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Anxiety and depression were part and parcel of dealing with chronic disease overall. I kind of have the full bouquet of all of those things. Sort of that unmitigated like inflammatory condition is really dangerous. Listen to health discovered on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. To trust your truck, you've got to trust your truck tires. And that's where the Cooper Discoverer AT3 family of tires comes in. Cooper Discoverer AT3-4S, LT and XLT light truck tires are made with adaptive traction technology designed for increased handling, durability and traction even when hauling heavy loads. So your truck's ready when you need it. Learn more about the Cooper Discoverer AT3 family of tires at CooperTire.com. Go with the Cooper's. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hello and welcome to another episode of It Could Up In Here. I'm your guest host of this episode where I'm hoping to take a moment to discuss the comments, the principles of successful comments management and why certain attempts to establish the comments have failed. My name by the way is Andrew of the YouTube channel Andruism. You follow me on youtube.com slash Andruism. I'm joined here with my two cool hosts. That will be Garrison Davis. Hello. James. Awesome. But before I get into exactly what makes the comments work, I first want to discuss what exactly the comments are because despite being, you know, common throughout human history, a lot of people can't imagine how they might have worked, what they are. Of course, the comments is a very specific definition, a particular context of feudalism and whatnot, but even outside of that, the idea of the comments is essentially the resources accessible to all members of society, the totality of the material riches of that community or even of the world, regardless of their whole inheritance, rather than being subject to inclusion and to privatization. Even today, despite the process of inclusion, which is with the FATUN, podcast episode or series of podcasts episodes or book even, even today, there are still, you know, viable existing comments institution. And they've, in some cases, endured for well over a thousand years. Most famously, Helena Ostrom, the columnist who explored the concept in depth and depunked the tragedy of the comments, wrote in her book, Gov. In the comments that from, you know, the Alpine metals of Tobel, Switzerland to the three million hectares of Japanese forest to the irrigation systems of Spain and the Philippines, the possibility of community, of popular, rather than public or state or private or corporate ownership exists. Possibility of communal ownership, as opposed to capitalist or state ownership exists. There's also the communal land of Chiapas in Mexico after the successful Zapataes de Revolution. And of course, as I discussed in previous episode, there are the commons of Barbuda, where the entire island of the Twin Island Nation of Antigone Barbuda is owned collectively by all Barbudas and regarded as their collective heritage. These projects, of course, are not static. The commons of Barbuda, for example, existed for about a hundred years, but had some precedents prior to that, and are now honestly being encroached upon after the sole shock doctrine of the hurricane that ravaged the island has opened up an opportunity for Antigone Barbuda's government to sort of swoop in and privatize the land for the benefit of foreign companies and foreign resorts. So the commons is not this timeless institutional institution that can't be interrupted, doesn't ever change. In the case of Chiapas, they had similar projects, similar institutions, prior to colonization, colonization, rolling and interrupted all that. And thanks to the Zapataes de Revolution, they were able to institute some semblance of that sort of commons institution, that communal land, for their collective benefit. They respond to experience, to conditions, to circumstance, to serve, or some cases, eventually not to the people. But of course, not all commons are able to work, not all commons institutions operate effectively. And she talks about why, using various case studies to illustrate her point. In the course of governance, the commons, she used, of course, the existence case studies to develop certain principles that she believed make the commons work. The principles that she found in common, between Switzerland and Japan and the Philippines and Spain. And she then used those principles to examine the commons institutions that didn't work, identified which principles were missing from the equation. But I'm talking a lot about what these principles, about these principles of successful commons management, and I haven't broken down what they are exactly. So to get into that, the principles of successful commons management are as follows. Number one, clearly defined boundaries. Boundaries in the sense of having, of those involved, the appropriators of the commons, the people who are directly accessing the commons, have an clear sense of the structure and characteristics of the resource system itself, whether it be through a scientific study or through generation-preserved folk knowledge, as well as knowledge and a clear sense of who is involved in withdrawing from and sustaining it. Even if, you know, even in the case where the entire world has been commons, where all land has been returned to common land, to the ownership of none and everyone simultaneously. In such a case, in individual instances of common pool resources, whether it be a forest, or a fishery, or a lake, or groundwater basin, the people most directly accessing those that segment of the commons, that system, that common pool resource, need to have a clear sense of exactly what that resource entails, the limits of that resource, the renewability of that resource, and who is involved in withdrawing from and sustaining that resource, so that they're able to collaborate. If, you know, as in the case with the tragedy of the commons, everybody is just this isolated actor, not communicating at all, not collaborating, there's no collective institution in place to help them, you know, work it out. They basically end up in a case like the tragedy of the commons, where the system is depleted because nobody has a sense of what anybody else is doing. There's no open channel of communication, which brings us, of course, to collective decision-making power. That's the third principle, so I'm jumping ahead slightly, but it flows back to this thing. Having collective decision-making power over the commons mean, and there's an institution in place that those who are drawn from the commons are able to come together and discuss the rules of the commons, how they're going to draw from the commons, how they're going to deal with the commons, how they're going to deal with each other as they deal with the commons and so on and so forth. The idea of rules is not anti-anarchist as a concept, just the idea that there is not popular inputs and collective inputs and free association in place. And so, with consensus, with this institution of collective decision-making power, people will be able to come up with and modify the rules as it suits their situations, as it suits their shift in circumstances. And of course, and this is the second principle that's their appropriation and provision rules of the commons are compatible with local conditions. The whole idea is that they're not relying on any external authorities to come up with these to commit to these rules, to find themselves to these rules, even when the temptations to violate those rules apply. So as a practice of developing community, you need to have some sense of shared norms and developing those shared norms over time regarding behavior. And of course, as in the case in almost all societies, of course, reputation and one reputation would play a role. If you are knowing to be consistently violating the commons rules, of course, there are social consequences to that. That's just a natural consequence. Just because the commons exist doesn't mean that people are free of the consequences of how they use those commons. Just like in the case of the environment, just because you can cut down all the trees in the forest doesn't mean you're free of the consequences from cutting down the trees of that forest. Your actions are still going to have consequences, whether it be environmental or social. There are, of course, limits as there are in any other aspect of life. And of course, simple norms regarding behavior or concerns about reputation may help, which you also going to need the fourth and fifth principles established in some form, effectively meaning social harmony. The fourth principle is, of course, monitoring, which is the process of continuously evaluating the conditions of the common pool resource itself, as well as the behavior of the appropriators. Now to monitoring is kind of spooky, right? It's on to a little bit 1984, like big brothers watching you kind of fight. But that's not really the intention. It's just the idea that it's just this constant informal process of looking at and observing and collecting data on the conditions of the commons. The conditions include in how people behave with the commons, as well as the commons themselves, the resources themselves, how much of them we have, how quickly they've been renewed, that sort of thing. And through that process of each person, each appropriator of the commons and institutions, monitoring the system continuously, you begin to learn what rules work and what rules don't. And so you can adapt your rules to suit the circumstances, to suit how people actually behave, which is something that's centralized and hierarchical institutions have a bit of trouble doing. Because when you have this horizontal commons institution, you're able to look at, okay, this is how things are going so far. And let me, we can now talk about it. We're constantly in this dialogue. We're able to contribute our information in this horizontal system and adapt our rules and our behavior to suit. Whereas in the pyramid structure of a hierarchical and centralized organization, the further up the pyramid you can, yes, the more power there is as centralized institutions tend to have, but also less information. Because the narrow end of the pyramid leads to less and less information from the bottom, filtering up to the top. And so when you have these centralized institutions, rules are a lot more rigid because they're not able to respond quickly and effectively and as informed, as informedly to the situations as they arise. That's also why 80% of the planets by biodiversity is being protected by a very small percentage of indigenous people because they are on the ground because they are interacting with the systems in real time. They're able to respond directly and quickly to changes in that biodiversity to changes in behavior in order to maintain and sustain that system. Whereas you find that a lot of conservation projects, a lot of restoration projects, environmental restoration projects are failing, you know, I recently read an article about how a lot of these tree plant initiatives that governments have been doing these days. While it gets them good publicity, it gets them good social political, international clouds. When you go back one year, two years, three years down the line, almost all, if not all the trees are dead. The communities living by these reforestation projects were not involved in the process that don't have any say in the selection of the trees. In fact, the trees aren't always even chosen in a quarter into local conditions. They're often isn't enough biodiversity in terms of the trees. I mean, when it comes to a forest, and that's what people do understand, a forest is a living organism. It has multiple layers, has multiple parts. You can just plop a set of trees down and expect things to work out okay. James C. Scott talks about this in scene like a state. You can't just, in these states, they start these sort of forestry projects. They try to legible, legibleize, you know, these forests. These simple rows and organizations, and you cut out all the fluff, all the shrubbery, all the other plants that are competing, go down and cool. You end up with a dead system. You end up with a system that is very fragile. It's not able to respond to changes in the pharmaceutical rise because it does not have the buffers of a complex web of life in place. Indigenous groups and really anybody who is grounded in the local context is able to most effectively engage and respond because they have access to that information, because they're able to see the shocks of the system, the buffers, what works, what doesn't. Human cultures are able to, you know, to have these intensive systems because they are constantly monitoring, come in full circle here, constantly monitoring the feedback that they're getting from their systems. And of course, there's a fifth principle. You know, in these sort of situations, you're still going to have a couple opportunistic people maybe attempt to be tempted to take advantage of the trust presence in the group. And when I say opportunistic people, I don't mean to create this other, this old group. I just mean it's in the sense of, you know, you have, like we all do moments of weakness, right? And in those moments of weakness, it can be easy for some to falter. And in that falter and jeopardize the security of the system as a whole. And so the fifth principle successful common spanishment is the practice of accountability and systems of accountability through graduated sanction. Of course, empathy needs to maintain throughout the process. And I don't think that every infraction must automatically respond it to with sanctions. Like again, I'm not trying to do something 1984. But just obviously when you have a system that has, and I know I'm reference to 1984, like a right finger. But yeah, I think it's fine to reference 1984 correctly as opposed to like someone who hasn't read it or read it anything else that he wrote. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we can take it. But you know, obviously not every situation can respond to its sanctions. Obviously, empathic and maintained throughout the process. But when you have a system in which a lot of people are dependent on the sustainability, not just people living right now, but generations to come. And that's not something we are accustomed to thinking about, but generations to come you out of think about with these sort of comments institutions. You can't do as the capitalist do and just let people do whatever with minimal, if any environmental protections with minimal, if any like standards in place. Yes, infractions, varying severity and stuff, but when the livelihood of the entire community is at stake, you know, things can be so easy. When infractions are just, you know, temporary deviations or unthreatening to the overall survival of the CPR, then you know, tolerance can be high, but it depends on the circumstance. And that's why it really is important that the prior four principles are in place. You know, you have declared a fine boundaries. You have the rules of the comments established by collective decision making power over the comments with a constant process of monitoring and police because again, the responsiveness of the people on the ground is a lot more in tune with the conditions of the comments and with the needs of the people themselves because they are the people. And the fifth principle and the fourth principle, all the other principles would be nothing without the sixth principle, which is the presence of conflict resolution mechanism. Humans are going to human. You know, we make mistakes, we have disagreements, and it needs to be some sort of means of discussing and resolving conflict in a healthy and effective way. There are a lot of processes in place. A lot of communities, egalitarian communities throughout history have used some sort of system of mediation. There's also arbitration, which tends to be more common in state societies. And they are also new models and methods of justice being established and drawn from from the past as well that we can look into, but they are conflict resolution mechanisms. They have to be in place the successful comments management. We live in a society and society includes conflict. We are not always necessarily a bad thing, but it's a thing. And you kind of ignore it and expect it to go away. The seventh principle is the freedom to organize. And this principle is the basis upon which the other principles rest. In some places, people have a lot of autonomy to self-organize free of state control. In other places, they don't. In other places, there's a lot of state encroachment on the commons because that has been the mission of the state to further their tendrils in every sphere of life and existence. So obviously, the end goal, or one of the end goals, the complete abolition of the state. And obviously, the process upon which we reach those end goals would require prefigurative politics in the sense of establishing the institutions that we want in a future society in the here and now and building that dual-polic capacity to provide a competitive, excuse the capitalist terminology, but a competitive model that can compete with rise from and separately from and eventually replace the existing system. So that's the process of social revolution. I will video coming up on that in December. Lastly, and this does not apply to every instance of commons management. But in some cases, you'll need the eighth and final principle for successful commons management. It's nested enterprises, which is basically the same principle as an anarchist confederation. A particular community is accessing a commons institution that other communities are accessing or if the commons that a group of communities are accessing are part of a larger regional commons or archipelagic commons or continental commons, then you want to have means of collaboration, bottom up of course, bottom up organizations, but maintain the power of the local level while coordinating these larger scaled commons and ensuring that there's a smooth running and smooth communication between the appropriators, the people involved. These principles very clearly differentiate between success and the failure cases. To reiterate the commons and the principles of successful commons management as follows. Clearly defined boundaries, rules compatible with local conditions, collective decision-making power to establish those rules, monitoring to ensure those rules are compatible with people and conditions, graduated sanctions to ensure that rules are kept up with and the commons are protected from potential threats, conflict resolution mechanisms because humans are going to human freedom to organize, particularly in the fragile early stages of establishing these projects and nested enterprises. Confederation from the bottom up. In certain failure cases, we see that none of the principles apply. For example, in the book El Nordstrom references these two Turkish fisheries, the Bay of East Mirror and Bordrum, where there was severe rent dissipation, continuing unabated. Of course, the book was written a while ago, so I'm not sure how the situation has evolved since then. But rent dissipation is basically a circumstance in which the commons, common pool resources are being depleted severely and the sustainability of those commons are at stake. With all those principles in place to ensure that doesn't happen, you get a situation like what's going on, what was going on in the Bay of East Mirror and Bordrum. In the Kirin the Oil Irrigation Project in Sri Lanka, they did have player boundaries, that one principle in place, but the other principles were not. In Mokhave, California, they did have the institution of collective choice, they did have conflict resolution mechanisms and they did have the recognized right to organize, but the other principles were not in place and so that institution was also a failure. Or we could look at the case in the Mahwella fishery, also in Sri Lanka, where rent dissipation had become a very severe problem, particularly after 1938. Now, they did have rules in place, they did have a monitoring system, but unfortunately, despite having those rules, regulating the access to the beach and the use of the beach scenes and the control of the number of nets to be used, they really did try. It wasn't a problem of ignorance. The issue was that although they were aware of the consequences of adding too many nets and drawing too much from the fishery, the issue became that the appropriators, the fishermen themselves, they don't have the autonomy to make and enforce the rules of the fishery. That was deprived of them and so the institution was not able to sustain itself, the long time. So, in all these cases, no more of the three design principles actually characterised any of these cases and so they were unable to solve the problems that they faced. They of course also issues where they are viable but fragile common systems, where they have more of the principles in place but they still lack all of them. So also in Sri Lanka, there is a gal oil, where boundaries and membership were clearly designated, where rules have been devised and monitored, where collective choice arenas have been set up. But they did not have the autonomy and they did not have conflict resolution mechanisms in place and so the institution is not as robust as it could be. Of course when it comes to the commons and existing institutions, existing fragile institutions, existing successful institutions, existing failures of institutions, that does not necessarily need to limit all imagination of possibilities but it's got to be informed as to what has worked in the past and what hasn't. We can still imagine future scenarios and experiments and how they might play out but the point is if we're trying to reinstate the commons, we need to understand what makes them work. At least what has made them work in the past and in the present. For more information on the commons and also the potential of a library economy, you can check out my videos on the commons and the library economy on my channel, youtube.com slash andrism. You can also check out Eleanor Ostrom's book, Covenant in the Commons as well as a book called Eleanor Ostrom's Rules for Radicals which I haven't read yet but I've heard it was pretty good. If you like what I do and you'd like to support me, you can follow me on peacher.com slash scene true and on twitter.com slash underscore scene true. That's all I have for today. It could happen now. Peace. Football is back and Bed MGM is inviting new customers to join the huddle and enjoy the action like never before. Sign up today using bonus code champion and your first wager is risk free up to $1,000. 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Now and more markets than ever visit bedmgm.com for terms and conditions must be 21 years of age or older to wager virginia only new customer offer all promotions are subject to qualification and eligibility requirements rewards issued as non withdrawable free bets or site credit free bets expire seven days from issuance please gamble responsibly gambling problem call 1 8 8 8 5 3 2 3 500 Let me guess unknown caller you could reduce the number of unwanted calls and emails with online privacy protection the latest innovation from discover will help regularly remove your personal info like your name and address from 10 popular people search websites that could sell your data and will do it for free activate in the discover app see terms and learn more at discover.com slash online privacy protection Hi I'm Cindy Lauper for years I felt awful because of my psoriasis but I didn't give up my doctor and I chose cossentics cossentics secu can you map is indicated for adults with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis and is given as a 300 milligram dose don't use your allergic to cossentics before starting to check for tuberculosis an increased risk of infections some serious and a lower ability to fight the may occur tell your doctor about an infection or symptoms like fevers sweats chills muscle aches or cough or if you've had a vaccine or plan to tell your doctor if your Crohn's disease symptoms develop or worsen serious allergic reactions may occur see our ad in country living magazine learn more at cossentics.com or by calling 1 8 4 4 cossentics cossentics works for me ask your dermatologist about cossentics welcome to the can happen here podcast about things falling apart and then maybe kind of putting them back together again sort of this this this this is a special episode about thing that happened where thing that happened is the Brazilian election and with me to talk about this is garrison hello and James hello so I think I think people probably know by now I Louise and I see a Lula to Silva better known as Lula has defeated Jair Bolsonaro in a absolutely terrifying squeaker of a presidential election this is like by far the closest election that Lula is a former two term president of Brazil is ever one part of this is a campaign of last minute voter suppression that Bolsonaro and the supporters did where like the like basically like the Brazilian federal police started setting up like they said like 550 road blocks to stop people to do the strongholds from voting there's like they assaulted people wound up not mattering and right now as as of time of recording which is one p.m. is 130 p.m. Pacific on Halloween. Uh, Bolsonaro is missing an action. There's no like no one seen him the old the old the only thing the the only sign of life that there has been from him is he unfollowed his wife amazing stuff. It's it sounds like he just locked himself in the presidential palace and turned all internal all of the lights off. Yeah, he's missing it. Nobody's seen or heard from him. So by the time this episode comes out there's like a small chance there's been a coup. There's like a small chance he's died from COVID. I don't know. Probably neither of those have happened. But you know, so Lula won his election like he won like like 50.8% of the vote roughly. And okay, so there's a lot of voter suppression, but even voter suppression cannot explain by Lula who won his last elections with respectively 61 and 60% of the vote was reduced to like 50.8% this time. And okay, so this begs two questions. But who is Luis Sonacio Lula de Silva and how did we get to this election? So the first episode of this is going to be answering the first question and the second episode is largely the second question. Okay, so who actually is Lula? Lula is born in 1945 actually his birthday is a few days ago to a desperately poor family in Brazil's northeast. And this family moves from the northeast to what became known as the APC region of Brazil, which is Santa Andre San Bernardina. Oh, sorry. Santa Andre, Sal Bernardo. Uh-huh. Who can't say names of Brazil now? Okay. Okay. This is not a famous name. This is Sal Bernardo. Wait, wait. Uh-huh. Wait, are you conflating Brazil and Argentina, which are famously not the same country? Oh, different languages. Here's the thing. If this was in Spanish, I could do this. I'm going to make this. I'm going to make this as glimmer here. All of my pronunciations are based on by terrible knowledge of Spanish. The problem is Brazil famously speaks Portuguese. A language that is not Spanish. So yeah, but okay. So there's a thing called the APC region because there's three cities there that are the ABC. Not it. As part of this sort of mass migration, which is popularly remembered as like this mass migration of people from the northeast to Sao Paulo. But the sort of the action that that's the popular memory of it, the actualities that millions of people flow into Sao Paulo like from all across Brazil. Um, the ABC region become the Brazil sort of industrial heartland. Like every story you read about this, we'll call it like Brazil's Detroit. And that's kind of true and kind of not true. Like I don't know. Every one who writes about Brazil is like, how can we make this the US? And like God forbid other countries have their own realities. Yeah. And like, okay. Like there is an extent to which Brazil is also like the X slave colony thing, right? But no, Brazil is its own country. Um, however, comma, the ABC region becomes the core of Brazil's massive metal working industry. This industry is just like from the 50s to the 80s, just like purely expanding. Um, the historian JD French knows that the ABC's population increased by 800% from 1950 to 1980. So Lulu arrives in the middle of a veritable industrial revolution. Um, this is going to end in one of history, sort of great built in industrial working classes. But he's there. That's kind of not what's happening. Oh, there's a thing I should mention about this region is that when I say metal working. So there's a, the reason there's so many Detroit comparisons is that this is the region that is massively involved in Brazil's auto industry, which in this period is expanding it is, is very large. Um, I think I've actually talked about this in the neoliberalism episodes, um, a little bit. But yeah. So Lulu, like, leaves school in fifth grade to basically find whatever work you can in the street. And this is another sort of very famous thing that everyone talks about. Lulu, about Kihil. Like, he has like a great school education. And that's like sort of true. Like, it is true that he never like, like, graduate, like, he never went to school past like fifth grade, mostly, although we'll get to some other stuff that you did later. Um, what happens basically is that his, his mom's able to get him into this, this metal, this, this government metal working sort of a apprenticeship program that is teaching like young people how to do, how to basically become skilled metal workers. And this also is an education, right? Like, it, you know, the people in this, there's a lot of very interesting sort of like theory stuff about this, about how these people like are, are also kind of worker intellectuals because in order to like, be a metal worker and to do all this stuff, you have to know a shit ton of stuff. You have to know, you have to know about just how to go stuff about how metal works. You have to know, you know, it's, it's very highly skilled and very high, like, degree of knowledge you have to have. So, you know, she, she gets this kind of education. And she becomes a very, very good metal worker. And he's, he's part of a, a, like a highly skilled and the academic literature will call it highly paid, although like, okay, this is highly paid compared to like someone, like someone who's a worker, but who's not like a metal worker, like one of the sort of skilled, quote unquote, metal workers. They're not like, these people aren't like lawyers, right? Like they're, they're, they're so closer to the actual sort of working class than, you know, some, some like people who are sort of like auxiliary parts of the ruling class. And he enters, you know, he enters this sort of manufacturing boom as part of what's called the Brazilian miracle. Well, okay, so she, she's there a bit before the sort of Brazilian miracle starts, but there's this period under the military dictatorship, which takes power of 1965, where they kind of like luck into a functioning economy. Although I should, I should mention this now. Um, okay, so it, it, it is period in Brazil, like inflation being good and under control is, inflation is at 20%. Like when inflation is at 20%, everything is considered fine. And when it goes up from 20%, it's like, oh no, we've lost control of the economy. So, if we look at our own population, and this, this kind of like, this is a survivable thing because people's wages are sort of indexed to, um, their indexed across living increases to some extent, which is a thing that like, yeah, it will never happen here. Yeah. While I mean, I guess if, if you do the kind of stuff these guys do, you can probably get some of this, but. Yeah. So, but the sort of interesting thing about what's happening here is you have a very large industrial working class, but it's not really very militant for most of the time Lula's in it, except for sort of right around the military like Kuwait 1965. Lula sees some of kind of like the old radicalism like he talks about like watching people like storming factories because they're on strike. The Brazilian working class does a lot of fun stuff that they do like, they do things like, okay, so everyone will show up to a protest with like a bunch of like pockets full of marbles and when it when a calvary charge starts they'll just roll the all rolled marbles down the street and the horse will step on the marbles and fall. My that's an OG battle of cables street maneuver. Yeah, yeah, my absolute favorite one. This is just like like pure looney tune shit. They do this thing where, okay, so they'll string piano wire up, like between light posts and then they'll bait calvary units to the charging at them. And then the one other thing and the guys will just get fucking close. That's so good. Yeah, that's pretty great. The horse cops. You know, you see horse cops in America, but no, no, no, no, no, no, no, well, you see them sometimes, like I have seen some horse cops. Hortland's horse cops only like stop existing a few years ago. Yeah, yeah. In the UK up until very recently they used them to police protest. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. There was footage from 2020 of people getting run over by horses in the states. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they still do this. Yeah, fucking sucks. There's actually, okay. I think that the most famous police horse related story in the US is a Philly sports fan. I think it like he also did 14 punching and police horse. What a city. Yeah, the most famous British police horse thing is the horse, humping the cop. Oh, God. Critical support to the horse. Yeah, it's gonna be quickly copy the image into the chat so you can all enjoy it. I'm glad that we've taken this episode in this direction. Oh my fucking holy shit. That. Oh my god. Okay. That is much more graphic than I thought it was. Do you know what else will take a cop and bend it over and nope. All right. Well, here's some here's some. We got promise that, Garrison. Here is some advertisements. And we're back with other things that will scar my soul forever. Oh boy. I put it out sort of 1965. There had been a kind of left wing government in Brazil. And then the military coup, like just overthrows it. And the left is kind of just like annihilated from this. And it's not just from the pure political repression, which forces like all the communist parties are forced undergrounds like. But one of the things, like one of the real things that's sort of like really shatters the Brazilian left is that like the coup happens and the left, you know, the left sort of knows as a coup coming right. But they expect that when the coup happens, there's going to be strikes and like the working class is going to fight them and they're going to beat it. And everyone kind of just like in the factories kind of just shrugs. And nothing happens and they just get rolled over. And this is the sort of this period of sort of like, you know, this kind of like the workers movement, like nothing is happening again. There's some sort of radical student groups are trying to do stuff. But like, I know there's a Brazilian version of May 68. But mostly what happens there is like one factory gets occupied and then the army shows up with guns and they get owned. And it's really grim. And you know, you have these sort of like like tiny like actually, okay, you have these tiny Catholic Maoist groups who release Maoist student groups. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. We just got straight through that. All right. It's nuts. Normal, totally normal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then you know, there's a try who tried it, you like to reel and certain things off. And the army just sort of like kills them all. They're horribly destroyed. So for almost a decade and a half, like you have a very deep politicized industrial pull Terry and and Lula's part of this, right? Like from like when he enters the workforce until like the late 70s, he is not political at all. Are they doing the thing under the dictatorship where they have like pet unions, I guess when it's like one mandated union for the industry? Actually, I was about to talk about this. Um, yeah. So the Brazilian labor system, then the thing is, so this wasn't set up under this military dictatorship. It was kind of set up under like a previous one. But this, yeah, it's still sort of a thing. All of the unions have to register with the state. And when they're doing contract negotiations, right? They're not negotiating with the corporations and negotiating with the state. And so this means that like the state is setting wage rates. It's going to become important later. But yeah, there's a really interesting sort of problem here because there's this entire class of basically sort of like government union guy who's like, yeah, basically a bureaucrat and is like really corrupt. We love unions. And yeah, well, and this is like, and like, like a lot of people just hate them because like they, you know, because they like literally what these people are are like, they're a guy who's doing this job to get ahead. And then their job is to sort of like, like, you know, technically, it's like mediate the class struggle, right? But like what what it actually means is like make sure that like there isn't actually sort of like like make sure the union isn't actually sort of a sort of a class conflict. And you know, this, this is the whole sort of thing behind this because before like next the 1940s, Brazil had this really, really built in like labor movement. They had a bunch of anarchists like the anarchist right over to the government a couple of times. If he's huge general strikes, there's a communist party is like a real thing. And then the government tries to like bring all of like, you know, okay, we're going to bring all the unions under our control. And it's still also true that these are like, they're still technically unions. So there are people who are sort of doing union organizing in them, right? Like they still do some regular union stuff. And yeah, we're going to talk about this a bit more later. But there's, I don't know, these unions are fucking weird. Like they're not like unions anywhere else have ever seen. Yeah, but so, okay, so the other thing like Lula in this point like is a political right people, people he tried to talk to about politics and he's like, I just want to play soccer and like chase girls. And he talks about this like, like, it speeches a lot. But his brother who's known as Frey Chico is a Brazilian communist party militant for like his entire life. And being being a PCB militant in like the 1670s, this is like life threatening. The party is outlawed. Everyone is so clandestined that like, Frey Chico's own wife doesn't know that he's a communist and finds out that he's a communist when he gets arrested. Like it's this, this is like this is like the level of like clandestine shit that everyone that that like, you know, the sort of communist parties are working under here. But Frey Chico's also like an open union activist and everyone knows he's like he's a leftist basically because you know, even the sort of like the unions are sort of like split between like there's sort of left factions that are like trying to actually do union stuff. But like for towards sort of leftist goals, there are like more moderate people who are like bread and butter trade unionists. And then there's also just like a bunch of people who are like just the corruption fashion. But yeah, like Lula doesn't like Lula, like doesn't care about the union at all. Like he's not even in the union until Frey Chico like his brother's just like literally just like drags him kicking and screaming into running for an elected position in the union because I like he needed a guy to run on a slate. But he couldn't run himself because everyone knew he was a leftist. So he was like, okay, I'm gonna hear brother. You run. You're not like openly a leftist. You can actually win this. And this is, you know, and then this works and he gets elected. And this is where Lula like learns politics. From the book Lula in his politics of cunning. quote, Lula would have to master the mundane aspects of union life, including bureaucratic routines, budgets, services, and preparing union assemblies. Lula would also undergo a gradual politicization through relationships with fellow directors, union lawyers, and staff, and activists central to the union's turbulence internal politics. Finally, Lula would need to learn about the repressive dimension of working class life on the military rule, including close supervision and surveillance by police employers and labor ministry officials. And what's interesting about this story is like everyone around him, we join this union, including basically his boss of the union is a guy named Vidal, who's a very powerful union leader. Like, you know, his brother to like everyone thinks he's going to be the sort of like compliance, like obedient fingerhead. And instead, what they have done is they have created arguably the greatest politician of the 21st century. Um, what are the things that's important to note here is that like, okay, so like the unions are like fucked up, right? And everyone kind of understands their fucked up. These are still probably the most like, like these are probably still the most competitive democratic elections that are happening in Brazil. Like Brazil technically has elections. There's these sort of like two official parties. So, okay, so it's kind of weird that the military like is in power, but like they have the sort of veneer that they're not and they had technically, they technically sometimes have a civilian president. They have these sort of like parties that are kind of real. But you know, the union actually has like, there are like leftists, slates, there are conservatives, like there's actually sort of politics going on. And Lula is actually able to sort of like make his mark through his ability to just like make friends with people on both the sort of like radical and moderate side of the union, um, union sort of political aisle. And this is because Lula, like Lula is just funny. He loves playing soccer. He loves just like dancing and hanging out. And this lets him like win his election slate like pretty easily because you know, she's just very popular. So these are things that like, I don't know, like the other workers in the factory, a lot of times don't care that much about union politics, but they do care about like they do care about soccer a lot. And so Lula was able to build a bunch of support. And this lets him sort of easily take a position in a union system that like, I, it's basically a miniature state. Like the unions have their own welfare programs. They have, they have the room education system. And you know, this is part of the thing about people talking about like Lula was like completely uneducated. It's like, no, it's not like he, he spends a bunch of time like in classes that like the, the union, like puts on basically like university and academic classes, right? For, for its workers and for other people sort of affiliated with them. So he spends a bunch and this is like, you know, part of where he'd learn sort of politics and where he loves political economy is like, is through the through these classes the union has. And he, sorry, he, the union also like, you know, I talked about like they run welfare programs, right? So he's like, he's like a social worker, right? Trying, trying to sort of like help workers and pensioners with his job, he gets this position that like everyone hates. Like he has this position basically like running, running their sort of like like welfare program. And like nobody wants it, but he like does it. And he doesn't really well. And this makes him really popular because he's the guy that like, you know, if you're like a pensioner, right? Like he's the guy you go to to figure out pension bullshit. And he's the guy you just go to in order to sort of get stuff done. And yeah, you know, this means he's spending a bunch of time doing paperwork and like to go shading with government bureaucracy. And he did this makes him a very, very effective politician. Here's from Lula's politics, the cutting again. But Lula also gains access to an even larger consistency at the Union headquarters, a working class public sphere. Do you know how many people pass by the Union daily? He asked a journalist in 1979 at minimum, 1500. Those frequenting the union did so for many reasons, often for various sorts of assistance or assistance, yeah, which I think is yeah, like government union to assist and stuff. Yeah. Assistance, yeah. But also to complain about work, shoot the breeze or catch up with friends. Some union directors often arrived late to the headquarters and were off always busy when they did. The Gregorius Lula by contrast maintains an open door policy and his office became a gathering point for break and file workers, factory activists, and fellow directors still linked to production. And this is never thing that's sort of important about this is that like, okay, like once you reach like a certain position in the Union, like you're just a full time a union guy. And so there's a lot of people who like join the union and become like union people because it means like it takes you off the shop floor. And the government does this deliberately, right? Because it means that you know, you're creating, you're the thing they're trying to do is create a certain credit area between the working class and like the union. But Lula's like still really connected to what's going on in the shop floor because he's just like talking to everyone all the time. And the product of this is that Lula is becomes a very very like he comes to trade union leader, becomes a very very powerful one. He who rapidly becomes a president of his union after some like, Vidal, who's like his boss, there's this whole thing where he's trying to stay in power, but he doesn't run for president of the union because of some complicated political maneuvering. And so Lula ends up as the head of the union. Vidal's like, it's fine. I'm so going to be a control here. And that is not what happens. You you you have just you have just given the presidency to like a a a a a a a genuinely truly singular, like political figure. But but there's something that's very very important about Lula that you need to understand to figure to like to understand anything that's about to happen here and basically sense Lula is not a communist. This is this is very important. Um, he could not have done what he's about to do, which is, you know, become literally like a living symbol of one of the largest strike waves in Brazilian history. He could not have done this if he was a communist. The military if he was a communist, the military would have, you know, tortured and possibly executed him like they'd done with thousands of other communists. His brother, Frecicco, was kidnapped and tortured horribly by the military. Although he like he will insist that he didn't have it as bad as like a lot of other people did, which is true, but also like they tortured the shit out of him. And it was fucking horrific. And the fact that like every single like met person, like the fact that every single fucking member of the military dictatorship was not fucking like taken out behind a fucking shed shot and had their like corpses fed to dogs is like genuinely one of the reasons why we're here right now. This stuff is awful. It is. Yeah. It's really a theme of the podcast. Yeah. Yeah. But what to do with dictators? You know, Lula and she was wife were eventually able to sort of get him released because he's not like a very high like he's in the PCB like he's in the communist party like Frecicco's brother like but he's not like a high ranking guy and you know the sort of cruel irony of it is like they knew that he didn't know anything that they didn't already know but they just tortured the shit out of him anyways. But one of the important things that happens here is his brother like under torture like insist that Lula is not a communist and like continues to insist this because he isn't and you know and like people who are like that and and people in the military dictatorship like believe this right because like that like they're you know they they they have a really extensive sort of intelligence network like at this point they they've basically like they've basically destroyed the Brazilian Communist Party and they've like captured and killed most of the raccoche and because he's not a communist Lula is able to stay in the labor movement even if in the short term after his brother gets arrested he loses his job in the union because and he's able to do this because like beyond his brother who like his brother has literally been like saying communist stuff at him for decades and he's Lula has just been like I don't care um and like a couple of other people who's just quite a kind of friends with like Lula like he has no connection to the organized left like he's he's not sort of like like he he's he's he's not like a leftist right like in that sort of conventional sense like he's he's not tied to one of sort of the old left political factions and this means that he can stand in as as a kind of sort of labor leader that that the the the more moderate factions the military dictatorship have been looking for which is this sort of like non-communist like quote unquote genuine trade unionist and okay so like talking about like a moderate faction of a military dictatorship is always kind of fraught because you know it's a military dictatorship but like like all these people suck it's also true that there were there were factions within the military dictatorship who so there's like fashion called like the dungeon which is like the people torturing all these people to death there were other people in the military dictatorship who are like this is really fucking gauche like why are you guys doing this like this makes us look bad also why are you torturing these people and those guys look at Lula and they they're they're willing to work with him because like what what what they think they're doing is creating the sort of like authentic non-communist labor movement that will like work with them the stop communism like sort of like the a flc i out like specifically talk about this like in the in the way that the a flc i out does in the us work work working as a decommunist force they think that they can get Lula do this and Lula does a lot of stuff that like looks like collaboration to the sort of like surviving leftist around him he develops like literally like personal relationships kind of friendship it's not really friendships but like develops personal relationships with professional relationships with members of the regime and you know again it like it looks like he's collaborating but that's not that's not what's actually happening what's actually happening is that he's holding these negotiations in order to sort of increase the power of the union and build this like safety network because he has these personal relationships with people in the regime it means that he's not going to get fucking disappeared and his people aren't going to get disappeared and this has happened to a lot of even a lot of sort of other regular union activists who didn't have his kind of connections just like vanished and the people is able to build connections with like keep him from being like vanished and keep his trade unions and being slaughtered and you know like the the the people in in the military leadership like really think that like okay they've gained that you know they're gaining an ally and defeating communism uh the thing they are actually doing uh is producing their own grave diggers um then okay you know who else yes there we go yeah you know who else is creating their own grave diggers garrison uh the advertisement industrial complex yes they have produced us we can dream unbelievable well in the meantime so inside inside the new Batman game you play as the four sidekicks after Batman allegedly dies and the weirdest thing is that they because three of the sidekicks don't usually have capes they you you know they don't do any kind of mass gliding feature for city traversal instead you have a really slow bat cycle and then you have an almost spider man like grappling hook and it's it locks on to anything around you it's really confusing and are we back okay yeah yeah and we're back we should we should leave in like just like two minutes of Batman talk they was completely baffled so okay there's a thing about Lula just as a person is that fundamentally he's a negotiator like his style is almost like Biden-esque in the sense of like Biden started believes like talking to everyone across the political I also to accept right except like okay the key difference here is that Lula is actually charismatic um yeah but like you know he he will just sit there like with people across the I will like talk things out negotiate with them he'll talk with employers will talk with members in military dictatorship but you know there were differences that like okay so Biden is like is a concert politician right like what he when he talks about like talking with people across the aisle he means like strum-thurman right when Lula is talking with people he's talking with everyone like he like literally everyone he runs a class he's talking with random people like Union Halls and meetings at picket lines at like soccer games at bars and because he spends all of this time talking people constantly he gains this is like incredible ability to read crowds and like tailor message messages for them and like figure out what sort of like like what what sort of things will work with whatever person he's saying and he gains this like absolutely incredible ability to sort of charm people and it works for people even on people who fucking hate him like they were like journalists who will spend literally their entire careers trying to destroy him and who are when they're asked about them they're like well I mean like he was a person he's really charming like a nice guy and but you know so part of what he's doing in this period this is this is this is the late 70s going into the release he's telling this like this very specific like game of respectability politics of like not directly criticizing the government and like okay so there are these like there are these strikes that start happening because okay so it turns out that the military government has been trying to get inflation like the whole sort of economic system they've been doing starts to fall apart and inflation starts to come back and they start doing these like measures to combat inflation and the unions okay so originally no one believed them but the union has like it has like like they have like a think tank kind of right they have like a social sort of like center with a bunch of sort of like sociologists and economists and they figure out that the union's been lying that that's like the government's been lying about in flight like how bad inflation is and then the IMF in the late 70s confirms this that that that the military dictatorship has been lying about how bad inflation is by doing some statistical stuff and this matters because they've been setting costs of living adjustments by a lower level of inflation that's actually that that was actually happening and this pisses everyone to fuck off because they're like literally the government is robbing us like they've been lying about how bad inflation is like like third is and it's this is like it's like a 30% income drop right for these workers and this pisses everyone to fuck off and suddenly there's these massive like protests there were like hundreds of thousands of people like a hundred thousand people will show up to a soccer stadium as part of a strike like but you know Lula has to make sure that everyone doesn't get murdered and so he does these things like he'll like he'll like he'll avoid directly criticizing the government he has this whole thing about how like he wants to negotiate directly with the employers he like kicks out like left to student groups who are like trying to like distribute like common to students who are like trying to distribute pamphlets at the rallies because he's trying to make sure that the strikers aren't seen as like communist subversives and instead is sort of like they're seen as like good upstanding hardworking citizens and yeah here it shoes from that book again given the diverse outlooks Lula represented himself as a thoughtful righteous man who disparaged riotous behavior as unworthy and counterproductive like all honest workers he called for the strikers to be disciplined and counseled against classes with the police he continually frames their fight as one with the companies not the government or the policeman and this like works because any more radical action probably is going to get everyone killed and I mean like like that when the strikes are going on there's like like they're they're getting buzzed by helicopters there's like fucking army trucks everywhere um but you know he manages not to get a full killed and the result of this is that Lula immediately becomes the most famous worker in Brazil he's like on TV he's leading strikes everywhere like there's these massive rallies and you know there's some really like there's some really like genuinely adorable stuff that's happening we're like when he's giving his first speech to one of these rallies it's like it's fucking raining the soccer stadium is just mud like his podium is literally sinking into the mud he's trying to speak and this is like the first time he's addressed a crowd this loud and he's nervous and people start leaving and like oh so they're doing the funny other things learned about this is how old the how old the crowd mic is so they're doing this thing that becomes almost a crowd mic where like you don't have a microphone or you can't reach everyone so each so okay so some the the speaker says like a sentence and then each person the crowd says a sentence and it just sort of moves back through the crowd from everyone repeating it and he's trying to give the speech is not going great and like the workers in the front row start like yelling like hey you can do this Lula don't worry you got this and then he like yeah and then this is like absolutely adorable moment and then he sort of like like you know I say it like gets better at it and like by like the second one of these like people are just like in love with him he is unbelievably popular he's an incredible speaker he's like you know and it's very easy to and you see writing about this at the time that are like that look at him and are like well this got like this guy is like like people people are like calling him literally the Messiah of the working class right like this is the kind of sort of like like a claim that he has like they are that they're after one of his speeches like the entire crowd literally carries him on their shoulders from one end of the soccer stadium to the other like they are like like like they're there are people like walking on stage and calling him like father and saying Hail Mary's like it's it's fucking wild um but you know but like and it's in like when when when when when like sort of rich and educated people look at this they're like oh these people are like blindly obedient to him they're like they have this client pageant relationship he's like manipulating the masses and that's not what's happening like that that's just not what's happening like he actually like the union votes against him like a couple of times like it because because he's trying to do negotiations right and he does it does this thing right if I'm understanding the story right I think what happened is that he's trying to like negotiate like people coming back to work negotiations continue it's like a show of good faith or whatever and the unions like fuck no we're not going back to work and just like votes him down and so like like this kind of stuff happens right like that you know like people respect him enormously and he he is like literally in some sense he's like the avatar of the industrial working class like working class people look at him and like and they see themselves in him and they see they see the power that he's able to sort of insert how many people he's around then they're like oh shit the union is strong like we are strong we can actually sort of fight back but it's not like a sort of client patron thing he he's it's just like he's at the head of a workers movement that is a force in and of itself and has its own agency capacity to act and Lula has to like negotiate with that and like he has to sort of like rebuild her trust after he you know is taking a sort of more modern line he he eventually gets like arrested 1980 although he gets released after like a month and from there he gets to work founding like every important left just organizations like the last 40 years so in 1980 he's one of the people who found the workers party in 1983 he founds the CUT or the English translation of it's a unified worker central which like to this day is Brazil's like national trade union center like it's like it's like their big union federation and this is illegal at the time but you just like fuck it we're doing it anyways like these people are losing the the the the the the dictatorship losing control in the CUT like plays a huge role in how the dictatorship loses power on so does the PT to some extent like the PT the PT like as a party or powerful enough that like they're involved in drafting the constitution he's there for the founding the land this workers movement which is a social movement that like ceases land that's not being used to be just to work her she's heavily involved in the campaigns to sort of force the military out of power and you know as a military dictatorship like kind of falls apart in democracy like kind of like fully returns to Brazil in 1989 he goes like full intellectual politics but the the the problem is that like he's kind of too early for his politics um he he spends like the entire 90s just like getting his ass handed to him in a lesh into over and over again and part of what's happening you know part by part of literally what he's doing in the 90s is rebuilt is like he's like rebuilding the entire Latin American left like from ground zero after the fall of the Berlin ball wall and the sort of like global defeat of the left in the 80s um he he's one of the founders of the form of of south polo which is the first of this series of sort of like meetings of leftists from Latin America and the Caribbean which is trying to figure out like okay like hey what what is socialism now that like the Berlin wall is down and everything sort of going to shit and in 1990 that's a really bleak prospect like neoliberalism is completely ascendant nationalism as destroyed socialism like every sort of former socialist states falling apart like capitalist or running rampant across the globe like literally entire communist parties are just like disbanding and all of the sort of cadre are becoming liberals but you know as the 90s go on and people actually have to sort of like live under this they increasingly realize that it sucks ass and that I you know what what living under neoliberalism means is like IMS structural adjustments and like like the economy like there's there's the Asian market collapse there's a bunch of other market collapses and you know as after the zapatista sort of go on the take like are the first like part of the left to really go on the offensive after they're uprising in 1994 the left kind of starts to put itself back together and this left like I think like this version of it's kind of dead now but like I think there are people who are old enough to remember it or like remember sort of like what it used to be like the slogan of this sort of whole like like left like the one of their big slogans is another world as possible which is sort of like the anti like the anti slot it's a response to like that shares there is no alternative is like another world as possible is this is the sort of like alter globalization left like this is a left that does the battle of Seattle 1999 and Lula's there for like all of it like after Seattle he helped after the battle Seattle like he helps found the world social forum which is just like giant meeting plays for like international social movements and you know and so you know through this whole period like the left is sort of gathering a strength everywhere like well okay in Latin America and also like I mean it's in a lot of places right like in India it's like Indonesia it's always in the US although the US has this problem that metal left it happens and yeah that's a chit-chou yeah it's it's amazing how that this movement existed almost everywhere else but not to my knowledge is a significantly here yeah well I mean we had we had Seattle right but then when that haven't happened the the unions like pulled out of doing any direct action shit and then it kind of everything kind of got eight by the anti war movement which yeah and then the green scare yeah yeah then that led to the adbusters doing and the stuff that occupy Wall Street and then yeah and that's the last well I was okay I would say this I think there's I think there's a there's a break here like I think I think occupy is when that kind of politics died because when when occupies were under and this is the sort of irony of this and we'll get you next episode is that like you you can there's a good argument that the place that that politics actually died was in Brazil when the workers party fucking like tear gas then rubber bull did the absolute shit out of a bunch of protesters who had been who are like the Brazilian wave of sort of like that series of protests and they crushed a shit out of them it is horrible like this is one of this is like one of like my foundation's political memories is like fucking tanks rolling down the street people shooting rubber bullets at people like seven year olds getting tear gas it is a it is a fucking shit show but in in in two like you know it's not that we haven't gotten there yet like even the sort of like more cynical trotsky I like can't imagine the fucking peachy rolling tanks through the favelas which is what they're gonna be doing in 12 years and we had that was it went I can't quote me but when Tony Blair there's 97 but like Britain the British Tony Blair right like represented this other vision for the left yeah well and everything is like people like like one of the boys everything is like people talk about Obama as being like the end of the same wave except Obama sort of like the like even more so than any of the other politicians when we talk about is a sort of like recuperation of this right like yeah the guy you take all Synergy and is like yeah and and and okay so what we're we're gonna get into like the negative side of all of this shit next episode but like in some sense Lula does play a similar role in Brazil and we will get there but right now you know I okay so there's another part of this that like doesn't get talked about that much which is that in the early 2000s in Latin America it's not just that like the left is winning elections like there are open revolutions going on like that I mean there's there's a bunch of them there's a like like arguably like the last communist revolution like ever happens in like the last sort of like the last gas of the classical workers would happen in Argentina in 2001 this is huge revolt against the IMF in austerity and like this is this is the last time like in world history that like people occupy factories and then attempt to like like take them over and use them as a way of seizing the media's production people occupy factories and Bosnian has a gov in like 2014 but like by that point like like that those guys are occupying factories and then having like occupy meetings in them they're not like attempted to sort of like seize production yeah but you know like these these are real revolutions right like there's there's there's there's a there's a coup against you go travest that gets overturned by another popular revolution um there's the water and gas wars in Bolivia which culminate in like literally the like the capital is like entirely blockaded off from the rest of the country and surrounded by roadblocks and the fucking like this is in five the government is like fucking imploding the military's fallen apart like you know like there like and this is this is this is this is the sort of chain of events that brings you to realize into power but like they very nearly just destroy the entire uh believing governments the cycle sort of ends with the will hawk uprising in 2006 where like like the people of will hawk just fucking take the city and hold it for like I think of like a few months and like run it through democratic assemblies and then like the army shows up and they get yeah but like you know like like there is a point like that that was like I I think like like in my lifetime like the workers of a city fucking just took it over like this is stuff that like you know like I think now we're kind of like we have problem like I think most people sort of forgotten about this stuff like this this was a moment in which like like revolution and the destruction of capitalism was on the table yeah and like a lot of it I'm not super I lived in Venezuela for some of this time uh briefly but it felt very possible in a way that like it probably hasn't since right like yeah it was fascinating to see like and the cooperation between those countries was very real right like um obviously Cuba like Cuba Cuban doctors are fucking everywhere right if you travel yeah I'm resisting though but it was fascinating to see like people from here coming here and they think they have that São Paulo forum right where they would where these ideas would be exchanged and it it yeah it that was very formative for me it it genuinely felt like it was possible for something as a result of this like ghoulish IMF policy that we'd had for the previous 20 years people like no fuck this we're doing it our way yeah and yeah yeah didn't tell you okay but this is this is this this is what's really weird about Lula because Lula is running in 2002 and he's watching all of this happen and his strategy his response to this is basically the analysis because he okay so he's spent the entire 90s lose running leftist campaigns and losing right yeah and his strategy in 2002 is he's going to move the PT the workers party to the right both of them are messaging and in policy so it's not to sort of like scare voters and he finally convinces the rest of the PT to do something he's been advocating for for like decades which is allying with sort of like liberal or conservative like non leftist parties which they do in this election and we're going to see how that goes later because oh boy but you know okay so like what why why are they sort of doing this there's a few reasons partially it's because Lula has been like losing elections is being like okay so we have to do something different partially it's because the PT is a product of the collapse of like okay the PT like in the 2000s like the the base that had formed that party is basically collapsed right the PT is like it's Corcoran's situancies are sort of like leftist groups there's like like left wing Catholic groups and the sort of like the the the the giant sort of like trade union stuff that like the giant workers movement that Lula was a part of but by 2002 like the the Catholic church has swung back to the right like the sort of the sort of left Catholic people are on the retreat there's very few of them left um there's and we're going to talk about this more later but the sort of giant industrial unions that like Lula have been ahead of like and that you know Lula's career and the PT itself comes from have been shattered by sort of like the by by the industrialization of the collapse of sort of Brazil's industrial economy and the product of this is that without it sort of social basis like Lula keeps losing elections so he goes okay so he's a solution to this and the PT understands this right like they're they're aware of the fact that like part of what's happening with them is that like they they've you know they're losing parts of their working class base because that that working class literally doesn't exist anymore they're gaining a bunch of sort of middle class like leftist activists but they need to find a way to sort of broaden their appeal and so like keep promises like openly gives us like speech about how he's not going to do like a quote rupture with the economy which is what there's party of been campaigning on because you know the PTR leftist right the whole point of another world is possible is we don't have to live very capitalist anymore Lula's like no no no no no guys hold on hold on I didn't mean that like we're not going to do a rupture and instead what Lula does is pledges to and like stays in the Brazil's commitments the IMF including like fucking insane shit like maintaining primary budget surpluses which is nuts and she you know and she instead of like yeah yeah she stays in the and you know are so Argentina famously like in Argentina solution to the sort of uprisings that are happening is that they they default on our death the IMF they're like fuck you we're not paying and Lula's like nah nah we're pay like it's fine we'll just keep paying it and like the PTR itself is like what the fuck is going on like what what is happening here why is this happening here like why why is he doing this and you know Lula's just like well okay we need we need to take power we need to do this take power and so he does and and weirdly in the middle of this cycle of sort of like the resurrection of the left he's running increasingly to the right and you know okay part of what's happening here is that there's an inherent problem that leftist governments have when they take over the state especially when they take over a capital state by winning an election which is that if you are in control of the government right for control the state your job is now to keep the economy running and in theory this isn't incompatible with leftist police but if you stop if you stop and think about what this actually means for a second keeping the economy running means keeping the economy growing and economic growth right means that capitalists have to keep making more money every year than they did last year like that that's what economic growth is right and this is a real problem if you are a leftist taking power because if you don't do this you will a lose elections because regular people get pissed off because when capitalists don't make one money they start firing people and be the bourgeoisie who only ever grudgingly accepts the leftist sort of like a legitimate power in the first place if you're if you're if they're if they're not getting more money every single year they will overthrow you and you know Lula knows this right but the the solution to this problem that these they sort of like pink tide governments come to is basically to let a faction of the sort of national bourgeoisie the sort of national capitalist class the people who are like capitalist domestically like they they they let them into this product of sort of like not this nationalist developmental project and so what this means essentially is you are like you are by you are buying a section of the of the ruling class off right you are giving the masses state contracts you're doing state investments infrastructure that helps them like expand things like mining so they can you know take take some of the profits from it you're giving the preferential access to government contracts in exchange for supporting you and there's a lot of ways this can look like the M.A.S. and Bolivia for example starts bringing these elites directly into the party with this sort of developmentalist faction in Brazil it looks like an alliance something called the centro which is like centroid sorry my my poor Jesus not good um which is this like this sort of like ever present force in Brazilian politics which is like the corruption faction it's like this this series of sort of parties are like kind of loosely knit you kind of vote together but you don't like they don't the parties normally have ideology but like their ideology is I am I am like a local political like powerful political person and you are going to pay me or you will not be able to pass literally any bill ever and okay so they they they they they have to form an alliance with sort of these parties and the other thing they start doing is that they are just literally but like they just literally start buying people off and this leads to sort of like a bunch of corruption scandals that we're going to get you next episode um but well while Lula is in office this seems like it's working really well um he's able to sort of pay off the bourgeoisie and fund the social welfare programs for the Brazilian working class and this has a massive impact right like this lifts something like 20 million people out of poverty and okay and I I and other people will argue about what it means to like lift people out of poverty and how poor they still are but you know it is true these people have a massive increase in quality of life like people are getting running water in their homes for the first time like people are having electricity for the first time um all right it's also with pointing out that Lula who is white spends a fucking shit ton of time fighting like fighting against racism and fighting for educational and job opportunities for black people even though okay there's like an asterisk next to that that has to do with the police that we'll get back to that yeah oh it's it's fucking oh boy it it is worse than you can possibly imagine um who what you know like he's trying to end hunger he has this very famous program called the Bolsa Familia which is basically like if you're pouring off and you agree to send your kids to school and get the vaccinated like the government will just give you money and you know there's also a micro loan part of this which is my dot dot dot uh this won't go oh yeah uh uh nothing bad will happen from the Brazilian government attempting to get a bunch of people to take micro loans oh great this this does not lead us into fascism at all I but you know okay like this works right Lula is able to grow the economy like Brazil's economic growth in this period is like seven percent which is fucking nuts like year on year um he leaves office was I've seen it ultimately said as like an eighty five or a ninety percent approval rating he's unbelievably popular and you know so everything like looks good right kind of from inside Brazil it looks like the PT has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of everyone they've been like they've been in successful social democratic party and that they've lifted a bunch of people out of poverty there's like people who are alive because like who are alive today who would not be because the PT was in power right and you know he like he there are people who don't starve there are people who don't go hungry there are people who have opportunities like educational opportunities to have opportunity to advance themselves the first time ever and it's a successful capitalist government too because again seven percent year on year growth right like this is fucking nuts like this is this is a kind of economic growth that is like unimaginable in in most parts of the world however comma if this at all actually worked we wouldn't be here right now with I you know the the the fascist president going into like hiding and so next episodes you know March I've been I've been talking about grave diggers sort of this episode right there's there's a for a famous part of the communist manifesto we talk we're remarks talks about like like capital like capital is producing its own grave diggers and capitalism has never done that right like like to to to this day right now capitalism has yet to produce its own gravediggers social democracy has brews its own gravediggers in every single fucking country anyone's ever done it and the next episode in next episode we're going to watch the PT brews its own gravediggers and we are going to watch the attempt to bury Louise and Asia Lula to Silva and the rest of the Brazilian working class alive oh good you're going to do a bolsonara update because he's apparently left the building oh shit okay yeah I'd bolsonara update bolsonara was left the building hold on breaking breaking breaking news yeah he left the palace finally yeah in a convoy of black SUVs oh he's expected to break the silence yeah but so I'm looking at Benjamin Vogel who's pretty good on this yeah he's expected to break the silence but not to congratulate Lula on winning she's Christ is it I have lost goodbye okay so yeah I there might be a if I don't know what we're going to do if there's a coup in between this episode and the next episode hopefully not I don't know I mean I one one thing that like I will say and that I think we were in talk a bit about next episode is it like part of what's happening right now that's very important is that Biden is in office in the US and I mean okay so the Brazilian military is a long history of doing coups but usually when they're doing coups they're doing coups with the backing of the US government and Biden like just on a personal level fucking hate spools and arrow and there is a there is a very real chance that this is a significant factor in why we haven't seen a coup is literally the president of the United States personally does not like the vassage president of Brazil and this is a fucking batshit state of affairs right like the fact that like the like personal inclinations of the president of the United States has this much of an impact on like the politics of an entire country is nuts it this happened in the other direction for a while right like it's I guess not personally it's just the personal inclination of the president that case yeah well it that there's weird things here too because like like Lulu was really friendly with with Bush which I think is why part of why he never like they never tried to keep him as opposed to Chavez who called him the devil yeah which is really interesting because Lulu and Chavez are friends yeah right but then Chavez gives the speech about how like everyone has the road like at the at the the world social form gives a speech about how everyone's existing in their own like conditions so you can't expect like you know you can't expect Lulu to be Chavez you can't expect Chavez to be a Castro like stuff like that yeah but it's it's weird hopefully Pulsarro fucking leaves office if not I don't know but either way I don't know things are the history of Brazil during this period is also kind of bleak but after this period is way the fuck bleaker so yeah we're gonna talk about that tomorrow and yeah we'll update you if there is a coup football is back and bet MGM is inviting new customers to join the huddle and enjoy the action like never before sign up today using bonus code champion and your first wager is risk free up to $1,000 you'll also have instant access to a variety of parlay selection features player props and boosted odd specials just download the bet MGM app today or go to bet MGM.com and enter bonus code champion and place your first wager risk free up to $1,000 the bet MGM app is the perfect way to experience the excitement of wadering on live sports now in more markets than ever visit bet MGM.com for terms and conditions must be 21 years of age or older to wager virginia only new customer offer all promotions are subject to qualification and eligibility requirements rewards issued as non-withdrawable free bets or site credit free bets expire seven days from issuance please gamble responsibly gambling problem call 1-888-532-3500 let me guess unknown caller you could reduce the number of unwanted calls and emails with online privacy protection the latest innovation from discover will help regularly remove your personal info like your name and address from 10 popular people search websites that could sell your data and we'll do it for free activate in the discover app see terms and learn more at discover.com slash online privacy protection hi i'm Cindy Lauper for years i felt awful because of my psoriasis but i didn't give up my doctor and i chose cossentics cossentics secukinumab is indicated for adults with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis and is given as a 300 milligram dose don't use a fear allergic to cossentics before starting get checked for tuberculosis an increased risk of infections some serious and a lower ability to fight them may occur tell your doctor about an infection or symptoms like fevers and sweats chills muscle aches or cough or if you've had a vaccine or plan to tell your doctor if your crone's disease symptoms develop or worsen serious allergic reactions may occur see our ad in country living magazine learn more at cossentics.com or by calling 1-844 cossentics cossentics works for me ask your dermatologist about cossentics oh god is dead and the woke left have killed him welcome to it could happen here the podcast where we celebrate the destruction of jayur bolsiniaro and the concept of Christianity in the human soul both of which happened recently in brazil as far as i understand from skimming the news on twitter how's everybody else doing today. utterly exhausted but yeah such as such as such as such as such as the world without christ yeah yeah well destroyed yeah that's what that's what the woke mob did speaking of woke mobs what are we what are we doing today what are we talking about uh we are talking more about the Brazilian elections. I guess we should start with our with our perennial update about what seems to be happening there right now so okay currently it is what 11 a.m. Pacific time reporting this on yeah that sounds like right yeah yeah that one so as of right now bolsiniaro like still so he's appeared but he still hasn't conceded the election um he sure hasn't yeah and okay so the other thing that's been going on is that there's been okay so one of the sort of perennial bolsiniaro things is that he has a bunch of support among a bunch of sort of like like a bunch of different sort of like kinds of truckers and there's been a bunch of there's been a bunch of barricades. I okay from from talking to people on the ground and from what I've seen from it I I don't know it's hard to get it's hard to gauge like how serious these like I mean okay actually some of these blockades I've seen videos of some that involve several dozen vehicles yeah I mean they have a lot of vehicles like as the thing okay so the the Supreme Court has ordered the police to like clear the barricades and as best I can tell they're kind of just getting their asses kicked like they're not really resisting like particularly hard and so I don't know if this is like yeah it's I mean it's the kind of thing that it will present perhaps a model for other people in the future if there's any efficacy to it it certainly could be part of an effective coup like locking down the roads in this way yeah I mean this is like the the the the the plugins I enday started for example if bolsiniaro and his in the military don't both go in 100% right now basically um then then what these truckers are doing will not be much more than like an annoyance you know it's the same thing is with with January 6th if Trump when they breached the capital if Trump had declared I'm remaining president everybody rise up well then a whole thing might have happened um but he didn't and so the momentum that might have kind of led into a more thorough takeover of the government fizzled out with a bunch of guys getting you know into fist fights with the capital police and shit yeah and there's an aspect I think too that's sort of important of like so these like bolsinaro like the this whole sort of like truckers blockade thing like this has been going on in various forms for like the entire time he's been in office and like he he sort of turned them into these these motorcails that he would do but they're really weird in that like okay so like they are blocking roads but a lot of it is kind of pure spectacle like there's this whole wave of sort of right wing candidates like like base like there's little whole wing of sorts like right wing politicians who like got their start from like doing Instagram videos from like or like TikToks or like shit like whatever like yeah basically like from these blockades so like I don't know they don't they don't seem to be like as of right now I don't think they're like an incredibly serious fighting force but you know I mean it's not good it's also not good that the police was like initially cooperating with them and that the police set up their own road blocks to stop people from voting so I don't know the situation is not good but it's not as bad as it could be and yeah and I you know I want to reiterate that like the US has recognized that Lula is one of the election which I think makes it like infinitely harder. Yes the fact that and this is this is one of those things when people on the left talk about like is there a harm reduction point in voting well this is harm reduction right because of Trump had been in office he would have backed Bolsonaro and Lula would be in prison again and there would be absolutely no hope for stimming the destruction of the rain forest. Not that things are going to work. I do like I think it could still be a nightmare in Brazil. Don't get me wrong but we've we've at least avoided the most obvious way things could have been a disaster. Yeah although I do want to point out that the Obama administration had a huge role in like this entire shit happen to be fair the Obama administration I don't think was trying to put Bolsonaro on power they were trying to put the neoliberal gulls in power but they definitely well we'll get into that next episode but they definitely like helped get us here. No I mean that's true and it also follows in the continually building story that like Biden's actually a much better precedent than Barack Obama. Yeah low bar but I mean it's probably low bar because Barack Obama led directly to Donald Trump for a variety of reasons. Yeah there you are. I don't this is a weird world that we live in. Yeah and it's it's also like people are now starting you know rightfully so I know we're going to be talking about a bunch of fucked up stuff about Lula. Most recently kind of bringing up his very bad takes on Ukraine but it's also like I don't care like obviously I think I would always like for people to have if they're going to have a representative democracy better leaders but at the end of the day like the the rain forest being destroyed at the rate it's being destroyed it's an existential existential threat to all life on earth and Lula has a proven track record of reducing deforestation in the Amazon. So like what I don't care that he has a bad take on you I just don't like it doesn't matter really. Yeah yeah I like I saw I saw articles that were like ah Lula like supports democracy in Brazil but supports authoritarianism abroad it's like I guys shut up like holy shit Jesus Christ like I can I if I go back to 2017 I can find all of you like writing pull fucking progos in our articles so like shut up so okay so let's get to how everything went to shit so I will last episode we sort of left the PT like writing high Lula's out with like a like 80 90% approval rating he's done like an economic miracle he's pulled one people out of poverty and you know if things I continue like that I we wouldn't be here right now so obviously something happened and to understand what happens unfortunately we have to do some materialism okay so bear with me through the materialism I promise we're going to get to a bunch of like absolutely horrific crimes against humanity but first we needed you a bit of a crime against humanity yeah yeah there it's a ooh there there lots of crime in there there it's oh boy I'm already hard wait maybe I shouldn't have said it that way moving swiftly on so okay I'm good I'm gonna quote here from but one of the sort of more famous marks quotes from 18th through bear that is genuinely a very good way of understanding history which is men make their own history but they do not make it as they please they do not make it under self-selective circumstances but under circumstances are existing already given and transmitted from the past so okay what what what are the circumstances that like 2002 Lula is inheriting um Lula's sort of social democratic plan is able to sort of grow the economy and also pay off the ruling class to be able to stay in power at the same time because of the called the commodity boom um a commodity boom broadly is this like it's a large spike across the board in the prices of commodities over a sort of period of time I we're using the sort of like mainstream bourgeois definition of commodity which is like primary commodities and it's stuff you can like pick up the off the ground dig up or harvest so it's things like soybeans like copper iron horses uh led um condoms yes we understand what commodities are yes the look of the Brazil condom tree I don't know I got nothing so okay and Lula Lula like takes office and leaves power like almost exactly perfectly to take to take advantage of like the peak of the commodity boom right Lula comes into power in 2000 and well okay so he wins 2002 election he takes office 2003 um the commodity boom according to a Cambridge to Cambridge is a handbook of primary commodities in the global economy took off 2004 and ended in about 2014 but it's slowing by about 2010 2011 ish and Lula exits office in 2010 due to the two term limit which means he never has to deal with the consequences of the downturn and let's stop here for a second how do term limits work in the Brazilian system because it's not the same as here here like a term limit means you get your two as president and then you're done yeah so I okay so the way I think it works and I could be wrong about this but the 90 percent sure the way it works okay so you can have two terms and then you can't run again in a row but if if like someone else comes in you can then run again after that it's just that you can only do two in a row I mean I'm happy that he's beaten Bolsonaro but that is a very silly way to do it yeah well I will say something about this is something about Lula that like I think kind of infuriates a lot of the people who like don't like him politically and want to sort of screaming about his authoritarianism or whatever like he he was always like like mostly really scrupulous about the sort of like democratic norm stuff like he a lot of other sort of like pink tidal leaders in the same position like this is actually how even Morales eventually gets in trouble is that he tries to seek a third term and Lula is just like not I'm out I'm fuck it like which is good yeah I mean it kind of like on the one hand in so in theoretical terms this is sort of like good for Brazilian democracy etc etc in practical terms it's kind of a disaster I mean it's it's good because I think that it's always good when popular leaders acknowledge like absolute limits but yeah I mean the timing wasn't ideal yeah and you know but you know okay so like the the reason that he's able to sort of like you know I'm like if you if he if like if the constitution had allowed him to run for a third turn he would have just like like he would have clobbered everyone there's just not even like any remote competition to him and the reason is able to do this again is like this guy I he got like 10% less of the vote this time I mean yeah but what was that yeah okay like the this election was like really close no no no you said that this most recent one most recent one yeah I think I was Lula back then yeah yeah Lula back then like literally unsophable political drug or very very popular at this point yeah but but this is because of the commodity boom and and we need to in order to understand what is going to happen to the PT we need to understand why the commodity boom happened in the first place um this turns out to be very important there's there's a lot of causes technically that have to do with a lot of complicated macroeconomic stuff the the single most important cause um for us and I and I think generally the the one that is like is credited with the reason that these commodity prices are increasing is the skyrocketing growth of the Chinese economy in 2000s um and I mean when I say skyrocketing growth like we are talking like double digit GDP increases every year this is when we have that Olympics where they have all the drummers and you have that newsweek article about how scary China is maybe it's time um yes and and you know and the sort of the massive increase in industrial production like they are the CCP is like Chinese industrializing on a scale that is I think like almost hit a two one imaginable and this means you know there's an enormous increase in demand for primary commodities but this boom was only sustainable as long as the Chinese economy can maintain something like double digit GDP growth but the problem is after 2008 the Chinese economy starts to slow and sort of in response to this in 2009 the CCP does like one of the largest stimulus projects ever and they spend four trillion RMB on like infrastructure and welfare programs to save off a recession and it works but you know like they this is this is like the largest like stimulus program ever and it can't really keep the economy growing like ever ever since 2010 uh every single year well okay I excluding the weird rebound stuff in 2021 but like I like every single year like year on year growth or the rate of growth of the Chinese economy has been decreasing right and okay well the commodity boom you know is produced by by feeling you know by by increased Chinese demand but okay uh what happens when that you know isn't true um but but you know okay so we in in in the two in the two thousands like this this is great that these are the sort of material conditions that make littlest like politics possible right you have enormous economic growth and it bring and the economic growth is happening in sectors like in a very important sectors of resilient economy to the extent that it's able to provide a revenue a stable revenue base for the state that allows it to fund welfare programs like and pay off the bourgeoisie which is you know this is sort of like like papering over this sort of like fundamental contradiction of of of the uh PT's base right which is that they have to like they have to keep the economy running so they have to have to pay off a bunch of sort of like incredibly corrupt dudes and also just sort of like Brazilian capitalists and they also are trying to sort of view the welfare programs but you know the commodity boom collapses and suddenly there's only enough money to either pay the capitalists or pay the workers and not both and the project becomes to collapse and and this this happens across Latin America um like like I would make the argument that like the end of the commodity boom like is the reaper that came from the Latin American left it is at least as important if not more so in the collapse of the sort of the pink tide over over the the the the course of 2010s like then the actual CIA like the CIA is very heavily involved in this but the commodity boom just sort of like just nuking all of these economies like coming to an end is like that that is in enormously important uh sort of like like element of this entire story and there's there's a there's another thing that we should note which is that there's a problem with organizing your economy to be sort of like in a way that's reliant on sort of like primary commodity like export production a handbook of primary commodities in the global economy specifically notes quote Brazil's significance in coffee cotton iron ore sugar in tobacco and Chile is a dominant exporter of coffee so okay Brazil exports like 11% of the world's cotton 20% of the world's iron ore 15% of its coffee 39% of its sugar and 18% of its tobacco and also it has an enormous cattle industry it's got like a bunch of soybean farming which is actually really important because uh it turns out as trying to get richer it turns people into into into soy boys yeah it also makes soy sauce which is our our very important for I mean more importantly our reserves of of beta cuck energy would be disastrously low if if we didn't have Brazilian soy so thank you jay or bolson yaro for keeping the soy flowing yeah well I mean this this is sort of like like this is a joke like this is this is sort of the issue with this right like okay so politically this is a there's also a massive timber industry which has been literally destroying the entire planet yeah but like okay so like she's like if you know anything about sugar coffee cotton into back oak uh you know those are slavery crops and you know like you these are these are like a primary exports of plantation economy and the people who run those kind of like like like economists the people who like those plantation owners or like these scary as people who have ever lived anywhere like at any time on earth and you know in Brazil these people have been in power for 500 years and unfortunately this this is like a big part of what sort of Lewis economic miracle is resting on it and and this this isn't really like a base that produces socialism like if your economic base is relying on these like like unbelievably psychotic racist like planter oligarchs like your economic base something that creates fascism however comma Robert do you know what else produces fascism um the products and services that support this podcast ding ding ding ding ding that's so I guess our fascism just directly so true yeah yeah the goal the the gold people probably would be the main example of this um but we also are sponsored by big fascism dot org com ah shit I don't I don't know I don't just roll the fucking ants ah we're back boy that was a good ad pivot I hope everybody's happy Chris why don't you continue talking about Lula yeah so uh speaking of fascism uh that I was doing uh uh yeah I wanted to read not not not well no this is going great it's hard to hard to we'll uh we'll have Daniel fix that up in post yeah okay so so speaking of creating fascism yet let's talk about that time Lula invaded Haiti all right well for okay to be fair hummus among us hasn't invaded Haiti this is true like that's true I've never made a Haiti however the US and Canada also and the UK that is more what I was saying like it's yeah so okay so in 2004 a CIA bat coup out of the Haiti's democratically elected left as presidents uh gene bette at Aristide and initially okay so the the initial sort of occupation force that's sent in by the UN is a US is like an American French and Canadian force um and they're sent in like ostensibly under the sort of guys of like restoring stability or whatever um but they mean when I think about who can make Haiti stable it's France and the United States yeah you know there's a nation stability and Canada and Canada now God bless you guys are you know getting getting involved in in your big brothers uh uh crimes against humanity yeah I'm wondering for the Canadian stuff how how do they ship all all of all of the Mounties all the way to Haiti okay so they took their forces over the water garis yeah built the land bridge yeah loud and the right you know okay so the thing about this force right is that like okay so even to like the most casual observer having literally France in the US and also Canada which is like the it's just the US but there's also a French part of it uh like literally weird fucking sausage soup on their goddamn french fries yeah it turns out okay so like like the the optics of these people just militarily occupying Haiti is really bad um so okay the you want to try to figure out like a permanent force and initially Lulu like opposes Brazil getting involved in this which is good but that's that would make sense but would I think about when I think about whether or not Brazil should be involved in places Haiti would not be the top of my list you know this is always or this is always just like a really sad thing of sort of like just like the history of Latin America of like how many countries like oh there exists in to Haiti over and over and over again like sending them troops and ships and weapons and then everything in one of these countries are like ah fuck you Haiti so I Lulu like baby basically Lulu becomes convinced that like this is this is like his big opportunity to like build the influence of Brazil on the international stage and so Brazil just like takes over the occupation or the auspices of the United Nations stabilization mission in Haiti which has the like like an utterly imprenounceable acronym minish or something I got damn it guys come on I you know how to do an acronym you have enough money Jesus you would think however comma no it's this bullshit and okay so apparently this is part of a plan to try to get US and French support for a bid to get Brazil a permanency in the UN Security Council if you Google who was currently on the UN Security Council you will see how this went which is to say it did not work and shit starts going horrifically badly almost immediately um basically like at the outside of the occupation Brazilian troops in Haiti launched an attack on a quote gang leader and note by the way here the terminology that is used should describe this operation and the people the people that they're fighting is exactly the same way as the paramilitary forces in Haiti are described like right now by the US and the UN as the US strike the stage another invasion this time with the backing of I Mexico's nominally leftist president Amlo so I yeah I'd I'd real sort of legacy of I people who Americans think are leftists doing imperialism in Haiti good job everyone I well everybody does a little bit of imperialism in Haiti you know okay as a treat I mean this is the thing right right every every single country in Latin America is bound in determined to prove that you actually cannot do I I contrary to a contrary to sort of popular opinion about this you actually can't do social democracy without imperialism and every single time someone tries to do a social democracy they have to invade Haiti it's just sort of like it's it's it's it's it's it's it's in the contract here mm-hmm okay and so they they the the the UN the sort of like the by the way I should point out the UN force is commanded by a Brazilian general like the entire basically wants to Brazilian state over this commanded by Brazilian generals the entire time um and those that seem nice uh yeah okay so they they they go after this guy and they fire 22,000 rounds of ammunition into basically just like our apartment buildings um to this day nobody knows how many people they killed but from i-winner's reports we know they killed babies they killed children they killed pregnant women it is it is Vietnam shit it is absolutely awful um Augusto Hullano who Helen like I guess a Helena I don't know how to pronounce this guy's name uh he's the guy who leads this operation uh becomes the head of Bolsonaro's institutional security bureau um here here here's a headline from podere 360 from last week uh quote it is not possible to admit the return of the red gang says Hullano and by the red gang he he means I uh Lula he's calling Lula communist um and this is fine and good from a guy who again is the head of the institutional security bureau um uh this guy like sucks so much um when he retired in 2011 uh Hullano defended uh this is from Breuters when he retired in 2011 Hullano defended Brazil's 1964 to 1985 military dictatorship as a bulwark against the communists close to the communization of the country sure and okay so like we we can say that as much as sort of Brazil's like fascism is home grown and this is absolutely true there also just like eating the ass end if you cause boomerang because all of the fascism that they're about to do is exported to Haiti before it comes back um here's some writers uh this is talking about uh Bolsonaro's cabinet his pro his proposed defense minister former general Fernando Alvarez Ysilva served under Hullano as a as an operations chief Bolsonaro's incoming infrastructure minister Torsicio Freetas was a senior UN military engineer in Haiti arriving shortly after Hullano left in 2005 retired general Carlos Alberto Dostanta Cruz Brazil's next government minister led UN troops in the Caribbean nation 2007 um all of those guys by the way this this was written before the election um all of those guys took office uh uh two fully two of of Bolsonaro's uh secretaries of government were part of this occupation so yeah this this obviously uh it went great for Lula like yeah okay good job you you you you you you you sent a bunch of colonial troops to occupy Haiti and then all of the generals came home where like let's fucking do fascism here too yeah so in this episode we're talking a lot about sort of the Brazilian fascism because you know we're this is a brissel up so but I don't want to minimize like what this did to Haiti where like to this day Lula is like fucking despised um for you know like betraying the Haitian people and fucking occupy in the country with troops like there's there's this whole thing where like he he Lula goes to Haiti and he has this whole thing about how like he has he's playing like a soccer match and he's like okay we're gonna show the world there's no alternative to bullets and meanwhile this soccer stadium is literally surrounded by the by the Brazilian army and it's oh boy um I love I love showing the world there's I mean there is an alternative to bullets and it's just threatening people with your guns because they know you've shot enough people that you'll use them if they and drones too by the way uh this is where this is where the UN learns how to do drone warfare um the everything is happening here is this is the this occupation is where the UN starts to like fight quote like hybrid wars for the first time it you know the like the the wars that they're they're doing these sort of peacekeeping operations quote unquote I they're starting to do kind of insurgency shit where like the enemy can be mixed in with the population and you know that they kill a shit ton of people there is rampant rape and sexual assault because it turns out that uh when you when you send troops to another country to occupy it this is what happens um and when when when when this force eventually pulls out in 2017 they just like leave a shit ton of fireless babies behind because the people who you know did all this shit like fuck it we're just gonna leave like leave these children behind um I think most famously okay so there's there's a giant earthquake in Haiti just a lot in 2010 and this leads to this like enormous sort of redoubling of the occupation and troops are brought in from other parts of the world including there's a contingent from Nepal and the the results of this is that the hate seems like a place Nepalese soldiers up to be this is by the way like the this this is like the new revolutionary government in Nepal that is like finally defeated the monarchy after like god decades like decades like it's like we all looked at the British empire and we're like well that's clearly fucked up but what if we did it in a decentralized way right like what if what if what if it wasn't just the British what if everyone was sending Nepalese shock troops into crackdown on yeah popular insurgencies well and you know and the thing that the thing that particularly goes wrong with the Nepalese troops is that the Nepalese troops would bring cholera to Haiti and okay well again who hasn't I you know okay these things the defeat of cholera this is like one of the few genuine victories we have had over sort of like like the last 200 years over the forces that have caused like human misery and suffering for like just timing the oil is that we defeated cholera and then we brought it back the fucking you an occupation brings like this is the this is the first law scale cholera outbreak in modern times on 800 thousand Haitians get call her as she was all she is fucking Christ yeah it's it's not hard to not spread cholera yeah we succet like even if you're looking by the standards of military occupations like the Russians didn't haven't spread cholera in Ukraine it's not hard to not spread cholera in Vietnam now like we didn't create a cholera epidemic in Afghanistan or it is not hard to not create a cholera epidemic yeah I could to be to be fair the the Saudis have managed to create one and create one in Yemen now too yes that's probably worse than this one but yeah that more just reinforces my point that most imperialist occupations are able to not cause cholera epidemics it's hard and okay you know and obviously right like okay you you've now created your colonial army the colonial army is going to come home and literally these same troops go back to Brazil and like launch a war in the favelas like like under under under djobarusas PT like the fucking army is literally occupying the favelas and you know this is all part of the PT's like massive campaign to sort of buy weapons and modernize the army which in you know and and buy like I think currently they're involved in like okay okay I I'm not entirely sure about my dates on this I I'm not sure if they're currently involved in nine UNPC commemoration or 16 but there are like there are there are there are I Brazilian troops like all over the world I still doing this bullshit and you know okay and as we've talked about like literally the people who are in Haiti like are the people who are going to help put Lula in prison and put both in our power so you know this is some I this is some fucking enormous like creating your own gravedigger shit okay so okay we've now we've now gotten through one of the sort of sets of gravediggers the PT is building for themselves um but also back in back in Brazil things are also like you know not going great for them which she and the way that this is specifically not going great is that like even even you know sort of in the hour of triumph triumph of the workers party right Lula ascendent etc etc there is a massive Fisher opening under the feet of the Brazilian left and that Fisher is the gig economy um we we have talked like literally ad dozium on this show about how the gig economy is bad for workers um for for our purposes the the the the thing that's kind of important here is that doing this kind of gig work right like becoming independent like an independent contractor um it has a profound social and political effect and it creates a sort of profound social political atomization right it breaks down the sort of social bonds that like built the workers who've been the PT and transfer and and and instead of instead of the sort of like you know massification right like the conversion of people into sort of like these these these these like concrete mass social entities you can like take collective action you get these neoliberal subjects who are incredibly atomized and critically isolated and vulnerable to sort of like you know fascist projects to promise like community and unity like this new organic call and you know guess where Bolsonaro Jaws is support from oh wait it's a it's a newly evangelical section of the working class um and to to be clear here the informal sector in Brazil has always been massive but the way the PT runs their welfare programs makes everything just exponentially worse um we talked about this a bit last episode but one of the big things the PT's welfare programs do is they're about getting giving people access to micro credit and okay so in the short run this is technically incredibly effective at combating poverty but it had another effect which was to sort of like deeply and firmly like sort of like like ingrained vast sections of Brazilian workers into the banking system and turned them into micro entrepreneurs and okay so being a social democratic party and on purpose constructing an entire class of micro entrepreneurs is like maybe the single best example of producing your own gravediggers that I've seen since like the military dictatorship cooperating with Lula in the first place this is a terrible idea but you know okay so I think I think I think it's worth asking like why is the PT doing this shit right like this is this is something that is like otherwise absolutely incomprehensible um and the answer is that the PT was never quite the part of the people think it is um here here is from a group of Brazilian anarchist writing in crime think the rulers linked to the realization of mega events cheaply read political rewards for FIFA and its corporate cronies not coincidentally the same companies that finance the electoral campaigns the PT the benefits were financial profits stretched into the billions under written by public resources and guaranteed by police repression the PT could not have done this alone it was the party that received the largest total of private donations in recent years 75 million 2013 while other parties like the psdb the social democratic party and PMDB party of democratic movement the biggest and oldest party in Brazil mostly sent a right and conservative politicians only managed 46 million dollars altogether in 2014 the year of Dilma Rousseau's reelection the PT received 47 million dollars from contractors facing lawsuits and investigations while the PMDB got 38 million the psdb got 28 million this demonstrates the symbiosis between the workers party and those you control the flow of capital in in the country a connective tissue of economic and political power so this is not good um and and you you can sort of ask what what was the PT really doing here right like why okay why are they doing micro loans why are they taking all this money um and that there's a really really good pair of articles from a Brazilian group called Bill Tinson the fog that was published at ill will called working revolt in Brazil's dead ends and I'm going to read from some of it a bank account a smartphone with access to the internet and a profile in a nap the means to collect emergency a which is emergency aid is um the part of this is talking about Bolsonaro stuff so I Bolsonaro implements this policy you called him emergency aid which is like it's kind of the equivalent of like the US's like the stimulus checks that we got but slightly difference but the the means required to collect a emergency aid are the same required to create an account for Uber assign that we are facing fundamental parts of this quote new way of working years ago it was already possible to identify the bolsa familiar program which is that giant PT like workers party cash transfer program that we talked about last episode cruise dimensions were small in the face of the 2020 financial aid program the the objective of forming a unified workplace more deeply subjugated to capitalist relations the quote bankification promoted by the program contributed to the expanding contributed to expanding the reach of microcranit systems a process of financialization of informality which was deepened in recent years with the dissemination of increasingly agile and easy payment terminals and electronic payment systems such as pics a tax free a quicker and tax free money transfer method the phenomenon reached unprecedented intensity due to the emergency aid the state owned bank taxi a economic and federal absorbed 30 million customers in 10 days and it was in what was possibly the fastest bankification process in history thus reaching a record profit in 2020 access to credit is essential for the emergence of a precarious workforce to which capital costs and risk are transferred well interest rates introduced a new level of productivity to the olds okay this is a Portuguese word that oh boy via caro which is like getting by which is the sort of like it's a sort of slaying term for kind of like doing stuff in the informal economy to like survive yeah which is now directly connected to global financial markets thus the focus of these income policies would be less on expanding consumption capacity for the beneficiaries as in the kinsian distributive model and more on expanding their investment capacity financing the acquisition of work instruments and quote self-valueing their human capital enthusiasts of such programs claim that financial the financial cushion provided by basic income can represent enough stability for people to be able to spend their own savings or other capital starting a business so okay what's happening here um and the militants of fog is arguing this after the work of a Brazilian academic renamed uh Ludmila a billio is okay what what's happening here is is the real subsumption of the formal economy which okay so like what what what does that mean I we need to take a step back do like a little bit more marks so marks makes this distinction between what he calls formal and real subsumption so assumption is this like whole philosophy thing I'm not going to get into here but basically what he's talking about is stuff getting like subsumed by capitalism right like becoming a part of the of the sort of capitalist like process and system and this comes in stages right the first is formal subsumption where okay so say you have a peasant right formal subsumption is where the peasant like enters the market for the first time and suddenly be instead of being a peasant is now like a wage worker right and you know in in in this phase right capitalism has entered into sphere right someone who was a peasant who was like not doing capital stuff before right who was going for self-production and had like fetal dues and obligations is now a wage worker but you know and then they're selling the goods to the market but the actual process of production which is like okay so like how a peasant does like how how how you do your former peasant new agricultural worker like grows their crops and what crops they grow and like when they decide to work in in in this first stage this is still the peasant's choice um that ends with real subsumption where just all control over the workplace that like workers that had is completely destroyed and you're just you know okay this this is what like we think of as a regular job right we're like okay the the way the job works is your boss tells you what to do I you're entirely reprocess has been like fully integrated into into into this sort of like broader capitalist production processes that you have no control over and this is what's been happening in the informal economy over the past three decades in Brazil it's a real subsumption right like and and you know what what like it it it stuff that had formerly been you know like people taking wage labor but the the the the sort of structure of how people do the jobs that they're doing right whistle up to them uh this this this has been ending and the way it's been ending is through basically the degree of control offered by two employers by apps like uber of oh and like yeah the control that these apps give you over the informal economy and the results have been absolutely catastrophic um on the one hand the sort of limited autonomy that the formal economy like that the informal economy used to give you has been crushed by sort of I'll go for bit sorry has been crushed by algorithmic control from gay economy apps that you know like track where you are and tell you where you need to go and how how fast you have to get there and like what lights you have to run in order to get there and also increasingly uh these good workers are being squeezed by a new level of middle management who work basically the same way as like gang like the old gang bosses that control Chinese labor returned to the 20th century where you you have these guys who act as like private recruiting companies and form in for workers who okay see you you you go to this place right these people are like okay I will give you a job and they negotiate they're the people who negotiate directly with the company and take the money from the company and then use that money to sort of like pay the employer and this this you know this sucks right because on the one hand you have all of the bad parts of a regular job which there's a guy you tell you what to do and if you don't uh do what he tells you like you get fired and then you have all the bad parts of an informal sector job which is that you don't have any illegal protections that like workers with formal contracts have and you know the the the effect of this has been to create super hell for like vast vast swaths of the Brazilian working class and this has been a just unbelievably catastrophic sort of disaster for for Brazilian politics but okay you know what else is creating super hell for the Brazilian working class I mean not the products and services that support this podcast yeah no that that we're just we're just we're just we're just you with the American working class now now yeah okay here's fucking ads oh we're back wow I for one think everything's gonna be fine the fact that Lula won this resounding victory over J. Erbulsignaro by by nearly a whole percentage point uh is gonna mean none of these problems that you're talking about are ever things again yep no and you know okay so it's speaking speaking of reasons why this will not be a problem again the the sort of like financialization bullshit this this this doesn't just like stick in sort of labor process like this stuff spreads to the like to social movements as well which are in a lot of cases like very old and powerful Brazilian social movements are reduced to these sort of like state-back financialized husks of informed ourselves where like you know you you have like you have social movements that are literally like issuing bonds to like fund their their members businesses you have social movements that are like okay if you show up to assemblies you can just like earn points so that you can get access to like be put on a waiting list for like a government rent stabilized department or something like it is a shit show and and this whole process sort of leaves to the hollowing out of the Brazilian left and you know and as as as the left is sort of like being sort of like torn apart from the inside out and as you get into sort of like 2011, 2012, 2012, 2013 is the Brazilian economy begins to slow I you get Brazil's version of the sort of like movement of the squares like 2011, 2013 not rising which is going to be waged against a hostile wall a okay a a pretty hostile PT government like there's a sort of public show by Dilma Rousseff to like yeah no I support the protests when they're not violent and we're gonna do stuff but okay this goes badly very quickly so these protests start over these like raises and public trends and in the cost of public transportation like the fair cost raises in a bunch of cities and very quickly there are like 3 million people in the street um the the the sort of conventional narrative about what happened here is that so the protests start off leftists right but then the leftists get run out as as the protest sort of keep going by these sort of like follow a political like conservative nationalists that like take them over and and turn them from this sort of like leftist call for like a more egalitarian society and for like the right to the city and like stopping evictions and stuff like that to the sort of like anti corruption crusade against PT against the PT against Dilma Rousseff and against sort of like the left itself and okay this is true like as far as it goes um we'll be talking more about that impeachment campaign like next episode but there's more going on here and the more going on here is that in 2013 there are massive protests like 800,000 people um protested a confederation cup which is which is like the soccer tournament hosted by like that that's perceived like is it is one of the things that like proceeds the world cup I don't know I'm not a soccer knower but yeah and there's massive protests against them and they are just unbelievably brutally suppressed like 50 54,000 cops are sent out to like stop this shit and they they beat the absolute shit out of everyone and to understand why these movements were crushed and how the right was able to take power we need to talk about the Brazilian police so I think you know most of our listeners you to me like we are familiar with the American police right like if you're listening to the show odds are decently good you have seen them beat your friends to a bloody pulp you have seen them taste the parents of children locked into building with the mass shooter you have seen them slaughter men women in children of the street for no other reason than they can because they're a fascist desk wad fuse with organized crime outfits funded by putting guns to the heads of the American working class they are descendants of slave catchers working each and every day to keep the American racial hierarchy firmly intact um okay we'll put it that way it sounds bad but I don't know like I like law and order so like the tv show yeah you know they have they have they have a lot of ganda you've never watched law and order sv you oh no oh oh you're missing out on all of the good law and order uh is that the one with the goth chick in it I honestly don't know there's like 40 different law and order shows it's impossible to keep track of them but there is that there is that one goth chick uh that they brought in because our grandparents would think she was hot yeah I think I think the power of goth chicks to extend the police budgets yeah it's it's it's fun and good and okay you know like we we know how bad the u.s police are um I'm gonna read this from the LA Times quote Brazilian cops kill it nine times the rate of u.s law enforcement nine times well that's pretty bad yeah you know I and I it's worth pointing out here that Brazil was the last country in this hemisphere to evolve slavery like they abolished it like 20 years after the fucking u.s. did right and so you know when when you're thinking about what the Brazilian police is take everything you know about the American police and understand that the Brazilian police right okay so they went with the American police right the murder dial goes out to 11 with the Brazilian police that murder dial goes up to 99 and that's where they've pranked it to um here here's some crime think in 2014 Brazil's prison population became the third largest in the world with 570,000 prisoners just like 600 something thousand prisoners today most of whom are black during the PT administration this figure increased by 620 percent oh yeah like and this this this is a part of the PT that people really sort of tiptoe around which is that they preside over like a regime of mass executions and mass incarceration that is like utterly atrocious and as an aside here um okay so like there are probably some of our listeners who's things that they want to go into electoral politics and if you are doing this you have one job like solely you have one responsibility and your job is to fucking annihilate the police your job is to destroy them so utterly and completely that they're very name as bad as a curse industry by people who make the sign of cross reproduction every time they think about them like by the end of your first term these people need to be living in fucking hovels in the woods without access to a weapon that even as deadly as a two by four and every time they attempt to enter a town people need to be like chasing them and throwing rocks at them and if you do not do this you will live like Lula has to see literally everything you have ever done crumble beneath the way the way fascism that is too terrible to imagine and you will also experience into your lifetime and instead of doing this the PT is like fuck it no we're going to use the police to stamp out protests against the mega events that they're putting on the police refreshing around the world cup is like arguably worse than the stuff for the confederation cup in order to prepare for the world cup the PT stage is this like massive social cleansing campaign we talked about this in our sports episode like they they carry up mass evictions against both like regular people and also against like like there's there's a bunch of sort of leftist and also sort of just like regular people who squat in Brazil right like a huge part of the social movements have been about so seizing property and building like building stuff on its seasoning event buildings and yeah this stuff all gets infected so they can be replaced with world cup businesses it's you know like what what is happening here is it's like all the violence gentrification but in the span of like a year right the PT are literally rolling German tanks to the favelas because like you know subtlety is something that happens to other people not like to reality and you know as we talked about before they're putting them under literally military occupation with colonial troops who were like fighting in Haiti right evict 250,000 people for this fucking tournament here here's some other shit they did this is from a series of pieces by Brazilian anarchist group called fictional faction in 2012 the federal government and FIFA signed the general law of the world cup to ensure that the country would quote uphold FIFA standards of organization during the 2013 Confederation Cup and the 2014 World Cup this agreement constituted an enormous legal offense to the Brazilian people entailing the suspension of both of many constitutional rights and norms that are already precarious for most for example a court established to rule within 48 hours on strikes that occurred within the world cup workers lost to write to strike or fight for improvements while FIFA avoided paying taxes on businesses within Brazilian territory a special secretary to public security for great events was created breaking the laws stipulating that justice may not have special sponsors or clients you demand priority the privatization of public space was legitimized by the creation of exclusive streets for FIFA and its partners in which even local businesses were required to keep their doors closed within the exclusion zone around the stadium the laws allowed FIFA to intervene directly in the market without the oversight of the state FIFA was able to stipulate the price to charge for tickets suspending the usual half price for students and any application of consumer protection code in addition more than 20,000 people were allowed to work as unregulated volunteers during the world cup these volunteers did not receive the protections of basic labor rights and operated outside of constitutional norms in a situation in situations analogous to slavery according to Brazilian law these exceptions to safety and labor the labor in safety law are supposed to be limited to volunteer work for nonprofit institutions that have a quote civic cultural education recreational social assistance purposes which hardly describe FIFA the state even overlook the use of child labor and activity related to the games such as the role of ballboy which had been banned in Brazil since 2004 so this goes great and the thing you know so this happens to the 1114 under Dilma Rissif but it's worth noting like this is Louis project from the beginning right like he he has been fighting to get Brazil the world cup like sense sense sense like the the opening for applications to get this world cup in Brazil to happen and what you know the the this this this campaign to get the world cup takes the form of a a literally all-out war against leftist protester squatters workers people living in favelas people who are literally all those at the same time who are you know supposedly the PT's base and this is what the PT spends literally the rest of its time in power doing right like Dilma Rissif implements much of austerity measures like this this the spending police powers like this is the shit that the PT is doing like literally as the grim reaper is coming to their door like two months before Dilma Rissif is impeached she passed a pair a pair of anti terrorism laws targeted at protesters and okay we're gonna we'll go into the impeachment next episode but I want to close on this which preventing this from happening right preventing the party of workers from fucking rolling tanks through the streets in in in in in fucking working class neighborhoods like that this is the actual sort of beating of of and that this is the actual sort of principle politics of anti capitalism like that this this is why there is a sort of rigid anarchist opposition to the state right this isn't just ideological purity is the concrete knowledge that any other path is death because we literally cannot continue to do as the PT has been doing for the past fucking 20 years to produce a run gravediggers literally the ecosystems we draw our life from will not survive if we keep doing this it does not matter how many people you live you lift out a poverty if you do not actually destroy the class system capitalism and fascism will force them back into poverty all of the poverty like almost all the poverty gains that Lula gained during this entire time in office were destroyed in four years of Bolsonaro every day that the state is allowed to exist every day the class system is allowed to exist it creates a thousand more Bolsonaro's it creates a thousand Bolsonaro's in the police it creates some of the armies it creates them in corporations it creates them on the street and they have to be destroyed or this world will fucking burn and in the next episode we are going to watch a thousand person don't post in our was burned the entire country and that that is my incredibly angry response to this absolute fucking bullshit that is the reason like our our our lot of the reasons why everything is completely fucked cool well everybody have a happy start of November and hopefully Brazil isn't in a state of civil war by the time you listen to this episode yeah I update at the end of the episode I don't think there's been any change remember remember folks if you somehow take control of the political apparatus in Brazil dismantle the police in the military that's that that should be that should be a lesson for you I know a lot of you are on the verge of taking power in Brazil so hopefully hopefully that message will get out yeah and I'm in general don't fund them like don't give them more money don't spend a bunch of money buying them German tanks like well would you do okay like why why are we focusing on German tanks they make fine tanks okay but here we out here can you name a single good thing a German tank has ever been used for yeah um the commies I'm guessing yeah they they do some communist probably I don't I don't know um let's anyway killed a lot of Englishmen anyway Canadians so football is back and bed MGM is inviting new customers to join the huddle and enjoy the action like never before 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four cossentics cossentics works for me ask your dermatologist about cossentics it could happen here it's it could happen here it's the podcast that's happening right now yeah it's about things that you know about it's there are third and final episode about where's the Brazilian elections it's me Chris it's it's i'm here with James doubt hello hi Chris so we have we have an update on this situation which is that J.R. Bosonaro okay he's still he's still i don't think has publicly announced defeats but he appeared he apparently told the supreme court quote it's over so he sees who have committed defeat which has not stopped a bunch of his followers from calling for a military coup yeah and from these people are still seem to be blocking roads right yeah it's happening i don't know i yeah it's it's it's sort of unclear to me to what extent his followers are gonna back down i don't think there's really much chance of a military coup at this point like they seem to have just lost i read something earlier about Bosonaro making plans to like so you're just like it's like a like a sash thing you're supposed to hand over to the next president and he was making plans to not be in the country when Lula took office it was gonna have his vice president and over instead which is like this is like the most whiny baby shit i've ever seen which is like oh god i want to what a loser holy fuck like first as tragedy and then as fast and then as fast yeah and continually as fast like that's how the right operates right yeah i actually almost had that like i i actually almost started the Lula episode with that quote and then i was like well his return i was like i was like that that's that's too mean to say about Lula like his return hasn't been first yet like yeah but Bosonaro is oh boy yeah he's he's gonna go spend more time with the novel coronavirus yeah he's withdrawing from politics you know i heard there's a great line in one of the things i was talking about that uh Miltonson the fog piece from ill well yesterday where they they talked about like i i forgot their exact quote it was something like but but but also it wasn't it's not just that Bosonaro failed the like failed to responded coronavirus is that he was a vector for the for coronavirus that was like yeah yeah this is this is both literally and metaphorically true like yeah several of the outbreaks are just from Bolsonaro oh yeah absolutely amazing yeah real real piece of shit um yeah yeah so today we're going to be talking about the very specific so we've been last episode talking about sort of like the the the the enormous army of grave diggers that the PT had sort of built around them and this episode is it going to be about like how their grave was actually sort of built and then filled in um so i talked about in episode one um there was in 2005 i think i might have accidentally accidentally said 2006 in the original episode but it's it's it's 2005 there's just a giant corruption scandal involving the workers party that like shakes all of Brazil but basically the the the the short version is that a bunch of senior members the PT were accused of bribing members of the central centro who is like Brazil sort of like perennial elite corruption faction to like buy their votes to get bills passed which honestly like i'm okay with this like that we're going to talk about some corruption later that like does suck uh this i think is fine like i'm i am i am okay like i would have put this on the record at me Christopher Wong i am okay with literally just buying the votes of like weird corrupt right wingers to get them to vote for legislation that's actually good like whatever i don't care about this like this is bullshit like who cares um but that that said i okay so this entire episode like well okay the first like three quarters episode this is this episode is like a lot about corruption and before we need to we go any further like we need to talk about like what corruption actually is and about the politics of it so okay i want to say this as someone who lives in like okay so i i think most listeners understand that Chicago is the touristly corrupt i didn't grow up in Chicago i grew up in Chicago's even more corrupt suburbs like i i literally watched a mayor sell physically sell city hall to the highest bidder like she actually literally physically sold city hall like this this is the kind of shit you get out in the suburbs like it is fucking mind boggling right like that that that that wasn't my town but like i have seen some shit right and okay the thing i the thing i can say about government corruption is that there are two kinds of people in the world there are people like Chicagoans who understand that every single politician no matter like every single politician whatsoever is going to rob you blind because they're all corrupt and you know there's a sort of like a more analytical culinary to this which is that like corruption corruption is just a structural tendency of the state right it's it's a product of state officials like having access to the states enormous supply of resources it's a product of the kind of structural incentives that like being in a state produces and it's a product of the fact of the state you know acquires resources to violence and you know okay so there's people who understand this on various levels right like i mean this is genuine the rising bunch of caucus like everyone gets it like you don't have to convince people and then there's a bunch of people like like the other category of people are people who genuinely think that like politics is about people debating political principles and that like if we just make slightly better arguments and like have slightly better land use policies the politicians who literally spend all day taking bribes and developers will like somehow end homelessness or something that was that like somehow like like like a like a corruption is a matter of political principles like no no they're all that they're all doing this to you like you guys you can't understand this it's very funny and it's like we don't get enough credit for our corruption San Diego for like right oh yeah and run by the sea as San Diego is his name but it's it's very funny to see people being like oh there can't be corruption because identity politics is or because not Donald Trump uh rather like this is the nature of the state especially the state under capitalism especially state under capitalism in the United States is that like you don't get fuck all unless you pay for it yeah or I'll say this corruption is a policy of the state is essentially trans ideological like the reddest communist of brown as fascist and the most leading hard red white and blue capitalist all take bribes they all give contracts with their family and they all steal money from the government like you can tell this by the fact that the US is literally like the US just made it legal to give like the made it legal for a corporation to give money to a candidate in order to have the voter certain way this is legal uh Nazi Germany corrupt is shit the US are famously and say it corrupt it like this this is not this is not actually a product of ideology it's it's it's it's it's just it's just it's just a sort of structural like tendency of the state and it doesn't make the military your caterships are corrupt like the fuck and like the like the the parliamentary democracies are corrupted like this is this is just this is just like how the state works right um and and and the like so political corruption genuinely isn't that interesting right like the actual politics of it like it's not that interesting like it's just like people just corrupt right what is interesting is anti corruption politics and when you get this out of the way immediately it is simultaneously true that like almost no one openly supports corruption like it's it's it's it's like it's almost impossible to find anyone who will come out on the record and say their pro corruption like you like you can't do it right and it's and it's also true that like every single one of these people on the crust the entire political spectrum is corrupt and you know and the the you know and no no politician is actually anti corruption this is something that's very very important to understand none of these people are fucking anti corruption this this is sort of this is one of the lessons of Chicago which is that all of the sort of anti corruption crusaders are like just as corrupt as people they're replacing but this is part of the way like I don't want to go like extreme mark user but like the like this idea this false choice right the corruption in itself creates a means for another person who's equally corrupt you enter simply by claiming to be anti corrupt right like and then this we can just kind of continually water each other and claiming to be different and doing the same shit and and people will embrace this fucking false choice yeah and you know we're gonna see this in this story later on I will give you a preview of where this is going so Sergio Moro who is this judge who's like like Brazil's like great anti corruption crusader turns out to have been funding is quote unquote anti corruption investigations by selling illegally selling information to the FBI and then getting paid and find and find money collected by the US some successful corruption prosecutions he also is going to like very blatantly and pretty openly take a job as the as Brazil's justice minister in exchange for putting a Bolsonaro's political opponents in prison magnificent okay yeah and and you know so okay what's the thing that's important about this right is that anti corruption is not a real politics right like it's not it's not an actual real center political political positions right what it is is a set of politics you con roobs with but it turns out is really really good at conning groups because people really fucking hate corruption and the thing the thing the thing that being like an anti corruption quote unquote candidate does is it lets anyone like appear to be this sort of like populist champion of the people against the corrupt elite and this is really useful to the right into sort of I mean not just to the right but it's really useful to sort of like bourgeois like capitalist politicians in general because there are a lot of times where in order to sort of protect their interests you know I'm or protect the interest of like there's specific faction of the ruling class they need to win an election they need to win the sort of hearts of minds of the people who see that the world sucks and like reflexively hate quote unquote the establishment because they know they're getting screwed and the easiest way to sort of con these people is to take up the politics of anti corruption it's it's it's it's it's it's it's like the the absolute picture perfect neoliberal politics right like Rudy Giuliani for example um god is start going after the mob in New York and yeah and you know and what what he did right really he goes out to the mob is anti corruption guy and then he replaces them with like even more efficient and extractive neoliberal bureaucratic parasites yeah and it's perfect like yeah in terms of neoliberalism right in terms of completely avoiding a class analysis because you can you can appeal to people who are genuinely oppressed and marginalized by the system right by saying I'll go against this corrupt system which is oppressing and marginalized and you but also to the bourgeoisie because you can say oh the reason you're fucking businesses not a success is there's one is corruption so to just vote for me and we'll sort that out and you can continue exploiting the workers who I'm also appealing to yeah and and you know like Julie ony specifically like he is his name is just literally a punchline now right like it's not it's not even worth talking about him fucking like trumping on a cigar doing an ad for a cigar company the melody right like like like but but but you know if they selling flip flops now isn't that yeah something like that but but that's the thing like the anti corruption stuff was really really good for his career and you know that this is the Paul does anti corruption is the politics that the Brazilian right finally figures out as like the only thing that gets out the workers party juggernaut now like in 2005 the corruption case brings out a whole bunch of sort of like high profile PT party members but it doesn't touch Lula himself who is like he gets his rep like basically similar to Reagan is just like the Teflon president or everything just bounces off of him but you know the right in joseph i really thinks that they've got him and they're like okay we're gonna crush him this next election everything's gonna back to normal and then you know and it is true that from 2000 compared to 2002 Lula does have less support in 2006 he goes from 61% of the vote to a whopping 60% of the vote so okay so this didn't work right but the right still sees that like this is the only thing they've been able to come up with that like actually damages the PT at all and in 2014 a judge named Sergio Morro who we've are more who again we have given you the spoiler this is like though this is one of the most corrupt dudes in like the history of Brazilian politics but he he goes after he finds like a different corruption ring to go after that he's not a part of and and I think it's important to understand sort of from the outside of this right that like this anti corruption stuff is essentially like a newer faction or like a slightly different faction of the Brazilian ruling class going after another faction the Brazilian ruling class so he finds he starts to think that that becomes known as lava jato or operation car wash um and and what Morro is going after is this legitimately genuinely enormous corruption rings surrounding petroboss which is Brazil's state-owned oil company um and the investigation leads to the arrests of an enormous number of government officials like this but like some of the like richest people in Brazil go to jail like and it is true that like there is an enormous amount of corrupt like there are billions and billions of dollars that are being sort of stolen from this oil company right through sort of like contracts and like payoffs and stuff um but we also get to some reveal like lepers eating people's faces party shit here as well where okay so 2013 Duma Rousseff signs a law that massively expands police powers that includes in particular allowing them with no strings attached to offer pleaberg as people to get the the confess to stuff amazing and like give the cops information they want to hear which is like genuinely really unethical because I mean for a lot of reasons right like the the the the whole plea bargaining system is like the reason like one of the reasons the whole US justice system is completely fucked up because everyone just fucking please out instead of going to trial because they know they know they're like everyone is pretty sure they're gonna lose and so people you know people will just plead a shit that they didn't do because they have no chance of winning the case it's completely fucked up and Duma Rousseff's like nah yeah fuck it like we're gonna sign this like you know and I like I get that like she she was responding to like the protests and I get that she thought it would mostly be used against like fucking protesters or some shit but like who did you think this was going to be used against yeah yeah this is why like and come on like seriously it's like yeah this is good luck is in their own face yeah like I just oh it's like it is simultaneously true that there was like an incredibly coordinated sophisticated like like a joint American Brazilian like intelligence and like justice state operation to bring down the PT it's also true that the PT like like the reason they were able to be knee capped so like so easily is that like they'd spent the last like six years like firing rounds over and over again into their own knees so like okay I these things are brought through at the same time but okay and so wait love a jato like eviscerates an enormous part of the sort of the the section of the Brazilian ruling class but it very quickly becomes clear that it's being used as a political weapon against Delma Rousseff and the PT despite the fact that like literally every Brazilian like party is involved with this like I think the PSO well might be like the only major Brazilian political party who wasn't involved in this and like that's because I don't think they had anyone who was senior enough to do it so like you know I but but you know everyone instead like just is using us to go is like very clearly using us to go off the PT the problem is that like and this is going to be a perennial problem with these investigations is that they can't actually directly Dale Delma Rousseff or Lula with doing anything that they have real problems with this um you know it's a little Lula Delma wins reelection 2014 but also 15 there are these at as lava jato is like going and there's this enormous fucking press fury around it um there are these massive sort of anti corruption protests demanding that like she resigned that's ripped up by like like like again like the right wing media goes just completely batch it in this period um and you know okay so again morals running into this problem that he can't find anything that Delma Rousseff did that was illegal so he starts relying on political theater instead he he and he he starts he stages this like enormous series of raids on like Lula's house this non-profit like he's like like his brothers business and you know with the entire press court like they're right like with all the like that stays for all these raids they like they drag him off to like jail for questioning but again like they don't really have anything they they kind of like invent this case about Lula based on some convoluted shit about a property that he didn't own it's like I know the the the the thing here basically is that like as with all corruption scandals right this this is a fight between parts of the ruling class right like the actionable details of who's taking money from who are essentially a relevance because that that's not one actually matters right what matters here is that like these sort of right wing prosecutors have decided that they're going to destroy the pt and you know they're the pt has helped them do it at every step it's just a prosecute is right there's like this this like press plus prosecutors it's plus plus plus a bunch of political parties too yeah well it's so not to like draw a comparison where it's not necessarily entirely valid but like look at the United Kingdom right we have Boris Johnson like Monumentely fucking up the COVID response tons of people die and it's not that that brings him down it's he had a suitcase of wine in a karaoke party like because at some point but it's the appearance right it's this political theater of accountability like but you're not actually accountable to the people who you let down or the people who you lied to you're accountable to like 17 media editors yeah to hyperburetok right and because Brazil has its own versions of birdock who are like I can only imagine like people people to who if I if I said my actual opinions on them like the FCC would specifically start regulating podcasts because like oh boy all of these people should I'd redacted parody etc etc. I would have like a five minute bleed here well Chris goes yeah so okay but but I can't so okay they they have this problem again which they can't really get Dilma Rousseff and anything and so what happens instead is that the Brazilian Senate is sort of like scrambling for something they can use and what they eventually impeached Dilma Rousseff for is this like accounting procedure thing basically that like everyone does and when I say everyone does like almost every previous president I'd like every every like every single like I what's it called like every single like I why am I playing here governor is that the right word yeah like the the people who are like the heads of states yeah I think like all the governors do this like fucking literally everyone of Brazilian politics does including some of the people who are signing like the fucking I impeachment thing but they they they remove her from this and okay so like a part of the like the the sort of sort of like like decrepit and despise neoliberal right takes power and but the normal part thing here is that she is Dilma Rousseff is impeached by her own allies right he is impeached like Michael Temer the the guy who replaces Rousseff like winds up as presidents because Dilma Rousseff made him her VP like it's just like you know this is this is dating back to like this is this is like really old sort of PT political maneuvering stuff dating dating back to like Lula finally winning out over the sort of PT base in 2002 right where he's able to convince them to like have a sort of like conservative guy like B is running mate and here this this is where this finally goes to shit because the PT is making alliances was sort of like center right parties and all these corruption parties and it's like okay you allied yourself like I I understand the reason they were doing this was that the sort of central which is like the the sort of corruption parties have enough votes that you kind of have to work with them but also like what did you expect was going to happen like did you did you really not expect that the leverage we're going to eat your face like I okay it's you know like it's really like okay like you let a mosquito into your house and you are now like fucking Pikachu facing because they because the mosquito bit you is like really like yeah you know and this all comes back to sort of like the things I've been talking about in the last episode about like the inherent contradiction of being a leftist and happy to having to keep the stick and having to run a state we have to keep the economy going right which again it means you have to make sure the capital is get money and Lulu could just pay these people off like literally or figuratively because he was he's benefiting from the commodity boom right but then when the Chinese economy goes under and suddenly the money dries up because the commodity boom is over and the Brazilian economy starts to collapse like you know there's nothing to pay off the bourgeoisie with sure and you know and deliverers like it's just trying to pay them off but you know in order to fund it now now she's doing austerity okay and that's sapping her and that's sapping her base because you know okay you have to choose one of the other but she's not big again but she's also not able to pay off enough of the bourgeoisie to stop some coming and so they offer and you know okay so the the the the the PT PT supporters will describe what happens like that this impeachment is a coup which is like true like as far as it goes like it is true that like a bunch of absolute like psychopaths like just like overthrew the democratically elected president on for bullshit I actually think it's less of a coup than the next than the next thing we're going to get to or but yeah so okay so the product of this is that Michael Temer who is it like it's just a unfathomable neoliberal cool like I really like oh god like I just really one of the worst people ever um who again Rusef picked us MVP I because president in 2016 spends the next two years like oh wow so if Draco Malfoy grew up this is what he would look like yeah no it's it's it's really incredible yeah you you you you do owe it to yourself to go look up it's mad at this man is like yeah very streamlined but otherwise yeah it's remarkable I mean he just like he just looks like like he's like exactly who he is yeah yeah I cannot believe this guy succeeded in politics when he yeah looks like an yeah an evil snake yeah I think he also got arrested for being even but like okay so like like like there is corruption going on in the PT Temer is the corruption party right like he actually goes down eventually in in level he is like unfathomably corrupt like he goes down for like what did he he took like is that bribe from a meat packer right oh that guy yeah that was one of he he funneled like $180 million dollars into like he's his politically like into like his friends and his like like on fast like okay like and this stuff genuinely sucks right like it actually does suck that literally hundreds of millions of dollars are being just like fucking stolen by these ghouls right especially in a country where like people genuinely struggle to get by every single day yeah and and and I think it's worth mentioning like like the level of poverty that we're talking about here is like like again like the people who don't have running water people who live in deserts and like don't have water at all like it is really really bad and you and then you know you're you're you are watching just this bullshit happening right like this fucking like guy who I got it this is like absolute fucking demon just stealing 100 like 50 million dollars right yeah it's worth just like rich people playing monopoly with yeah you're fucking future and your children's future yeah but you know but but again like temperate nobody nobody fucking voted for this guy right like and he he he's just immediately starts implementing like unfathomable just atrocious austerity and he like he has a 7% of who are rating everyone is conjuring into resigned yeah 7% this is this is this is the second lowest this is the second lowest proof already have ever seen for for a ruling politician after a Kim Jong Pil who I think got down to 3% one day I'm going to do an actual Kim Jong Pil episode but yeah so you're within the erimagine of any polling once you get into the single digits yeah no one likes you like literally like like like remember like people like people from his own party want him to resign right and he just doesn't she just isn't power because there's no one can do anything about it because well you always get that right when you when you engage in his politics of corruption the the the like sort of palace coups and interonizing backstabbing will necessarily happen because like that is how you further your own career and therefore benefit more from the corruption right like again see the clusterfuck that is the United Kingdom yeah now do you know who else doesn't benefit from corruption like the rest of us don't think we can say that with any degree of certainty Chris it's it's it's show it's it's the products and services that support this podcast okay and and we're back um and okay this I think is a good time is any to mention that like okay so lava jato is is going on this entire time right this this thing is going on for years and years and years and years and it's reiterating that lava jato is being illegally backed by the American Justice Department Justice Department the SEC the FBI probably all I think also the CIA although weirdly this is okay and this is where things get very strange because this like from the documents that we've seen there is some evidence the CIA handed them shit the thing we have the most evidence for is actually the FBI running this coup you weird yeah it's very weird okay what what's happening basically is that okay so the the way American corruption laws work is that like if any money passes through like an American bank account the FBI has the authority to go after them and the FBI and the Justice Department fucking hate the PT and they're they're looking at petroboss and they're going like this is so much fucking money we can get if we go after these people and also we hate them and it's also worth nothing so uh certainly a morrow is like he's a Harvard guy right he he was a Harvard guy he was trained by like a bunch of American police people like he he is like he's like one of these sort of like he's a naps at cool basically right but like he's like the the the law version of a naps at cool and so the the entire like it's funny like the FBI in theory is not supposed to be like the FBI is supposed to be a domestic agency which does not make them better by the way but like they're not supposed to be going after like they're not supposed to be trying to overthrow the president of Brazil but you know they are and again like they are to be taking down the black panthers increasing anti-Semitism yeah you know they'll stand a domestic agency yeah shooting anarchists shooting like possibly assassinating him okay um yeah yeah that's what we expect from them yeah not they're not supposed to be doing the four inches that's the CIA's job but they're they're muscling into the CIA's territory here um it's it's it's it's worth mentioning as well that like the Obama administration is heavily involved in this right show and you know it turns out that by the time you get to 2016 Trump administration Trump administration's the power they love this shit because it's Trump it's like wow damn who could have guessed yeah that is wow yeah yeah yeah and and as and this is gonna come out it's gonna come out later um by this okay this is the second time that Glenn Greenwald is just handed like one of the biggest news stories of the decade like literally dropped on his lap and he gets to like right about it is that yeah it comes out that like this stuff is being politically like very obviously politically motivated like so hey moros like it's openly cutting deals with Bolsonaro to political persecutions uh there's again again the the stuff about how he's being paid by he's literally getting like the task force is being funded by the FBI through these slush funds of of fine money collected from petroboss like it's unbelievably shady shit um now the entire time this is going on uh Sergio Morro has been like illegally wiretapping ludeless conversations and leaking them to the press to like destroy Lula and don't lose it politically it's and you know I'm like like uh operation carwash like prosecutors are just like going on TV and telling the entire brisley in public like no Lula's guilty there's no doubt about it and then it just the 17 moro has Lula convicted now Lula appeals us on the grounds that like this is incredibly obviously a show trial like but by the okay there's a lot you will read a lot of like the sort of liberal press in the US like fucking loves this shit and like he doesn't 14 doesn't 15 times 16 so so much 16 times 17 but like by 2017 even the sort of American liberal press are so is like hey you're running these trials too fast like these don't look like real trials anymore like he's like it's just like it really is like they they stop having even the pretence at this not being show trial so just like convicting people, convicting people, convicting people, and like you know in the Lula case there's some interesting stuff which is that like okay Morro doesn't have the legal jurisdiction to prosecute Lula here like the crimes that were supposedly committed are committed in a place where where where where Morro has any jurisdiction at all like it's another state and he just doesn't anyways because he's just like fuck it like yeah whatever and so the law is more of a vibe when you're all city government yeah well and then again like like this is the thing like people people get really really really hung up about legal technicalities and that shit and as we about to see in that in in in this case right like that shit does not matter right this this is entirely about sort of power power brokering and sort of like where where where the Brazilian elite is in a particular time who's backing what Lula puts in a petition he puts in a rid of habeas corpus that's like hey there's stuff in the constitution that's like I shouldn't be put in prison until my appeals are done and this goes to the Supreme Court at which point a fucking Brazilian general who apparently be this this this apparently was planned by 15 other generals uh who I I I I I got a guy named on Edward Eduardo vios bolos like literally sorts threatened to the Supreme Court on Twitter like he he starts employ and then this tweet is read on globos which like the fucking like like big like biggest news network in Brazil they like read out this tweet like the the subtext of which is if you don't put Luleen jail we are going to do a coup. So they drag Luleen off to prison and they put him in solitary for 580 days. Which is like yeah. Yeah, they are like they are torturing the shit out of him. Um, Jesus yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They also living out there like a fucking like you know like previous generation of coups against Latin America like chopping Victor Haras hands off fantasies. Yeah. And like just like you know, I say it's like Luleen has like was arrested by the military dictatorship in the 80s, right? But even the military dictatorship only held him for 30 days. And we let him go. You have anything like nothing on the neoliberal. Yeah. And they're like they're trying to put him in prison for things like it's usually seven years and then they extended to 12 years. Um, and there's this whole thing but like he's also like not allowed to speak to the press during this time. And the reason this is happening is that uh, if you're in prison, you can't run for president. And in 2018, if Lulea is allowed to run for president, even with all the press shit, he is going to fucking stop literally anyone in the field. Yeah. And yeah. So this is going on. But before we talk about the election a little bit and then sort of wind down, there's one more thing I want to talk about, which is that four days before Lulea is arrested. Mariella Franco, who is a incredibly radical city council and a Rio de Janeiro is assassinated by death squad. Um, there, there's a lot of coverage of like who she was sort of like there's a lot of coverage of her story about how she said black lesbian woman who came to like was from an incredibly poor family in the favelas and how she sort of like worked away out to the politician. But like they don't talk about, you know, as people will sort of obliquely mention her human rights work or they'll talk a bit about how she's part of the PSOL, which is this leftist party that like, okay, so I'm still I, I spent a lot of looking, I'm still kind of hazy about their exact story. I think what happened was there was a group of PT, Paul of of PT, like, uh, politicians who refused to vote for an austerity package to PT was trying to push through and they got kicked out of the party for it. And they found out the PSOL. Um, and you know, they'll talk about sort of this stuff. What they won't cover really is what she was actually doing. And, and I think this is like, this is incredibly important because the thing she was actually doing was a bunch of very radical and unbelievably dangerous anti police activism. Um, so in 2008, this is again under Louis P. T. government, there was a reorientation of police strategy in the favelas tours. This new program called pacifying police units, UPPs. And the idea was that instead of doing constant raids, and then favelas and then leaving them, they were just going to put them under like constant police occupation. Yeah. And you know, like, there's something like 400,000 people at a time are just living under these occupations. And in the beginning, it's supposed to be tied to like so like there's this will be like an expansion of like social services into the favelas and just supposed to be like community policing. And that just doesn't happen. And by 2013, they just like give up the pretense of doing any social work and they, they found this thing called tattooed groups of proximity police, which very quickly turned into just like fucking desk wads, but they're both desk wads and they're also doing like stop and frisk shit and just like harassing random black people, there's murdering people on the streets on a scale that is like it's worse than it's been before like there were individual police unit. There's an individual police unit that goes 117 people in a year. Like it is it is fucking horrible, right? This is what I was talking about about the Brazilian police killing killing at a rate that's 11 times higher than the American police. Like it is, it is fucking atrocious. Oh, yeah. And there are some incredible videos of yeah, like it's fucked. And they're at war with parts of their own population. Yeah. And I mean, I'd say this like this is one of those things about fascism, right? We're like fascism like always kind of has works on this system of alliances between sort of like the police paramilitaries who are sort of tied to the police and organized crime. And you know, like there is an extent to which there are a bunch of gangs and the police are fighting them. There's also an extent to which like everyone involved is just shaking down all of these fucking like unbelievably poor, largely black, like working class people who are just getting fucking robbed every day. It's horrible. Yeah. And it's that where I said, it might be a bit of a side by that we don't like need to fit in here, but I'm in which case we can just delete it. But there's a I know that one of the big Brazilian prison gangs is like ostensibly leftist. They're like they're called red command, right? Yeah. I think is it? It's commandanty, very male. But yeah, yeah. So they they used to be yeah. So okay, red command used to be like an ML group that was like a sort of like a alliance between like regular people in prison and like leftist people who've been put in prison. Commando. Yeah. And it it it does a similar thing to like like there are parts of the FARC that go like this. There's a lot of there's a thing that happens when you're dealing with sort of armed groups like this, which is that okay, so like a lot of the things that you do to get money as an armed group are things that are also just a good way to get money. So things like kidnapping, things like entering the drug trade. And there's a lot of groups that start out ideological that just cease to be ideological and the people are just in the drug trade now. And this is kind of what happens here with these people. But okay, there's actually this actually does tie into this because so that's what happens here. Maria LeFranco like spends her entire life like fighting these people. She she she gets it's a sociology degree and like what she's doing and like while she's doing sociology stuff is she's like making reports and like like telling everyone like what these people are doing like what what the fucking police are doing. And when she dies, like there's a fucking judge who's like actually what happened was that she was she was working with red command. And she got behind her debt payments in the kilter. And it's like this is some fucking bullshit. Like right. It like she so we think is we actually still don't really know much about like who killed her, right? We know that one of the one of the people who's being tried for the getaway driver was like picture with Bolsonaro. He's a bunch there's a bunch of weird ties to like Bolsonaro's brother because Bolsonaro is very very heavily tied into a bunch of arm-pull mode per military groups. Yeah. It works well for everyone to have these groups that they campaign as like the great Satan, right? Like the peace can be like we're combating the gangs. The gangs can be like well, you all hate the fucking police, right? And then they yeah, they could just blame anyone else whenever there is. And it's like the self-supporting structure. Yeah. But every once in a while you get someone that's like very less frankly like she's a very very rare kind of person. She she winds up as a city council, right? She's a very very rare kind of politician who like everyone likes like an inch like everyone on the left likes like you're even you're sort of like like most hardcore like fucking guy and like it was like like hardcore guy like a tiny m l sect and like your most hardline anarchists like everyone likes her because she's doing like she's every day putting her life in danger trying to stop the police. And you know, and when you get someone like that who is not part of this sort of like is not part of either of these factions right? And who is a genuine threat to both of them because she is unbelievably very strong. She she gets a fifth most votes of anyone like who's running for city councilor and she's doing it again running for the PSOL who's like they have like five seats. I think in in the Senate or something like that like they're not like they're not like they are a kind of large party but they're not like one of the parties ever going to like win a national election right like. And you know, but she she is an incredible threat to them. And so they have her that that I she was killed by were part of a batch that was sold by the police. We know that from from another one of the batches that was in that sequence. I there's a bunch of other people who were killed by the police and this also like wait sold to the police. I sold by the police sold by the police Magnificent. Oh good. Yeah. Yeah. Um there you know, there's a lot of stuff going on here too which is like there are a lot of activists in Brazil who get killed like this is this happens all the time. There are a lot of digits that are not active as you get killed or a lot of black activists get killed or just like if you piss off the wrong person like you can just get executed and this assassination is one of the symbols of it because like she was a city councilwoman right. Like she was part of a major political party and they just fucking shot her. Yeah. And no one's been held accountable. Yeah. It's it's fucking horrible. Um I yeah, I don't really have I don't have any sort of like clever thing to say here. It's just it's just been standing awful. There's one more thing I need to mention which is that yeah. Okay, so the thing she was doing, like literally literally she was at a conference like she was killed, like driving home from a conference right. And the thing she was doing, like literally in the days leading up it lead like leading up to a assassination was. So Michael Temor has this thing called the quote the quote the quote federal intervention which was apparently like a strong popular in Brazil which is like a sign of how fucked up everything is which is that he just like was like fuck it. We're gonna going to hand control of quote unquote security and realty gnarled to the army and let them like go to war with the gangs. Yeah. Fucked it. Unbelievable. Yeah. And she, she, she takes, takes an incredibly bold stance against this is trying, is trying to fight it. And then she is mysteriously assassinated. Yeah. It's a bit like, you know, how like you obviously people will say the fascism is like the return of colonialism to domestic policy, right? Colonial colonial methods in, in the, in the Mexican, instead of in the colonies. And like it, this is similar here, right? Like what you're seeing is just they're doing a colonialism, but just to poor people. Yeah. Although I should mention a lot of us in that analysis is developed in like, like is developed for Europe. And the Brazilian context is not the same thing as that, because like Brazil was also doing all of this stuff to its own population because again, Brazil has a mass like like, like, like, Brazil is a cellular colony that was also a slave state, right? Yeah. So all of this violence is just, it's the same thing that they've been doing since they got there. Like, yeah. I mean, and this is something actually Lula talks about a lot, which is like the people who have been in power for 500 years are still in power. But I think it's important to understand, like part of how Bolsonaro is able to do what he does is that everyone is already, like, everyone is already so primed to just like back the fucking army coming in and like, right? Like there's so much racism. There's so much just like there's this whole zone of law and order shit thing that's going on. And the sort of product of all of this is, in 2018 election, the PT put in basically somewhere, I mean, he's not some random guy. Like he was like, like, he was like a kind of prominent politician, but they basically run like some guy and he gets clobbered with Bolsonaro. And part of this is there's a lot of stuff that happens here that's like very similar to sort of US information campaigns. Like there's all these like telegram groups going around where like, yeah, his name is Fernando Haddad. There's this whole thing about how he's going to like turn your kids gay and like, he's a satanist. Yeah. So and then both of these things. Yeah. Interesting. Right. Because I think people, there's this analysis like we have to see everything through the lens of American politics like the Bolsonaro is the American, the Brazilian Trump. But like it's I'm in my knowledge that this is not deep, but like it strikes me that he embraces Catholicism to a degree that is like much greater than like Trump did religion. I mean, it's interesting. So like the Latin American context has, you know, it has this like thing. I think you know what I'm just like it. There's this sort of right wing Catholic evangelical alliance. Yeah. That is happening here. And you know, because like a whole bunch of of Bolsonaro's base is a shit ton of evangelicals, but he because he's like, there's this sort of shared language around, specifically like around anti abortion stuff around opposing gender, ideology, and like feminism and stuff like that where it's like, yeah, you can you can do this sort of dog, like not even dog wasn't you can just sort of like whistle at them. And you know, it like it works. And the this is sort of like, you know, I'm like, okay, like if I had any energy left in me, I would probably do another episode that was like two, three, I could do like a fucking year of episodes, but everything that happened to their Bolsonaro. Yeah, I'm just going to sort of hit some of the like low lights. I don't know what you call it like Bolsonaro. Okay, but Bolsonaro managed to kill less people than Trump did, but and also then Biden did, but comma, he also killed a fucking unfathomable number of people with COVID like he refused to buy vaccines. He like was like really into the classic core clean stuff like I tried to clear himself like he, he like personally spread COVID to a bunch of people like there's like one one I think one of the most famous things that people know about like the sort of Bolsonaro regime is that the Amazon was fucking burned because they're all these like huge part of his base are these like basically legal loggers. And Bolsonaro was just like yeah, fuck it, go like destroy all destroy all this digits land fucking kill the people on it. And they've been just like annihilating the Amazon. Didn't he also I may again be completely off base on this? Didn't he break down a lot of the like from FUNAI is the Brazilian national organization that among other things does some sometimes problematic but protection of indigenous peoples. Didn't he like a dismantle a lot of the structure of that and trying to yeah, yeah, and it's like Trump right like it'll take years to undo this bullshit. Wait, I might never be I'm not like in that. We're running out of fucking time, right? Like we don't have. Yeah, well, this is one of the things we're like we have to hope Lula actually fucking holds up to his word here because like, okay, so the PT the PT's record of deforestation is was is way way enormously better than Bolsonaro. But it's also true that a lot of the sort of legal framework that Bolsonaro has been using to push this stuff like is stuff from the PT. And you know, I Lula has pledged to stop deforestation like I hope he does or fucking everyone is going to die. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's you know, like everything that was like that I've talked about that was bad before got enormously worse under Bolsonaro. The police violence got worse than military violence got worse. There's just like he's able to sort of like do this like enormous anti communist fervor. But the problem is that he kills like he kills too many people. That's not what he's killing himself. What are they? I mean, he is but like the thing is like he really just destroys the entire Brazilian economy. Like he just nukes it. And this costs him the support of a bunch of the ruling class. And this is actually the thing that this is like ultimately what defeated Bolsonaro is him like in so far as we can even talk about it be defeated. What what defeated Bolsonaro personally is the fact that like he like he loses it off of the ruling class that when Lula appeals like with those actual case appeal goes to the Supreme Court, they throw it out. And so he more like turns on him for a bit. Although more and it comes back and endorses Bolsonaro in the election because he's the piece of shit. But like yeah, there's he loses a bunch of sort of the support of the ruling class. And there's this kind of this is the thing I think is kind of disturbing about this election even though Lula won is that Lula did this like giant united front strategy, right? Like he pulled together like he was recognized by sort of everyone who opposed Bolsonaro's like he's the only person who could stop him. But this means that he's drawing a bunch of support from the right. His his running mate in this election is a guy named uh Ronaldo. I mean yeah, he this is a guy that Lula beats by 20 points in an election or 30 points something like that. Like this is literally like a right wing guy who Lula fucking destroyed an election. And he had and Lula brings him on as a running mate because he's trying to sort of appeal to like disaffected like he's he's he's he's running the sort of like Biden suburban strategy, right? Like he's doing the like appeal to sort of moderate voters thing. And like I mean like this is going on to the point where like he's telling people like not to like bring PT flags or like wear PT colors to rallies because they're trying to down yeah that because they're trying to downplay the sort of like communism thing and this doesn't really work because like Bolsonaro's just calling him everyone's just calling him a communist anyways. Yeah right. And and he like squeaks by this fucking election right like he I mean he probably wanted by he probably would have wanted by a couple more percent than the actual vote total shoulder hadn't been voter suppression. But like it was close. And the other thing that's really really bad about this is that I like the right like Bolsonaro's party like controls the Senate. Right. So and and this is everything right if Bolsonaro's party can cut enough deals and you know like Jettison Bolsonaro like Bolsonaroism as like as a force is still there right like this this this this this this sort of like fascist right has consolidated as his own political force. And you know there's a non-zero chance that they just in peace Lula right and this you we we literally watch this entire fucking cycle that has happened again. Yeah fuck like right like like this this kind of shit like this could happen. Yeah so things are still not great. And yeah Lula's actual hand to do stuff here is very good. I should also mention though like I don't know like there was literally like partying in the streets in like like they were like they were parties in the streets of cities that like he didn't even win like like this is like he I don't know like the the fact that he won is genuinely very good um I haven't I don't know what can be done to actually sort of defeat Bolsonaro's as a structural force because again like he won like 49% of the vote right like yeah that's still there killing a like like yeah tens of thousands of his population and being a general shithead yeah so yeah yeah they're not on the level to do it. Yeah yeah the law like I don't know like like act actual structural things have to change but both the Brazilian political system like the Brazilian political system the police, the military and the economy have to structurally change or we're like we're gonna just get in getting another Bolsonaro like this is what's happening in the US right like there hasn't actually been a sort of structural shift in like in the American political system so we're just gonna get another Trump maybe it'll be actual Trump who knows like like maybe this is the thing like until until fascism sort of like class base and base in the state is destroyed like and it's sort of ideological base in sort of like right we constructions of the family it's religious base like a particular like we're just we're gonna be back here and we're gonna be sort of like continuously teetering between fascism and something that's not fascism but has no way to oppose it and yeah yeah that fucking sucks um yeah but we keep doing it like we keep trying to defeat fascism by running like closer and closer to fascism to pull away like the marginal fascists. Okay so here's the thing I one thing I will give to Lula is that like okay his his way of doing this was that I a bunch of people found pictures of I both Sardaro and aluminum like like with a bunch of aluminum like a bunch of like in free Mason robes with a bunch of free mason's and this I think genuinely may have cost Bolsonaro like like there's an argument this cost Bolsonaro like a bunch of election points with his own base because people found this there was another thing like like the day like a couple days before the election like an old TV clip turned up a bullson arms out of nowhere saying quote I would eat an Indian yes yes the canvases this turned into a cannibal I mean this is like you know because like this is really about his racism right but he's turned into a whole cannibalism being this Supreme Court ruled like I think incredibly cowardly because he did say this is real court ruled that yeah uh he couldn't run ad that Lula couldn't run ads calling him a cannibal but you know like like there were some like this like we're like like suddenly this that like that there were like I don't know like this is and I will applaud Lula for this like he hasn't really like he could have run an election where he just fucking threw his entire base under the bus and was like insanely racist and was like no I hate queer people and I hate women and like he could have he could have run a camp you could have run a Bolsonaro community didn't right yeah and in so far as he was tapping into rightway shit he was tapping it to hey this guy's a fucking this guy's in free Mason robes like it was sort of funny shit that like it's probably not great that this is where the political sphere is it's not like like you know okay Bolsonaro literally say he would eat a human being is like I would rather that be the kind of insane right wing thing that's going around then like I don't know queer people are gonna murder your children or something which is like the normal shit that yeah you hear yeah I just said in 2016 it's not like he said it when he was 18 no like yeah I think he said it's like a journalist as well right no problem yeah insane what are you fucking terrible guy you can imagine Donald Trump saying he'd eat someone like he probably yeah I was always thinking I think I think Donald Trump you'd have to prompt Bolsonaro just unprompting yeah yeah there's no connection here he was just like fuck it no I am so racist I'm just gonna say this I don't know I I wish I yeah I wish I wish good luck and good fortune and yeah like victory to everyone in Brazil who is fighting yeah sure it's yeah fuck Bolsonaro I hope all these I hope you fucking dies of COVID finally yeah and I hope I hope I really do hope that Bolsonaro can be defeated yeah I don't know like make better choices PT please God we can't do this again yeah I hope all the people in Brazil who continue to be impacted by this this bullshit can yeah yeah better meaningful improvements to their lives yeah and selection and I mean I mean I was like like this is proof that like Bolsonaro isn't isn't undefeatable right like it like the fact that he wasn't able to pull off military coup right like it is beatable it's just it's very very hard and yeah I mean this is true or fascism everywhere right it's hard to beat but it can be stopped and we are going to because the alternative is the fucking annihilation of the earth so yeah fuck them we're gonna win mm-hmm football is back and bed MGM is inviting new customers to join the huddle and enjoy the action like never before sign up today using bonus code champion and your first wager is risk-free up to $1,000 you'll also have instant access to a variety of parlay selection features player props and boosted odd specials just download the bed MGM app today or go to bedmgm.com and enter bonus code champion and place your first wager risk-free up to $1,000 the bedmgm app is the perfect way to experience the excitement of wadering on live sports now in more markets than ever visit bedmgm.com for terms and conditions must be 21 years of age or older to wager virginia only new customer offer all promotions are subject to qualification and eligibility requirements rewards issued as non-withdrawable free bets or site credit free bets expire seven days from issuance please gamble responsibly gambling problem call 1-888-532-3500 let me guess unknown caller you could reduce the number of unwanted calls and emails with online privacy protection the latest innovation from discover will help regularly remove your personal info like your name and address from 10 popular people search websites that could sell your data and we'll do it for free activate in the discover app see terms and learn more at discover.com slash online privacy protection hi i'm Cindy Lauper for years i felt awful because of my psoriasis but i didn't give up my doctor and i chose cossentics cossentics secukinumab is indicated for adults with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis and is given as a 300 milligram dose don't use a fear allergic to cossentics before starting get checked for tuberculosis an increased risk of infections some serious and a lower ability to fight them may occur tell your doctor about an infection or symptoms like fevers and sweats chills muscle aches or cough or if you've had a vaccine or plan to tell your doctor if your Crohn's disease symptoms develop or worsen serious allergic reactions may occur see our ad in country living magazine learn more at cossentics.com or by calling 1-844 cossentics cossentics works for me ask your dermatologist about cossentics ah it could happen here is a podcast that you're listening to right now if this is a surprise to you if you if you thought this was the joe rogan experience let me assure you everyone here does eat a diet of nothing but elk meat and to talk to me about the health value of elk meat if no so about a i don't know a week or so ago we're talking with a seriong sera how you doing good how are you i'm i'm pretty good seri you're a deputy features editor at the verge you are a lawyer and a journalist so you have embraced the two most cursed vocations in 2022 um and you you've never won most recently written an incredible piece um about the portland van abductions uh which is like brutal and um very important for the verge people ought to check it out it is a uh i don't know i i've had trouble getting through all of it because it is very good and because i was there but everyone needs to read it it's an important piece we're not talking about that today uh we're talking about a post that you made on the twitter.com about a week or so ago that i i messaged you about wanting to chat about do you want to kind of talk about what that post was uh and what you were trying to get across yeah the audience so if you live in portland right now it's um it's absolutely fucking rancid like um i think and i think the discourse not the city well well sometimes the city but uh the discourse is rancid uh it's like this in a lot of other cities as well um but you know what it is like it the discourse around homeless people right yeah yeah every every conversation you have with any random person it like eventually goes to oh it's gotten so bad here lately and it's always about homeless people um and they it always goes to this place where they're like oh we should start rounding people up into camps and getting rid of them and it's like people are a little too excited to literally murder homeless people like you you get just saying the most insane things like oh i'm not gonna break my car if i see one of those homeless people it's it's awful and like yeah it's really really awful and like and then you get people going like oh well you know how things are and like pulling out murders that have happened in like New York um of Asian women at me to like justify why it is that i need to start supporting the cops and so on and so forth um and it it's just there's this thing where i i think that they're that well-maining leftists really want to sort of pull out like let's humanize homeless people which like yes but the people you're talking to they don't deal with empathy actually right they already don't see most of the population as people so what you're doing is you're not even speaking the language that they speak the issue for me is that what they're what people are doing when they dehumanize the homeless or like turn them into like a problem that you can just sweep away or like kill or put in danger or drop into a camp where they're more likely to die or get sick or be harmed um it's it's that you're making a vast class of people based on like superficial characteristics right um they might be dirty their intents whatever you felt threatened by one of them once so now everyone who's ever been homeless deserves to have a worse off life because you didn't feel great about it this one time and or two times and it's it's really absurd to me because like yeah i i i've had many instances in my life where i haven't felt very safe um because of someone who is homeless because of someone who is an addict um i mean i'm a small Asian woman i take public transit uh it is the vibes are off in every fucking city right now for people who look like me um but that doesn't mean that everyone who looks like the person who's making me uncomfortable deserves to be swept up into a fucking camp and in fact like if i like roll the tape back and look at sort of oh let's look at people who've made me feel threatened afraid whatever i've like gone through big old sprints in my life where i'm getting a lot of death threats from white supremacists i mean i'm sure you've lost life too i mean i can see i i i see it but like you i don't know because you're a woman writing on the internet like you'll get more in a couple of months than i do in an average like year i mean it's a piece right like it depends i mean i was just looking at your midgets yeah i don't know i don't really look too carefully so i don't even know what the numbers are like in case i did have an incredible like six month period where it was really intense um because Tucker Carlson was like putting me on his show i think my preference for a while so it was it was really bad like people like some guy called into my office and and uh threatened to fire bomb it and the people who got the phone call like were stressed out enough that they called the cops and there's like a police report and like um there was a bunch of stuff that happened during this period that was pretty scary and uh and it was always like guys who all sort of look the same right it's like all the you know the oakley sunglasses like taking a selfie of themselves in the car like that sort of stereotype yeah right and you know you got to say for a while i'd see that like that little profile picture or i'd see someone in person and like my like heart would start beating faster right took a while for me to like be able to dial that back um during that six month period i'd hear someone yell a racial slur and i would almost have a panic attack because i'd yeah like oh no like like someone's gonna come and and make good on these threats and um i don't like i don't want to round people up into camps or looking like a shitty racist suburbanite white guy yeah it's like that's that's because i'm not a fucking Nazi like it's like it's like it it doesn't matter what you've experienced you're like what legitimate harm you faced from people who look a certain way like and you you don't round them up into camps or like talk about like how you're not gonna break on this on this train in your car i i'm glad i was happy for kind of your perspective on the matter because i i do try like whenever people talk about how scary portland is or how scary the homeless camps are like the thing i want to say is like like i have like five or six different running routes in the city and most of them have homeless encampments on them and i run through them at night i run through them at the day never had a problem you know sometimes there's like trash and i i would like it if it were cleaner but also primarily the people cleaning up are usually like autonomously organized groups of formerly houseless folks which is the thing that happens in a couple of the neighborhoods that i go to um and like but at the same time i don't want to bring that in when there's an argument about it because like i'm a six foot three two hundred pound white guy right like of course i'm as a general rule in a lot of situations i don't feel worried when other people do because i'm a big white dude and that's um but i what i will say i had an experience a couple of months back a person that i live near like a neighbor of mine is a young woman with a like a six month old infant and she was out jogging on one of the trails near our house and two guys uh in new kawasaki like motor cycles dirt bikes whatever you want to call them i i assume rich kids because these were very new bikes drove up and shot at her and her baby with baby guns um hit her in the face nearly hit her baby um and it was like homeless folks and people at an illegal skate park who came to her aid and like made sure she was okay and when i got out there because i i rolled out there with a fucking beat stick and a handgun just to be like if i see these mother fuckers we're gonna have words and i started talking to homeless folks that i knew on the route who were all like yeah those people like they come by to shoot at us and it's and i have heard this in multiple encampments i've heard this at lorlhurst a number of places that like kids from the suburbs will come in to shoot homeless people with baby guns and mace them and um i have i i'm not gonna say again i've also been in a situation where like an agitated houseless woman was like swinging a machete at some folks and you know everything was deescalated but like i get it the fact that there are people out there who are having like mental health difficulty means that people are going to have encounters that can be frightening um but by and large the people that i find myself most threatened by are like kids people like those assholes rolling by and shooting people with baby guns and of course folks driving gigantic trucks in tiny streets like assholes often while wasted um like those are the things that scare me in portland not the encampments yeah and honestly like there there are some increasing safety issues in portland but like a lot of it is also just like from cars right like it is a it's it's more there's more of a car culture than there used to be um and people get hit and uh they go to the hospital or they die like it's it there's like they're they're big changes in the city for sure but like yeah it's there's so much focus on homelessness as being like the root of all of that and like i don't know they'll say oh portland has gotten so bad and the same breath is like talking about how high rents are or like how expensive houses have gotten just not even connecting those two things right like why is it that housing is so expensive now like clearly people are placing bets on real estate either that or just we haven't built out enough could that be something um or maybe things aren't as bad as you think and it's it's a desirable place to live um it's it's really like it is it it's extremely frustrating um i i also think that there's this weird thing where you just don't really think about the fact that you might have one or two encounters where you it's upsetting you you feel scared and then like the vast majority of people who are unhoused are just trying to stay the fuck out of your way right and like they're you're not going to see them you're not going to talk to them um unless you go out of your way to talk to them and reach out yeah and like they're probably scared of you because they don't know who you are like you're a stranger you might be one of those assholes on Kawasaki's like out to yeah to shoot you uh out to shoot them and like it's it's really frustrating like it's halfway i don't know some some of the people who buy into this kind of discourse are just outright terrible human beings right yeah they're just they're just they're just they're just bad and this is useful but then there's like it's really frustrating how many people in the city right now are just useful idiots for the fascists yep i've just like gone down that gone down that rabbit hole and aren't thinking past like what it means to quote unquote take care of the homeless problem uh like what do you what do you want to do here what do you actually want to do um where are these people gonna go like what's going to happen to them and it's it's super yeah frustrating we're focusing on Portland because it's where we live but all of these things are evidence of like broader trends you can see a lot of the same tactics being used in Los Angeles and Austin and Minneapolis and and one of the things is kind of this conflation of like disorder drug use homelessness with like deadly violence and a number of things like at we've talked about kind of jailing and putting into camps the homeless is one thing people suggest there's also a lot of like suggestions around massively increasing the number of police and this all also goes into you know you've got this kind of series of of right wing uh kuz against elected leaders who have any kind of other suggestions we saw this in San Francisco with the dhs abode and the police like just refusing to enforce like the the law when they were when chesa was attempting to carry things out in a different way and like what we're seeing in Portland right now we've got um city commissioner Joanne uh hardesty who uh number one is a the only black woman in the city council the only person on the city council who rints uh and the only person in the city council who is in debt and who is endured and i'm not going to say she's a perfect counselor a perfect politician there's plenty of things to criticize hardesty over um but there has been like number one this kind of unhinged campaign of attacking her because of the fact that like her financial situation isn't great which icy actually is a plus um because a lot of people in Portland are in rough financial condition maybe it's nice if they're represented on the fucking city council but also she's instituted as people keep fetching about you know violence and gun violence which are problems that have gotten worse in Portland although it is important to note Portland is one of the safest cities in the entire united states even after the quote unquote surge in violent crime i don't think that mitigates that i just think it's important to keep like things in perspective but hardesty has instituted the only effective program that has reduced gun violence in the city of Portland in the recent past which was essentially a series of traffic calming measures right like i think that's probably a fair way to say it was sort of altering the way in which um traffic worked in a neighborhood to kind of try and reduce some of the situations that were like leading to violence and um she's undergoing this massive attack right now by a a candidate a right wing candidate i mean he like everyone who runs in Portland he claims to be a democrat um he's donated to republicans is his girlfriend named Renee Gonzalez who's being backed by a lot of the same business interests that are pushing this anti homeless agenda pushing the mayor's proposal to put homeless people in campments and um i don't know it's just i i feel like i can see it all coming together and i i hate how many people are as you said kind of useful idiots about it where they're like you know look it clearly these people who are talking about rehabilitation or who are trying to like actually who who are not suggesting a carceral solution to the fact that it's unpleasant to see people suffering on the street um are wrong because look at what the news tells me about how much worse violence has gotten and stuff like i it's very frustrating it's it's don't vote for Renee Gonzalez yeah but yeah please please don't vote for a man who donated to a republican pack yeah six months after January 6th let's please let's not do that uh but uh god it's it's i think like really sad that i mean like people i think really just don't want to think about how damaged all of society is right now yeah like we like we lived through you know our our country had one of the worst responses to uh covid uh millions of people are dead our mental health is fucking shot through uh even people who didn't experience sort of federal jackboots on the ground um it we're not well right like it it's any number of housed perfectly like financially stable people turn to substance abuse during this period um and uh are are still you know recovering um people who are unhoused also turn to substance abuse if they weren't um already there and their mental health is also shot through and uh sort of the upshot of this is everyone is fucking sick and taking it out on each other and um it really sucks to see it really sucks to see people be their worst selves yeah increasingly and increasingly yeah and i first off i want to try to provide people with some objective numbers and this is just on the city of Portland so Portland number one never to fund it its police their police are police currently get the most money they've ever gotten um but we do have one thing that is accurate to say is we have fewer police per capita than any major city in the united states and we have the fewest number of police on the force in living memory i'm fairly certain right now there's like 700 Portland police officers which is significantly down from 2020 because um it's not a pleasant job because people hate the cops here in Portland so they keep quitting and moving to other cities um um and it is true that when the pandemic hit violent crime in Portland raised by about 207 percent from january 2019 through june of 2021 which is the largest increase compared to five comparable cities this is from an article in the Oregon capital chronicle many apples at land of san francisco denver and nashville um however it's also worth noting that over the course of the last year uh we're at seven fewer homicides than we were the year before um overall the number of homicides in 2022 has fallen 2 percent from 2021 even as we continue to have fewer and fewer police almost as if the surge in violent crime was not a result in policing but as you said the result of a lot of other factors around the pandemic and around the economic situation and like the rate of violence has been continuing to decrease it's also worth noting that while we're talking about homicides here in portland did see a surge in homicides during the pandemic that's not the only kind of crime or the only kind of violent crime um and i want to quote here from travel Oregon in february 2021 the major cities chiefs association issued a report noting that 63 of 66 major cities saw at least one violent crime category grow in 2020 among cities of comparable size portland generally experiences violent crime at somewhat lower rates like the a lot of this is media driven and it's specifically the thing that you highlighted in the post that that made me reach out to you was was talking about how particularly white suburbanite homeowners are driving this panic and are driving these kind of surge and very like fascist solutions to the the the fears that they have about homelessness and about crime and one of the reasons why this shit works is people don't go into the city they live in the suburbs they see the scary news and i that's the thing i don't know how to actually combat because it is a nationwide problem shootings and deaths due to shootings they have increased since the pandemic but if you look at them on like a 20 year graph fairly flat nationwide um but no nobody does right no no and nobody does right statistics of gun crimes like what in the like the last couple years and then now they're saying that gun violence has increased like it's yeah yeah anyway it's what what we what is increased vastly more than gun crime is reporting on gun crime which has surged it like and and that's because you know if it bleeds it leads in whatever but it is this thing of like that's the stuff that gets people to pay attention and it's the stuff that spreads on social media just like pictures of like poop on the streets of San Francisco can spread on social media and it it it all exists to keep these kind of suburban voters at a constant state of agitation which makes them easy to manipulate and like that's the thing that scares me the most yeah i mean things are almost shittier with Portland because well like okay the the same in just go poop situation so i used to live in the Bay Area that was a real situation uh there's poop in San Francisco yeah another species human they're just human shit everywhere um it's you know you you live with it it's it just is what it is and and you know someone's from New York when they start complaining about it right like it's uh and it i think the New York which smells like pee everywhere by the way it smells like hot garbage because they don't they don't take their garbage they like just put their garbage out on the curb and when it's summertime it just smells fucking terrible um but uh so everyone's got their problems but uh it's it's this like weird thing we're just because of the way that we're drawn up geographically we've got all of these people like it's like you said like out in the burbs uh who vote who have control over the way the wind blows um who just never come out here ever yeah in this they never come out here and uh in San Francisco like yeah they've got outlying areas as well but it's it's not drawn up exactly the way that we are quite right like like the people who are going to be the most alarmist about San Francisco are like not going to be in the area where they're voting about the things that happen to to San Francisco the way the chasas stuff went down like I mean that's complicated right like I mean it was it was a witch hunt and it yeah made me really chasabood the DA format DA in San Francisco it made me really want to never move back uh yeah but uh it it was like we've we've just got a different sort of setup here where the people who are the most upset about all of the crime in Portland like they don't come out to where they think the crime is happening at all no like they like they just don't really interact with the city they're off somewhere else and it's it is truly strange really annoying uh yeah yeah and it is this is like I don't know this is part of why this is part of why politically I tend to align myself with like libertarian municipalism um I think one of the problems we have is that places that have very little to do with each other get to pass laws that impact how people live in those those places like and it which is a problem um as we all just got overseeing with fucking Donald Trump right like that's it that's a version of the problem and a version another version of the problem is that like people in Los Angeles can pass a gas tax that makes total sense for cities in California but fucks over people who live in the middle of nowhere um and all of these things are like I don't know it's the you you get the you it's two simultaneous issues like one of them is you've got these liberals in Portland to the rest of the state resents for dominating politics in the entire state even in areas that are very little to do with like Western Oregon and then you have these these outlying like you you have these folks who don't live in Portland who you know are pushing for like you know who are responsible in the fact that we might get a Republican governor in the state right um who are reacting to like what they hear about Portland even though it's not accurate and I don't know I I this is we're getting past like what people can do in terms of like voting on local elections but I wish we had a system in which like folks weren't constantly pitted against each other in this way because I don't think it's very productive well we're chopped up and I really um by the way I vote for charter reform etc if you're living in Portland uh like we we've got some some other other things going on with our our city government that makes things additionally weird and um sub optimal there's a bunch of things that I'm kind of dreading in the near future or from the the midterm elections including you know Renee Gonzalez um you know I have I have strong feelings on the proposed gun control measure but um I'm broadly optimistic about charter reform that actually seems like something good that we're likely to do yeah um yeah let's talk about that a little bit because Portland would be the first city in the United States to reform its city council along these lines if I'm not mistaken along which lines like the the way the charter reform is like set up um so basically Portland currently has a commission form of government in which we have a very powerful mayor and four city council people um who are handed portfolios by the mayor and they basically run the city government um which is it's a pretty dysfunctional system um it leads to a a small number of people running very large bureaucracies that they usually don't know how to handle which is one of the reasons why the city is so dysfunctional in addition to the fact that our mayor Ted Wheeler is politely speaking dog shit under the the new form of government that's that's being voted on right now the charter the uh the commission structure will be jettisoned city council members will not directly manage bureaus instead they'll pass laws and meet with constituents the mayor will no longer be part of the city council instead he'll lead the executive branch I'm I'm not wild about the amount of power that the mayor will still have um but I think broadly speaking uh it's it's a much better system and there will be like a larger group of people involved in actually like managing the cities affairs um I don't know it the what we have currently certainly is not particularly effective um and I would like to see a more democratic system put into place um yeah I mean and what we had was like obscenely outdated right I think it like yeah I don't know who else does things like Portland currently does but the charter reform is is greatly needed uh yeah and it's going to bring in ranked choice voting as well when people vote on yeah on there on their like city like which is uh like one of the issues that we've had here is that like or that we're having right now with like the gubernatorial race is that um you've got three candidates running one of whom is kind of positioning themselves as independent Betsy Johnson who does not really have a chance to win um and seems to be being funded by people like the Nike guy in order to take votes away from Tina Kotech who's the democratic candidate uh so that uh Christine Dreson who's the republican candidate will be more likely to win I don't know like um I still don't know how much I believe Dreson actually has a shot but the polls show them neck and neck uh so certainly it's like it's possible yeah the polls are pretty terrifying um yeah we're we're kind of like covering on the cusp of of the governor seat going red to yeah it's yeah I don't know um yeah that's the election that scares me like I really do I really don't want to see Renee guns all as win but no the if charter reform passes like the the harm that he can inflict on the city becomes limited just because yeah like right now city council seats just have outsized power in a very dysfunctional way um yeah and uh it's and that that changes with charter reform like we just get a little bit more of a normal city um um and uh but the state the state election though that is that's pretty scary stuff yeah the state especially since if the democrats stay in power at the state level then there's a good chance that I mean the as far as like what people are talking about then we're going to actually see like Portland become or Oregon become a sanctuary for uh reproductive health right like that's one of the things that's that's on the ballot um so if you uh like if you care about that that's kind of the the whole game right like regardless of the fact that kotec has a history with our current governor that's not entirely positive our current democratic governor has been a shit governor and handled the pandemic terribly like at the end of the day it's it kind of has to be all about um uh all about reproductive health right because like the the the republicans would not have handled the pandemic any better um but they will also support a crackdown against people having access to abortion we also have the craziest republicans out here like it and I mean part of that is the areas are representing or whatever but it part of it is also just we've been under democratic control for so long that like the minority party gets weirder and weirder and weirder like we've got we've got the guys who like what ran away from the legislative session rather than vote on a climate change bill right like it's not it's not good it's really bad like handing any of them the keys to the kingdom is uh terrible move yeah I don't know what else to say uh uh you get anything else to say as we as we head into the midterm elections here in Oregon I felt like I don't know this was broadly speaking uh actually I got a one here about your your your feelings on that gun control measure um yeah so we've got measure 114 coming up which is um uh gun control so for people who don't know uh and this may surprise folks even how blue it is Oregon basically does not have any kind of like gun control laws um this is uh this is a state in which any kind of gun that's legal to own in the United States and any kind of magazine you can own in the state of Oregon um we are a shall issue state which means if you are a law-biting citizen uh and you apply for concealed carry permit they have to give it to you um gun owners have quite a few protections at present uh the first major there was a gun control law passed in 2015 most reasonable gun owners had no issue with it because all it did was say you you have to get a background check to you so there's this thing called face-to-face sales whereby in a lot of states like Texas you can just hand somebody a gun for cash as long as you're not a professional gun dealer that's that's legal and it's uh that's bad generally it's how a lot of guns get across the border that was removed as a legal possibility in Oregon back in 2015 but other than that we haven't had a whole lot of gun control um in the wake of the evolve shooting uh a a an organization i think lift every voice is what they're called led by some church leaders pushed for what a ballot measure so this is not something where and i do think this is interesting this is not a situation where democratic politicians in the state of Oregon are trying to pass gun control this is a situation in which a ballot measure was proposed and enough people voted that the entire state uh is voting on whether or not uh to have gun control um which regardless of my opinions on um the measure itself i think is a better way for stuff like this to work than a bunch of legislators just like making a lot but anyway the measure itself is in my opinion deeply flawed in the way that it's written it does a couple of things for one thing it requires that every person who buy a gun pass a background check which is already the law that's in the bill and it shouldn't be because it's already the law i think one of the things that reasons i think that's dishonest is because it always gets summarized and like this is what the bill will do it will require that everybody pass a background check well they're all they're already required it does not actually do anything there um it adds in a magazine capacity restriction as an you won't be able to buy or take out in public magazines that have a higher capacity than 10 rounds we can talk about that in a second and then the primary thing it does is it requires people pass a series of tests in order to purchase firearms and the people who will be administering those tests and running the whole program uh are the police so the police essentially get control over who gets to own firearms um i do consider that that is particularly the thing that i find problematic um for one thing regardless of your opinion on gun control the right to bear arms is similar to the right to freedom of speech and guaranteed in the same way and so the fact that the police are being made the arbiters of who gets to exercise that right is deeply problematic to me um i think given what we know about how often police in Oregon work with far right groups work with organizations like the proud boys um it is very likely that we will see uneven enforcement and uneven um uh like the police granting the ability to bear arms very unevenly which concerns me greatly we had a mass shooting earlier this year at a protest in which a right-winger killed a woman uh 61-year-old woman and injured five other people that person was stopped by a left-wing demonstrator with an AR-15 style rifle um what was actually technically a handgun but that's anyway whatever it was an AR-15 style weapon um i'm concerned that under this new law the right winger would have still had the ability to acquire firearms but the person who stopped him would not um so that's why i have an issue with it i also think if you're going to i'm not i don't personally advocate magazine capacity restrictions but also i don't speak out against them uh Washington recently passed a law restricting magazine capacity i didn't say anything about that i think maybe it i i i i i i i i think if if like if it works i will be happy um i think the way the Washington law was written was a lot more sensible than the Oregon law because it was written in such a way that it stops the additional sale of expand of standard capacity magazines of 30 round magazines and and hire without giving the police an opportunity to harass and arrest people over what they own um which i think is important the way the law is written if you had like whatever you had prior to the band taking effect you can keep and continue to use as normal um just no more can be sold and so the thing they're the thing you're trying to stop with a magazine capacity band at this point is someone doing what the evolved shooter did right where a kid goes out and buys a weapon and a bunch of 30 round magazines and then goes on a mass shooting right you want them to not be able to go and immediately acquire those magazines um it is i think by making it illegal to take them out in the world if you already own them what you're doing is giving police pretext to stop and search people to like search people going out and shooting in the woods like folks do in Oregon without having an impact on mass shooters because they're not going to care about violating that particular law if you want to stop more of those things from being sold i think a law written the way the Washington law is written does the maximum in order to restrict people from purchasing the thing you don't want them to purchase without uh giving police the ability to like harass and arrest people um anyway that's that's my thinking on 114 yeah yeah i think that's that's like an important is an important uh series of distinctions to like get out there yeah um anyway i i i voted against it i i try i try really i actually do try despite my opinions not to talk about gun control too much on this show but like that's my my thinking on the matter folks can do whatever they want will know in on January or on november eight how they voted yeah i mean like it's hardly the most uh disturbing thing on the ballot right now yeah no no and i i i am like like i there's there's so much going on right now and it's one of those things i guess we'll all learn in the near future like we're gonna learn a lot from this election in Oregon like if hardesty stays on if we get charter reform and if kotec wins then kind of regardless of what happens with 114 i will be broadly optimistic heading into 2024 because it'll show that the campaign of fear didn't work entirely yeah um and if gonzalez and and and drazen win and charter reform gets defeated i will be really pessimistic heading it yeah yeah if if drazen wins like that's yeah it's uh yeah it's it's bad it's really bad it's bad news for a lot of fucking reasons um yeah i mean row that's huge um yeah but yeah like it's the sky's the limit for a a state that has been under democratic control for this long right like it's it's they've they've just gotten so complacent is all i can think um oh i mean the spoiler candidate obviously that that did change a lot um yeah but uh it it's the the complacency was is alarming yeah um well is there anything else you wanted to say about what we're heading into uh well i mean uh don't let your fear control you um don't be a useful idiot for Nazis and uh don't put people into camps i guess uh yeah that that's by thinking don't like if if somebody's trying to make you scared uh about a group of people who are the most powerless people in your community you might want to assume that the person doing that is trying to take advantage of you um that's that's that's kind of where i land on this sort of stuff um yeah don't put people into camps we really shouldn't have to say that anymore but yeah we should have people to not be Patrick Bateman from fucking America yeah right like it's like we should people should like but no it's yeah we've we should not be regressing this hard in terms of uh our moral compasses but that's where we are that's where we are well do you want to plug your pluggable Sarah yeah so uh uh uh Robert mentioned that i just put out a big feature about the Portland Van abductions published uh on the verge um it's part a a longer series uh that we did this year about the Department of Homeland Security which is 20 years old this year um so we did a bunch of features some about Puerto Rico and FEMA um uh some about the TSA of course uh i did a short little thing about how Chad Wolf was illegally head of the DHS for a hot minute um and so there's some fun stuff in there um we've still got another feature that'll go up by the end of this year uh i think your your listeners would enjoy going through some of those excellent all right uh well that has been the episode this has been it could happen here um bye hey we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here as a production of cool zone media for more podcast from cool zone media visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzone media.com slash sources thanks for listening hi i'm ebony mone and i'm rick shwarts and we're here from the sandiego zoo wildlife alliance we're the host of amazing wildlife a show from iHeart radio that deep dives into the fascinating world of the animal kingdom and our conservation efforts through sandiego zoo partnerships so rick i cannot tell the difference between a leopard and a jaguar what sets them apart well i'm glad you asked that and honestly it is challenging to be able to tell them apart yet a glance especially if you want to really get good at here we go spotting the difference between a leopard and jaguar remember those cluster of spots those leopards have all 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