It Could Happen Here Weekly 58

episode it could happen here. I'm your guest host of this episode where I'm hoping to take a woman to discuss the commons, the principles of successful commons management, and why sitting attempts to establish the Commons of field. My name, by the way, is Andrew of the YouTube channel Andrewism. You'd follow me on YouTube dot com slash andrewis m. I'm joined here um with my two cool hosts that will be Garrison Davis Hello, and James Stout. Hi. Awesome.

But before I get into exactly what makes the commons work, I least want to discuss what exactly the commons are because despite being you know, common throughout human history, a lot of people can't imagine how they might have wooked what they are. Of course, the commons is a very specific definition of particular context of you know, feudalism and whatnot.

But even outside of that, the idea of the commons is essentially the resources accessible to all members of society, the totality of the material riches of that community or even of the world, regarded as their whole inheritance, rather

than being subject at inclosure and to privatization. Even today, despite the process of inclosure which is with you of its own podcast episode or series of podcast episodes or book, even even today they are still you know, viable existing commons institutions, and they've in some cases endured for well

over a thousand years. Most famously Helena Ostrom, the economists who explored the concept in depth and depunct the Tragedy of the Commons, wrote in her book Governing the Commons that from you know, the alpine meadows of Torbell, Switzerland, to the three million hectares of Japanese for us, to the irrigation systems of Spain and Philippines, the possibility of community of popular rather than public or state or private or corporate ownership exists. The 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 Zaptista 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 Antiguan and Barbuda is owned collectively by all Barbudas and regarded as their collective heritage.

These projects, of course an art static. The commons and 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 soul shock doctrine of the hurricane that ravaged the island has opened up an opportunity for again robilious government sort of swooping and privatize the land um for the benefit of foreign companies and foreign resorts. So the Commons is not this timeless internal institution that

can't be interrupted, that's never change um. In the case in chap Us, you know, they had similar projects, similar institutions prior to colonization. Colonization ruled in and interrupted all that, and thanks to the Zappleas revolution. They were able to institute some semblance of that sort of commons institution, of that communal land um for their collective benefits. They respond to, experience conditions, to circumstance, to serve or in 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 keys studies to

illustrate her points. In the course of governing the commons, she used, of course, the existence case studies to develop sit in 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 to then use those principles to examine the common institutions that didn't work,

identified which principles were missing from the equation. But I'm talking all 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 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 access in the commons have in a clear sense of structure and characteristics of the resource system itself, whether it be through a scientific study or through generationally preserved folk knowledge as well as knowledge and a clear sense of who

is involved and withdrawn from and sustaining it. Even if you know, even in the case where the entire world has been common 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 that segment of the commons, that system, that common

pool resource needs to have a clear sense of exactly what that resource entails um, the limits of that resource, the renewability of that resource, um, 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 canna 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. Um, there's no 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 better this way, um having collective decision making power over the commons, meaning there's an institution in place that these who are drawn from the Commons are able to come together and discuss the rules of the Commons. How are they going to draw from the Commons, how are they going to deal with the Commons, how they're gonna deal with each other as they deal with the Commons,

and so on. And to afford, the idea of rules is not anti anarchists as a concept, um, just the idea that there is not you know, popular inputs and collective inputs and free association in place. Um. And so with consensus, with this institution of collective decision making power, people be able to come up with and modify the rules as it suits their situations, as it's as it

suits their shift in circumstances. Um. And of course, and this is the second principle, that they appropriation and provision rules of the Commons are compatible with local conditions. The whole ideas that do not relying on any external authorities to come up with these rules, to commit to these rules, to bind themselves to these rules, even when the temptations

to violate those rules apply. So as a practice of you know, developing community, you need to have some sense of shared norms and developing those shared norms over time regard and behavior. And of course, as in the case in almost of all societies, of course, reputation and one's reputation will play a rule. Um, if you are known to be consistently violating the Commons rules, of course they're going to be 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 comments. Just like in the case of the environment. You know, just because you can cut down all the trees in the forest, doesn't mean you're free of the consequences from cutting on 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

as there are in any other aspect of life. But of course simple norms regarding behavior or concerns about reputation may help. But you're also going to need the fourth and fifth principles established in some form effectively meant in 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 term monitoring, it's kind of spooky, right, It sounds a little bit 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 this constant, informal process of looking at and observing and collecting data on the conditions of the commons, the conditions including how people behave with the commons as well as the you know, commons themselves, the resources themselves, how much of them we have, how quickly they're being you know, renewed, that sort of thing.

And and through that process of each person, each appropriator of the commons, institutions um 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 in that centralized and hierarchical institutions have a bit of trouble doing, because when you have this horizontal common institution, you're able to look at, Okay, this is how things are going

so far, and let me we can we can now talk about it. We're constantly in this dialogue. We're all 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, but further up the pyramid ecal yes, the more power there is, as centralized institutions tend to have, but also less information because the narrowing 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 informally um to the situations as they arise. That's also why eighty percent of the planet's biodiversity is being protected by a very small percentage of indigenous people because they are on the ground. Because they are they're interact with the systems in real time.

They're able to respond directly and quickly to changes in that biodiverlity, to changes in behavioral in order to maintain

and sustain that system. Whereas you find that a lot of conservation projects, a lot of restoration projects, in environmental frustoration projects are feeling you know, I recently read an article about how a lot of these tree planting initiatives that governments have been doing these days, while you know, it gets them good, publicity gets them good, you know, social, 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 community is living by these reforestation projects, we're not involved in the process. They don't have any say in the selection of the trees. In fact, the trees aren't always even choosen in accord and with local conditions. They often isn't enough biodie felicity in terms of the trees. I mean when it comes to a forest,

and that's what people don't understand. Forests are living organism. You know, it's it has multiple layers, has multiple pasties. You just pop us at the trees down and expect things to work out. Okay, you know, um 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, legibilize, you know, these forests, these simple rules and organizations, and you cut out all the fluff, all the shrubbery, all the other plans that are competing coote and coote, you end up with a dead system, you know, to put the system that is very fragile, that is not able to respond to changes in the environments they arise 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 to the system, the buffers, what works, what doesn't. Human culturists are able to you know, these intensive systems because they are constantly monitoring coming 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 who may be tempted to take advantage of the trust presence in the group. Um. And when I say opportunistic people, I don't mean to

create this other this 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 prince will successful. Common spanagement is the practice of accountability and systems of accountability through graduated sanctions. Of course, empathy needs to maintain throughout

the process. And I don't think that every infraction must automatically responded to with sanctions. Like again, I'm not trying to do something. It's just obviously when you have a system that has and I know I'm reference to ninety for like a right fringer, but yeah, I think it's finely reference if correctly, as opposed to like someone who hasn't read it or read anything else that he wrote, Yeah,

we can take it. But you know, obviously not every situation gonna respond to its sanctions, obviously empathytion, immunity and throughout the process. Um. 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 accustomed to thinking about, but

generations still coming out and think about. With these sort of commons institutions, you can't do as the capitalists 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 that state, you know, things can't be so easy. When infractions are just you know, temporary deviations or and threatening to the overall survile 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 or in place. You know, you have the clearly defined boundaries, you have the rules of the commons established by collective decision making power over the commons, with a constant process of monitor in place, because again, the responsiveness of the people on the ground is a lot more in tune with the conditions of the commons 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 kind of human, you know, we make mistakes, we have disagreements, and it needs to be some sort of means of discussing and resolving conflict and a healthy and effectively. There are a a lot of processes in place. UM. A lot of communities, Galterian communities throughout

history have used some sort of system of mediation. UM. 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. Conflict is not always necessarily a bad thing, but it's a thing, and you ignore it and expected to go away. The seventh principle is the freedom to organize, and this principle is, you know, the basis upon which the other principles arrest. 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 states encroachments on the commons because that has been the mission of the state to further their ten

drils in every sphere of life and existence. So obviously the end goal, but one of the end goals the complete abolition of the state, and obviously the process upon which we reach those end goals would require pre figurative politics in the sense of establishing the institutions that we want in the future society in the here and now and building that dual poll capacity to provide a competitive excuse the capitalists terminology, but a competitive model that can

you know, compete with rise from and separately from eventually replace um the existing systems and that state process of social revolution. Have a video coming up on that in December. Lastly, and this does not apply to every instance of commons management, but in some cases you need the eighth and finale principle for successful commons management, and that is nested enterprises, which is, you know, basically the same principle as an

anarchist confederation. You know, if a particular community is access in a commons institution that other communities are access in, or if the commons that a group of communities are accessing are part of a larger regional commons or archpeologic commons or continental commons, then he wants to have means of collaboration bottom up of course, partom of organizations, but you know, maintain the power the local level while coordinates in these larger scaled commands and ensuring that there's a

smooth running and smooth communication between the appropriators, you know, the people involved. These principles very clearly differentiate between success and the failure cases. To reiterate, the commons and the principle 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 that 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 eyes, 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,

you know, none of the principles apply. Um. For example, in the book, eleanor Austrom references these two Turkish fisheries, the Bay of His Mirror and Boardroom, where there was severe rent diticipation 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 corn pool resources are being depleted severely and the sustainability of those comments at take.

And so with all those principles in place to ensure that doesn't happened, um, you get a situation like what's going on? But what was going on in the Bay of his Mirror? And put in the Kirin the oil irrigation project in Sri Lanka, they did have clay boundaries, that one principle in place, but the other principles were not. In Mojave, California, they did have the institution of collective choice.

They did have contact resolution mechanisms, and they did have the recognized right to organize, but the other principles are not in place, and so that institution was also a failure.

Or we can look at the case in the Mabella fishery also in Sri Lanka, where renticipation had become a very severe problem, particularly after nine Now they did have rules in place, they did have a monitoring system, but unfortunately, you know, despite having those rules, despite having you know, regulating regulating the access to the beach and the use of the beach scenes and the control of the number of nets to be used. I mean, they really did try.

It wasn't a problem of ignorance the issuers 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 an enforce the rules of the fishery. That was deprived of them, and so the institution was

not able to sustain itself in the long term. So in all these cases, you know, no more of the three design principles actually characterized any of these cases, and so they were unable to solve the problems that they faced. There of course, all sort issues where they are viable but fragile common systems where you know, they have more of the principles in place, but they still lack all

of them. So also in Sri Lanka there's 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 you know, did not have the autonomy and they do not have collect 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 exist

in successful institutions, existing failures of institutions. That does not necessarily need to limit all imagination of possibilities, but it's good to be informed as to what has worked in the past and what hasn't. We can still imagine future scenarios, next peraments 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.

More information of the Commons and also the potential of library economy. You can check out my videos on the Commons and the library economy on my channel YouTube dot com slash Aurism. You can also check out Eleanor Ostrom's book Governing the Commons, as well as a book called Eleanor Astrom's Rules for Radicals, which I haven't read yet, but I felt it was pretty good. If you like what I do, you'd like to support me, you could follow me on pitture dot com slash same true and

on Twitter dot com slash underscore, same true. That's what I happened today. It could happen here. Peace, Yeah, welcome to make it happen here. A podcast about things falling apart and then maybe kind of putting them back together again sort of. This this This is This is a special episode about the thing that happened where a 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 Louis Nacio Lula is Silva, better known as Lula, has defeated JR. Bosonaro in a absolutely terrifying squeaker of a presidential election. Um. This is like, by far the closest election that Lula there is, a former two term president of Brazil, has

ever won. Um. Part of this is a camp pain of last minute voter suppression that Bolsonaro own his supporters did, where like like basically like the Brazilian federal police started setting up like they set up fifty roadblocks to stop people in the low strongholds from voting. There's like the assaulted people. Um, it wound up not mattering and right now, as as a time of recording, which is uh one pm, one third pm Pacific on Halloween, Bolsonaro was missing in action.

There's no like, no one's seen him. The only the only thing, 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 turn and turn all all of the lights off. Yeah, he's he's missing and no nobody's seen or heard from him. Um. So by the time this episode comes out, there's like a small chance there's been a coup. There's like 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 fifty point eight percent of the vote roughly. And okay, so there's a lot of voter suppression, but even voters suppression cannot explain why Lula, who won his last elections with respectively sixty one and sixty percent of the vote, was reduced to like fifty point eight percent this time. And okay, so that this begs two questions. Who is Luis Snasia Lula da 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 who actually is Lula? Lula is born in actually his birthday is a few days ago um to a desperately poor family in Brazil's northeast um and this family moves from the northeast to what became known as the ABC region of Brazil, which is Santa Andre San Bernard sent sorry Santo Andre sal Bernard who who can't say

names of Brazil? Now? This is this is not a famous name, this is sal Bernado. Wait, are you conflating Brazil and Argentina, which are famously not the same country. Different languages is the thing. If this wasn't Spanish, I could do this and I'm gonna make it. I can make this claim here. All my pronunciations to this are based on my terrible knowledge of Spanish. The problem is Brazil famously speaks Portuguese, a language that is not Spanish.

So yeah, but okay, so there there's there's things of the ABC region because there's three cities there that are abc UM as part of this sort of mass migration, which is is popularly remembered as like this mass migration of people from the northeast to sub Hollow, But the sort of thing actually that that that's the memory of the actualities that millions of people flow into sub ho Hollow, like from all across Brazil Um. The ABC region becomes

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 everyone who writes about Brazil is like, how can we make this the US? And like god, fibida out of countries have their own realities. Yeah, and like, okay, like there is an extent to which Brazil is also like the ex slave colony thing, right, but no, like Brazil,

Bazil is its own country. Um. However, come up, the ABC region becomes the core of Brazil's massive metalworking industry. Um. In this industry is just like from the fifties of the eighties, just like purely expanding. Um. The historian J. D. French knows that the ABC is poppy relation increased by eight percent from the So Lula arrives in the middle of a veritable industrial revolution. Um, this is going to end in one of history sort of great built industrial

working classes. But he's there. That's kind of not what's happening. Or The other thing, as you mentioned bout this region is that when I say metal working, So there's the reason there's so many Detroit comparisons, is that this is this is a reason that is massively involved in Brazil's auto industry, which in this period is expanding it. This is very large. Um. I think I think I've actually talked about this in the Neo Liberalism episodes. Um a

little bit. But yeah, so Lula like leaves school in fifth grade to basically find whatever work he can in the street. And this is another sort of very famous thing that everyone talks about about Lula Abalkio, Like he has like a grade school education, and that's like sort of true, Like it is true that he never like like graduate, like you know, he never went to school past like fifth grade. Mostly. I thought we'll get to

some other stuff that he did later. Um, what happens basically is that his his mom is able to get him into this this metal this this government metal working sort of 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 you know, the people people in this there's 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 ship ton of stuff. You have to know. You have to know a bunch of tactical stuff about how metal works.

You have to know that you know, it's it's very highly skilled, very high like degree of knowledge you have to have. So you know, he he gets this kind of education. Um, and he 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 is a worker, but who's not like a metal work like one of the

sort of skilled quote unquote metal workers. Um, 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, so somelm like people who are sort of like auxiliary parts of the ruling class. And he enters, you know, he enders the sort of manufacturing boom as part of what's called the Brazilian miracle. Well, okay, so he he's there a bit before the sort of Brazilian

miracle starts. But there's this period of the militaryed katership for sakes power where they kind of like luck into

a functioning economy. Although I should I should mention this now, Um, okay, So in this period in Brazil, like inflation being good and under control is inflation is like when inflations everything is considered fine and when it goes up from it's like, oh no, we've lost control of inflation and this this kind of like this is a survivable thing because people's wages are short of indexed to um like that their index to cost of living increases to some extent, which

is the thing that like, yeah, it would never happen here. Yeah, well, 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 Cui, Lulas sees some of kind of like the old radicalism, like he he talks about like you know, like watching people like storming factories because they're on strike. Uh, the Brazilian working class does. There's a lot of fun stuff that they do.

Like they do things like okay so that everyone will show up to a protest with like a bunch of like pockets full of barbles, and when when a calvar recharge starts to just roll the all rolling barbles down the street and the person fall. It's an o G Battle of Cable Street. Yeah, yeah, my absolute favorite one.

This is just like like pure looty tune ship. Um, they do this thing where Okay, so they'll string piano wire up like between light posts and then they'll bait calvalry units the charging at them and then they run the thing and the guys will just get sucking close lock. That's so good. Yeah, that's pretty great. Horse cups You didn't in America but not no, no, no, no, well they you see them sometimes, Like I have seen some horse cops. Portland's horse cops only like stop existing a

few years ago. Yeah. Yeah. In the UK of until very recently they used them to police protest. Yeah. Yeah, there was fowenty of people getting run over by horses in the States. Yeah yeah, they still do this. Yeah, fucking sucks there. Actually, Okay, I think the most famous police horse relatest story in the US is a Philly sports fan. I think it punching a police horse. What a city. Yeah. The most famous British police horse thing

is that the horse humping the cop. Critical support to the Yeah, it's quickly copy the image into the chat so you can want to enjoy it. I'm okay, I'm glad that we've taken this episode in this direction. Oh my, holy sh it. That Oh my god, Okay, I thought it was graphic. Do you know what else will take a cop and bend it over and nope, alright, well promise that, Garrison. Here's some advertisements, and we're back with other things that won't scar my soul forever. Oh boy.

Up until sort of five there there had been a kind of left wing government in Brazil and then the military q 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 like

all the communist parties are forced underground like um. But one of the one of the things, like one of the real things that sort of like really shatters the Brazilian left is that, like the coup happens and the left, you know, the left sort of noses the cue coming, right, but they expect that when the coup happens, there's going to be strikes and like the working class is gonna fight them and they're gonna 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 start of this period of sort of like you know, this kind of like the workers movement, like nothing is happening in there's some sort of radical student groups trying to do stuff, but like I know there's a Brazilian version of sixty eight, but mostly what happens there was 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're these tiny Catholic Maoist groups who these Maoist student groups. Yeah yeah, yeah, okay, we just straight through that. It's it's not um normal, totally normal. Yeah yeah. And then you know they're trying who tried to do like drill in certainty stuff, and the army just sort of like kills them all. Um,

they're horribly destroyed. So for for almost a decade and a half, like you have a very deep politicized industrial politaria, and and Lula's part of this right like from from from like when he enters the workforce until like the late seventies, 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. I was about to talk about this. Um. Yeah,

so the Brazilian libor system. And the thing is, so this wasn't set up under this military sectatorship. 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, negotiating with the state, and so this means that like the state is setting wage rage. It's gonna 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 basically a bureaucrat and it's like really corrupt and yeah, well and and this is something like and like like a lot of people just hate them because like that, like you know, because because they are 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 that 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 source of

class conflict. And you know this, this is this is the whole sort of thing behind this because for like still had this really really built and like labor movement, they had a bunch of anarchists, like the archics tractor over the government a couple of times, maybe these huge general strikes, there's the communist parties like a real thing, and then the government tries to bring all of like you know, okay, we're gonna 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 gonna 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've ever seen. Yeah, But so okay, So the other thing, like lu Lula in this point, like it's a political right people people keep trying to talk to Hi about politics, and he's like, I just want to play soccer and light chase girls. And he talks about this like changing like it speeches a lot. But his brother, who's known as Frey Chico, is a Brazilian Communist Party miility for like his entire life and being being a PCB militant in like the

cities and seventies, this is like life threatening. Uh, the party is outlawed. Everyone is so clandestine that like fried 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 it's this, this is this, this is like this is like the level of like clandestine shit that everyone that that that like you know, the sort of

communist parties are working on under here um. But fres Chico is also like an open union activists and everyone knows he's like he's a leftist basically because you know, the even even 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 faction. UM. 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 Free Chico, like his brother just like 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 your brother, you run. You're you're 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 um from the book Lula and 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 turbulent internal politics. Finally, Lula would need to learn about the repressive dimension of working class life under 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 when he joins his union, including basically his boss and the union, is a guy named Vidal who's a very powerful union leader. Um, like you know, his brother to Like everyone thinks he's going to be this sort of like compliance like obedient fingerhead. And instead what they have done is they have created

arguably the greatest politician of the twenty first century. Um, what are the things that's important to note here is that like, okay, so, like the unions are are like fucked up, right, and everyone kind of says they're sucked up, these are still probably the most like like these are probably still the most competitive democratic collections that are happening in Brazil. Like Brazil technically has elections that 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 theydentically they technically sometimes have a civilian president. They have these sort of like parties that are kind of real, but you know, the the union actually has like there are like leftist slates, there are conservative slaves.

Like there there's actually sort of politics going on. And Lula is actually able to sort of like make his mark through through his abilities 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 it's 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 she's just

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 that you 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 their own education system, and you know, this is part of the thing that people talking about Lula is completely uneducated. Like, no, it's not like he he spends a bunch of time like in classes that like the 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 him. So he spends a bunch and this is like, you know, part of where he'd learned sort of politics and where he large political economy is like is through the through these classes the union has and he sorry. 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 his position basically like running running there 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 negotiating with government bureaucracy, and he this makes him a very very effective politician. Um, he's from Lula's politics to cutting again. But Lula also gained access to an even larger constituency at the union headquarters, a working class public sphere. Do you know how many people passed by the union daily, he asked a journalist in ninety nine, at minimum fift hundred.

Those frequenting the union did so for many reasons, often for various sorts of assistance or sistencia, which I think is yeah, like government union assistant stuff, but also to complain about work, shoot the breeze, or catch up with friends. Some union directors often arrived late to the headquarters and we're always busy when they did the Gregarius Lula, by contrast, maintained an open door policy, and his office became a gathering point form break and file workers, factory activists, and

fellow directors still linked to production. And this is everything 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 there this you know the government does is deliberately right, because it means, you know, you're creating they're they're they're they're the thing that they're trying to do, create a certain of bureacratic area between the working class and like their union. But Lula's like still really connected to what's going on the shaft 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, it becomes a very very powerful one. He who rapidly becomes the president of his union after some like Vidal, who's like his boss had 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.

Fadells like it's fine, I'm still going to be a control here, and that's not what happens you you you have just you have just given the presidency to like like a a a genuinely truly singular like political figure. Um. But but there's 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, Lula is not a communist. This 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 the 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, military would have you know, tortured and possibly executed him

like they've done with thousands of other communists. His brother Frey Chico, 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 ship

out of him and it was fucking horrific. And the fact that like every single person, like and the fact that every single fucking member of the military dictatorship was not fucking like taken out behind a shocking shed shot and had their like corpses fed to dogs. Is like genuinely one of the reasons why we're here right now.

The stuff is awful. It is a theme of the podcast. Yeah, yeah, but what to do with dictated you know, and Lula Lula and she's wife 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 his 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

to share to him. Anyways. Um, but one of the important things that happens here is his brother like under torture, like insists 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 moltitary chairship like believe this right because like the like they're you know, they have a really extensive sort of intelligence network like at this point that they've

basically like they've they've basically destroyed the Brazilian Communist Party, and they've like captured and killed most of her cadre.

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 the rest of 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 Lula has just been like, I don't care um, and like a couple of other people who's just quite 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 not like a leftist right like in 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 a kind of sort of labor leader that the more moderate fashions 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 fraud because you know it's a military tatorship, but like, like all these people suck.

It's also true that there were there were factions within the military tatorship who so there's a fashion called like the dungeon, which is like the people torturing all these people to death. There were other people in the military tatorship who are like this is really fucking ghost, 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 this sort of like authentic non communist labor movement that will like work with them the stop communism like sort of like the a fl CIA like specifically talk about this like in the in the way that the a f l C i OH does in the US work work working is in the

communist force. They they think that they can get Lula to do this, and Lula does a lot of stuff that like looks like collaboration to the sort of like surviving leftists around him. He develops like literally like personal relationships kind of friendship. It's not really friendships, but like the personal relationships and professional relationships members of the regime.

And you know, again it like it looks like he's collaborating, but that's not, 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 be like that. Because he has these personal relationships with people in the regime, it is that he's not going to get disappeared and

his people are going to get disappeared. And this had happened to a lot of even a lot of sort of other regular union activists who didn't have this kind of connection just like get vanished. And the people are able to build connections with like keep him from being like vanished and keep his trade unis and being slaughtered.

And you know, like the people in like in the military kidership like really think that like Okay, they've they've they've gained you know, like they they're they're getting an ally and defeating communism. Uh. The thing they are actually doing, uh, it's progressing their own grave Diggers UM and okay you know before yes, you know who else is creating their own g Grave Diggers Garrison U. The advertising industrial complex. Yes,

they have produced us Weakened dream unbelievable. Well in the meantime, So inside inside the New Batman game, you play as the four sidekicks after Batman UM allegedly dies. And the weirdest thing is that they because three of the side Kicks don't usually have capes. They you know, they don't do any kind of massive gliding feature for city traversal. Instead, you have a really slow, bad cycle and then you have an almost spider Man like grappling hook and it's

it locks onto anything around you. It's really confusing. Are we back? Okay? And we're back? We should we should leave in like just like two minutes of Batman talking was completely bowed. So okay. There's the ever thing about Lula just as a person is that fundamentally he's a negotiator. Like his style was almost like Biden esque in the sense of like Biden sort of beliefs like talking to everyone across the political etcetera, etcetera. Except like, okay, the

key difference here is that Lula is actually charismatic. Um hm, yeah, but like you know he will just sit there like with people across the aisle and like talk things out and negotia with them. He'll talk with employers, will talk with members of the military dictatorship. But you know there were differences that like, Okay, so Biden is like is a concert politician, right, Like when 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 who runs in the class. He's talking with random people at 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 just like incredible ability to read crowds and like Taylor message messages for them and like figure out what sort of like like what what sort of things will work with whatever person is saying. And he gains this like absolutely incredible ability to sort of charm people, and it works with people,

even on people who fucking hate him. Like there are there are like journalists who will spend literally their entire careers trying to destroy him and who. But when they asked about him, they're like, well, I mean like him with a person and he's really charming, like he's a nice guy. And but you know, so part part of what he's doing in this period this this is this is this is the late seventies um going into the earliest.

He's playing this like this very specific like game of respectability politics of like not directly criticizing the government and like so that 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 of combat inflation.

And the unions so originally no one believed them, but the Union has like 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 has been lying and that's why that the government has been lying about inflation, like how bad inflation is.

And then the I M. F in the late seventies confirms is that that that the military tatnership has been lying about how bad is inflation is by doing subsistical stuff. And this matters because they've been setting costs of living adjustments by a lower level of inflation. That that that

that was actually happening. And this pisses everyone the funk off because they're like, literally the government is robbing us, like they've been lying behad bad inflation is like like third and it's it's this is like this is like a thirty percent income drop right for these workers. And this pisses everyone the funk off. And suddenly there's these massive like protests. There were like hundreds of thousands of people, like a hundred thousand people wi 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 avoids directly criticizing the government. He has this whole thing about how like he wants togotiate directly with the employers.

He like kicks out like left to student groups. You are like trying to like distribute like communist students, you're like trying to distribute pampas 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, hard working citizens. And yeah, here's here's from the book of 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 that when it's actually 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 everyone 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, where 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 bodies. He's trying to speak, and this is like the first time he's

that are the crowd this loud? And he's nervous and people start leaving and they're doing this. One of every things I learned about this is how old, how old the crowd mike is. So they're doing this thing that becomes own as the crowd mike, where like you don't have a microphone or you can't reach every one, so each so okay, So some of the speaker says like a sentence and then each person in the crowd says a sentence and it just sort of moves back through

the crowd up from everyone repeating it. And she'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 and then and then this is like absolutely adorable moment and then he sort of like like you know, 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, refusing

an incredible speaker. He's like you know, and it's very easy. And you see writing about this at the time that are like that look at him and are like, well, this guy like this guy is literally 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 there are 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 there are like like there there there are people like walking on stage and calling him like father and saying him Mary's like it's it's fucking wild um, but you know, but like and it's and like 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 patient relationship. He's like manipulating the masses and that's not what's happening like that, that's just

just just not what's happening. Like he actually, like the union votes against him like a couple of times, like because because she's she's trying to do negotiations, right, and there's there's a there's this thing where if I'm understanding the story right, I think what happened is that he's trying to like negotiate like people coming back to works,

negotiations can continue. It's like a show of good faith or whatever, and the unions like, funck 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 they see themselves in him, and they see they see the power that he's able to sort of how many people he's around there, and they're like, oh, ship, the union is strong, Like we are strong. We can actually sort of fight back. But

it's not like a sort of client patront thing. He's it's just like he's at the head of a worker's movement that is a force in and of itself and has its own agency and capacity to act, and Lula has to like negotiate with that and like he has to sort of like rebuild their trust after he you know,

is taking a sort of more moderate line. He he eventually gets like arrested in nineteen eighty, although he gets released after like a month, and from there he gets to work founding like every important leftist organization like the last forty years. Um So in aitte eighty he's one of the people who found the Workers Party. In eighty three, he founds the CUT or to the English translation of it, it's a unified Workers 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 anyways. Like these people are losing the the the tatorship losing control. Um in the CUT like plays a huge role in how the dictatorship loses power. Um so does the PT did something that Like the PT, the PT like as a party are powerful enough that like

they were involved in drafting the constitution. He's there for the founding the land this workers movement, which is a social movement that like sees his land that's not being used in leadership, is it the workers. He's heavily involved in the campaign to start of force the military out of power and you know as a military tatorship like kind of falls apart in democracy, like kind of like fully returns to Brazil and nine he goes like full

inte electoral politics. But the problem is that like he's he's he's kind of too early for his politics. Um. He he spends like the entire nineties just like getting his ass handed to him in elections over and over again. And part of what's happening, you know, part of but part of literally what he's doing in the nineties is rebuilt. It's like he's like rebuilding the entire Latin American left, like from ground zero after the fall of the Berlin Wall Wall in the sort of like global defeated left

in the eighties. Um. He's one of the founders of the Foremost of South Paulo, which is the first of this series, a sort of like meetings of leftists in Latin America and the Caribbean, which is trying to figure out like okay, like hey, what what what is socialism now that like the Berlin Wall is down and everything is sort of going to ship and in that's a

really bleak prospect. Like neoliberalism is completely ascended. Nationalism has destroyed socialism, Like every sort of former social states following apart, like capitalist are running rapping across the globe, like literally, like entire communist parties are just like disbanding and all

of the sort of cadre are becoming liberals. But you know, as the nineties go on and people actually have to sort of like live under this, they increasingly realize say, it sucks ass and that I you know what what living under Nail Elizabism means is like I m F structural adjustments and like like the economy, like there there's there's the Asian market collapse. There's a bunch of other

market collapses. And you know, as after the epetits to sort of go on the like the first like part of the left to really go on the offensive after their uprising in the left kind of starts to put usself back together. And this left, like I I think, like this version of left 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 one of their big slogans is another world as Possible, which is sort of like the anti, like the anti it's a response to like thatchers there is no alternative. It's 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, and Lula is there for like all of it, Like after Seattle, he helped after the Battle of Seattle, like he helps found the World Social Forum, which is just like giant meeting place for like internet

social movements. Um. And you know, and so you know, through through this whole period, like the Left is sort of gathering is strength everywhere like well okay in Latin America. And also like I mean, it isn't a lot of places right like in India. Um, it's like Indonesia, there's always in the US, although the US has this problem that the lefton happens and yeah that's a ship show. Yeah, it's amazing how that this movement existed almost everywhere else

but not to my knowledge is as significantly here. Yeah, well, I mean we we had we we had Seattle, right, but then when that levn't happened, that the unions like pulled out of doing any direct action ship and then kind everything kind of got eight by the the anti war movement, which and then and then the Green Scare. Yeah, then that led to ad Busters doing and the stuff that occupied Wall Street and then yeah, and that's 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 there under And this is the sort of iron of this and we'll get you next episode, is that, like you could, there's a good argument that the place that that politics actually died was in Brazil when the Workers Party fucking like tear gas and rubber bulleted the absolute ship out of a bunch of protesters who had

been who were like the Brazilian wave of sort of like that series of protests, and they crushed the ship out of them. It is horrible, Like this is one of this is like one of like my foundationals and political memories is like fucking tanks rolling down the street, people shooting rubber bullets at people like seven year olds getting tear gassed. It is a it is a fucking ship show. But and and two thousand too, like you know, it's not that we have we haven't gotten there yet.

Like even the sort of like most cynical trotsky I like can't imagine the fucking pig rolling tanks through the favelas, which is what they're gonna be doing in twelve years. And Britain we had that was when I can't requit re member when Tony Black there's nightty seven, But like the British Tony Black, right like represented this other vision for the last well and everything is like people like

like one of the thoset everything. That's like people talk about Obama as being like the end of the same wave, except Obama is sort of like to like even more so than any of the other politicians. What we're talking about is sort of like recuperation of this right, Like he's the guy who takes out energy and is like yeah, and and and okay, so we're we're gonna get into like the negative side of all of this ship 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, Okay, So there's another part of this that like doesn't get talked about that much, which is that in the nearly two thousand's in Latin America, it's not just that like the left is winning elections, Like there are open revolutions going on, Like I mean, there's there's

there's a bunch of them. There's a like like arguably like the last communist revolution like ever happens in uh like the last sort of like the last gas of the classical workers whom that happens in Argentina in twous one, there's this huge revolt against the I M F and Austarian 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 metic production. People occupy factories in Bosnian has A Go VI and like fourteen. But like by that point, like like those guys are occupying factories and then having like occupy meetings in them, they're not like attempting to sort of like sees production. Yeah, but you know, like like these there's are real revolutions, right, Like there's there's there's there's a coup against Hugo Travis

that gets overturned by another popular revolution. Um there's the water and gas wars in Bolivia, which culminate in like literally deep like the capital is like entirely blockaded off from the rest of the country and surrounded by roadblocks and the like five. The government is like fucking imploding.

The military has fallen apart, like you know, like they like and this this is this is this is the sort of chain of events that brings even rallies into power, but like they very nearly destroyed the entire believing governments. The cycle sort of ends with the Wahaka uprising in two thousand and six. Were like like the people of Wahaka just fucking take the city and hold it for like like a few months and like running through the democratic assemblies and then like the army shows up and

they get yeah. But like you know, like like there there is a point like that that was like I think, like like in my lifetime, like the workers of a city fucking just took it over. This this stuff that like you know, like I think now we're we kind of like we have problems, Like I think most people have 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

I did a lot of it. I'm not sure I lived in Venezuela for some of this time briefly, but it felt very possible in a way that like it probably hasn't since, right, Like it was fast slating to see, like, and the cooperation between those countries was very real, right, Like obviously Cuban Cuban Cuban doctors are sucking everywhere, right if you travel resource saying there, But it was fascinating to see like people from here coming here and they think they had that Sal Paolo Forum right where they

would where these ideas would be exchanged and it Yeah, and that was very formative for me. A genuinely felt like it was possible for something as a result of this, like Google ish I m F policy that we'd had

for the previous twenty years. People like, no, funk this, We're doing it our way and yet didn't tell Okay, but this is this is this is what's really weird about Lula, because Lula is running into dozen too, and he's watching all of this happen, and his strategy, his response to this is basically the analysis because okay, so she spent the entire nineties lose running letters campaign and losing right, and his strategy in two dozen two is he's going to move the PT the Workers Party to

the right, both of hers a messaging end 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 why why why why are they sort of doing this. There's a few reasons.

Partially it's because Lula has been like losing elections and being like, okay, we have to do something different. Partially it's because the PC is a product of the collapse of like, okay, the PT like in the two thousands, like the base that had formed that party is basically collapsed, right that the PT is like it it's core constituencies

are sort of like leftist groups. There's like like left wing Catholic groups and the sort of like the giant sort of like trade union stuff that, like the giant workers troupment that Lula is a part of, but but he doesn't too, Like 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 what we're gonna talking 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 and the collapse and sort of Brazil's industrial economy. And the product of this is that with without its sort of social basis, like Lula, KU's losing elections. So

he goes, okay, so it's solution to this. And the PC 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've they've you know, they're 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 broughten their appeal. And so like he promises, like openly gives us like speech about how he's not going to do like a rupture with the economy, which is what those party of compaigning on because you know, the ptr leftist right, the whole point of another world is possible is we don't have to deliver a capitalist anymore. Lula is like no, no, no, no, no, guys, hold on, hold on, I did I didn't mean that, like,

we're not gonna do a rupture. And instead what Lula does is pledges to and like stays in the Brazil's commitments to the i m F, including like fucking insane ship like maintaining primary budget surpluses, which is nuts, and you know, and he instead of like yeah, yeah, he stays in the end. And you know, so Argentina famously, like in Argentina, solution to the sort of uprisings that are happening is that they default on our death in the I m F. And they're like fuck, you we're

not paying, and Lula's like, now we're paying. Like it's fine, We'll just keep paying it. And like the PT itself is like what the funk 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 is just like, well, okay, we need we need to take power, we need to do this, take power, and so we does. And weirdly, in the middle of this cycle, 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 capitalist state by winning an election, which is that if you are in control of the government, right, if you 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. An 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 will get piste off because when capitalists don't make more money, they start firing people and be the bourgeoisie who only ever grudgingly accepts the left is 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 solution to this problem that these they sort of like pink tie governments come to is basically to let a faction of the sort of national portions either sort of national capitalist class of people who are like capitalists domestically like 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 buying you are buying a section of the of the ruling class off right. You are giving them ass to state contracts. You're doing state investments in infrastructure that helps them like expand things like mining, so they can you know, take some of the profits from it. You're giving them preferential access to

government contracts and change, we sort of supporting you. And there's a lot of ways this can look like the m A s and Bolivia, for example, starts bringing these elits directly into the party with the sort of developmentalist faction UM. In Brazil, it looks like an ally into something called the Centro, which is like crow, sorry, my Portuguese is not good, um, which is this like this sort of like every present force in Brazilian politics, which

is like the corruption faction. It's like this this series of sort of parties that are like kind of loosely knit, you kind of vote together, but you don't like they don't their parties nominally 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 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 gonna get you next episode. Um, but will 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 these social welfare programs for the

Brazilian working class. And this has a massive impact, right Like this list something like twenty 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, it's a's also with pointing out that Lula, who is white, spends a fucking ship ton of time fighting like fighting against racism and fighting for educational job opportunities for black people, even though okay, there's like an asterisk next to that that has to do with the police. That yeah, it's it's fucking oh boy, it is worse than you can possibly imagine. Um, who

you know, like he's trying to end hunger. He has this very famous program called the Bosa Familia, which is basically like if you're pouring off and you agree to send your kids to school and get the vaccinating, like the government will just give you money. And you know there's also a Mike Roland part of this, which is my dot dot dot. Uh, this won't go oh yeah, nothing bad will happen from the Brazilian government attempting to get a bunch of people to take micro loans. Um, this,

this does not lead us into fascism at all. But you know, okay, like this works, right, Lula is able to grow the economy, like Brazil's economic growth this periods like seven percent, which is sucking nuts, like year on year. Um he leaves office, was I've seen it, ultimately said, it's like an eighty five or ninety rating. He's unbelievably popular and you know, so every 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 a sucessful social democratic party and that they've lifted amongst 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 and you know, like 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 opportunity

too themsels the first time ever. And it's a successful capitalist government too, because again seven percent year round your 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 fascist president going into

like hiding. And so next episodes, you know, Mark, I've been to I've been talking about grave diggers sort of this episode right there's there's a famous part of the Communist manifesto Ory Talks where where Marks talks about like capital like capitals abroducing its own grave diggers. And capitalism has never done that, right like like to to to this day right now, capitalism has as yet to produce his own grave diggers. Social democracy has Bruce's own grave diggers.

And every single fucking country anyone's ever done it. And the next episode, in next episode, we're going to watch the pt Bruce's own grave diggers, and we're going to watch the attempt to bury Louise and Nascia, Lula da Silva and the rest of the Brazilian working class of live. Oh good, you going to do a Bolsonara update because he's apparently left the building. Oh shit, okay, yeah, Bolsonara upweate Bolsonara has left the building. Hold on breaking breaking news.

He left the palace finally, Yeah, in a convoy of black SUVs. Ope, he's expected to break the silence. Yeah, so I'm looking at Benjamin Fogel, who's pretty good on this. Yeah, he's expected to break the silence, but not to congratulate Lula on winning. Jesus Christ, is I have lost? Good bye? Okay? So yeah, there might be a if. I don't know what we're gonna do, if there's a coup in between in between this episode and the next episode, hopefully not.

I don't know. I mean, I want one thing that, like I will say and that I think we were gonn talking a bit about next episode. Is it like part of what's happening right now that's very important is

that Biden is an office in the US. And mean, Okay, So the Brazilian military is a long history of doing cous, but usually when they're doing coups, they're doing cous with the backing of the US government and Biden like just on a personal level fucking hates Bulsonaro, and there is a there was 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 vast 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 as much of an impact on like the politics of an entire country is nuts. And this happened in the other direction for a while, right, Like it's I guess not personally, just the personal inclination

of the president in that case. Yeah, well there's weird things here too, because like, like Lulu was reirdly friendly with it with Bush, which I think is why part of why he never liked, never tried to cut him, who called him the devil? Yeah because friends, Right, But Travis gives the speech about how like everyone has the road like at the at the social form gives how everyone's existing in their own like conditions. So you can't expect, like, you know, you can't expect Lula to be Travis, you

can't expect Chaves to be Castro like stuff like that. Yeah, but it's it's weird. Hopefully Willsonarow fucking leaves office. If not, I don't know. But either way, I don't know. Things are the history of Brazil dream this period is also kind of bleak, but after this period is way the funk bleaker. So yeah, we're gonna talk about that tomorrow,

and yeah, we'll update you. If there is a couph God is dead and the woke left have killed him, Welcome to it could happen here the podcast where we celebrate the destruction of JayR Bolsonaro and the concept of Christianity and the human soul, both of which happened recently in Brazil. As as far as I understand from skimming the news on Twitter. Um, how's everybody else doing today? Utterly exhausted? But you know, such as such as such as such as the world without Christ 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? We are talking more about the Brazilian elections. I guess we should start with our with our perennial update of about what seems to be happening there right now. So okay, currently is what eleven am specific time recording this on? Yeah that sounds right, Yeah, yeah that one. So as of right now, Bolson like still so he

he's appeared, but he still hasn't conceded the election. Um hasn't. Yeah, And okay, so the other thing that's been going on is that there's been Okay, one of the sort of perennial Boston Bolson row 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 this before. He's been

setting up 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 blockades. I've seen videos of some that involve several dozen vehicles. Yeah, I mean, they have a lot

of vehicles, like as as the thing. Okay, so the Supreme Court has ordered the police to like clear the barricades, and espect I can tell they're kind of just getting their asses kicked, like they're not really resisting like particularly hard. And so I 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. Like this is how like the against end started. For example, if both Signaro and his in the military don't both go in a dent right now, basically, um than than what these trekkers are doing will not be it much more than like an annoyance. You know. It's the same thing as with with January six. 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 Capitol police and ship. Yeah, and and there's an aspect I think to a sort of important of like so these are like Bolson Row like this whole sort of like Trucker's blockade thing like this has been going on in various forms for like the entire time he's been in office, and like he sort of turned them into these motorcides that he would do. But they're really weird in that. Like, Okay, so if they are blocking roads, but a lot of it is kind of pure spectacle.

At there's this whole wave of sort of right wing candidates like like basically but there's there's a whole wings with the right wing politicians who like got their start from like doing Instagram videos from like or like TikTok's like ship like whatever, like 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 and this is happening. Um, it's also not good that the police was like initially cooperating with them, and that the police set up their own roadblocks to some people 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 has won 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 and voting, Well, this his harm reduction, right, because if Trump had been in office, he would have backed Bolson Yarrow and Lula would be in prison again, and uh, there would be absolutely no hope for stemming the destruction of the rainforest. Not that things could still be a nightmare. And 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 ship. It should be fair. The administration I don't think was trying to put Bosonari own power. They were trying to put the neelible rules in power. But they definitely we'll get into that next episode. But they definitely 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 indibly low bar, because is Barack Obama led directly to Donald Trump for a variety of reasons. There you are, this is 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 gonna be talking about a bunch of funked up stuff about Lula Um, 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 rainforest being destroyed at the rate it's being destroyed as an existential, existential threat to all life on Earth, and Lula has a proven track record of reducing defores station in the Amazon, So like what I like, I don't care that he has a bad take on you. I just don't like it. It doesn't matter really, Yeah, yeah, I like I saw, I saw I saw articles that were like Lula like supports democracy

in Brazil but supports authoritarianism Abra. It's like, I guys, shut up, like holy shit, Jesus Christ, like I can I if I go back to two tho, like seventeen, I can find all of you like writing pulled fucking probos and now our articles, so like shut up. So okay, So let's get to how everything went to ship. So the last episode we sort of left the pt like writing high. Lula's out with like a like approve of rating. He's done like an economic miracle. He's pulled one of

people out of poverty. I And you know, if things that continued like that, we wouldn't be here right now. So obviously something happens. And to understand what happens, unfortunately, we have to do some materialism. Um 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 my love. Crimes against humanity. Yeah, yeah, there it's there. There are

lots of criming. They're there. It's oh boy, I'm already hard. Wait, maybe I shouldn't have said it that way, moving, moving swiftly on. So okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna quote here from one of the sort of more famous marks quotes for mation through beare uh. 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 do. 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 two thousand two, 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 something called the commodity boom um. A commodity boom broadly is just like it's a large spike across the board in the prices of commodities over a sort of period of time. We're we're using this sort of like mainstream bourgeois definition of commodity, which is like primary commodities and it's stuff you can like pick up off the ground, dig up or harvest. So it's things like soybeans, like copper, iron, horses, lead, um, condoms. Yes,

we understand what commodities are. Yes, the look brazil condom tree. I don't know, I got nothing. So okay, Lula, Lula like takes office and leaves power like almost exactly perfectly to take to take advantage of the peak of the commodity boom. Right, Lula comes into power. Well, okay, so you wouldn't see us in two election he takes obviously

ausn't three. Um the commodity boom, according to a Cambridge to Cambridge is a handbook of primary commodities in the global economy, took off a two thousand four and ended in about two thousand fourteen. But it's slowing by ten just eleven ish and Lula exits office and two doesn't tend 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 I Okay, so the way I think it works, and I could be wrong about this, but I'm 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 Bolson Naro, but that is a very silly way to do it. Yeah. Well, and 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. But 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 tied leaders in the same position. Like this is actually how even Morallies originally gets in trouble, is that he tries to seek a third term and Lula it's just like not I'm out, I'm fuck it, like, which is which is good. Yeah, I mean it kind of like on the one hand and sore in theoretical terms, this is sort of like good for Brazilian democracy, etcetera, etcetera.

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 it. But you know, okay, so like the but the reason that he's able to sort of like you know, like if he if he if like if the constitution had allow him to run for a third term, he would

have just like like he would have clabbored everyone. There's there's just not even like any remote competition to him. And the reason is able to do this again, it's like boom, guy he got he got like ten percent less of the vote this time. I mean, yeah, but what was that? Yeah, Okay, like this election was like really close. You talk about this most recent one back then? Yeah, yeah, lu Lula back then like literally unstoppable political, very very

popular at this point. Yeah. But but this is because of the commodity boom, and we need to in order to understand what is going to happen to the PT, we need to understand why the commodity will happen 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 single most important cause, UM, for us, and I think generally 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 two thousands, um. And I mean when I say is sky rockey and growth like we are talking like double digit GDP increases every year.

This is when they have that Olympics where they have all the drummers, and you have that Newsweek article about how scary China is. Maybe it's um, yes, and and you know, and the sort of the massive increase industrial production like they are the CCP is like like Chinese industrializing on a scale that is I think like almost here that you want 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 she has in eight the Chinese economy starts to slow and sort of in response to this, and she does nine, the CCP does like one of the largest stimulus projects ever and they spend four trillion R and B on like infrastructure and welfare programs to

stave off a recession. And 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 two ten every single year well okay, I excluding the weird rebound stuff in one, but like like every every single year, like youar on your 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, what happens but when that you know isn't true? Um, but but you know, okay, so when in the two in the two thousand's like this, this is great. These are the sort of material conditions

that make loopless like politics possible. Right, you have enormous economic growth and it bring and this economic growth is happening in sectors, like in a very important sectors to presuli an economy to the extent that is 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 of the pt S base, right,

which that they have they have to, like, they have to keep the economy running, so they have they have to pay off a bunch of sort of like incredibly corrupt dudes, and also just sort of like Brazilian capitalists, they also are trying to sort of dough the welfare programs. But you know, the commodity 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 course of the dozen tends. 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 like that. That is an enormously important, uh sort of like like element of this entire story. And there's all 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 and the Global Economy specifically notes quote Brazil significance and coffee, cotton, iron ore, sugar, and tobacco, and Chile has a dominant

exporter of coffee. So okay, Brazil exports like eleven percent of the world's cotton, twenty percent of the world's iron oreft of its coffee, it's sugar, and eighteen percent of it's tobacco um and also has an enormous cattle industry, has got like a bunch of soybean farming, which is actually really important because it turns out as trying to get it turns people into into into soy boys. Yeah. It also makes soy sauce, which is are are very

important for it. I mean more importantly are reserves of of beta coc energy would be disastrously low if if we didn't have Brazilian so So thank you JayR. Bolsaaro 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.

But like, okay, so like you just thinking, if you know anything about sugar, coffee, cottinent tobacco, you know those are slavery crops, and you know, like these are these are like the primary exports of a plantation economy, and the people who run those kind of like like economies, the people who are like those plantation owners or like the scariest people who have ever lived anywhere, like at

any time on Earth. And you know, in Brazil, these people have been in power for five years and unfortunately this is like a big part of what sort of los economic miracle is resting on and and and this this isn't really like a base that produce of socialism, like if your economic base is relying on these like unbelievably psychotic racist like planter oligarchs, like you're economic based 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 some of them, I guess art fascism just directly so true. Yeah, yeah, the Gold the Gold people probably would be would be the main example of the UM. But we also are sponsored by big fascism dot org. Calm, goshh it, 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 is happy, Chris. Why don't you continue talking

about Lula? Yeah, so speaking of fascism, but doo doo, doo do do, I was doing a yeah not not not well, this is going great. It's hard to hard to We'll we'll have Daniel fix that up in post. Yeah. Okay, So, so speaking of creating fascism yet, let's talk about that time Lulu invaded Haiti. Al Right, well, okay, to be fair whoms among us hasn't invaded Haiti. This is true. That's true. I've never InVID Haiti. However, the US and Canada also and the UK that is more what I

was saying. Okay, like it's yeah, so okay. So in two thousand four, a CIA backed coup, I said, Haiti's democratically elected leftist presidents Jane bachid aristide and initially okay, So the initial sort of occupation force a sent in by the U N 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. Because when I think about who can

make Haiti stable, it's France in the United States. Yeah, partners stability and Canada. Now glad you guys, are you know, getting getting involved in in your big brothers uh crimes against humanity? 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

horses over the water, garrison built the land bridge. Yeah you know, okay, So but 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 it's just the US, but there's also a French part of it, like literally weird fucking sausage soup on their damn French fries. Like like the optics of these people just militarily occupying Haiti is really bad. Um, so okay, you want to trying to

figure out like a permanent force. And initially Lula like opposes Brazil getting involved in this, which is good, but that would make sense when I think about change, When I think about whether or not Brazil should be involved in places, Haiti would not be the top of my list.

This is always 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 their existence to Haiti over and over and over again, like sending them troops and ships and weapons, and then every single one of these countries are like, ah, fuck

you Haiti. So Lula like it's basically Lola becomes convinced that like this is this is like his big opportunity to like build the influence of Brazil and 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 utterly impronounceable acronym minished or something. God damn it, guys, 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 is currently on the UN Security Council, you will see how this went, which is to say, it did not work and ship

starts going horrifically badly almost immediately. Um basically like at the outside of the occupation, Brazilian chiefs and Haiti launched an attack on a quote gang leader. And note, by the way here the terminology that he's used to describe this operation and the people, the people that the fighting is exactly the same way as the paramilitary forces in Haiti are described like right now by the U S and the u N. As the US tries to stage another invasion, this time with the backing of Mexico is

nominally leftist president. A'm low so uh yeah, real sort of legacy of people who Americans think are leftists doing imperialism and Haiti. Good job, everyone, well everybody does a little bit of imperialism and Haiti, you know, okay, as a treat I mean, this is the thing, right right, every every single country in Latin America is bound and determined to prove that you actually cannot do I contrary to contrary 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 it's in the contract here, okay. And so they they the the un the sort of light And by the way, I should point out that the u N Force is commanded by a Brazilian general, like the entire basically wants the Brazilians take over the It's commanded

by Brazilian generals the entire time. Um, and they seem nice, yeah, okay, So they go after this guy and they fired twenty two thousand rounds of ammunition into basically just like our apartment buildings. UM. To this day, nobody knows how many people they killed, but from my winners reports, we know they killed babies, they killed children, they killed pregnant women. It is it is Vietnam ship. It is absolutely awful. Um. Augusta Helano, who I guess the Heleno, I don't know

how us name. He's the guy who leads this operation. Becomes the head of Bolsonnaro's Institutional Security Bureau. Um here here, here's a headline from PODA three sixty from last week. Quote. It is not possible to admit the return of the Red Gang, says Hellano. And by the Red Gang he means Lula. He's calling Lula communist. And this is fine and good from a guy who again is the head of the Institutional Security Bureau. Um. All right, this guy

like sucks so much. Um. When you were retiring two thousand eleven, Helano defended this is from Bruter's And when he retired in two thousand eleven, Helano defended Brazil's sixty four military dictatorship as a bulwark against the communist quoted the communization of the country and Okay, so like we we can say that as as much as sort of Brazil's like fascism his home grown, and this is absolutely true, they're also just like eating the assend if you pose boomerang,

because all of the fascism that they're about to do is exported Dehiti before it comes back. Um, here's some wriuters. This is talking about Bolsonaro's cabinet, his proposed his proposed defense minister, Former General Fernando Alvarezi Silva, served under Helano as a as an operations chief. Bolsonardo's incoming infrastructure minister, Tarcisio free TOAs was a senior UN military engineer in Haiti,

arriving shortly after Hellano left in two thousand five. Retired General Carlos Alberto does Santa Cruz, Brazil's next government minister, led UN troops in the Caribbean nation two seven. All of those guys, by the way that this was written before the election, Um, all of those guys took office, uh to Fully two of of Bolsonaro's secretaries of government were part of this occupation. So yeah, this this obviously it went great for Lula, Like yeah, okay, a good job.

You you you you sent to logic colonial troops to occupy Haiti and then all of the generals came home and we're like, let's fucking do fascism here too. Yeah. So in this episode, which we're talking a lot about sort of the Brazilian fascism because you know, this is a britil episode, 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 you puy in the

country with troops. Like there's there's this whole thing where like 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 an 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 and drones too. By the way, this is this is where this is where the UN learns how

to do drone warfare. Um. The everything is happening here is this is this occupation is where the UN starts to like fight quote like hybrid wars for the first time, you know, the like the wars that they're that they're doing these sort of peacekeeping operations quote unquote, Uh, they're starting they starting to do kind of insurgency ship where like they animate can be mixed in with the population, and you know that they kill a ship ton of people.

There is rampant rape and sexual assault because it turns out that 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 Shent seventeen, they just like leave a ship ton of fither of those babies behind because the people who you know, did all this ship like fuck it, We're just gonna leave,

like leave the children behind. Um, I think most famously. Okay, so there's there's a giant earthquake in Haiti and justn't ten 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 contisition from Nepaul. And the results of this is that definitely Haiti seems

like a place Nepalese soldiers. This is. This is, by the way, like this this is like the new revolutionary government in Nepal that is like finally defeated the monarchy after like god decades. 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 it wasn't just the British? What if every one was sending Nepolie shock troops and

to crack down on popular insurgencies. Well, and you know, and the thing that the thing that particularly goes wrong with the Nepolice troops is that the Nepolice troop would bring cholerade to Haiti. And okay, well again, who hasn't you know? Okay, there's the thing, the defeat of cholerade.

This is like one of the few genu Wined victories we have had over sort of like like the last two years over the forces that have caused like human misery and suffering for like this time of memorial is that we defeated cholera and then we brought it back the fucking you had occupation brings like this is the this is the first lower scale color outbreak in modern times, UM eight hundred thousandations get color results. Christ, Yeah, it's

it's not hard to not spread cholera. Yeah, we success, 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 SPA in Vietnam now, like we create a cholera epidemic in Afghanistan. Ad Right, it is not hard to not create a cholera epidemic to be to be fair, the s the Saudis have managed to create one and create one in Yemen now too, but

that's probably worse than this one. But that more just reinforces my point that most imperialist occupations are able to not cause epidemics. It's hard and okay, you know, and and obviously right like, okay, you you've now created your colonial army. The colonial army is gonna come home and literally these same troops go back to Brazil and launch a war in the favelas um like like under under under Joba Russo's PT Like the fucking army is literally

occupying the favillas. And you know this is all part of the PATS like massive campaign to sort of buy weapons and modernize the army, which is you know, and by like, I I think currently they're involved in like okay, okay, I I'm not entirely sure about my dates on this. I I'm tirely sure if they're if they're currently involved in nine UNPC co operations you sixteen, but there are like there are there are I Brazilian troops like all

over the world. I still doing this bullshit. And you know, again 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 Bulson in power. So you know this is some I this is some fucking enormous like creating your own grave diggers ship. Okay, So okay, well we've now we've now gotten through one of the sort of sets of grave diggers the PTS

building for themselves, um. But also back in back in Brazil, things are also like you know, not going great for them, which and the way that this is specifically not going great is that like even even you know, in the hour of triumph, triumph of the Workers Party, right Lula Sendent, etcetera, etcetera, there is a massive fissure opening under the feet of

the Brazilian left. And that fisher is the gig economy. Um. We we have talked like literally ad nauseum on this show about how the economy is bad for workers, um, for for our purposes. The thing that's kind of important here is that doing this kind of gig work right, like becoming an independent like an independent contractor, um, it has a profound social and political effect, and it creates

a sort of profound social political animization, right. It breaks down the sort of social bonds that like built the workers who have been in the PT and transport 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 like concrete mass social entities who

can like take collective action. You get these neo liberal subjects who are incredibly atomized, incredibly isolated and vulnerable to sort of like, you know, fascist projects that promise like community and unity, like this new organic hall and you know, get for bulcenario draws support from oh wait, it's a

it's a newly evangelical section of the working class. Um And and to to be clear here, the informal sector of Brazil has always been massive, but the way the PC runs their welfare programs makes everything just exponentially worse. Um We talked about this a bit last episode, but one of the big things that the PC'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, infirmly like sort of like like ingrained vast sections of Brazilian workers into

the banking system and tournament to 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 grave figgures that I've seen since like a military dictatorship cooperating with Lulu in the first place, this is a terrible idea. But you know, okay, so I I think I think I think it's worth asking, like, why is the PT doing this?

Ship right? Like this is this is something that is like otherwise absolutely incomprehensible. Um And the answer is that the PC was never quite the party that people think it is. Um Here here is from a Brazilian anarchist writing and crime think. The rulers linked to the realization of mega events cheaply re political rewards for FIFA and its corporate crony is not coincidentally the same companies that

finance the electoral campaigns of the PT. The benefits were financial profits stretched into the billions, under written by public resources, and guaranteed by police oppression. The PC could not have done this alone. It was the party that received the largest total of private donations in recent years seventy millions

dozen thirteen. Well other parties like the PSDB, the Social Democratic Party and PMDB Party of Democratic Movement, the biggest and oldest party in Brazil, mostly center right conservative politicians, only managed forty six million dollars altogether. In two thousand fourteen, the year of Dilma Russo's re election, the PT received forty seven million dollars some contractors facing lawsuits and investigations. While the PMDB got thirty eight million, the ps dB

got twenty eight million. This demonstrates the symbiosis between the Workers Party and those who control the flow of capital 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 was the PC really doing here, right, like why okay, why are they doing micro loans? Why

are they taking all of this money? Um? And there's a really really good pair of articles from a Brazilian group called Bilitants in the Fog that was published at ill Will called Work and Revolt in Brazil's dead Ends. And I'm going to read from some of it. A bank accounts, a smartphone with access to the internet, and a profile in an app. The means to collect emergency aid, which is emergency aid is um. Part of this is

talking about Bosonaro stuff. So I Bolsonaro implements this policy called emergency A which is like it's it's it's kind of the equivalent of like the U S S I like the stimulus checks that we got, but slightly difference. But the means required to collect emergency aid or are the same required to create an account for Uber, a sign 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 um PT like workers Party cash transfer program that we talked about last episode. Chouse dimensions were small in the face of fcial aid program. The the objective of forming

a unified workplace more deeply subjugated to capitalist relations. The quote bank ification promoted by the program contributed to the expanding contributed to expanding the reach of micro credit systems, a process of financialization of informality, which was deepened in re some years with the dissemination of increasingly agile and easy payment terminals and electronic payment systems such as picks at tax Free, a quicker and tax free money transfer method.

The phenomenon reached unprecedented intensity due to the Emergency A. The state owned bank Taxia Economic and Federal absorbed thirty million customers in ten days, and it was what was possibly the fastest bankification process of history, thus reaching a record profit in two 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 old. Okay, this is a Portuguese word that oh, boy, via carro, which is like getting by, which is this 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 Kinzian distributive model, and more on expanding their investment capacity, financing the acquisition of work instruments and quote self valuing their human capital.

Enthusiasts of such programs claim that financeial 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 academical named Ludmilla Abilio is Okay, what's happening here is is the real subsumption of the formal economy, which okay, so like what what what does

that mean? We need to take a step back and do like a little bit more marks. So Marx makes this distinction between what he calls formal and real subsumption. Subsumption is this like the 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 foremost 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 not like a wage worker, right, And you know, in in in this phase, right, capitalism has entered induced fhere, 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 of the market, but the actual process of production, which is like, okay, so like how a peasant is like how how how you your former peasant new agriculture worker like grows their crops and what crops they grow, and like when they decide to work in In this first stage, this is still

the peasant's choice. Um that ends with real subsumption where all control over the workplace that like workers had had is completely destroyed. And you're just you know, okay, this this is this is what like we think of as a regular job, right We're like, okay, the way the job works as your boss sells you want to do I your your entire labor process 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 of the past few decades in Brazil. It's a real subsumption, right like and and you know what like it stuff that had formerly been you know, like people taking wage labor, but the sort of structure of how people do the jobs that they're doing, right, was still up to them. Uh,

this has been ending. And the way it's been ending is through basically the degree of control offered but to employers by apps like uber of like yeah, the control of 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 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 big 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. In return to the twentieth century, where you have these guys who act as like private recruiting companies and foremen for workers who okay, so you go to this place, right, These people are like, okay, I will give you a job,

and they negotiate. There are the people who negotiate directly with the company and take 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 hands, you have all of the bad parts of a regular job, which there's a guy who tells you what to do, and if you don't 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 legal protections that like workers with formal contracts have. And you know, the 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 podcasting the American working class now now yeah, okay, here's sucking ads. Ah, we're back. Wow. I for one think everything's gonna be fine. The fact that Lula won this resounding victory over j R. Bolsonaro by by nearly a whole percentage point is going to mean none of these problems that you're talking about. Are everything's again yea, nope? And you know, okay, so, speaking speaking of reasons why

this will not be a problem. Again 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 them form ourselves where like you know, 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 if you show up to assemblies, you can 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 ship show. And and this whole process sort of leads to the hollowing

out of the Brazilian left. And you know, and and and as as as as the left is sort of like being sort of like torn apart from the inside out, and and as you get into sort of like two eleven and twelve dozen thirteen is the afrezilian E comonomy begins to slow. You get Brazil's version of the sort of like movement of the squares like two thirteen uprisings, which is going to be waged against a hostile all okay,

a pretty hostile PT governments. Like there there's a sort of public show by delmar roussoft like, yeah, I know, 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 three million people in the street. Um. The sort of conventional narrative about what happened here is that so the protests started off leftists, right, but then the leftists get run out as as the protest sort of keep going by these sort of like foe a political like conservative nationalists that like take them over 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 this sort of like anti corruption crusade against PT. And it's the PT against the LaRussa 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 the impeachment campaign like next episode. But there's more going on here. And the more going on here

is that she isn't thirteen. There are massive protests, like eight hundred thousand people, um protest a Confederation Cup, which is which is like the soccer tournament hosted by like that that that's present, Like it's one of the things

that precedes the World Cup. I don't know. I'm not a soccer nowher, but yeah, and there's the massive proaests against them, and they are just unbelievably brutally suppressed, Like fifty thousand cops are sent out to like stop this ship and they beat the absolute ship 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 we are famili you with the American police, right, Like, if you're listening to the show, odds are decently good. You have seen them beat your friends, your bloody polpe. You have seen them taste the parents of children locked into

building with the mass shooter. You have seen them slaughter men, women, and children in the street for no other reason than they can because they're a fascist des squad fused with organized crime outfits funded by putting guns to the heads of the American working class air descendants of slave catchers, working each and every day to keep the American racial hierarchy firmly intact. Okay, we can 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 that they have you've never watched Law and Order, s VU, you're missing out on all of the good law and order. Uh that is that the one with chick And I honestly don't know. There's like forty different Law and Order shows. It's impossible to keep track of them, but there is that. There is that one goth chick 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 we know how bad the US police are. Um, I'm gonna read this from the l A Times quote, Brazilian cops kill at nine times the rate of US law enforcement. Nine times. That's pretty bad. Yeah, you know, and I think it's worth pointing out here that Brazil was the last country in this hemisphere to evolve slavery.

Like they abolished it like twenty years after the fucking US 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 with the American police, right, the murder dial goes up to eleven. With the Brazilian police, that murder dial goes up to And that's where they've pranked it to. Here,

here's some crime think. In two thousand fourteen, Brazil's prison population became the third largest in the world, with five hundred and seventy thousand prisoners, just like six hundred something

thousand prisoners today, most of whom are black. During the PT administration, this figure increased by six hundred and twenty 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 a regime of mass executions and mass incarceration that is like utterly atrocious and and as an aside here, um okay, so like there are probably some of our listeners whose 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 just joy them so utterly and completely that their very name is spent as a curse in the street by people who make the sign of cross

for protection 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 at 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 crumbled beneath the way to way fascism that is too terrible to imagine, and you will also experience in your lifetime. And instead of doing this, the PT is like, fuck it, no, We're going to use the police to stamp up protest against the mega events that they're they're putting on. The police repression 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 just like massive social cleansing campaign.

We talked about this in our sports episode. Like they they carry out mass evictions against both like regular people and also against like like there's there's a bunch of sort of left is and also sort of just like regular people who squat in Brazil right, Like up a huge part of the social movements have been about seizing property and building like building stuff on its seasoning, evanded buildings and yeah, this stuff all gets victs that can

be replaced the 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 pag 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 two hundred and fifty thousand people for this fucking tournament. Um here, here's some other ship they did. This is from a series of pieces by Brazilian anarchist group called Fictional Faction. In twelve, 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 two thirteen Confederation Cup and the two

dozen fourteen World Cup. This agreement constituted an enormous legal offense to the Brazilian people, entailing the suspension of mode of many constitutional rights and norms that are already precarious for most. For example, a court established to rule within fourty eight hours on strikes that occurred within the World Cup. Workers lost the right 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 as partners in which even local businesses were required to keep your doors closed within the exclusion zone around the stadium. The laws allowed FIFA tag intervened 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 out. In addition, more than twenty thou 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 and City law are supposed to be limited to volunteer work for nonprofit institutions that have a quote civic, cultural, education, recreational and social assistance purposes, which hardly described FIFA. The state even overlooked the use of child labor and activities related to the games, such as the role of ball boy, which had been banned in Brazil since two thousand four.

So this goes great um and and the thing, you know, so this happens, he doesn't fourteen under del Marissof. But it's worth noting like this is Lula's project fund the beginning, right, like he he has been fighting to get Brazil the World Cup, like sense sent sense, like the opening for

applications to get this World Cup obriginal to happen. And what you know, this, this, this campaign to get the World Cup takes the form of a literally all out war against leftist protesters, squatters, workers, people living in favelas, people who are literally all those at the same time.

Who are you know, supposed to be the PT space And this is what the PT spends literally the rest of its time and power doing, right, like Dilma Roussef implements much of mousterity measures like this, the spending police powers like this is the ship that the PT is doing, like literally as the Grim Reaper was coming to their door, like two months before delmar Roussef is impeached, she passed a pair of 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 was 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 this is the actual sort of beating of of and this is this is the actual sort of principal 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 twenty years to produce her own grave diggers. 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 of 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 games that Lula gained during this entire time and officers were destroyed in four years of will scenarrow. Every day that the state is allowed to exist, every day the class system is allowed to exist, it creates a

thousand more bull scenarrows. It creates a thousand bol scenarrows and the police, that creates them, of the armies, it creates them in corporations, it creates them on the streets, 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 of pull and aros burned the entire country. And that that is my incredibly angry response to this absolute fucking bullshit. That is the reason, like our are are a 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 chance. Remember, remember, folks, if you somehow take control of the political apparatus in Brazil, dismantled the police in the military, Um, 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 mean 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 what do you do? Okay, like why what? Why are we focusing on German tanks? They make fine tanks. Okay, here we have here. Can you name a single good thing a German tank has

ever been used for? Yeah, I'm guessing. Yeah, they did some communists, probably, I don't. I don't know. Um, let's live anyway, killed a lot of Englishmen anyway and Canadians. It could happen here. It's it's it could happen here. It's the podcast that's happening right now. Um yeah, it's it's about things that you know about. It's there are our third and final episode about the Brazilian elections. It's me, Chris, It's it's I'm here with James Stout. Hello, Hi, Chris.

So we have we have an update on 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 apparently told the Supreme Court quote it's over, So he seems to have committed defeat, which has not stopped a bunch of his followers from calling for a military coup. Yeah, from the people I 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 going to back down. I don't think there's really much chance for a military coup at this point, like they seem to have just lost. I read something earlier about Bolsonaro making plans to like so it's like there'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.

I was gonna have his vice president ended over instead, which is like this is like the most whiny baby ship I've ever seen, which is like, god, I want what a loser? Holy fuck, like first as a tragedy, and then as fast and then as fast yea, and continually as fast, like that's 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 that, that's that's too mean to say about Lula, Like it hasn't been first yet, Like yeah, but Bulsonaro is oh boy, Yeah, he's going to go and spend more time with a

novel coronavirus. It's withdrawing from politics. You know. I heard that there's a great line in one of the things I was talking about that Milton's in the fog piece from Ilbow yesterday where they they talked about like I forget the exact quote, it was something like but Bolso it wasn't It's not just that Bolsonaro failed the like failed to respond to coronavirus, is that he was a vector for the for coronavirus. And I was like, yeah, this is this is both literally and metaphorically true, Like

several of the outbreaks are just from Bolsonaro. Absolutely amazing. Yeah, real, real piece of shit. Um yeah yeah, So today we're gonna talking about the very specific so we we We've been last episode talking about sort of like the the enormous army of grave diggers that the PT had sort of built around them, and this episode is 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 twousd five. I think I might have actually accidentally said six in the

original episode, but it dealsn't five. There's just a giant corruption scandal involving the Workers Party that like shakes all up Brazil and basically the the short version of it is that a bunch of senior members of the PC were accused of bribing members of the Central Centrow, 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 gonna 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 I'm gonna 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 I okay. So this entire episode, like well look at the first like three quarters episode, this is this is this episode is like a lot about corruption, and before we need to go any for other 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 Okay. So I think most our listeners understand that Chicago is notoriously 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 ship you get out in the suburbs, Like it is fucking mind boggling, right, like that that that that that wasn't my town, but like I have seen some ship, right And Okay. The thing that 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 Robbie blind because they're all corrupt. And you know, there's a sort of like a more analytical cularreya 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 state's 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 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 a genuinely thing about of cocos, 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 and 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 of politicians who literally spends all day taking bribes and developers or like somehow end homelessness or something or that like somehow like like

like a corruption a matter of political princess. Like no, no, they're all that they're all doing this to you, Like you guys, you kind of understand that. Yeah, It's it's very funny. And it's like we don't get enough credit for our cruption in San Diego, like right, yeah, and run by the Sea as it's very funny to see people being like, oh, there can't be corruption because identity

politics this or because not Donald Trump. Right then, like this is the nature of the state, especially the state under capitalism, especially stated a capitalism in the United States. Is that like you don't get funk all unless you pay for it. Yeah, although I will say this corruption as a policy of the state is essentially trans ideological.

Like the reddest communist, the brownest fascist, and the most bleeding heart red, white and blue capitalists 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 they made it legal for a corporation to give money to a candidate in order to have the vote a certain way. This is legal. Nazi Germany corrupt as ship, the USS

are famously insanely corrupt 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 a sort of structural like tendency of the state. And it doesn't meant like the military kaderships are corrupt like the fun like the like the parliamentic democracies are corrupted, like this is this is just this is just like how the state works, right,

um 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 people just corrupt, right, What is interesting is anti corruption politics. And we need

to 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 almost impossible to find anyone who will come out on the record and say they're pro corruption, like 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 across the entire political spectrum is corrupt and you know, and and and and the you know and and no, no politician is actually

anti corruption. This. This is something that's very very important to understand. None of these people are sucking anti corruption this. This is sort of this is one of 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, uh, I don't want to go to extreme marcusa, but like the like this idea, this false choice, right the corruption and in itself creates a means for another person who is equally corrupt to enter simply by claiming to be anti corrupt, right like, and then this weekend just kind of continually wad up each other and claiming to be different and doing the same ship and people will embrace his 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 Morrow, who is this judge who's like like Brazil's like great anti corruption crusader, uh, 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 uh find money collected by the US and 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 Bolton'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 sense of political political positions. Right. What it is is the set of politics you can rooms with.

But it turns out is really really good at conning routs because people really fucking hate corruption, and and that the thing, the thing, the thing that being like an an anti corruption quote unquote candidate does is it lets anyone like appear to be the sort of like populous

champion of the people against the corrupt elite. And this is really useful to the right into sort of mean, not just to the rime, 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, or protect the interests of like their specific faction of the ruling class, they need to win an election, and they need to win the sort of hearts of mines of the people who

see that the world sucks and like reflectively 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 antique ruption 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 you know, and

what what either, right? Really because he goes after the mob is the interruption guy and then he replaces them

with like even more efficient and extractive neoliberal bureacratic parasites. Yeah, and it's perfect, like yeah, in terms of near liiberalism, 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 in marginalized and you, but also to the bourgeois because you can say, oh,

the reason you're sucking business is not a successful as the one is corruption. So to just vote for me and we'll sort that out and you can continue exploiting the workers who am also appealing to. Yeah, and and you know, like Giuliani is specifically like he is his name is just literally a punchline now, right, Like it's

it's not it's not even worth talking about him. Fucking like trumping on a cigar doing an ad first a guard company in the middle melodio right like like but but but you know if they're selling flip flops now,

isn't that something like that? But but that's the thing, Like the anti corruption stuff was really really good for his career, and you know, this is the poll does anti corruption is the politics at the Brazilian right finally figures out as like the only thing that got out the workers partty drug or not now like insan five, the corruption case brings down a whole bunch of sort of like high profile PT party members, but it doesn't touch Lula himself, who is like he has this rep

like he basically similar to Reagan, is just like the teflon president. Everything just bounce off of him. But you know, the Rights and five really thinks that they've got him and they're like, Okay, we're gonna crush him this next election. Everything's gonna go back to normal. And then you know, and it is true that from two compared to two thou too Lula does have less support than two six. He goes from of the vote to a whopping sixty

percent of the vote. So okay, so this dude work, right, but the right still sees it like this is the only thing they've been able to come up with. It like actually damages the PT at all. And and she's also in fourteen a judge named Sergio Morrow, who have we've our Morrow? Who again we have given you the spoiler This is like this is one of the most

corrupt dudes, and 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 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 of the Brazilian ruling class. So he finds he starts this thing that it becomes known as Lava Jatto or Operation car Wash UM. And what moral is going after is this little legitimately genuinely enormous corruption ring surrounding Petro Boss, which is brazili state owned

oil company UM. And the investigation leads to the arrests of an enormous number of government officials, Like there's like some of the richest people in Brazil go to jail, like and it is true that like like there is an enormous amount of coruption, Like there are billions and billions of dollars that 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 real like lepers eating people's faces. Party ship here as well, where Okay, so Chils in thirteen deal with russef signs a law that massively expands police powers that includes, in particular, allowing them with no strings attached, to offer plea bargains of people to get that they confess the stuff and like give the cops information they want to hear, which is, like Jenny Winely, really unethical because for a lot of reasons, right, like the whole

plea bargaining system is like the reason like one of the reasons the whole USS system is completely sucked up because everyone just fucking please out instead of going to trial because they know they know they're like every everyone is pretty sure they're gonna lose, and so people, you know, people will just pleader ship that they didn't do because they have no chance of winning the case. It's completely

fucked up. And den Lar Russo'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 ship. But like, who did you think this was gonna be

used against? Yet? Wait? Why, like come on, like seriously, just 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 just the state operation to bring down the PT. It's also true that the PT, like like the reason they were able to be decapped 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, these things are both through at the same time. But okay, and so loveto like evisceerates an enormous part sort of a section of the Brazilian ruling class, but it very quickly becomes clear that it's being used as a political weapon against Delmar Russef and the PT, despite the fact that like literally every Brazilian paul like party is involved with this.

Like I think the pso L might be like the only major Blurzilian 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, but but but you know everyone instead like just is using this to go is like very clearly using this

to go after the PT. The problem is that like and this is this is gonna be a perennial problem with these investigations is that they can't actually directly dale Delmo Russef or Lulu with doing anything that they have real problems with this. Um. You know, Delma wins re election to US in fourteen, but he also fifteen there are these as Lavata was 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 again, like the right wing media goes just completely batshit in this period. Um, and you know, okay, so again morals running into this problem that he can't find anything that Dylan Russof did that was illegal, so he starts relying on political theater instead.

He and and uh, he starts stages these this like enormous series of raids on like Lula's house as nonprofit, like he's like like his brother's business, and you know, with the entire press court like they're right like with the stage for all these raids. They drag him off to like jail for questioning, but again, like they don't really have anything. They kind of like invent this case about Lula based on some convoluted ship about a property

that he didn't own. It's like, you know, 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 actual details of who's taking money from who are essentially irrelevant because that's not what actually matters, right, What matters here is that like the sort of rooting prosecutors have decided they're going to destroy the PT, and you know they're the PT has helped

them do it at every step. Um, it's just the prosecutors right there. It's like there's there's like press plus prosecutors, plus plus a bunch of political parties too. 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 monumentally fucking up the COVID response, tons of people die, and it's not that that brings

him down. It's that 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 on the people who you lied to your accountable to, like seventeen media editors Murdoch, right, and every Brazil has its own versions of Murdoch who are like, yeah, I can only imagine like people people to who if

I if I said my actual opinions on them, Like the the the FCC would specifically start regulating podcasts because like, oh boy, all these people should redacted parody, etcetera, etcetera, just like a five minute bleap here. So okay, but

but again so okay. They have this problem again which that they can't really get delmar Roussa for 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 Delmar Roussa for is this like accounting procedure thing basically that like everyone does. And when I say everyone does, like almost every previous president like every every like every single like like uh, what's it called?

Like every single like uh, why am I blink? Governor is at the right word? Yeah, like the people who are like the heads of states. Yeah, I think like all the governors do this, like fucking literally everyone in Brazilian politics does is including some of the people who are signing like the fucking uh uh impeachment thing. But they remove her from this and okay, so like a part of the like the sort of sort of like

like decrepit and despise neoliberal right takes power. But the normal part thing here is that she's Delia Russof is impeached by her own allies, right, she is impeached like Michael Timer, the guy who replaces Russf like winds up

as presidents because Dilma Russof bade him her VP. Like it's just like you know and this this is this is dating back to like this this is like really old sort of pet political maneuver stuff dat dating back to like Lula finally winning out over the sort of PC basis in two thousand two, right where he's able to convince them to like have a sort of like

conservative guy like be his running mate. And here this this is this is where this finally goes to ship because the PT is making alliances with sort of like set the 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 sort of corruption parties have enough votes that you kind of have to work with them. But also like what did you expect was

gonna happen? Like did you did you really not expect that the leoparage, We're gonna eat your face? Like 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 bait you. It's like really like you know, and this all comes back to sort of like the things I've been talking about in last two episodes about like the inherent contradiction of being a leftist and happy to having to keep

the state and having to run a state. We have to keep the economy going, right, which again it means that you have to make sure the capitalists get money.

And Lulu could just pay these people off, like literally or figuratively, because he was used benefiting from the commodity boom, right, But then when the Chinese economy goes under and suddenly the money dries up because the quality boom is over, and the Brazilian economy starts to collapse, like you know, there's nothing to pay off the boozie with, and you know, Deli results like she's trying to pay them off, but

you know, in order to fund it. Now, now she's doing austerity and that's sapping her, and that's sapping her base because you know, okay, you have to choose one

or the other. But she's not been again. But she's also not able to pay off enough of the bored to stop this from coming, and so they off her and you know, okay, so the pt PC 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 the next thing we're gonna get to. Um. But yeah, so okay, so the product of this is that Michael Timer, who was like just an unfathomable neoliberal coool, like I really like, oh god, like it's really one of the worst people ever. Um who again russef picked us her VP, becomes President Intel spent the next two years like 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 look up. Yeah, it's man is yeah, very streamlined. But otherwise yeah, he just like he just looks like like exactly who he is. Yeah. Yeah, I cannot believe this guy succeeded in politics when he looks like, yeah, an evil snake. Yeah. I think he also got arrested for being even more like ok so, like like there is corruption going on in the PT timer is the corruption party, right, Like he actually goes down eventually, he

is like unfathomably corrupt. Like he goes down for like what he took, Like it's a bribe from a meat packer, right that guy, Yeah, that was one of these. He funneled like a hundred and eighty million dollars into like

his politically like into like his friends. And it's like like unfat like okay, 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 goals, right, Um, yeah, especially in a country where like people genuinely struggled to get by every single yeah, and 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 and then you know you're you're you are watching just this bullshit happening right like this fucking like guy who God, just this is like absolute fucking demon just stealing a hundred like fifty billion dollars, right, yeah, it's like rich people playing monopoly with your fucking future and your children's future. Yeah,

but you know, but but it again like tempered. Nobody, nobody fucking voted for this guy, right like, and he's just immediately starts implementing like unfathomable just atrocious austerity, and he like he has a seven percent of rating. Everyone is calling, yea, this is this is the second lowest. This is the second lowest group of ready I've ever seen for for a ruling politician, after Kim Jung Pill, who I think got down to three percent one day. I'm going to do an actual Kim junk Pill episode.

I feel like you're within the error margin of any polling. Once you get into the single digits, no one likes you, like literally, like like remember like people like people from his own party want him to resign, right and he just doesn't. Just days in power because there's no one,

no one can do anything about it. Because but you always get that right when you when you engage in this politics of corruption, the like sort of palace cups and interronicing, 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. Now do you know who else

doesn't benefit from corruption like the rest of us. I don't think we can say that with any degree of certainty decrease it shall 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 at a time as any to mention that, like, okay, so lava Jotto 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 Jotto is being illegally backed by the American Just Department, Justice Department, the SEC, the FBI probably all, I think, also the CIA, although weirdly this is okay, And 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 ship. The thing we have the most evidence for is actually the FBI running this coup. Weird. Yeah, it's very weird. What was happening basically is that Okay, so, 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 they're looking at Petro Boss 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 and it's also worth nothing. Okay, So, uh, Sergio Morrow is like he's a Harvard guy, right, He's a Harvard guy.

He was trained by a bunch of American police people, like he he is like he's like one of these sort of like he's he's a Nazi cool basically, right, but like he's like the the law version of a Nastic cool and so the the entire like and again it's 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 any better, by the way, but like they're 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 taking down the Black panthers, increasing anti semitism, just the normal standard domestics. Yeah, shooting anarchists, shooting like possibly assassinating MLK. Um, yeah them, yeah not they're not supposed to be doing the four in cruise. That's the CIA job. But they're they're muscling into the CIA's territory here. Um. It's it's it's worth mentioning as

well that like the Obama administration is heavily involved in this, right. Um. And you know, it turns out that by the time you get toy sixteen Trump ministrate tries amteen trusmistrations of power. They love this ship because it's Trump. It's like, wow, damn, who could have guessed? 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 sorry Morrows, like openly

cutting deals with Bolsonaro to the political persecutions. There's again again 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 fine money collected from Petro Boss. Like it's unbelievably shady ship. Um. Now, the entire time this is going on, Sergeo Morrow has been like illegally wire tapping Lula's conversations and leading them

to the press to like destroy La. And politically it's and you know and like like operation car Washed, Like prosecutors are just like going on TV and telling the entire Brazilian public like, no, Lula is guilty, there's no doubt about it, and then she doesn't. Seventeen Morrow has

Lula convicted. Now Lula appeals as on the grounds that like this is incredibly obviously a show trial, like but by the because there's a lot of you will read a lot of like the sort of liberal press in the US like fucking loves this ship and like she doesn't fourteen doesn't. He's the sixtees, somebody say seventeen, but like, but she doesn't seventeen. Even the sort of American liberal press is like, hey, you're running these trials too fast,

Like these don't look like real trials anymore. Like he's like they're there's there's like it really is, like they stopped having even the pretense that it's not being show trials are just like committing people, convicting people, convicting people,

convincing people. And like you know, in the Lula case, there's some interesting stuff which is that like, Okay, Morow doesn't have the legal jurisdiction to prosecute Lula here, like the crimes that were supposedly committed aren't committed in a place where where Barrow has any jurisdiction at all, like it's another state, and he just doesn't anyways, because he's just like fuck it, like whatever. And so it's more

of a vibe when you oral city government. Yeah. Well, and and again like this is the thing, like people people get really really really hung up about legal technicalities and that ship and as we're about to see in that in in this case, right like that ship does not matter, right this this is entirely about sort of power, about 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 if 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

fifteen other generals. Uh who I I got a guy named Edward edwardo Vilas Bolas like literally sorts threatening the Supreme Court on Twitter like she's like he starts employing And this tweet is read on Globo, which is like the fucking like like big, big, biggest news network in Brazil. They like read out this tweet, like the subtext of which is, if you don't put Lulie in jail, we

are going to do a coup. So they dragged Lula off to prison and they put him in solitary for five and eighty days, which is like yeah, yeah, they they they are like they are torturing the shot out of him. Um Jesus, yeah yeah yeah, living out there like fucking like you know, like previous generation of coups

against Latin America, like chopping Victor Halla's hands off fantasy. Yeah, and like like I said, you know, I would say, it's like Lula Lula has was arrested by the military dictatorship in the eighties, right, but even though the military dictatorship only held him for thirty days and then let him go, and they're they're like they're trying to put him in prison the fourth things like it's originally seven years and then i s extended to twelve years um,

and then there's this whole thing. But like she'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 jail's an eighteen. If Lula's run allowed to run for president, even with all the press ship, he is going to fucking stop literally anyone in the field. Yeah and yeah,

so this is going up. 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 Lula is arrested, Mariella Franco, who is a incredibly radical City City councilor and real

dejan Narrow, is assassinated by death squad um. There there's a lot of coverage of like who she was sort of like there's lot of coverage of her story about how she's a black, lesbian woman who came who like was from an incredibly for poor family and the favelas and how she sort of like worked a way out to you politicians, but like they don't talk about you know, people will sort of obliquely mentioned her human rights work, or they'll talk a bit about how she's part of

the PSOL, which is is leftist party that like, Okay, so I'm still I suppose it. I'm looking I'm so kind of hazy about their exactory. I think what happened was there was a group of PT of of PT like uh politicians who refused to vote for an austerity package the PT was trying to push through, and they got kicked out of the party for it, and they found at the ps O l um and you know, they they'll talk about sort of this stuff. What what they won't cover really is what she was actually doing.

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,

and she doesn't. Eight. This is this again. Under Lula's Pizza government, that there was a re orientation of police strategy and the favelas tours this new program called Pacifying Police Units UPPs, and the idea was that instead of doing constant raids in the favelas and then leaving them, they were just gonna put them under like constant police occupation. And you know, like there's something like four hundred thousand 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 supposed to 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 but he hasn't. Thirteen. They just like give up the pretense of doing any social work. And they found this thing called had the Good Groups of Proximity Police, which very quickly turned into just like fucking desk squads.

But they're but they're they're they're both desk squads and they're also doing like stopping frisk ship and just like carassing random black people. There's they were just murdering people on the streets, um on a scale that is like it's worse than has been before, like that there were

individual police unit. There's an individ to a police unit because a hundred and seventeen people in a year, like it is, it is horrible, right, And this is what I was talking about about the Brazilian police killing killing at a rate that's a eleven time tire in the American police, like it is. It is fucking atrocious, um. And there are some incredible videos of yeah, like it's

fucked um and they're war with parts of their own population. Yeah, I mean I say this like this is this is one of those things about fascism, right, where like fascism like always kind of has works on the 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 that there is an extent to which there are a bunch of gangs and the police are

finding them. There's also an extent to which like everyone involved is just shaking down all of these fucking like unbelievably poor uh largely black, like working class people who are just getting fucking robbed every day it's horrible. Um yeah. And it's that where it might be a bit of a side by that we don't like need to fit in here, but in this case we can distribute it. But there's a I know that one of the big

Brazilian prison gangs is like ostensibly leftist. They're like they called Red Command, right, yeah, I think I think is it really command anti? Yeah? So they they used to be Yeah, so okay, Red Command used to be like an m L group that was like a sort of like alliance between like regular people in prison and like left just people who've been put in prison command of Yeah, and 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 away to get money. So things like kidnapping is like entering the drug trade. And there's a lot of groups to start out ideological that just ceased to be ideological and the people well, which is in the drug right 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 Marilla Franco like spends her entire life like fighting these people. She she she gets she has she gets 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 what the funding police are doing? And when she dies, like there's a fucking judge who's like, actually, uh, what happened was that? Uh? She was she was she was working with Red Command and she got behind her debt

payments and they killed her. And it's like this is some fucking bullshit, like like she so we stick 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 pictured with Bolsonaro and he's there's a bunch of weird ties to like Bolsonaro's brother, because Bosonaro was very, very heavily tied into a bunch of arm paramilitary groups.

It works well for everyone to have these groups that they can paign as like the Great Satan, right, Like the police can be like ware com back to the gangs, and gangs can be like, well, you all hate the fucking police, right like, and then they yeah, they could just blame anyone else whenever there is and and it's

like the self supporting structure. Yeah. But then but every once in a while, you get someone and that that's like verylar frank, like, she's a very very rare kind of person, like she she winds up as a city council, right, She's she's a very very rare kind of politician who like everyone likes like, like everyone on the left likes like you're even you're sort of like like most hardcore like fucking guy in like like it was your almost like hardcore guy like a tiny mL sect and like

your most hardline anarchists. Like everyone likes her because she's doing she's doing, like she's every day putting her life in danger trying to stop the police. And you know, and when when you get someone like that who is not part of the sort of like it's not part of either of these factions, right and who was a genuine threat to both of them, because she is unbelievably popular. She she gets the fifth most votes of anyone. Like who's who's running for city counselor 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 like they're not like they're not like that. They are a kind of large party, but they're not like one of the parties that ever gonna like win a national election, right like, and but you know, but she she is an incredible threat to them, and so they have her killed. We know that the bullets that were at that that 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. Uh, there's a bunch of other people who were killed by the police. And this is also like wait, sold to the police, are sold by the police, sold by the police. Magnificent. Yeah, yeah there, you know. And 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 activists, you get killed. There a lot of black activists to get killed. They are 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 held accountable. Yeah, it's it's fucking horrible.

Um I 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 fucking awful. There's one more thing I need to mention, which is that Okay, So the thing she was doing like like literally literally she was at a conference, like she she was killed, like driving home from a conference, right, And the thing she was doing like literally in the days leading up, like leading up to her assassination was um so, Michael Timmer has this thing called the Cote, the call the quote unquote

federal intervention, which was apparently like extremely 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 hand control of quote unquote security and real Dejannarrow to the army and let them like go to warward the gangs. Yeah, fuck, unbelievably fucked. And she she is too, takes an incredibly bold chance against us, is trying it, 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 that fascism is like the return of colonials into domestic policy, right, colonial colonial methods in the metropal instead of in the colonies, and like 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 and that that analysis is developed in like like it's 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 Brazil's styled colony that was also a slave state. Right, 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 five years are still in power. But I think it's important to understand, like part of how Bollsonaro 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 there's so much racism. There's so much just like like there there, there's this whole set of law and ordership thing that's going on. And the sort of product of all of this is in the n eighteen election, the PT put in basically some right. I mean, he's not some random guy like he he was like like he was like a kind of prominent politician, but they basically run like some guy and he gets club every Bullsonaro.

And part of this is there's a lot of stuff that happens here that's like very similar to sort of US this 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 gonna like turn

your kids gay and like he's a Satanist. Um yeah, so and then things interesting, right because I think people, um, there's this analysis, so like we have to see everything through the length of American politics like the Boston aro is the American the Brazilian Trump but like it's and my anority. This is not deep, but like it strikes me that he embraces Catholicism to a degree that is like much greater than like like Trump did religion. I mean,

it's interesting. So like the London American contexts has you know, it has this like thing I think you think you know about, which is like it's there. There's this sort of right wing Catholicy evangelical alliance. Yeah that is happening here. And you know because like a whole bunch of of of Bolson Arrow's base is a ship ton of humangelicals.

But he he's like there's this sort of shared language around ESPEC, specifically like around eddy 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, like

it works. And this is sort of like you know I and like okay, like if if I had any energy left in me, I would probably do another episode that was like like two three I could do like a fucking year of episodes. But everything that happened to their Billsonaro, Um, yeah, I'm just gonna sort of hit some of the like low lights, you 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 it was like really into the classic Cory clean stuff like tart and stuff like he like personally spread

COVID to a bunch of people. Like there's like one of one of I think one of the one of the most famous things that people know about like the sort of bullstion our regime is that the Amazon was fucking burnt because they're a huge part of his base, like basically legal loggers and bulson just like yeah, fuck it, go like destroy all destroy all this indigenous land, fucking kill the people on it, and they've been just like

annihilating the Amazon. Didn't he also and I may again be completely off based on this, didn't he break down a lot of the like from fun I it's the Brazilian National Organization that, among other things, does some sometimes problematic but protection of indigenous people's didn't he like a dismantle a lot of the structure of that and trying to defend Yeah, and it did, like Trump right, like it will take years to want to do this bullshit.

It might never be not like that. That's like we're running out of sucking time, right we didn't have Yeah, well, and this this is one of the things where like we have to hope Lula actually fucking hold up this word here because like, Okay, so the PACs record on

deforestation is way, way and obviously better than Bollsonaro. But it's also true that a lot of the sort of legal framework that Bosonaro 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 there's you know, like everything that was like that I've talked about that was bad before, got

enormously worse Bosonaro. The police violence got worse, the military violence got worse. Um, there's just like he's able to sort of like do this like enormous anti communist fervor um. But the problem is that he kills like he kills too many people. That's that's what she's killing hiselfvers he is. But like the thing is like he really just destroys the entire Brazilian economy, like his 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 both to morrow is m like in as far as we could even talk about a being it, what if he did Bolsonaro personally is the fact that like he like he loses it off with the ruling class that when Lula appeals, like Lulula's actual case appeal goes to the Freme Court, they throw it out and say Morrow like turns on him for a bit, although Morrow and it comes back and endorses Bolsonaro in the

election because he's a piece of ship. But like, yeah, there's he 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 the Lula one, is that Lula did this like giant United French strategy. Right like, he pulled together, like he was recognized by sort of everyone who posts boson arrows, 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 Gerald. I mean, yeah, this is a guy that Lula beat by twenty points in an election or thirty points something like that. Like

this is literally like a right wing guy. Hulula 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 running the sort of like Biden suburban strategy, right like, he's doing the like an appeal to sort of moderate voters thing.

And like, I mean like, and this is going on to the point where like he's telling people like not to like bring PT flags or like where PT colors to rallies because they're trying to down yeah, because they're

trying to downplay the sort of like communism thing. And it doesn't really work because like Bolson Haro's just calling him, everyone's just calling him a communist anyways, right, and and he like squeaks by this fucking election, right, Like, I mean he probably wanted by he probably would have wanted by a couple more percent than the actual vote total. Shoulder han'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 Bilsonaro's party like controls the Senate. So and and this is everything right if Bolsono's party can cut it off deals and like jettison Bilsonaro like bilson is um like as a force is still there, right like 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 impeach Lula, right and this we literally watched this entire fucking cycle that has happened again, like right, like that this kind of ship like this could happen. Um. Yeah, so things are still not great, and yeah, Lula's actual

hand to do stuff here is very contract. I should also mention that 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 this is like he I don't know, like the fact that he won is genuine leave very good, Um I have I don't know what can be done to actually sort of defeat boll snaros am as a structural force because again,

like he won like of the vote, right, like that's still there killing like like tens of thousands of his population and being a general ship head. Yeah so yeah, yeah, yeah, they're not I don't know. That's the like, I don't know, like the like actual structural things have to change about both the Brazilian political system, like the Brazilan political system, the police, the military, and the economy have to structurally change or we're or like we're gonna get gonna get

another both SNAr. 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 systems that we're just gonna get another Trump. Maybe it'll be actual Trump. Who knows, like like like maybe this thing like until until fascism is sort of like class base and base in the state is destroyed, like and and it's it's sort of ideological basins in sort of like righting constructions of the family.

It's religious based, 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 fascist. Okay, so here here's the thing. I one thing, one thing I will give to Lula is that like, okay, his way of doing this was that a bunch of people found pictures of Bolsaaro and illuminate like like with a bunch of a lout, like a bunch of like in Freemason rooms with a bunch of Freemasons. And this I think genuinely may have cost Bolsonaro, Like like there's an argument this cost bulson Arrow like a bunch of election points with their own base because people found this people.

There's another thing like like the day, like a couple of days before the election, like an old TV clip turned up a Bulson arms out of nowhere, saying quote, I would eat an Indian. Yes, yes, this started to acountabism. I mean this is like like this is really about his racism, right, but you're starting to a whole cannibalism thing.

The Supreme Court ruled, like I think incredibly cowardly because he did say this is ruled that he couldn't run, ad that that Lula couldn't run, as calling him a cannibal.

But you know, like like there was something like this like we're like like suddenly that like there were like I don't know, like this is and I will applau Loula 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, he could have run a Boson companion.

He didn't, right, And and in so far as he was tapping into right wing ship, he was tapping into hey, this guy is a fucking this guy's in Freemason robes.

It was sort it was sort of funny ship that like it's probably not great that this is where the political sphere is, but like you know, okay, Bossonaro literally saying he would eat a human being is like I would rather that be the kind of insane right wing thing that's going around than like, I don't know, cueer people are going to murder your children or something, which is like the normal ship that Yeah you hear. Yeah, and it's in sixteen, it's not like he said it

when he was eighteen six years ago. Yeah, I think he said it's like a journalist as well, right, Yeah, it's a fucking terrible guy. You can imagine Donald Trump saying he'd eat someone probably, I think I think Donald Trump, you'd have to prompt Bosaro just unprompted. 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 wish, I yeah, I wish. I wish good luck and good fortune and yeah, like Vick to reach it. Everyone in

Brazil who is fighting. Yeah, fu Bolsonaro, I help all these I hope he fucking dies of COVID finally. Um yeah, and I hope, I hope, but I really do hope the bulls narrows can be defeated. Um, yeah, I don't know, like make better choices, pt please God, we can't do this again. Yeah, I have both. The people in Brazil would continue to be impacted by this this bullshit. Can yeah,

have better meaningful improvements to their lives yea. And the selection and I mean I will say, like, like this is proof that like bullsonaroism isn't isn't undefeatable, right, Like it's like the fact that he wasn't able to pull off the military qu right, like it is beatable. It's just it's very very hard. And yeah, I mean then that this is true or fascist and 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. Uh, 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. Uh. And to talk to me about the health value of elk meat, uh is UM, no, uh so about I don't know, a week or so ago. Um, we're talking with Sarah Young. Sarah, how are you doing good?

How are you? I'm I'm pretty good. Sarah. You're a deputy features editor at The Verge. You are a lawyer and a journalist. So you have embraced the two commos cursed vocations in two um, and you you've number one most recently written an incredible piece UM about the Portland's Van abductions, which is like brutal and um, very important for the Verge. People ought to check it out. It is. Uh. I don't know. 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. We're talking about a post that you made on the Twitter dot com about a week or so ago that I I messaged you about wanting to to chat about you want to kind of talk about what that post was 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 I think the discourse, well, sometimes sometimes

a city, but the discourse is rancid. Uh. It's like this in a lot of other cities as well. Um, but you know Portland is like it's the discourse around homeless people, right yeah. Yeah. Every every conversation you have with any random person, it's 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. You get just saying the most insane things like oh, I'm not going to 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 just a by why it is that I need to start supporting the cops and so on

and so forth. Um, And it's just there's this thing where I think that they're well meaning leftists really want to sort of pull out, like let's humanize almost 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 bowl based on like

superficial characteristics. Right. Um, they might be dirty, they're intense, 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've had many instances in my life where I haven't felt very safe, um because of someone who was homeless, because of someone who is an addict. Um, I mean I'm a small

Asian woman. I take public transitu 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 hat back and look at sort of, oh, let's look at people who have made me feel threatened, afraid whatever. I've 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 life too. I can see 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 depends, right, Like it depends. I was just looking at your mentions. Yeah, I don't know. I don't really like to carefully, so I don't even know

what the numbers are. Like this is, I did have an incredible, like six month period where it was really intense because Tucker Carlson was like putting me on his show for a while, so it was it was really bad, like people like some guy called into my office and threatened to fire bomb it, and the people who got the phone call like, we're 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 looked 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. Right, And you know, I gotta say, for a while, i'd see that, like that little profile picture, I'd see someone in person, and like my 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 yellow racial slur and I would almost have a panic attack because I f like, oh no, like like someone's gonna come and make good on these threats, and I don't, like, I don't want to round people up into camps for looking like a shitty racist, suburban nite white cut. Yeah, It's like that's that's because I'm not a fucking Nazi. Like it's like

it doesn't matter what you've experienced. You're like what legitimate harm you faced from people who look a certain way, Like you don't round them up into camps or like talk about like how you're not going to break on

the straw on the street in your car. I'm glad I was happy for kind of your perspective on the matter, because I do try Like whenever people talk about how scary Portland is are 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 went through them

at the day, never had a problem. Um. You know, sometimes there's like trash, and 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 ft three pound white guy, right, Like, of

course I'm as a general rule, in a lot of situations, I don't feel worried what other people do because I'm a big white dude and that's um. But 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 within 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 motorcycles, dirt bikes, whatever you want to call them.

I assume rich kids because these were very new bikes drove up and shot at her and her baby with BB guns, 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 motherfucker's, 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, of heard this at Laura Durst 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'm not

gonna say again. I have also been in a situation where like an agitated houseless woman was like swinging a machette at some folks, and you know, everything was de escalated. 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 BB guns and of course folks draw having gigantic trucks in tiny streets like assholes often while wasted. Um, Like, those

are the things that scare me in Portland's 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 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 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 as 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 realist state 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 really

like it is. 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 it's upsetting you feel scared, and then like the vast majority of people who are unhoused are just trying to stay the funk out of your way, right And like there, you're not going to see them, you're not going to talk to them unless you go out of your way to talk to them and reach out,

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 to shoot you, out to shoot them, And 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 they're just fashion, they're just they're just fast. 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 have 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, Like what do you what do you want to do here? What do you actually want to do? Um? Where are these people going to go? Like what's going to happen to them? And it's it's super 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, um in 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 we've talked about kind of jailing and putting into camps the homeless is 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 coups 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 law when they were when CESSA was attempting to carry things out in a different way.

And like what we're seeing in Portland right now, we've got um a city Commissioner Joan Hardesty, who UH number one is the only black woman in the city council UM, the only person on the city council who rents UH and the only person in the city council, who is in debt and who is endured. And I'm not gonna

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 I see actually as 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 not Portland is one of the safest cities in the entire United States, even after the quote unquote surge and 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 think that's probably a fair way to say it. 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 candidate, a right wing candidate. I mean he, like everyone who runs importantly, he claims to be a Democrat. Um, he's donated to Republicans. He is called named Rene 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 encampments. And UM, I don't know, it's just I feel like I can see it all coming together, and that 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 are not suggesting a car serrale 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. Don't vote for Renigans Hollace, but yeah, please please don't vote for a man who donated to a Republican pack six months after January six Lets please please let's not do that. But 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, my wait, like we lived through you know, I currently had one of the worst responses to COVID. Uh, millions of people are dead. Um, our mental health is fucking shot through un people who didn't experience sort of federal jack boots on the ground, Um, we're not well right like it. It's any number of housed perfectly like financially stable people turned to substance abuse

during this period. Um, and uh are are still you know, recovering. Um. People who are unhoused also turned to substance abuse if they weren't um already there, and their mental health is also shot there and uh sort of the upshot of this is everyone is fucking sick and taking it out on each other, and it really sucks to see It really sucks to see people be their worst selves 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's So Portland's number one, never defunded its police. There 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 seven hundred Portland police officers, which is significantly down from because it's not a pleasant job, because people hate the cops here in Portland, so they keep quitting and moving to other cities. UM. And it is true that when the pandemic hit, violent crime in Portland raised by about two hundred and seven percent from January nine through June, which is the largest increase compared to

five comparable cities. This is from an article in the Oregon Capital Chronicle, Minneapolis, Atlanta, San Francisco, Denver, and Nashville. UM. However, it's also worth noting that over the course of the last year, we're at seven a fewer homicides than we

were the year before. UM. Overall, the number of homicides in two has fallen two percent from one, even as we continue to have fewer and fewer police, almost as if the surgeon 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 surgeon 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 one, the Major Cities Chiefs Association issue to report noting that sixty three of sixty six major cities saw at least one violent crime category grow in. Among cities of comparable size, Portland's 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 in our driving these kind of surge and very like fascist solutions to the fears that they have about homelessness and about crime. And one of the reasons why this ship works is

is people don't go into the city. They live in the suburbs. They see the scary news. And 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 twenty year graph, fairly flat nationwide, um but has right, like the statistics of gun crimes

like what in like the last couple of years. And then now they're saying that gun violence has increased, like it's it's yeah, yeah, anyway, what had What we know what has 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 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

same Randisco poop situation. So I used to live in the Bay Area. That was a real situation. Francis is just human. There's just human ship everywhere. Um, it's you know, you you live with it. It's it just is what it is. And you know someone's from New York when they start complaining about it, right, like, it's uh and it I think New York which smells like p everywhere, but I mean it's it's most 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 it's it's this like weird thing where just because of the way that we're drawn up geographically, we've got all of these people, like like you said, like out in the burbs who vote who have control over the way the wind blows, who just never come

out here. Ever 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 happened to

San Francisco. The way that Chazi stuff went down, Like I mean, that's complicated, right, Like I mean it was it was a witch hunt and it made me really in San Francis and made me really want to never move back. But it it was like we've we've just got a different sort of set up 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, 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, 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 which is a problem, um as we all just got overseeing with fucking Donald Trump, right, Like that's a that's a version of the problem in

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 fox 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 get the it's too simultaneous issues. Like one of them is you've got these liberals in Portland, who 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 have these folks who don't live in Portland, who you know, are pushing for like you know, who are responsible with the fact that we might get a Republican governor in the state, right, 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 and 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 in a really by the way, I vote to charter reform, etcetera. If you live in Portland. Uh, like we've we've got some some other other things going on with our our city government that makes things additionally weird and um, suboptimal.

There's a bunch of things that I'm kind of dreading in the near future or from the midterm elections, including you know, Renee Gonzalez. Um, you know, I 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 way they try to reform is like set up um. So basically Portland's currently has a commission form of government in which we have a very powerful mayor and for city council people 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 uh politely speaking dogshit. Under the new form of government that's that's being voted on right now, the charter, 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 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 city's affairs. UM. I don't know. What we

have currently certainly is not particularly effective. Um. And I would like to see a more democratic system put into place. Yeah, and obscenely outdated. Right, it's like, Yeah, I don't know who else does things like Portland's currently does, but the charter reform is greatly needed. Yeah, and it's going to bring in rank choice voting as well, when people vote on yeah, on their on their like city like, which

is uh. Like. One of the issues that we've had here is that like 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 an independent Betsey 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 voids away from Tina co Tech, who's the Democratic candidate,

so that Christine Drayson, 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 Drayson actually has a shot, but the polls show them neck and neck soos 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 Gonzala's win. But the if charter reform passes, like the the arm that he can inflict on the city becomes limited, just because right now, city council seats just have outsized power in a very dysfunctional way. And uh, it's and that that changes with stry to reform, like we just get a little bit more of a normal city. 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 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 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 whole game, right, Like regardless of the fact that co Tech has a

history with our current governor that's not entirely positive. Our current Democratic governor has been a ship 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 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 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. Al Right, Like it's it's not it's not good. It's really bad. Like handing ending them the

keys of the king him is a terrible move. Yeah, I don't know what else to say, 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 is broadly speaking, I really want to hear about your your your feelings on that gun control measure. Yeah, so we've got Measure one fourteen coming up, which is

um 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 a 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 abiding citizen and you apply for concealed cary 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 most reasonable gun owners had no issue with it because all it did was say 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 that's 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 But other than that, we haven't had a whole lot of gun control UM in the wake of the Vivaldi shooting, 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, there's 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 is voting on whether or not to have gun control UM, which, regardless of my opinions on the measure itself, I think is a better way for stuff like this to work than a bunch of legislators just like making a law.

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 backgroundch of well, they're all they're already required. It does not actually do anything there. Um. It adds in a magazine capacity restrictions, and you won't be able to buy or take out in public magazines that have a higher capacity than ten 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 a ministering those tests and running the whole program 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 opinions 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, sixty one year old

woman and injured five other people. That person was stopped by a left wing demonstrator with an a R fifteen style rifle. UM. What was actually technically a handgun, but that's anyway. Whatever, it was an a R fifteen 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 and 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. Washington recently passed a law restricting magazine capacity. I didn't say anything about that. I think maybe I I think

if it 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 thirty round magazines and higher 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 it can be sold. And so the thing that the thing you're trying to stop with a magazine capacity band at this point is someone doing what the Valdi shooter did right, where a kid goes out and buys a weapon and a bunch

of thirty 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, um, to like search people going out and shooting in the woods like folks do in Oregon, um, 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 giving police the ability to like harass and arrest people. Um. Anyway, that's that's my thinking on one fourteen. Yeah, yeah, I think that's that's like an important as an important series of distinctions

to get out there. Yeah, um, anyway, I I voted against it. 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 when on January or November eight how they voted. Yeah, I mean, like it's hardly the most disturbing things on

the Balett right now. Yeah, no, no, no, And 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 co Tech wins, then kind of regardless of what happens with one fourteen, I will be broadly optimistic heading into because it will show that the campaign of fear didn't

work entirely. Yeah. Um, and if Gonzales and and Drayson win and shatter reform gets defeated, I will be really pessimistic heading in. Yeah. Yeah, if if drays and wins, like that's yeah, it's ah 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 just gotten so complacent, is all

I can think. Um oh, I mean the spoiler candidate obviously that that did change a lot. Um, but it's 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, 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 yeah, that's that's my thinking.

Don't Like, if somebody is trying to make you scared 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 to tell people to not be Patrick Bateman from fucking American 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 our moral compasses. But that's where we are. That's where we are. Well do you want to plug your plug? Double Sarah? Yeah? So, uh, Rerobert mentioned that I just put out a big feature

about the Portland van abductions published on the Verge. Um. It's part of a longer series, uh that we did this year about the Department of Homeland Security, which is twenty years old this year. Um, So we did a bunch of features, some about Puerto Rico and FEMA. Uh, some about the t s A. Of course I did a short little thing about how Chad Wolfe was illegally ahead 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 will go up by the end of this year. I think your your listeners would enjoy going through some of those excellent. All right, 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 is a production of cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.