Fol Zone Media.
Hi, this is a special message from me, Margaret. It's not an ad message. It's just not related to what we're going to talk about today on the podcast. And I'm recording this separately. I'm recording this separately because on June tenth, twenty twenty four, Leonard Peltier is going to have a parole hearing and I want to talk about that.
One of the guests that we have a lot on this podcast, but also just like cool Zone Media podcasts in general, is my friend Moira Meltzer Cohen, who is a lawyer, a defense lawyer who is on Leonard Peltier's court case. And Moira asked us to read this statement, and I just want to say I co sign this statement. I've done a lot of research about Leonard Peltier for this podcast and also on my own as an activist. Some of the first protests I ever went to were related to free Leonard Peltier.
So this is the statement.
On June tenth, twenty twenty four, Leonard Peltier enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa of Lakota and Ajibo Ancestry and the longest serving political prisoner in the United States, will be appearing before the US Parole Commission for the first time since two thousand nine. He faces staunch opposition from the FBI and other law enforcement due to having allegedly killed two FBI agents in a firefight on June twenty six, nineteen seventy five, after the agents
appeared on reservation land to execute a pretextual warrant. The initial firefight occurred during the quote reign of terror on Pine Ridge in the wake of the occupation of Wounded Knee, a time of extreme violence when federal law enforcement installed a puppet tribal chair and was arming vigilantes who targeted
Indigenous traditionalists. Everything leading up to these events, as well as the subsequent investigation and mister Peltier's extradition, trial, conviction, and sentencing, were characterized by gross misconduct on the part of law enforcement, the prosecution, and the courts. Mister Peltier's co defendants were separately tried and acquitted on grounds of
self defense. Mister Peltier was railroaded, and his case is tainted by discrimination at every level, ranging from the withholding of exculpatory evidence to the torture and coercion of extradition and trial witnesses, and from the refusal of the trial judge to dismiss in avowedly racist juror, to the apologetic gymnastics of courts affirming his conviction in the face of meritorious legal challenges and admitted evidence of outrageous government misdeeds.
Mister Peltier has been in prison for more than forty eight years and is almost eighty years old. He suffers from chronic and potentially lethal conditions for which he receives insufficient and sub standard medical care. If you want to take action to free Leonard Peltier, you can call the U. S Parole Commission at two zero two three four six seven thousand. Again that's two zero two three four six seven thousand. Or you can sign the petition. And this is a string of This is a U R L
so I'm going to read it out. N d n c O dot C C slash us PC dash free Leonard Peltier. Again, that's n D n c O dot C C slash us PC dash free Leonard Peltier. Leonard Peltier is spelled l E O N A R D P E L t I E R or you can follow Indian Collective on social media, which is n d N Collective. For more information on Leonard Peltier, Listen to Margaret's podcast on the Low Coda Nation. Oh thanks Moira, and read in the Spirit of Crazy Horse by Peter Matheson.
And again, just want to reiterate, I go sign all of this. I've done a lot of my own search into this. You can and should too, and free Leonard Peltier, Magpie.
Please tell these people, why will a mess the day this is happening?
Well, because today on today is cool people did cool stuff. No, I don't know. Is there anything that's happened well, okay, today is a podcast about history and about cool people in history. And today my guess is prop and prop. You run a podcast called hood Politics with Props, Yes, and I use that when I want to figure out what the fuck is going on in current events. As far as I can tell, there's no current events happening.
Oh man, right now, right, well, like not in the last fifteen minutes, the last.
Fifteen minutes that completely derailed baits. Listen. Our mamas used to always tell us, baby, your arms is too short to box with God, and you just what we just watched it happen right now.
Honestly, we are recording this on the day that Trump was found guilty on thirty four fellon account for.
Unanimously, unanimously airy body Jerry Yo Peers bigged out.
I just really don't know if I can be a professional today, Magpie.
It's gonna be hard, it's gonna be very And it's funny because the news cycle. I mean, y'all are going to hear this four days from now. Yeah, I know, but four days from now is an infinite We could have had a coup between now and then.
Who knows, you could have went to jail, broke out right. It's just it's just like the January sixth.
Yeah, I was trying to like do the oh man, it's so funny.
But I was trying to do like the all right, uh, like this is America, be rational, nothing nothing good could come of this. But the thing that I was thinking about, as he is a resident of the state of Florida, is that maybe, uh you know, voters rights could get changed there.
So they actually did get changed, and just remembered, yeah they did. Last the good thing last ballot, they said the felons can vote. So yeah, well once they're once they're out, not once they're done. Yeah yeah, yeah, once they're out.
Okay, is maybe voters' rights could uh once again get get amended.
But it's so crazy.
I'm going to be a professional. I'm going to be a professional.
I'm mostly thinking about how four days from now we're gonna have so much more information, but you all can see the unfiltered Yeah right now, three people who two people who pay attention to curn events for a living, and one person who reads history books for a living like this.
It's just so it's like as knowing to tie it all together, knowing we're witnessing history, knowing for a fact this is for until you know, the the heat dome rises and climate change finally takes us out. This is this will go down in history.
So so to the Secret Service folks that are protecting him at his home.
Are they legally allowed to have guns?
I don't know.
Shit.
They got to go to jail.
Do they sit outside the jail if he got like sid First of all, he's not going to go the second of all, his jail would be like a room at mar A Lago, because.
That's how fucked up this country is.
Yeah, I'm just excited for Waco too.
I know.
Yeah, Yeah, we'll tell you.
About how got followed at Waco.
No, but I would love to hear that I went.
I went on a trip recently across the country and the person I was traveling with was like, we gotta go see the Waco compound. And I was like, I'm not sure I agree with you. We were not to have to go see the Waco compound. And so we drove by it and it's on this like gravel road and we got followed for like fifteen miles by a sports car for having driven by it on the gravel road.
Wow, sports car, it's pretty random.
No, And it like it turned around on the road to follow us. It was pretty like even it was just like, oh, there's someone behind us. It was like, oh, I see why, even though this is a public road, Yeah, I see why. They don't want I get it. I even I was like, I'm in my fucking I refer to my pickup truck as my Chud truck because it looks like a Chud drives it because I got a giant Tundra, and I'm like, oh, I'm safe I totally me.
I like this stuff.
Yeah, exactly. Anyways, you go to the near future. So today I even went more recent than usual. Today, today we're going to talk about the time when in two thousand and one. See, it's even in this millennium, after bankers and predatory international loan funds gutted their economy, thousands of working class folks in Urina took over hundreds of abandoned factories, got those factories running again, and found work with dignity and no bosses.
Would you say that the government was behaving very messy?
I would say that there's even going to be politicians who get convicted and don't serve time in this great.
I was making a Lionel Messi joke.
Oh yeah, no, it went over my head.
Okay, do you even know who Lionel Messi is? Magpie?
No? All right, yeah, on the level of Pele as far as.
Like Great is either.
No.
If you've heard of the game soccer, yeah, do you know that it's internationally loved as like the.
Beautiful I genuinely like soccer, and I've watched the World Cup at least once. Whenever I'm not in the US, people are like it's way better in the world.
Yeah, it's way better outside anyway, Lionel Messi, it was Messi Argentina.
Sorry, okay, no, no, no, this is good.
I'm glad you could borrow that later.
Yeah, all right, all right. So one of my favorite things to do on this show is draw wild conclusions and connections by draping red string all over my wall, okay, or talk about strange chains of dominoes. And today I'm going to tell you that the reason I have a wall, and that I'm recording this from inside a house that I live in, a house that I bought, is because of those workers from Argentina.
All right.
When workers started taking over their factories, it inspired people from all over the world. A few of the people from the global North, like the author and filmmaker Naomi Klein, who alongside with her husband, went and made a documentary about the struggle called The Take. Some finance people from the US took note of that documentary, including a guy named Brendan Martin, who moved Argentina to figure out how to help finance this cooperative revolution in a non extractive way.
While he was there, he learned about what's called non extractive finance, which is a way of loaning money to cooperatives that doesn't extract value from them, but is still a sustainable form of finance. Don't worry, there's gonna be burning tires and shit later in this story. I know I'm starting with finance.
Okay.
He came home, This guy, Brendon Martin. He comes home from Argentina a couple years later, and with what he learned, he starts a worker cooperative finance organization called the Working World. Okay, in proper cooperative form. They soon federated with a shitload of nonprofit loan funds to finance worker cooperatives and spread this model that came from Argentina. That federation is called
Seed Commons. I worked for Seed Commons for two years, and it turns out that a modest nonprofit salary is enough to buy a house if you are shopping in West Virginia.
Got it okay, because I was like, my wife works for a nonprofit.
And uh, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, no, I have a very nice house for you know, I've been live in West Virginia though, so it's affordable. And I got to confuse my family by showing up as like the anarchist bad daughter, you know, yeah, and be like, oh, I got a job in finance.
You are quite a pickle for that family or yours.
Yeah, so funny dominoes. Some seamstresses took over their factory, and now I no longer live in a twelve by twelve cabin in the woods. We're going to start our context with one of my least favorite things, and one of the things that people don't know what the word means is they use it wrong all the time, including, and I'm not mad at them, the word neoliberalism. Oh yes, yeah, it's fucking messy.
It's messy. That's I'm glad you're bringing this up because like for the next couple of shows, like I have to actually get in and explain what it means. So I'm glad you're doing this.
Yeah, yeah, No, it's because I all the time I hear people basically be like, oh, liberalism, it's neoliberally they conflate them there, misfortunately. Yeah. One of the most confusing and annoying things about language and politics is the same word means different things in different contexts. An Irish Republican
has nothing nice to say to an American Republican. If you ever want to be entertained, look at the comments on like Irish Republican Army songs on YouTube, and it's all these Americans being like, yeah, we love Republicanism, and then Irish people being like, we would murder you.
Yeah that is I don't think. Yeah, we are not the socialists.
Yes, yeah, Republican means opposite things between those two countries and a lot of the world. Libertarian is used by anti authoritarian socialists to distinguish themselves from authoritarian socialists. In the US, it means that you believe in private property above everything else and don't give a shit about people. Yes,
liberalism is one of these words. Classically, liberalism was like, well, I like capitalism and I don't like kings, so privilege should rest not in the hands of the aristocracy but in the hands of the business owners.
Yes.
For an awfully long time, liberalism has now instead meant vaguely center left politics.
Right.
This is like most people who are hearing this, If you like yourself as a liberal, or you complain about liberals, you're imagining people who follow the Democrats party line. Biden is a liberal, you know, believing in more rights for marginalized people, a state that you'll look after people who can't work, but not too extreme.
Yeah, any of them that like that would what we would call bare minimum, Like it's just this is.
I'm not a monster, Yeah, exactly, Like just enough to make it so that people fewer people feel justified in violent revolution. Yes, liberalism is to the right of progressives in US politics who start tying a little bit of class politics into it.
Yeah.
So in the late nineties, a new word started floating around, neoliberalism, and it was confusing as shit to people because neoliberalism, I mean it basically means the old liberalism again, but not liberals like we understand them today, but free market capitalism.
Yeah.
Neoliberalism stands for shutting down all government protections for the environment and for workers. It stands for selling off public infrastructure to private companies, often to international companies, and free trade agreements that I think very negatively of and tend to well we'll talk about their effects.
Yeah. Yeah, this episode the scuttle bucket around like the policy wonks is like, I think it's they're kind of like, it's time to admit that neoliberalism failed. Yeah, it did. Not give us the promises, the NAFTA free trade aught at just the Clinton of it all, the boy Clinton
of it all. That's neoliberal. It's like, oh, you know, if we will bring China, will make China modern, you know, we'll just like, you know, instead of just having a factory, have factories all over the world, and you know, we'll just trade, you know, and then everybody wins, right, like you know, you know, we're all making money.
Yeah, yeah, no, And like you said, like eventually even the realization that it didn't work trickled up.
That's my trickle down econot.
It's good. It trickled down.
Hey, people eventually realized that this didn't work. It took well, we'll talk about what it took. By the end of the twentieth century, neoliberalism has swept across the globe for the rich and powerful. It swept across the globe like a trend. This is cool, We're excited for the downtrodden. It swept across the globe like a plague and destroyed economies and collapsed economies everywhere. It went through a series
of predatory loans. Groups like the IMF the International Monetary Fund managed to start the process of extracting more and more value out of developing nations. Okay, I'm kind of curious because like when I used to try and explain the IMF to people, the main people that you would talk about is like bail bonds, like predatory loans, like pay payday loans, these things that show up and fuck.
Over environments everywhere they go.
What you I'm curious what you're the thing you're going to talk about with neoliberalism.
As Yeah, so I'm trying to talk about what does it mean to be a world power? And if you are a world power and fail, what does that mean? Right? So, and like what does it mean to have a collapsed government? Like so, so that's what I'm talking about, like you know, essentially, like all right, so you know, whether it's like rust Bell, it's basically it's like I'm trying to explain voters like
in what we're working about. Like so, like, you know, the center of American economy was the car until it wasn't, you know what I'm saying, And kind of when it wasn't, really dovetails well with the birth of neoliberalism because the
stuff went international. So ultimately it's like if you're going to be mad at immigrants for taking your job, it's like, well this isn't really not really a new thing, and like you mad at the wrong people and just kind of understanding what it like the supply chain, the goal, the goal of finance is, you know, the most amount
of money for the least amount of work. And then ultimately, so I'm kind of going through all that and then I'm going to land in the Congo to talk about the the cobalt things right there, you know what I'm saying. So ultimately that's what. Yeah, but it's like a I have to get through neoliberalism to even understand this because it's like it's not it's there's a lot going on there. But yeah, that's kind of what I'm using.
No, no, I mean, I mean, honestly, this is one of the reasons I like your show. I think you do a lot of work showing context and then yeah, I don't know, thank you, Like I'm going to need that because it's like I keep hearing about what's going on in the Congo and I haven't like really dived into it.
Yeah, yeah, it's I mean, and like really it's like it's I mean the thing is like, it would probably have got there anyway, like, because you know, the the global North is propped up by the global South and just has been for centuries, you know what I'm saying. So eventually, whether it was nafter or neoliberalism or not, we were going to end up there. But the fact that it's so exploitative I'm putting on at the feet of neoliberalism.
No, totally. It's yeah, it's the some of the same stuff as regular capitalism, just like turned up to eleven.
Yes.
So, as neoliberalism started to cross the globe, a powerful global movement rose up to fight it, which at the time was called the anti globalization movement. In retrospect, we tend to call it the alter globalization movement because we don't want to sound like a bunch of anti Semitic assholes, and also we don't want to sound like nationalists.
Or Alex Jones. Yeah, I want to be all Alex Jones.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And one I'm gonna cover that in more detail, that movement. But that movement didn't smash capitalism, but it it won. It absolutely broke the neoliberal consensus. It showed enough people that this is not what people actually want, and that they exposed the lives of neoliberalism enough that it eventually trickled up to the halls of power, and like the expansion of free trade agreements across the world is something that had stopped. I didn't know that
until years after the movement had collapsed. I basically was like I wasted so much in my fucking life, Like I got all this PTSD fighting cops and shit, and we didn't accomplish shit. Every you know, FTAA still existed, we didn't shut them down, blah blah blah. And then I read this essay by David Graeber called The Shock of Victory that I'm not going to get into too much, but it basically was like, here's what we were trying
to do. It basically was like people suck at gaining their immediate and their long term goals, but you can also often activist movements gain their middle goals. Our immediate goal was like end the FTAA, yeah right, And our medium term goal was like crush neoliberalists consensus, and our long term goal was like smash capitalism and have a society of like free association or whatever. And we failed at two of the three. But we accomplished a middle work.
Yeah yeah, and I I felt way better, you know, pre rad. So this is a wildly internationalist movement. There were coordinated demonstrations happening all over the globe, from Italy to India to the US. People fought these extractive policies. At least two people I know about died in this fight, and I'm going to shout them out. In two thousand and one, an Italian anarchist named Carlo Giuliani was shot dead by a cop in Genoa at a protest while
he was wielding a fire extinguisher. Carlo was twenty three years old and he was a history student, a punk, and a petty criminal. May he rest in peace, just to show this also shows the variety of people who
were in the streets together and coordinating together. The other person that I know about who died in this In two thousand and three, a fifty six year old cattle farmer from South Korea named Lee Kyong Hey traveled to Cancun, Mexico to participate in the protest against the World Trade Organization. He held a sign that read wto kills farmers, and then he scaled a fence a top the fence, he faced the media cameras, and he killed himself with a pen knife.
Wow.
He was the president of the Korean Federation of Small Farmers.
Wow.
He had seen farmer after farmer take their own life because in South Korea so many people were dying from the poverty caused by.
The World Trade Organization.
They may he also rest in peace, And that's the movement I got into politics through.
Wow. I just learned a lot about you right now.
Yeah, I'm a little moved, like wow.
Anyway, Yeah, yeah, No.
I dropped out of college and went to every protest I could and tried to organize things, and you know it, I acted like it was my full time job and got a lot of PTSD but also accomplished some stuff and amazing. Around the turn of the millennia, neoliberalism was just fucking gutting the world. I read a statement about it recently that was like, people talk about it as if there was winning countries and losing countries in globalization,
but they were actually the only winners were multinational corporations. Yeah, but if you want to be a winner, you can use our ads, I'm sure, one of which is gambling. If you do the thing, the ad says you'll win, always correct. That's the promise we make here, cools and media. It's legally binding, right, Sophie. Sophie's nodding, Oh no, shaking. Sorry, yeah no, sorry, I got those confused for a second. Here's the ads and we're back. So now Argentina. Okay, wait ah.
Wait, before you do Argentina, I think like, first of all, if you're a cool Zone media listener, you probably understand how these dots work. But like, I'm gonna plain all this anyway on my show. But like the the a lot of times the question is like but how like how is And a good example I would give is like, okay, so say, for example, I'm use something light and then heavier,
So like remember Tom's shoes. I was like a you know, a whole like thing where it's like, oh, you buy a pair of these, like you know, denim slippers, and then we'll send a pair to Africa. You know, so it's like, oh, yeah, buy one and then we give one. Okay, Well you're saying that is as if there's no shoemakers in Africa. So so when y'all do this, it's cool.
You feel better about it. But you just you just put a shoemaker out of business right now, because everybody getting free shoes, right, So even even if they don't like them, you just flooded the market. So that's one way. Now you now scale that and say if you're if you're growing wheat, and you know outside of Kenosha, Wisconsin, right, you're next to a farm you know, also growing wheat.
But but they got like seventy nine hectores owned by Walmart, right, So that means that in they're and they're getting their machines from China, they're getting their seeds from Mexico. They're getting there so they have the first of all, the connection the clients, the and and are just able to do things at a scale that are completely impossible for anyone to compete with. And and you have entire countries
in entire government desiring for this to work. So you just it's like there's no competition, like there's just there's nothing you can do except for sell your land to that corporation. And so then so essentially what we're saying is like from the government perspective, it is like, what are you talking about? This is dope, man, all the costs go down. Everybody's happy. We're connected world. It's one country, this is one world, like and it's truly, we truly
are sharing this one rock. You know what I'm saying, it spinning through space. But in a way that says, oh, but but but this is better for everybody, But it's not. It's better for y'all. Yeah, it's not better for your neighbor who now like used to have could be able to grow wheat and then sell it like that is now impossible.
No, totally. And this, yeah, the the buy one give one to Africa plan is like such a perfect example of a false solution to this kind of thing. And like what actually enriches areas is to bolster instead of gut their economies, you know, and like going in and saying like how do we foster small businesses? In my mind, especially cooperatives, but like how do you actually like what?
And you know, and this is the era that you get the fair trap from, right, you get this response to it being like, well, how do we make sure that the coffee growers we're getting a coffee from aren't fucked over by the fact that we drink coffee because we're not going to stop drinking coffee, you know, and we're not going to start growing it in the US.
Yes, not possible at scale unless climate changes, which it might eventually. Yeah, yeah, but right now we can't anyway, you're correct.
Yes, Okay, So in Argentina, we did an episode a couple months back about a rebellion in Patagonia's huge wave of strikes across rural Argentina in the early nineteen twenties. If you ever want to hear me do early Argentina context, listen to that one. I'm not going to go over it all again. Then the stuff that Argentina's most famous for that I know the least about, happened like decades
of various dictatorships. One day we'll probably talk more about the people who fought against that, But it's not what Argentine has been famous for in my circles. Instead, it is famous for what we're going to talk about today,
an incredible bottom up labor movement. At the turn of the twenty first century, Argentina proved the neoliberal order wrong and showed the cracks in the IMF and the World Bank, and specifically and concretely, a fuck load of workers took over their factories and ran them more efficiently than they were under bosses.
Amazing.
It's worth understanding that Argentinian politics in the twenty century they don't map very well to most other countries politics. For years, you have Perhonism, which is like right wing and authoritarian, but complicatedly so it was sort of a right meets left. It gets called centrist, but it's like way more horseshoe theory than that. It's like way more both. Okay, you know, like Biden is a centrist, this man is
the inversion of that, all right. Paranism is the ideology that ruled for a lot of this time after a guy named Peron, who took power after a coup nineteen forty three. It is fiercely nationalistic. It is anti communist, It is pro corporatist, but it's nationalism. Embraces ethnic diversity and believes in building a strong local economy and keeping foreign companies from stripping the economy.
Yeah yeah, yeah, keive them money local.
And believes in keeping class stratification to a minimum. There was a more proper dictatorship later, which was further right wing and anti pirnist, and I don't understand that show well enough to tell you about it. None of these tendencies that existed throughout the twentieth century were anything like neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is a different kind of conservativism. It's one that sells the country to the highest bidder. Yeah, but paronism
was a really popular stance for politicians to take. In nineteen eighty nine, this guy, Carlos Menim was voted into all office as a peronist. He immediately dropped the peronism. Politicians famously don't actually care about the values that are embedded into labels. They care about what they can get out of those labels. Correct, he was a neoliberalist.
Fuck.
He was also corrupt as fuck. He eventually was sentenced for arms trafficking and embezzlement, but he was like a politician still at that point, so he had immunity from actually going to jail, and he never went to jail, which is totally unrelated to oh, we successfully stopped thinking about today.
But yeah, I was actually transfigurated into another place and then it was like, oh, yeah, no, never mind.
Yeah, still Earth, nothing changes, still Earth. Yeah, Although what's interesting about actually Argentina collapsing, specifically Argentina, despite being like a globally south country, both in terms of physically and also like seeing as part of the developing world in a lot of contexts, was like by a lot of other contexts, it was like an up and coming economy like Canada or Australia.
Yeah, it's quite a comfortable place to be with the incredibly beautiful humans Argentina.
Like, yeah, everything I read about Argentina, I'm like, I want to go to Argentina.
That sounds amazing.
It's pretty rat I mean there's yeah, there's certain places and times that I don't want to be there because I get killed.
But most of the time, yeah, I mean the colorism runs incredibly deep culturally. Like I don't know a lot about the politics. I just know like of like the Latin countries, they're very they're they're a little more fair skin than the rest of them, and they take a lot of pride in that.
But that doesn't surprise me.
Yeah, but they are.
During economic collapse. Yeah, they're in the economic collaps We're going to talk about a lot of the other countries, including like Uruguay, which is right next time we're like, yeah, fuck you, you had it coming. You thought you were better than us.
Yeah, basically, yeah, because you think you better in all of this.
Basically, it's like they thought you were white. You thought you were exactly what happened. Turns out your nose, That's exactly what happened to them.
Yep.
So once this guy met him, he takes power, I mean, he gets elected into office, he turns back on Peronism and adopts what's called the Washington Consensus model, which is basically, saw your country to Washington, and so he did, and this fucked the country up, just crash the fucking economy. Eventually for a little while, like Time magazine was like this is amazing, and they had like Time had him on the cover with the headline Menem's miracle.
You know.
By nineteen ninety eight, Argentina started into a depression. And this was because the Russian and Asian markets were starting to crash, so foreign investment had dried up in quote unquote emerging markets, and Argentina has hit hard and the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, demanded its debts repaid. There's one hundred and thirty two billion in debt, but they would like making up their own interest rates whenever they wanted.
I don't entirely know the mechanism, but I was like reading it was like and then one month they jacked the interest rates from nine percent to fourteen percent. Like, but why man, I wouldn't.
Sign that loan.
That's like, and we could just change this whenever we want.
No, I need a fixed rate, and you just just make it in numbers up.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
And in order to allow for repayment, the IMF basically imposed austerity measures on Argentina. And this is what's happening all over the world. So pensions are cut, unemployment benefits are cut, education is cut, healthcare is cut, state employee salaries dropped wildly, and it's basically strip mining the country. They're like, okay, give us all your money, and they're like, oh, we need that money so that we can eat. And they're like, that's not what we asked. In two thousand
and one, the economy collapsed. Fifty eight percent of the population was below the poverty line by that point. Wow. By two thousand and three, unemployment hit thirty eight percent in Argentina. The election of nineteen ninety nine before the economies totally collapsed, but at depression has hit. Menem's position was weakened. He'd abandoned peronism for neoliberalism. He'd guided the country and things were in decline. He was voted out.
This didn't turn the country around. It had already been sold, and the depression worsened. And so the working class got real organized and got real militant, and in particular, the unworking class got really organized. Okay, the unemployed workers, which was twenty percent of the country, is unemployed by the turn of the millennium. It goes up to thirty eight percent a couple of years later. Yeah, plus another twenty
percent that's underemployed. They'd start what's called the unemployed workers movement, and they were called pikateo's for like picket picketers, and they would set up pickets, but they didn't have a union workplace to complain about scabs, so they were just blockade roads and demand subsidies for the unemployed be outside. Yeah, and they would go and they would blockade roads with burning tires and shit. There's a lot of early evocative
images from this time, and these were horizontal movements. The government would like show up and be like, who's the leader here and they would all yell back all of us. Most of the there's like one hundred thousand a month. Two sixty percent of them were women, most of them were young. Whole families would come out and join these protests. They would like set up like kitchens and shit in the middle of the road and start feeding everyone, which
is good because people are literally starving. Their signature weapon, because what protest movement doesn't have a signature weapon?
I mean, come on, was a.
Three foot wooden club?
Oh word?
And okay, yeah, they're not around heavy. Yeah, I know, I think it's a I don't think it's like I don't think we're imagining like a caveman club that's like a huge you know.
I mean, it's like more like a three foot dowel rod. Thinking for my own nevermind.
It still sounds big. Yeah, bonkers.
Their signature uniform was a black and red bandana around their neck, and I love them. Women with black and red bandanas, burning tires and declaring they had no leaders.
This is like my.
Shit, Yeah, it's pretty dope.
They started setting up basic neighborhood assemblies and mutual aid networks. The government is collapsing all the economies collapsing, They're like, well, we still got to take care of it ourselves and take care of our neighbors. And they started negotiating with clothing manufacturers to get clothes to kids. They started building childcare centers. They set up education workshops. They taught people
like health and nutrition at different classes. They set up a network of pharmacies, a bakery, and a cement brick factory. I don't know as much about that.
Last time.
Through their bakery they managed to undercut I think bread was nationally subsidized at this point, where like you couldn't charge more than a certain amount for a lot of bread. That amount was still a lot by a person who has no money standards. So they the Pikataros, were able to sell bread for a peso for a kilo loaf, which is the cheapest that the government subsidies ever got was a buck sixty. But that was only three days.
I don't know what they averaged, and so there's growing unrest in the parliamentary elections of October two thousand and one. The blank ballot one. I believe this means that people showed up and got their ballot and then wrote nothing on it. To blank and then turned it in hard. Yeah. I don't think they feel like they got much to lose at this yeah point.
I mean, we're burning tires in the streets, dude, bread is to experience, like d none of the above.
Yeah, they're probably like, Oh, the neighborhood assembly that actually feeds me, that's what I'm bout actually voting for.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So meanwhile, there's a clothing manufacturer named Brookman, and the seamstresses who worked there had the lives of seamstresses and factories everywhere, which is that it kind of sucked. They had fast turnaround deadlines, there was no talking, no music. I don't know how much worse than that. It was obviously seen. Some sweatshop factories are like the worst places in the world. I get the impression that this one like sucked, but wasn't like murder Land. Yeah, I don't
know whatever. As the economy started to sour, the company fell deeper and deeper into debt, and the workers' salaries were cut so low that they couldn't afford bus fair to go to work. Like, they're basically volunteering to go to work at that point, right, because you're like, I don't get paid enough to get here.
I can't Yeah, yeah, if I can't afford to get to work, Like then what am I doing? Yeah, I'm paying you to be there? Yeah.
Basically, yeah, most of them had been. I've read from one source half of the three hundred employees were fired, but I've also read that there's only like fifty eight workers left at the time of the takeover the factory, which is like, you know, a sixth or a fifth the women who started this revolution, because they kind of started they at least started the factory takeover part of it. As best as I can tell, they didn't do it
through like anger. They did it through stubbornness and resourcefulness. On December eighteenth, two thousand and one, they went to the factory owners. They like went to the factory, went to the owners and were like, hey, you're going to subsidize our bus fare or we can't afford to work for you anymore.
Sorry, Like you know, the.
Handouts from us to you are going to stop, yeah, you know, And the owners were like, all right, you wait here and we'll be right back with some money. We're totally coming back, right, don't go nowhere. Definitely be right here.
Yeah.
Yeah, they just never showed up, right, They just like they went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. And so the women wag and waited and the owners never showed. They just abandoned the factory and the workers and all the unpaid wages entirely. So the workers were like, well, we know how to run this place. It's our place anyway, and so they ran it more efficiently than ever. They paid down all the debts that the company had accrued, they found new customers, like in
the middle of this like massive economic crash. They were just like, all right, we can just do this. I mean, one worker, Yeah, no, they just I love it.
It's so fucking cool. Yeah.
One worker named Celia Martinez said, quote, I don't know why the owners had such a hard time. I don't know much about accounting, but for me, it's easy addition and subtraction.
Like you notice, most people when they say man, I could do your job's not that hard, usually are just being arrogant and dumb. But in this situation today, it was like, I don't understand what the product. You just here go to money, Like you said, that's so funny. Yeah, you just yeah, you just you give the workers the money for the hours that they worked. Yeah, I just don't understand what's so hard about that. That's funny.
Yeah, you've ever seen the chart of theft in America where it's like all of the different categories of theft and they are all lined up, and all of the like burglary and robbery and like muggings and all of that or this like tiny percentage and then I think a bigger percentage than that is like asset forfeiture from cops. Yeah, but then far and away the majority like is unpaid wages, Like that is most of the theft that happens in America. Wow, because there's no criminal prosecution.
Yeah, it's like who do you? Yeah, how do you prove it?
Yeah? And so Celia Martinez also said, quote, they are afraid of us because we have shown that if we can manage a factory, we can also manage a country. That's why this government decided to repress us.
M hmm.
Because eventually the government's going to repress them. Although spoiler alert, they win and they still exist. This is still a cooperatively run business. All three of the examples that I'm going to use today still exist and they're still run by the workers. So now that the women ran their own place, they worked harder than ever because they had an equal ownership stake in the success of the business.
They're like, oh, well, you know it's like if you're like washing dishes for McDonald do you have kind of like a duty to slack off as much as.
You Yeah, like the bare minimum, that's your your job is to do the bare minimal.
Yeah, they're paying you minimum wage, so you do minimum mappter exactly.
You know.
But when a business succeeds or fails and you succeed or fail alongside of it, you care about it.
Different story.
I mean, you're a small business owner, you know that. You know it's your life. Yes, Like like people are like time off and you're like, oh, that sounds like an interesting.
Yeah it was that. Yeah, But.
While they're working, their lives don't suck the same, right, because they're doing something that they care about and they're trying to do it well. Because they care about their craft, they get to listen to music while they work, and it became a culture of helping one another learn. Like the older women would come by and like teach stitches over people's shoulders and all this stuff that was like not allowed.
Before, you know.
Yeah, and they made all their decisions and open assemblies.
Like a democracy, like what could have been. Yeah, we sit down in discussion the.
Whole, one of the whole. Like things that people talk about in the cooperative movement that kind of blew my mind when someone first brought it up, is like, why do we claim that we live in a democracy when like you spend forty hours a week in an autocracy? Like yes, So, while working at this factory, end of the bosses, one woman had her pay deducted whenever she would go to chemotherapy. They're like, oh, you didn't come
into work, you don't get paid. When the workers took over, she didn't have to come into work anymore because she was sick with canvas.
Had cancer.
Yeah yeah, all the rest of her co workers supported her and paid for all of her treatments.
Just you, we shouldn't be so floored by, right, such a human Yes yet duh, Like you got cancer? We I got you girl, like you good?
Like we got you? Yeah yeah, you've worked here forever forever.
It's fine.
Yeah, yeah, like could have been any of us. Yep, Naomi Klein wrote about the Brookman women in two thousand and two, quote, if there's anything to be learned from these surprising Brookman women, it's that the working class already knows how to organize and fight. In Argentina and around the world, original, creative and effective direct action is way ahead of intellectual leftist theory.
Correct.
And the very next day after the women occupied their factory, the country exploded into protest, not as a result, but just as part of the same thing. And if you want to explode your wallet all over.
There, you go, goods and services, just pop a load right on your services.
Yeah, yeah, that's yep, here's the ads and we're back.
I'm sorry about the popping the load guys.
No, no, I set you up for You did set me up for it. Yeah, you're not the only one who sullid yourself there. So these protests pop up all over the country, especially in Buenos Aires in the capitol. And these are called, I mean, there's a lot of different names for different parts, but these are called the Cassalaza pop protests, the stewpot protests, or the saucepan protests, compending on your translation. Yeah, some places will say, it's
like casserole, like casserole dish. I'm under the impression that that's not the case, but my Spanish is like pretty mediocre. This is a classic form of protest where you get pots and pans and you march around banging them. I think of like the kid's book. It's like, is it where the wild things are something? It's like some kids book I have where someone's just like walking around the pot and pan banging on it. It's like the classic, like annoying kid thing to do to piss off your parents.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's a cool form of protest. I've only been around it, like once in Italy when they were mad at the prime minister or something. Most famously, this method has been used in Chile, but it's also been used all over the world. These protests were spontaneous in that they were not like organized or called for by a labor union or by any other specific organization. Later the government is going to be like, ah, it's the peronists they organized it.
That is, of course.
No, Yeah, there's nothing to that as far as they can tell.
One participant said that it just started that someone like went out to their they just like walked outside of the pot and pants started banging, and so their neighbors started banging, and so then people all down the street did it. So people who saw it on TV did it's dope, and soon enough, yeah it's super organic. Yeah yeah, soon enough. Basically, the entire country was mobilized under the slogan kisevan totos they all must go or out with
them all to be more libal. Yeah okay, yeah yeah, And and this was a slogan that then spread to the rest of the anti globalization movement.
This was like.
Argentina was like our shit, this is like this is our high water mark, Like, holy shit, people are going to fucking do something with this, you know, because the people of Argentina basically demanded the end of their entire political and economic system, which they blamed correctly for gutting their economy. And it wasn't like we demand communism or anarchism or anything out there. They're like, they're like, we don't like what's fucking happening.
Yeah, simple, you know.
And this was both the working class and the middle class in the streets together, which is frankly a rare thing. Most of the working class was organized into unions and grassroot networks. So interestingly, the middle class elements actually had some of the more spontaneous rebellion vibe. Although then also you had the unemployed Picutari's right, who were working class and very rowdy. But you have all of these crazy,
rowdy middle class people. When we whitewashed the history of this, it's like, oh, they all went out in pots and pans, and then the government decided I didn't want to be the government anymore. Yeah, there's there's video footage of like middle class people sipping their mate while kicking in the glass panes of banks. Yes, it's so good.
Hey, you guys want to smash this bank right now? Like, let's go get okay, listen, let's go get a couple of lattes. Oh mate, yeah yeah, being silly, Yeah yeah, I know. Mates. Yeah, they yerba yerba, so they go through yerbra mate, you know. And uh and then let's go let's go do some uh, let's go do some direct action. You guys down, Yeah, I'm down. I love it.
Yeah, why not?
Yeah?
And as best as I can tell, the protest didn't start off specifically destructive, but they got more routy more destructive when the state started shooting them with shit and killing a bunch of them, which is a common enough pattern. The reason the middle class was in the street was because the middle class was being robbed.
Two.
The IMF cut funds off to Argentina in December two thousand and one, and all the rich business owners were like fearing a crash and causing a crash, so they converted their pesos to dollars and started taking them out of the country almost overnight. Multinational banks took forty million dollars out of the country.
What yeah, damn.
So it's like it's one of these things where, like a lot of stuff, it's like collapses slow until it's.
Fast, yes, yeah, until you hit the cliff.
And like right now in the US, we're in like slow mode, although we might not be the time you hear this, you probably we're probably still.
In slow mode.
Yeah, and often just stays in slow mode. But then sometimes cliff. So the government instituted what one journalist called uh cortolito, the children's playpen, or more literally the small enclosure, and they froze bank accounts, not just of the multinationals that were like robbing the country, and taking all the money out. They froze it all, so middle class people were suddenly frozen out of their life savings. You could
only withdraw two hundred and fifty pasos a week. You could only do that if your account was pesos not dollars.
So you can't pull your money out.
Yeah okay wow, and soon enough as the crisis pulls on, you can't get any money out.
Damn.
So people have just been robbed of their life saves by greedy, fucking corporations working hand in hand with their government. So they rioted. They smashed up banks while sipping mante. And I don't think sipping mante is not a middle class thing in Argentina. It's just such an evocative image.
Yeah, it's pretty normal. Yeah yeah, yeah, it's like coffee here, like everyone drinks it. But yeah, I just I like, what did what did y'all think was gonna happen? If you, like you shut down the bank, like you telling me my money in there? I just can't have it, Like who's not fighting? Like who not gonna fight for that?
Like?
Yeah, yeah totally. I have worked my entire life for the money that.
Is in that bank.
Yeah, they can't have it.
It's mine.
Yeah, even if it's as simple as like I just let's let's be as middle class as possible. I got Yeah, I got a direct debit for my light build. Yeah you're telling me I can't. So now I'm gonna have a late fee. It is not that I don't have the money. They gonna turn off my lights. Yeah, not because I can't pay for it. Yeah, because you won't let it go. Nah, fam we fight them.
Yeah yeah, and so they all you know, they chanted they almost go another banner read we are nothing. We want to be everything. I think they allowed credit card transactions. Oh, but you couldn't get cash out, and you couldn't convert the money out of paesos. There's like a million different things you can't do.
Yeah. It's kind of shady though, to be like what you can do credit because it's like, okay, yeah, I see what y'all doing. Yeah, that's even more shady. Noah, I want to pay cash. No, you can't have cash, you know what. Yeah, burns place down.
And most of the economy at that point was running on cash for most people as best as I can tell.
Yeah, whack.
Soon enough, the unions call for general strikes. The government called for a state of emergency. So you know, both sides do what both sides do. Yeah, And it's like if you read the like Cliff's notes, they're like, and thirty nine people died in the riots. Cops killed thirty.
Yeah, yeah, say it right, say it correctly. Yeah.
Yeah, nine of them were kids. Many of them were looting, mostly for food. Shop owners and security guards killed another seven people.
I would love I would love to pay for this.
Yeah, no, totally, yeah, exactly, I would.
Absolutely love to buy this. Yeah.
I don't know if you knew this, but we all got robbed just now, of all of our money.
Yeah, go check your account, Go check your account right now, shop owner.
Check, you take some cash out?
Yeah, don't take some cash out your cat, right, just to kind of low go get some twenties, try it, right, I'll wait here, I'll wait Yeah.
And what's interesting is even still with all of this, these protests weren't just like everyone running around losing their mind. They weren't like there was like puppets and street feater and this like celebratory like we are coming together to do this thing, vibe the president. It was not manim at this point, this other guy who's just to not throw in too many names, I'm not gonna includ him
because he's not he's not gonna last much longer. He tried to get the military to intervene, and the generals were like, not fucking up, We're not doing that.
You are on your own, homeboy. Yeah, we did not sign up. But it is, yeah, exactly similar to the US. They have laws about how the military is only allowed to be used for domestic policing in like really specific ways, you know, and they probably could have claimed that one of those was happening. And the generals were like, we're not fucking touching it.
It looks like a parade to me, homeboy.
They yeah, totally.
You shouldn't making the fall for this, Like, yeah, shouldn't have fun with day money, you understand, ask people get like that you messed with day money.
Yeah, you know, I tried to get some money out of earlier today and.
It didn't work exactly. I should look, my son needed twenty dollars for his field trip. I couldn't give it to him. Yeah, it sounds like a U problem.
And so it was the it was the Federal Police, the Border Guard, and the coast Guard out there killing protesters. So next the president goes to censor the news, of course, and the media secretary of the government is like, I'm not fucking the hell you got. Everyone is like this boat is sinking. I love it, Like, get away from me. You've got a fucking plague. So the whole time the president assumed it's the Peronists, so he he goes to the like Pironists, and he rather he goes on the
news to beg the Pironists, this is fucking embarrassing. He gets on the news to beg the Pironas, who are not behind it, to please stop the protests. He will put them into the government as well if they will just stop the protests, and the Pronas are like, we're not fucking.
Joining you either. I look like Drake, Like, bro, you done lost this one. Fam like there's no one you can call. I know that reference, all right, magbe I'm online enough for that, Yes, BBL. Pironis has already went viral. Man, there's nothing you can do.
Hilarious.
Yeah, And so the president resigned and had to be evacuated by helicopter because he couldn't get out by car, and so the the news footage of him fleeing by helicopter is just like it's two thousand l.
Right, yes, just coward puss as. Like if we was in a like we was in New Orleans, yo, puss as.
Yeah, like we were not fucking Yeah, They're like, yeah, we knew he sucks. Now we know you suck.
Knew he was a coward.
Argentina went through five presidents in three weeks. Oh wait, I don't think they were either.
That was that was it? Listen, Margaret. That was a natural, guttural, realcity like everything is, but that was really natural, Like what yeah?
Yeah?
Wow.
And then importantly, and I actually think they did this. I think this is actually why I have pulled out, but I've read it in different confusing ways. They defaulted on their debt to the IMF. They were like, we're not going to fucking pay you and the rest of the world who's in debt as the IMF was like taking notes, they were like, wait, we can just wait.
You could just tell them ukpay.
Like what the fuck? That sounds amazing. Yeah. And the thing that I'm most excited about about these protests, if you ask me, is the alternatives to government that the people formed these neighborhood assemblies, which is what seems to happen all the time during these kinds of crises. We've talked about it extensively during our episodes on the Russian
Civil War. For example, during the uprisings in Argentina, millions of people formed into neighborhood assemblies to make decisions and get things done in their areas in a bottom up fashion. The occupation of factories spread across this country at this time because hundreds of factories, well I thinks of factories had been abandoned by the bosses who were like, oh I'm in debt, everything sucks, I'm leaving, you know, And so hundreds of factories with hundreds of workers each start
becoming occupied. Mutual aid networks are spreading too. Basically, the Piccateo model exploded across the country. One assembly put out a manifesto that I want to read because this is their like, it's just like up on their bulletin board. It's not even a like we published this manifesto for the world or whatever, right, and it's still fucking poetry. What is your dream? Do you remember? The nineteenth of December? That night you said enough of thieves. Yes, you shouted it.
I heard you, We all heard you. We also heard you when you said, I no longer want to be who I was. I don't want them to decide any more for me. I don't believe in any political leaders anymore, nor in judges, nor in union leaders, nor in bankers, nor big businessmen, nor policemen. I felt so much pride to see you and me. It's just that I did not expect so much of you, even less of me. You surprised me because of that, because you pushed me. I am walking to find a way, banging pots, thinking
out loud in assemblies with my neighbors. Where are we going? You ask, Well, we are trying to create, with neighbors a democratic and assembly based system from which our representatives can come forth. The majority express a firm refusal of political parties. There is no space for them in the assemblies.
It's gorgeous. I know, man, we need that. Yeah, oh my god, we have this. I just got like butterflies. I'm like, god, damn, America needs that?
And how And there's actually this thing about because Americans, especially white Americans, I think, see Argentina as like global South, it's all the same. It might as well be Mexico. And not that any of these places are replaceable or each other. But Argentina absolutely was like like we were saying earlier, it was it saw itself as like a Canada in Australia. It also had a really strong protection
of private property. Like and so I think sometimes people see this and they're like, oh, well, people from other cultures are like just better at taking care of each other, and like, okay, sometimes that's true, but like this is still a country that like does it. You're not supposed to do this there. No, you're not supposed to create your own network of things. If they can do it there, it can be done, you know.
Yeah, it's very They really take pride in their Spanish like European ancestry.
So yes, yeah, And so every neighborhood in Buenos Aires had an assembly, and then soon it spread to the suburbs. There's two hundred assemblies in Buenos Aires alone, with an average of two hundred participants at their Every Sunday they had an assembly of assemblies with four thousand people meeting for like four hours. This is the downside to this particular style of vav coach and it takes.
To go to meetin's time, and there's a lot of yeas.
Yeah. And they would break up into committees to address certain issues like health and media, and they would throw parties to bring the community together and help people in neighborhoods like find each other. Each assembly works differently. Most are open to anyone in the neighborhood. One band, bankers and political parties, another band media. One older guy, a shopkeeper said about them, quote, never in my whole life did I give a shit for anyone else in my neighborhood.
I was not interested in politics. But this time I realized I've had enough and I need to do something about it.
Wow.
And so it's not like this wasn't just like waiting under the surface that everyone was just like really close friends with all their neighbors. Yeah, they just made it happen.
I do think too, to your point, there's even even among you know, more progressive kind of people of color.
We often romanticize our ancestral lands are ansenstral people's as if they were as if like you know, being power hungry is like modern like no, like you know, like there were people roaming the African Savannah, you know, lobbying for power against their chieftains, you know what I'm saying, Like, so this so to think that, like you said, like under the surface, they all wanted to go back to this sort of you know, communal lively like, no, this
was hard fought, and it was. And if you're pressed and when pressed to a position, you have people like this shopkeeper that was like oooh, I was out here getting mine. It just the system failed me and I realized I needed each other. We needed each other, you know.
And for me, that's actually a huge sign of hope, yes, is that you look at this and you're like a lot of people you could like look around and be like those that's my political enemy. Oh that's my political That guy voted for Trump, Oh that guy vote for Biden. I hate both of them. So I hate everyone, you know, Yeah, only I am like pure and radical.
Yeah.
And you're like the people who did this revolution in Argentina were the shopkeeper who hated every.
Yeah yeah, yeah, this is Karen and Chad Man. Karen and Chad you got radicalized, you know. Yeah. Yeah.
And some of the stuff is going to stick and some of it is not. And the neighborhood assemblies are not going to stick, but like it's a fucking start. Yeah, And so these assemblies were split. Some assemblies wanted to put pressure on government and reform it. Others wanted to restructure society around the assemblies themselves. But they were getting shit done and they were taking care of themselves and the you know, their neighborhoods, and they were taking over factories.
And we're going to talk about those factory takeovers on Wednesday. The first we're going to talk about your show, which people probably probably already listening to. I hope, so they're not they're missing out, but I hope.
So that's about.
Anyway, every Wednesday, hood Politics will prop We really try to like step our game up. We're doing video ones now hood politics with eyeballs or four eyeballs where there's like zero potty words and so you can, you know, play it around either young or old ears. Yeah. So proptpop dot com hood politics a prop that's really the focus right now. And uh yeah, check me out there.
And I have a substock you can read all the things I write a weekly column basically at this point of trying to spread hope in the face of darkness while also acknowledge while trying to make people acknowledge the goddamn darkness.
And you're like, look, you're a good ass writer. I like, I like, like like full stop.
Just got got my copy. I just got my copy of your book in the mail ship.
Oh that's the other thing I'm supposed to talk about is I have a book that kickstarts like next week. If you're listening to this, called a Sapling Cage, Sophie has a copy. Why don't you have a copy? I got to get prop up guy didn't get well.
We're going to fix the friends of yours that get advanced copies and feel really special.
But if you want a copy, you can back it on Kickstarter, unless you're a problem, which case I'm going to give you.
One courious and I'll still back it on Kickstarter.
Oh thanks, We'll see you on Wednesday, when we won't have two more days have gone by in the saga. Yeah, Trump, but we will. We're recording it in ten minutes from now, so we'll still be still won't have any more information that you.
People in the future do.
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