It Could Happen Here Weekly 97

thing I will be able to write about again. And unless the cycling press just kind of gives itself over to the Turfs, which doesn't seem to have done, to be fair, generally generally dicycling press, I think it's fair to say it's lacked an intersexual analysis of anything. But they've been better on this than I had expected, especially the outlets which are not run by white sis head dudes in Boulder, which, to be fair, is a minority.

Yeah strange, that odd? How odd? But yeah, shouting in particular to Outside for including a gear guide to the gear the cops used at the twenty sixteen RNC, which could perhaps be included as the most tone deaf article ever written. Yeah, yeah, incredibly, and then to leave it up in twenty twenty to not like cover your tracks. You know this is one of those.

you watched the video? Will include a link in the note to everyone else of it. Did you watch it with the sound on? Yeah?

Hand ups are a big thing in cycle across. So, like I've been handed dollar bills beer. What is happening in the sport? Oh yeah, it's very funny. And the moment you're not competitive if you're just grabbing shit off the spectators. So like, like I remember racing in Las Vegas at night. There was a race in Las Vegas at night, and I ain't gonna win right like then, so I'm just grabbing dollar bills and shoving them down my like like.

was not. It wasn't the blood sugar. It was affected my cognition. So cyclograss is fun and silly, and heckling is part of it. But like heckling occurs within a certain certain bounds, right, Like you're not supposed to be mean, it's just supposed to be funny, Like everyone's supposed to laugh.

So I think in twenty twenty one everyone was rather it's funny signed part of it too, right, But in twenty twenty one we saw some shit that was distinctly not funny when a group called Save Women's Sport posted up at the race and held what were, as you can probably guess by the name, transphobic science throughout the race. So a lot of people were upset by this, and by their own admission, nobody wanted them there. One woman told the protesters your ship feminism isn't welcome here, which

I think would be a great T shirt. If she's listening, please will license your.

nothing to stop it. Right, So, this particular focus on cycling came about in twenty eighteen when anti transcadras began to focus on the sport because of the success of a woman named Veronica Ivy and that she wasn't called Veronica Ivy at the time, and she was using she had a different name then, but that's her name now, so I'm going to use that name out of respect for her choice for that to be her name. She she won a world championship in the women's thirty five

to forty four spring category. Now, like, I have no disrespect at all for masters athletes.

older people. So it's so in cycling you have juniors and there are various you know, obviously the eight year olds don't compete with eighteen year olds, but up to eighteen as juniors espoires is eighteen to twenty three. We use a French name because you know, you want to be call what is what's what? Jesus Christ? Yeah, yeah, this French name under twenty three, right, you can call it if you want it to be an angler phile. And then from there you go into the elite competition.

Elite competition is it's actually eighteen and like an eighteen year old could compete in an elite competition, so could a fifty year old, right, but it's the highest level of competition. And then you get protected age categories again once you get to thirty five, So so thirty five to forty four forty five to fifty four going ten year blocks, right, and that's for people who are only

of that age. Now, it's the older you get, the less competitive it gets, just because more people will people will be racing, right, But thirty five plus masters sometimes they call it baby masters, is.

on an indoor velodrome. Masters track cycling, it's a smaller sport and the amount I know some excellent masters track cyclists who just don't care to go to worlds, right, they've been professional cyclists, are very high level amateur cyclists, and once you reach your mid forties, some people don't care to travel and spend that money and do that competition. Right. San Diego has a really great track scene. Some people who I know very well have recently won multiple world

championships on the track. Like, we have a very thriving scene, but not all of those people even care to go to La to race worlds like let alone travel across the world. Right, So it doesn't necessarily truly mean the people who win Masters are the best athletes in the world for the age group, And certainly I wouldn't say. There are lots of things that make this competition unfair. One of them is how much track bikes cost, how much track time costs, and how much travel costs to

get to the event. But of course it didn't matter to these people, right. What mattered is that a trans woman had won, and she became the center of the cultural war. And this was really, at least the first one that I was aware of, the sort of instance of someone a trans person winning a very a notable

event in cycling. And maybe trans people have been competing in elite races in cycling for forty years, like Wally Cameron was the first trans woman to race in a World Cup, and Money's been racing for a while, and no one said shit, no one cared, right, But around twenty eighteen, the culture war around trans people was becoming heightened, and so people got mad about her wing the race. And since then there's been this steady increase in transphobic

sentiment towards by crisis. It's really the sort of leading voice in this has been former probike grace at Inger Thompson. She's been joined by a few amateur women in various fields voicing their feelings about the participation of trans women. And Thompson has made a lot of statements, some of

which you know, choose not to share with you. You can google them if you want, but most of them will be like she missgenderous people all the time, right, that that's what you can find her on Twitter, misgendering people.

And I think that that is kind of the giveaway that this isn't necessarily about sport, right, And I think that it's really important that people, regardless of where you stand on sport, understand that this is a wedge, and it's a wedge that's designed to push trans people out and away from femininity in a way, from inclusion.

sort of issue open. It's been really really effective at this and it's also been like you know, it's something that's sort of like vaguely plausible, plausibly deniable, and it also plays on a really kind of effective branding strategy that these people had, which is that like you know, if people remember what feminism was like in like the twenty tens, it was almost entirely about you know, not just in the twenty tens, like you even sort of

previous to this, right, Like the notion that like women are weaker than men was something that was like like broadly considered to be sexist, Like that was not a feminist thing that was like like women are weaker than men. And then you know what you're getre You're getting into people complaining about like like trans women like being on Jeopardy or like this ship that's happening in Chester that

we're going to talk about later. It's like, okay, like if you go back in time to before sort of trans arrangement syndrome set in, like and you told someone that in the future, this person is going to be arguing that like like like trans women have a biological advantage in jeopardy because men are smarter than women. They'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about, Like this person is like a neo Nazi.

it's it's a social process, not a biological one. And then you know, and and but because there was like a kind of cultural victory for feminism where it suddenly became really really difficult to be a mainstream person and like call yourself, uh, like call yourself an anti feminist, like all of these people who believe all of the same ship that like Phylishchlaffley did like have to relabel themselves feminists, and you know, and sports is the sports

the thing they picked to do that because sports is the like it's the area they can pick where they can, like with some plausible deniability, start doing all of this like oh, women are inherently weaker than men and have to be protected from men, like shit again.

laying claimed to feminism. I guess. Yeah. So, in the most recent sight of Rouss Nationals, trans athlete Austin Killips finished third at the event, local John Brown gun Club members had attended to step in and protect trans athletes where the sports governing body wouldn't, And it was actually a really I mean, what you saw was a lot of discourse online about Austin quote unquote blocking and a SIS woman athlete, and then you saw like a lot of people sort of saying that and like SIS women

had been I guess, like you know that Austin's inherent biological advantage. I'm using heavy scare quotes here had allowed her to come third. She got beaten by two sis girls, Right, this is always the thing like that.

the finish line first. But she didn't do anything that anyone else wouldn't have done. And at the time Turfs kind of tried to make this a big deal but were unsuccessful. And it was not really until Austin won a race in New Mexico, a big race tour of the Healer that it became again, like like it wasn't twenty eighteen a very big deal? Right? So one of the key leaders, as I said, is Inga Thompson. Inga is a very accomplished cyclist. There's no doubt about that, right.

She's a Bicycle Hall of Fame inductee, five time national champion, three time Olympic team member, a Tour de France firm, and a podium finisher, a three time silver medallist at the US World Championships. But I think she's arguably more famous now for her anti trans bigotry and she's a paid She tried to encourage cyclists to take a knee in protest at the UCI's transgender inclusion yeah, which like.

that otherwise currently eligible to compete in UCI events. She is also tempted to use our team as a platform for political activity, which like is a very neutral stance, but it's also it's also like it's fine, right, like like our cycling team isn't here to hate trans people. If you're going to use it for hating trans people,

please go somewhere else like it. It doesn't. You don't have to, like I do take a hugely radical stance to be like that this isn't a hate platform for hate speech, like like go away and uh that they added to be clear, Miss miss Thompson is entitled to her opinions an advocacy, but her methods and personal attacks are inconsistent with siniska's mission to advanced opportunities for women.

These methods, well documented on Miss Thompson's social media presence, include dehumanization of transgender people, spreading misinformation, demagoguery, and personal attacks on anyone who opposes her views spellow alert that includes me. She doesn't like me it all, I don't don't be mean to trans people, uh don't missgender my friends. So I did think it was very funny that like this team isn't like the like I don't note like

the woke team for woke people. They're just trying to get along with helping women's cycle and they can't do that if they're one of their board members. Is so consumed by hate that no one wants to have anything

to do with it. So in the wake of this protest, the twenty twenty one Save Women's Sport protest Fliletted they're an official with USA Cycling, published an open letter calling for the resignation of the organization's CEO and the Safe Sport Coordinator, kelsy Erickson, who's responsible for preventing hate speech and bullying. They gather one hundred and five signatures from racists and other cyclists in support of their demands, and a day after they sent the letter to Martini announced

he was stepping down. So he has a bit of a failure of just like there's a statement he made an interview where he said it would be different if our athletes were going to be affected. When he was talking about bands for trans athletes in interscholastic sports, he said, we don't believe they will be which like in technical and in technical sense because cyclists can bete for clubs,

not schools. They might not have done. But if you think that a ban on trans kids playing at school isn't going to affect participation in trans athletes in all sports everywhere. You just either completely myopic or you're burying your bigotry. He claimed he was quoted out of context, but it was part of a pretty big block quote. I don't see how that can be taken out of context. They did say at that time that they're against any

legislation limit trans inclusion. It's worth pointing out that cycling has a body as to all Olympic sports. It should prevent hate, beach, bigotry, and bullying, right, And that's called safe Sport set up in twenty seventeen, and that was following what happened at USA Gymnastics, right, which was widespread sexual abuse of athletes. People I'm sure will remember that Safe Sport, I feel fairly confident in saying has completely

failed in preventing abuse, preventing harassment, preventing bullying. What it has done is is perhaps given a legal shield to governing bodies, so has prevented them getting sued. But it's done nothing to prevent this kind of bullying, which is why athletes and the community you've had to taken it upon themselves to do that, right, Like, if there's one thing you should expect a governing body to do, it's

to make sure everyone feels safe at races. But people were legitimately worried about racing in areas where they knew there were a lot of not just turfs, but like groups like the prowd boys, right, who have kind of hung their hat on transphobia. I know people who didn't go to races in areas where they were worried about that.

I know people who, like you know it, went out of went to an effort every day to drive a different way back to their hotel at races because they're worried about Like, people genuinely felt unsafe doing something that no one should feel unsafe doing, which is playing. So as I said, you know who won't make you feel unsafe?

women's categories. It claimed that several races in the cycle across national championships privately did the organization to express concerns, but only one, Ev Edwards, competed under the SWS team banner. SWS at the time was not a nonprofit, so it was relatively hard to find out what exactly their financial ties to various other transphobic and right wing groups were. It's registered in Minnesota as a business, but it appears to be a sault. At the time, again, it was

a sole prop run by someone called best Steltzer. The both Ev Edwards and SWS used the race to aggressively fundraise for their campaign. Steltzer, for instance, at the time, was making three hundred and eighty five bucks per month on Patreon by quote creating awareness of males Invading female Spaces. Page has been taken down since then. She turfed too

close to the sun. She also received donations on her venmo page, which is very funny because I don't think she realized hervenmo page was public checked it out in the judgment. Yeah, that there is no there there was no distinction made between advocacy spending and personal spending on that account, I will say. And she was taking a donations and you know, making emoji purchases on her Venmo at the time. I think maybe since has made it private.

there should be a large red flag. It's an extremely nebulous concept that very ready does anything to help anyone. But much of this awareness seem to be tied to pre standard right wing anti trans talking points and not the many dozens, maybe hundreds of instances or transist women happily compete alongside each other, have a nice time, do exercise,

go home, and don't engage in any bigotry. In the past, WUS has worked with far right organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council to prepare a guide to quote help parents understand the transgender issue. Again, if you're framing the existence of other people as an issue, you know that far from flaming it as a question, are you? Yeah? Like, I'm impressed the self awareness avoided the transgender question, but like, only by you know, using

the thesaurus to reframe it as an issue. I guess the guide refers to the transgender trend quote unquote and repeatedly caused trans women men. They of course. Also you know Steltzer in particular, it appears anti abortion rallies, anti marriage equality rallies, things like that. Right, this is part of a wider space of painting bigotry. It's not just

about support. Cyclists are taken it upon themselves to protect trans riders, so access of solidarity, of range for blocking SWS protesters and national Championships announces refusing to allegedly refusing to mention races on the team. That's pretty funny, Yeah, it is pretty funny. Also this Mney Cameron has this organization called Ride, which is let trans kids ride and money mate sees wristband which like a trans flag, the transpride flag, and like one of my friends won the

biggest race in the US. It's cis guy with his Transpride ristband on, which is you know a little thing. But also like it's it's nice to see people show up, Like yeah, it's nice to see and like it's rare that you'll go to a race when people won't be you won't see a few people wearing that, like in pro men pro women, both like it's there are overwhelmingly people don't give a fuck. They're just happy if you're enjoying riding bikes. It's not like it's a big sport.

cancel their flights. Yeah, it was the most bungled, fucked up pseudoscience kind of half fast, Like it was just a mess. The whole thing was a fucking mess. They had an extraordinary meeting in August, just a few weeks before the World Championships, and like people previously had to have a submit blood numbers to show a testosterone level to compete, right, which is a thing lots of governing

bodies have been doing for a while now. They had certified people, like weeks before this, they'd be like, yeah, you're good to go for another year and then psych no, you're not. You can't compete ever again. And like, this is people's jobs, right, this is their livelihood, it's how they pay rents. It's also like being an elite cyclist is hard. It is most of your life, right, Like you're you've got to sleep or you got to eat, right,

You've got to train all the fucking time. You can't go out, you're going to be resting when you're not training. To take all that away from someone with a click of the fingers and bringing no consultation for them, it's incredibly cruel. And the I'll just read their statement because I think there's a couple of things in it we should pick apart. Obviously, you can't take Woying for it

being inherently transphobic. From now on, female transgender athletes who have transitioned after quote male puberty will be prohibited from participating women's events on the UCI International Calendar in all categories in the various disciplines. Notably, they also said it's also impossible to rule out the possibility that biomechanical factors such as the shape and arrangement of the bones in

their limbs may constitute a lasting advantage for female transgender athletes. Yeah, it's yea, there's a lot going on there, right, Like they use female where where most people would use woman. The barrier they set is to rule out any possibility of an advantage, right, which is a very high barrier. That's like a kind of guilty, and to improve it innocent situation. Right, Like I'd also like the arrangement of the bones in my limbs changed significantly when I was

racing bikes because I broke them all the fucking time. Like, such such a strange category to choose. Also, the requirement that you transition before puberty. That's not the same as taking puberty blockers, right, They're requiring that you're taking the hormones before puberty, like like eleven or twelve, yeah.

and then like everyone went insane about puberty blockers. And now like even the compromised position has been sort of like you know, I mean like when we're away that and it's like okay, like you know, but and then and then like and then you know, like now and then having done this right and it's like, oh well, now you can set up all of these rules that are like require you to have done a thing you've now made illegal. It's like this is great, yeah, exactly right.

Google is right there for you. But she was dismissed from a Spanish Olympic team in nineteen eighty six for failing the gender test. She's publicly shamed for being like a secret male. She loses her fiancee, she loses her funding, she loses almost everything. She fought and won a successful court battle, illustrating the fallacy of this binary gender approach. But she's not a trans woman, to be clear. She's

an intersexual woman who has androgen insensitivity syndrome. But she was able to They were using chromosome typing, right, Like you'll often this is a thing that you'll still see turf trotting out right, something that was outdated in nineteen eighty six, that like xx or x Y, that is that is not a binary that fits the entirety of the human species.

gonna fall on you. But this, this is the one thing where you can just like you can say ship that. It's not even like like people people make the joke it's like high school biology. It's like it's not it's just like elementary school biology. And it's not right, like like YouTube biology, isn't it.

these different competitions. I just want to read a statement that Austin made and like, it's very hard not to see this as them, specifically seeing Austin winning a big stage race in New Mexico and going like, right, we can't fucking have that, Like as soon as trans women win stuff, right, It's fine if they come and then don't win, but as soon as they win stuff. And again, if she had this inherent, massive biological advantage, she would

have won everything, which hasn't happened, she said. I'm devastated by the UCI decision to renege on the policy and

framework it previously set out for inclusion. My journey in professional racing has allowed me to see the world, build lifelong friendships, and most importantly, if my absolutely or something I find deeply fulfilling, no one should be denied the opportunity to chase that same joy that I and others found through racing, which I think is great, and I think it's important to lift up her voice in this and other transathlete voices. In theory, there is what's called

an open category, which is the men's category. The problem is that there are no open races, and that this category, like if you line up as a trans woman in the fucking open category. You're being very clearly othered, right, Yeah, you're being like you're Some of them also will have women's licenses, like it's not clear what men's category they

can race in. But more importantly, I think, as Chris Mosia pointed out, people will be familiar as Chris as the first trans athlete tend Olympic trials in the US. The open category contradicts both International Olympic committeeuidelines on fairness and inclusion and extensive research of states trans women do not have an inherent advantage in sport. Chris is a good follow on Twitter. It's to the Chris Mosia.

because our community has generally been inclusive. Like even after this at the World Championships, there were people with trans flags course, you know, like world championship or which trans women could not compete advocating for inclusion. Right, it was in Glasgow, and as a rule, the sport I think has been accepting Like I've never cycled, not known there being trans people in cycling, and I've cycled a lot,

but this has allowed trans people to thrive. And when trans people started describing these fucking bigots to make this a wedge issue and that's why it's happening here. But it's also fucking happening in chess. So do you want to do you want to talk about chess?

happening here. And then also for some reason, Okay, so chess has had this thing for a while where chess has like there are like women's sections for stuff, and there's a lot of some weird stuff going on here.

So like there's the regular title like Grandmaster, there's also like a women's Grandmaster thing which has different qualification, is slightly different, and this was this was set up basically because like the guys who play chess are insane, Like I've talked about this some of the Bobby Fisher episodes right, like they're like most of the most famous chess players in history are like utterly deranged Neo Nazis or like like people who are even weirder than Neo Nazis, like

like like unreconstructed like nineteen seventeen czarists like people like that, like just people with with like truly truly deeply weird political ideologies that are like unbelievably right wing, and you know, and like part of part of what like happens here is that like just chess in general is like unfathomably sexist, Like it's it's really really bad, and you know, like their solution to this effectively was like to create this

like kind of parallel like women's infrastructure, which kind of works and kind of hasn't in a lot of ways. And you know, like part of what's going on is just like, okay, so a lot of girls, like young girls play chess, but there's this bottleneck that happens around when you're like thirteen or fourteen, while this is twelve to thirteen, So there's fourteen where like the number of girls playing chess just like collapses, right, And the reason that happens is because boys are fucking dog.

woman who's really good at chess is so high. And then yeah, okay, so so this this is the sort of background, So like there are these separate like women's like tournaments and stuff like that, and so fee DA, which is the Chess Federation, released this thing where Okay, so they say a few things. One is that, okay, the the the big one is that if you like, if you are a trans woman, you cannot play in official feed day events or women until fee Day does something.

And it's not entirely clear what that is.

a great organization run by amazing people here. Yeah, but this is I don't know, it's it's incredibly deeply weird. Like the thing I keep thinking about is I don't know, this is kind of a weird, kind of silly story

in some ways. But like so, like the first trans person that I was like aware of it was a trans StarCraft two player named Scarlett, and she's great, She's awesome, Scarlet rules she actually she she she's she's one of three non Korean players ever to win a tournament in Korea, which, like I I don't know how to express how difficult

it is to win a StarCraft tournament Korea. Like it would be like if a football team from like Siberia showed up to the US was somehow allowed to play in the NFL and then like won the Super Bowl. Like that, That's about the level of difficulty it is to win a StarCraft tournament in Korea.

But like one of the things I remember about that was like she was always, as best I could tell, like always allowed like StarCraft also had a women's division because you know, very very similar like probably even more intense sort of sexis going yeah, yeah, being pretty toxic you know, and like like yeah, like it was actually you know, over the arc of like the like the like over a decade she's been playing, like you know,

like I've seen the scene get less transphobic. But like, as much as I could tell, there was never like a thing in the women's tournament. There always just like yeah, sure, hey, look a girl wants to play StarCraft like this rips and yeah yeah yeah, well more of us like yeah yeah, like you know, and she's also like and she's like again really really good at the game.

like the fucking ravening hordes of like absolutely deranged psychos in like the twitch chat and be like, oh god,

they hate both of us. Yeah, yeah, which is also like I think the other thing about this is like it's unclear like who at feet day like decided this, Like this doc just like appeared, and so there's like a non zero chance this decision is being made by men, Like pretty high that this is just like a decision made by a bunch of men because fuck them, and they've just decided that, like you know, just like literally not giving a shit about women's jess for like the

entirety of its existence. They've finally decided to do something, and they do something is make me not be able to play women's tournaments.

forced social transition. But yeah, there's a long history of us trying to work out gender ship through sport, and I guess I just want to finish by, like, if you don't give a shit about sport, you have to understand this is still important because like sport's always about like who's on our team and who's not right. That's why we didn't let black people play baseball in this

fucking country. It's why they took like Olympic medals away from indigenous people for violating stupid amateurism rules because they were designed to only let people have a certain class pay. It's why Colin Kafmack doesn't have a job, right, Yeah, it's why people didn't want to go to the Nazi Olympics and went to one in Barcelona, and it was bigger. Like sports not just about being the best to exercise, it's it's a social tool to include or exclude people.

And if you care about including people, then I think you have to care about sport right now, because that is a wedge that transfers are using to exclude people. So yeah, that's that's what I have for you.

we're starting this episode. It could happen here the podcast where we taken into nowhere's victory lap because yeah, so if you've been following the discourse about inflation over the past about two two and a half years, and especially in the last like maybe year or so, so very interesting stuff has been happening, and the stuff that we've talked about on this show, and then also stuff that's been sort of moving around in the sort of broader

discourse and has now reached like the IMF. And the thing that's been happening is that the theory of inflation that I've we've been pushing on this show, and that also very importantly I that has been being developed by Strange Matters has been like incredibly vindicated to the point of everyone else adopting it and then claiming that they

invented it. So yeah, we're this is this is this is the this is the inflation Victory Lab episode and to talk about the fact that these two people and their colleagues were right about inflation and a bunch of other stuff too. Is John Michael Kolan and Steve Mann, who are both co editors of the magazine Strange Matters, And yeah, both.

by like democratic and federalism. We've got like people who don't like a lot of those labels but are really into like direct democracy stuff. But like you know, the the four of us basically converge on the direct democracy, you know, socialism is putting people in charge of the

decisions that affect them kind of school of things. So in terms of our economics pages, however, we've for the last couple of years been really dedicated to publishing heterodox economists, economists who don't correspond to the usually quite right wing mainstream of the economics discipline, but challenging in fundamental ways.

And there's a bunch of different schools of heterodox economics, like you know, everyone knows about like Marxists, but there's also post Kinesians and ecological economics and feminist economics, and

a whole bunch of different schools. We've been dedicated to publishing people from all those different schools and trying to kind of get them to write in a style that's more accessible for ordinary people, so that some of those ideas actually start not just reaching the public, but actually reaching each other because they don't really talk to each other very much.

and I think that's a real strength. Actually, yeah, like there's there's quite a there's quite a few pieces that at least one of us is like, I still don't really know about this thesis, but I've been there have been times in which I've been down on a piece, but it does amazing, so let's go with it.

what are we going to do about like the Internet and its future? What are we going to do about these these horrible culture war type issues that like, you know, people talk about it as the culture of war, but actually it's these massive reconfigurations that we have to do of our consciousness in order to think about you know, gender, national identity, and ethnic identity and all these other things in different in new ways that are actually like freeing

and emancipating and stuff like. Like all of these problems are vast and nobody actually knows what the answer is, and that includes leftists. Like there's a lot of these problems that are either like too technical or too complex

for any one person to have the solution. So there needs to be a space where we kind of come together people who are kind of like of good faith and who like are trying to kind of do the whole democracy and egalitarianism thing, and we actually butt our heads together across lines of difference and are like, Okay, what are we going to do about this, and what are our different perspectives and what's the what's the common ground, and what are some little bits and pieces of things

that people have figured out that we can kind of stitch together into something that will let us not just get steamrolled by the fascists. And that that's the kind of space that we're trying to be, and that's why we try to accommodate these different perspectives, even though we ourselves tend to come from rather strong perspectives both individually and as a group.

And you know, in the in the last period of like runaway inflation in the eighties, people were having a similar reckoning, although they didn't quite coalesce around supply gene and cost puss related theories of inflation like they are

at this time. But like the theory like in a nutshell, the supply chain theory of inflation is essentially saying that along there are groups of businesses called supply chains who buy inputs from each other in order to produce products and sell them to either the next person in the chain or to outside consumers that the end user and over time, given stressful enough biophysical conditions that they all find themselves in even if they don't want to raise prices.

And broadly speaking, we know from empirical studies that most businesses most of the time are very biased towards not

raising prices. If the situation gets dire enough and they've run they've exhausted all of their non price based mechanisms for dealing with bottlenecks what are called bottlenecks in the supply chain, Like they just don't have enough of the inputs that they need in or to sell enough stuff at assert at their normal price in order to make enough revenue to socially reproduce themselves and their supply chain.

Eventually they will exhaust all options and there will be one person who's kind of like the progenitor price increaser. And because like every single and like, what is inflation, really, it's a general rise in prices. What are prices? Prices are things that people themselves inside of firms, it's their job to set and so any theory of inflation needs to start with a theory of price essentially. And like, so these managers whose job it is to set prices,

when they change prices, why did they do it? Well, we have answers going back many decades, almost a century of the surveys of economists who have gone out and actually conducted surveys asking under what conditions would you raise prices?

And at no time did anyone say, oh, I raise prices because I looked at monetary aggregates and I saw that there was too much money, so I raised prices that and so like that was kind of a starting point for me when I when I read those these surveys conducted by Gardner Means, who is an economists and doing this work in the twenties and thirties long. If I don't burrow, I got really excited because I'm like, oh,

of course, well, of course it's inflation. There's so much mysticism about like piles of money building up, and then it's like demand pull and cost push, and like what does this all mean? Right? Well, at the bottom of it, it's what are pricing managers doing when they make that fateful decision to be the first guy to raise prices,

because there is one. It has to start with someone, and it's usually, like I was saying, they've exhausted all of their other methods of dealing with this, such as rationing inputs or economizing like increasing their efficiency and their production, or diversifying their product lines and all this stuff in order to maintain customer goodwill throughout a period of biophysical

stress to the supply chain. And they're just going to raise prices because they have to get a certain amount of revenue in order to make it as a business. So that's essentially what the supply chain theory is is that when that happens, it propagates along supply chains first and then because nowadays our economy is so extremely integrated,

it's not just one supply line. It's an entire supply chain network nowadays, and it's global in scope, so even if it can't it's it's increasingly less constrained to just like one industry or even one country these days.

really profound. I think the first person to articulate that I'm aware of was John K. Galbraith in an essay that he wrote about that, but in like the fifties. But like, that's honestly not the way that we usually think of it, right, Like, usually we think that inflation is when money, the value of money goes down value money buys you less than it usually does. And that is not just because that's how we experience it in

our pocketbooks. Everything else is just scott more expensive. It also has to do with the kind of history of theories of inflation, because back in the day, the first and og theory of inflation, which people still some of them believe in, is the quantity theory of money, and it basically envisions like the entire economic universe as a bunch of like atomized individual agents. And by the way, there's no like distinction between companies and how households or anything like that here.

When things are more abundant, they're less valuable. And when we want them more they're more valuable, we want them less, they're less valuable. So that's kind of like like the very basic universe that they're kind of like operating in. And money was just seen to be one one good being traded like any other. It just so happens to be the one that we trade in exchange for everything else.

So rather than doing barter like like of everything, you know, many chickens for this amount of haircut, you know, like instead, it's like, you know, we choose one thing to be exchangeable for everything else, but it still has a value, which is basically determined, according to this theory, by how much of it there is. So if you increase the money supply, money gets less valuable, which is why you know,

everything becomes more expensive, prices go up. Whereas if the money supply shrinks, you know, then the value of money is higher relative to the goods that it buys, so therefore prices will go down. This was the theory that was developed in like the sixteen and seventeen hundreds to try to explain a massive global inflation that happened then in the so called price revolution of the seventeenth century.

And frankly everyone by the twentieth century knows that there's huge issues with this, so they start trying to evolve away from it, away from the quantity theory of money, because it has no real empure goal basis. I mean, some people tried to kind of like, you know, juke the stats to make it look like there was but like, really, our best estimates of the money supply have no real good correspondence to prices in the economy. It's not it doesn't really work that way.

too technical to get into. Steve Essay has like the full version of it, but basically they started evolving away from a theory where the absolute amount of money in the economy is what matters most, and towards theories where, for example, it's the amount of money relative to the

goods that can be bought by it. So if you have a bunch of people spending money to buy stuff, but there's not enough stuff to meet that demand, then that will basically mean that there's like scarcity and shortages and things like that, and that will cost prices to

go up. Although why they do, like the underlying microeconomics of why prices go up when they're shortages and stuff, this theory doesn't really address because it's a macro theory and it'll kind of like fall back on supply and demand stuff or various kind of weird hydraulic metaphors about like well, god, yeah, yeah, you know, it's really like like, you know, different people will have different versions of this that have totally different explanations of why it's happening, but

they'll generally say, if you look at the economy as a whole, if the stuff that's being made is less than the orders being put in for it, then that costs inflation because you're just not producing enough stuff. And they call that demand pull because the poll of basically it's like demand pulling, you know, for stuff that isn't being produced, so it's like okay, well that that causes

price rises. There was a parallel development where they're trying to get away from the QTM another way, where some people were like, well, what's the most important single cost for businesses across the economy And they say labor obviously, right, like everyone needs to pay somebody to do wages to keep the business going. So they just said, okay, well, if the cost of labor goes up across the economy,

then that will cause prices to go up. So that's called cost push, which now theoretically this could be true of any cost. And this is kind of like where you know Steve's theory comes in is because it actually like starts talking realistically about what the cost of businesses are.

But originally this was again a macro theory, so they picked the one cost that's common to all the things in the economy and they said that basically, inflation is the cost of workers agitating for higher pages, which leads wages to go up, which causes cost push inflation. The cost go up, so that pushes puts pressure down the supply chain because it's a it's a cost for everybody downstream of it, so then it causes it to the prices to go up. Now, the problem with these theories

is that like they're very like rigid. It's like it has one cause and it's also like, you know, and it's this one thing and it has to operate across the entire economy, right, But that's not actually how our economy is put together. Because our economy is not this general equilibrium produced by the trading of individual agents who are buying cheap and selling deer to each other. That whole universe doesn't really exist. The universe that we actually

live in is one where businesses are not isolated. They're interdependent. Right Like the the you know, the people who collect sands, you know, from the earth and other minerals, feed into the factories that turn it into glass, which feeds into the construction industry that puts those glass well actually, no,

sorry I missed a step there. You know, it feeds into the factories that turn that glass into windows, which then feeds into the construction industry, which puts them into buildings that then feeds into like real estate conglomerates that rent it, which then feeds into businesses and households that live there. Right Like, that's the entire supply chain, and all those businesses depend upon each other because they're each other's customers. So how much glass do they make in

the in the glass factory. It depends on how much how many windows the window factories that are all their customers order. That's what determines how much they're going to make. You know, this whole picture of the world as supply chains is common sense to anybody who actually like works a job, especially if they're like in a management position where they have to maybe be dealing with some of the supplier relations stuff or customer relations stuff. Economists just

don't talk about it. It's not really in their models because their models are developed from the ground up from this kind of like everybody's just trading as individuals perspective. And that's a great deal of the reason why Steve's theory is so powerful. Now, a lot of this supply chain picture that I'm painting, besides coming from the real world, it also came from a particular heterodox economist that I wrote a very long profile of, called Frederick S. Lee.

which is coming up. But in addition to that, he was also a great economic theorist, and part of what he did is that he put together the bits and pieces of this alternative picture of the economy, where, for example, prices are not this thing that allocates resources automatically through supply and demand, and their price changes are telling us what to how much to produce and how much to consume,

which is the kind of like mainstream neoclassical picture. But rather prices are a markup that businesses like set themselves. They're not receiving it from the market. They set a price markup over their total costs of production in order to get the money that they need to keep the lights on and stay in business. This all sounds very trivial, I know, but believe it or not, in economics, this

is like a revolutionary idea. So well then it's like, okay, well, if that's the way that an individual company is, how are the companies linked together? He basically comes to he doesn't call it this, but to a supply chain view of the economy, especially in his last textbook, which tries to create a model of the economy as a whole, and he says that the entire economy is basically just

a circuit of supply chains. It's all the businesses sort of linked up together, forming a closed circuit that loops back on itself. And that is the economy that we use to produce the goods and services that just keep society going day to day, week to week, year to year. So he Lee basically had all of that and that

was the main ingredient that we used. But it was Steve who then took that framework and used it to create a new theory of inflation, because if you have a world of the supply chains, then it becomes very obvious that if prices are going to rise all across the economy, it's going to be because people's cost go up so then the question becomes why how do people's costs go up? And the answer is almost always what

Steve called his progenitor price increase. This this first guy who chooses to raise his prices if and only if that person is even only if that person is in the uh you know, in a position in the supply chamber,

a bunch of people are downstream of them. And that tends to happen when, for example, an input that goes into the entire economy, like energy, suddenly goes up in price or becomes scarce, or it happens when a natural disaster causes disruptions in a couple of businesses that everybody else depends upon, or when there's an adverse shift in the balance of payments, you know, the the Let's say that the peso you know starts becoming you know, versus

the dollar. You know, the dollar becomes much more expensive, So imports become much more expensive. So any business that depends upon imports, you know, will suddenly will suddenly have their costs go up. These are the kinds of events that are like an external shock that leads to a rise in prices, and key nodes in the supply chain that because so many people are connected to them as customers, their costs become more expensive, and that's these costs increase

travel across particular supply chain. So you have to actually know how all the businesses are linked together so that you can identify what the origin of the stress was and see which particular supply chain is traveling down. It's not this like this thing that has to do with a single factor across the whole economy or this or much less the amount of money that's being printed. The amount of money is almost like irrelevant in this situation basically.

I mean, it maybe has relevance inasmuch as, like you know, if people have the amount of money in their pockets that they have, usually they might start purchasing more things than can be produced at this moment. But that's usually

like like usually it balances out normal situations. The only reason why that would be true is because there was some kind of disruption upstream, so that what's normally produced isn't being produced, And so you always have to look at the particular supply chains and the kinds of stress that they might have. Did I did I communicate that roughly?

push guys. They I think they have a tendency to focus on like macrodynamic forces at work in the lens of cost push, like partly because it is like it really it relies on high profile fights between labor unions and companies that the audience already kind of understands, and it makes a lot of sense that you would go to union fights in particular since they're like one of the big items that they typically fight over is cost

of living adjustments built into their wage increases. And so that's like an obvious like, Okay, if there is ever a time in which macrodemic forces would convene in to specifically to raise inflation, it would probably be fought over like the cola adjustments, cost living adjustments, and like the

that leaves so much of the story untold. Focusing on cola adjustments in these union fights leaves so much of the story untold because it's it's putting like, what's really this incredibly interdependent, micro based phenomenon onto the backs of like one union against one company fighting over one contract, and the way they make it work in like a lot a lot of the modern interpretations of cost push in this macrodynamic sense, the way they square, the way

they square how it gets from that fight to become a generalized inflationary episode, which is what people want to know about, Like they don't want to know about one well, they want to know about politically about a union fight, but in terms of the economics, they want to know

about the inflationary episode. The way they square that is that there's typically like in what they call an information diffusional component to this, it's where and that's a fancy way of saying people learn about the outcome of the fight and then replicate.

just not enough people, Like it can't it literally cannot be true that it is purely like a union cost testment thing because they're just not enough people.

like you know, social democratic ones, you know. But the thing is that, like it sounds really fancy to be talking about like the district what was it, the informational informational communication coefficient or whatever like that sounds that sounds incredibly sophisticated, right, but like, actually what it is is that it's this kind of like Nutsoe story about how the reason why price rises happen across the economy is because people are picking union fights when like empirically and

labor economists often do this, like you know, the ones who work for unions and stuff. It's like it is almost always the case that wages lagh cost of living, you know, like significantly, so cost of living goes up, and that that's why people at some point, usually years later, will try to, if they're organized, agitate for for for higher wages to catch up with costs of living. So like the causality of it of cost push, you know, probably is not labor action. Like that's a sort of

macro brain superstition. But funnily enough, this is kind of like like the devil is in the details. Because cost push as a general framework ought to probably be the basis for any reasonable theory of inflation, because the idea that it's costs going up, that then whatever prices now stream of those costs also go up, that is probably true.

It's just that you have to look at particular supply chains and their costs and not just like their labor costs, but all the costs that they have and what cost in particular went up that affects those particular supply chains. Like that's but that's a different story, and it's a story that looks more like Steve's and also a story that looks more like what's been going on in the world since twenty two.

much of a story, I'm told, Yeah.

you would think would be a pretty like not that controversial thing. But then economists can't tell the difference between a theory in which you can have multiple different things that are working on a supply chain and a theory where you can have like a thing.

this like macrodynamic cost push story eventually of like well, either like but you can you can tell that they are kind of hedging because there will be there's like a bifurcation of interpretations of it, like one is the like it really is, just you can tell it's not that strong of a theory because there are two like diametrically opposed interpretations saying that like, oh, you'res this corporate price gouging or it's workers uh causing inflation themselves, which

like if like James was saying, there's a lag typically associated that workers are just trying to catch up with the prices that were being raised by firms in order to keep up with inflation they generate.

it was March of twenty twenty two. The that's right, but we'd been working on the magazine all through like twenty twenty and twenty twenty one and twenty And the thing is that Steve's Peace was kind of like taking shape, and you know, we as editors but then also as people who are like helping with the research and talking things out internally and talking with other people outside the collective, we're all kind of like sort of imbibing it and

thinking about it. When COVID hit right and one of the things that was rather magical, And there is written evidence of this, funnily enough, not as an article because the magazine didn't exist yet, but as a Twitter thread that I made actually on March third of twenty twenty one. And the reason I'm being so specific about dates is because of what happened where we and I was just summarizing basically conversations that we had been having inside the

magazine internally. You know, that was when some of the news stories were starting to come out about shortages that were being caused by COVID. So most famously the chips shortage were semiconductors, which take like a year to make, like from the moment that the order is put in to the moment when the thing is actually shipped, it's like a year. And if that process is disrupted, you

have to start from the beginning. So the shutdowns in China shut down semiconductor production, and actually I say China, but it was really China and Taiwan because both of those places have major chips companies, and that basically screwed up ships production for like as long as the shutdown happened, and then after that at a lag of like a year at least, and then that in turn caused a

bunch of other shortages. The fact that we were all inside meant that like there was a huge problem in food, both in agriculture itself and in food processing factories, you know, where the raw products that we take out of the earth are turned into the packaged you know, bits and bobs that you know, go to restaurants or to you know, food product factories and things like that, Like you couldn't get people to work there, or if they did, you know,

and you tried to like pay them measure or whatever, they would get sick so they would stop production. So there was a labor shortage in agriculture as well. Then there was a container shortage right in in shipping, where we weren't producing enough containers to actually ship stuff around the world. And if you can't do that, well, everything

is made. Everything that somebody needs to make something is often now made in another kind of or at least another part of a country, you know, that's connected by trucks. So if there's no containers, how do you get stuff from one place to the other? And the answers that you don't So they were just piling up like mountains in the in the docks of various countries, including here on the West Coast and the East coast. So all

of these shortages caused by the pandemic. Basically we're hitting key sectors of the economy, right that everybody depends upon. So transportation, everybody needs it, you know, semiconductors, a whole bunch of manufacturing needs it. So that's that's why cars suddenly got super expensive, is because the chips in the machines that make the cars got more expensive and scarce, and not just expensive, it's scarce, like you just couldn't get them. And then food everybody depends on, and you know,

like everybody buys groceries. Restaurants need it, so restaurant prices went up. So you can see how specific sectors having these problems traveled down specific supply chains to produce the cost increases that we all start and seeing. But here's the thing. All that stuff was happening from twenty twenty on. I did this thread on March third of twenty twenty one. But the thing is that at that point there was

not yet inflation. We predicted that there was going to be inflation, and there was a lot of people, like including left wingers, including heterodox economists, who got really angry

about this because for them, inflation fear mongering. You know, this was in the context of the government printing out all the stimmy checks, right, so inflation fear mongering for them is kind of like something that a right winger would do, you know, by saying the government's printing too much money, so there's going to be inflation, you know, quantity theory of money stuff, Milton Friedman stuff, the stuff that they had experienced in the turn to neoliberalism from

the seventies to the eighties. Right. I understand that fear. But the thing is, this wasn't fear mongering. These shortages for very clear reasons that were clear if you had the supply chain theory of inflation framework, which unfortunately we did because we hadn't published it yet. Like you know, it was very clear that these shortages were going to cause cost increases in very well linked together, you know, nodes within supply chains that we're going to travel down

those supply chains and basically be economy wide. So I said so because I had a hunch that it was going to be true, and that it would be a big deal if it was true, for you know, validating these discussions that we were having internally. So I said, some predictions. One, there's going to be inflation in the next year or two, potentially lots. Two it will be caused by cost increases due to the chips shortage and COVID induced bottlenecks, and agriculture and manufacturing. Three, they'll try

to blame the stimmy checks and attempt to implement austerity. Now, at the time of that first tweet, inflation was at two point six percent, which is like within normal bounds, although slightly higher than have been before. By the end of that year, even actually, I think just a few months later, it was at four point seven percent, and in twenty twenty two it would peak at eight point seventy three percent, which was like the most inflation that

we've seen since the Crisis of the seventies fifty years ago. Like, so we you know, the first success that we had as the magazine, before we even came out as a magazine, is that we successfully predicted the biggest inflationary crisis since the Crisis of the seventies, and not only predicted it,

but predicted its specific causes. Because as the thread kind of was continually updated over over the course of that next year, like you know, people started looking digging in and actually, like a lot of journalism was uncovering that precisely those bottlenecks were leading to cost increases, you know, the and there were other ones that were kind of added to it. So when the Ukraine War started in

twenty twenty two. That increased global inflation because Ukraine is the world's single biggest and by a lot, supplier of wheat, which is a key staple in diets across the planet.

So the shortages that were created by the Ukraine War, by Russia's blockades and also just by bombing and you know, the war disrupting the labor market over there and all these other kinds of things that meant that there was less wheat being exported, which created bottlenecks in those supply chains, which led to the global increase in the price of wheat, which led to the global increase anything that uses wheat, bread,

you know, and other food products. So beer, actually, well does I'm not wrong about that?

push thing created by these shortages. But like demand pull is, the real form of inflation is when there's like too much money in people's pockets. And that's not what's happening clearly, so we'll be fine. You just have to wait, right, which is not Actually the attitude that you have to take. Inflation is inflation and like you know, the the if the causes or these disruptions and supply chains. You actually,

i mean, this is like the really edgy take. You actually have to spend more money in order to unplug these bottlenecks. You know, It's far from inflation being a product of there being too much money in the economy. You might actually need to do government spending too, for example, hire people you know, and and take extra steps for precaution for their safety to unplug bottlenecks created by labor shortages.

Or you might have to like you know, rapidly invest you know, on a large scale, almost as if you're in a war are in order to create a new industry to like, you know, to to replace something like containers that that that you would normally import, you know, or something like that so like like these are these are the kinds of actions that a more muscular approach

to the inflation would have would have been. But instead they basically just waited for the supply chains to fix themselves, even when multinational corporations and their boards of directors were begging the government to actually intervene more. Uh, which is insane with economic planning. You know, you would never expect to hear something like that, but it was in the things like the pages of the Financial.

But one of the things that happens in this sort of period is this this German economist named Isabella Weber who wrote a like fine like mostly reasonable book about like the economists behind the like the reform period in the eighties and China like started pushing well, actually, this is the thing where I'm sort of unclear at the timeline. I started pushing the greedflation thing, although she had a

different name for it. Yeah, I wasn't really talking about that sort of whole thing, because that was really interesting, sort of like turn in the whole inflationary discourse inflation.

because like, supply chings are so much more nimble now than they were in like the seventies and eighties, and like liquidity sources are so much more plentiful, they have so many Like I'm probably giving them too much credit. Actually, I think they literally just were like.

hasn't happened. Yeah, and like when it obviously in late twenty twenty two to to through the middle of twenty twenty three, when there's obvious evidence that that wasn't the case, then they like really didn't, like they went like hard to starboard and said, like, Okay, the inflation that we see, it's because of corporate greed and it just reduces to that now. Yeah, and so it's like a purely opportunistic

thing between of like the largest corporations. And then you know, maybe later people saw that and did monkey see monkey do, but it's it's because of.

and as an example of the good stuff. For example, she actually uh one of her one of the underrated aspects of a paper that kind of pushes what is popularly known as the greenflation thing. The better part of that paper is that it actually creates a map of the current to today's supply chains in the US, like you know, and and identifies the keynodes you know. And she's a method called input output input output tables, which Steve and I have written about and we're gonna write

about it more on the magazine. This is like the main tool that you can use to do real economic planning.

the nodes. If prices go up here, everything downstream of them will go up, and those the and and that basically hits most sectors of the economy, like and knowing what those nodes are is like super important because then you can figure out how to protect them, you know, like that's that's actually like one of the key things that you know, one wishes that that that that governments were doing, it would be one of the few useful things that they could do in a situation like this, right,

But unfortunately there's another aspect of her work which is more and this also comes from heterodox theory, but it's just not good theory in my opinion. And it's this whole deal with like, okay, inflation, with prices going up. So why are the prices going up? Well, a lot of them are going up because corporate management sees that everybody's talking about inflation. Now, maybe their costs. They're not in one of these sectors where upstream their suppliers are

raising prices. They're actually getting the same prices for their ingredients as always. But because everybody's talking about inflation, they're expecting prices to go up, right, so why not just raise prices, you know, like like the and so like. That basically ended up that basically ended up being a theory of like, well, a lot of the price rises that going up is because of corporate greed, and corporations

are always greedy. But a situation where people are talking about inflation means that they can that they can basically do a price get away with a price rise that they wouldn't be able to get away with normally. Now, there might be situations like this. I'm not even denying

that that's the case. Like there are clearly, you know, based on a couple of journalistic exposees some companies whose costs have not really gone up, but they're raising the prices opportunistically so that they can do higher payoffs for

the shareholders and upper management. However, as a primary explanation for why the inflation happened, as an argument for the main cause of the inflation, and therefore for what the main solution should be, which is slapping on price controls and saying no, you can't do this, I don't think that that's tenable because there are clearly biophysical stressors in at least the places that are experiencing them, that are traveling down supply where if you slap price controls down,

that's not going to get you more chips that at least not by itself, and in itself, price control should be part of the picture, but that's not, especially in situations where there is corporate greed sort of driven price rises.

But that's just not an explanation for everything. And some of Weber's followers, not not necessarily her, but some of the people who are like promoting this perspective are doing so again partly in order to avoid conversation, in my opinion, about these kinds of biophysical bottlenecks and how they might be they might be undone, and it's and it's a

huge issue. One thing to kind of like conclude is that like in you know, this, this whole thing that we've been saying about the supply chain as disruptions to the supply chain as the cause of a progenitor and price increased by people in the affected sectors, which in turn, through their connections to a bunch of customers, leads to price rises across at least second of the economy. That whole story allowed us to kind of see all this.

A lot of the inflation that's happened in the world since twenty twenty, we saw it coming, and we saw specific causes coming. And now no less a capitalist institution than the imf right has kind of been forced reluctantly, I would say, in some ways to admit that, as Christine Legard said recently, you know, energy played a significant role, then food kicked in, and energy is now fading. You know.

Now they still want to make it about wages, right, I mean, that's the thing that ends up happening in a crisis like this, is that they do want to blame wage increases. But it is quite clear that even the authorities have needed to kind of admit that these specific, measurable biophysical crises have been the source, the main source

of the inflation. And then a great deal of the of the battle has been over who's going to kind of like who who's going to have to narrow their ambitions for their goals as a result of it, capital or labor. And this is where I think VAPOR is on firmer ground, not as an explanation for the inflation. But afterwards, and then after inflation is already kicked in, who ends up having to quote unquote foot the bill, right is there's now like less money coming in in

these companies. So do you give it to workers so that they can, you know, since their money buys them less, you know, compared to rising costs of living, you give them a little bit more so that they can like kind of like balance it out. Or do you give

it to management? You know, Now, obviously if it's management making the decision about what to do with the company surplus, because we live in a capitalist economy, that's a dictatorship with the big owners, guess what they're gonna say, you know, and now and now you have a therefore a class struggle, the distributional conflict that some of the kind of traditional cost push theories always talk about between capital and labor over what to do with these rising markups in firms. Now,

they would say that's why the inflation happened. I think I would say, and I think Steve would be in agreement with this, that it's what happens after inflation, an inflationary crisis kicks in, and then there's a battle between capital and labor over who gets screwed as a result. I think that that's kind of the way that we should think about a lot of the labor struggles that have taken place since COVID.

they are administering at the same time. So there's a mixture, i would say, bias towards the former group, those who have to do what they have to do in order to socially provision themselves. But there's a mixture of them, And so you have to look at like that, who are the price leaders and are they opportunistically raising prices

and are people copying that? Yes? Sometimes, but as far as like the progenitor price increase that we keep talking about, you know, in our pieces like that, very often like and this is born out in the surveys, like when they're asked like for their reasoning as to why they

raise prices. It was typically like for the for reasons like that are quote unquote socially acceptable at least to say, And for the most part, they were just defending their margins, like they they were at risk of going under right, Yeah, and so you have to you have to weigh there's a dynamic, there's an interplay between those that group and then the opportunistic group, and so it really doesn't like reduce neatly into the greed inflation sort of like vestardization

of vapors. Otherwise, really excellent piece that goes through some like interesting and out but analysis.

we're not. We're trying to understand the actual causes for things, and we think that actually help you because, for example, if a company, let's say that you're in a company that is part of this wave of unionizations where you know, let's say you're a Starbucks worker and people want to

start up a Starbucks union. Maybe one of the ways that management is trying to kind of like screw over your union is to tell people who are on the fence, well, like, the reason why there's so much inflation is because of these unions, like we we have to all stick together, and you know, the company's got your best interests at heart, so you like, don't join this union that's going to be pushing for for wages that are ultimately just going

to get eaten up by inflation. Like like, let let let management figure out what'll what's best, because otherwise you'll just end up screwing up the whole economy. And which is not unheard of. You know, it might be something they'll fall back on the negotiations and their anti union propaganda if you know that the actual cause of the inflation has to do with disrupted supply chains and that really the question is who's going to be screwed over and who's not. Within the company, you can go back

and say, hey, wages are always chasing. Cost of living increases, the cost of living increases happened before the big unionization wave kicked off, and we can tell that it's specific causes in logistics, and its specific causes in chips, and specific causes in agriculture that are causing the price of this, that and the other thing. You can even map out your company's supply chain and maybe point out certain cost increases that caused it, and you can say, okay, so

we're going to have to raise our prices. But where's that money going to go? Not all of us should go to management. Some of this should go to us. So this is what a materialist understanding of how the actual causes of the thing worked out can help you in organizing your workplace and in pushing back against the kinds of things that your boss might try to tell you. So that's what I would say to somebody who's like, oh, well,

you're just defending corporations. No, I'm absolutely not. But I don't think that we can actually have power, we can actually kind of like take direct actions that really matter because they're actually going to make life better for us and our friends and our loved ones. Like, I don't think that we can actually do that unless we understand how the world works, and sometimes the world works in a way that doesn't necessarily look like we would most

expect it to or most wish it to. But nevertheless, you have to kind of see how it works so that you can then figure out what's the best intervention that I can make into it, given where I'm at, the institutions that I work through, the coalitions that I can put together, and that kind of thing.

bottle like supply chain breakdowns is like you know, they'd get the supply chain bottle now because they just didn't have way through them, and like people fucking that up, Like there was a like there is a decent argument that like that's part of what caused the Great Leap Forward was people not fucking understanding that, like not quite understanding how to deal with their supply chain stuff and seeing this kind of like inflation like issue kicking in

and being like fuck it were to do something that's completely nuts, and you know, that went like about as badly as like any attempt anyone has ever tried to do,

like to fix any problem has ever gone. And the larger the number of people who actually understand how this stuff works, even in sort of like you know, even even on a kind of like not enormously grandeur level, the more likely you are to have someone who's in and it has the ability to make a decision where this stuff matters and you know it and like yeah, you could be like, oh well, like the odds that we're ever gonna be in a place for this matters

is like direct, you're gonna be the one making the decisons pretty low.

I don't know how. It's hard to actually gauge the influence of discourse on policy makers, especially when they're as opaque as like the chairman of the Federal Reserve, but it is worth noting that we didn't get a like Vulgar style fifteen percent like interest rate increase, And I think there's a non zero argument the fact that there were other alternative explanations to inflation like around and that enough people were pushing them, like is a reason why

we didn't get one of these, like a Vulcar style thing, which would have pushed employment to like unemployment to like

twenty five percent, destroy the entire global economy. And that, you know, like we could count that as a fucking w because as as bad as things are right now, like the world, the world where Jerome Powell pulls the trigger and hits the like hey, I'm now a monitorist, like I'm gonna I'm gonna decrease the money supply button and Jack's the interest wrapped like a dew percent, Like that world is so much worse than this one. It is it is difficult to imagine.

essays that we're talking about. But but you know, like at the end of the day, I think that what's important, what's most important about what we've discussed, is this for me, like having this model which we developed, you know obviously, like steve've developed it out of as an expansion of the logic of Fred Lee's work. And fred Lee was

not actually particularly original. He just synthesized a whole bunch of stuff that existed previously, like these pricing studies by Gardner Means in the thirties and pricing studies over the next hundred years from all sorts of different people, you know, into his post Kanteene price theory and stuff like that,

the cost plus markup stuff. But like like having a theory that's developed by looking at the world and building your abstractions up out of things that you can see, particularly in a field like economics that's so complex that you have to kind of start with like observable relations between actual institutions that exist in the world that empowered us, you know, that allowed us who really were just like four weirdos started a magazine right like four anarchistish weirdos, But.

don't have that concrete material picture. The question of how we're going to get fossil fuels out of agricultural production without causing famines, right, the question of what do you do now that we have the Internet, Like how do you govern that?

Right to make it a better place. And obviously, like you know, some of this sounds like stuff that the government should do, but a lot of this is actually stuff that social movements need. If you think the rent is too damn high in your city, and you organize a tenancy union that has real political muscle and you actually like have the ability to do stoppages or other

actions that can really like bully the local city government. Okay, but what do you ask for, what do you demand or what do you try to put into place yourself using your own money? Like, what do you do if the rent is too damn high? How do you get it lower? And it's like, oh, well, there shouldn't be rent, we should abolish it, Okay, how do you do that?

You know, you need models of the world, and that's what we've been trying to kind of build in the magazine more than anything else, especially in our ECON coverage. So there's a lot more that happened after this. We'll probably have a part two, but I just to wrap

up the story up to then. So we did launch the magazine, we did put out Steve's essay, but then a really remarkable thing happened, which is that we started getting, like all magazines do, people who came in into the slush pile who were inspired by Steve's work, and we're like, this makes the most sense of anything that I've heard, and I want to build on it too. So we started publishing other essays that we're kind of building on the research program that Steve kind of got us started on.

And although our sort of influence was difficult to calculate in terms of, like, you know, how much we influenced the discussion, you know, in these early stages before the magazine was even up and running. Afterwards, after we kind of publish the people that I'm talking about, some of those pieces have actually definitely influenced the conversation in really exciting ways, and I think that we can talk about some of that next time.

our writers. And we try to pay writers above market rate for magazines of our size, and you know, to do that is very difficult, you know, we need we need to So if you want to support worker controlled media production that's financially independent. We don't have any big foundations, you know, like telling us what to write or things

like that. It's all like basically small donations and subscriptions, like you know, if you want to keep that kind of media alive and keep this kind of economic analysis alive along with our cultural philosophy, philosophical, historical, anthropological, literary stuff. Then then please consider it because we could really use the support.

the site in a pretty successful action. The police repression came down hard, but the militancy of the force defenders left a pretty impressionable mark. Later that month, to Cab County closed and barricaded in Trenchment Creek Park citing public safety concerns, and allegedly found booby traps police did an exhaustive sweep of the forest and established a relatively firm

control of the territory. After a year and a half of there being a nearly continuous presence in the Mulani by forest defenders, now the police began a forest occupation

of their own. During the month that followed, the Atlanta Police Foundation, or the APF, rushed to clear cut around ninety acres of the Mulani Forest, seemingly in a ploy to show investors and the city that they are committed to the project and to crush the spirits of those who spent years opposing the facility and defending the forest. People then set their sights on the Atlanta's City Council, who in early June was to vote on whether or

not to provide taxpayer funding for the APF's project. Over twenty three hours of public comment across multiple days, almost universally against copp City, culminated at the June fifth City Council meeting, which lasted into the early hours of the next morning. Despite the record breaking turnout opposing the facility, in the early morning of Tuesday, June sixth, the Atlanta City Council voted eleven to four in favor of the sixty seven million dollar funding package to build cop City.

The next day, a group of community organizers announced a referendum campaign to collect tens of thousands of petition signatures from Atlanta voters to put the cop City land lease on the upcoming ballot. City council approving public funds for cop City was certainly disappointing, but not quite unexpected, because another Week of action to stop cop City was already planned for later that same month. This is it could

happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. In this three part series, I'll be talking about what's been happening in Atlanta this summer to stop cop City. If you want to hear more about the background of this movement. In the month of May, we put out a five part series on the Week of Action from that spring, along with the few other previous Defend the Forest and Stop Cup City mini series published over the course of the last year

and a half. With much of the forest already destroyed and no easy access to Entrenchment Creek Park, this Week of Action in June was set to be very unlike any that had come before. The kickoff rally was to begin on Saturday, June twenty fourth, at Brownwood Park in East Atlanta. I made my way there and met up

with Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective. My first feeling walking in is like it felt very society of the spectacle in terms of like the ratio of cameras to participants was the most extreme that I've really ever ever seen for like, you know, a week of action, like there was there was an outside of like a press conference, yeah, and like it felt like there was so many just cameras looming around, and it's like there's so many people trying to make a similar from the

movements to sell back to other people at this point in time, and like there's just a very like that's just a very large, pervasive feeling, and that combined with the more kind of the more liberalization of certain of certain aspects, again compared to the last week of Action, which felt there was a strong militant continuent.

the forest. The weeks of action definitely have this ability to affect how the movement as a whole evolves in the subsequent months. On Saturday, there were worries that if things were simply going to continue to be like this kickoff rally, that wouldn't be a positive direction and would be a bad sign. It's just so I mean, it's hard not to convey this to the to the last Week of Action kickoff rally at Gresham, which just felt so different like that, there was like almost ten times

as many people. There was like a feeling of like motion. There was a feeling of like we can, we have we have to go do a thing, and we're gonna do it no matter what, Like we don't know it's gonna be on the other side of the tunnel, but we're going there to do it anyway.

There wasn't supposed to be a vigil for Tortighita in the park that evening, which was in terrupted by Atlanta Police officers who swept through the park issuing a quote unquote friendly reminder that the park closed at eleven pm.

All right, it's around eight thirty, about forty police officers just walked through Brownwood Park telling people that are gathered here that the park closes at eleven and everyone's basically anticipating that police are going to try to sweep the entirety of the park, including the sections where people are trying to camp out. Around eleven PM, the cops were walking south through the park as the crowd was walking

and chanting along the way as well. Cops left under the heels of like maybe seventy five to two hundred people who were chanting along the south side of Brownwood. They've been staging around Brownwood Park and Portland Avenue for the past hour or so. They had like twenty thirty cars,

it's around forty fifty officers. People decided they did not wish to stand their ground and fight off a possible police raid at Brownwood Park, so they spent the next few hours packing up all the supplies and equipment that they just spent all day setting up, and then evacuated from the area. Okay, it is eleven ten PM. It seems like the cops essentially just did what I'm referring

to as advanced bluffing. So they walk through it on eight thirty warning people hey, park closes at eleven, which very much, very much indicating that, hey, we're.

to leave or else get arrested. Standard stuff. At this point, there's about seven or eight police cruisers staged around the south side of the park, but they're not actually sweeping through because it's pretty clear that there's like no one actually in the park at this point. It's just very clearly like empty and quiet, So I don't even I

don't even think cops are going to sweep through. It's it's been already like ten to fifteen minutes, so we expected them to kind of sweep on the hour, but they just like don't need to because it's very clear that no one's in the park, so they just kind of like successfully bluffed themselves into getting everyone to leave.

I mean, if there were people still here in visible capacity, I'm sure police would sweep through, but there's really there's no one visible in the park from many of like the perimeters around, so they're not even gonna bother sweeping through. But yeah, it looks like this is the end of Brownwood Day one and the very kind of low key kickoff rally. Still, the week definitely is lacking a sense

of direction. There's been a cab swat doing perimeter sweeps around the Wailani Forest and the round Grressian Park where there's some future events planned. We will see how that plays out in these next few days. It certainly seems like police wanted to make some show of force early on in the week to stifle the week of action. The threat of array the very first tonight was indeed disruptive to the logistics for the week, but ultimately peopeople were able to band together to keep each other safe

and cared for. During this current general sense of directionlessness, there were a lot of questions on how the movement will change during this turning point. With little in the way of obvious answers or new paths of resistance, The following Sunday and Monday of the week continued to be mostly low key. People used those days to facilitate workshops and discussions to work through the shift the movement was

going through. At the end of the week, I sat down with Matt in East Atlanta Village to talk about the week as a whole and compare notes. Here's a bit of our conversation talking about the discussions that started happening during those first few days. This was a week

of discussions, like it was, it really was. There was a lot of meetings, There was a lot of discussions happening, people figuring out what do we do, Like if we actually want to stop cop City and it's going to get built in these next few months, like now.

last week. There was one on like what the state of the movement is now, especially with the referendum taking up more visibility, how are like radical is going to navigate this space and this movement with a lot of things in flux, and I think that that was definitely my first read. Even even on the Cookoff rally, I felt like there's a lot of people like not sure what to do, as very directionless. People were asking a lot of questions, and more questions were being asked all

throughout the week. There's a lot of discussions, a lot of meetings about like what do we do now, Like if construction is going to start in the next two months, like what is this movement going to do? Like that people can chant if you build it, we will burn it.

But chanting it and doing it two different things. And the movement is it's going to go through a period of evolution and then in these next few months, and with all of those questions being asked, I feel like the answer to those questions is going to be the actions people do take in these next few months. In the aftermath of the clear cutting, it felt like in some ways that the window of possibility for this movement

was closing as options seemed to be getting smaller. More people started pursuing the referendum as a potential means of stopping Copcity, but those in the more militant anarchist wing of the movement were left questioning, after two years of employing a diversity of tactics largely led by direct action, if it's the right and move to switch to an electoral strategy now when the situation is approaching its most dire but since it is happening whether they like it

or not, anarchists were wondering, what can people do so that the referendum doesn't completely dominate the narrative of the

movement or disincentivize other evolutions of the struggle. Now, obviously, a group of people pursuing a referendum does not prohibit other people from engaging in direct action, but there still were worries that the referendum could become a sort of release mechanism for the move both in terms of new people's involvement being pushed toward this more liberalized electoral strategy instead of radical action, or if the petition or even potential ballot vote fails, then that being used as an

indicator that most people in the city actually do want copcity. But through all this, what anarchists can do, and what they typically do, is to encourage radical autonomy and self determination, regardless of electoral strategies or outcomes, whether or not a petition gets sixty some thousand signatures does not affect a burning construction vehicle. Just as these sort of discussions were happening.

It's kind of fitting that on Monday, June twenty sixth, we saw the first communication in months claiming responsibility for equipment sabotage. After the last week of Action in March and subsequent police raids on the forest, increased security, the rapid clear cutting and big push for city council public comment followed by the start of the referendum. Throughout that series of events, there really hadn't been much in the way of nocturnal direct action sabotage happening in Atlanta or

across the country. In solidarity once a core component of this movement was seriously lacking in the months leading up to this summer, and then suddenly, after the June Week of Action's mostly uneventful start, a post went up on the sketchu web site scene stott no blogs dot org claiming that a group of anonymous individuals snuck into a subcontractor's machine storage lot and poured hydrochloric acid into the

oil tanks of three vehicles. The target was Brent Scarborough, company, a Georgia based subcontractor who was hired to clear cut the Wallani forest and was currently engaged in mass land grading on the site. I drove by the site on Monday and I saw like over twenty machines like actively working on the land.

quote unquote violent and nonviolent resistance. To briefly quote a few of the last sentences of the statement, quote, the cop City vote referendum campaign is grounded in the values of abolitionist organizing and racial and environmental justice. We also recognize our chosen tactic is a single intervention in a

wide rainbow of fighting state repression. We seek to use the Cop City referendum to leverage local power, educate and activate our communities, and build networks that can strengthen our city and future mobilizations. The referendum is one piece of a vibrant, into multifaceted movement, one that defies respectable categorization

as well as its state violence and repression. The Cop City Vote Referendum Coalition stands in solidarity and full support of the Stop Cop City Week of Action, the larger movement and abolitionist organizers and activists across this city.

An executive order from DECAB CEO Michael Thurmond closed the park late last March as the police geared up to fortify Bolauni and speed run all of the tree felling.

and then that was that was it. Not much from the cab, Like the cab only came out to make sure that they were blocking a pathway okay, And it was kind of hands off. I did get a parking ticket, that was my fault, you did. Yeah, I let my parking expire for twelve minutes. A legalist mascot at the ACPC. Wow. Uh and yeah, the minute I do something illegal, I get a traving ticket.

of looming over everyone's heads. There was a march planned from Gresham Park towards Bolani that was to take place on the evening of Wednesday, June twenty eighth. The police response to this action was prime to be the most intense out of the week. The path to Entrenchment Creek Park is a pretty closed in bike path with a tunnel going under an overpass where police have been staging to prevent people from entering the forest.

The day began with an unfortunately rocky start and the first arrest of the week outside Cadence Bank in Midtown. The protest was calling on the bank to cancel their twenty million dollar construction loan given to the Atlanta Police Foundation.

but much has changed on the ground since then. As people started to gather at Gresham Park on Wednesday evening, the numbers were quite small. As I progressed, around one hundred and fifty people eventually amassed, but it was still a small fraction of the number of people at the previous Gresham Park March and with a much greater police presence.

The exact plan for the night was heavily dependent on a lot of factors that it was impossible to explicitly know beforehand, like how many people would show up and what they would feel comfortable doing based on the police response.

what happens after that's kind of a big mystery. Definitely very different than the last time we were gathered in Gresham Park with a crowd of people.

All right, it's around seven to twenty pm, About one hundred and fifty people are leaving Gresham Park and they announce they're going to be going to hold a small vigil near one of one of the felled trees on the bike path. For a little while, the march was getting along fine, there was music and chanting, when suddenly police made an early appearance. Okay, so it's what seven seven fifty seven forty one on Wednesday, June twenty eighth. We are walking on the bike path and staged.

on the Wooden bridge. But the visible police caused the group to pause.

speech quote. We shouldn't come away from this feeling demoralized. We should feel clarity because we believe we set out to participate in a movement to obstruct the construction of a police militarization site, but that is not being allowed to happen. The people we're fighting against believe we are a domestic insurgency. They are treating us like an insurgency. The state is using militaristic language like denying anarchists operating space.

And so we're going to great lengths to be safe, to play it safe, and to go slow, and to proceed rationally and defend one another. But we're coming under constant attack everything we do. We're under attack unquote. Just earlier that morning, people were attacked by the state and arrested as they stood on the sidewalk outside of a bank. Those who work to bail activists out of jail are attacked. People doing on the ground jail support are physically attacked and face police intimidation.

to never go to a protest about this movement. Again, if our top priority is safety, everyone who's not currently facing charges should move away, should not go to events or actions. But if we have a higher priority than safety alone, we're gonna have to figure out what we're going to do to achieve that, which is going to require going on the offense when we're able and how

we're able. This movement has been very creative, and we're going to have to continue to be more and more creative, and we're going to have to continue to deploy all available means in order to have this kind of offensive, victorious, and strong movement that we all deserve when we fight, when we attack the enemy, when we have our offensive actions, we have to follow through with them. We have to go all the way with them. We have to be willing to believe in ourselves to believe that we can win.

And so I believe that we are going to win this movement, and I think you guys believe that we're going to win this movement. But that's going to require us to abandon the idea of looking good while losing. We can't look good losing. So are we going to look good losing or are we going to win?

still processing and are still comprehending. Another big aspect of the week, like this is this is the first week of action where people haven't gone in the gone in the Wilani, Like.

what would happen. And we saw what would happen, and now people can use that action as reference when making future plans and decisions about actions, because you can point back to this and demonstrate what the police response will be when people march to Wolani. Massive amounts of SWAT riot police waiting for you, SWAT mobile command centers, heavily armed police estanged on roads, overpasses, entrances, and all around the forest specifically waiting for people to try to cross

over or through the tunnel. So now people know what will happen if they try and do the same thing again. In some ways, it kind of needed to not just be theoretical speculation, but actually happen so that people can now truly allow themselves to evolve, so that you don't have this question in the back of your head, because now that question has been answered, you would be throwing yourself at a wall of swat and riot gear. And now everyone can let themselves evolve and start figuring out

what new things can be fostered and imagined. We'll hear more about those evolutions and conclude my coverage of the week of action.

the necessity for evolution. The main event on Thursday, June twenty ninth was a protest outside the Home Depot in the upscale retail district off of Ponce de Leon Avenue. Home Depot is one of the Atlanta Police Foundation's financial backers.

and we get a call that they are arresting Lorraine Fontana. So, Lorraine Fontana is a seventy six year old activist in Atlanta, and she's great like she she pops up everywhere. She's beloved by everyone. And so we get this call that Lorraine Fontana is being arrested, and uh, I bolts as far as my little legs will take me in. Then I have to stop and catch my breath, like right before I get there. But Lorraine and one other person were arrested in the parking lot right outside the home depot.

know Leshawan Thompson. Of course that the guy who was eaten alive in his in his cell by bugs because of neglect. That is Rice Street Jail. That's the Fulton County Jail. That's the Fulton County Jail. So we get worried that Lorraine is at Fulton County Jail and not ACDC, which is pretty striking. So everybody goes down to do a jail vigil and noise demo for context.

Fulton County Jail. He had been held in custody since October sixth, twenty nineteen, without bond on several unspecified felony and misdemeanor charges. According to the County Sheriff's Office, last month, a nineteen year old girl died in Fulton County custody after being arrested on a minor misdemeanor charge. This past year alone, six people have died in the Fulton County jail system. People in Atlanta have been doing jail vigils and noise demos for years and it's never really been

a problem. Cops might tell people to move off to the side if the crowd gets to a certain size,

but they have typically gone on without issue. But this time Fulton County deputies came out and declared that people are not allowed to protest outside the jail and ordered everyone to completely leave the parking and go all the way to the other side of this big hill off of Rice Street to jail property in order to continue protesting, which no one was really keen on doing, so this kind of game of chicken began.

are just going back and forth. This This deputy is like completely overmatched, doesn't really They didn't seem like Fulton County had a plan. You know, usually APD or the cat they have some sort of protest planned. Fulton was flying by the seat of their pants. And so all of our cars were down at the bottom with the hill.

They were back in the Rice Street parking lot. And this this becomes like an issue because some of the protesters cars are there, all of the media cars are there, like down at the bottom of this hill, and they're not letting anyone go down there. And this woman shows up to like put I think money on her son's commissary car and they don't let her. Now she's like

they're just shutting down jail rage aloud, Yeah exactly. So they finally first they're like we're gonna let you go down one by one, and everyone's like hell no, like we are not trusting you.

I can't see that. I'm moving my hands to Showcarrison, but it becomes this backward moving thing up up the hill. That's the bottom line.

So once again we got this little game of back and forth, except one side has guns and the power to arrest you.

place of a mattress. If they were lucky enough to be asleep, they were woken up at two am for breakfast and then again at four am for head counting.

Atlanta Village. Shortly before the Youth Rally, news started to circulate that early early that morning, just after midnight, several Atlanta police motorcycles and cop cars suffered mysterious damages, which possibly could have contributed to the more bolsterous energy among some of the radical attendees. People are driving by and honking in support. As about seventy five people, maybe one hundred are marked as about seventy five or one hundred people are marching next to Metropolitan Avenue.

this section of town. There's also three less cop cars in Atlanta than there usually is, so that that might have something to do with it.

Caesar's pizza. There was much more energy here compared to the kickoff rally, which happened in the very same park exactly a week beforehand, which felt sort of reversed from the previous week of action this past March, which is interesting because like last week of action, you know, the kickoff rally was like the biggest thing, was the biggest energy point, and the youth rally was kind of the more like muted clothes And this has kind of been inversed.

But like I said, I think this week started with a lot of questions being had, and it's ended with some of those questions being being answered and people figuring out that to answer some of some of those other questions, the answer will will will take the form of actions that happened in these next few months, and I feel like there's it's it's it's ended with a bit more directionality than what it began, which is interesting for a week of action. Yeah, it was needed, though it was

absolutely needed. Like at like the first rally just felt so weird that for the first kickoff rally that the first day, that the first few days felt just very very like very scattered. It was unclear how what was happening was related to stop in Cop City. And in some ways, this week of Action feels like the reverse of the last week of Action, where like the last week of Action, it started with a point of directionality, like we are going to retake Kolani and they did.

adequate level of planning. There was probably some demoralization from the ninety acres of trees cut down and with Entrenchment Creek Park closed and under police occupation. Launching options in Atlanta was more of a mystery for those coming from outside the city. More time away from the death of Tortigita is probably also a factor. People in Atlanta may have to reconcile that the movement may not have as much widespread national support and all the ground numbers as it did last March.

deadlines kept getting pushed back every single thing. Like the occupation was very good at doing what it attempted to do, and at a certain point that became no longer viable and things are now changing gears. Yeah, and you have to allow yourself that evolution, Like it has to the same way people started occupying the forest in October after the city council stuff in September twenty twenty one.

other avenues that things could that things could go. Even during the use March, Matt and I were wondering if this new spike in sabotage actions would break the spell and we'd see a return this type of action happening more frequently.

In late June to early July, a group of friends visited the home of copp City architect Anthony Kenny in Norcross, Georgia, while another group paid a visit to ambush Basil Walla, a member of the boarder trustees for the Atlanta Police Foundation. People painted messages around their homes and tires were slashed.

On the night of July second, Keith Johnson, the Eastern regional president for Brassfield and Gory, the contracting firm who broadly oversaw the destruction of the forest and who has decided to physically build cop City, also received a mysterious visit. Late in the night, an unknown number of people evaded security guards and spread blood red paint around his pool and left a message reading cop City will never be built.

Drop the contract and you can't hide. According to an online communicate, rotten fish and dirty motor oil were left hidden somewhere on the property. Part of the communicat addressed to Keith reads, quote, we know things haven't been feeling great in the office. You're losing money. Subcontractors are upset. There are fractures everywhere in the cop City project, and all of that weight and procarity is on your fragile shoulders. Each time you think of us or see the reminders

we left you, remember this is your own doing. You can make all of this stop by dropping the Copcity contract unquote. On July fourth, in lieu of fireworks, people claimed to have set two Brent Scarborough machines on fire in broad daylight due to the lack of security during daytime. Scarborough is the subcontractor who physically leveled the ninety sum acres of forest in the Wallani The same day, in Michigan, Chase Bank ATMs were sabotaged with glue and the bank

was vandalized with messages of resistance. Chase Bank's head of Regional Investment Banking serves on the board of the Atlanta Police found and on July eighth, a Bank of America in Berkeley was vandalized with stopcop city slogans and three

ATMs were smashed. During the start of this little wave of actions, the Mayor's office and APD were none too happy, so on July fifth, Mayor Andre Dickens and Atlanta Police Chief Darren Shecherbaum put on a press conference with the ATS, Georgia Bureau of Investigation and FBI to discuss the recent surge of direct actions.

hours of Saturday, July first. The targeted attack utilized extremely dangerous homemade incendiary devices to set a fire to the building and completely destroyed eight police motorcycle motorcycles. As shocking as this is, this was not an isolated incident of violence. This group actually took credit for these incidents and they stated it as I quote, we are vengeful wing nuts with nothing left to lose.

was to set those vehicles on fires. Well, there's a burgraff and fire off of the red fuse on the ground that has been used by this group in the past to set police vehicles on fire that was dropped when a citizen observed the criminal actions progress and actually interrupted the crimes that were occurring there. So we believe that the fire attack that was planned on Memorial Drive was thwarted by an observant citizen. A short time later, about an hour, we had the fire at our facility

on South Side Industrial. Our training center has housed there most recently, and then our special operations precinct is there. The intent was for all forty to be destroyed, and had all those forty vehicles caught on fire, that police facility would have been gravely damaged, if not destroyed in the fire. And we are thankful for a police officer that saw this unfolding and likely interrupted that plan for being able.

Tires were flattened on a contractors home, a home of an executive for Brassalgory was significantly vanalyzed in another jurisdiction, and then we had another location where graffiti was used to intimidate. And then yesterday morning, slightly after seven o'clock

in the morning. A location at four eighteen McDonough Boulevard belonging into Brent Scarborough's company, which is a key provider of work and this training centers was also targeted and attacked and equipment was set on fire at that location. These acts are of a small, determined group. These are small individuals from across the country that are using violence and fear and intimidation to stop a public safety training center.

And this group cannot hide behind the dark of night or the home address and feel that they are not going to be held accountable. I have standing at this podium with me today representings from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the ATF, and we are also partner with the Georgia

Bureau of Investigation. These agencies are working together to determine where federal laws violated this weekend and ensure that the full expertise of American law enforcement is present right here in Atlanta to stop this group, stop this group across the region, stop their ability to impact the public safety network of Atlanta, and hold them accountable.

has not happened. Yeah, I mean, the scariest indictments everyone's expecting are going to come in these next few years, after you give the FBI two three, four years to investigate, after you interview more people who've been arrested, see if anyone stitches, see if anyone turns state's witness. But so far, it's been safer to do nocturnal sabotage actions than it

has been to attend a public protest. And that is an interesting paradigm as well, is that no one's actually got arrested for lighting like cop cars and fire in the middle of the night. No one's been arrested for sabotaging equipment in the middle of the night. All of the arrests that are you know, are being tied to like violent crime, are from like daytime protests, which is

an interesting factor about this movement. Direct action in the most surveiled city in America can be tricky and even just managing cell phones and Internet search data is a huge factor, but as much real security there is out in the world, the amount of security theater is arguably a stronger aspect in getting people to not go out and do direct action. The implicit threat of the opticon is often enough to stifle people's potential action, but these

things are beatable. Guides for how to do it exist either at your local anarchist book fair or online as long as the computer is running tour browser and a reputable VPN.

go into that. There's a lot of ways to get got whether you're like buying supplies and you keep a receipt and people please find a receipt, They track back, they find security acount of you'll be purchasing things and then they're like, oh, this bottle is bought at this place because you have this receipt in your house and blah blah, bah blah blah. Like there's there's lots of

ways that that stuff happens. So like I'm not going to give a guide on how to do it right now, but like this anarchists have been.

do it to brag about it like that. That's just not how this works, which is why there's like kind of a much more like kind of insular culture around some anarchists, especially anarchists to identify as like illegalists or like the types of like like green nihilists or green anarchists.

That kind of pioneered the militancy of this movement, both slightly even slightly before the first city council vote and then definitely after the first city council vote where we saw a massive explosion no pun intended in the number of type of sabotages happening in the Wlani Forest. Yeah, which I think that drew a lot of anarchists do come to Atlanta because it was like, oh, they're doing a.

shit at night. Like you can you live in this like autonomous zone during the day, you're able, whether you're you have housing instability, whether you just want like an escape from like horrible police state living like where in whatever, wherever the city you're in, you can go live in the Wilane Forest. You can live in a tent, you can have friends, you can defend this force during the day, and then you can do crazy, crazy shit at night.

And that drew a lot of people to Atlanta, and now with the forest not being there, that that also changes that that changes the type of people who are come who are who want to come to the city because that that was a big draw for people and now that that's no longer an option, you can't really

sleep in the Wilani Forest as easily anymore. Yeah, that changes the types of people who want to come to Atlanta and who are gonna like do crazy shit because that's just how and further own safety they're not here.

since cut ties with cop City. This is something that APD Chief Darren Sheerbaum certainly seems worried about.

and cut ties with the Atlanta Police Foundation. The project manager for Atlas Technical Consultants engaged with protesters in the street and told them that Atlas had indeed already dropped out of the project due to mounting pressure.

to leave the project. In the next episode, we'll talk more about the referendum, the city's attempts to divide the movement and the growing pr battle over the fate of Cop City. See you on the other side, Welcome back to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis, and this is the last episode in my trilogy covering what's been happening this summer in Atlanta to stop Cop City. Last episode we covered the end of the Week of Action, the resurgence of nighttime sabotage, and at Las long Engineering

dropping out of the Cop City project. A relatively new, big aspect of the movement that I've really only mentioned peripherally is the Cop City vote referendum. The goal of the referendum is to let the people of Atlanta vote on whether to repeal an ordinance authorizing the land lease of three hundred and eighty one acres of forest into Cab County that was given to the Atlanta Police Foundation in twenty twenty one to use the land for the

construction of Cop City. In order to get the referendum on an upcoming ballot, the petition had to gather sixty thousand signatures in sixty days. Every signature must be from an Atlanta resident who was registered to vote in twenty twenty one, and initially those who gathered signatures had to also be Atlanta residents. Sixty thousand signatures in sixty days was a lofty goal, but volunteers around the city were being increasingly mobilized during and after the week of action.

For the first few weeks of the referendum, the city stayed mostly quiet, but then on the July fifth APD press conference, Mayor Andre Dickens addressed the referendum.

on what we know about the citizens of Atlanta. They are a supportive of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. We know that this is going to be unsuccessful if it's done honestly, and so we're making sure that we continue to monitor the process.

Good Trouble civil and human rights work. It's our multi isssue platform and we look at it as the justice department for hip hop, so we do it. We work on everything from police reform to education and healthcare, and then our Justice Paid in Full, which is our economic justice platform, So how do we achieve economic justice. We actually started our activation like on the groundwork in LA last week during bet weekend, so we did a similar

event in LA. We're doing this one here and we're planning to be here in Atlanta and through the referendum and through the election.

LA for the Hollywood Climate Summit. I spoke on the panel with Jane Fonda, so there was a lot of people from Hollywood that came and said, oh my god, that's what's happening in in Georgia. We have to be if we cannot sign for on the referendum, but we w we stand with you all because what we are also educating people at is that if Cop City is built, they already having contracts with police nationally to come here. This would be the largest farm police training facility in

the United States. I went to Universal Studios, Hollywood, Universal Studios. Roller Coaster's huge, just nice. It's four hundred acres. That's fifty acres less will be Cop City then, you know, and I'm like, that's an amusement park of nothing but real, real gunfire, real bombs, real real everything. It's not gonna be fake. It's not amusement park in that way, but this is their call of duty.

because the mayor. I want to meet the mayor's publicists because the way that this whole thing has been spinned on his side that no, it would be great for the EMT and the firefighters, and and they're pushing EMT firefighters more than the police part, but the police part is a huge part. I think these type of conversations need to be talked about, and so that's what this

community town hall is all about as well. For those that are kind of wavering neutral, maybe don't know, maybe they know it a lot, you know, because the number one thing that we've been seeing, like I was on V one oh three yesterday on the radio station, and I also have been doing a couple of other media and call ins, and a lot of people don't understand, like they a lot of people don't understand, like why is this a bad thing? You know, you can move

it somewhere else, they say. But even if it's moved somewhere else, I'm still gonna fight against cop city, you know, just because I have this hits home for me too. Many of my friends and family have been murdered by the hands of radical power hungry, gun happy, trigger happy police officers. And I feel that there is and then also another thing too, there is answers, you know, in regards to we don't need more police, we need resources. They shut down our hospital, they shut down the shelters.

It's not like they don't know, right, Like we tell them, we need more jobs, not just any job, good quality jobs. We need pristine health care, not just affordable healthcare. And then most importantly, it just are unsheltered friends to see that they put bulldozers. They this administration, this city continues to ignore, ignore, the people. We have the hugest, the biggest wealth gap in the nation. They and they call it Wakanda, the blackest city. But if this is how

you treat us, our people, our people need resources. That's where this sixty seven million dollars should be going. It should not be going towards a more police. We don't need more police because when you go to Cobb County, when you go over to Alpharetta, they don't have a lot of police. They don't have a lot of Why would they mean a lot of police because they already got the resources.

a community. So this is not on the outskirts. This is in a community and in a community of color, and you're bringing police from around the country in to learn military tactics, tactics that we use in foreign countries to protect citizens. We should not be thinking about our citizens, our residents as people who need to be protect did from them sales, if I'm making sense, you know what I mean.

hundred years. Now the car sort of violence inflicted on this land is attempting to be exported as police the Beast will soon come from around the country and even the world to train at copp City.

and they're actually the ones doing it to them. You were elected by people to represent them, and they've told you for two years, we don't want this, and you are ignoring their voice.

so I needed trees. That was nothing but desert. But I moved here because of these trees, because I love the life force that trees give us. Even when we see a tree, the earth is talking back to us, saying, stop doing what you're doing. The dolphins, the orcas, the wells, they're all migrant. They're like, you're the ocean is hot right now, so they are they're yelling at us. And when not listening. And as a native in my native way, our elders, our chiefs have said that we plan for

seven generations from now. I am a mother of two sons and what this administration is doing and what these corporations are doing. They're not looking at seven generations from now. They're not looking at how this is going to affect us on the long run. And I love the fact of everyone that is standing firm and saying stop cop City because we see the vision. We know what this Uchi Marka, this mother Earth is going to look like

seven generations from now. And we're fighting to our death because of the fact that we want to make sure that our children's children's children's children could still live here and be in a peaceful, safe place and environment to live.

all of his unfulfilled promises. When talking with Nashaha, she expressed that she felt disappointed that herself and this big block of people helped Andre get elected and now Mayor Dickens is fully committed to the cop City project and is even having conversations with other black leaders in the city to bring them on board and prevent them from opposing Cop City.

don't like hypocrisy. And I see hypocrites all throughout this and on this administration side, from the governor all the way down, even when we try to help our unsheltered friends. In December, when it was so cold out here, I went on social media. I raised five thousand dollars in two hours. I went and went, Me and my friends went and got them all tents, tents, sleeping bags, everything. The mayor called my comrade. Mayor Andre called my comrade and was all like, why are you saying that they

don't have no heating stations? And I set up a heating station. Not everyone wants to go there, because so is there. Where is your mental health services? Where's the transitioning team that you should have on the ground to help transition them. Don't just open up a temporary heating shelter. Where's the transition team to go and talk to the people of saying, hey, let me walk you in to go get heated. There was none of that. You're just expecting people to just go in there or they knew.

this is going to be built. So since this is going to be built, let me figure out at least I'm at the table in the community and there's community engagement. At least there's some type of ridging happening. That's their angle. Anyone that said Black Lives Matter was on the front line with us in twenty twenty, that that was horrified by the videos that they saw this we are at prime time. This is the epicenter of police terrorism being built. This is it, this is this is it.

a hypocrite. You're a hypocrite, period, point blank.

black lives. So I think there's just this huge contradiction in who these companies say they are how they're showing up.

in twenty twenty. Not only does this erase the abolitionist core of the twenty twenty uprising, but it also obfuscates the fact that cop City is indeed a direct response to twenty twenty, not in terms of police reform, but in the aftermath of the neoliberal police state being under genuine threat. Corporate America and police have made this pact to maintain each other's legitimacy, as one cannot survive without the other. Cop City is to ensure that what happened

in twenty twenty will never happen again. After the clear cutting of around eighty acres in the Wallani Forest, there's been more of a focus on the stop Coop City wing of the movement than defend the forest. Sure, there are still three hundred acres to defend and eighty acres to restore, but as construction is getting more imminent, the specific cop city focus has taken center stage in messaging.

the people in the community. I watched some of the testimony from the city council meeting several weeks ago.

to do with me. And then also the fact that the faces that they saw on t it was they're thinking this is a white lead, white organization, white problem. It's not our problem. So they haven't engaged. So I think those are all things that we have to consider that and let people know this is a diverse problem.

It impacts everybody. It's going to impact people of color and poor and marginalized communities more than anybody else, just because of the nature of how policing is done in America and so and the and the problems that we still have with that. So our program is from Red Dogs to cop City, the Dirty South history of over policing Atlanta. So helping them understand how this is just a new iteration of what's been happening. So the Red Dog Unit was at some call it a gang within

Atlanta PD for many years. It was disbanded in twenty eleven, but they were terrorizing low poor communities of color, and so cop City in the way that they're thinking about training these officers would be just a new iteration of that. So helping them understand that just because we have come far with the civil rights, with our civil rights, and I'm not even talking specifically about the sixties movement, but civil rights for people of color, women, LGBTQI plus communities.

Just because we've come far doesn't mean it can't go back.

to heal all the wounds in our communities and to actually deliver.

in Atlanta. This is funneling all of that money into the police and into not even like the police department, a private police foundation, like funding the APFS.

peaceful protesters. You have individuals that will burn up construction equipment, light a fire to police vehicles, and then have a bouncy house party the next day with peaceful protesters at a park. So they will go to a park by day, and then by night they're burning up police equipment or setting fires or trying to destroy construction equipment. So these individuals are trying to use the guys of peaceful protests that maybe some local Atlantans may actually be engaged in

desired conversation about their views on public safety. But these individuals have different views than those folks. These individuals are anarchists. They want to destroy. So these individuals are alongside these arsonists, these criminals are alongside peaceful protesters, and sometimes the peaceful protesters are aware of it, and sometimes they are not.

We have made it clear to local activists that we know and individuals that tend to be peaceful, We're letting them know that we are aware that there are individuals that are in our city that have committed crimes across the nation, and that they are on your social media or in your network saying they're coming to your event to do the same.

dirty hands, so to speak. And so that's what the message that we want to get out to the public is that these individuals mean harm and you don't want to be around them or associated with them. When you are, it makes it difficult to tell who's who.

addressed this dynamic quote. We took action after non combative demonstrations at Cadence Bank and Home Depot. The police attacked those demonstrations with no cause, as they do wherever and however the movement gathers. There can be no separation of time and space for tactics when police have turned society into a war zone. Despite this, we dispersed our activity as much as possible across their area of control. We encourage those who are pursuing a strategy of referendum to

continue supporting all methods to stop cop City. If you defy the state's unilateral authority in any way, you will be seen as a valid target. As demonstrated throughout the history of this movement, including during this last Week of action, police will treat you like a violent criminal, whether you're holding a sign in a parking lot, bailing activists out

of jail, or smashing a cop car. Only a group of activists in unincorporated Decab County, near the potential site of cop City, filed a lawsuit against the City of Atlanta and the State of Georgia, claiming the requirement that signature gatherers must themselves be Atlanta residents violated their First

Amendment right to free speech and petition the government. Due to the potential constitutional violation, the lawsuit also requested the court reset the sixty day clock for gathering signatures while still counting the signatures that were already gathered.

an impermissible impairment of that contract unquote. The city also argued that if the court does deem the Atlanta residency requirement for gathering signatures unconstitutional, then the entire referendum should be deemed unlawful. A rebuttal by the plaintiffs said that the city did not provide factual or legal evidence for

its claims and misread the cited precedence. According to the plaintiffs, the land lease contract is ongoing, not an irreversible quote unquote one time event, and since the city authorized and issued the petition form, they skipped their chance to argue that the referendum is somehow invalid by already approving the language of the petition and letting the referendum process begin.

Near the end of July, US District Court Judge Mark Cohen ruled in favor of the cop city referendum, allowing non Atlanta residents to collect signature and reset the sixty day clock to collect the roughly sixty thousand signatures needed to put the land lease on the ballot. In his ruling, Judge Mark Cohen said, quote requiring signature gatherers to be residents of the city imposes a severe burden on core political speech and does little to protect the city's interest

in self governance unquote. Mary hooks. The tactical lead of the referendum coalition reacted to the ruling, saying quote, we are thrilled by Judge Cohen's ruling and the expansion of democracy to include our cab neighbors and level the playing

field for our coalition unquote. The city quickly filed for an appeal, which was subsequently denied on August fourteenth, with the judge stating quote, the city's real concern may be that now that non residents have the ability to gather signatures on the petition for the entire time that they would have been permitted to do so had their initial request been granted, there is an increased possibility that a

sufficient number of valid signatures could be obtained. As liberals cheered on the Fulton County District Attorney in Atlanta for indicting Trump and co conspirators for election tampering under rico charges, the same exact sort of charges that this office has used against young black rappers and have been wielded against the Stop Cop City movement, the City of Atlanta's own election interference by repressing the referendum has been largely ignored.

Fulton County Court set Trump's bond for two hundred thousand dollars for attempting to overthrow a federal election. The same court set bond at three hundred and fifty five thousand dollars each for multiple protesters arrested for being merely present

at a protest. After Georgia State Patrol killed force defender Torteguita in January of this year, during all of the glowing press for District Attorney Fanny Willis and the City of Atlanta, it was revealed that on August eleventh, the Atlanta Police Department killed a sixty two year old, unarmed black man named Johnny Holman while responding to a minor traffic accident. Both Holman and the unnamed second driver called nine one one after the accident. Holman told nine one

one operators, quote, somebody ran into my truck unquote. After waiting for over an hour for police to arrive, twenty three year old officer Kiaran Kimbro responded to the scene. Kimbro joined APD in March of twenty twenty one and currently has an open complaint for quote sexual misconduct non

criminal unquote. Johnny Holman, who served as a deacon in his church, called his kids to listen to how the officer was escalating the situation, and then an unknown witness helped this APD officer wrestle sixty two year old Johnny Holman to the ground and put him in handcuffs as the officer used his taser. To quote the Atlantic Community Press Collective quote, the children listen for seventeen minutes as they drove to the scene of the accident, hearing their

father call for help after officer kimbro tased him. When they arrived on scene, they found officers giving chest compressions to their father.

own alleged voter suppression has continued. Initially, the cop city vote referendum hoped to not have to use the extra day is granted by the judge and submit the collected signatures on August twenty first, with the intention of getting

them verified in time. To put the cop city vote on the upcoming November ballot come Monday, August twenty first, the referendum of put out statement that, despite collecting over one hundred thousand signatures, that they are delaying submitting the petition due to concerns that the city was going to

employ voter suppression tactics during the validation process. The statement reads, in part quote, In recent days, we began to hear from reporters and sources inside city Hall that the City of Atlanta is planning to argue for a higher than

previously reported legal minimum signature count for ballot access. More concerning were reports that they also planned to utilize signature match in their verification process, an archaic and widely abandoned tool of voter suppression that has been widely condemned across the political spectrum, including by the Republican controlled Georgia State legislature.

Signature matching is a subjective form of a vote validation, which uses election workers to visually match signatures on a ballot or in this case of petition, to a previous signature on their driver's license or voter registration card. Hours after the referendum's statement, the city of Atlanta officially announced their intention to use his signature matching for the cop city vote referendum. Back in twenty eighteen, a federal judge in Georgia ruled that signature matching did not serve any

legitimate interest and disenfranchised black and brown voters disproportionately. For years, the ACLU has advocated against and won multiple court cases

against discriminatory signature matching processes. Fair Fight Action, a Georgia based voting rights organization founded by Stacy Abrams, responded to the news Atlanta would be using signature matching with a statement saying, quote, signature matching is a tool of voter suppression that litigated extensively in Georgia and removed from the mail in ballot process because of its harm to voters

resulting in mass disenfranchisement. Using the discredited process of signature matching is unacceptable and risks unfairly rejecting thousands of valid petitions. Signature of verification is notoriously subjective, disproportionately impacts voters of color, and as biased against disabled and elderly voters. There is extensive precedent in Georgia showing the harms of this process,

it must be relegated to the past. Fair Fight calls on the City of Atlanta to rescind their intent to use this process and to enact steps that fairly evaluate these petitions unquote. Facing the City of Atlanta's quote open and ongoing hostility to the cop city vote referendum, the coalition has decided to use the time extension granted by federal Judge Mark Cohen to continue collecting signatures to quote leave no doubt as to the will of Atlantic voters unquote.

They now plan to submit petition signatures on September twenty third. The City Council will then have fifty days to validate the signatures, which means that, if successful, and assuming the city doesn't further interf the referendum would get put on the ballot during the March primary election in twenty twenty four. The vote being pushed into March adds a few complications.

Turnout may skew more Republican as it's unlikely there will be a Democratic presidential primary, and the vote being seven months away disrupts the momentum that the campaign has been gaining over the past couple of months. People who sign the petition back in June would have to wait almost

a whole year to vote on the ballot. The few extra months does give more time to educate the public about Cop City during a lead up to the election, but that goes both ways, which means that after two years of this movement mostly taking form as a ground war over territory, now for the time being, much of the fight to stop Cop City will change into a

pr war in the public sphere. This shift from a physical offense to a metaphysical offense was something that I already felt coming back during the Week of action in terms of like cameras and spectacle the other The big feeling I had on the Saturday kickoff rally was like this just feels like society of the spectacle, Like.

it was even three years ago. So I think people are also realizing that and realizing that, hey, the sacrifice inherent in setting up actions where you know that you're probably going to get fucked up by police, that's not worth it. That one, it treats people as like tools. It treats people as disposable, which is, you know, that's not great if you want to build a long lasting movement,

And that's not even very effective. As the public relations battle over the fate of cop City intensifies in the lead up to the vote, with the City of Atlanta undoubtedly ready to run a full election propaganda campaign, strategies of resistance cannot overlook the physical construction of the facility. Pre construction has been active and ongoing for a few months now, mostly in the form of tree clearing and

land grading. Just a few days ago, the Atlanta Police Foundation updated their construction timeline, saying that they had just began installing a stone base for the main roadway, that irrigation and site lighting is now underway, and full lawn construction is set to quote begin in the next week

or so. Unquote That now may be out of date, but based on the progress being made on the site, it's clear that construction is now imminent, and with the threat of the referendum, the APF will try to get as much built as quickly as possible to help with the pro cop city side of election messaging. One of the original goals of the referendum was to try to place an injunction on further construction until the ballot vote,

but it's unknown if or when that would happen. In the meantime, activists may take a queue from Earth First and instead of trying to occupy the site, instead they might find creative ways to make the construction site hard to work on with the increased element of spectacle, placing a lot of extra eyes on pre announced public demonstrations,

more secretive actions may start becoming more common. There's other actions that can happen more covertly, like if you're doing sabotage where you don't need to invite a camera crew to film.

process unquote. Camal Franklin of Community Movement Builders added quote, if the city needs to see a demonstration of the people's commitment to the issue, we're happy to provide one.

July first. Quote, while signatures are collected, the police are still killing. We cannot wait. If the referendum fails, actions like ours and Boulder will be the only means available unquote. With construction imminent, subcontractor tensions increasing and the City of Atlanta gambling with voter suppression. Right now, the movement really cannot afford to alienate the green anarchists that pioneered the

early legitimacy of this movement with bold direct action. The Atlanta Police Foundation is trying to snatch a victory from the jaws of defeat. What happens in the next few months may push Atlanta to a dangerous tipping point. No matter the endpoint of this particular struggle, victory or defeat cannot be imagined as the end. The fight against Coppcity is one large battle in an ongoing war, a war of police militarization, racism, environmental justice, and against the incestuous

neoliberal police state in its leviathan like formation. Based on what happens here in Atlanta, similar police project proposals will be recalibrated. As the South goes, so goes the nation. Capitalist realism posits that history is over, that it's a literal thing of the past, But it turns out you're living through it right now, so what will you do

to create it? You can read more about the fights to stop Coopcity at Atlpresscollective dot com and donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund at atlsolidarity dot org.