It Could Happen Here Weekly 76

and was scalded by a ten year old. It was for medical reasons. Okay, how am I going to introduce? How do we need to start? That's the start, we already got it. Okay, yeah, we'll do the oreos yep, ten year old children? Okay, I guess yeah, yeah, yeah, this is where it works. And today everyone, because it's Monday, we are starting something that we like to call shitty Mas Monday. I don't know as we'll actually let us put shitty in the in the in the title. They

might might we'll get that. That's that's what we're calling it. That's what we're calling it on the I can't stop us here. It would be funnier if it just had like ten seconds of bleep and then it was like

a mayor's Monday, like I'd said, some truly unfathomable shit. Okay, so we've noticed that across America right there are a lot of mayors who ran and were elected as liberals, progressives, certainly as Democrats, but tend to have governed in a particularly shitty and terrible way that doesn't really have any material difference from a Republican mayor, but like the way that they post on Instagram is a little bit different.

So I guess that is nice. And we're starting with the town I live in, which is San Diego, and with the mayor we have, who is Todd Gloria. The people might have heard of Todd Gloria, and last year we did we did an episode with several people who work with an housed people in San Diego, mutual Aid workers advocates, and they spoke a lot about Tod Gloria. Not in gloing terms, but we spoke about Tod Gloria.

So we're going to talk about his record on homeless, and we're going to talk about his life a little bit, and then we're going to look at sort of the promises he made when he was elected, I guess, and the things that he's done, which it will shock you to hear, are not the same things. And we're also going to talk about his hip hop video. Yeah yeah, yeah, Bunnily really yeah he did. He did Return of the Mac,

but hilariously changed it to Todd Gloria is Back. Oh yeah, no. If you want to see some problematically sinking, you're going to Yeah, ok, brace yourself. Did a local newspaper had a headline that called it the cringiest video ever, which rare win for local media. Everyone's in a while local news does one good thing. Yeah yeah, yeah, occasionally, like like like a stopped clock there, yeah exactly. Yeah yeah,

all right. So when Todd Gloria talks about his early life, he talks about being the son of a maid in a gardener, and it's a way I think of distinguishing himself from the very few elites who have held power in the city for a very long time, people whose names are on every building. But his dad's LinkedIn profile

tell us a little bit of a different story. According to his own LinkedIn account, Phil Glorier A sixty four has been in the aerospace industry for many years, including as a production controller at General Atomics, who people might remember as a manufacturers of the Predator and Reaper drones. Oh yeah, so it's a slightly different story, right, It's different from maiden a gardener. Prior to working at General Atomics, fil Gloria works for fourteen years the supervisor at United

Technologies and other errors space and technology company. Gloria has clarified later that his parents didn't work in those specific fields, that the son of a maiden a guidener thing recently, but they did when he was born, so he wasn't He's not. Yeah, I don't, that's bullshit. Like I could.

I I could take this argument and argue that, like I am the child of like a pancake maker and a dishwasher, like this is yeah, yeah, it's like it's it's sort of classic like this classic politicians, right, like like telling enough of the truth for it not to be a lie, but but maybe not telling the whole truth. And like I know, like like my folks worked in

agriculture when I was a kid. They still do, but like they also worked very hard you know to like provide for me and get a better place in life, and I wouldn't want to run them down by denigrating the work that they did, but hey, I don't want

to be a mayor either. Um yeah, it's also like also, like, you know, you don't get to do your fucking like burnishing working class credentials, and then your dad worked for a fucking like like yeah, yeah, none of my parents have ever made a Reaper drone, so I guess I do have that in my favor. It is an extremely San Diego story. In twenty twenty, to San Diego Union

Tribune wrote he was running. So the San Diego story that allowed his mother a hotel maid and his father a gardener, to work hard and afford a home doesn't end with their generation. That story seemed to admit the glaring reality that San Diego is one of the least affordable cities in the world right now, and it's housing as unaffordable as ever has been, and it's got worse since tog Gloria became mayor. So who is tog Gloria. He's an enrolled member of the Tlinget hyda Indian tribe

of Alaska. He was born and raised in San Diego and graduated from the University of San Diego with a bachelor's degree in history and political science. He began his career to San Diego's Health and Human Services Agency, and then he worked with Congresswoman's Susan Davis, who became his mentor. He was elected to the city Council in two thousand and eight and two and twelve and served as interim

mayor from August twenty thirteen to March twenty foty. He was also elected to the California State Assembly in twenty sixteen and twenty eighteen, and he chose not to seek reelection for the Assembly when he launched his campaign for mayor in twenty twenty. So he's done the kind of the sort of the climb up of offices that you see a lot of these folks do, right, And I'm sure that he has admissions to run for further office. That would be my guests. So in twenty twenty he

was elected mayor of San Diego. He became our first gay mayor, our first mayor of color, our first indigenous mayor. So it was a lot of first for us, and it is good to have a gay indigenous mayor, right like if we're going to have a mayor. You didn't know. It's nice to it's a position, it's over to more people. But unfortunately he hasn't done a lot else to encourage up with social mobility. He made a big push for private sector housing building as opposed to subsidize public housing,

and he promised police reform. In a twenty twenty op ed for The Union Tribune, Lauria wrote, we watched in horror as George Floyd was killed by four Minneapolis police officers. Mister Floyd and other victims of excessive force by law enforcement demand that we revisit, reconsider, and reimagine how police operate in our community and how we expect them to interact with the public. It's time we work together to create a more just system of policing. The primary responsibility

of government is protected people, all people. Many of us don't feel safe or protected, particularly our black community, so it seems like like a pro at least reform statement, right. He went on to say, whether it's our mental health crisis or a homelessness crisis, we resort to the same solution. Send the police and arrest people. We have to stop severely penalizing some people for minor missteps and invest in lifting people up from difficult situations. I will need to

put a pin in that. As we talk about his politics, it will shock you to hear that he's done exactly that. He also wrote, the rapidly expanding and secretive use of digital surveillance of our community members is unconstitutional and it should end. Again. Put a pin in that as we get back to discussion of the cameras that we're putting

on street lights in San Diego. So In a PDF of his plan to end homelessness, which has been removed from his campaign website but were sank represerved by our friends at Voice of San Diego, Gloria wrote, no more criminalizing the existence of San Diego's poorest and residents. He also told right wing news station KUSI that San Diego cannot claim to be America's finest city, or even a great city where thousands of people live, unsheltered and dying

on our streets. It's time to stop the band aids, the temporary solutions, and bad policy from city hall on this issue, he said, As mayor, my administration will prioritize ending chronic homelessness. I will focus the city's energy and resources on results oriented programs proven to get homeless individuals

off the street, connected to services, and back on their feet. Now, to be fair, while it is tru one, is that anything Okay, Like any person who was running from mayor is a system out could lying to you about what they're going to do. The second thing is, if you ever hear someone say the words results oriented, it is time to grab like the largest saber you have and like, yeah, get to work. Oh yeah, and as we'll discover the results that he has oriented towards. Somewhat disappointing for folk.

I was going to say for all of us hashtag for all of us is his campaign slogan. It's yeah, it's just it's very cringe and I don't know will it. It's very sad when we see the impact of this for like the least fortune of people in San Diego and then like it, it is very funny, but when you see how this plays out on the street, So it's also very sad. You know what is also very funny kind of sad mia the coin So yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a Ronald Reagan silver coins that pay for my

friends to get hormones so please enjoy these adverts. Thank thank you Ally Ronald Reagan for funding HRT. Yeah, thanks for Ronnie. All Right, we're back and we're talking about Todd Gloria, san Diego's mayor, and we've just before the break we talked about like his promises, right, so let's see how he did on those promises. I want to start with January nine, twenty tw one, told Gloria taken

office a few days before. If you can cost your mind back, then there have been a significant event at the Capitol a couple of days before Proud Boys, theo Nazis ether assorted Chuds decided to visit San Diego. Three days after they visited the capitol, anti fascists assembled shows them they weren't welcome, and the police responded by declaring the anti Fascis assembly illegal, escorting the Chuds around Pacific Beach as they did various crimes, and trying to shoot

me in the dick with pepper balls. Garrison's just smirking, I thought, Gloria, the guy who ran on police reform, had this to say. Mayor Gloria spoke candidly about what happened at the Capitol and how that's reverberating around the country after seeing what happened in Washington on Wednesday. What are you doing out on our streets supporting that mess right, racism, fascism,

anti democracy? Why would you choose to be out there, Gloria says, despite his feelings, San Diego supports peaceful protests of all kinds. But on Saturday, police say three people were arrested and five officers suffered minor injuries. We're asking for the public's assistance and helping us identify some of those folks, but we were not able to apprehend yesterday to make sure that how to account all these are people on both sides of the debate, both sides, Yeah,

both sides. So some of you remember some other people have caught out people on both sides the debate. So I think the most blatant sort of thing he did with regards to the police comes after Derek Shovin the copy murdered George Floyd was convicted of murder. I guess a few you can probably remember where you were that day. I can remember I was, and it was at the very least after an entire summer of protest right it was like the smallest token instance accountability, but I guess

at least it was something. And in that moment told Gloria, who was looking at that same thing that nearly everyone was looking at in this country that day. Right. He thought about what he wanted to do, and he decided that rather than talking to black organizers who have been the street for almost a year and have been peppable and tear gassed and mace and never stop demanding justice, he was instead going to call the cops and in such many such cases, yeah yeah, and checked out the

video that the verdict wasn't making them sad. What he did was took over the entire police like scanner radio thing and delivered a message to the cops, which I've got audio of here. Collie. This is Mere Todd Gloriam. I want to address each and every single one of you who nobly serve our great city. Today's verdict is just the beginning of building a deeper trust with our community. Justice reserved today against someone who does not represent you, or US, or our department, or who we are as

a nation. So I want you to hear from me today. I know who you are. You are people who helped complete strangers on the worst day in their life. You are people who believe in collaboration, in community. You're who put your lives on the line every single day to protect this city. I and the people of sand are grateful for your dedication and your service. With today's decision made, there's now time for all of us to come together, to heal and to move forward. Please take care of yourself,

of each other. You know the people of this great city. Be safe. Everybody. Has anyone ever said the words to move forward and not be like not just be an absolute dipshit. It sounds like it was written by an ai y. Yeah, if you had a chat GPT for a liberal mayor, it wouldn't look hugely different to what liberal mayor's statements. Yeah yeah, chat GPT right, liberal mayor writing a ponto the cops. Now it's time to heal and come together as a community. Yeah, stop you black

lives mattering. It's it's scary. Yeah. Yeah, it was extremely cringe like, especially when you consider how it differs from what he was saying just a few months ago. And that again, like this was about a man who murdered someone and that somebody in it was an STPD who killed the person, but somebody in San Diego died in similar circumstances with someone doing a carotid restraint on them. A few days before this, Gloria also proposed a budget.

In his budget, he proposed that we cut library hour significantly and lay off one hundred and fifty three library employees, but give the police nineteen million dollars more than a previous year. The previous year, I probably don't have to remind people, is a year in which San Diegans had turned up in droves at zoom council meetings to urge the city to do the exact opposite of this. Let's

check in on that surveillance claim he made. You remember that he said it was unconstitutional, right, So, on the second of this year, told Gloria in a shocking vault fast tweeted streetlight cameras and license plates readers can be helpful public safety tools. You know, just because he thinks it's unconstitution or doesn't mean he doesn't think it's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's once again been held back from protecting your people,

San Diego by that pesky constitution. The city pass strong privacy protections last year and now it's time for at San Diego PD to use this technology to keep us safe. Public meetings to get this done start soon. So yeah, these street lights, they were deactivated in twenty twenty, but they had previously been introduced and build us a way to assess traffic patterns, but in fact, they never assessed

traffic patterns. Yeah, yeah, this will shock you. They put thousands of cameras and microphones on our streets, including one outside a planned parenthood facility, you know, for traffic. You know, the funniest part about this, this was literally the thing about doing traffic science was this was literally Tom Cruise's cover story and like one of the early Mission Impossible movies. So that's what we have next. Is it fucking scientology

coming for San Diego. Yeah, it'll it'll shock you to hear that we stopped using these for very reasonable people had very reasonable concerns in twenty twenty that you know, it's not a good idea for the cops to be able to see and hear everything that you do, to be able to read your license plate and see everywhere

that you go. Beton wants some back and if people actually want to follow the discussion about having them back, because every single time, like every single public meeting, there's someone and they'll stand up and have a vehement like position pro cameras, and then it'll turn out that they are like a prosecutor at the DA's office, or in one instance, there was a prosecutor in one instance who

insisted he was there in his personal capacity. But like the lieutenant for Sauron is defending the surveillance cameras that are being posted around Middle Earth. Curious this, this guy whose name is not Big Brother, is here to advocate for having cameras in your home. The king of the new surveilance for a crash. But he's wearing a a fake mustache, so you can't tell who he is. So let's look at what he said about stopping criminalizing homelessness, right,

and this is a big, big issue. In San Diego. We have a massive and growing unhouse population because our rents are exceptionally high and our waits are not, so the number of unhoused people has increased in the Gloria so of death on the street, which hit a record of five hundred and seventy four in the county last year. So that's think it's more than one person dying every single day in the streets. Right. He's opened some shelters,

but some scouters are scheduled to close. The shelter beds and traditional transitional housing provided have failed to grow at the same rate as the young house population. Let's haven't stopped him taking photos and claiming every single one. It's

a huge step forward. We also continue to build what it called congregate shelters, which don't give people privacy, right, which don't give them A lot of people might not want to go into a congreate shelter, into effectively a dormitory, and there are a number of reasons why you might not want to do that, and yet that's what we're building. There are also some other sort of single lot composity shelters, but nowhere near enough. He's been a huge backer of

something called California's Care Court. Are you guys familiar with the care Court at all? No? No, this shit is dystopian. This could be a whole episode. Maybe one day it will be CARE stands for community assistance, recovery and empowerment, which I have a feeling that this is not going to be about empowerment. Yeah, when it's empowering someone Garrison, but it's not empowered to people we might want to empower. What it is in practice, it's a massive expansion of

force conservatives ship. So I'm going to quote from Human Rights Watch here. Human Rights Watch said the plan promotes a system of involuntary coerced treatment enforced by an expanded judicial infrastructure that will, in practice simply remove unhoused people with perceived mental health conditions from the public eye without effectively addressing those mental health conditions. Jesus, Yeah, it's pretty bad.

It's it doesn't provide money for mental health services. It takes money that's already existing in the budget and puts it across to court mandated treatment. It doesn't provide housing, which the multiple studies share that Housing First's approach a

housing first approach is a way to solve homelessness. Instead, it allows for a broad range of people, which include family members, first responders including cops and outreach workers, the public guardian, service providers, and the director of the county Behavioral Health Agency, to refer individuals to the jurisdiction of the court to take away their autonomy and liberty. It very broadly covers people it describes to having schizophrenia, spectrum

or other psychotic disorders. Under this system, judges can force people into treatment and housing. If they don't comply, they can be forced into conservatorship. Now, obviously evidence doesn't support the conclusion that involuntary outpatient treatment it's more effective than intensive voluntary outpatient treatment, and indeed it does show that involuntary coercive treatment is harmful. But it isn't really about people with mental health. It's about keeping a house people

where they can't be seen. And Human Rights Watch claims that this violates due process and international human rights conventions. And yet the quote Glory and Gavin you some to be fair, who I'm sure we'll run for president soon, have been cheer leading this and it's I'm surprised it hasn't got more press coverage internationally and nationally. Sorry, because it's a massive assault on personal freedoms, right, and it's extremely easy to effectively say that somebody quote unquote need

to mental health, help force them into conservatorship. And if they're not willing to attend these treatments, so they're not able to attend these treatments, so they're not willing to go into the housing that they are assigned. Let's say that they don't want to live in in congret at housing, right or something like that, Or they're in housing with someone who they don't feel comfortable or safe with them, they could be forced into conservatorship and effectively lose all

their liberty. Right. Yeah, it's pretty bad. It's a new and exciting way of criminalizing homelessness effectively. And like I said, it doesn't provide housing, it doesn't provide funding for behavioral healthcare.

It just directs existing funding to court mandated programs. So I could pick hundreds of other examples of this tod glorious stuff, but I want to pick one more to focus on, and it's something that I think it gets a little bit like inside politics, grifty stuff, but it like it has ruined a good number of careers in San Diego politics. And I'm really heavily indebted to that plan certain Voice of San Diego for their reporting on this.

But let's start by talking about public restrooms. So I think most of us are going to agree that like having a safe place to shit and wash your hands is a pretty basic human right, but in San Diego it's something that not everyone has so since two thousand four, grand jury reports have warned the city's inadequate public restroom

infrastructure could become a public health threat. That's what happened in twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen when a hepatip itis a swept through the city, sickening five eighty two people and killing twenty. So after the heapet, yeah, it's not a thing that like you expect, right and like like on the left coast in America's find a city. Most Americans will not encounter, thankfully, hepatitis in their lifetime and sadly made this isn't our only hepatitis outbreak, so that's great.

Oh no, And so after the hep A outbreak, the city stopped locking restrooms at night, which had done previously, but that changed with the COVID pandemic when the facilities were temporarily closed and some have since not returned to twenty four seventh service. Following this, a twenty twenty one Shigella outbreak second at least forty one homeless residents, most of whom were staying in Central San Diego, further shed

light on the city's restroom issues. Much as this was dealt with in a great report by Bella Ross in the Voice of San Diego, to which Gloria commented, the goal here isn't to add as many permanent public restrooms as possible. The goal is to help get unsheltered residents off the streets and into safe, sanitary shelter and permanent housing. Like I don't quite know where he was going for here, but not having a place to shit is an everyone issue.

This isn't just an unhoused issue, right, Like everybody poops, and not all of us live in houses and have giant offices in city Hall downtown. And so it was this bizarre kind of gas lighting approach, like we fundamentally have an issue with access to bathrooms and to try and like reframe this as another issue where he's also failing. Was It's kind of indicative of their response, but also

very bizarre. Where the city has installed new bathrooms, they're often installed by private groups as part of development projects, which is great, right, A good old a public private partnership has never gone wrong before. So it will shock you to hear that these private groups are responsible for maintaining and securing these facilities. And this means that they're often a lot. So despite literal human shit being all over downtown and people are being forced to endure the

massive a dignity of having nowhere to poop. In December twenty twenty two, researched by stsu's Project for Sanitation Justice found that less than half of the city's permanent restrooms could be considered truly open access, and that just two permanent facilities were available around the clock, seven days a week. Gloria has later acknowledged that city has an issue, but he's chosen to blame residents. I just need folks to

quit acting a fool in these bathrooms. I mean, it's not just a homeless population, it's everybody, he said in an interview. In February twenty twenty three, nearly five years after the last outbreak, San Diego County again began recording an uptake and hepatitis say cases, which is great, Right, We're back to where we started. Much of this reporting was met with absolutely unhinged responses on Twitter from some of Glorious staff. They called themselves a todd squad that sucks. Yeah, yeah,

it's pretty bad. So not tour responses come from Dave Roland who left the old weekly City Beak for a job in PR and Rachel Lane, who she's tuggs I think ahead of public relations. She spent June of twenty twenty posting about black Lives Matter, whilst also doing volunteer public relations to work for the cops. Wow, amazing, Yeah

yeah here public relations. Yeah yeah, yeah, like there there there's there's like a there's like a joke on like there's this like a sort of pejorative label for the okay, so on Chinese Twitter, there's this there's a joke of calling people unpaid five cent army, which is like army is like or well, the number of sense changes over time. But it's like there there used to be a thing where like you could get paid by the government to get like like to to to like that you get

paid pro post to like posts. Wow, whatever fucking shit the Chinese government wanted to like have posts on. But this person's actually literally an unpaid but like actual usually literally like volume cheer. Yeah, volunteer public relations for the cops, Like what the fuck is this bullshit? Oh yeah, it was really a magical public when I sent that PRRA email, Yeah, yeah, I think she framed it as like helping the community and the police talk to one another in a difficult time.

The future is the giant boot stamping on your faces when people volunteer to paint the boot. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah it is a rainbow boot. Yeah, I mean you can you can find their feed. Some of the attacks on myself and some of my colleagues are like incredibly petty and unprofessional and also quite nerving when you consider the huge amounts of taxpair money that are wasted on their salaries which pay them to post. And again, this is a town where people die because they don't have

a place to take a shit. But but we're paying people to get into Twitter beef. You know. It's it's also it's it's also really cool that like the the sort of two axes of American politics are you can't use the bathroom because you're trans, and you can't use the bathroom because you don't own one. And then sometimes they just coverage and it's the same yeah yeah, yeah, locking yeah, that's the hands clasping meme locking trans people

out of the bathroom. All right, So now we're about to get to Todd Squad's finest hour, which is when they use city resources and work time to make a video of them singing Return of the Mac. Only it wasn't Return of the Mac. It was Todd Gloria's back and yeah, I'm going to make you all watch it. So that was that was? Was he walking through a city hall? Yeah? Was the first part him walking to a security line at the airport. Yeah, which is funny.

That's a security line to get into city hall. Yeah, okay, okay, have you have you never been to a city hall before? Mine didn't have that? Certainly does now Chicago, Yes, it certainly has that. Now my local town one didn't. Are they are they saying that the mayor lied to the city? Is that what they're saying? They Yeah, the previous math Oh the okay, wasn't he the previous mayor? Only for a little bit of time then he he was entering Math. Okay,

they're blake. Oh my god, I believe you when you said, why is on me? One guy? That was like twelve guys. Yeah, it feels like it's gone on for like forty minutes. Yeah, if stalin grad there's a point where they come in dressed as flavor flav but I think it's here and anyway, one of them's wearing a medallion that just says Cocks on it. The egg Glory is wearing a medallion here we can probably no note, hang on here he is again he said, franchise. That's some cops. What is the

leg of the ground circle? I think their heads touching. There's a person with the cocks medallion. Again, this is okay. So is one of the worst things that people showed up with the chain that it was like an SD for San Diego. When it first comes on to screen, it really looks like a swassica the Padres logos. That's like, yes, now shitty asked to go. The Padres did a different genocide, and it should it be a conflict with the other genocide.

I'm guessing this is like a sports thing or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah they are the sports ball team. That's what I thought baseball to be specific. M very proud of him. Yeah, but yeah, as you'll have noticed, one of the most cringe things that has ever fucking happened. Yeah, it's pretty bad, right, like like it's it's it's pretty crushing when like, like I have personally known people who have died on our streets and also my Merria is making return of the

Mac videos dressed as Flavor Flavor. So I think we're mostly done. I want to talk about one more thing, because no review of San Diego politics will be complete without a mention of the giant monument to Griff that is one on one Ash Street? So what is one on one Street? In twenty sixteen, San Diego leased a downtown high rise hoping to house city employees. It turned out that building was riddled with asbestos. And it turns out the city knew it is riddled when it started

to lease the building. Yeah. Yeah, And then it will shock you to know that they deny this at first. But in the agreement to lease to own the building, it says Bayer acknowledges that the building contained asbestos and that SEMPRA has maintained an asbestos monitoring and handling program. So eventually, in twenty nineteen they managed to move staff in after a renovation that ballooned in cost. In twenty twenty, they were forced to evacuate the building because of the asbestos.

Since then, DA's investigation has been opened into Jason Hughes, who publicly represented himself as a volunteer advisor to the city, according to Voice of San Diego, but unbeknownst to the city, collected nine point four million dollars from Cistero, who owned

one on one ashtreet. The City Attorney's office alleged but could not prove that the city's former top bureaucrat, Chris Michael, ordered City Information Technology Star to purge record tied to the one on one as Street debarcle last year so they can improve that she paid to records. But what they do know that she did was pass a confidential legal document to Corey Briggs, a candidate for the city attorney. NBC reported that the memo included a footnote, which Eliot

and others later decried as fabricated. In the footnote, they claimed that Elliot's office made an effort to shield Gloria from an outside probe at the one on one Ash Street debarcle. The footnote suggested an interview with Gloria might have clarified why the city decided to go forward with the Ash Street lease, given Gloria's skepticism about a similar

past deal. So it's not clear if this If this footnote was real or fabricated like then it's alleged it was fabricated, which it's bizarre, like this whole sort of weird, corrupt, corrupt thing is resigned. It may this may well not be true. To be clear, during this time, Dorian Hargrove, who was a reporter, obtained some of those records, faced legal threat of prosecution from the city attorney and lost

his job for obtaining those records. So far, the city has poured more than sixty million into one oh one Street, roughly the same amount of this annual library budget. It's only occupied the office space. Yeah, it's great, it's absolutely into. This has been occupied for like less than a couple of months for the five years since the city acquired it. Are they do? Do? Do do? Do we know what their ties to like the contractors who are doing the

renovations are, and that will be an interesting thing. I actually don't know that. Yeah, because that that's like that that's that's that's like that's the classic Illinois griff. Yeah. You just keep keep renovating a building, keep getting donations from the from the contractors, well or or or the contractors are just your friends and so that's okay, Yeah,

keep the money around. Yeah, well they're not doing any more contracting on it here because the city agreed to buy the building, which needs one hundred and fifteen million million dollars in repairs, for eighty six million last year. Yeah, it's good stuff. Amazing yep. This week, the UT reported at San Diego's top real estate official did not seek input from her staff or a view internal files before recommending a city buy out the one or one as

Street lease. They also reported that in a confidential memo to the city Auditor's office, anonymous employees wrote, the City of San Diego should be aware of the level of waste and abuse that is occurring within the Real Estate and Airport Management Department, which has led to a toxic, hostile, revenue wasting, and unproductive work environment. Which is great. Yep. This is a San Diego we wanted hashtag for all of us. So this is a lot of inside San

Diego politics, right. So it's a lot of lists of things and promises made and promises broken. But I want to come back to the fact that this is a guy who ran for Mare on a ticket the push compassion and a relative liberal set of policies, and he's done the exact opposite in his time in office, he ran as a progressive downe very well to differentiate himself policy wise from mayor's like Republican Kevin Fulkner. Obviously, we're just cracking the lid on some of these policies here.

He's consistently chosen to suppund it, to fund and support the police over the people of the city. He's consistently moved to make it harder to live on the streets and harder to get off the streets, and he's consistently chosen photo opportunities over real of governance for the city. His pr people spend hours bashing mutual aid workers like Michael who he had a guest on the show on Twitter,

and wasting taxpayer money doing it. Just this week, he welcomed right wing maniac Rishi Sunac, who actually as Prime Minister of the UK. Despite the fact that people haven't noticed to our city and San Diego State University researchers released a report saying negative interactions with police are driving black people who are experiencing homelessness away from services and housing opportunities. This is what we got from a mayor who positioned himself as a progressive and as governed as

a Rainbow Republican. So yeah, that's I would say. That's all I have to say about Todgloria. If you follow me on Twitter, you'll know that it's not the case, and I will continue to have more to say about Gloria. But yeah, it's really sad. It's deeply sad. And like I said, it's funny. The crnty Mutic music video is funny.

We'll linked to it in the show notes, but it's it's also really deeply troubling that this has real impacts for real people who are already down on their luck and you know, living on the streets or experiencing you know, over aggressive policing. All the things that he said he would fix have just got worse. And yeah, it sucks. So thanks for listening to me why and about my city everyone, And yeah, again, my apologies for traumatizing you further with that video. It's fine. Next week. Next week,

we're well okay. So we would have been doing Chicago's own version of this exact same person, which is Lloyd Lightfoot, except to the surprise of absolutely zero people who live in Chicago and everyone who doesn't live with Chicago, Lightfoot didn't make it out of her fucking primary. So we're Insteady Gore be doing Chicago's once in future while not once potentially future mayor Paul Vallas, who absolutely sucks ass.

So stay tuned for that in another week when I get a yell about Paul Vallas and inflict some truly horrific bullshit on all of you. Very excited to get my revenge. All right, well, I would look forward to seeing Paul Vallas's hip hop video. Carriston's just sitting there background of dying. This is this is, this is worse than anything anything the Daily Wire can throw at me. Should we just pivot to more come content? Garrisons, Okay, this has been naken. Happen year. You can find us.

It happened here pot on Twitter, Instagram. But we're gonna leave before one of us dies. Hello and welcome. It could happen here with me Andrew of the YouTube channel andrewism and today I'm joined by Miya and care Hello. Hello, Hello, Hello, and I want to talk about cities because I very recently published a video on Sulapunk City Planet. I mean, I don't know what you're all going to hear this podcast, but I did recently publish it, and you can check

that out of my channel. And I thought i'd share a bit about a bit more about one particular historical urban planet movement that I talk about in that video, and that is Ebanez A. Howard's Garden Cities movement and his book Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Are all familiar with either, No, I don't think so. Yeah, so Ebane's a Howard side note, by the way, I don't know who looks at a

child and names them Ebanez Howard. But he presented this idea of the garden city concept in eighteen ninety eight in a book called Tomorrow, A Peaceful Path through Real Reform. Later he republished in nineteen or two under the name of Garden Cities or Tomorrow, And take notes in the title of the book of the use of reform and peaceful path because it does highlight a noticeable lack within

Howard's vision that will discuss later. He wants to provide access to the benefits of both town living and a country living. As he describes, a town and country are like magnets drawing people to them, you know. So, according to him, town offers vibrant society and opportunity and transportation, but it lacks the beauty of nature. It has pollution and has crowded, it has disease. I mean this is Victoria and era cities. He's talking about place what stink.

In contrast, country and country offers the space and the beauty of nature and it's abundance, but it lacks society and it can feel isolated and it really spread out. So you wanted to create a hybrid of both concepts, a third magnet of town country the combined the benefits of both. I believe the secret Sorry I have to help. I've jump in here and make a secret secret thing. Yes, yes, thank you, yeah, country, but a secret third thing. We

fulfilled our we fulfilled our contractual obligations. One joke. All right, I'm going to side optical, Andrew, you take it from here. So, yeah, a secret third thing. How I would believe that the ideal living conditions for people of all economic backgrounds could be created by establishing these town country cities with very specific parameters run by strong government institutions. In Ebenezer Howard's context, again, no offense to the Ebanese as the world, but jeez,

I can't. I can't let go of those amplications. I think I think we need to bring back the name Ebenezer. Actually it's it's it's been too long since I've seen an infant named Ebenezer, meaning I've never seen one. I think I feel like we should see more. Just absolutely absurd. All the timing names. What do you what do you call the baby? Do you call them ebby or something like? How do you call the baby Ebenezer? The baby's name?

Why would you you call it the baby's name? You could call it Niza, you could eventually call it weezak horrible nickname is awful? Oh yeah, that is okay. I'm here on the amplications. I do never I never want

to hear that again. Yeah, I digress Howard's writing. I just gonna call them Howard Howard's Rights in Journey Industry Revolution was in response to well, the industrial Revolution, you know, his response to the urban slums, the pollution, the lack of access to the countryside, and much of his book is dedicated the idea that cities as they existed in

his time were not sustainable in the long run. By the middle of the nineteenth century, over half of Britain's population lived in towns, and in nineteen hundred that proportion had resuned over three quarters. But English towns and cities presented social environmental problems of an unprecedented scale, and much of Britain's history in that period could be connected with the efforts to ameliorate the frightening conditions that a lot

of people lived in. When it comes to the design, Howard wanted to create these highly structured, carefully laid out communities to provide the best conditions possible for every kind of person he saw. He wanted to put just like large areas of land from aristocratic owners as a setting up garden cities that would house up to thirty two

thousand people in individual homes on six thousand acres. And that whole vision of individual homes is I think it belies a limitation the imagination there, but it's it's someone understandable considering the historical conditions of the time where people were living in these overcrowded slums and stuff. And the dream was really to have a home of your own that you didn't have to crowd out, it didn't be crowded,

you couldn't have to share with others. But anyway, I think a sustainable city should trade the sprawl that single family homes generate for more dense development. For the most part. That is, but I digress once again. That's not all his plan entailed. His garden cities would also include a huge public garden with public buildings like a town hall,

lecture halls, theaters, and a hospital. An enormous arcade called the Crystal Palace, not arcade as video game, where residents would browse a covered market and enjoy a winter garden, neighborhoods with cooperative kitchens and shared gardens, schools, playgrounds and churches, factories, warehouses, farms, workshops, and access to a train line. In its ideal form, the garden city would become a network of smaller garden

cities built around the larger central town. The idealized vision of the garden city contained very specific utopian elements, like small communities planned on a concentric pattern that woul accommodated housing, industry,

and agriculture, surrounded by green belts that would limit their growth. Now, there's a diagram that he did up for his book that has been popularized that represents like a sort of a concentric circle design, but he didn't believe that that necessarily had to be the shape of the garden city. He still wanted the city to be adapted to local layout somewhat, and these elements of garden city design were all into dependent you know. He wanted strong community engagement,

he wanted community ownership of land. Although he wasn't a socialist, mind you. He was a Georgist. Oh god, wait, that explains it. That explains so much about all of his politics. Of course he was a Georgeist. Yeah, quite an interesting crew of characters. He wanted mixed ten years homes and homes and types that were generally affordable, you know. To go on another digression, I find Georgis Owe to be

such an interesting fixation of a philosophy. It's like, you know, looking all the problems in society, and you know what, we need a land tax. That'll salt thing. I mean, obviously that's something. All it is to the to the that political philosophy, that economic approach. But I just found I just find it every time I think about it. I find it funny that it was just really like the whole movement was basically this one like um tax proposal.

It's really that was the whole focus of it. Yeah, it's really funny too because it has one of the sort of largest like collapses of any ideology ever. Like this is like it was just a very like very it was. It was a big It was a big ideology. You know. It literally helped to develop the the board game Monopoly, you know what. It's like, it was a huge thing. This is something I've actually been looking into

a lot of it. I've been trying to track down some of the original like nineteen twenties copies of Monopoly that's more based on the second game. Yes, I've been trying to find the ones that were like pre pre pre Parker Brothers UM, and I've I've I found I found a few a few. I found a few like two months ago, but before I could order them, it was sold to somebody else on eBay. So I've been trying to track down another another one in the U in the past two months, and it's been a bit

more challenging, just because I'm kind of a Monopoly freak. Yeah, it's um. It's really interesting to see how um that game was developed and then changed over time, and how hasbur was stepped in. Isn't Hasbro Poker Brothers without stepped in? And did there do so I'm kind of basically rewrote

with the history of the board game entirely. Yeah, but anyway, elements to the garden city strong community engagement, communitytionship with land, mixed tenure homes, homes in type so generally affordable, a wide range of local jobs with easy commuting distances of homes, well designed homes with gardens combining the best of town and country, and green infrastructure that enhances a natural environment with strong cultural, recreational and shopping facilities in addition to

integrated and accessible transportation. It's not all sunshine and roses, though. I mean you could look at the sort of the cream washing elements of the garden city design, and even in the time they were criticized. I mean, they were praised for being an alternative to the overcrowed industrial cities, but they were also criticized for damage in the economy, being destructive to the beauty of nature, and being in convenient.

You know, they weren't able to be Furthermore, because they had this sort of top down design philosophy, they weren't able to truly reflect the natural and organic developments of a town or a country, you know, so secretly thing couldn't do either other things that the original two stuff could do. And then of course you have the mustached man himself, Marie book Chin, stepping in in the limits of the city to evaceorate the idea of the garden City.

He talks about how howards scheme was basically a system of benevolent capitalism that presumed to avoid the extremes of communism and individualism, and as a result, his entire book was quote permeated by an underlying assumption. So typically British that are compromised going to be struck between an intrinsically irrational material reality and a moral ideology of high minded conciliation microsh Yeah, I feel like the most brutal part of that is just the typically British like, yeah, I

mean anything learning. Look at really the plan that Howard had, you know, the offices and industrial factories and shopping centers that he intended to provide the Garden city with. Those spaces are battlegrounds of conflicting social interests. You know, there's alienated labor, their income differences, their disparities of work, time and free time. All that conflict is not addressed just

because you make a pretty city. You know, there's no resolution to the problems created under a capitalist factory office or shopping center to just because you have a nice transit system and a green belt. I feel like some of some of these same problems crop up on some of the solar punk stuff online as well. I mean we've an attacked him definitely greenwashing throughout the solar punk

aesthetic and stuff. But yeah, I mean it is it is an interesting, an interesting, interesting aspect that keeps propping up, and it's just intriguing that it like dates back over a hundred years ago, like this same exact thing. Yeah, exactly,

and funny enough, you know, his garden cities. We even fallen short of utopias that were thought of before his time, you know, like I'm not even just utopias, but also actual historical political experiments that you know, try to address various social problems, you know, like unlike the Greek polis, which had some basis of face to face democracy, Howard just had a central council and a department structure based on elections, Unlike in Thomas More's utopia, there's no proposal

for rotating agricultural and industrial work. Unlike the Paris Commune of eighteen seventy one, which was established long before Howard wrote his book, he had no sort of incorporation of that sort of political experimentation in the garden city development. The criticism really is how superficial a lot of Howards ideas are, right, Like, there's just a lack of social analysis analysis in fear of just design. Yeah, Georgism, Like sure it would probably be like better than what we

have now. Well yeah, but but it by no means like fixes all of the systemic issue. It's like Amsterdam, right, I would rather have capitalism while riding a bike. But Bookchin also talks about how these communities do not encompass the full range of possibilities a human experience. Again quote because you know Bookchin is Loki a boss. Right, Neighborliness

is mistaken for organic social intercourse and mutual aid. Well manicured parks for the harmonization of humanity with nature, the proximity of workplaces for the development of a new meaning

for work and its integration with play. An eclectic mix of ranch houses, slab like apartments, and bachelor type flats for spontaneous architectural variety, shopping, marked plazas in a vast expanse of lawn for the agora, lecture halls for cultural centers, hobby classes for vocational variety, benevolent trusts, so municipal councils for self administration. One can add endlessly to this list of misplays. Criteria for community that save to off your

skate rather than clarify the high attainment of the urban tradition. Indeed, the appearance of community serves the ideological function of concealing the incompleteness of an intimate and shared social life. Again, boom, you know, and people are brought together. You know, they have all these conveniences in these pleasant trees, but they're still culturally impoverished. They're still atomized, they still deal this stark reality of capitalism in the spaces that they're they're

gonna inevitably spend most of their day at work. Like it's nice that the city is well designed, but how much of it are you going to get to see if you still have to go to work for eight hours plus a day. I mean, if there anything at least you know, the commune will probably be shorter, but that's about it. And that's if you get a job

in the city itself. This is interesting because in some ways, the invention of the suburb in the in the years after this kind of tried to solve for this issue while also just doing it in an incredibly racist way. Like you can you can you can see the invention of the suburb of trying to create these little nestled communities but also getting away from the the the urban center, which was seen as this like scary place full of

people who were non white. So you have like this white flight thing that developed this notion of the suburbs, which in some ways kind of does this, but in a in a much worse way. Actually, it makes it makes the idea of the garden city look like a much better alternative to what the suburbs did. And it's it's just interesting that even the version of this that got implemented was just done in a way that it's so much more dystopian and depressing. Yeah, I mean, and

Booked Chin addresses that that comparison to the suburbs as well. Right. He says, in the best of cases, the new towns differ from suburbs, primarily because job commuting is short and most services can be supplied within the community itself. In the worst of cases, they are essentially bedroom suburbs of the metropolis and add enormously to its congestion during working hours. I can't, I can't believe book beat me to the

punch on this one. I'm devastated. This is the first time booktions ever has has ever has ever beaten me. This is this is this is really terrible. So but despite some of these flaws and criticisms, how it was passionate about his idea, all right, I mean he published the books. He also organized like he's actually he's not sitting on Twitter, right, He's actually doing something about his ideas.

So he organized this Garden City Association in eighteen ninety nine in England to promote the ideas of social justice, economic efficiency, beautification, health and well being in the context of City Planet. That Garden City Association later became the Town and Country Planet Association, which still exists to this day. Women played a very active role and continue to play very active role in the organization. I mean, as Howard says himself in his book, Women's Influences Too often ignored

here that ladies this guy's are feminist. But when the garden city is built as a chokey will be woman's share. And the work we found to have been a large one. Whomen are among our most active missionaries. And so he's doing some Abdullah now that yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's liberating life, you know. But yeah, the TCP in the Town Country Planet Association has continued to campaign for a new generation of garden city is based on modern modern

Godden City principles. They will cross sector and government influence policy and legislation. There is awareness through guidance and training. They promote affordable homes and inclusive, healthy and climate resilient places, and they try to create texta world barriers, opportunities and practical solutions necessary to make new garden cities a reality.

They also are genuinely interested in empowering people to have a real influence over decisions about the environments and to secure social justice within in between communities, or at least that is what their website says. Outside of the TCPA, the idea of godden city definitely sort of rooted itself and urban planning and the urban planning tradition and it did sort of feed into this rise of green spaces within urban landscapes that we now find around the world.

The concept of the garden city is definitely still revisited today, but it's considerably different from the original idea. It's also taken the garden city as an inspiration, as an esthetic inspiration to create greater integration between urban areas and green spaces. In his time though, going back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Howard was a successful fundraise again he was trying to get things going. In the first

years of the twentieth century. He built two garden cities, Letchworth Garden City and Welwyn Garden City, both in Hertfordshire, England, and both still exist today. Letchworth was an originally quite successful.

It was first you know, an ancient parish from like the left hanth century and remained a small rural village and so the start of twentieth century when the land was purchased by a company called First Garden City Limited, which was founded by Howard and supporters, and they went on to establish the United Kingdom's first roundabout the Solar Shot Circus. A lot of urban like park land and open spaces, including a green space named after Howard called

Howard Park. But after Howard's passing, the first Garden City Limited was sort of taken over in nineteen sixty and the company so it changed how the town was managed.

The residents of the local council kind of lost, some say the original Garden City ideals were reduced, and the corporation eventually became for the first the company created a corporation transferred ownership to the corporation which is now called the lech Withth Goden City Cooperation, and then that cooperation was replaced by a charter will body in the nineteen nineties called the lech Withth god Cy Heritage Foundation, which continues to own and manage the estate to this day.

Letchworth was a sort of an interesting experiment. The people who were founded, who helped to found that town, were very much otherworldly as some people would describe them. They for example, they had some people describe them as health freaks. They actually voted on a band to set against the selling of alcohol, a ban on the selling of alcohol in public premises. Oh boy, so which is I mean for a British village? Right? In the early nineteen hundreds

to vote against having a pub. Unheard of, right, they eventually create a pub. That pub didn't serve any alcohol. Bumber bumber, hate to see it. Yeah, but lat truth was still like a real pioneer, you know. It's approached to blend in. Town country was used in the Australian capital Canberra, in hell Rao, in Germany, in Tapanila and Finland, and in Messa parks in that field, and of course in the other Garden City well win how I had arranged for that land to be purchased by a company

called Second Gardain City Limited, real creative there. And first they were gonna call them the City Digs. Well, but a couple days later they changed their mind, probably because they realized as a dumb name. And then I wasn't gonna say anything, but yeah, that's not that's not a great name. Yeah. And so the town is laid out along these tree line boulevards. It's sort of a new George and town center. Um. There's a lot of ass

out of parks, as to be expected. And the planners had intended to create the Guarden City to have like one shop called well Wind Stores, which is basically a monopoly that all the residents were expected to shop at. Lastly, I think I want to bring up one final inspiration. I was about to one on whether I would include this one or not, but I said, you know what, I might be entertaining and I might want to talk about it further in the future. A certain character by

the name of Walt Disney. Oh no, this is Epcot. This is this is this is the experiments or prototypical city of tomorrow. Yes, this is the Florida Project. Oh no, Disney's Epcot was designed in concentric circles with radius. This is this is the worst job scare. Oh, but it should be noted, or rather it should be expected that, unlike Howard, mister Disney envisioned having a lot of personal control over the day to day management of life in his city. So really, Epcott was only loosely inspired by

Howard's idea of combining the populace with industry. Um. This city would have had a hotel at the center with more than thirty stories and a convention center. There would be an internationally themed town center. Um. There would be a mega mole. There would be themed restaurants, shops, and attractions. There would be a monorail, Yeah he was. He was a car free community advocate of Disney. Yeah. Like, his

plan was that nobody would drive in Epcot. Delivery trucks and other autobiles and other automobiles that needed to enter the city were to be kept underground. So it's kind of like a fusion of Ebone's ah what an elon musk that sucks? That sucks. Yeah. Also, this city would

be climb a controlled with a glass roof. Yes, I mean, And it's funny because like he couldn't even do this properly, Like he couldn't even build this instead instead of got turned into like a like a like a bare skeleton of what his original plan was because Epcot will failed in so in so many ways, the reason being that he ended up dying right Yeah. Yes, like even on his deathbed he was still sketching up designs for Epcot, so he never really got to implement it. Pro life

Dictator dies anyways. Yeah. Actually, like the actual like living communities in in Disney World Florida are are so different and in many ways they're they're just like another suburb um, except you're in a suburb owned by Disney. Yeah, yeah, and I mean it's gonna be a peek into what life would have been like on the Epcot. Right. Your home would have been pre fabricated and modular. Certain materials and technologies could be tested as soon as they were beable.

By the way, why they have nothing against free fab homes, I think they could be very useful. Um, But Disney's idea was basically, your home is pre fab so that any time he wanted to install an update on it, he could. It's great, you know, like the entire city was basically like a guinea pig for any technologies he came up with. Um, And so he wants to really retain absolute control of the city, like they wouldn't even

own anything. Disney alone would own the land so that he and his success, says, can make updates and changes without ever being snowed down by this pesky thing called citizens votes and rights and all that. It's funny because this is actually now under attack by Ron de Santis in Florida. The sovereignty of Disney may like change a lot, and I think already stripped it. Yes, But but but how this plays out in actuality as yet to be determined.

But it is funny that this is actually like this is a very very recent thing, Like it's just like a week or so. But see what we can see here is one of the inevitable transitions as as as we saw in British colonial rule in India, which is that direct corporate rules always replaced by injurrect corporate rule via the state. Yeah for know which, Yeah, it's in some ways. We will probably learn that it was better to live under Disney than Ron de Santis. But that's

not saying much. Next time he opens up a disun this wild No, no, it's just it's just it's literally just like eighteen gipmo exhibitions. Oh lord, I mean Descenter's world will just be the United States with descent potential election. True, sad but true. But let me tell you a bit more about EPCOT. Right, if you were eighteen or older, you have to have a job. Also, you don't get to retire. Nobody is allowed to retire. You only get to stop working if you either die or leave amazing

one way out. Also, he and reason being, he believed this would prevent slums or ghettos from foreman in any part of his magical city because I mean, if everyone has a job, then nobody will be struggling to pay rent or eat. Right. Funnily enough, of course, a lot of Disney workers today can't afford to pay rental eat. But hey, the theoretically everybody in Epcot would have their basic needs met also, though in exchange for that, they wouldn't have any privacy because Epcott was also supposed to

be like a tourist attraction. You know, you look outside, you win new, and tourists are like looking inside, you win new. That was a thing that was Epcott, thankfuley doesn't it wasn't fully implemented. I mean, some people have said that Singapore is like a dystopian city state run by Disney. But we could talk about that another time. That's a basic rundown on garden Cities past, present and future.

The idea of it, I think was, you know, notable, admirable, good effort, but flawed um and because it lacked a strong ideological foundation, economic foundation, an analysis that took into account the contentions speak within society that uh, you know, manifests in the urban landscape. And I think it's a clear oneing that for solo punks and for any people who are interested in urban planet as a whole. That. You know, aesthetics is not everything, design is not everything.

You know, they asked me some some meat to those, Um, let's say some meats underneath that flesh. It's a really weird analogy. But yeah, yeah, no, but like yeah, the principle of Okay, I'm just gonna I'm gonna, I'm gonna abandon the Walter Benjamin thing I was gonna do there, but no, try it, keep keep going, keep Benjamin thing I have. I haven't. I haven't actually read any of his stuff in like five years. But one of Benjamin's things was when politics is sort of displaced, you're converted

into aesthetic, it becomes fascism. So don't do that. In fact, have actual politics and not simply reduce your politics to an esthetic or to aesthetics, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, true, true. All right, Well that's it for me. You can follow me on YouTube dot com slash Andrewism, on Twitter at and his School of Saying True, and on picture dot com slash Andrewism. You can find us at happen here,

pod or cools on media, on Twitter and Instagram. Um, and you can find me tweeting about my desire to understand the mechanics of how Disney World operates at Hungry Boutie,

mostly on Twitter. Yeah, welcome to Dick. It happened here the podcast that I am a Wong occasionally hijack talk about Asian American stuff, and you know, some some so some some pretty interesting Asian American stuff happened, which is that, Yeah, there was a sort of massive sweeping cultural victory question mark for the Asian American community TM when everything ever we're all at once did. Okay, I'm getting conflicting sources about exactly the record that I said at the Oscars,

but it won seven Oscars, did very well. Everyone is very happy. Um. Yeah, So I decided that I was going to use this to talk about some other stuff that is related to it, and with me to talk about many things, including sort of the family in patriarchy and Asian American culture and media. Is Tiffany Yang, a filmmaker from New York. Tiffany Welcome to the show. Hi,

thanks for having me on, Thanks thanks for being on. Um. So we were for trying to figure out how precisely we want to sort of start this because you know, there's a lot of sort of angles you can take. I think that the thing that I want to start with is well, like a okay, everything, every All it wants is a very good movie in a lot of ways. And I think it's sort of it's kind of the apotheosis of a structure of Asian American media that I've

I've talked about before on this show. Um that I'm gonna I'm gonna run through a brief explanation of what this is. So something that I, yeah, I've talked about a bit before that that I think about a lot is the way in which Asian American media has been It has a basically a structural form. It has there's a very specific story or set of story structures into which anything you're trying to tell has to be fit

and and that that series of things is okay. So you have a small business, you have you have a bunch of immigrants that come to the US or that they are well usually they're already in the US and they're trying to run a small business and they're having these issues sort of integrating into into sort of like a wide American society, and there's some kind of conflict in the family, and the TV show or the movie

is about like resolving this sort of conflict. Um. Yeah, And I think Everything Ever All at Once is like the best version of this that we've ever gotten in a lot of ways. But you know, and something I've talked about in a certain New Year's episode is that there's something about I guess Asian American like the way our sort of political culture works that makes it so

that this is the only story that we tell. And you know, I mean you can look at a lot of the sort of like, sorry, I've been rambling for a lot, but I want to get this out of the way before you go further. But you know, like there there's a lot of movies that are like it's like you know, shows like Fresh off the Boat, like and Fist is also sort of like almost literally this, right, um, Like Turning Red is sort of like an emblematic example of sort of thing that is exactly this, Like Fresh

off the Boat is basically this, right. I think part of the sort of there's a kind of ideological shell game happening here that's about the family. Everything Ever, All at Once has a lot of similarities. The Crazy Rich Asians in ways that are kind of not immediately apparent.

I have finally reached the point TM, but which is that both everything everywhere all at once in Crazy Rich Asians ends in exactly the same way, right, which is the the like the the sort of family tension that has had been sort of building up and playing out throughout the entire movie, like is resolved and everyone sort of goes back to being a family. And this is interesting specifically for Crazy Rich Asians because in the original, like in the book version of this story, the family shatters.

The plot of that movie is this this Asian American girl is dating like this guy who's from Singapore who has not told her that he's from like an unbelievably rich, like Singaporean family, and the story is about him going about them going to Singapore and realizing that this guy is unbelievably rich and that his family is just assholes who suck And in the book, like the family like mistreats both of them really badly, and so they just leave and they book it and they cut they cut

off the rich family. But in the movie they some weird thing happens where like the the main character plays Ma Jung with the guy's mom and like a miracle occurs in the family works out and everything everyone wants. How's a very similar sort of thing where like the way this movie ends, and I would just say this, like I do, I do like this movie a lot, but the way that it ends is Evelyn, who is Joy's mom, walks up to her and says, you're fat,

and I don't like that. You gotta tattoo. But also the family is good and like we should work it out, and then they do, like a baricle occurs, and there's this sort of running ideology in this which is that like the family is sort of sort of too big to fail, like you're you're not allowed to have a a movie that's about something that's not about the family, or be a movie where you know, like the end of it is the people walk away from their family

because it's hurt them a lot, right. And I will also say that sort of Asian American cultural production that doesn't center the family, it actually just doesn't get read as being Asian American, right, like I think, I um, I don't know if you've seen this, but like Being View has this beautiful documentary called Minding the Gap and it's about like his trauma and his like sort of youth growing up in a broken home and hanging out with skateboarding friends, some of whom are like black, and

that just never gets talked about as an Asian American film, even though it's made by an Asian American filmmaker, and his experience as like someone who actually migrated from China is such a big part of his story, Like, because it's not about the sort of family conflict and reconciliation, it actually doesn't get read as an Asian American film a lot of the time, which to me is interesting.

And yeah, I just wanted to second your point that like in both of these films, everything everywhere, all at once and crazy rich Asians, like nothing actually changes. You know, there's the reconciliation within the family, but nothing about the family structure changes. Like I think Evelyn her the sort of like conciliatory gesture she gives is like, oh, I'm your mom, and I would always choose to be with

you in any universe. I forget, like the exact praising it's been a while since I yea, it's something like that. It's like, you know, I would still want to be with you because I'm your mom. And it's like this very um the families is its own explanation. Yeah, and I think it points to sort of this is the movie that I think hit the exact limit of this kind of of this kind of sort of Asian family politics because in it in in it's in in the sort of like moment where it needs to justify itself,

it can't. It doesn't have anything. The moment's it's sort of it's it's it's it's it's empty of an actual like it's it's empty of any sort of like ideological message about why this should be redemptive, right, like just you know, and and I think this is something that like we don't think about enough, which is that like like okay, if if if your mother hurts you like a lot, right, like them being your mother is not

a redemptive thing. I mean, this is something I've been thinking about a lot in the context of sort of transness, and you know, and in the ways that like trans people like i mean literally get killed by their families, in the ways that they get you know, kicked out from their families, and the ways that sort of this this this sort of self justification of it's good because

it is right that like the relationship. Yeah, this is sort of what you were saying, right, is like it justifies itself by just like, well, I am your mother. It's like, well that's not an argument, right, yeah, right, and it's not enough. Like I think Joyce spunds the whole film like fighting to be seen by her mom, and in the end, her mom doesn't really give any reason why she loves Joy, Like there's nothing like specific to Joy herself as a person. It's just like you're

my daughter, I'm your mother. Of course I love you. Um. And you know, like why should that be something a queer child settles for, like just this very basic baseline of acceptance rather than anything that like actually celebrates who they are as an individual. Yeah, and that's something that I also wanted to talk about with this is like and this this is not just like the specific thing.

You know, we're talking a lot about the specific movie because this is like the most recent one that's come out, and and we're not sort of saying this to like like there is a lot of like good stuff in this movie, Like this is the movie like like Joy is probably the character who is like closest to me who I have ever seen in anything at any point, right, and like there was something, you know, sort of incredibly emotional, like I cried a lodger in this movie that was

like incredibly emotional about it, you know, like seeing yourself in it, Like yeah, yeah. But there's something about the way that Asian Americans, like especially sort of like cysaid Asian Americans, think about queerness that that I think is is you see in this movie, which is that. Okay, so this movie has two queer relationships in it, right unless you're going to count like the guy in the Raccoon, which it's funny, but I don't know about that one.

But right, but but you know, the actual like the actual two sort of like queer relationships are between Joy and her girlfriends and then between Evelyn and the tax lady.

And there's two things that are interesting about that. One is that both of the both of the characters they're in relationships with are white and very and this this is a visit like something that's very very specifically like pointed out about Joy's girlfriends, and you know, you know that's the joke is like, well, she's half Mexican, but She's played throughout the entire hier thing as like an outsider who like doesn't understand what's happening in this sort

of scenes, like doesn't understand the family dynamic, doesn't doesn't understand his knees and you know, and you see this again with Okay, so who who have like you know, they're able to imagine a world in which, like Evelyn, the main character who has like just been homophobic this entire movie, is in a queer relationship and like, yeah,

like I good for her. But if you look at who it's with, right, it's it's the character in the movie who is this tax lady who her thing is that she is like like she she she she is like the human representation of the sort of white supremacists, like capitalist bureaucracy that is, you know, attacking this family and is sort of like driving these people into the ground. And then she's sort of redeemed by by like love

and queerness. But there's this way that queerness gets positioned, this outside of asianness, by the way that like the by the way that the only possible crew relationship that they can imagine is with a white person, as you know, as someone who's explicitly marked as an outsider, right, Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Like queerness, It

queerness is like attached to these anxieties over assimilation. Yeah, from the perspective of like the older generation like evaln and Gong Gong is like the fear of them being assimilated too much into this Western culture um, which is just a very it's it's very strange to me that this is the thing that keeps coming up in like Asian American narratives and discourses because obviously like Asian like Asian queer cinema in Asia is like such a powerful

cultural force, and the film makes all these one car why references, and I feel like one car Hi has made like one of the greatest works the cru cinema Happy Together um of like recent decades. And so it's just it's so strange, um how Creus is being positioned

as like an external threat. And I mean, like you know, you you could you could take a sort of like like the if you if you want to do the lib analysis of this, like China has had queer rulers like there has there has the West produced one, like maybe I possibly at some point maybe but like, you know, like it's kind of like it's ideologically frustrating, right, like like you know, you can fall back on the like we know that, like we have records of where people

in China for like five thousand fucking years, right, Like it's you know, but like I think, I think what's really interesting about this is that this is something that's seen as so natural that people writing like even like like Asian American like writers writing about the film don't even notice it, like they just they just sort of

passively reproduce it. Yeah, And I don't know, I think it's like I mean, it's deeply frustrating, like being an Asian queer person, because this is something that like, you know, the the kinds of right wing nationalism that like are like they you know, like there's a different kinds of sort of Chinese nationalism, right that will make that will make this like explicitly make the same argument that like gay people are like a like a sort of like I mean, I guess they would have they would have

said it was borgewab, but now it's a sort of like decadent Western like imposition onto the like onto the world of Asia. But it's like like no, but then, but then, but you know, you you get these like sort of like very well credentialed, like progressive like Asian American writers who are just either implicitly or almost explicitly

making exactly the same argument. Yeah. Yes, And it's also what the American right wing thing right like they want to China as like if you know, China represents this like sexual threat of having like the society where everyone is in their place, you know, like they imagine that these sort of like traditional gender roles are much more adhered to in China, which is why it's like we're on the decline, like China's rising. So it's yeah, it is a very weird idea that nationalists on both sides

are attached to. And it's disappointing that UM Asian Americans who think of themselves as progressive or even radical kind of reproduce this unthinkingly. Yeah. I mean one of my like recent black Pill moments was I don't know if people remember this, um, but there were there, There was there was someone on Twitter who very kind of famously got like just like obliterated for saying that. I first,

for saying that like people people shouldn't like canceled. There's a scription to the New York Times after they like did the whole thing. They did this whole bullshit that a few people don't know what the sort of scandal was. So the a bunch of people who'd written for The New York Times sent them a very very bild letter saying like, hey, can you guys like fix some obvious like like not even saying fix, like can you report

on trans issues better here? Or some like glaring short of mistakes that you made in New York Times through a hissy fit and got really mad at them and and you know this, this person's reaction was like, oh, well you can't you like don't cancel your subscription, like

you have to support the news. And it was this like sort of moment and she she is one of the hosts of like one of the big progressive ation American podcasts, and it was like it was just you know, for me, it was just really sort of like black pilling moment of like, oh, this is like this is like what like like you know what like like three three, three seventy five a month. It is what these people

think my life is worth. Like yeah, I don't know, I think This kind of ideological stuff is very deeply tied into the way that Nasian Americans have been representing and thinking about. The family said of recent years, and but but, but but before before we go into that, do you know when the family is trying to sell you it is it is the products and services that supported this podcast. We have to take an ad break.

We will be right, okay, Miah, just out of just out of curiosity, since I don't have the pleasure of listening to the ads while we're recording, Like what is going to play during that? I have no idea, Like, it could be anything. I don't know. It could be a gold ad, it could be the f While we haven't had the FBI tried to do it yet, we've had We've had we've had law unfortunate agencies. We've had

people selling gold Ronald Reagan coins. We've had so I don't think I've seen that, like since I was a child. I think they used to have like television commercials. Yeah, they do it on podcast now. Apparently a thing that I discovered when people sent me thelyp so who look like maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe they'll do a Thatcher one and you two can own the the immortal words. There is no such thing as society. There is only individuals in the family. Yeah. Wow, well whatever it takes

to keep the podcast running. Yeah, so all right, something I wanted to sort of circle back to is, you know, I think one of the one of the sort of one of the things about this kind of Asian American media. You know, you have this this sort of ambivalence of like, like, who what the sort of queer child is supposed to be? And you know, like I would say this like it is a pretty common experience if you are like a queer child of an Asian family that your family does

fucked up shit. Do you like that's a thing? Um? And this is I wanted to ask you about something that you've been talking about that I'm sort of interested in, which is one of the things that I don't know when you trying to talk about this stuff. There's this way in which the way we sort of collectively think about when I say we this is like I guess like a kind of specific Asian American thing, the way we think about trauma gets involved very quickly. Yeah, And

I was wondering if you talk about that some more. Yeah, I feel like there's this there are these sort of like unspoken discursive rules where when you talk about trauma within an Asian immigrant family, there are like, first of all, it's always intergenerational trauma, right Like you can't talk about like a queer child experiencing trauma without then like getting into the fact that, oh, like the parents have experienced traumatic things like through the process of immigration or like war,

the refugee experience, etcetera, etcetera. And so there's this sort of like economy of trauma where some members within the family get their trauma treated as more legitimate and others don't.

I think it's like really common to hear this refrain, which is like, oh, um, second generation immigrants are like the you know, people like US Asian immigrant children who were born in the West can't possibly know that like the real trauma that our parents or grandparents went through because they were the ones who like fled their countries

or experienced war firstand or grew up in poverty. But then it's also just like when we talk about eight intergenerational trauma, um, there's this sort of like obfuscation of who is enacting that trauma within the family, right Like if the intergenerational trauma exists, like who is passing it down?

And so I don't I don't know if I'm articulating myself well on this, but um, yeah, I guess the essential ideas that I think there's this like mechanism which kind of um immediately delegitimizes any talk of abuse or trauma from the perspective of um Asian youth or from the perspective of like the child in the family. Yeah, and I think I think that's a kind of I don't know, there's just really baffling, deep unwillingness in a lot of ways to think about And I think this

is a sort of broader like cultural thing too. But there's just deep unwillingness to think about the family as a side of violence and as a side of sort of profound violence. It's like, you know, like it's the place where the violence that shapes you comes from in

a lot of cases. And I mean, like, I know a lot of people this has happened to you, has happened to me to some extent, And there's this real kind of you know, this is what this is what I actually really liked about everything everywhere, all at once. It's like it like goes into that in a lot of ways, Like it is a movie for about ninety

nine tenths of the movie. It is a movie about how like the people around like how how the people in your family can hurt you repeatedly, and about the sort of like the ways that they think about it, the way but you know, there's there's but but but but but I think this is where this sort of perspective thing comes into it where like, yeah, we're I think, like we don't really have a language to sort of talk about this stuff, and the way the film deals with it is sort of like you know, is is

this kind of like very specific kind of nihilism, which is like definitely a thing that you can fall into, right like you know, like that like that that is definitely a reaction to being traumatized. But it's seen as like illegitimate and world destroying I think in a lot of ways because it causes you to sort of like if if that's your experience of the family, like you're going to leave or you're going to or you're only going to stay in by force, and so you know,

the movie sort of rejects it. But but you know there's this way that it's very difficult to talk about this stuff and about the sort of like long arc of how people have thought about the family before us. Right, what's an example of what you mean by like how

people have thought about the family before us? Well, I think I think in the Chinese context in particular, there's a very there's like there's I mean, if you look at what was happening in in the sort of rat like in the in the sort of very radical periods in Chinese history in the last you know, if you like last sort of hundred years, you look at sort of what's going on in nineteen twenty five, if you look at what happens immediately like after the Chinese Revolution,

like there is a real period of like questioning, questioning patriarchal authority, of questioning like what is the family for? Like why why are we doing this? And you know, I think I think the answers they came to were ultimately unsatisfying, which is that like, well, we need the family around because like we we are, our economy does not function without uncompensated labor. So the maoists sort of

like attempt to grapple with this fails. But I don't like as as as as with many things that Maoism attempt to grappled with, I don't think they were wrong to look at it. I think their solutions were all terrible. But I think there's this kind of I mean, there's

this reaction. There's there's a kind of older Asian queer reaction, which I think is like kind of deeply suspicious of the family, as you know, this thing that has an enormous amount of potential to sort of inflict violence on you and sort of de stabilize your life and cut

you off from resources and information. I mean, I was struck by someone else making this comment about how like in everything everywhere, all at once, you know, they can imagine like this sort of infinite um number of universes, but in every single one, the family unit remains the same. Um. You know, like the social arrangement never changes across all of these different universes. Um. Yeah, I thought that was

a really good point. Um. There's just like the sense in which a lot of the recent Asian American culture can't imagine the family as like something that can be transformed. It just kind of takes it for granted as this like static eternal structure which can't be challenged, and people, if they find reconciliation or happiness, it needs to be

somehow within that same arrangement. Yeah, And I think a lot of that has to do with like the thing that we've decided about elders collectively, which is another one of those things that like is like the legitimacy of the authority of elders is something that in Chinese revolutionary history is something that's very much up for debate, and almost everyone who decided to like take up arms against the state, like almost all of those people were like,

this is messed up. And then you know, I think, I think partially as a result of how badly sort of the Maoist project goes, and then also I think as as as a kind of like explicit part of state policy, there's this way in which that kind of authority gets reinscribed and any sort of questioning of it gets gets looked at as like, oh or like a

return to sort of like Maoist egalitarianism or whatever. Which the thing that I see a lot in the ways that like not really Asian Americans, but like in the in in in in, I don't know, you see this in Chinese discourse like a decent amount. I mean, you see this in kind of um messed up ways and some of the Asian American discourse from people whose families

never participated directly in the Maose project. You know, they might have like a lot of people who immigrated here to the u US weren't like they were connected to the KMT. They were on the nationalist side. There are people who ideologically were never aligned with um any sort of socialist project, and you know, Bill Bill, Bill invoke things like well, you know, this is exactly what my

ancestors were fleeing from China. Yeah, and it's like, okay, like you guys, like I I have really bad news for you about like what the KMT's ideology was, and like I feel like this is sort of these are like the egg monopoly people, right, Yeah, And but I think I think like this has two effects, right, which is like, on the one hand, those people like that like specific kind of very weird Chinese anti communist is sort of incredibly privileged in in the way that like

that stuff's thought about. But then you know, like there are a lot of people who are in like from like from China who are in the US, like specifically

because of the failure of this project. And this is something else you talked about in the Atlanta episodes, but like several of the people like who were killed in Atlanta, like were there because like liberalization drove them to a point where like they you know where where they had to work to support their families, and you know, and and and the the other thing that sort of comes hand in hand with liberalization is that that and I don't know, this is something that like people really don't

want to think about, which is that you know, economic at somebody said political liberalization in China came hand in hand with this massive and transport to the patriarchal project, which is the one shot policy just sort of slamming down like a hammer of being of the state, just being like we're going to just directively like we are going to directly control your reproductive autonomy. We are going to you know, we are going to force we sterilize people.

We are going to like would literally just limit the amount of kids you can have. We are going to make this sort of like giant, I don't know, like this enormous state intervention into like social reproduction and the people who were the victims of that, Like you don't

really hear from them much. I mean, like what one of the stories I'm still just haunted by is that one of the people who died in Atlanta, like her family refused to bury her, like refused to take her remains to bury her because like their village was like no, you you you never married, so you can't be like

buried in the village. And wow. Yeah, and so you know, like her like she had a funeral in the US that was attended by no one who knew her because none of her friends could roll up because they get a rushed by the cops. And you know, there there were these like there were these kinds of like transnational linkages of like the violence of people's families that just disappears from this sort of like narrative of like like Asian Americans like is the family is this union basis relation? Right?

And on that note, did we also want to talk about how the sort of like focus on the small business slash family or the family as a small business obscures some of the class conflicts within the Asian American community, Like yeah, these very massage workers you're talking about, I remember in the wake of that Atlanta shooting, a lot of people started they kind of use the massage workers as like an emblem of the Asian American community more broadly one in fact, like a lot of the sort

of like more professional class Asian Americans or like the Asian Americans who get platforms in the media. Um, they aren't like, they aren't from the same class as like the massage workers are. Um, we heard from like a lot of small business owners, but those are those are the same people who like own massage parlors and hire these exploited workers, who like have undocumented status and who can thus be like put into much more precarious positions than like you know, US citizens and so um, yeah,

I did you want to talk a bit more about that. Yeah, I mean I think I think the small business owners are it's a really sort of interesting and powerful character, like especially in the US, because it's it's like it's possible to be a small business owner to be really poor but also not be propertyless. Yeah, and I think that like the like the specificically like the core of

the American dream is to own property. And you know, so here is this class you can point out as like oh, well, we're really poor, but you don't actually you never have to look at labor relations at all, right, and that that like frees you from having to actually think about what capitalism is. And and it also lets you it lets really like the actual sort of like the real sort of Asian American ruling class, right, like the actual billionaires, right. And you know there are Asian

American billionaires. There's there's a good number of them. There's also just a bunch of just Asian billionaires. Because there is a there's just an Asian ruling class. It lets those people, especially in the US, hide behind the image of the Citi small business owner, right, and they can you know, and they can use it the launder their sort of reputation because like it's in the US, like being anti small business is like the hardest position you can possibly take. It is like like it is you

you like, I don't I don't know if people remember this. Um, a friend of mine, Vicky Osterwall, wrote this book called in Defensive Looting. Oh yeah, yeah, great book. Everyone should read it. Like they were like sitting US senators were like like yelling about the book, like like a huge swasp left left got like unbelievably mad about it. Like a lot of you will probably also get mad about it. But like, like one of the things that always comes up with with with looting is like, I you know,

it's like, well, are you gonna loot small businesses? And it's like, well, actually yeah, Like like in so far as people looting small businesses, a lot of times it's the people who work there and it sucks because working for small businesses is fucking terrible and right, yeah, are people in the community where those like small businesses are and like our discriminatory towards Yeah, And Vicky makes this point about this, there's just kind of populism that gets

invoked where you know, one of the police statements about I think it was about ferguson Um was they're talking about like they burned down our Walmart and it's like, well, what do you mean our Walmart? Like fucking owned the Walmart, Like don't get shipped from it, Like everyone who works on the walmartt's fucked. Everyone has to buy it from the Walmart. But it's it's just really hollow like populism, Like it's this thing that like you assemble a community

based around then around the corporation. And I think that's kind of what's been happening with Like I think it's the reason why Asian American culture is like like this

because it's it's this. It's like, you know, there's there's this this very hollow like in a lot like like multinational like populism has been assembled around like the figure of the small business owner, but it's ultimately like it doesn't really have ideas other than you should let us like you should let us make money without being racist. And also the fact like the it has that idea, and then it has the idea that the family is good because it is and that's kind of it. Yeah, yeah,

I don't I don't know why. I think there's there's a lot about well, okay, I would say this, like the the the day people are okay with looting small businesses is the day the US can actually fall, and any until before then, like it will it will survive because that's always the sort of last defense of capitalism is like what about small businesses? And you will you will get people who call themselves communists who will be

like no, no, no, actually these are fine. It's like I mmmm mmmmm, Okay, so I wanted to kind of pivot back around a bit to talk about elders a bit more because I feel like I kind of sidetracked us off of that, and I, yeah, I think there's this, really I don't know, there's been this kind of like rehabilitation of the elder in a way that like was something that was deeply questioned in periods where it was kind of like it was more obvious and less and

more socially statable to sort of look at the power these people have and how much it can suck. H Well, yeah, I think I noticed this picking up during you know, the sort of like first state of anti Asian attacks

during COVID. I think that's when like a lot of progressive Asians started invoking the figure of the elder, right, like our elders are being attacked, Like an attack on our elders is an attack on our community, Like that sort of thing um where the elder is kind of like used as a sort of emblem of the innocence of the Asian American community or what do you like, what work do you think the elder is doing there in this discourse? Like why does it have to be

an elder? Like what if you were just saying Asian people being attacked, or like what if it was Asian youths being attacked? Like what why does it have to be the Asian elder? Because I think we were talking about this earlier. Empirically it's not exactly true, right, it

wasn't mostly old people who are victims of these attacks. Yeah, And I mean I think this is one of the areas where like the murky, like you know, it's really really hard to get good data on cruise being attacked because I mean, police reports are obviously incredibly unreliable, right, and then you know, like they're self collected data, but the self collected data is not all encompassing it, you know,

it's sort of skewed in its own ways. But yeah, I think I think there's this way in which, like, I don't know, like I think there's almost as way in which elder is almost like they're also like like personally infantilized by it, where it's like the pick as this sort of like like part of like they used as a sort of symbol of like people who can't defend themselves, which partially isn't true. Like there were actually

examples of like Asian elders like defending themselves. But but it does this kind of like and also like the rates of gun purchase purchases one up with it. I mean, I know, like just the ncdotally in the Chinese American community, I knew so many like like elderly Chinese people who are like, I'm going to go out and buy a

gun though. Yeah, yeah, I think like the way that that thing it was invoked has a lot of sort of like I don't know, it was it was like there was this way in which they like they became framed, is like this is sort of like this is the apotheosis of like everything that it is to like be Asian American h and that like that like the fact that that was under attack was this sort of incredible crisis, right, And I think like I think there's like that as

gears a lot about what was happening, which is that like if there was one clear trend in the data, it was that women were being attacked at like a

way higher rate than anyone else. And you know, and this has been a thing that has sort of continued, which is like I don't know, like there's been more attacks in the last like few months, right, and it's it's it's it's been a lot of like young women getting like young Asian women getting pushed in front of trains, and people have just really stopped caring, like yeah, to the extent where like it's it's like literally a meme that you can like watch the cycle of like the

stop API hate like signs coming up and down. Right. And I don't know, I think I think the elder part of it kind of like it obscured a lot of what was actually happening. Yeah. I feel like the last incident that really made a splash in the media was, um, the murder of Christina Una is that urt I forget what her last name is, but um, Christina Una leave um getting murdered in Chinatown And this was already a year ago. Um, And I haven't really heard anything since,

Like I see things in the local news. Um that where I live in Queens recently had a couple of attacks, um just a week ago, I think, but it didn't make the national news or anything. Yeah, And I think the way that the kind of like hierarchy of victimhood I guess affected that like has had I you know, I'm not sure it's the biggest like single reason why

everyone has sort of stopped caring. But like I like I I think the sort of stop api hate like that moment kind of only happened because there was this sort of backlash against like there's this backlash against Black Lives Matter and against the insurrection, and people needed another people needed a kind of like ideologically safe like thing, like way of demonstrating like how good their politics were or whatever. But I think it definitely contributed to sort

of why like stuff has been abandoned. And I also wanted to ask, do you see this, this thing, this stixation on elders um is happening at the same time that ancestors get invoked a lot in like Asian American literature, especially queer literature. Um, I'm thinking of authors like Ocean Wong, Like how did ancestors become such a thing? Yeah, really, I don't know, I really don't understand how that happens.

Like a lot of my ancestors fucking sucked. Like I don't know, like like I don't know how to sort

of like I don't know. I have this sort of I don't know, I have this sort of weird sense of the kind of politics at work here, which is like there's a lot of kinds of politics that I think can work in for example, in indigenous contexts that are very very powerful, that don't really work in the Asian American context where like like our ancestors, Like if you're a Chinese, right your ancestors did some fucked up shit, Like your ancestors did a lot of jedicides, like you

you like you know, And I think I think that's something that's actually at the core of the kind of like right wing Chinese nationalism, which is that like right when Chinese nationalism is basically about the anger that China was like ceased to be able to be an empire because like if you look at the sort of colonization process, right, like the Qing are this very very expansionist like like sort of militarist imperial state, right like they're they're they're

they're they're like they conquered, like they if they find a bunch of wars around Tibet, they conquered shing Jun and they do a genocide, They're like immediately they're pushing south.

They're pushing like they're they're basically pushing like in every direction they could possibly push and then they kind of like you know, they they hit like a pretty impressive territorial boundaries, and then their ability to do imperialism gets kind of halted because suddenly there's other imperial powers like in the region, and you know, and the sort of end of this is like they they lose all these wars and you have the start of like you have

the start of the Century of Humiliation and all of the sort of stuff that happens there. But it's like the actual thing that they're like the actual thing that the Century of Humiliation people are humiliated about. Well, I mean the fact that it's called the Center of Humiliation and not like I don't know, like the like the Century of Death or something, which for people who don't know what Century of Humiliation is. Um, So, I think it's it's I think that the actuals I think it's

like eighteen forty nineteen forty. There's this is sort of nationalist term around understanding this period in which China is undergoing, like you know, it is genuinely like like people in China are like suffering enormous imperial violence. Um Like, I like unfathomable numbers people die in this period this is like the Opium but basically a period from the Opium Wars until you know, sort of through the various Japanese conquests and then sort of ending essentially with the Revolution.

But yeah, I don't know, Like, I think it's interesting that it's it's understood in the in terms of national humiliation, in terms of sort of like the loss of disability to do I mean to do imperialism, and instead of in sort of terms of like the just unfathomable human suffering that one on. And I think this all of this sort of comes back to this weird kind of intensification of nationalism kind of among everyone in the last

like especially since twenty twenty. You know, I mean there's been there's been like a kind of like explicit like Chinese nationalist terms and parts of left. But I think I think it's really kind of like hit everyone in

ways that like hasn't really been examined. There's been this kind of difficulty in having a kind of like theoretical and cultural language to speak about Asian American nous, partially because well because like the you know, I've talked about this before, right, but like the term Asian American was created by like Third worldists, right, many of who are a Maoist someone whom are certain Marxist Lendinness. But like

that that whole language just died. I mean, like you you know, you know you can still find like Boba Vankian or whatever, but like the sort of language is like understanding yourself was part of the Third World. And like you know, like as as like a liberal national liberation movement, like that's over. National liberation is basically dead as a politics, like and any and anyone who tried it after a certain point like just got called sessionists

and now just get murdered horribly. Um. And like you know, and there's there's obviously also the sort of like China, Vietnam, Cambodia fighting each other thing that that has this massive impact on that kind of politics, and it gets replaced with um, this kind of politics that's based that's you know, it gets sort of replaced by like the Asian civil rights movement stuff. Right, But like there's there's no but the things like ASI Rescue is it doesn't have politics,

like as politics are completely incoherent. Like you have of like you literally have these marches where you have like old school like camp desk squad guys like marching next to maoists, And it's like why you you can because it's supposed to be a sort of like panaty logical thing and over time, like all the all the ideologies

they're supposed to compose, it die. And but but that meant that like there's there's no like there's no actual language to sort of talk about the experience because the two sets of vocabularies that like or like wait like frames of understanding the struggle or just have both kind of like eire basically collapsed or been discredited. And I think that leaves this whole and people are trying to fill the hole by like adopting other people's politics, But

like it doesn't work for us. I don't think, Like I I don't know, like I like, I think people will disagree with me about the potential of of sort of ancestor politics and politics of elders, but like, I don't think it does that much for us. Yeah, I think the last thing that I do want to say is, you know, if we've reached the limits of a lot of the politics that we've been seeing here, Um, what what what kinds of politics and what kind you also

sort of what kind of media do you do? You do you see as stuff that we can used to go beyond this, because I think there is a lot of like like, there are a lot of like people creating good like queer stuff, not like yeah, actually I think I mentioned this to you. Um. I recently watched this film called Return to Soul Um. It's by a director called Davy two, and it's about a French Korean adoptee.

So she was adopted from Korea as a baby, I mean yeah, as a baby by French parents and grew up in friends and the film is like kind of a journey of her going back to Korea and meeting her birth family. But it's like, it's not it doesn't fall into the same sort of like family natalist politics.

It's very like deeply questioning of of the family and of even like this idea that um, I guess what the sort of like wayward queer stray Asian child like needs in order to heal from trauma, Like she doesn't really have reconciliations with either family, like either her French family that she comes from, like they're very much sidelined in this film, they just don't play that big of

a role. And then she and then when she goes to Korea, you know, she has these very like awkward encounters meeting her birth family because they're like immediately like, oh, you know, we're so sorry we gave you away. Now you're back, you could come live with us. And then she's just like hold on, like I don't even know if I consider you my family. And so it it seemed to me like to really depart from this like script that we've become so accustomed to in Asian diasporic

film in a really interesting way, I thought. And it's also a lot about music, Like it's a very moody, music driven film. It doesn't feel that identitarian. Yeah, I would recommend everyone to watch it everything every all at once. Is we have that we have now told the best version of that story, and I think we can find you know, I would just like like this is this is a really broad recommendation, but like, go watch One

car Way. This is this, Okay, this is the most film nerd I'm ever gonna get that doesn't involve I am I suddenly blanking in the name of the thing. Sorry, Danel The most film nerd I'm ever going to get that doesn't involve the Commune de Paris eighteen seventy one is go watch one Car? Why like they're there? I

don't know. I I think I think there is something to be gained by looking at you know, I mean they're like looking at Hong Kong cinema looking at I don't know, I I like good, good Americans have finally realized that Korean cinema was really good, which is wonderful. Um, I'm glad, I'm glad. We're, you know, getting to the place where people realize that it's that like, there's a

lot of great stuff going on there. But we know it is possible for Asians to tell different stories because all across the world they already are, right like we we are already telling stories that are different and more interesting than this. And I think, well then, and I

must typically saying, like, then everything everywell it wants. But then that then then the specific structure that that the the Asian American movies fallen too, and yeah, people should go discover them because they're great, and yeah, we can find new and better kinds of queer joy and yeah, yeah, Tiffany, thank you so much for joining us and being on. I don't know why I'm saying us as if there's more than me here, but yeah, thank you, thank you

for being on the show. Yeah anytime. Thank you for having me on. And it's been a really stimulating conversation. Yeah. Yeah, this has been naked Happened Here. You can find us at Happened Here pod on Twitter and Instagram. You can find Coals on Media at Coals on Media. I hope it's Cools on Media. I'm actually not one hundred percent suffets. I should know this by now. I simply have not learned. M Yeah, go go, go, go into the world. B

gad crime. Welcome Dick had Happened Here The show about things following apart and how to put them back together again. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today we have a really exciting episode. We're gonna be talking to a group of workers from the California Nurses Association, which is specifically their national Organizing Committee, which is I think better known

to most people. And then you are a national Nurses United and these people are part of a shift of workers who was for the first time running a rank and file slate for the Council of Presidents, which is sort of they're a body that combines the positions of vice president president in the Union. They're called Shift Change and so, Eric, do you want to introduce yourself? All right? My name is Eric Cook. I've been a nurse for thirty two years. I currently work in the cardiac telemetry floor.

And I became a nurse after being a Navy corn in the First Gulf War and just continued in healthcare from there. I was originally an alvin and then became a registered nurse, and I've been on the past three negotiating teams for Altabates Summit Hospital and I've seen a lot of changes in the attitude and movement of the union in the past twelve years. So I'm hoping with John and Raina and Mark to make a change for our union and our members for the better. Yeah. I'm glad,

glad you could be here to join us. Thank you. Yeah, Rina, do you want to introduce yourself? Hi? There, I'm Rina Lindsay. I have been a California nurse for over thirteen years, and out of those thirteen years, eight of them I've been in Altibate's Medical Center, which was my first union as an r N how I And also I'm sorry, And also I work in ice you and I've been there through been there for about seven years wow. And

I've worked with Eric a year prior to that. So the reason why I became a nurse is a long story, but the bridge version is at the beginning, I wanted to be a lawyer. So when I went to college kind of fight. I was dyslexic, so that kind of backed out. And then I also was a teen mom, which that's something that a lot of people do not know about me. And during that whole process, I wanted to find something that I could be an advocate for people and also know the political side of it. So

nursing became the best benefit. One thing I love about nursing is you can learn everything about the world to know about people without going anywhere, So that was the thrill. And then also being an advocate for the patients I take care for. In addition to that, you know, knowing my peers and knowing that we all have the similar struggles when it comes to the systems that we work for. Doesn't matter which employer you work for, and so being in the union, it gives you that way of a

contract between you and your employer. And along the way there has been some issues which Eric and I and John all been experiencing where things do need to change, and being part of shift change is part where we have to change of leadership and be more transparent between the union, the employer, and the people in general. Hell yeah, and yeah, John, do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah? Sure, I'm John Horonymous. I'm a packy recovery nurse at University

of Chicago. Before that, I was in the medical U for six and a half years. And then before that, I was like a associate's degree r END working at the emergency room at holy Cross Hospital. And I also started, which is funny to me, as an LPN, which is the same thing as an LVN that Eric did. And

I was a CNA before that. I decided to become a nurse way back in the day when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do after dropping out of high school, and I was thinking about man and maybe I should become like a history teacher, and I was like, Oh, why would I want to go back to this place I hate so much? I

dropped out of it. And I personally got like incredibly sick with something called ul sort of kalitis, and I got bunch of surgeries done and got some really amazing experience being taken care of by nurses, and it became really immediately obvious to me, like I also, like Raina,

wanted to help people. And also I thought that nursing was like a way where even like for you know, individuals, I could change someone's day just a little bit for the better, but also like maybe changed some bigger things. And so I thought nursing was just like a really great way to do that. Also, it's really fortunate to be raised by an amazing nurse. My mom was a nurse and she was always like she's like one of

those people was my hero. And a lot of other nurses in my family, both men and women, including someone who is like a Kentucky frontier nurses like the first group of nurse practitioner nurse midwife back in the like the nineteen forties, back in Kentucky. So I got a lot of nurses in my family and on this like incredibly proud to be like paring on all the stuff that they have been doing for all their years as like nurses, so and like meeting the folks out in California,

like Raina and Eric. It just makes me feel so good, like we're doing really important stuff in terms of both our daily practice of being a nurse, but also like that we can have like this bigger impact on how things are happening in our profession, in the healthcare industry, and just the broader world. Yeah. Yeah, we've we've talked like a decent amount on this show now about sort of the labor issues that have been facing nurses both actually here and in the UK, and I think a

little bit in a couple of other countries. Yeah, I was. I was wondering what were the sort of specific things that you all were dealing with, both just in the profession and then also in the union that got altogether to run this sleep Okay, So one of the things that caused us to actually meet, by coincidence was one of my co workers, told Doordall, who's a Norwegian nurse who's been a nurse here in America for over thirty years.

She contacted labor notes and you know, realizing something was wrong in our union, she started talking with specifically Sarah Hughes at labor Notes, and through labor Notes and Sarah, we were able to connect with John and Chicago, and it was amazing that what we discovered is that our problems here in California were mimicking what they've experienced in Chicago, and through Sarah finding out from other diverse communities of nurses in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, New York, in Minnesota

that the same things are happening there under our same union. And our complaint was through our union, was that we felt we were being siloed. And of course, when I say siloed, is actually in our negotiations. We had seventeen facilities negotiating, but we were told that we were not allowed to communicate with each other. I said, it was it was forbidden by the federal mediator. Now why this is? Yes, yes,

I know that was my reaction initially too. There were two other negotiators on the team and it was highly suspicious because the union wanted to put all new nurses onto the negotiating team, and that was a little bit of a red flag. There were so many red flags through this negotiation. I swear I could almost see Lennon's tomb. That's how many red flags there were. It was amazing to us is that they said the mediator forbade us from talking to each other, because that was part of

the agreement to have the federal mediator. The three of us that had previous experience with negotiating just knew that was the wrong thing. And it took over at least about seven months before we started breaking through to other tables and communicating with them on text and having our own zoom conversations with them to convince them that no, this is a lie. We are allowed to talk to

each other. And we end up finding out that we were kind of being railroaded into what we considered an agreement that was less than satisfactory for the workers, for the nurses who have suffered during the pandemic, we could have gotten probably one of the greatest contracts that any nursing body had ever received. We had the industry by the throat. We suffered so much, you know, John, everybody throughout the country, all the nurses suffered, everybody's suffered, but

everybody that was at that bedside during the pandemic. We it was a horrific experience. It's great when you take care of people and you heal them. Yes, it's that's

a great thing. But the stress and the you know, the unending anxiety that you felt, and then in the midst of this, you have a union that short changes you at a point when we had so much power, And thank Heavens for Sarah to put us into contact with all these other nurses to realize that it wasn't just the subter division of the California Nurses Association that was running things among it was actually it seemed to be a perceived playbook plan of what they were doing

throughout the country. And I think nobody perceives themselves as doing evil or anything like that. I think they always think that they're doing it for the better interest of everybody. But that's what's important about a rank and file movement is that every nurse, every person in the union is important and deserves a voice. And we don't need to be gas lit, we don't need to be mistreated by the union that we pay to represent us. We need to be marching on the boss. We could have had

an unending euphoria for nurses with a contract. We could have had great staffing, we could have had better pay, we could have had everything that we wanted to make our work lives to be the best they could be, and it seemed our union already had a preplanned agreement with the corporation. Now they deny that, but it's kind of hard to believe when they had the same agreement that they were supposedly negotiating in silos, that they weren't communicating.

Each table was supposedly negotiating their own, but it was the same thing they wanted at every table, and not all the tables were equal. It was very sad for us. Like I said, this is the third negotiating team. I was on the first negotiating team I was on. We lasted over two years negotiating, and we went through nine strikes and threatened a tenth and until we got an agreement.

So our hospital, obviously it's Altibates Hospital in Berkeley. Our sister hospital Summit Hospital in Oakland, and we have affiliated with us is the Herrot Campus, which is the the psychiatric facility. And we have struggled so much through this pandemic, and it was amazing to us that we came up with less than what we should have gotten. I will tell you that thanks to Sarah and meeting all these

other nurses. We were able to come back, and I think through fear and intimidation, our union was forced to back us and we're able to get economically what we wanted. But like the rest of the country is nurse is, we wanted better staffing, we needed more more bodies at the bedside. We're overworked, we're fatigued. Raina worked in the ICU and they had their own COVID unit there. Um, I don't think there was enough tums and roll aids to go around for all those nurses. The anxiety and um,

you know, the heart in your throat. And of course John himself, I don't want to his personal business, but you know his experience. He has long COVID. So we we as nurses, have suffered quite a bit and we expected a lot more from our union. Yeah, and I mean even just on a very basic level, like no matter what you go through, you have the right for your union not to light you. Let's see, this is

a very elementary sort of that. That's a really elementary thing. Yeah, but it's really, um, it's really scary how comfortable some of the people who are paid their wages out of our dues are with lying to us. I think that's a thing that like, um, you know, like we're one of the things we're specifically fighting for is like transparency

and accountability, especially for our staff. And you know, when I, you know, Eric mentioned that I had had long COVID, I'm finally getting I've been to the point where I'm like as recovered as I probably ever will be, and which is great. You know, being recovered from long COVID

is so much better than having long COVID. But you know, I was always like someone that they came to to ask for help with like political sorts of issues inside the union, where they would come to me for Medicare for all or um, you know, speaking around things like ratio was that sort of stuff. Or they would send me off to When the Chicago teachers went on strike in twenty nineteen, I was sent to speak on behalf of our union for them, and you know, just doing the work of I'm kind of a I'm a bit

of an agitator. And then COVID hit and it was just a really surreal experience. And my area, the hospital is one of those places where they basically did everything they could to minimize the amount of surgeries we were doing initially when the lockdowns were happening for the first six months of pandemic, and then but they were moving us into because we are all former ICU nurses, so I would do my shift a few shifts up in the medical U than we made a special clean ICU

because we were still getting traumas. A University of Chicago apparently sees more penetrating gunshot and stab wounds than any other hospital in the United States. Thirty percent of traumas are are from some sort of violence, which is substantially higher than anywhere else in the US. And then I got sick, right, and so to me, the union was like a thing that was like, man, this is nice to have. I had never worked at any union hospital before. Getting union raises was like a big step up in

my life, you know. And it was also like, oh, yeah, our union's progressive, Like I kind of I like most of the things that it stands for, and I didn't really think of it as someone that needed the union right to do. The things that unions really kind of like is the bread and butter of unions, which is like coming in and like helping you when you need help. As an individual worker, and you know, when you're not in the middle of like a contract negotiation, and I

got sick with long COVID and lost. We had negotiated this great you know, like COVID six pay policy, and management just took that away without like from me, without really giving any notice or you know, explaination why. And you sit there trying to get like the help that you need from your Union's like I'm trying to explain why it is that like this is a problem for me to our labor rep, who's like our they called

them business agents, labor reps whatever. There are people who basically are paid out of our dues to kind of help us in theory like stay organized and be pushing management to do, you know, to follow the contract. And it got to the point where like my partner who's like is like literally screaming at the labor repel. I'm on the phone with the labor rep and she's, you know, just like what the fuck is your union even doing?

Like why are they not making sure that you're taking care of And it was like this really like come to Jesus moment where you're like, oh, yeah, like this union ship isn't just like you know, platitudes about like we need a ratio bill in Illinois or you know,

Medicare for all or Bernie Sanders. It's like, oh, this shit is actually like about my material well being and like my family still hasn't recovered from all that because they only you know, after an enormous amount of pressure was put on staff, they finally started looking into it, um and we got you know, payouts for not just me, but for ten other nurses who had had their COVID pay like cut, you like, really unjust ways um. And it really opened my eyes as to like what a

union should be doing. Um. And it really opened my eyes that maybe there's a problem with how staff interact with us as workers, because like there should be um. You know, we try and like say, like you know, there's a service union service business or service unionism, and then there's rank and value unionism. We had this weird situation union where they tell us where a rank and file democratic union, except the staff kind of treat us like,

you know, it's a business union. So we get told one thing, but then we see another thing and like not that I think that like, uh, it's you know, the whole point of a union, you kind of pull together to take care of people who can't necessarily take care of themselves in that moment, and like, it just took an enormous amount of effort on my family's part to like get that moving, and it just seemed incredibly It was just very eye opening for me as a

you know, my experience here in Chicago. No, that that's really bleak. I mean that that's another thing that you would you know, you would expect a union like to just be on top of not not even just a sort of oh well, you asked them and they started doing it. Like you you would think that, hey, the people who got COVID doing this job not getting paid what they're to be getting paid would be like a priority and not something you have to fight them over.

That is, Oh, that is incredibly krim. I don't know, well, I haven't a story for you. So my first year working at out debates. Before that, I was working in Swaller hospitals and they gave you certain packages about your benefits. So when it was time for me to get my benefits, I couldn't get my benefits at all because during that

time they were doing it at the yearly. So I said, is there any way possible at least to get something, because mind you, they are paying for my benefits, I'm not paying for it anything for it that there should be a reason because if I had any medical issues, what would happen? And basically the union was very lackluster about it. Now, of course I went to the manager,

went to human resources. Basically they basically told me where there's eighteen hundred nurses, and you know what we're going to do about this issue, and pretty much it was. It's pretty much disappeared about it. There was nothing I could do so for that whole year, so I worked in January of twenty fifteen, I had to wait till the following year to get benefits, to get medical benefits. J Now, I got everything else, so let be honest, I got everything else, but the medical benefits is important.

But thank god I don't have any health issues. Thank god my daughters didn't have any health issues where we didn't require any help and there wasn't in an emergency. But when I started noticing there were other nurses or teas that were spirits of the same thing, because a lot of us got hired within that time, frame. They weren't telling us these issues, and we would end up getting these things sooner. And it's all about the transparency,

It's all about our value. And then over the years people always complain on these dudes, why are they're not helping? Why are not supportive? And when I was actually hired, they were quick to give you the paperwork to tell you how to pay this all so they could take money off your dues. Quicker than what about the history about the union? Why is the history is? Why is the union important? And what you can do if there's

a grievemance? There was none of that, And to this day it's still the same thing because I precept new grads and I tell them about, you know, part of the union. What he got, Oh I didn't get a booklet, or oh I didn't hear anything about it, but I got this paper here so they could take out my dues. That's what pisses me off of anything. Is that part so so? And then all this stuff dealing with what Eric has told you, what we've been doing with the

strikes and the negotiations. Me personally, we should done negotiates it within the first year the pandemic and I think we got everything, but they were quick to say, no, we're going to get all these facilities all together at one and so we can all negotiate. And then the gag order happened, the slam of the gag order, and I'm like, there is a lot of collusion going on

and that shit needs to stop. So, I mean, things that they don't really tell us, which I think is really a thing that we want to resolve, is they don't really inform you of what your union rights are. You kind of get the initial like here's your wine garden rights, which means that you have a right to

representation whenever you're being disciplined. But aside from that, there's very little discussion inside of our union facilities, in particular about the kinds of things that we have as like union members, what our rights are, what are our rights

within the union, how the union works. So many of my co workers don't like a big part of our work is just explore aiming that there's an election happening, and so you would hear that an election it happened, maybe and you know, you would be like, well, who voted, I don't know, like and you'd get these like you know, all of the communication from about the election to us as the people who are like the you know, the opposition, has all been in these very like plane plane envelopes

that don't look like anything like it could be like just an anonymous bill you wouldn't know or junk mail. And so like, you know, as a union member, you have something called a right to represent representation. So and every union, every union employee and elected officer is considered a fiduciary, has a fiduciary obligation to look out for your financial interests, and if they don't do that, it's

called a failure to represent our union. In particular, Spends had brags internally about never having a They called them unfair labor practice. Like if a nurse or any worker in any union decides that their union, you know, did not represent them in their financial interests, they can file something called an unfair labor practice claim for failure to represent our union. Is like, they've never had an unfair

labor practice claim. Stick we foy had one of their unfair labor practice claims and somehow it got like withdrawn like in this really like sketchy way, and it was like just a random one that we picked to to see what happened, and so then it got like assigned like a special like liaison like afterwards, like they're like, oh, we weren't supposed to do that, like when we contacted the Department of Labor, We're going to look at that

again and figure out what's going on with this. And it also turns out when we started doing research, which I think every union member listening to this should know, every union has to file paperwork. They're legal. There's legally mandated reporting. So there's things called LM two's and nine nineties that you can get from the Office of Labor Management. You google them and they'll figure you can search for your own union and you get to see the union finances.

And we found out that there's like forty two million dollars that our union chief in the bank account. And this goes to there was an article it wasn't Jacobin, I'm not sure about, like the financialization of unions and

for like forty two million dollars, what is that? It's like and they you know, unions will practice like, oh, we've got a forty two million dollars war chest, but like, what are we spending that forty two million dollars on is it to like fight arbitrations and constantly be making like our like working conditions better and taking fights to the bosses. It's like, no, Actually, what they're doing is they're spending that money on settling unfair labor practice claims,

so they don't actually officially stick. So the war chests and even against the you know, isn't to go to war against our you know, supposed you know, I mean to go to war against management. It's to go to war against kind of us. When you think about it, it's just it's just so wild when you start digging into this stuff, it's just crazy. Um, Eric, you want to tell them about the Office of Oakland. Yeah, so

obviously we're in the heart of the empire. Um. You know, I live of just a few miles from the CNA headquarters and I've been there many times prior to the pandemic, um, you know, and I have taken part in lobbying in Washington, DC on behalf of the union. You know, nurses from all across the country that are in the union go to DC and we lobby for uh, you know, not only for single payer UH and medicare for all but you know, individual bills that will benefit nurses across the country,

whether they're in the union or not. And you know, I'm very familiar with it. I've lobbied in Sacramento, and I've bent to the NNU convention in Minnesota. So I've met a lot of nurses across our union. In fact, it's one of the when you do that, that's about the only time you get to reach out and see other union members. One of the things I will tell you that John and I and the person that's not

on the call right now is Mark Goodick. He is an American citizen now, but he was a Canadian nurse before and he is right now working on our campaign video to introduce us to a broader audience. And that's why he's not on the call tonight. We should be intermingling and talking with other nurses across the country. I should not be siloed here in Oakland and not knowing that what a nurse is doing in Texas. And yeah, we need to be part of our pledges that we

need to join hands across this country. Every nurse needs to see. We need to digitalize our contract. We need to see University of Chicago's contract digitalized. We need to be sharing our contracts so we know what good things that maybe they got in Texas, or what good things they got at the University of Chicago, or what good things we have in our contract. We need to see that nurses can say, hey, I want that language. We

need to be sharing that. I don't know why it's not happening or why it's just at the upper tiers of union management that they see these things, but we need to be joined together. No more siloing nurses. You know, altivates the nurses stay in your lane, Kaiser, stay in your lane, University of Chicago staying You're like, no, no no, no, no. We need to be one fighting body for the betterment of nurses. Uh doubt. You know, it's amazing when you find out that we have a beautiful building that the

union purchased in downtown Oakland. Um. You know, they only occupy a few floors of it and they rent out the rest, and you know what, it is a fabulous building and it would be great for it to be a headquarters where we're we're not just fighting and lobbying for Democratic politicians, but we're actually fighting for nurses at the bedside and that's what you know. Our whole mission is that we're going to be running for is for

the council presidents. We need to take the macro focus down to what is happening at the bedside for every nurse across the country and make the change for the better for them. And that's the big difference here. I'm all for an activist union and I think and we have been the union is active, and you know climate change and you know how the environment affects the community.

These things are important, but it's more important that we take care of the nurses at the bedside and offer opportunities for those nurses who want to be involved to make the community better. We need to have those resources available for them. And if we make nurses lives at the bedside better, we're going to have more nurses available to make the community better. And that's what we need to be working on. It is a it is going to be a fight. I can't be more more honest

than to tell you we are David versus Goliath. We are four nurses who really have no big national exposure. But the most important thing we have is that we're bedside nurses and we know what's important for bedside nurses. I do want to say, like, there's four of us who are running for the for the council presidents, but we would not be even talking to you if we didn't have like at least one hundred nurses all over like the hospitals that we're based in, like doing the

work of building our campaign. So I do want to point out that, like, because like our slate is like three white guys and it's Raina, and Raina is like and we want to make sure that we're not that it's we made a cho The choice that we made was not you know, us coming to together as four individuals being like we should fix the union by ourselves. It was this we keep mentioning labor notes, there's a healthcare worker chat with a fair number of nurses in

our union. And we noticed that there was an election coming up. And this is also at the time when both altbates was having their issues. And then in Cook County we had a particularly traumatic firing of a very popular staffer who without any without any input from the

local nurses or elected local nurse leadership. And we got together and we all were like, what are we going to do this is crazy, and we had people like we are like, well, who would do Like, we have this opportunity and if we run as a slate, we can do things like get access to we can send emails out to other nurses and break down those silos connect nurses from across the country. And we're like, well, if we don't do anything, we're kind of stuck in

this kind of like square one. You know, a few small hospitals talking to each other, not small, but you know, a few hospitals talking to each other, still struggling against like these kind of silos that have been constructed for

us by staff. And we had a vote and there was you know, over twenty nurses all together raise their hands and where like, we could do this with an imperfect group of people that we recognize asn't like the fully representative of everyone in the union, but are fully committed to democratizing the union, or we could sit and wait.

And a nurse who had been in the union for a very long time and she's now retired, said, if you all don't take this chance, you don't know what could happen in you know, three years from now union could be completely different and so two thirds of everyone in that call said it's time to go, and we don't care. We would rather that you run and take that swing and maybe get big for all of us.

So a big part of what we're doing is got like I've got a meeting with you know, Cook County nurses on Thursday, and they're all basically going to come to me and tell me all the ship that I need to do for them, not the other way around. When you're the rank and file leadership, you know, it's like taking that pyramid and you invert it, right. The people who are matter the most are the regular bedside nurses, And all we can do, as like people who step

up into that role is we take that. We take that heat and put ourselves out there so that we can enact what our coworkers are asking us for. I literally have co workers walking up to me completely unsolicited. I'm a very like I'm not walking around telling I like I told a few people up front in the beginning, because I was like, all right, you're about to see my face on some flyers, let me tell you why.

But I now have coworkers coming to me and they're like, John, you've got to tell me what's going on because I heard a little bit about it and I need to help you. I'm just like, okay, it's very it's like it's a little bit like a drug. But I have to be careful because like I like, I can't let this whole thing like none of this. We all have to stay humble as they're doing this. Because all four of us, John, all four of us were volunteering to

help other people to run exactly. We were like, okay, we're here, you know, John, are raining on myself, We're here to help you. Guys who's running now, I'm going to help you. We're gonna help you. And then it's like their crickets, you know, and it's like and it goes to show exactly what happened. It goes to show how impoverished the internal democracy of our union is that people who are leaders already did not feel comfortable or

prepared to take on that kind of leadership role. You know, these are nurses who have been in our union for decades, who are taking fights to their bosses all the time already, and they did not feel that they knew enough about the union. Because there's an intentional I believe like obscuring

of how the union works. And that's like how you end up with a situation where people are like, well, I guess we're just kicking the door down for all these people who we know will be doing it better when when we get it situated so that they can do it better. It's amazing though, to tell us that an America and History class, or you have Civics class, you learn about the US government, right, you know how it functions, how it runs. But when it comes to

our union, we were all asking each other. You know, we're putting pieces together. Oh wait, I know the council presidents. Yeah, well, how does this person fit into it? How does the board fit into this? Well does the election run? How is it done? We had no We had to search out the answers. We had to call all sorts of people, and we were only getting bits and pieces. There should be a clear outline of how you run a democracy and a union. I mean, it shouldn't even be that difficult.

You know, obviously there'd be specific rules for the union, but they shouldn't be occluded. They should be you know, there shouldn't be occulted from the members. We should clearly know how you step forward to be a more of a contributing member to the union to run and to serve the others in the union. And that was an amazing thing that we're finding out amongst each other. It's like, wow, how how does our union run? I mean, how why is it difficult to find out these things? And I

mean I don't think it's insurmountable for us. I don't think that should disqualify us. I don't think if we can step in and do healthcare in a pandemic, we can very easily learn how to how the union functions and a quick, a quick little tutorial. I don't think that's going to be a big deal for us. But yeah, it's pretty amazing if we're talking about democracy and the union. How is it that it takes I mean to find

the buy laws. We can all tell you it took a tremendous amount of effort to find the by laws that are runs by hold on, hold on, let me tell sorry about the by laws. So we have a nurse in Chicago who decided to make a pain of themselves about how to get the by laws and then instead they went to the union, Like I want to see the by laws. I want to see the by laws and they were lists like you know, like and they give them the runaround, and eventually they gave him.

He got personally to the liver envelope that was like a photocopy of a photocopy of photocopy of the by laws. And it's funny because the legally, the by laws are all spops to be filed with the federal government. And like from our pressure and organizing to figure out how our union worked, they had to publish the newest set

of by laws and on the federal reporting websites. UM. I was in Oakland in twenty nineteen for the Global Nurse Assembly and there was an after party and it was a bunch of staffers and like, you know, some nurses and you know, just chit chatting, and I was like, man,

be really good. I told the story about you know, like the you know, the nurse you tried to get by finally got a copy of the by laws to you know, some of these One of these staffers like, man, it'd be really great if we, you know, could figure out how are you know, getting hints for other union works, and just as like good luck with that, and they

just disappeared ways I'm not. Yeah, I mean because because what we're finding is to add any staff that helped nurses learn how the union works find themselves out of a job. Like that's what's really that's what really sketches everyone out is when like people, I mean, you all can tell tell the story about the staffer who like got ran afoul. So I will tell you that there are a lot of great labor reps, a lot of

really great people out there. But to tell you that they would communicate with us, because obviously I told you I've done all these other actions. So I know a lot of people and they have my personal number just because we would. You know, when we're in other cities, you know, you text each other and hey, we're at this place, now where do we meet you? Etc. So we were getting texts from some labor reps in the union saying, you know, you guys need to stand tall.

There are a lot of us supporting you. We can't come out and publicly support you because we'll get fired. What. So, yeah, so we were getting these texts from the labor reps saying what they're doing to you is wrong, and they were you know, we actually got together and we we wanted to go out on strike in October, and we were getting this runaround from a group of this I

thought they were it was just an inner cabal. Little did I know that it probably extends throughout the you know, the organization, but that they were telling us that there was no need for a strike, and it seemed they were trying to just pressure us into taking a pretty low ball contract. And so, uh, we're getting push you know, the good labor reps are texting us like stick it,

stick to it, stick to it. And we actually got a postcard campaign and we actually drove up to the executive director's house in Sacramento, knocked on our door and delivered five hundred some postcards that we organized on our own, not with you know, it wasn't a union driven, it was just nurses union, nurses driven, and we delivered postcards saying we want to go out on strike, and the union, of course still fought us on it, but we were

allowed to go out on strike. And there's a video of us confronting the executive director at our strike line asking her why we were gagged, why the mediator gagged us, and she clearly didn't know what was going on. She said, the mediator wouldn't gag you. Why would they gag you? So she didn't even know what was going on at

our table. We then got we were contacted and they we were told, oh my god, they're running around like chickens with their heads at all because they're petrified that they might use their jobs, that they've been exposed to

what they've been doing to you. And so one of the labor reps that used to work for us, she used to be at our hospital, and then she moved along and she was at Sutter Cilano and her nurses were asking, hey, did you see this video of this speech Eric made on this you know, at the strike line. And it was a speech where I kind of excoriated the union about why they would gag us, that that wasn't you know, we needed to be united and we didn't need a union, you know, working behind our back.

They needed to stand with us. And so she says, well, let's see. So she was looking at the video on her union cell phone and with the negotiators, nurse negotiators at her hospitals at our Salana who were also in negotiations with us, that we weren't supposed to talk to because you know, the mediator forbade us. So she's showing the video and they thought because she was formerly in our hospital, that she was our inside scoop for all this information. What I can swear to God and take

a lie detector test. I had one exchange with her during like the twenty one months that we were negotiating, and it was at a joint Bargaining Council meeting on zoom where they kept the union kept muting us on zoom and prevent and preventing us from writing in the chat because we were saying we want to go out on strike, we want to go out on strike, and next thing you know, we would find out we couldn't type in the in the chat. So I texted her

and says, can you see this. I'm trying to write in the chat and I'm forbidden from writing in the chat. They muted me, they I can't type in and she goes, I'm feel for you, buddy, I feel for you. That was my only exchange with her that caused her and the fact that her nurses asked her to look at this video with them, that's what cost her her job. She's it was. It was clearly guilt by association and

the charges were outrageous for her. We had labor reps leave because they just felt that it was they couldn't live with themselves with what they were doing to the nurses. It was incredible for them that they're here to work for the nurses, They're here to work for the most progressive union in the country, and it was a fraud. That's been like a big, like consistent problem is that we know that they are busting their own Like the

staff are supposed to have a union. The staff have their own contract, and that's a normal thing inside unions, right, yeah, you know, to keep you know, we believe in or that every worker who you know, works for wages should be in a union. And we have seen time and again that like the like the contracts, that they've busted their own unions. So like that they've there was a slate that was run of nurses in um Our, not

nurses of the staffers. I think it was in twenty twenty one where they were like trying to get something together to change you know, things inside you know, how they relate to their management and and several of those uh staffers were basically illegally fired Jesus. So this is like I mean, and I know you keep saying Jesus a lot, but like there's a reason me, you know me, I wouldn't be running into this sort of situation if it wasn't like so like out of out of this world.

The stories that we hear, and they're the same. This is what's disturbing, is it? And it's because the union is baited. Like I was just talking to a lawyer today. She was looking over the by laws of our union and she's like, this is set up like a local

like it's one big local union. It's got like a tiny little committee of people who are making the decisions that effect or we believe that it's mostly the director non nurse director staff that make the decisions, but these four people kind of rubber stamp them and that they make decisions for one hundred and fifty you know, thousands

some on nurses and it's so centralized. You know, this is one of the things describe as like it's almost irresponsible because you know, we live in you know, you know, crazy times, and all it takes is one wrong election or bad decision in Supreme court, and it would literally our union could be dissolved with like you know, if they just arrested you know, a handful of people and

uh and froze our bank accounts. And a big part of our goal is to help disperse those resources out into foster more local leaderships so that any event that you know, something you know like that terrible happens like that, we're not caught without anything. Because the way it situated now is we have this massive concentration of all of the decision making and resources in a very small group

of hands. And most of these people are are not have never been nurses, or if they've been nurses they've been you know, out of practice for so long that they wouldn't know how. I mean, maybe they could put band aids on. I don't need to, like, I don't want to disparage anybody. You know, A nurse is a nurse. I know nurses, you know, you learn it and you learn a lot of things. It's really important, great skill,

but there's something to be in practice. If I you know, I can walk back into the medical issue I used to work in, you know now it's going on like five years and be the same nurse that I was when I was at the peak of my practice there. And there's a real key thing too, I think we're all committed. None of us are doing this because we want to be the face of California Nurses Association National

Nurses United for the next twenty thirty years. We're doing this because we feel that there's a real value to there being a continual turnover in leadership, new ideas, people bringing in new energy. We think that nurses should have the opportunity to work release time so that they could see how the union works as staffers from the inside and then go back to the regular jobs. We're doing everything we can to like I like my job. I think my job is great. I don't want to leave

my job. But doing what we can to bring our met our mentality as those bedside nurses to the sensibility of running the union. Because nursing does give you a lot of really powerful tools, as like you have to be able to listen to people. We're not listening a lot tonight, but you know, we've got to talk and get the word out. Being able to kind of see. A big thing we see is like, you know, you have a lot of people who will tell youths things

and then they act in a different way. And that's a big part of nursing practices, being able to understand what people's real deal is. And you know, it's kind of that's one of the things where it's real frustrating, is like we know when people are lying to us, Like I know, we all know when, like the staff are lying to us. Nurses do have bullshit detectors, that's for sure. You know. I slept through the class in nursing school where they teach you how to grow eyes

in the back of your head. The class slept through where they teach you to get a through arm. And I really regret sleeping through the class where they teach you how nurse mitosis like being able to asexually reproduce an extra nurse. But I definitely didn't sleep through the class where I can learn where I can see when someone is saying one thing and then but it's like

what they're fucking lying to me? Yeah, And that's a that's like a constant theme, and that's one of the things that's driving a lot of our organizing is that a lot of people are tired of just being lied to by people who were paying their paychecks. And it's like and it's like they think that we I mean, we have staff informants, right, we know people inside staff

who are allied with us. We know how they talk about us when we're not there, they talk about us like we can't figure this shit out, And it's like, motherfucker, I know how to keep a person alive who like who shouldn't be alive, Like I know how to walk a family through like you know, multiple family members with conflicting opinions through like an end of life discussion, and along with a doctor who can't really make up his mind, like you don't think it while I've got you know,

like multiple pressors and like continuous dialysis. You don't think I can't figure out like when you are like telling us one thing and then another thing's happening. We know

why they're canceling meetings right now. They don't want us talking to each other where we get that, and this is kind of like it's it's almost like a feminist practice of women talking to each other makes men nervous, right, And it's like nurses talking to each other makes management nervous, and it sure as hell is making our union nervous. We want our union to be encouraging nurses talking to

each other and not like discouraging it. And anytime someone is discouraging people from talking to each other who have similar concerns, that is an immediate you know, like Eric was saying the red flags, it's like this is the kind of thing that like this is. It's like an almost an abusive relation. Shift. You know, I would not be running if it wasn't this intense of a problem

this has been. It could happen here. Join us tomorrow for part two of the interview, where Shift Change discusses more of their vision for what the union could be. In the meantime, you can find us on Twitter or Instagram. That happened here at pod and you can find cool Zone Media the same places at cool Zone Media. We've also posted a link in the description to Shift Changes go fund Me if you want to help support their campaign.

Welcome back to it could Happen here. We now continue our conversation with the team from shift Change enjoy Outside of the obvious the union is doing landlordism for some reason, part which is just sort of I can't get over, like, well, what do you what do your media forty four dollars. The thing you're doing is being a landlord. But yeah, I mean it seems like they're you know, like out of one side of their mouth saying this is a democratic union. In their side of their mouth, they're doing

political purges. They're like doing everything possible to make sure people don't know how to like democratic process works, which I think is a pretty like basic precept of democracy is that if if, if it's impossible to figure out how the system actually works, it's not it's not it's not actually a democracy in any real sense. Yeah, and you know, yeah, and this is the thing you're saying is like they seem they seem to be acting like bosses,

like they're firing people. They get nervous when people start organizing, which is not a thing that you would think a union would be ecstatic, and it's like, oh, heir, there's

this one wors like organized themselves. I don't know, it's just I mean, there's a there's a there's a mentality inside among some people and even among some of the nurses that like, you know, when people are causing problem or you know, it's the Yeah, it's it's a very it's a very perplexing situation to be in, and many of us it's taken us years to really figure it out, because you don't we all come to work right to

do our job, you know. I don't come to work to like figure out every like little nuanced thing about what's going on inside my union. I didn't become a union nurse because I wanted to be like a hero union member. I did it because it was down the street and it was a good job, and like I wanted to be a nurse more than anything in the world. So you know this, But this is what we do, and this is why things like labor notes and learning how your union works is really important. We've been self

educating ourselves. Like it's almost like you have to become a jail house lawyer, right, yeah, like a yeah, We've been sharing our favorite resources for like how do you learn about how union works or what your rights are, and like we're basically taking notes for what we're going to have to do when we if we get in power inside the union to educate all the nurses in our union. One of the things a little too, I mean every time I talk with people about this, to

try and give little tips and tricks. Don't leave your staff are a loan in at the negotiating table. They'll tell you everything's going great, go get go, get some dinner, and you come back. And you can't do regressive bargaining. You can't unbargain like a thing when someone's been empowered

to decide something for you. And this is where especially new like new units in hot in countries or parts of the country without strong union culture are finding that they'll step away from the bargaining table and they'll come back, and then all these decisions will be made that they don't have any You can't go back on it. It's like literally no backsies in like in union negotiations. No.

And so there's no such thing as regressive bargaining. If if if I say that I want a you you offer a fifty percent increase in fifty cent an hour increase for floating to another union unit, I can't turn around and you can't offer me forty five cents the

next go round. You cannot go back if you said fifty percent, it has to be you know, more than fifty percent on the next offer, or you just say that's my final offer, so you know the idea of regressive bargaining is I have to tell you it's amazing, is that when we negotiate against Sutter in twenty eleven through twenty thirteen, we had multiple cases of ulps filed for regressive bargaining on their part. They constantly made these mistakes which we as nurses and the labor reps caught.

And now for us, it's so important that we don't regressive bargain regressive bargaining on our own members here. We need to be moving forward. We should be making quantum leaps and bounds as nurses. Well, what we've gone through, we're supposedly the most trusted profession in the country. I think it's the past twenty years. The only time we have not been the most progressive or the most respected profession was in two thousand and one, and you can

obviously guess that it was firemen. It was firemen. But it's like twenty five years or so in a row we've been the most trusted profession. It's because, you know, how can you not trust somebody who's cleaning you up when you soiled yourself in the bed, who's holding your hand when you're scared. That's why we're the most trusted profession and we should be the most respected for what we do. It's just amazing that our union can't carry

us through that. Our union was formed in a revolution that we overthrew and kicked out management nurses and formed the California Nurses Association, the bargaining part of the organization. The association broke away from the management part and we toraled her. It all as a wonderful example somebody who was part of that revolution. And for about twenty over

twenty some years, we were a rapidly progressive union. We didn't have all the rank and file things that we should have had in the union, but it was in the right direction for nurses. And we've kind of made in the past ten years this U turn and the Association, which I think is bad for nurses. We need to be going forward and we have new nurses and new a new generation that is joining the union and they need to be a part of it. And they can't look at me and say that that old fogy that's

been in the union for thirty some years. You know that I'll be doing the work for them. They need to be active in that union and they need to love the idea of solidarity, you know, out of the fires of desperation, burn hope and solidarity. It was one of the ladies said, I think Sharon Borrow from Australia, an Australian labor activists, said that we need to have

every union member. I don't think every one of them has to be rabbit about it, but they should be aware that they need to stand tall and support each other, and not just even they need to support the non union nurses they need to get. We need to get more nurses unionized. The problem with unions is there's not enough unions out there. There's not enough people in the unions. We need to get more nurses unionized and our union hasn't been able to do that in quite a while.

We haven't. We we've been raiding a lot of other unions, but we need to get out there, uh and get people in the South unionized. We need to get other nurses and you know in the Midwest organized that aren't unionized yet. We have a bigger vision as bedside nurses, and I think that our our national union has I'm only as strong as the person next to me. I need support. As John said, yeah, we're four people running for the Council of Presidents, but behind us, there's there's

so many nurses supporting us. Nurses are texting me all the time, Hey, give me some pliers, give me some buttons. I want to pass them out. It's it's important for us. I know we're we're at a disadvantage we don't have.

You know, the people were running against even though it's illegal for them to have the union promote them, they're obviously going to have that advantage like a city president because they're going to be in the National Nurse magazine, going around the country, you know, doing the things they do as sitting presidents, so they're going to get that free publicity. I wish the union presidents went around the country because as far as I know, they've never come

here at Chicaca. Yeah, I think the only time we bet to Chicago's when we had that People Power convention there and that was my first visit back to Chicago, and I think ten years was when I went there. And it's amazing. Is it should be our union should rotate, rotate where they have their their their conventions. They should we should be all around the country. We should be going to the south and having conventions so that we can attract people. Um. I think it's important we need

to make inroads. UM. You know, I know a lot of it is They're going to say the pandemic, and I think the pandemic did hasten this siloing. Um. And you know, some of it was a little understandable. But even when it was evident that they should have come out of the borough, they never did. And they people have been saying how tired they are from the pandemic, right, Like, I don't know how they could have been tired. The union could have been tired when they were just having

zoom calls. No, no, I mean the nurses are saying that they're tired. Like. But here's what's interesting. This is a thing that I'm seeing in real time as we're doing this work, is that nurses who have been exhausted and some of the most beat down like like nurses who are like in the worst situations here in Chicago, are tired. But then they hear something interesting is going on with the union that is actually something that they have a say in, which is very unusual in our union,

and people get very excited. So I'm having coworkers coming up to me who are the least interested in union business until maybe it's time for a strike. And you know, it's interesting because like when we did our strike organizing in twenty nineteen, the first strike in Chicago's of nurses

in like forty years in Chicago. You know, they kept it would call these small kind of symbolic actions, and they call them stress tests or structure tests for like, you know, we're going to do we're going to do a press conference and you have like you know, a handful of nurses come out for the press conference, yet like ten or fifteen nurses to come out, and they're like, oh,

they're all wringing their hands. And then we start started calling pickets and then we start blowing past our turnout numbers. And then when we did our strike, they were expecting eight hundred nurses with twelve fourteen hundred nurses, more nurses than ever been in anyone place in our hospital. Like

it was like a giant party. So it's kind of like when people have know that there's something that really has like they has a stake in, right, there's an infinite amount of energy almost and this election is really kind of like we can't make the buttons fast enough to give away like they keep people keep coming up

and they're like, here, give me a handful. I've got coworkers and we're doing there's you know, let's get the pictures of everyone with their nurse with their with their shift change buttons shift change, and you know, we're turning that stuff into we're getting ramped up and prepared for like our social media like outreach, and this is part of it, is like getting people to see like, hey, there are people out there who want to do something different and that put you like as a as a

bedside nurse. This is our opportunity to get you into the driver's seat of how your union is run, how strikes are called, how we negotiate, Like we want to have a council of hospitals in contract campaigns. It's just nurses from negotiating teams so that they can all so we can coordinate and decide when we want to go

on strike. And it's not someone who's never been a nurse making that call for us, Yeah, which seems just baffling that you'd have some random person who hasn't been a nurse making strike decisions to this I mean the fact that it's not also just there seems like there's such an enormous gap between the things you would just basically fundamentally expect a union to be doing and what's actually happening, which has nothing to do with that, And it's just the sort of I mean it almost it

seems like like intentional dubobilization. Well, they want to treat us like a spigot, like they want like you can turn us on and turn us off. You know. The problem is is that people don't respond to that well, and you kind of constantly have to be honing your practice through defending the contract, which is a big thing that like a lot of my coworkers are just constantly

annoyed that the contract we're not defending. Our chief nurse rep is always annoyed that she can only know scrape together you know, like four or five people, and you know, I do it, and I'm not like I'm really good when I'm in the room with you know, I've my coworkers think that I do a good job, but you know, when it comes down to like doing all of the reading and everything to make sure it's done, I need you know, It's the thing that I'm always working on

and trying to get better at m But you know, the that is kind of the lifeblood of trade unionism is like, if you're going to have a contract, you need to in between contract barting campaigns where you can go on strike, you need to be constantly probing and pushing and finding where the weak spots are and keeping people in the practice of like fighting. And if you do that and you're really effective at it, you can

affect some pretty impressive changes in between contracts. When our friends was was the labor rep at Cook County, they went from having maybe like ten people doing like the rep work to over sixty people doing the rep work.

She partnered with a really phenomenal chief nurse rep who had a family Her dad had been president of a SEIU local, and they were they had pushed so hard that they were able to read to open negotiations for attention bonuses, which after you've settled a contract is like to open something on economics, like on the order of fifteen,

fifteen or ten thousand dollars, retention bonuses is a huge deal. Yeah, the problem was is that that then they fired her when she connected us at Cooke County, or the nurses at Coo County with nurses at University of Chicago, and we started comparing notes with what our staff were like, and their chief nurse reps started asking the director of bargaining, who's not a nurse and has never been a nurse, to say, why is it that we are bringing in

why is my facility bringing in four million dollars worth of dues? And we get like, you know, two hundred twenty thousand dollars worth maybe of staff, Like what's the deal? And why is it that we don't spend any money on arbitration or any of the stuff. They're constantly afraid of doing anything. And that's when they fired Natalie. And then and now they're down to they're trying to whittle those those nurses retention bonus negotiations down to like three

thousand and four thousand bucks from like fifteen thousands. You know, you bring in the right people, and all of a sudden, management has to like hire in like um an entire legal extra legal department at cook Anty Health Services. It's not it's not that somebody is not a nurse. That doesn't matter. Natalie was not a nurse, yet she was an outstanding example what a labor rep should be. An organizer. Yeah,

I mean she you stand with the workers. I just I do believe that we need more nurses involved in UH in organizing and inside the union. But I have no issues with you know, when you have labor reps like Natalie, that's that's what you need to keep the union thriving. And unfortunately to cut her down when she was making inroads to really empower nurses and the union was it's just beyond the pale to make that decision.

Why they made that decision is something that I think if we won the presidency, we'd want to find out why was that decision made because the big part of this is holding the staff accountable is our big thing, Like we just need to know right now, there's no accountability to So imagine having a job where like if you are a nurse, Like if we're speaking to our coworkers right now, imagine being a nurse and no one ever checking your charting, no one ever checking what a

patient has to say about the care they got. No one asking a doctor like what you did during a shift, right, No one checking your like to see if like all of your vital signs are actually really reflected in like the monitor. That's the situation. Or we're dealing with staff right now, no one who's outside of their staff bosses at the director level has they're they're only accountable to those people, and they are only accountable and they're not

actually accountable. They just write like they write everything themselves. They write their own reports. They get they you know, they'll take you know, a nurse will come up with a good idea, they'll run it up the flag pool. Check out this awesome idea, have, boss. I mean, it sounds like a downer I guess is like it all sounds very like this is all grim and like depressing. But the fact is is that we are at a point now where we see what's going on and what

we need to do. We've been educating ourselves about what can be done to change the union because the union is a democratic structure, even in like just the shell form of it, and as nurses, we've got a lot of faith that as nurses we can figure this out and come up with a much better, more democratic way to run our union. And I think it will fundamentally be a much stronger organization. I think That's the fear is that somehow we like, you know, some people are like, oh,

you know, you're gonna make it worse. It's like I don't know that you could make it worse. It's like,

you know, there's the healthcare industry is changing. I think we're seeing this in real time as the healthcare industry is changing, and we are seeing to the you know, you have hospitals that come up with the most cutting edged version of healthcare, like the Universe Chicago, or the university systems out in California, or maybe like Stanford that's like the very like the top end of like what healthcare is, and those hospitals are like basically they might

as well be gold mines. And then you've got the safety net hospitals. And my fear is that the safety net hospitals they would like to casualize to uber They keep telling us about, oh, they're going to uberize nursing. Well, you know, what is it that they're doing to stop you know, over half of the nurses being at Cook County Health Service from being replaced with agency nurses right now?

Like how long is that going to go until there's like you know, they go from a bargaining unit of you know, over fifteen hundred nurses in the union or seventeen hundred nurses in the union to like, you know, it could theoretically drop down to you know, a handful of union nurses. And so they like they it's like an unofficial layoff, right, people quit and they institute a

hiring freeze, and then they don't replace them. They bring them in as agency nurses because they would rather in these safety net institutions, not pay benefits, not pay pensions. You know, our hospital we lost, they took our pension away, and the union didn't do anything to fight that back. I was in the pension plan for like two years and then they're like, guess what, no more pensions and the union to do shit about it, and they could

have done something. I mean, it was like it's because the contract language is like, well, you get whatever we offer you. And our teamsters in our facility took like a very like a hundred two to four hundred dollars buyout to get rid of their pensions, and that was the end of our pensions for the entire medical center. And then our union where our staffers are all bought

into the Steelworkers pension, right, they have a pension. They're like, well, John, maybe you'd have to strike six or eight times, which is what they say whenever they don't want to do anything. And they certainly aren't telling us about hospitals, like the folks that all debates who have struck like ten times to get what it takes. And it's just like, you know, striking. I think there's this idea that it's scary. I have co workers who are telling me, John, just tell me

when the next strike is. I can't wait for the next strike. But we've been through it. We have a lot of coworkers who haven't. Half of our nurses are new, they've never been through a strike. But you know, you build a union through strikes, which is the thing that is a little counterintuitive, especially if you do it the right way and you're strategic about it. Raina, You've been real quiet, like what do you think about all this? That's really number one. I'm a lady, and I don't

interject unless I absolutely have to. So to go back earlier, what was said about how unique are Slate is, well, it's unique in itself. For one, of course, I kind of sit with being a female and minority. But you also got to think about the men. Now, there is not a lot of men in nursing in general, and I think that's what also they need to look at, because I heard the criticism about that. But let's flip

the script on this. I mean we individually, as Eric and John did say before, that we were not here to be a counsel of present. This lay on every who was actually jumping on it to help other people. But form you know, I myself and Eric, we've been knowing each other for what seven six seven years, yeah, something like that. And yeah, and you know, I have seen the changes with the union. I feel that the union has been really stagnant. I think our dudes should

be used for community. And now during the pandemic, there is a lot of nurses are totally burnt out and they're slowing to realize that nursing is not what I thought. I did not signed for for this pandemic. I never I've been a nurse for thirteen years. I never knew that was never thought it was gonna be a pandemic like this. So it changed your whole spectrum of what nursing stands and also what we should do to preserve it. Now.

I you know, I look young, but I am a grandma about to be a full and so one of them are going to be a nurse one day. And actually one of them is a ten year old. And he told me, he said, you know, looking at all my nursing books and looking at you know, all my medical stuff, and he's looking at me, he said, you know what, I may want to be a nurse now. Mind you, two years ago he wanted to be a race car driver. So it happened. So it kind of inspired me a little bit, like I need to do

more leadership. I mean, I think I'm a natural leader in itself. It's just how to do it, where to go And this is just a step for me. I'm at that age. You know, I need to look behind me, if all the younger nurses my family and what my young grandchildren, what they may be. And I want to preserve that. And that's a third reason why I'm standing to do this. So and my peers, I mean, you work, any nurse work eight to twelve hours. The facility that you work with is almost a second home to you.

So you want to stand up with your peers. You know, there shouldn't be no divide. We're all standing for an employer who has been trying to take benefits away, trying to take you know, anything that makes it decent for you to just work, and also is wearing and tearing on your wellness and your work life balance and just your whole mental state. So it's so important to really know about your union, about the breakdown of it, about the history, about everything. You need to keep your employer

accountable and also within the union. Just like nurses have to be accountable for everything we do, and if we get in trouble, of course we're going to be reprimanded. The union needs to also go through the same thing as we do. It's only fair. So that's pretty much it for me. Any other questions you're reading, are you have you finished up your copy of Solidary Unionism yet? Arena? Oh, you mean the rank and File I am on chapter

three has been on. It's been interesting and since I will be going on vacation, well, I am on vacation right now. I'll be leaving tomorrow. I should be finished up with that book by then. That's a That's one thing that like, I don't want anyone to think just because I can speak about the union in a halfway intelligible way that I've been studying this for a long time.

A lot of my knowledge about the union is pretty new and recent, and uh, like I got, you know, I picked up a copy of Stoughton Lens The Rank and File Labor Law for the rank and Filer. There's an audiobook of it. It's just a great, like short little book about everything you need to know to kind of like exercise your rights and try and stay out of like trouble. Picked up a copy of you know, uh,

Jamie Mccayfleery's No Shortcuts. We've been passing around a copy of Stoughton Len's Solidary Unionism, and like there's a lot. And then we went to Labor Notes and like it's funny because our union sent us to Labor Notes. Like I've got pictures of me and like other shift change people that were taken by staff if we were at

the Labor Notes conference. The funny thing was that I was in the talks about how to build a caucus and how to exercise their democratic rights as one of the funeral the only nurses in some of those spaces, and uh, you know, I don't know what they expected to happen, but the way they're treating this whole thing, every little thing that we've gotten, the fact that we can send that we were about to be able to send emails out was the thing that we had to

fight for every step of the way. They gave us a set of rules that the rules were the most conservative interpretation of our leagual democratic rights that are set in federal law. They gave us like the nineteen fifties, like carpenters union interpretation of like those those rights. They ignored all the case law that we have to be able to communicate with our coworkers through normal union channel, like every communication method our union uses to normally communicate

with us legally we should have access to. Now they're trying to throttle that's like all you can only send an email communication every fifteen days. It's like you know what, like you're doing your little whisper campaign like twenty four hours, twenty four seven just by and then you have to opt into like to communication about the about the election, like they were trying to keep and they're cutting meetings short, they're cutting meetings off. They were trying to bury this.

Now we think that they're they're trying to shift gears because they know that this is a lot more serious than they thought it was. You know, we're not here to you know, turn the union upside like well, maybe turn the an upside down is a good way to think of it, but in a good productive way, not in a you know, turn it upside down and shake it, you know, to like, you know, destroy it. We want to turn it upside down so that it's the way

a real union is supposed to be, is it. People who are elected into leadership are accountable to the people who elect them. And our goal is to you know, to make the union like we want to go from something like you know, Chicago Teachers Union, which is really powerful and famously like democratic. It wasn't always that way. It was only focused on very basic stuff, you know, before the women in the Chicago Teachers Union took it over and changed it for the better. M you know,

that's our goals. We want our union to be to have that internal, vibrant discussion and debate about how the union should be working should work because we know that as nurses that we've got the skills in the capacity to have an impact on the others are said, we don't think that people who are paid out of our due should ever be afraid when a nurse opens their mouth and says I think things could be better or

I don't like how this is happening. Yeah, And I think I think one more thing I do you kind of want to add is that you know, you were talking a bit earlier about sort of the risk of stagnation, and I mean, I think something that people don't want to hear, is it, like, you know, there's been a wave of militancy in the last few years, but the actual union like the actual unionization rate of the US

keeps going down. And I think a big part of that is, you know, like even even in the periods when unions are really strong, they got into these sort of bureaucratic patterns where people were busy sort of fighting their own internal like like busy fighting their own rank and file, and then when the bosses came for them,

they got destroyed. And I don't know, like it really seems like a moment where either unions are going to people like you are going to win and you get these rank and file movements that are changing what the union is to be what it's supposed to be or

the last remnants of unionism is going to die. And that's I don't know, Like I mean, it's depressing, but that's like if you if you just look at the unionization rich chart, it just keeps going down and down and down, and every time it seems like it's hit to do low, it's like it finds another way to go out, which I guess is kind of a room way to look at it. But I don't know. I mean, it is very positive to think about how how there's organizing that's difficult. It's hard to get people to do

some things right. It's difficult to pull people together for you know, um certain types of organizing when they don't feel like they have a say or a stake in what's going on. But I will say that like it has been, it is always eye opening when I watch my co workers pull together in this thing, and I think that there's that common experience at work and especially care workers right now, it is like that is driving

us to do different things. There's a reason why we're having a rank and file movement in our union now and things aren't just continue like continuing to stagnate I think that people recognize that their union has to be fighting for them. I think that's a big thing. People want the union to fight, not to just kind of like sit there and you know, you know, people get really frustrated when they feel like their dues are being

taken and they're not seeing that immediate benefit. The immediate benefit only comes when we pull together and we fight back. So I think that I totally see what you're saying. I think a lot of that comes down to people who get into these positions. And this is why we believe in the principle of like rotation and like and churning over the leadership as much as possible. Is that I think when you stay and no one should be in the position of organize yourself out of a job.

Right if you're doing you're if you're being effective, you're organizing yourself out of a job. And I have organized out of myself out of some jobs. And right now I've organized myself out of telling people that there's a movement and that we've got to participate in it. And now I'm moving on to other things because I have like a whole crew of people in my hospital who are doing that organizing work without me having to do it.

So I think that there's like it's can be little depressing when you look at like the raw numbers, but I think that a lot of that is Like it's like if you if your union is clearly not great and people kind of complain about it, then yeah, no

one's going to want to join it. Like if your union thinks it's more important to be a landlord or you know, stash forty two million dollars in the bank, then it is to invest that money in actually building organizational expertise or you know, building, And I see the unorganized, like Eric was saying, in places or like right to work states, which we've won. We have won contracts in right right to work states. But you have to be looking.

You have to be constantly pushing for it. And if you can't just take a little win here there and then be excited because you just got another union to affiliate you like our union does. Like we need to be working on actually bringing more and more workers into our union and if we don't do that, it will die. But um, I think that there's a spirit in the you know that you know when you come to a place to work, with coworkers and you face common enemy

and common problems, common conditions. You do see what it can look like when people decide to do something on their own. You know, to get back to MIA's point about declining unionism in this country. In order to, you know, to change this decline in unionism, we need to change who we are as union members. We need to You know that I'm not a big doctor phil fan, but he used to say that thing all the time. Well,

how's that working for you? Unions need to take a look at themselves and say how, how how is this working for you? We are declining. Why do we continue to do the same thing we're doing over and over again. We need to change who we are. For example, as a nurse, a nurse needs to know when they stand up and speak out that when they stand up they won't be standing alone, that there'll be somebody around them, that other nurses are going to be there right behind them,

backing them up. And that goes for any trade. You know, we we can't progress as workers without struggle, and there will be struggle. We need to march forward. We need to be able to say everybody that can be any union should be any union, and we need to expand ourselves as nurses. I mean, I don't want to harp on it, but this pandemic was devastating for us, and I obviously no nurses worked remotely. I should say no

bedside nurse worked remotely. I know many of our nurse managers worked remotely and checked in on us through you know, online things, But for the most part, every nurse, bedside nurse was at that bedside. It was not it was not pleasant, it was it was something that I'm sure many nurses are probably in uh, you know, counseling for they were that traumatized by it. Many people had lost family members, just like the rest of the public did,

yet they still had to continue to work. I think as a as a union, we need to change who we are. And like I said, I don't want to point fingers or anything that you know, people that are in the union now or the people are running against I'm sure they're good people, but we have a different idea and we want to bring a change to how the union runs. And I think that change will make us a stronger and better union and I think will be will have happier nurses and wind up with more

activist nurses who will expand the union. It's going to be a word of mouth. You know, one thing. You can have the best organization in the world, but the things that are the best product, but what really makes your product worthwhile is word of mouth campaigns. People have to talk about you. People have to say, hey, you know that California Nurses Association that and then you they're

really doing something. I want to be a part of that. Uh, you know, we need to you know, we've been pressing on a Medicare for all, single payer and and of course ratios for everybody, but we need to start organizing more and all those states where those workers suffer. Because I can tell you this right now. You know, I'd ever talked about it with John. Our hospital is filled with nurses from the South and they tell you, oh,

I came to California for the ratios. They need to fight for those ratios back in Alabama and Mississippi and all the states they come from. We need to help them, you know, bring unions to the South. You know, the basic core of right of right to work it was racism. The racism is what drove right to work. It was the same people that brought you. Segregation is what brought you right to work, and uh, you know that's a fact.

Oh and it's important for us that uh you know, we want to be an activist union and I'm not opposed to that, but we can do that by unionizing these hospitals and making those nurses bedside lives a lot better. Um, you know Stouton Lynn. It's funny, is that I always laugh, you know, John brings it up. I'm from originally from Canton, Ohio, and of course Stoughton Lynn taught I believe it was at Youngstown State. He was from. He was He spent the last part of his life after his Vietnam War

activism in Youngstown, in the Youngstown area. And I think the last book I read by him was Bob Lee's and Zapatistas. You know, he was talking about the It's a great book. And not many people know about him. I knew about him in Ohio because you know, you know social justice work there. Uh you know at Walsh at that time it was Walsh College and then Walsh University. Now, uh, you know Joe Turma, the professor there, you know, was often talk about Stoughton Lynn and that's how I you know,

started reading a lot of his works. Um, the things that he says about rank and file workers is something that we need to make part of the national conversation. And we need to get that message out. We need to to to tone down the big union actions and the big union talk and let's just make it a nurse's conversation. We always talked about our union about nurses values. Nurses valuables. Values are invaluable. Uh. They apply to every walk of life, every trade. And I think that's what

we need to do. And I know that's what Mark would say if he was on the call with us. I just got a text from him. He's almost finished with our video, so he's working hard. I mean, the guy took two weeks of his own time. And that's another thing. Here we are, we are bedside nurses. He had to self teach himself how to make pretty high end quality videos. And we're not bought and sold. We don't hire anybody to do our work for us. We're doing this ourselves. We're bootstrapping it, as you know what

they call bootstrapping it yourself. Up here. We are bootstrapping a campaign and a movement. I don't know if we're going to win, we are at least going to make a hell of an impression on people. And I hope, whether we win or lose, that impression goes far and that people listen to what we're saying and demand what we're staying for. What we want our union to be. We don't want to have an sciu like union. We don't want to uh like we're paying for services here.

We want a union that listens to us and does what we want. Um, a nurse shouldn't have to beg a labor rep to say no. We said no to a last, best and final and our labor rep said no. This in our professional opinion, this is a good deal. Well guess guess what, Mia, We got ten percent more by saying no. And I know that that sounds greedy, but in reality, um, you know, we do get paid considerably more in California than another place in the country.

But also, to buy a house in a bad neighborhood is a million and a half dollars, So it's so it's I have to drive an hour away just get to work. It is cheaper where I live right now than it is in the Bay Area. I could not get a house in the Bay Area at all. And we should be incorporating housing demands into our negotiations as well, like especially the years gonna be a landlord, Like come on, well, okay, how about we you know, the first public housing was

really cooperative housing built by unions. Like there's no reason why. Um, you know these some of these institutions are like incredibly wealthy and building. Uh, you know, if we can we have the kind of power to bring them to you know, a screeching halt. We should be able to like, you know, get the kind of things that we need to live by in our community, like we should be living where

our patients are anyway. And it's you know, and it's a way of bringing our bringing us ourselves into our community so that our community is you know that we're part of our community. Um. And you know, I think we're I'm just gonna say I'm gonna be waking up in six hours so that I can go back to work. And we want to make sure that people know a couple of key things. So there is an election happening.

If you are a nurse in a CNA, California Nurses Association or National Nurses United and NOC like Hospital, there's an election happening. Ballots are being mailed out to you on channel tenth. We expect that they're going to start arriving a day or two after that. We are the shift Change slate, so the four of us are running for the Council of Presidents. It's Eric, Raina, John and Mark And if you want to find us on social media, we just got our Instagram account. We are called shift

Change and on you. We're on TikTok Now we're going to be releasing some video Shift Change and and You, And then we're also going to have we've got our YouTube and Facebook set up as well. Look for us there. And we've got to go fund maybe because we've got to buy the materials that we are using to help organize with. Thankfully, by the sounds of it, our lawyers are going to be working for us for because they believe in what we're doing. And these are movement lawyers.

These are not right wing people who want to fight unions. They want unions to be accountable to their workers and to be strong fighting unions. And that's our main goal is we think that our union could be one of the most powerful unions in the country if we organize and fight, and we organize by building our relationships on trust and solidarity, by constantly working to defend our contract, and we think that as we build that energy, we can take that to all the other things that we

think are portness nurses. So we talked about nurses values. We know those are actually nurses values and not some person who decided that they're going to tag along with us and ride on our coat tails to you know,

whatever political future that they think they have. You know, we are you know, this is our union, and we're going to make it you know, accountable to us so that we can change the world and change our workplace and make you know, being a nurse one of those kind of jobs that people aspire to and not something that they come into for two or three years and then leave because it's so terrible. So I don't know what else to say. I'm ready for chift change, Rain,

Are you ready for chift change? Yep? And just like Nelson Mandela saying I never lose, I either win or I learn. Hell yes, hell yeah, I love this. This is the stuff I look for. Thank you so much, Thank you, Mia, thank you, thank you all for being on. This is great and I really hope you all win and if we win, bring us back. Yeah. I was

about to say, yeah, give us a report back. We'll tell you, We'll tell you everything that happened, and maybe if we win, we'll have a nice victory party and maybe we'll let you come out, you and the rest of the It could Happen Here crew, Maybe do some live stuff for us, because I think be a kick out of that. Every time I hear a nurse say that I listened to It could Happen Here, a part of me just like does a little snoopy happy dance. 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 zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening,