amongst the press. He's not one of the people sat on the couches supposed to be giving the press conference, right?

Speaker 4 He just kind kind of wades in to,

Speaker 4 I guess, like, like, offer this opinion and kind of like be the kind of embassy of this of their response, I guess, in a sense.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think crucially, like, Abrago Garcia's protection was from being returned to El Salvador, right?

Speaker 4 Because he had been harassed by gang members when leaving El Salvador and when living in El Salvador.

Speaker 7 He's lived in the States since 2011, and he left El Salvador to flee harassment and abuse from gang members.

Speaker 4 Yeah, the gangs that he's been accused of being a part of. But like, it then follows that like it would be legal for them to deport him to a third country, right?

Speaker 4 And that is the path that they've followed with all the Venezuelan migrants, right? They've accused them of being members of Trendaragua.

Speaker 4 I have not seen a compelling case made that any of them are yet.

Speaker 4 I'm sure people from Trendaragua have come to this country, but no, they have not provided any evidence that the people they have sent to Segot are those people.

Speaker 7 No, like we've said like 14 people are like accused of some kind of like violent crime, like murder or rape. Um, and the other like 275 do not have a criminal record whatsoever.

Speaker 4 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 Trenderagua.

Speaker 4 And for them, right, 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 El Salvador.

Speaker 4 But for the Salvadorians, that's a different question, right?

Speaker 4 And that is what they're trying to find here.

Speaker 4 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 Salvadoran man.

Speaker 4 And I hope that doesn't mean that the ship has sailed for the Venezuelans, right? That essentially

Speaker 4 they don't have a case. Because that was the vast bulk of them.
I think there was something like 60 Salvadoran citizens and the rest Venezuelans.

Speaker 7 No, hundreds of people have been forgotten in this.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 And Stephen Miller hopped back in to talk about this Supreme Court case that they're falsely saying they won 9-0, which is not how that case went.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 91 No, the foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the President of the United States, not by a court.

Speaker 91 And no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States.

Speaker 4 It's that simple.

Speaker 96 End of story.

Speaker 95 And that's what the Supreme Court held, by the way,

Speaker 96 the Supreme Court said exactly what Marco said, that no court has the authority to compel the foreign policy function of the United States.

Speaker 96 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.

Speaker 7 Part of what I find so disturbing about this idea of

Speaker 7 no habeas corpus, no due process if you aren't on foreign soil, is that 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 And this is such a troubling, broad concept that the portions of the courts are kind of allowing them to claim right now.

Speaker 7 And the complete removal of due process is like slowly getting encroached upon at first with undocumented immigrants and green card holders.

Speaker 7 But as we will see in the next section, they are also absolutely going to be targeting U.S. citizens.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think like we should just point out, obviously, the court is not conducting the foreign policy of the United States.

Speaker 4 It's ruling on the legality of the action taken by the president, which is exactly what it's supposed to do.

Speaker 7 Yeah, and as it relates to your rights for due process, if you are in the United States.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, like every single U.S. person, right? U.S.
person would be anybody who resides in the U.S., be they documented or undocumented migrant citizen, what have you, like has a stake in this.

Speaker 7 We're going to go on break and then come back to discuss the expansion of the Seacott detention program and the possible targeting of u.s citizens

Speaker 7 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 for the 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?

Speaker 7 A few days later, the White House Press Secretary reiterated that this is something that Trump is discussing both publicly and privately.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 citizens to these prison black sites.

Speaker 94 I'd do something.

Speaker 97 We'd help them out.

Speaker 97 They're great facilities, very strong facilities, and

Speaker 97 they don't play games. I'd like to go a step further.
I mean,

Speaker 97 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

Speaker 97 hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they're not looking that are

Speaker 97 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?

Speaker 7 So this is just the start of a long process that is going to be deeply troublesome and worrying. And again, like this is something that they keep talking about.

Speaker 7 Like, 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.

Speaker 4 Yeah, did you notice he called out Miller? He said, you'll have to look at the laws and then leave. Obviously, Miller is not the Attorney General.

Speaker 7 He also did mention Attorney General Pambondi.

Speaker 4 Pambondi.

Speaker 7 Yes, who's also looking into this option right now.

Speaker 4 Right, but Miller is often credited with being the kind of mastermind behind Title 42, two, right?

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 And like, that's what I'm wondering if they're going for again.

Speaker 4 Like, like Steve Miller has been very good at this, at finding obscure justifications in United States federal law for for shit that they want to do.

Speaker 7 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 it's outside U.S. soil, there's a limited way U.S.

Speaker 7 courts can actually interfere or undo things that have already been done.

Speaker 7 And again, like 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. Like

Speaker 7 we're just funding like gulag camps on foreign soil to send the undesirables to. And

Speaker 7 no matter how much Trump talks about how we're only going to to send quote-unquote American criminals there, as we've seen with Seacott so far, like, no, like

Speaker 7 they, the majority of people they are sending do not have

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 98 Just a follow-up question, a clarification. You mentioned that you're open to deporting individuals that aren't foreign aliens but are criminals to El Salvador.

Speaker 98 Does that include potentially U.S. citizens fully naturalized American?

Speaker 97 If they're criminals and if they hit people with baseball bats over their head that happen to be 90 years old and if

Speaker 97 they rape

Speaker 97 87 year old women in Coney Island, Brooklyn. Yeah, yeah, that includes them.
What do you think there's a special category of person? They're as bad as anybody that comes in. We have bad ones, too.

Speaker 97 And I'm all for it. We have others that we're negotiating with, too.

Speaker 97 But no,

Speaker 97 if it's a homegrown criminal, I have no problem.

Speaker 7 He's really obsessed with the spaceball bats thing. I don't quite know what that's about.

Speaker 4 That seems like a specific case that he's referring to.

Speaker 7 Maybe it's something he remembers like 30 years ago that really got stuck in his head. Right.

Speaker 7 But also later, he says that they're negotiating with other countries to send U.S. citizens to, not just El Salvador.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 I mean, they've sent migrants, third country migrants to Panama before, right? And detained them there. Honduras, I believe, is building like a prison that's not dissimilar to Sekot.
Like,

Speaker 4 I'm guessing this will be their sort of way of courting allies in the hemisphere, like, because they'll sort of pay them a relatively large amount in order to attempt to offshore offshore people they don't like.

Speaker 7 Yeah. And again, like as we've seen the past few years and increasingly so now,

Speaker 7 the effort to label like activists or people who are vocally opposed to the United States foreign policy, the United States or the state of Israel, deeming them terrorists.

Speaker 7 And then by extension, if you charge them with a crime, then criminals, the idea that they can be housed in a place like Seacot now

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 But you can't just take this as like, oh, you know, that's just Trump talking. Like, no,

Speaker 7 this is something they really want to do. And it's like one of the freakiest things that I've seen in like domestic U.S.
politics in a long time.

Speaker 7 Earlier, Trump was recorded half whispering to Bukele, telling him that El Salvador needs to build five more Seacot-style torture prisons to house U.S. citizens.
As Trump says, homegrown criminals.

Speaker 7 Bukele replies that they will have enough room, and then the entire Oval Office laughs.

Speaker 99 Homegrowns are next. The homegrowns.
You got to build about five more places. Yeah, that's fair.
All right.

Speaker 7 It's not big enough. It's the bleakest clip I've ever seen before.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Talking about homegrowns are next. Got to 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.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 Like, like, Germany did this in the East, right? Russia sent people to Siberia for a re Russia, Soviet Union.

Speaker 7 Creating these stateless zones where the regular laws of your fatherland state do 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 like the first thing you learn about is concentration camps and gulags and how that's like the symbol of evil

Speaker 7 and now it's something you laugh about in the oval office to send home groans to five disappearing torture camps.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and like, just to be like even clear, I guess what distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison is that there is no due process, right?

Speaker 4 People are sent there because of who they are, not because of what they did.

Speaker 7 Like, if you're a Venezuelan man who may or may not have a tattoo.

Speaker 4 Yeah, like, we are, I don't know what it will take for some people to realize what's happening here.

Speaker 7 And, like, the president of El Salvador is so on board for this.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, he doesn't hide from that reputation, right?

Speaker 7 He embraces it.

Speaker 4 His Twitter for a while had world's coolest dictator in the bio. I don't know if it still does.

Speaker 7 But like, both both him and Trump have openly aligned themselves with quote-unquote nationalism and nationalists. They're openly saying this.

Speaker 7 Trump said, dictator on day one, that wasn't just a rhetorical device. That was literal.
This is what he's doing.

Speaker 7 The El Salvador president told Trump, you have 350 million people to liberate, but to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some.

Speaker 7 And he followed that up by saying that he is eager to help with that.

Speaker 100 In fact, Mr. President, you have

Speaker 100 350 million people to liberate.

Speaker 100 But to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some.

Speaker 100 That's the way it works, right? You cannot just free the criminals and think crime is going to go down magically.

Speaker 93 You have to imprison them so you can liberate 350 million Americans that are asking for the end of crime and the end of terrorism. And it can be done.
I mean,

Speaker 93 you're doing it already.

Speaker 93 So

Speaker 93 I'm really happy to be here, honored, and eager to help.

Speaker 7 This whole liberation through through imprisonment thing is elementary school stuff here.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But like I'm here with one to tell you if that's what you need, you know? Like this is textbook stuff like Garrison's saying. Like this is not debatable.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 7 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 flat basis.

Speaker 7 And if you spend any time on X, the everything app, watching videos of these press conferences, it's full of people just like cheering this on completely, like completely blankly.

Speaker 4 I think that's a very skewed sample of people who totally paid for Elon Musk.

Speaker 7 Of course, of course. But like the number of people

Speaker 7 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 like this is those people are unreachable you cannot come back from that like you is there is no coming back from that if you believe that the way deportations are currently happening is fair just and right like i cannot understand you as a human anymore that is so like divorced and like alien yeah you've gone past the point of no return right like liberals who like shield their their, who like shield their eyes from like the horrors at the border, like I don't agree with that, but in some ways I can like understand it.

Speaker 7 The open like cheering on of this

Speaker 47 is like a whole, it's a whole other level.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's not like I can't bear to see it. I'm going to ignore it because it'll cause me to confront the contradictions.
It's, I'm seeing it, I'm watching it, and I think it's fucking great.

Speaker 7 The last thing I'm going to unplay here, a CNN reporter asked Trump if he would obey a Supreme Court order to return someone to the United States.

Speaker 7 Instead of answering this question, Trump Trump attacked the reporter and complained about how she wasn't praising him for deporting criminals.

Speaker 7 Well, the president, Mr.

Speaker 92 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

Speaker 92 it must be facilitated.

Speaker 97 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?

Speaker 97 Why do you go over and over? And that's why nobody watches you anymore. You know, you have no credibility.
Please go ahead. President Trump.

Speaker 38 Yeah, mad.

Speaker 7 Very textbook authoritarian, like blanket stuff. Like there's, there's nothing to like commentate about that.
It just is what it is. I guess

Speaker 7 we do have some breaking news because we're recording this on Tuesday.

Speaker 7 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?

Speaker 7 since it was sent back to the to the district court from the Supreme Court last week regarding his possible facilitated return to the United States. Right.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 DOJ didn't present any new information today,

Speaker 4 but we see that there's some hopeful things from a district court judge and then it kind of all goes up in flames. But I think Chinis is XINI S is how the name is spelled.

Speaker 4 I believe it's Chinis, has said that every day that he's there is a day of further irreparable harm. And she talks about the process being at the roots of the Constitution, right?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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 Seccord, right?

Speaker 4 And so anything else subsequent to that doesn't matter. Jinny said that like their interpretation of the word flies in the face of the plain meaning of the word.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 I'm going to be available if you need to do it at odd hours or weekends. That's what I'm talking about.

Speaker 4 Anything short of a judge saying you have to go to Sekot, remove him from the cell, put him on the plane and bring him back to America is going to be interpreted by the Trump administration to mean that they don't have to do that.

Speaker 7 Yeah, they're going to weasel their way around it the same way you heard Stephen Miller weasel his way around every question

Speaker 38 and with

Speaker 4 truth being used as a flexible medium yeah to to shape a sculpture of their choosing and like they've done that right 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 it's 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.

Speaker 4 I

Speaker 4 haven't seen anything to indicate that we're getting that anytime soon. And as the judge said, right, every day he's there.

Speaker 4 Irreparable harm is done to him.

Speaker 38 And

Speaker 4 that's where we're at right now, right? 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Good outlet, by the way.

Speaker 7 A father of a 19-year-old legal immigrant from Brooklyn, this 19-year-old with

Speaker 7 no tattoos,

Speaker 7 was kidnapped off the streets of New York. The quote from his father reads, quote, the officers grabbed him and two other boys right at the entrance to our building.
One said, no, he's not the one.

Speaker 7 Like they were looking for someone else.

Speaker 38 One officer, to be clear. Correct.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 But the other officer said, take him anyway, unquote.

Speaker 7 And now this father, exactly a month later, is still looking for his missing son, who is disappeared into an El Salvador torture prison.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Jesus.

Speaker 4 Like I've said before on this show, like one of the things that I learned in the Darien Gap was how much people can care about their kids.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 7 still think the things I said there I stand by and

Speaker 7 I stand by the the the only recommendation I have is to create options for yourself.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 But even that will not keep you safe, as we've talked about today.

Speaker 4 And your options include creating networks to take care of one another, right? Like

Speaker 4 the

Speaker 4 things that will probably affect more of you than direct state violence are economic downturns,

Speaker 4 recessions, right?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Because I don't think that the world is going to want to keep doing business with a country that

Speaker 4 acts like this,

Speaker 4 both economically and in terms of its conduct towards migrants. So like your plans don't have to be to leave.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 vital.

Speaker 7 We will continue to report on the Garcia case, other court cases regarding these 300 people rendition to El Salvador and Seacot in the next few weeks.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Just to 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But you can reach out to us there.

Speaker 7 I'll see you on the other side.

Speaker 17 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers.

Speaker 18 But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

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Speaker 48 All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie.

Speaker 49 For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

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Speaker 71 From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

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Speaker 83 Welcome, fellow seekers of the dark.

Speaker 11 I'm Danny Drejo.

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Speaker 1 In early 1988, federal agents race to track down the gang they suspect of importing millions of dollars worth of heroin into New York from Asia.

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Speaker 1 Listen to the Chinatown Sting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts.

Speaker 40 Welcome to Dick It Happened here, a podcast increasingly well-named as the days go on. I am your host, Mia Wong, and it occurs to me,

Speaker 40 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...

Speaker 40 Today we are going to be covering a pretty long-running strike. We're going to say how many days it's been going.

Speaker 40 It's unclear when this episode is going to come out, so who fucking knows how long it'll be

Speaker 40 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 Ore Workers Union.
Spencer, welcome to the show.

Speaker 38 Hey, thank you so much for having me. Yeah.

Speaker 40 Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you about this. So this is what day is it today? I should know this.
April 15th. And as of April 15th, you've been on strike for 25 days.

Speaker 38 Yep, that's just about right. Yeah, it started on the 22nd of March.
We held our strike vote like a solid 12 days before

Speaker 38 we actually went out on the picket line and

Speaker 38 won that strike vote with 14 yeses, a single no, and I think four abstentions.

Speaker 39 That's pretty good. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 38 So 93% of those voting voted yes. Yeah,

Speaker 40 which

Speaker 40 typically you want at least like mid-70s

Speaker 40 if we're going to do this kind of thing. But, you know, as listeners to the show, hopefully understand by now, you can't just like call a strike and have it happen.

Speaker 40 You know, you have to do a whole bunch of organizing.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 38 And

Speaker 40 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?

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 So we actually just had our union two-year birthday.

Speaker 38 Happy birthday.

Speaker 38 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, my purview.

Speaker 8 I'm a lot more involved now than I was at the start of the process.

Speaker 38 And

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 I was pretty on board right away. I mean, you know, like I'm from the Bay Area.
So

Speaker 40 there are only two types of people from the Bay Area. We wouldn't be having one of them on the show.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 38 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, no.

Speaker 38 Yeah, especially like my family's from the Midwest Midwest and everything. So there's

Speaker 38 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 like have.

Speaker 38 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?

Speaker 38 Aside from like my own just like. predilection to thinking, you know, more worker power is better.
Yeah. Also kind of seeing like some of the factors that precipitated it.

Speaker 38 Like, for instance, like when I was hired here, I was hired in my interview. It was the one of the owners

Speaker 38 and the manager of my department.

Speaker 38 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

Speaker 7 inas or whatever, get to get stuff for the store.

Speaker 38 But that manager, you know, he was there in the interview and we got to

Speaker 38 the portion where the owner explained what at will employment is. Oh,

Speaker 38 and she and she went, so we're at will here.

Speaker 38 So

Speaker 38 Samuel, Samuel's my manager. Samuel, how long have you been here? 21 years? He's there, hands folded on the table.
Yes.

Speaker 38 What at will means is

Speaker 38 it could be tomorrow. I could say, you know, Samuel, it's been a great 21 years.
I really appreciate all the work you've done. Today's your last day.

Speaker 38 What? Why would you say that? And he has to sit there and go,

Speaker 38 Jesus Christ. And then she says, of course, likewise, tomorrow, Samuel can come to me and say, hey, Mary Lou, it's been 21 years.

Speaker 38 I've enjoyed it. I'm quitting.
So, you know, the sort of sword over his neck is being cast is somehow equal to him not being like indentured.

Speaker 73 Yes,

Speaker 38 what are we doing here?

Speaker 40 That's also just, I mean, like, you know, yeah, on the basic level, yeah, it's like, okay, your opponent can,

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 44 And then second to real, I feel like just as

Speaker 40 just like as a management tactic, like,

Speaker 44 are you like trying to piss off your subordinates?

Speaker 45 Like,

Speaker 38 what?

Speaker 40 I have never had a boss, like, just do that in a hiring meeting. What?

Speaker 38 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 38 have you worked at like a, like a, like a sort of small, like, mom-and-pop, quote-unquote, business?

Speaker 38 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 40 that's probably why, because I've usually had like larger.

Speaker 40 My shitty jobs have either been like government jobs or like

Speaker 40 larger companies. So there was less of the like.

Speaker 40 I heard a line recently that I wish I remembered where it was from. It might be a line from Star Trek.

Speaker 40 It's like one of the Ferengi rules, which is like treat your employees like family, exploit them ruthlessly,

Speaker 38 which I love.

Speaker 40 You know,

Speaker 38 that's a traditional line in business, especially in small business. And

Speaker 38 it's no stranger here.

Speaker 8 Yeah, that question of like,

Speaker 38 wanting to piss off your subordinates or whatever. It's a

Speaker 38 I don't know if pissing off is necessarily like the concern but man ownership here definitely

Speaker 38 i've gotten the impression that they enjoy showing their power

Speaker 38 and i've gotten the impression that um

Speaker 38 the sort of like uncertainty and like yeah my mom would call it jockeying for position that you have to do is a dynamic that they I can't say, I really can't say they, honestly, because the other owner, he hasn't

Speaker 38 been very active in the business business since since my hiring but at least mary lou yeah tends to lean on that's kind of like the uh

Speaker 38 the special quality that you get with like a small business and organizing in a small workplace is that like

Speaker 38 you know you can see sort of in their public communications the way that like

Speaker 38 the Zucks and the Bezoses and the rest of them feel about their employees.

Speaker 38 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

Speaker 38 but it in a small business setting you really get a a keen view into how like

Speaker 38 the

Speaker 38 power of the employer mixes very readily with um

Speaker 38 a person's like predilection towards discipline predilection towards like personal

Speaker 38 what would you call it personal battling almost.

Speaker 40 Yeah.

Speaker 40 Well, 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.

Speaker 40 Like there's an old Chinese expression that's like, heaven is high and the emperor is far away.

Speaker 40 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 like, he never interacts with you.

Speaker 40 But with this, it's like, no, like the, the, the small business tyrant is right there in your face all the time.

Speaker 40 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 isn't just like a unique thing of like small business owners like people in all positions like in all portions of of like the class society have in them kind of like the capacity for cruelty and there's just people like that

Speaker 40 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 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 like i don't know you're dealing with like like one of the random king louis and you're like 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 doesn't get doesn't get a shit right like it's just like yeah it's this weird yeah no exactly it's like it's actually an argument that uh she's deployed in her reddit correspondence which uh has been seemingly a pretty active part of her spare time that she's not spending at the bargaining table with us, you know, made this comparison of like, this isn't a question about oligarchs or whatever.

Speaker 38 And it's true, like the small businessman is not an oligarch,

Speaker 38 but

Speaker 38 the small business is a microcosm of like the larger capitalist social order. And

Speaker 38 while the small business man might not have the scope of power of the oligarch or like the actual capital resources of an oligarch the behavior certainly rhymes yeah at least yeah and 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

Speaker 38 lots of people can be like this but only only the few the proud the small business tired 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,

Speaker 38 you know, you spend most people more than like a 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, we talk about,

Speaker 38 I mean, shit, we don't, people are not so much talking about democracy writ large in the U.S.

Speaker 38 in the same way now that they used to. But,

Speaker 38 you know, you talk about this idea of like living in a democracy, but democracy ends at the shop door. Yeah.

Speaker 40 Yeah. And like the the kind of power that these people have is something that like

Speaker 40 these people get to control when you can go to the bathroom, like what clothes you wear, like literally what you can do, what you can say at any given time.

Speaker 40 If you employed the exact level of control that your boss has over you on a state, it would be a totalitarian state.

Speaker 40 And yet everyone seems to 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 petrick 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 is that they want to like to import the sort of like just the pure tyranny of the workplace and expand it into the entire political system so that their their like sort of just pure like totalitarian corporate rule can't be challenged.

Speaker 38 Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, wasn't it Mussolini who coined the term the corporate state?

Speaker 40 Probably, although it would not surprise me if it was like some other fascist theorist and Mussolini just started saying it because

Speaker 40 yeah, but yeah, like that's, you know, that's a substantive thing here. And

Speaker 40 what this also means is that like

Speaker 40 even in ways that are sort of hard to see, like a fight over democracy in the workplace, right, is a, 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

Speaker 38 yeah yeah i mean you said it very very aptly there like the corporate structure mirrors the totalitarian structure And,

Speaker 38 you know, not only does like fighting the corporate structure at the level of labor make sense in that, right, labor is what enables the flow of capital that

Speaker 38 sustains the totalitarian state, but also, like you said,

Speaker 38 you're addressing the structure in its,

Speaker 38 I don't know, I almost think of it as like the, you know, like Grendel's mother in the fen or whatever. And like, like, you know, the, the,

Speaker 38 the authoritarian thing is like, uh, is like Grendel maybe. And like, Grendel's mother is like

Speaker 38 this capitalist hierarchical structure. Yeah.
You know, you take it on with an insistence on workplace democracy as kind of libby as that's, as that sounds.

Speaker 40 Okay,

Speaker 40 speaking of capitalist totalitarianism, I

Speaker 4 here are the ads that we are required to run by our corporations.

Speaker 38 Beautiful, beautiful.

Speaker 38 Let's hear them.

Speaker 39 And we are back.

Speaker 40 So

Speaker 40 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, the idea, the old sort of like anarchist idea of workers' control, right?

Speaker 40 But, okay, so one thing I wanted to talk about before we sort of get into the more formal stuff about

Speaker 40 the strike is 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

Speaker 40 Okay, every functional union wants to do this.

Speaker 40 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 the people who are doing your bargaining, people who are doing your thing, like your union is

Speaker 40 there's weird shit about it, and you should probably like be looking into that.

Speaker 40 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?

Speaker 38 Well, I think ultimately, like

Speaker 38 the easiest thing is a

Speaker 38 sort of ramping up degree of like responsibility within the organization, right?

Speaker 38 So like at the start, I would come to some of the meetings. I would miss some of them.
I would be like, oh, I'm fucking so busy with whatever is going on in my life.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And,

Speaker 38 you know, eventually, one, we like kind of persisted as a union over a longer period of time.

Speaker 38 The

Speaker 38 necessity of involvement became more like obvious to me. Right.

Speaker 38 And that's, that's a hard ask, you know, like you're organizing, you want momentum and you want,

Speaker 38 you know, you want to be able to change your conditions for the better as soon as possible. Yeah.

Speaker 38 And with

Speaker 38 Urbanoir, you know, lots of workplaces that need unionization have high turnover, right? And Urbanor is no different.

Speaker 38 And so I saw, you know, like some of the more committed elements of the bargaining unit be fired or quit or whatever. Yeah.

Speaker 38 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 some of them, you don't.
Yeah.

Speaker 38 You know, you have different dynamics. I feel like the hiring procedures may have changed a little bit after we won our election,

Speaker 38 but you know, I can't say that for certain. So the sort of like necessity of like

Speaker 38 keeping that like flame going, especially after we had won the election, we were in contract partying for a long period of time,

Speaker 38 made me feel like a sort of sense of like, I need to be more active in this because like this is an important struggle and like,

Speaker 38 I see our like main organizers taking on like a fuckload of work

Speaker 38 and like

Speaker 38 needing more voices at the table, needing more, more, uh, needing more people to be more involved. And so, like,

Speaker 38 I,

Speaker 38 you know, volunteered to

Speaker 38 like run for treasurer. I was the only candidate.
Yeah. But theoretically, I could have been voted down.
They could have been like, I don't know about Spencer.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And I had to 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 IWW branch,

Speaker 38 hand it, hand a big check to Dino,

Speaker 38 that kind of stuff. And just like having like little

Speaker 38 things to be doing, like Spur's involvement, other people, you know, became responsible for for like parts of social media outreach, making graphics, stuff like that.

Speaker 38 And

Speaker 38 also like sort of, I guess, giving people the opportunity to leverage their individual connections within the workplace, because every workplace is like clicks and groups and subgroups and all that,

Speaker 38 to leverage those connections in like service of. bettering everyone's conditions.

Speaker 38 So like to a certain degree, I've I've been like important as like an envoy to my particular department because it's our job takes us away from the job site or like from like the main main work site often and stuff like that.

Speaker 38 So, there's less of a direct avenue for communication there. Yeah.
So, I can say that's my experience. Yeah.

Speaker 38 As far as organizing goes, like, I'm easy. You know, I was already

Speaker 38 believing in it. Yeah.
And, like,

Speaker 38 there are others that it have, that it's been harder.

Speaker 38 I will say, though, that the strike strike itself is,

Speaker 38 I mean, a strike is a conflict. And when you're in conflict together, it's an extremely cohering force.

Speaker 39 Yeah.

Speaker 38 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 you are ultimately in conflict with the boss.

Speaker 38 The boss doesn't want you to unionize.

Speaker 38 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

Speaker 38 and to like support each other like tangibly in terms of 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.

Speaker 38 I think those are like really potent cohering forces.

Speaker 38 And,

Speaker 38 you know, it helps to have a good, uh, a good opponent you know the boss is the best organizer

Speaker 38 and at urban or it's

Speaker 38 you don't go along without coming head to head with like

Speaker 38 the

Speaker 38 with with conflict with ownership or with like ownership through the the mediator of management like although like support for the

Speaker 38 union might be divided a bit at the workplace.

Speaker 38 One thing that's pretty universal is like a frustration with ownership. Yeah.

Speaker 40 So, okay, speaking of a frustration with ownership, it is time for us to go to ads one last time.

Speaker 38 Oh, beautiful.

Speaker 40 But then, after we come back, strike, strike, strike, strike.

Speaker 7 Strike, strike, strike.

Speaker 38 Just after this message.

Speaker 38 Oh my god.

Speaker 40 Okay, we are back from a bunch of people who almost assuredly do not want you to go on strike, but

Speaker 40 yeah, so

Speaker 40 let's get into the process of how you actually organize a strike. Yeah, let's start from just like the very beginning.

Speaker 40 What are the kind of things that were happening that you know made people think that you needed to do this in the first place?

Speaker 38 So the strike itself is a result, specifically like this is a ULP strike.

Speaker 38 So it's in response to something that falls under the category of unfair labor practice according to the National Labor Relations Act.

Speaker 38 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 at the workplace.

Speaker 38 So the specific ULP that's being cited for our strike is bad faith bargaining. And for us, what that's looked like is two

Speaker 38 years of of completely stalled negotiations where

Speaker 38 we are basically being faced with a take-it or leave-it offer of the status quo in the vast majority of our proposals.

Speaker 38 Bargaining is very, very slow and

Speaker 38 ownership has held tightly to

Speaker 38 the offense at us having unionized it all, which to my understanding is pretty typical of small workplaces. The ownership takes it very personally

Speaker 38 and

Speaker 38 that

Speaker 38 personal feeling of betrayal or whatever becomes like a like a stumbling block in the negotiation process. I know that was the case with Moe's, another.

Speaker 38 There's a bookshop in Berkeley that also unionized with the IWW. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 They said, well, how can we possibly agree to any of this without understanding the full context, especially the economic context?

Speaker 40 Oh my gosh.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 We got to do a proposal by proposal.

Speaker 38 So

Speaker 38 it's been really unclear to us if ownership has even actually like read the entirety of our collective bargaining bargaining agreement that that we put on their desk.

Speaker 38 I know that in the past lawyers have the lawyers have said things like, oh, my

Speaker 38 eyes glazed over when I read your email. So I missed such and such part of it.
That's literally your job.

Speaker 38 Yes. You're a contract lawyer.
You have one job.

Speaker 38 Yeah, you would think like a lawyer would have like a little bit more than

Speaker 38 beyond like a tweet tweet-sized reading capacity, but.

Speaker 40 Well, they give anyone law degrees. Yeah.

Speaker 38 Or like ownership saying, like,

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 46 Just these readers bad faith bargaining.

Speaker 40 Yeah, that's bad by like the standards of like

Speaker 40 normal, it takes two years to do a fucking contract because they're just not doing shit. Like, good lord.

Speaker 41 Usually.

Speaker 38 in those long contract negotiations by two years at least there's like been some progress yeah yeah they've read the proposals.

Speaker 40 Like, yes, okay, will, will, 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 the time the meeting was going to start?

Speaker 40 Yes, but will they have done it? Usually, yes,

Speaker 38 yeah, and

Speaker 38 in fact, in

Speaker 38 the sort of company propaganda where they're claiming that this like bad faith bargaining charge has no grounds, they're like, ownership has come to like 25 to 30 bargaining sessions, neglecting to mention there have been somewhere in the range of like 50 to 60.

Speaker 8 And of course,

Speaker 38 maybe they've shown up to more than half.

Speaker 40 I don't want to be libelous, but yeah, but still, like, if at the point at which you are failing to show up for any bargaining session, I think you can like, 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.

Speaker 40 But

Speaker 38 hey, you know, they've been talking about a worker co-op for 20 years non-reformist reforms

Speaker 38 but yeah so those kind of things and then like finally like one of the 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

Speaker 38 They say it'll ruin the company. They say the company will go bankrupt.

Speaker 8 They say it's unsustainable.

Speaker 38 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?

Speaker 38 It

Speaker 38 obligates you to furnish information and prove that. And they, for whatever reason, do not want to

Speaker 38 furnish financial information.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 40 God damn it. So, okay, let's talk about like the just sort of the process of like how the discussions went for doing this.
What did those sort of look like?

Speaker 40 And how did how did you sort of, you know, just like plan plan this thing out?

Speaker 38 Well, I guess the process towards like deciding that it needed to come to a strike was like, you know, that, that is a, a sort of thing that builds over a long period of time.

Speaker 38 You know, you see ownership doing bad faith bargaining, you go, what more conciliatory approaches can we take first? You know, can we try this?

Speaker 38 Can we try offering this to make, you know, can we try this display of good faith? Can we offer this compromise?

Speaker 38 One of the things that was a big part was of

Speaker 38 some of the not exactly contract related discussions, but like ownership has been talking for a long time about a co-op transition that has never happened. You know, it's been 20 years.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And so the only way there's ever going to be a co-op is if the union goes away.

Speaker 38 And so in response to that, we 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.

Speaker 38 It was our lead negotiator who actually provided the information. So I don't remember the name of the organization.

Speaker 38 But, you know, here's such and such organization that actually specifically deals with union co-op workplace transitions was not received with interest.

Speaker 38 So it's like you massive catalog of bad faith bargaining and you end up in your strategy discussions with the whole unit testing the wires of like,

Speaker 38 when is too much? What's our red line that we need to take more direct action?

Speaker 38 And what that began with for us was first, well,

Speaker 38 if we're going to have a strike, we need funds for it. The IWW

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And so we did start with trying to get like a sense of like what we could get from, you know, the branches reserve. And we moved on from that to how we were going to fundraise and stuff like that.

Speaker 38 So we held informational pickets that had donations.

Speaker 38 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

Speaker 38 our, or it was maybe like a month and a half in advance of our of our strike.

Speaker 38 We also gave management like a courtesy notice about this so they could pass it on to ownership saying, hey, we've started fundraising for a strike in the hopes that like being aware that we're taking active preparations to go on strike.

Speaker 38 would facilitate bargaining.

Speaker 40 Sometimes it works.

Speaker 40 I've seen it before. I've seen it before.

Speaker 38 Sometimes it works. Yeah.

Speaker 38 And sometimes, you know, sometimes you end up on a podcast talking about how it didn't.

Speaker 45 You never know until you try.

Speaker 38 Yeah, you never know.

Speaker 38 But we did, yeah, we did give them that sort of early warning. And our readiness to strike kind of like depended then on like, where we were at in the fundraising process.

Speaker 38 So we continue to sort of solicit donations, reaching out to various organizations in the area that are, you know, pro-labor.

Speaker 38 You know, we talked to like DSA and whatever, because, you know, they have their like a workplace organizing committee. Yeah, I think it's EWOC.
EWOC. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 38 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

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 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 a Saturday.

Speaker 38 So in total, it was like around maybe like two weeks and change that they knew like definite possibility passed the strike vote.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 Yeah, take

Speaker 38 the risk seriously. Take 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.

Speaker 38 Ownership is is in their 80s and they've pretty consistently held the view that like like the union is like a bunch of young people who don't know what the hell they're talking about you know

Speaker 38 even though like uh 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 a which is of course the problematic group but yeah the young radicals um

Speaker 38 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

Speaker 38 you know bargain to avoid it. Yeah.

Speaker 40 One more fundraising thing that I just want to mention this for people.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 So like, I mean, 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.

Speaker 40 and this is this can also be a good way to just sort of do fundraising things that are fun and also raise morale because,

Speaker 40 yeah, you're doing the show, yeah.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 38 Yeah, the people I knew were didn't get quite the response I was hoping from the community. Uh, if you are a hardcore band,

Speaker 45 if you are a band in Berkeley,

Speaker 45 there's still time.

Speaker 38 I I believe in you. That is, that is totally, I think,

Speaker 38 a good option. What we did, we ended up doing that.
There was music, but it was also like one of our organizers is really into cooking. He did like a barbecue thing.
Yeah.

Speaker 38 Sold food, stuff like that. And

Speaker 38 had a raffle. A raffle is a great way to fundraise.
For us, we like raffled off like stuff

Speaker 40 we have.

Speaker 38 But honestly, you can even do like a straight monetary raffle is still a a great fundraising tool, you know, where everyone puts in money, the winner, the top three winners or whatever get like a certain percentage of like the total pool and the rest of the pool is

Speaker 38 to the cause. It's really simple, really effective.
Yeah.

Speaker 40 There's a reason, you know, it's not good, but there is a reason why a whole bunch of state education budgets are funded, are funded by the lottery.

Speaker 45 It does work.

Speaker 38 And we're

Speaker 38 people love to gamble.

Speaker 4 Much better.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 40 Mia says,

Speaker 40 having turned off her lunch, her Path of Exile 2 lunch break to come do this interview. It's funny such cases.

Speaker 40 Okay, so let's speaking of, I guess this is something that's been tied into sort of all of what we've 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?

Speaker 40 And yeah.

Speaker 38 Yeah, I mean, definitely when you go into a strike, you want to go in with a militant core group.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 That's really bad PR for your strike. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 38 And like the bosses will grab on that.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 But the issue with that PR-wise is that now the bosses are saying in their like tallying up of who's working and who's not working, they're counting them as working.

Speaker 38 You know, they're like, oh, there's only

Speaker 38 whatever. They've been saying eight people.

Speaker 38 I think it's more like nine or 10 who are on the picket line. But the rest of the employees are working.
They count themselves as employees in that count, of course.

Speaker 38 And they count these people who are not crossing the picket line, but not on it also as among that count of the rest of the employees that are working.

Speaker 13 What?

Speaker 38 And they've had the opportunity to really inflate that count because in the sort of, you know, classic move, really all the moves are classic.

Speaker 38 You know, you read your organizing books and you're like, can it happen here? And it does.

Speaker 38 So like, we got a lot of new assistant managers after we won our. election.

Speaker 38 So right now, like the composition of the workplace, right? Got 34 people, 15 managers.

Speaker 40 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 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

Speaker 38 manager managing

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And I mean, honestly, I think a big part of,

Speaker 38 again, the boss is the best organizer.

Speaker 38 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?

Speaker 38 Isn't this crazy? Like, what the hell? Yeah.

Speaker 8 Also, you know, is

Speaker 38 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 as 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

Speaker 38 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

Speaker 38 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

Speaker 38 you're not going to maintain morale if ever if like everyone feels like they've got things they got to hold in about it. Like there's room to be like, shit, like, are they going to close the business?

Speaker 38 Like, and what are we going to do?

Speaker 38 And like sort of like talk through that from a, from a place beyond like, you know, like what, you're not letting in speak into a crowd of a million people or whatever. You're just like

Speaker 8 two people going through a stressful experience together.

Speaker 38 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 40 And you have to actually grapple with that in a way that's not the sort of like weird corporate like, we ought to improve morale things. Like, that's not what that means.

Speaker 40 It means, like, you know, it means actually grappling and engaging with people's feelings and how

Speaker 40 and what they need in a moment. And yeah, and their fears and their concerns.
And

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 38 Yeah, exactly. Having like these authentic conversations with people.
Because, like, like, yeah, that's like a totally great point you bring up there. Like, the HR speak, that's the boss's tool.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 40 Yeah. And I mean, 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.

Speaker 40 And like, yeah, and it can be really disruptive to attempts to do this.

Speaker 40 But on the other hand, if you, if you do it well, it's like, it's the most powerful single thing that you can like possibly do is like forging relationships that are based on

Speaker 40 like the actual experience of having gone through struggle together and having had to like literally had to face your feels out on the picket line.

Speaker 38 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

Speaker 38 work interest,

Speaker 38 but it is ideally a community.

Speaker 8 It's not a family, right?

Speaker 38 And it's certainly not not a family in the way that the bosses will tell you the workplace is. But it is a community.

Speaker 38 And it's a community in the way that an employer's idea of a community is fundamentally incompatible with. Yeah.

Speaker 40 This is Vicki Osterwaal line that I think about a lot from her book in Defensive Fluting, where she talks about how

Speaker 40 I feel like it was Ferguson

Speaker 40 that this is about, where like the police chief is talking about the damage of the community and they keep saying our Walmart.

Speaker 40 It's like going into a Walmart and buying something is not a community,

Speaker 38 right?

Speaker 40 Like, you know, they like that, like those, those kind of relations are not actual community relations.

Speaker 40 But when the bosses talk about community, that's what they mean. They mean like, like our collective community Walmart.

Speaker 40 They mean preserving the relation of extraction that they have.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 40 And we are, you know, using the same word and meaning something literally so radically different than that.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And 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.

Speaker 38 Cause, 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.

Speaker 38 is like talking to every single person who's coming up and being like, hey, how's it going?

Speaker 38 I've been on strike such and such long. This is what's up.
Please don't cross the picket line.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 8 You don't know what the hell you're talking about.

Speaker 38 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

Speaker 38 and who attribute the entire attribute everything that they like about the business to the bosses.

Speaker 38 And then there's the other part of the community that is coming by frequently and like hanging out with us on the, on, on the picket line. You know, I pet the dog and we chat about what's going on.

Speaker 38 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, right? But they like,

Speaker 38 it highlights that like sort of divide in like what you think of as like community and your responsibility to your community. Cause like, These people also love urban ore and come here all the time,

Speaker 38 but they recognize that like, it's the workers at urban ore that create it every day, you know?

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 38 And it is a company that was like founded by the individual. The individual still owns it.
He did found it with his, with his labor and all that.

Speaker 38 He did the labor, you know, back when it was, you know, only a few people and stuff like that.

Speaker 38 But ultimately, a business, like any sort of social phenomenon, has to be constantly recreated in order to exist. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 38 And like the people who do the work that makes it more than just like a room full of garbage are us. And

Speaker 38 a lot of a lot of the like regulars recognize that. And a lot of them,

Speaker 38 you know, flip me off as they cross the pick the line, whatever.

Speaker 40 And 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?

Speaker 40 Like, 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 who make money from the labor that you do, right?

Speaker 40 And then take credit for the labor and take credit both financially for the labor and in public for the labor, right?

Speaker 40 Is our society going to just be a bunch of pure commercial relations where a bunch of people get very, very rich off the labor of everyone else in the society and get to rule them as sort of like these petty tyrant kings?

Speaker 40 Or is it going to be a society where the people who produce the society control it? Right.

Speaker 40 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?

Speaker 40 Where like, you know, where they're, where they're not forced to go to the market for all of 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.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 40 Yeah, dignity and freedom and where,

Speaker 40 you know,

Speaker 40 where you don't have to go home at the end of a day of making your boss money, worrying about whether you're going to be able to eat or not.

Speaker 40 And it's, and that's also a society that does not involve, again,

Speaker 40 at the very highest level, like you getting thrown into prison camps because your God king hates you.

Speaker 40 And we can do this we can live in that society yeah the demands are not that crazy no

Speaker 38 and that's like the thing that that that we have encountered over and over again is this 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 have such like a paucity of imagination about what's possible.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 38 And like about the legitimacy of trying to make something better, the legitimacy of saying, sure, I can subsist on this, but

Speaker 38 there's so much more that's possible. Yeah.

Speaker 38 So I'm maintaining that there's something more that's possible.

Speaker 40 Yeah,

Speaker 40 I think it's possible too. And

Speaker 40 that's the thing about this world, right? Is that our enemies have figured out that it actually can change.

Speaker 38 That's why they have to fight so hard.

Speaker 40 Yeah, but the thing is, the fact that they can change for the worse also means that it can change for the better.

Speaker 38 Oh, beautiful stuff.

Speaker 40 Okay, where can people find your strike fund? We'll also put it in the description.

Speaker 38 Oh, yeah, great.

Speaker 38 So it's on GoFundMe. I'll send you the link and it'll be down there.

Speaker 38 But also, people can hit up our union Instagram. It's

Speaker 38 urban or workers with underscores between the words, urban underscore or underscore worker.

Speaker 38 That we've got the link to like our strike fund and also hey if you're if you're 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

Speaker 40 yeah it's a good time

Speaker 17 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers.

Speaker 19 But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Speaker 20 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.

Speaker 22 So why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 27 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now.

Speaker 5 Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 48 All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie.

Speaker 49 For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

Speaker 57 I'm telling you, we know Quincy Hilda. We know.

Speaker 60 A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV.

Speaker 62 Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

Speaker 51 My name is Maggie Freeling.

Speaker 53 I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

Speaker 67 I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said.

Speaker 68 They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her.

Speaker 71 From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

Speaker 73 America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happen

Speaker 13 to good people in small towns.

Speaker 76 Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 78 And to binge the entire season at free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 102 May 24th, 1990, a pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Berry's car.

Speaker 103 I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it rip through me with just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe.

Speaker 102 In season two of Rip Current, we ask who tried to kill Judy Berry and why.

Speaker 104 She received death threats before the bombing.

Speaker 42 She received more threats after the bombing.

Speaker 105 The men and woman who were hurt had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California.

Speaker 12 They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods.

Speaker 106 The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area, but more than it was the culture, it was the way of life.

Speaker 78 I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement.

Speaker 102 Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 In early 1988, federal agents raced to track down the the gang they suspect of importing millions of dollars worth of heroin into New York from Asia.

Speaker 10 We had 30 agents ready to go with shotguns and rifles and you name it.

Speaker 1 But what they find is not what they expected.

Speaker 42 Basically, your stay-at-home moms were picking up these large amounts of heroin.

Speaker 90 They go, is this your daughter? I said, yes. They go, oh, you may not see her for like 25 years.

Speaker 1 Caught between a federal investigation and the violent gang who recruited them, the women must decide who they're willing to protect and who they dare to betray.

Speaker 90 Once I saw the gun, I tried to take his hand and I saw the flash of light.

Speaker 1 Listen to the Chinatown Sting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 Today I'm joined by Dr. James Stout and Reverend Dr.
the Honorable Robert Evans.

Speaker 38 That's right.

Speaker 37 That's right. Reverend Dr.
the Honorable Evans, who is currently hacking up a fucking lung.

Speaker 38 No idea why.

Speaker 37 I feel otherwise fine.

Speaker 7 Well, I'm sure you feel otherwise fine due to this great week in American history we've all been through together.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Which started with a meeting between President Donald Trump and El Salvador President Bukele

Speaker 7 on Monday morning in the Oval Office, where they discussed the possibility of the United States helping to build more Seacot-style facilities to disappear U.S.

Speaker 7 citizens and immigrants that the Trump administration deems criminals or terrorists.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 There's some very concerning satellite shots that appear to show piles of bodies.

Speaker 7 Yeah, that's from March of 2024.

Speaker 38 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 37 I mean, yeah, but it won't have gotten better.

Speaker 38 No, no. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 37 So I don't, I I don't know.

Speaker 37 This is about as bad as it could be, folks.

Speaker 37 We're in it.

Speaker 7 During that meeting, both President Bukeley and the Trump cabinet argued that there is simply no way for people sent to SeaCOT to ever return to the United States, coming up with a whole bunch of

Speaker 7 absurd reasons for why that is impossible due to foreign policy and safety of both El Salvador and the United States.

Speaker 7 Me and James did a whole episode on this earlier this week that you can check out on the It Could Happen Here feed.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 Mohozin Marawi is a Palestinian from the West Bank who has lived in the U.S. with a green card for a decade.

Speaker 7 While studying philosophy at Columbia, he co-founded the Columbia Palestinian Student Union in 2023 with Mahmoud Khalil.

Speaker 7 Marawi was arrested by ICE last Monday, April 14th, at his citizenship interview in Vermont.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 His lawyers quickly filed a habeas corpus petition, arguing his detention is unlawful and violates the First Amendment. A U.S.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 Zionist doxing accounts targeted Marui in recent weeks. I'm going to play actually

Speaker 7 this two-minute clip of Marui talking. This is from December of 2023 on the program 60 Minutes.

Speaker 101 What was your initial reaction when you heard about the Hamas attack on October 7th?

Speaker 107 I could not believe what my eyes were seeing

Speaker 107 where I see

Speaker 107 Hamas members getting into settlements and so on.

Speaker 107 But also the first moment I saw that I put my hand on my heart

Speaker 107 and

Speaker 107 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.

Speaker 101 The night of the rally, I believe someone in the crowd said something

Speaker 101 very anti-Jewish, not just anti-Israeli, but anti-Jewish.

Speaker 107 Yes, this was a walkout

Speaker 38 on

Speaker 107 November 9th.

Speaker 84 And

Speaker 107 a person who is not affiliated with Colombia, we've never seen him, we don't know who is this guy, comes

Speaker 107 down the stairs yelling, death to Jews.

Speaker 107 I was shocked and I walked directly to the person and they told him, you don't represent us because this is not something that we agree with.

Speaker 107 And directly what I've done, I took the megaphone and I gave a speech and they said, we here are conscious educated students and we know how to separate right from wrong and what this guy has said

Speaker 107 is wrong

Speaker 107 what this guy has said

Speaker 107 is clearly anti-Semitic against Jews anti-Semitic to be anti-Semitic is unjust

Speaker 107 is unjust

Speaker 107 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.

Speaker 37 Yeah, I mean, he said everything

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 There's nothing in anything I can tell this guy has done that his advocacy towards terrorism. Like, but obviously that's not what matters.

Speaker 37 What matters is they they have the ability to get him out and they're doing that because of his speech. Yeah.

Speaker 7 He took a step back from protests in March of 2024 during the second wave of student protests at Columbia.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And like, I believe he didn't, isn't he like a member of the University Buddhist Club?

Speaker 7 Yes. Part of why he took a step back was to focus on his role in the Buddhist club as a, as for, I think, the past like two years he has been.
has been participating in that on campus.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 Like other students who've been targeted and arrested, he has not been charged or accused of any crime, but the State Department has deemed him a threat to foreign policy.

Speaker 4 Yeah, hard to see how, but I think as we're seeing it, that doesn't really matter.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 Unquote. So there's no real evidence in this document.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 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.
Like they, they certainly have no need to.

Speaker 37 And the media that like I'm seeing coverage on Fox particularly that's just repeatedly framing this as like the left is angry that like a terrorist got deported.

Speaker 38 Right. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 I mean, this is the same stuff that we saw at the RNC where they referred to students as terrorists, like just completely, completely flattened.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 A separate habeas petition case is playing out in a New Jersey court.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 These documents showed that the government used unverified tabloid reporting against Khalil and contained contradicting information. Yep.

Speaker 7 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

Speaker 7 of the United States. We're going to go on break and come back to talk about Robert F.
Kennedy Jr.

Speaker 37 Finally, finally, something fun.

Speaker 7 All right, we're back.

Speaker 7 I'm going to throw to Robert Evans for an update on everyone's favorite roadkill consumer.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 Now he is, well, kind of launching a genocidal campaign against people with autism.

Speaker 7 Kind of doing a national eugenics program. Yeah.

Speaker 37 Kind of calling a large group of people in this country useless eaters.

Speaker 4 Jesus Christ. Yeah, fucking.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 The reason why rates of autism are increasing, every credible scientist agrees, is because we're looking for it more.

Speaker 37 And so we're finding more of it and we have a broader understanding of what it is. RFK Jr.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 He has called autism a preventable disease, which it is not.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 There is no evidence, and there have been repeated 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.

Speaker 37 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...

Speaker 37 the fake autism medical industrial complex that we covered recently on the behind the bastards.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 That got a lot of its start.

Speaker 37 And there's a couple of different places it got its start. Obviously, the the wild concentration camps and the political concentration camps are in that heritage.

Speaker 37 But when it comes to the actual mass killing of people, the very origin of that was in getting rid of the disabled, right?

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 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?

Speaker 37 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?

Speaker 37 As opposed to the vast majority of people who can be diagnosed as somewhere on the spectrum who are able to like live independently, right?

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 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 could play baseball.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 There's no, there's no evidence that people with this kind of autism, that there's any sort of raise in this, right? What's, what's raised is the number of people who are being diagnosed, right?

Speaker 37 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

Speaker 37 in order to justify the dehumanization of everyone with autism as well as like 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 like this is not an epidemic this is something that we're now screening for more He's kind of repurposing the language of like

Speaker 37 vaccine denial and whatnot as like a denial that this is sort of an immediate crisis

Speaker 37 that needs to be hit, which I find interesting.

Speaker 7 Also, like co-opting like COVID-conscious language.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah. Like the way he and his, his group were referred to during COVID, he's now using in the same fashion.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 Like you can't guarantee that.

Speaker 37 Like you said, we already know because people are seeking out diagnoses like because right we we have better awareness of it now but he he 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 uh so that doctors won't get gaslit by blaming autism on vaccines or you know mold exposure or the like So that's, 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.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 7 Also, like, frankly, I know way too many autistic people who write poems.

Speaker 4 Oh, tons of them.

Speaker 37 Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, the writing poem things was a really fucking poet laureate of Washington State since 2023 is a woman with autism. So, yeah, like I writing poems

Speaker 7 extremely common activity for my fellow

Speaker 7 my fellow autism people out there.

Speaker 37 Okay, okay, RFK Jr. Again, but he was talking about, you know, people with what he calls severe autism, but he also doesn't ever care to like specify his language because

Speaker 37 there's no benefit.

Speaker 47 That's not a real medical

Speaker 37 benefit to his ideology in acknowledging that, like, well, most people who get diagnosed with autism may need some accommodations. It's a difference, right?

Speaker 37 It's a difference in the way your mind works, but they're fine.

Speaker 7 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 um

Speaker 38 not really but

Speaker 38 that is certainly and that is that is an aspect

Speaker 7 speaking of the department of health and human services uh they released a report page on their website for you the the the vigilant citizen oh yes to report uh trans minors receiving health care finally and so another one of these like 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 sweeter.

Speaker 37 Not repeatedly the B movie scrap.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Speaking of trans people, I do have a few updates on some of the transgender stuff.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 37 Amazing. Yeah.

Speaker 7 I'm going to play the clip.

Speaker 97 And I don't like talking about it because I want to save it for just before the next election. I said my people, don't even talk about it because they'll change.

Speaker 97 But I watched this morning. It was a congressman fighting to the death for men to play against women in sports.

Speaker 7 That's like super interesting. Like

Speaker 7 very clear insight into how like Trump sees like the trans sports issue and treats it as this like election-winning superpower.

Speaker 7 And like he certainly he is directing like the DOJ and with his executive orders.

Speaker 7 He still is targeting trans people, especially trans people in school. So

Speaker 7 it's not that he's treating this as like a hands-off issue. to like 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

Speaker 7 caring about this issue in a way.

Speaker 7 The more

Speaker 7 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 mega stuff in general.

Speaker 7 But I think that it is an interesting look into his personal insight on this issue.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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 are considering to, quote, unquote, retroactively pull all funding that Maine has received.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 We are going to go and break and then return to close out this episode of Executive Disorder.

Speaker 7 Okay, we are back. I'm now going to throw to myself and Mia to discuss Tariff Talk in a future recording.

Speaker 40 Welcome to Tariff Talk, the talk where I talk to you about the turf tariffs.

Speaker 40 So,

Speaker 40 all right, the big thing that happens last week in tariffs was that Trump exempted smartphones and electronics. There's a whole suite of electronics that are exempted from the 145%

Speaker 40 turf tariffs from Liberation Day. Now, there was still a 20% tariff on all these electronic goods from the earlier round of tariffs.
And in one of the initial rounds,

Speaker 40 there was a whole thing where he put a bunch of tariffs on it.

Speaker 7 I'm so confused, though, because I thought that's 10% tariffs for non-Chinese companies.

Speaker 40 Yeah, but, okay, so here's the thing, right?

Speaker 40 China.

Speaker 7 There's like an additional or

Speaker 40 no, okay. So, 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, which

Speaker 40 and then the subsequent retaliatory tariffs pushed it, pushed all goods.

Speaker 7 Now, like, what, 250%?

Speaker 40 No, okay, we're gonna gonna get the 250 that number is bullshit okay but we're we're at 145

Speaker 40 like tariff from the liberation day stuff

Speaker 40 but that also had included an earlier 20 tariff and you see why 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 on all like iphones and all these electronic goods that are still in effect So the tariff rate for those goods is now 20 instead of 145.

Speaker 40 But but this is where things get even more murky.

Speaker 40 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,

Speaker 40 this is just also, if you want to just kneecap your entire economy, you put in.

Speaker 40 a tariff on all semiconductors from other countries, which was what this is looking like. It's possible the levels are going to be that high anyways.

Speaker 40 It's again worth pointing out that like there's a bunch of the parts of this production process that basically can only be done in Taiwan, which will presumably have these new tariffs on them.

Speaker 40 We don't know what they're going to be yet. They're coming and who fucking knows.

Speaker 40 But so it seems like 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 100% sure.

Speaker 40 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-digit items like things like medical syringes that already had like 100 tariffs on them the 145 tariff 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.

Speaker 40 So when you stack the 145 on top of them, they're 250%.

Speaker 40 But again, it's like, it's like three things, right? So like, that's fake.

Speaker 40 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%,

Speaker 40 like, it isn't that relevant because at 145%, you stop doing trading.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 It's still 145 for all non-electronics goods, 20 for electronics.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 access to rare earth elements that are necessary for a whole bunch of advanced engineering, and particularly sort of defense projects.

Speaker 40 This is something that could genuinely devastate the American defense sector.

Speaker 40 Trump's plan for this is that he's threatening to use the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 to impose even more devastating tariffs. Now,

Speaker 40 it is genuinely unclear to me. Like, what is he going to do? Impose in a thousand percent tariff? Like, you need to buy these goods.

Speaker 7 Like, you say that, Mia.

Speaker 7 And yeah.

Speaker 44 He probably will. He probably will.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 41 Why not?

Speaker 40 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

Speaker 40 big rip to the fucking AI people. Eat shit, get fucked.

Speaker 40 Yeah, so like, so that's roughly the state of the tariffs right now.

Speaker 38 More, more bullshit will happen.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 They were in charge of a whole bunch of things related to negotiations between employers and unions or the people who certify union elections. They handle unfair labor practices, disputes.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 So it came in, right? They technically had some kind of like order saying that they were supposed to be able to come in and do this stuff.

Speaker 40 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 all the sort of stuff that's supposed to like verify what someone's doing on a computer system.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 It has a lot of extremely sensitive trade data on private companies.

Speaker 40 Now, the NLRB person who blew the whistle on this to NPR described how so he complains about to his superiors about Doge again just like sort of breaking into this fucking like office and just like stealing all of this data because he I mean he so he notices this program that they're building that's literally just called like backdoor

Speaker 40 which is like 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 NLRB person complains to his superiors like hey these doge people are just like stealing all of 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

Speaker 40 so weird i i don't even know i don't even

Speaker 40 so yeah that's that's extremely alarming um this is this is their 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.

Speaker 40 There'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.

Speaker 40 And it's deeply unclear what Doge is going to do this information, but it's not good.

Speaker 40 And again, and I need to emphasize this. So I talked to a friend of the show, Maya Arson Crime W,

Speaker 40 about this. who is someone who knows a lot about hacking.
And I said to it, okay, so this is what you would do if you were just straight up like hacking the NLRB, right?

Speaker 40 Like these are the things you would do. And they went, yeah, pretty much.
So it's great.

Speaker 38 It's great.

Speaker 40 Yeah, the Doge has just stolen 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.

Speaker 40 Things continue to go bad.

Speaker 7 Well, thank you for that uplifting story, Mia,

Speaker 7 about Doge breaking into and stealing data from the NLRB and posting overhead drone photos of people's houses who threatened the Doge supremacy.

Speaker 4 We're back. Thank you, Future Garrison 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.

Speaker 4 Where I want to start this week is in the Roosevelt Reservation.

Speaker 4 This is something that's been reported on a little bit this week, largely by people who maybe only found out about it this week and looked at a Wikipedia page and then wrote a story.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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 drill piece is down now.

Speaker 4 They don't have that print side anymore.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 This year, in 2025,

Speaker 4 all of the Roosevelt Reservation that is not part of federal reservation land was placed on the Department of Defense jurisdiction.

Speaker 4 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 Tornadum Reservation.

Speaker 4 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 federal lands, including the Roosevelt Reservation and excluding federal Indian reservations that are reasonably necessary to enable military activities directed in this memorandum, including border barrier construction and in placement of detection and monitoring equipment.

Speaker 4 The way I read this, it also doesn't limit to the Roosevelt Reservation.

Speaker 4 It seems to include other federal land, right, which could include national monuments, national parks, BLM, and the national forests, all of which exist along the border.

Speaker 4 The Trump administration this week also obtained waivers. The waivers waive dozens of laws that have been limiting construction in the San Diego sector.

Speaker 4 I'd like to quote a little bit from that Sierra Club piece that I wrote because I think

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So, one of the laws waived was the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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 Kumiai people.

Speaker 4 With this waiver, they don't have to comply with NAGPRA, Native American Graves Protection and Relocation Act, which means that they can continue digging through what are literally people's ancestors' graveyards.

Speaker 4 Here's another quote from that 2020 story. If this were another country's government destroying a region's holy land, the U.S.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 7 Yep. We sure do turn away.

Speaker 37 Seems to be most of what we do these days.

Speaker 4 Yeah. It's not even what bugs me is 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.

Speaker 4 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 whose land the border crossed, right?

Speaker 4 like

Speaker 4 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 um and like that is a failing of the legacy media it 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.

Speaker 4 I don't think that you're going to see soldiers pointing their guns at the southern border and shooting anyone who comes across.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 And it's possible that those MPs will be able to detain people and potentially charge them with trespassing on a military installation.

Speaker 4 That would just be another string to the bow of their attempt to like rapidly deport people because because they already have many other kinds of options through executive order of doing that, which they're already implying.

Speaker 4 It might also make it easier for them to waive some of these other laws and to construct more surveillance equipment.

Speaker 4 In the Abrego 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 U.S.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Bukele refused to release him, saying that doing so would be to, quote, smuggle a terrorist into the United States. Garrison and I did a whole episode about this yesterday that you can listen to.

Speaker 4 Today, Senator Chris Van Holland 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.

Speaker 4 Van Holland held a press conference right afterwards that I watched right before we recorded this.

Speaker 4 In the press conference, Van Holland basically said that he'd asserted to the vice president El Salvador there was no evidence nor any conviction of being a member of MS-13.

Speaker 4 And he asked the VP why he was holding Mr. Brego Garcia.
And the VP said, because the U.S. is paying us to hold him.

Speaker 37 Yeah.

Speaker 37 Yeah, they won't even lie.

Speaker 4 Yeah, no, he's not lying. That's why they're doing it.

Speaker 37 I believe that.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 4 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 who are there it's one guy but at least he's doing something while the rest of the democrats are collectively yeah i don't know like voting for trump's nominees He asked to meet with Mr.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 They said they didn't know if they could facilitate a call. They said maybe the U.S.
Embassy would have to be the one that requests that.

Speaker 4 So he has now requested that the embassy request that he be allowed to call Mr. Obrego Garcia and Mr.
Obrego Garcia be allowed to speak to his wife.

Speaker 4 Garriton and I spoke about how it's not in the interest of the government of El Salvador to have people leave this prison and testify as to the conditions that are in it.

Speaker 7 No one has ever left this prison.

Speaker 4 That we're aware of. Yeah, that no one who's been detained there has left.

Speaker 4 The government wouldn't give him a date when he could meet Mr. Albrego Garcia or when he would be likely able to make a call.

Speaker 4 In a separate case, Judge Boseberg, who we've spoken about before as well, right?

Speaker 4 Judge Boseberg 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.

Speaker 4 What does this mean? It doesn't mean despite what you have seen on your timeline, that this will mean these people will be bought home. When they're found in contempt, they have two options, right?

Speaker 4 They can purge themselves of the contempt. And the way they would do that would be by providing habeas,

Speaker 4 not by bringing all these people home, at least not yet, right?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 I don't quite know how that works in Sisters, or the judge himself can appoint an attorney to prosecute them for criminal contempt. Again, like at least the guy's trying, I guess.

Speaker 37 No, I mean, like, I got nothing to say against him right right now. Like, this is what they all should be doing.
He went there. He's

Speaker 37 something, and he's not mincing his words. He's saying that this man was disappeared.

Speaker 4 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.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Judge Ginez, in oh Jinez, 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.

Speaker 4 Again, like, I've seen it asserted, like, oh, legal experts can disagree. Meanwhile, you've got the actual judge in the actual case being like, no, this is what the dictionary says.

Speaker 4 Your definition is ludicrous. I would caution people to be very careful looking at like blue-checked legal experts on X.com or people on Blue Sky.
Oh, God. There has been...

Speaker 4 so much misleading stuff about immigration law and the laws in these particular two cases and about the resource reservation actually.

Speaker 4 Just be really careful where you're getting your information, especially on immigration law from.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So be very careful what you're reading out there.

Speaker 7 All right. I think that's all for us today on It Could Happen Here.

Speaker 37 Yeah, I think that's our new erectile executive dysfunction episode.

Speaker 4 Erectile order.

Speaker 38 All right.

Speaker 37 Well, we're fucking done. Go away.

Speaker 7 We reported the news.

Speaker 39 We reported the news.

Speaker 37 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 108 It Could Happen Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 108 For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 108 You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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