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July 2, 2020 - Jimmy Dore Show
01:22:39
20200702_TJDS_20200701_Podcast
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Get ready for an outstanding entertainment program.
The Jimmy Dore Show.
Hey, we haven't heard from disgraced actor Kevin Spacey in quite a while.
Let's give him a call.
Hello.
Hello, yes.
Is this Kevin Spacey?
Maybe it is.
Maybe it isn't.
Who's calling, please?
This is Jimmy Door from the Jimmy Door Show.
The who now from the what now?
I do.
I have a show on YouTube.
I know who you are.
What do you want?
Oh, well, Mr. Spacey, we spoke last year, and I suppose I just wanted to catch up with you and see how you're handling all the legal trouble.
What legal trouble?
What legal trouble are you talking about, Mr. Door?
Is it a masseuse suing you for sexual assault?
Okay, first of all, a masseuse is a female.
I was being sued by a male massage person, which is called a masseur.
Oh, oh, oh, like how I played a chantour in a beyond the sea.
Okay, isn't a masseur suing you for sexual assault?
No.
No?
Well, he was.
That suit has been dismissed in court.
What?
Why?
Because he died.
Excuse me?
And I don't know how much you know about the law, Mr. Dorr, but if you were being sued by somebody and that somebody dies, then the lawsuit goes away.
And that's a fact, Jack.
Oh, my God.
There is no God.
How did he how did he die?
Oh, they don't know.
He died under mysterious circumstances, which are my favorite circumstances.
A real nail biter, a real who done it.
I'm kind of feeling sick to my stomach.
Really?
That's strange.
I feel great.
I guess this was a real convenient turn of events for you then, Mr. Spacey, the guy dying.
No, absolutely not.
I was devastated when I received the news.
I extend my warmest condolences to his friends and family.
You really are a terrible person.
Oh, spare me your judgment.
Would you have really done anything differently if you were in my shoes?
Well, first of all, I wouldn't be in your shoes to begin with.
Well, aren't you just a bus scout?
You've got your ear to the ground, Mr. Jimmy Door.
You know how things work.
You could go on your show and claim that my problem went away because Chelsea Clinton killed him with a blow dart during a butt massage, and you might not be wrong.
My God, you're a monster.
Unlike most Cretans, you actually have an idea of how things work in the real world.
So don't give me that schoolboy act.
I'm not falling for it.
You see my case go away.
You saw Epstein's case go away.
You know that this world is ruled by a cabal of hyper-wealthy pedophiles and other sex criminals.
You just don't know exactly how.
But I have news for you.
By the time you figure it out, you'll already be drowning on a dying planet while the rest of us are nestled into our doomsday bunkers in the high Sierras.
Wow.
Wow, indeed.
Wowie, wowie.
And I will have waiting for me a case of 1959 Chateau Lafitte and a Filipino boy of yet to be determined vintage.
Well, Mr. Spacey, I have to say, in real life, you are 20 times as terrifying as any movie villain I've ever seen.
That's the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.
fuck you.
Wow.
Establishment media sets of artists lighting so good luck the bullshit they can't afford fomenting this boat.
Watch and see as a jackdog comedian speeds and jumps the medium and hits them head on.
It's the Jimmy Door show.
Welcome to this week's Jimmy Door show.
We've got a lot on today's show, so let's get right into it.
What's coming up?
Elected Democrats say Black Lives Matter out of the side of their mouth.
Out of the other side of the mouth, order cops to smash heads of protesters saying Black Lives Matter.
Because that's who Democrats are.
They're full of shit.
Also, an inspiring story of bad cops being stopped by good cops.
Just kidding.
There aren't any good cops.
An amazing story of the squad standing up to the Democratic Party leadership and stopping a massive taxpayer giveaway to billionaires.
Just kidding.
They're feckless careerists.
And an amazing reversal, Joe Biden comes out in support of Medicare for all.
Just kidding.
He doesn't care if you die without health care because his big money donors are more important than your life.
Then we talk to labor organizers about how to organize workers during a pandemic.
And we talked to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges about the police state and how governments fail.
Plus, we got phone calls from Al Pacino, Mitt Romney, Sean Connery, Barack Obama, and Harrison Ford.
Plus, interviews with labor leaders who can tell you how to organize during the coronavirus pandemic.
Plus, lot lots more.
That's today on the Jimmy Dore Show.
Jimmy Dore Show.
Hey, this is Jimmy.
Who's this?
Hey, Jimmy, this is Aaron Pacino.
Hi, Al.
How you doing, buddy?
I'm doing great!
Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Jimmy, I'm so alone.
Yeah, I assume you're quarantined like the rest of us, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, you better believe it.
I got an underlying medical condition.
Oh, yeah, what's that?
I don't know what the fuck is going on.
I see.
Very dangerous to be out and about under those circumstances without handlers.
Jimmy, I need my handlers.
Yes, yes, you famously had one assistant whose job it was to remind you to eat.
Otherwise, you'd accidentally go days without eating.
Yeah.
And now my whole team is gone.
They're at home, sheltering in place.
I'm the most confused motherfucker alive right now.
I bet.
Not only do I not have my meal reminder, guy, I gotta make my own food.
Uh-oh.
This situation is unprecedented.
Well, what have you been preparing for yourself?
What kind of food?
Well, Jimmy, I'm always hungry.
So, before my staff left to go hunker down, they very kindly made sure that my larder was well stocked.
But I don't know how any of this works.
Do you have really complicated kitchen equipment or something?
Cabinets!
How do you open them?
What?
I asked Siri.
You know, she was no help at all.
She's being a little bitch right now.
I tried to tap on the metal tubes, you know, on the side of the cabinet, and I pulled at him a little bit.
No dice, nothing doing.
It's like trying to open a clam.
Okay, Al.
That's that you're talking about the hinge of the cabinet.
That's what you knocked on.
The what?
The hinge.
That's the that's not the side of that's not the side that opens.
You need to pull on the handle, which is on the other side of the cabinet door.
Wait, what if that thing?
Nah, it's dangerous.
I'm not touching that.
Al, just pull on it.
It's safe.
I promise you.
I wouldn't let you hurt yourself.
How do you know all this anyway?
Some kind of necromance or something.
Open sesame.
And I see some reasons.
All right, we're back in business.
See, I told you.
Jimmy, I owe you one.
I didn't want to alarm you, but my blood sugar was getting dangerously low.
If I hadn't figured out cabinets in the next 15 minutes, I probably would have dropped dead.
I'm glad we could help you out, Al.
Yeah.
Where are your handlers?
I don't have handlers, Al.
What?
But you're Johnny Big Times now.
Gotta have an authorize, right?
Handlers.
Just because I've had some success doesn't mean I don't know how to take care of myself anymore, Al.
Well, how do you know when to eat?
I usually eat when I'm hungry, Al.
Plus, there are three windows of the day that are more or less set aside for mealtimes.
I got a headache just thinking about what you just said.
This is like time chemistry.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
Well, I gotta go crack into these raisins so I don't die.
Hey, do you know how to open a package of raisins?
No.
How hard can it be?
I'll just claw at it until there are raisins.
That okay, that'll work.
Thanks for checking in with us, Al.
Appreciate it.
Don't leave me.
Hi, everybody.
We have a special guest with us today.
He is chair of the Industrial Workers of the World Organizing Department, IWW.
He was formerly the head of labor organizing in Iceland's second largest union, Epling.
And he specializes in building unions and mass mobilization, something we need here right now.
And he's here to talk to us today about how we can unionize workers during a pandemic.
Please welcome the show.
It's Maxim Baru.
Thank you for being here.
Hi, glad to be here.
Thanks.
I became aware of the IWW just recently because of what happened in Portland at Voodoo Donuts.
And so they're doing a thing called solidarity.
First of all, could you just tell us what the IWW is all about?
Sure.
So the IWW is a labor union started in the early 20th century.
It's been around for a long time and it practices quite a militant, combative, and solidarity form of unionization.
Essentially, like our union model, what we're about is about placing action in all of its forms at the heart of the practice of the union.
A model that affirms the primacy of mobilization over negotiation practices in the fight for social progress and against social regression, primarily at the site of work of where production happens, but certainly not exclusively.
And without excluding negotiations, our primary work concerns about building the kind of social structure which will, above all, give the balance of power in a favorable way to people at the shop floor.
And lastly, what we're about is putting workers at the center of developing their own strategy and setting their own pace of organizing, where they are at the cockpit of what they're doing.
And being in the union is a method and a tool and an accelerator rather than having bureaucrats run other people's organizing.
So that's the kind of union that gets me excited.
That kind of manifesto, anyway.
That's fantastic.
So like I said before, what made me aware of the IWW was the fight in Portland at the Voodoo Donuts to organize them.
Now, they did a different type of organizing there.
And it's called, correct me if I'm wrong, I might be right.
Is it called solidarity unionism?
That's correct.
Yep.
And can you explain to people what that is and how that differs from the normal kind of union organizing that normally takes place?
Sure, yeah, that's no problem.
So normally when people call up a union, what they expect to have to happen from the first phone call is that a union will dispatch them what are called authorization cards, where people will just fill them out.
They will deliver them to the National Labor Relations Board, which will call for a speedy election and which will then descend a SWAT team on the employer, force the employer to sign a contract and then obey that contract.
But the reality of the situation has been for a long time, and especially now, is that the National Labor Relations Board does not function.
It hasn't functioned in a long time, neither in the United States nor in Canada.
And as well in other countries, the equivalents are often very troublesome.
It certainly functions a lot less under Trump.
Trump appointees to that board have instituted, are seeking to institute additional restrictions on how that functions.
And certainly under COVID, what we saw is that the labor relations boards in Canada and the U.S. have essentially ceased to function for a long time.
Now they're functioning in a haphazard manner.
And what we end up doing is we strive to build the kind of social structure at the workplace that can take vague workplace problems, convert them into specific and winnable demands by and with the workers,
and to help them build a kind of strategy and action plan that is unmediated by professionalized union bureaucrats, just informed by people who have been on the scene a long time and have knowledge of best practices and allow the workers essentially to settle matters directly between themselves and their employers through what kind of we use the phrase direct action.
And so in essence, as I said earlier, the model is very much premised on putting preeminence on action and mobilization as the means of delivering what people need and then their ability to defend the concessions that they win, as well as a focus on democracy.
We want to build, we're not there to have a referendum through an election about whether or not the union should exist.
We are there to say when workers band together at the workplace, they are the union.
When workers are the union and they go forth and settle their problems directly with the employer, we want them to be in the cockpit of the organizing, just informed by what we've refined through our experience and best practices.
That's essentially kind of a frame it for people in a functional way.
So you're laying out the process of how it normally works to set up a union.
I remember when I used to drive a forklift in Chicago, we didn't have a union and we wanted to start a union and then we were told you have to call some outside organization.
I didn't know these people.
They didn't know us.
They didn't give a about us.
So it never worked.
And we never, you know, we got some guy sent some bureaucrat sent down from some union somewhere to tell us we can't go on strike.
I mean, it was crazy.
So the normal way you'd normally form a union is that process you talked about, right?
So you have to sign, well, I'm familiar with the card check.
Card check is when everyone signs an intent to join a union.
If you have 50, once you get more than 50%, you're supposed to have a union, right?
Instead of having an election.
Am I right about that?
Yeah, that's right.
And I don't mean to, you know, completely poo-poo that process.
I think that there are times that we have used this process, but we want to, in essence, our model is about using that process and relating to the government in an extremely surgically precise way.
We want to be building the kind of social structure at the workplace.
One of the things that a lot of people don't know is that once even they have a union, who's going to run it?
Who's going to have your negotiations?
Who is going to be there day to day to have meetings?
How are you going to defend yourself when your employer attempts to back out of whatever they've negotiated?
How are you actually going to bring your employer to negotiations?
All of these things require muscle building.
And our model puts the muscle building first and the know-how first.
And essentially, we say the social structure at the workplace is the union.
If we find it advantageous to engage this particular kind of like the legal toolbox, we do.
And we're very effective at it.
But at the same time, one of the things that we've seen over the years is that unions have become more and more dependent on formal labor relations processes.
Sometimes it's been against their will, but a lot of the time it's kind of with their collaboration.
And one of the things that makes this moment special, I just want to say about COVID-19 is that normally a lot of workers are sandwiched in a bad place between the government through the National Labor Relations Board and gigantic establishment unions that are more focused on collecting dues or more focused on they see themselves as a kind of social partner to the business community.
In essence, what a lot of them have become, sometimes, you know, against the will of many of their members, is a kind of labor force supply management sector of the business community.
There's a business community that has a demand for workers and the labor unions, especially for sectors that are very like they're labor intensive and enormous, they end up acting sometimes in their own view as a kind of labor force supply management sector.
In so doing, they kind of want to use these processes that are very slow, essentially like gig work, amongst other changes in the economy, have made the labor relations processes that they depend on ineffective for people.
And what we are doing is returning to unionism 1.0, the Coca-Cola classic of unionism, which is workers and employers settling their matters as directly as possible with their employer.
What do you think would be the key?
This pandemic has just shown all the power that the workers have, right?
I mean, just the grocery store workers, if they could actually come together.
In Texas, the meatpackers in Walmart unionized.
And so Walmart's answer to that was to get, they don't sell meat there.
And that was a big message to the rest of the workers at Walmart.
Don't try doing this.
We'll just get rid of your jobs altogether.
So one of the things the IWW does, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that they don't like specialized unions.
It's like if you work for a company, you're in the union, right?
Isn't that how it works?
So you wouldn't be clerks in one union and meat packers in another and fish people in another.
It would be everybody's in the same union, right?
And tell us the advantages of that.
Right.
So essentially, the heart of our model is kind of what I refer to as a workplace committee.
Now, the workplace committee in a large organization may very well include people.
You know, for example, if we're talking about a hotel, right?
Housekeeping often has sometimes their own issues or their own culture.
And then there's people who work in like the food service area of a large hotel.
And there may be people who work in maintenance of a large hotel.
They may form kind of like, in essence, committees that they can discuss their own issues and put them on the agenda.
But essentially, we want them to form together into a workplace committee that covers that particular branch of the company that ultimately covers as well in the industry.
We refer to it as industrial organizing.
And essentially, we want to avoid the kind of divisions and being played off one another where one set of workers can be played off another set of workers by an employer in the course of some industrial conflict.
And like just to kind of give people a sense in which this could be very effective is now while European unions have many, many problems, and we can go on and talk like a long list about them.
But one of the things that they've been successful at doing is to take a wide swath of sectors of unions, not just industrial unions, but sectors of unions into a union together and to be able to take them on strike together.
This is one of the major obstacles in the United States is that a sympathy strike is illegal.
But this is the kind of, like, if you're going to have workers that are precarious, that they're, you know, they're in terms of financially precarious, which means that they don't have time to participate in the union the way that we would like because they're always working, taking care of their families.
We want to enable them, but it's very difficult.
There may be, you know, racial issues that happen in a particular place.
There may be other elements or maybe healthcare elements.
We want to take workers of a diversity of roles and functions in a particular society.
We want to combine them so that they can go on strike for and with each other.
If you want cafe workers to win, of course they can win on an individual cafe and we have a very good track record of doing that.
But it is much more powerful if you can take workers in the whole food service sector or even, for example, bus drivers.
Bus drivers are on strike not until not only the bus drivers issues are dealt with, but also until the cafe workers or issues are dealt with.
So for example, in Iceland, there's unions that cover the entire, you know, I'll just use it in scare quote, unskilled labor sector in the capital area.
And so we could go on strike with all the basically the entire tourism sector to defend the whole tourism sector, including workers that are doing bus driving that are very expensive, defending workers who are working in very small workplaces where the balance of power against the employer is more difficult.
So in essence, we need to revive this idea of collaboration between unions.
And on that level, another note is that asking ourselves the question, how many collective agreements are opening up in 2021?
How many workers are going to be in a legal strike position?
Why aren't there more dialogues about collaboration about creating a revolutionary motion, revolutionary moment?
There are some of those dialogues are happening.
There are some interesting work happening about it, but this is one of the angles that needs to be revived.
And not just from a perspective of trying to reach a collective agreement.
A collective agreement is maybe a piece that people want as a piece of their organizing, but we want to create the social structure primarily where people in different industries as a sector are combined together and can be mobilized together.
You know, I'm optimistic that workers will rise up in this moment.
You know, in the United States, workers don't have, we don't have Medicare for all.
They don't have, we don't have education paid for at college level.
We have a horrible minimum wage.
Like, how does a general strike get organized?
Is that something you know about?
And is that something you think could happen?
So the unfortunate answer perhaps is that there aren't any shortcuts to it.
There certainly have been revolutionary moments where things take off with less preparation than sometimes people expect.
And the more it happens in a circumstance of underpreparation, the less likely its revolutionary potential is.
The less likely that at the very end of this mobilization that workers will be in the seat of power to be able to decide things going forward rather than changing the seats of our society's managers.
In order for it to be successful, we need to invest the time to build those structures and to change people's minds.
And on that level, unions need to become a values-driven institution.
Right now, for example, there may be a myriad of things the industrial workers of the world are doing, and there may be a myriad of values, but I would say one of our core values, if not the core value, is two words: organize work.
Look down at your shoes, see where you are, look at the Venn diagram between where are you, what is in your capacities, and what is objectively meaningful.
Like what can we, where can we intervene in the economy that will have leverage for it, you know, over society to be able to change what we want changed and act.
Take act in concert with your coworkers smartly, collaboratively, with an association and an organization and kind of take that lead.
One of the problems, so I think there's a huge potential there.
One of the problems is that unions need to become see themselves less as kind of managers of that process and allow that process to organically develop, which if you leave people alone and you give them support, they will develop that.
If you give them guidance and you give them support, but not be the manager.
You know, we're all addicted to our screens.
And any ideas on how to get us off the screens and into the streets in general?
I mean, I think that a lot of people have, I'm one of those people that believes that people's intellectual, moral, emotional engagement in various issues is something that is innate in everybody.
And we need to elicit it.
When there has been an atmosphere of mass mobilization, either in a particular workplace or a whole city or a whole country, and people's interest and investment in social change is kindled.
And if it is crushed, if it is crushed by violence from the outside, or if it is crushed from the rear by the workers' own organizations, it can have such a disheartening effect.
It can have a massively demobilizing effect.
So one of the things that we have to start with understanding is that not only have prior moments of mass mobilization been defeated by violence from exterior, that is, for example, police forces in the state, either directly with violence or through legal action,
which is just a delayed threat of coercion, threat of force, crush people's initiative when it has sprung up, but also largely our own organizations of civil society, whether they be journalistic, whether they be political, whether they be economic organizations, have from the rear sabotaged a lot of organizing, whether they realize it or not.
And a lot of the time, they can understand what they're doing.
Because a lot of the time, the economic organizations that we have, as well as political, they want to see mobilization.
Many of them want to see mobilization, but they're afraid of it because a consequence of mobilization is people wanting to be involved in decision-making.
What the business community would tolerate and maybe even like is for unions to be able to go on strike without needing to mobilize their membership.
They love that because they can make a deal with one person who is the head of some gigantic and bureaucratic union and the workers are just set on strike or removed from a strike like a joystick from the bureaucrat's office.
They're just fine with that.
What they're not fine with is when people get mobilized and they become involved in the running of the union themselves and they become, they set conditions of negotiations, they participate in negotiations and they're sort of setting the pace of it.
I think if we start with that, in my experience, and you go to work where workers are, you go to points of production or you go to places where workers congregate outside of the point of production and you talk to them and you start with the premise that unions have failed.
The union movement has been a gigantic component of the failure that we have that we have seen.
And we need to start with that rebuilding of trust and rebuilding a sense of community.
And this is a huge moment because a lot of workers, they've kind of the rhetoric of the Cold War era and the association of unions with communism has completely disintegrated.
And so people are thinking about it in an open-minded way.
And it's a huge opportunity.
But it's also a huge risk because they can be duped into going to a direction where they'll participate in a union that will essentially just treat them as a kind of supply of labor that the union can then bargain with an employer over.
You want this labor supply?
You have to give it these conditions, but the workers will be not, they won't be in control of their lives anymore than they were before.
So essentially what we want to do is give people a pitch that what we are doing is we're helping working people take control over their working lives.
And I think on that basis, it's not going to be as hard as people perceive to get people away from their screens, but they have to have a meaningful participation in what's going on.
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We're not playing that game.
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Hi, this is Jimmy.
Who is this?
Yes.
Hello, this is Hillary Supporter.
Hi, Hillary Supporter.
How are you?
I am.
I am devastated right now.
I'm sorry to hear that.
Why, Hillary Supporter?
What's wrong?
Excuse me.
What?
I'm sorry, but you are not entitled to demand for me the emotional labor of explaining what is wrong.
Oh, I'm sorry.
It's toxic.
Stop.
Do better.
I'm just trying to have a friendly conversation, Hillary supporter.
Okay.
Well, I don't even have the wherewithal anymore to celebrate the political downfall of the loathsome woman-hating misogynist Bernie Sanders because I just watched the four-part Hillary documentary on Hulu and I am wrecked.
Absolutely devastated.
Oh, I haven't seen that.
Well, you should.
Every American should, because it just lays out there in stark relief how Hillary was absolutely robbed in 2016 by American misogyny.
And it shows the full scale of the injustice done to her by forces of hatred and how she was basically literally murdered.
And it's a well-done, factual, unbiased documentary for once because it was made by Hillary herself.
Like Hillary says, if you want something done right, you got to do it yourself.
Are there any moments in the dock where Hillary reflects on mistakes she may have made?
No, absolutely not.
That's why I loved it.
There's not one second of horseshit like that.
Just four hour-long episodes of an absolute queen basically just saying me into the camera.
It was glorious.
Are you sure Hillary made it?
It says here the director was someone named Nanette Burstein.
Oh, I love Nanette.
You could tell Hillary was running the show because of how it put forward in such an unbiased, capable way, what a giant victim she is.
She was pulling the strings of this thing because she's smart.
Really?
How was Hillary Clinton the victim?
Okay.
There were several instances shown in this documentary of people, just people, just regular nobodies saying rude things to Hillary on the campaign trail.
It's astonishing.
No other candidate has to deal with those sorts of incidents.
Political candidates have to deal with hecklers all the time.
Male candidates, though.
Someone just unfurled a Nazi flag at Bernie Sanders rally the other day.
Are you kidding me?
Oh, crimier ever.
At least it wasn't some sexist pot shot about his appearance.
I'm sure Hillary would have preferred dozens of Nazi flags flying at her rallies over these just random losers telling her what color pantsuit to wear.
Go to hell.
Was Hillary Clinton's family murdered in the Holocaust?
Well, if by her family, you mean the worldwide community women.
And by Holocaust, you mean the Holocaust of women that the patriarchy has been doing for millennia?
Yes.
Yes, she is a survivor.
And Bernie is not technically himself a survivor.
So once again, she's beaten Bernie at his own game.
Wow.
So if Hillary were president now, what do you think she would be doing about the coronavirus pandemic?
She would have stopped it.
Come again.
It would be cured right now.
She's that good and capable.
How?
Never mind.
Look, how are you dealing with the coronavirus, Hillary supporter?
Well, actually, this works out fine for me because I have always self-quarantined.
As I have made clear to your listeners before, I rarely, if ever, leave my apartment due to a combination of anxiety and depression.
Have you ever been diagnosed with these conditions by a mental health professional?
Well, no, but what else could it be?
So you work from home?
No, I do not work.
I have a rolling array of GoFundMes that allow me to pay rent and purchase things I need for myself because of anxiety and depression.
Will you donate today?
No.
Will your listeners donate?
I doubt it.
Can I have a portion of your Patreon?
Like a fixed amount every month?
Because I'm basically the backbone of your shitty show.
Absolutely not, Hillary supporter.
Fine, asshole.
Fuck you.
I don't need your money.
Sorry about your revolution failing.
Bye, Bernie.
Sorry, all the millennials won't get a bunch of free stuff they didn't earn.
Sorry, the adults in the room are saving the Democratic Party.
All these Bernie babies are going to have to earn their health care like everybody else.
So why don't you go get a job at Favor or Uber Eats and deliver food to my apartment so I don't have to leave, you lazy bums.
And if you're good, little millennials, maybe I'll tip you.
Goodbye.
Hillary supporter.
So we have special guests with us today, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists and activists, best-selling author of 12 books, which includes his latest, America the Farewell Tour.
His work can be found in the New York Times and Truth Dig.
Please welcome back to the show.
Friend of the show, Chris Hedges.
Hi, Chris.
How are you?
Hey, I was fired from Truth Dig, so you got to cross that out.
Oh, that's right.
That's right.
I and all of the staff by the progressive publisher because we wanted to form a union.
Yeah, I know.
It's tough.
Some progressive organizations have a tough time with union formation.
Right.
That's kind of a red flag.
First of all, Chris, I wanted to show you this.
This is the headline.
That's their front page.
New Yorkers said enough, so the police rioted.
To me, that's significant because that's white people, those suburban white readers, right?
Yeah.
And so they've had enough.
I don't know.
Well, the police have, there's no, it's so disproportionate.
It's brutal.
They are going after not only nonviolent protesters, but the press.
And this is a daily reality if you're a person of color or lives in a poor neighborhood, but it's kind of new to the white middle class.
Yes, yes, it is.
There was a female reporter, and she was being shot at by police.
And they're like, don't they know it's you?
And she's like, yeah, they're looking right at me.
Like, they were so shocked.
Like, oh, my God.
It's like you could just see the masks being pulled off.
Like, oh, my God, cops aren't really what I thought they were.
It's, And that's the problem.
People keep looking at it as good cops, bad cops.
Even Bill de Blasio, who I know knows better, gave a press conference where he keeps referring to good cops and bad cops.
And we all know it's not about good cops or bad cops.
If you watch the movie Serpico, it's about a culture of policing that is criminal.
And it's a brutal, out-of-control.
They've been trained to be brutal and out of control and over the top and always fear for their life and their life is more important than yours.
And so, do you think, Chris, that people don't grasp the problem?
They keep talking about it in good cop, bad cop dynamics, which means that it'll never be solved.
So do you think it will ever progress to kind of investigating the culture of policing?
No, because institutionally, the police have been militarized and essentially empowered to revoke at will habeas corpus, due process, anything else, because they are the primary form of social control among these pools of what Karl Marx would call surplus or redundant labor.
This has nothing to do with law and order.
It has nothing to do with justice.
It has nothing to do with police reform.
But you've created these vast pockets and deindustrialized areas where people have been turned into human refuse in the eyes of the state, the corporate state, the oligarchic state, and the police, whose function should not be primarily about social control.
The police always are.
There's an element of social control, but there should be good jobs and all this kind of stuff to integrate people in a society.
Now that that's gone, that's the only tool our oligarchs have left, which means despite all this pretty talk about reform and the gaslighting of these cops who get down on one knee, which is really just replicating the behavior of an abusive partner who, you know, when you finally walk out, comes to your door with chocolates and flowers and says they won't do it again.
We have to look structurally at why they're there and why they have been empowered to do what they do.
And that's not going to change.
And you can go back decades.
Every police reform in the name of reform, in the name of professionalization, has only created a more omnipotent and vicious police force.
And the problem is we never talk about those structural issues.
We never talk about the reconfiguration of the economy to essentially push aside, in particular, poor people of color, huge segments of the workforce.
So, you know, we lock up the men if you live in a poor part urban area and we evict the women and children.
And those are, and we sow police terror and terror is the right word.
These are the bulwarks that are used by the oligarchic elite to keep everyone in check.
And that's not going to change until the economic system changes.
That 100% correct.
That's what I've been saying.
That I don't think these protests would be as intense or maybe not even happened if everybody had just gotten their third $2,000 check and was guaranteed health care free at the point of service and their debts were taken care of.
And so if they had felt the government was looking out for them even a little bit, but it's obvious the government isn't.
In fact, the government is their enemy right now.
In the words of Dylan Rannigan, they're a rapacious oligarchy and they're just inflicting pain on people right now.
The treason of the ruling class.
The ruling class no longer has legitimacy.
They have destroyed our capitalist democracy and replaced it with a mafia state.
What the Roman philosopher Cicero called a commonwealth, a respublica, a public thing or the property of a people, has been transformed into an instrument of naked pillage and repression on behalf of a global corporate oligarchy.
We are serfs ruled by obscenely rich, omnipotent masters who loot the U.S. Treasury, pay little or no taxes, and have perverted the judiciary, the media, and the legislative branches of government to strip us of civil liberties and give them the freedom to commit financial fraud and theft,
the loss of control over systems of rulership, the misuse of all democratic institutions, the electoral process and laws to funnel money upwards into a handful of oligarchs while stripping us of power ominously means that the ruling elites can no longer claim the right to have a monopoly on violence.
Violence employed by police and security agencies such as the FBI, which have devolved into occupying forces to protect the exclusive interests of a tiny ruling criminal class, exposes the fiction of the rule of law and the treason of the ruling class.
In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience, Stokely Carmichael warned.
And if your opponent is bereft of a conscience, then state violence is inevitably met with counterviolence.
Tyranny takes the place of reform.
The danger of widespread sectarian violence in America is now very real.
How long can you expect people to watch their children go hungry?
How long can you expect people to watch their loved ones suffer and die because they can't get medical care?
How long can you expect people to be abused by lawless police and a court system designed to railroad the poor into jails and prisons?
How long can you watch the rich profit from your misery?
I would prefer that our revolution issue the poison of violence, which I know too intimately from my two decades as a war correspondent.
But I also know that when everything around you conspires to crush you, the only way left to affirm yourself is to destroy not only the structures and institutions that have oppressed you, but often yourself.
Okay, so let's stop there.
Let's talk about that.
So you say the ruling lead has lost all legitimacy and their monopoly on violence.
So go ahead and explain that a little bit more.
Well, because that defines government in its modern term, and that is that it has the monopoly on violence.
It alone has the right to use violence.
But it can only essentially claim that right if the government represents the consent and the will of the governed.
Once it no longer does, then its legitimacy to monopolize violence is mute.
And at that point, it becomes tyranny.
And that's, I would say, we no longer live in a democracy.
We live in a kind of corporate form of corporate totalitarianism.
Both parties are complicit.
And therefore, the violence that they are using in the name of combating unrest and keeping peace is essentially to protect the interests of this tiny, rapacious criminal class that runs the country.
And so that's, and I think that, you know, in the streets, especially among the millennials, they get it.
This is very different from the 1960s, because in the 1960s, the country was affluent enough that you could get thrown out of college or you could be a protester and then go on and make a middle-class living.
You see figures like John Kerry, who's the height, his moral height was winter soldier and his powerful testimony in front of Congress, and it's been all downhill from there.
He's now one of the richest people in the Senate.
So even the black leadership class was bought off.
But now, because there's been such a monopolization of wealth, nobody can get bought off.
And these kids out on the street are fully aware that they have no opportunities, nowhere to go.
That this is, I mean, Biden is, there's a whole paragraph in that story on everything Biden's done, including passing all of the crime bills and death penalty bills and expanding police forces and capital crimes and everything.
It was all Biden.
And it wasn't a bystander, by the way.
Biden sponsored and pushed this legislation.
So, but the millennials and the kids, they get it.
These oligarchic rulers, this corporate oligarchy has stolen their future, has thwarted any possibility of them finding a meaningful place within the society, of actualizing themselves, of affirming them, of allowing them to pursue whatever their dreams are.
It's all been shut down.
So it's very different from the 60s and therefore far more ominous because as corrupt and awful as the government was in the 1960s, there was still enough of a liberal class within the Democratic Party to be able to respond, not, you know, not in significant ways, but enough to ameliorate the worst of the suffering.
Now that's gone.
There's no, so I look at this situation as kind of unprecedented within American society.
Let me just say this was originally posted on Robert Shear's site, Sheer Post, which after we were all fired, I'm not making this up, after we all fired from Truth Diggy set up with his social security checks.
So I know you have a deep reach in the billionaire class.
So maybe somebody out there watching can go write him a check.
And we all write for it.
It's kind of a mom-and-pop thing.
But anyway, it was originally on Shear Post.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
I didn't know that SharePost had started.
Yeah, yeah.
Him and his kids do it.
Fantastic.
Fantastic.
That's great that, you know, Bob Scheer doesn't need a billionaire.
So do you think other people see the same thing that you're talking about, about that the state has lost their monopoly on violence and that it's legitimate?
Because I keep thinking to myself, you know, if you see six cops running down a dark street at you, you better protect yourself.
So I mean, I don't know what human being, what am I supposed to do as a citizen if I see six cops running at me in full riot gear with club, and they're going to, they're going to maybe even kill me.
They might, you know, do whatever.
So when do so when do people get to use violence against the police preemptively?
Because you can see, well, like, for instance, we saw that horrible video of those two, those two college kids in Atlanta.
Like, it's horrific.
They break their windows.
They tase both of them.
They break the girls' dress.
The guys got, they just unbelievable violence I couldn't conceive in a game, in a video game was being perpetrated on camera to two kids who did absolutely nothing.
And by the way, now all those four cops have been charged.
But my point is, so now if you see a cop and he tells you to stop, so now people are legitimately fearful of the police when they see them.
And is it legitimate for them to use violence against police?
I wouldn't use the word legitimate.
I would just, you know, and this was the point of the piece, that when you shut every avenue for reform down, when people recognize that they're completely trapped, it is inevitable that they will use counterviolence.
Now, that often can be and usually is, I think, self-destructive, but it's the only way left.
It is the ruling elites who determine the configurations of resistance.
And if they don't offer the possibility of addressing the suffering and creating some kind of restitution, then that's what they're going to get.
I'm not going to put a moral quality on it.
I'm deeply opposed to violence, having been around a lot of it.
On the other hand, I was in Sarajevo during the war.
We were completely surrounded by the Serbs who were shelling the city with 2,000 shells a day, constant sniper fire, four to five dead a day, two dozen wounded a day.
It was a trench system, literally.
We knew that if the Serbs broke through past those trenches, a third of the city would be slaughtered and the rest would be driven into refugee and displacement camps.
And that wasn't conjecture because that's what they did in Vucovar.
It's what they did in the Drina Valley.
So at that point, you pick up a gun.
I get it.
You know, we were being bombed in Sarajevo.
People were not sitting around in basements having long discussions about pacifism.
At the same time, that doesn't protect you from the poison of violence.
And that's, you know, that's what I worry, that the ruling elites are so tone-deaf, so myopic, so out of touch.
And let me put Joe Biden at the top of the list, that they won't respond to what has really become my quote in the article, Barbara Ehrenreich, about how being poor in this country is one long emergency.
But of course, with COVID, it's gotten so much worse.
The moratoriums on evictions are about to be lifted.
The stimulus checks, which were a joke, won't exist.
Unemployment benefits will run out.
They're saddled with debt.
The hunger is now becoming hunger.
What was it?
One out of five children are already going and were food insecure before this thing.
Tens of thousands of people are lining up at food banks.
I mean, what do they think is going to happen?
How do they think people, of course, they don't.
They don't.
They are so out of touch.
And that's, you know, I've watched this.
I've watched it all over the world.
It's a kind of frighteningly familiar scenario.
You talk about the causes and you say that the uprising in the streets of America's American cities are not only about the wanton murder by police of yet another person of color, but the frantic fight to wrest back power over our lives.
They go far beyond police brutality, a daily reality for those trapped in our internal colonies where 1,100 citizens are murdered by police every year, almost all unarmed.
The uprisings are fueled as well by the seizure of the institutional and structural mechanisms that once made some form of equality, always imperfect and always colored by animus towards the poor and people of color even possible.
So, you know, you're just kind of highlighting the fact that, yeah, this is more about the police killing unarmed black people in broad daylight and no repercussions.
This is, as we've been saying, this is about just an oppressive oligarchy that is just strangling people.
And so do you think that we're, because Dylan Radigan had predicted we're going to become like Brazil and that we're just going to, we just, that eventually we just accept it and that, you know, slide into authoritarianism and that the they keep like 80 to 85 to 90 percent of the people poor, not starving, but right on the brink.
And that's how they keep control.
Yeah, well, that's it.
I mean, half the country already lives in poverty or near poverty, a number that's going to exponentially rise with 40 million unemployment claims and an estimated, these are government statistics, 25% unemployment by this summer.
Look, the capitalist class wants to keep the working class.
in a state of constant distress so that it expends all of its energy to subsist, to survive.
That's to their benefit.
It makes unionizing impossible because there's always desperate people willing to work for substandard wages and be abused because it's all they have.
So, yeah, that, look, I think we already, in huge parts of this country, I go all over the country for the books that I write.
And, you know, usually the poorest pockets of the country, I wrote a book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, which was literally written out of the poorest pockets of the country, including Camden, New Jersey, which is about an hour away, which per capita is the poorest city in the United States.
We never see it.
You never visually see it.
The stories are untold.
I mean, even Camden, you have to, you drive Camden's on the river right before Philly.
They built the thruways up over the Camden, so you don't even drive through the city.
And that place has literally streets that are abandoned with trees.
There are trees growing out of what used to be the public library.
I mean, hundreds of abandoned buildings.
So, yeah, the rot is extensive.
Detroit, Newark, Cleveland.
I mean, it's endless.
And the capitalist class has every intention of using forms of draconian control like militarized police, like mass incarceration, like the revoking of our constitutional rights by judicial fiat in order to use the iron boot.
I mean, look, all of the animus towards Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders on the political spectrum was a kind of, was not any kind of radical, you know, he wasn't even a great New Dealer because he wouldn't take on the military.
They couldn't even handle Sanders.
As soon as Obama, who, as Cornell West correctly said, was a black mascot for Wall Street, uttered a few very teepid words of admonishment towards Wall Street, they turned on him and all flew their private jets to Boston to inaugurate Mitt Romney, which didn't work out.
But so yeah, it's the capitalist class, which is global.
It's supranational.
It has no loyalty to the nation state.
Ralph Nader calls them traitors, and that is what they are.
They don't want to give up their obscene wealth.
What Bezos has, since COVID increased his wealth by $34 million.
Billion.
Billion.
I'm sorry.
Thank you.
Sorry.
And you had on your show the other day.
I mean, the billionaire classes collectively increased their wealth by $434 billion.
These people profit off of our misery.
I mean, literally, they do.
So why?
They're not going to change that.
So that's, I know.
So what happened the last two times stuff like this happened?
Teddy Roosevelt came along, broke up the trust, gave some rights to workers, stood up with them.
And then a little while, a couple decades later, it was FDR.
And he told his rich friends that if you don't give people some of your money, they're going to take all of your money, which just happened in the Russian Revolution.
And so where is that guy to tell those people?
Wouldn't that be you would think it would be Barack Obama.
Barack Obama's, I just saw a tweet that he's about to give a speech today about what's happening.
And I hope he shakes his finger, wags his finger at looters from his 49-acre estate on Martha's Vineyard.
But anyway, where are the, so that's what's, so where are the rich people?
Where are the leaders who tell the elite class, like, hey, you have to give people at least health care, a living wage, and some debt relief so they don't riot and take over the country.
Where are those people?
They're locked out of the system.
I mean, the Democratic Party in the 90s, when it began taking corporate money under Clinton, also made war against its own liberal wing and pushed everyone out.
And so anybody with a conscience, anyone who stood up and spoke on behalf of the working class was purged.
A lot of people don't know the history, and that's what pushed Ralph Nader to run.
Ralph Nader knows corporate power better than any other American, has been fighting it longer and with more integrity than any other American.
He said there's nothing left in Washington to work with.
And his idea was, and I supported him.
I was a speechwriter, is you pull five, 10, 15 million people into a third party and you create pressure.
That's how politics work.
I mean, it's just basic.
You know, surrendering every election cycle to corporate Democrats, and again, history has proven this, makes it worse.
You've got to make them come to you.
You've got to pose a threat.
You've got to instill fear in them and you've got to stand for something.
And if they don't give it to you, you don't give them anything.
But of course, the whole third party, the two parties have conspired to after Ross Perot got 19%, both the Democrats and Republicans said that's it.
And so I lived through the harassment.
I mean, the people who really went after Nader was the Democrats.
They made it almost impossible to do a third-party run.
They challenged all of his voting lists, not because there was anything wrong with him, but because they were trying to push him up to over a million dollars worth of legal fees to defend it in court.
So, yeah, the two parties are completely complicit and work together to essentially shut out any real leadership.
You have people like Ralph, Jesse Ventura.
I mean, there are people, Howie Hawkins, who's now running as a Green.
I mean, they're there, but they're locked out of the system.
They can't get in the debates.
Remember when Dennis Kucinich, they had these arcane rules.
You had to be in the top five or something.
I mean, and finally, Kucinich made it and they just changed the rules because they didn't want Kucinich to talk about health care.
Yeah, nobody would want to debate Ralph Nader either.
Yeah.
Yeah, of course not.
Of course, that's, I mean, that's why they handcuffed Jill Stein to a chair at the debates for eight hours.
It wasn't because they weren't afraid of her.
They were.
They were afraid of her message and getting out.
And that's why, by the way, used to be the League of Women Voters to care the debates.
They got rid of that.
The Democrats and Republicans formed a corporation.
And that literally get to choose all the rules, but they get to choose who asks them questions.
Right.
Which is amazing.
No.
And it's even worse than that.
They get corporations to sponsor it.
So like the for-profit insurance companies and pharmaceuticals are actually sponsoring the debates, which shows you why you get all these idiots on CNN with their little flashcards asking Bernie Sanders the kind of the questions that their corporate masters want asked and accusing him implicitly of not being able to pay for it and all this kind of stuff.
Now, do you think that there's, again, this is another one of those leaderless revolts or protests.
There's no leader and they don't have a clear set of demands.
So what should needs to happen right now to make some kind of demand on the establishment.
Well, that's the problem.
You know, they can deal with episodic eruptions around the country.
But the fact is we don't have, it's not so much even a leader, but there's no clear ideology.
You know, even the Wobblies, which, okay, they had Joe Hill and Big Bill Haywood.
But it was a pretty egalitarian organization.
But there isn't.
We don't have what we had in the 30s or what we had before World War I, which were these.
you know, powerful progressive.
And let's not write out the Communist Party.
It was a very important element in terms of challenging the power elite.
Why did Roosevelt do what he did?
It's because he was scared.
He was scared of the organized left.
And unfortunately, in the United States, there's been a very effective campaign to stomp out the left and marginal, not just stomp out the left in an organizational form, but silence the voices of the left.
And so, and that worries me.
That worries me because you are going to go either way, revolution or tyranny at this point.
But all of the organized force, including the ideology, which is a form of Christian fascism, it comes now from the right, not from the left.
Yes.
And as we speak, Nancy Pelosi is trying to expand Trump's spying powers.
So she's not, she's not.
So again, this idea that they oppose Trump is just a fake.
It's a phony idea.
It's propaganda.
Nancy Pelosi and Trump are in lockstep on most things.
They even gave him money for his border wall, if you want to know how much in lockstep they are.
And she's right now, as she's reading from the Bible and calling him every name in the world, she's behind the scenes trying to expand his spying powers so he can have more power to spy on his enemies or anybody organizing against him.
And they won't report that on the news.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, the whole news industry is, especially let's talk about the broadcast industry.
I hesitate to even call it news.
I mean, I have strong critiques of my old employer, the New York Times, but I still read it.
But I don't waste my time watching CNN or any of that stuff.
It's info entertainment.
It's vapid.
It's just the news version of ESPN, basically.
That's all it is.
And I'm watching, I watch just because I do the kind of show I do, so I like to get horrible clips of them being horrible so I can show everybody how horrible they are.
And I'm watching the last couple of days and every MSNBC, CNN, and I haven't been turning on Fox because that's just too easy.
That's shooting fish in a barrel in a situation like this.
But they all bring on their expert panels.
And who's on their expert, who's on their expert panels?
Fucking former policemen.
They're all former cops sitting around talking about the problem of policing in America.
Where's Medea Benjamin?
Where am I?
Where is the leader of Black Lives Matter?
Where is nowhere?
Anyone?
It's always former police.
They brought on experts and they never bring on anybody who's going to have a critical thing to say about the police.
It's amazing to see that happen.
And are you still amazed at that?
No.
Same thing with war.
I mean, war or, you know, they clapper.
I mean, Clapper should be in prison.
Brennan, Petraeus, all of these people.
Look, I spent seven years in the Middle East.
I was the Middle East Bureau chief for the New York Times.
I speak Arabic.
The whole lead up to the invasion of Iraq, I was watching, as you say, these so-called experts who'd never been to the Middle East, were linguistically, historically, and culturally illiterate, didn't know anything they were talking about, but they spun the dominant narrative.
So they gave them a seat.
It's not, again, it's scripted.
It's not about any real honest debate or discussion.
It's about buttressing conventional power and the conventional narrative.
That's it.
That's what they do.
And if you buck it, you're out.
I mean, Phil Donahue, Jesse Ventura, and at that point, I'm going back to the Iraq war.
They're gone.
I mean, they're disappeared.
Ed Schultz dared even cover Bernie Sanders, and they fired him for doing that.
So all the people who are hosting shows at MSNBC followed the rules and they obeyed commands to not cover Bernie Sanders.
That includes Rachel Maddow.
That includes Chris Hayes.
When they were given the order, they went along.
And when their colleague didn't and got fired for it, they shut up.
That's what $30,000 a day does.
And I'm not saying I would resist it.
I'm saying no one's making the offer to me yet.
Let's talk about infiltrators into the protests, which I think is really important.
People don't realize.
I've pointed out cops are often responsible for setting fires and doing property damage.
But let's start with COINTELPRO.
Can you tell people what that was?
Right.
So this was a kind of secret plan that was revealed by activists who actually broke into an FBI office outside of Philly and got the documents and sent them to the Washington Post.
But it was a heavy infiltration.
And let's remember now that the resources the state has are far expanded from what they were in the 1960s.
And they would carry out all sorts of dirty tricks in terms of surveillance, in terms of black propaganda, in terms of threats, in terms of turning public opinion against organizations.
That was COINTEL PRO.
But of course, now what's happening internally, which we can't see, is far greater and more pernicious.
And I used to tell the kids in Zuccotti Park, you just have no idea the resources the state has.
And the state, I mean, this, again, I've got to go back to the media.
I mean, let's be clear.
Almost all these protests, 99% of the time, are peaceful protests.
But the images they hit you with is that target burning or that brick going through a window.
And so that becomes the dominant image of the protest.
And that is really a way to demonize the protest.
I've been very critical of the black bloc.
Antifa is split between those who support kind of property violence or attacking property and those that don't.
But let's talk about the black bloc.
I know a significant portion of those people are cops.
First of all, they get to cover their faces.
But the idea is you want to make the wider public frightened of the movement so that you diminish the size of the movement.
It makes it easier to control.
And they're there in force.
I mean, there are large numbers of undercover people.
We've seen it with Muslims.
If you go back after 9-11 and look at all of the quote-unquote terrorism trials, it's all these dead-ender, these poor kids from Somali who can barely read, who get enticed by FBI agents who come in and show them how to make the bomb and give them the wires.
And then, yeah.
And that's literally 90 plus percent of all the terrorism cases.
And that's the same here.
I mean, they provoke it.
It's intentional.
And they know what they're doing.
You can read counterinsurgency manuals.
They're not there online.
And that is just a fundamental tenet of any counterinsurgency operation is that you demonize the movement, you make people frightened of it, and then it's easier to crush.
And I know that's happening across the country.
So I've been having these Twitter spats with people who want to delegitimize these protests by saying it's, you know, Antifa and just focusing on Antifa.
And so I keep saying, I would like to join Antifa.
Can you tell me where I send my dues?
Can you tell me where these meetings?
This guy, Scott Adams or something, he tweeted out that you should leave your phone at home because the FBI is onto Antifa.
If you're going to an Antifa meeting, you should leave your phone at home.
And I'm like, where are these meetings?
I would love to go to one.
Who's the leader?
Can I email him?
Do they have a headquarters?
If Antifa is so powerful that they're controlling every city, big and small, inside this country right now to the point that they can shut them down, you'd think they'd be easy to find, but they're hard to find.
Now, I know that a thing called Antifa exists, but not in the way the right wing wants us to believe, right?
Yeah, of course.
I mean, and also the idea that they're terrorists.
I mean, on the spectrum of terrorism, of world terrorist groups, they're the equivalent of the Boy Scouts.
They're tiny groups.
We dealt with them in Occupy.
They're certainly not behind the protests.
Look, did you see Susan Rice blaming Putin for the protests?
Yes, of course.
So did John Cusack.
Oh, really?
I mean, Russia Gate is a RussiaGate is officially a diagnosable mental illness.
That's right.
They've got all the Russians showed up in Minneapolis.
And no, it's just, well, that's what, you know, despots do.
They seek to blame any kind of legitimate dissent on a foreign power and turn you into an enemy of the people.
That's as old as, you know, I don't know.
It's been around forever.
But it's just insane.
Or blaming it on Tifa.
It's a way by the ruling elites to divert, deflect attention from their own responsibility for what's happened.
Do you know anything about Antifa?
I know very, very, I was in an Antifa quote unquote protest in Portland about a year ago.
It was the Proud Boys and then Antifa showed up.
It was mostly theater.
It was really, it was really theater.
Nobody there I was afraid of at all.
Right.
It's mostly theater.
Yeah, I've written about them.
They don't like me and I don't like them too much.
I don't think I actually don't have a problem.
I mean, Ishmael Reed, who's a great friend of mine, lives in Oakland.
He was very angry at Antifa for showing up in Oakland during Occupy and smashing the windows of local businesses.
He look, he says, I don't have a problem with smashing windows, but drive up to La Jolla, where Romney lives and smash his windows.
And that's what's, by the way, interesting about this uprising is they're not burning their own neighborhoods.
Fifth Avenue in New York got shellacked.
Now that's different.
And it shows a kind of class consciousness, which, you know, I don't think that property destruction or attacking the police is it's I understand it, but that's not the same as to condone it.
I don't think that that's going to be effective.
I mean, I think what's effective in a kind of dark way is that idiot Trump taking peaceful protesters outside the White House and using pepper spray and rubber bullets to remove them so he can stand in front of a church in his welcome to fascist America speech.
That's really that that will ignite the protests.
Well, he actually lost Pat Robertson even on that one.
So like that's that's the exact demographic he's actually targeting with that.
Trump thinks he's reaching and solidifying.
And Pat Robertson came out with a video saying, no, Mr. President, no, that this, he, he's like, that's not cool is what he said.
And I didn't know Pat Robertson started smoking marijuana, but it was nice to see him say, it's not cool, Mr. President.
And so the very people he's targeting, he's losing.
And the problem, though, is that if Trump loses, we get Joe Biden.
Yeah.
And that, so I just, but before we get off on anything else, I want to just go back to this one more thing about infiltrators.
I, you know, like when Ferguson, I remember I was on the Young Turks when the Ferguson fires happened and I was on the panel and they were like, oh, why would these people burn down their own neighborhoods?
And I'm like, I bet you half of those fires are insurance fires and the other half were started by the cops.
Right.
And the people on the panel, the Young Turks, looked at me like a Martian just came down and shit me out of an egg.
And I'm like, where did you guys grow up?
Do every one of you grow up in a cul-de-sac?
Is your middle name cul-de-sac?
Have you guys ever met a cop in your fucking lives?
Anyway, so I just want to make people realize if you see a fire.
Oh, by the way, there's a video of tape that I have in my computer.
I don't have it at the ready, but of these young black kids, I think they're in Dallas or Atlanta, and they found these crates of bricks in the middle of the street.
They just, there's no construction project, but there's a crate of bricks just sitting there and they didn't take the bait.
And it happened in San Francisco, too.
It's right here.
They put them in the middle of the street.
They're going to set them right up on the rail.
Yeah, I know what building this is.
I ain't even going to say what name it is.
Hey, where do them bricks go to?
Where do they set up?
Where do the rooks are going to be?
You got to do better.
Ain't no damn construction.
You got to do better.
Ain't no damn construction around here.
I see you.
Ain't no damn construction on here.
You're just going to set a pound of bricks right there.
Listen, I did zoomer duty three months ago.
Y'all don't keep no bricks right there.
Do better.
Do better.
George, George.
I see you.
They do this all over, right?
Where they put bricks and they try to incite violence in that way.
Yeah.
No, that's what they want.
Because, you know, if a crowd becomes violent or there incites a clash with the police, then you have to remember there are large numbers of people who won't go into the street.
Undocumented people who can't get arrested, elderly people, disabled people, children.
You know, you wash away a huge part of the demographic.
I think one of the things that frightened the state in occupying Zuccotti the most was on the weekends when all these white couples would come with their kids and strollers walking up and down the street.
And you saw the same kind of attempt to demonize Occupy as you're seeing here.
And it also deflects attention away from the fundamental questions about police violence, structural and institutional racism.
It gets you talking about something else rather than what you should be talking about.
Do you think a leader will emerge that there will be demands made and met?
Do you think anything good will come of this?
You can never tell.
I mean, you know, I learned that in Eastern Europe in the revolutions where all of the leaders, whether in East Germany or Czechoslovakia or Romania or anywhere, well, in Czechoslovakia, it was a little different because you had Havel, but they did emerge in some places and they didn't in others.
It's impossible to tell.
I mean, I hope so.
I think these kids have got it.
I think they figured it out.
I don't think they're Buying the game.
You know, I think they're very politically astute.
So, and there's also subterranean, you know, movements that the mainstream press is totally unaware of.
I remember after Occupy, I did a bait, did a debate with the anarchists, and it was packed.
It was in New York City.
It was hundreds of people, and it was live streamed all around the country.
And I thought, this is huge in terms of the churning of ideas and stuff, but it's completely below the radar.
It's unseen.
And Alexander Berkman writes that.
He writes about, you know, revolutions, the old system crumbles and decays.
It appears.
The facade remains and nobody sees it.
And he said it's like boiling water, that the wider society in a kettle, the wider society doesn't see it until the whistle goes off.
So certainly that churning, that boiling is there, that ferment.
But you can go anyway.
I mean, you know, in the 1930s, Europe went one way, we went another.
That's impossible to predict that there are capable leaders out there without question.
I mean, I've met a lot of these kids, kids.
I'm old, you know, probably in their 20s or 30s.
I mean, they're really impressive.
They've been locked out of the mainstream, but that doesn't mean they're not capable of immense leadership.
I see movements.
I just saw a video of the leader of the Sunrise movement, which is an environmental group.
And she put out a video touting her excitement over the task force that she's been appointed to between Bernie and Joe Biden.
I immediately thought, oh, God, another co-optation of a movement.
And that's exactly what that is.
Would you agree?
Yeah.
I mean, all those movements, moveon.org, they've all been co-opted.
That's, you know, I mean, it's political naivete.
They play to their ego.
They give them a little money.
It's kind of sad how easily people are bought off.
Randolph Bourne and Emma Goldman and Jane Addams all wrote about this, Eugene Debs with Wilson, who did the same kind of thing.
You know, how fast people, but, you know, then there are those who won't.
And they're out there too.
So let's hope they prevail.
Hey, you mentioned Eugene Debs.
I saw the other night.
Bernie was doing a live stream dedicated to the memory of Eugene Debs.
Yeah, Bernie, Bernie, there's quite a wide divide between him and Debs.
Remember, Debs is in prison.
Bernie go to prison.
Okay.
So, Ed, do you have any, you know, any advice to people in a time like this?
No.
I mean, I think people, I think everybody, my sense is that people out in the street understand that this issue is far, far beyond the indiscriminate, lethal violence of police, and that what's coming within the next few weeks and months is going to make life exceedingly difficult for, at this point, the majority of Americans.
And unless we rise up against this system, they will use the very draconian forms of control to really create a world of masters and serfs.
I mean, when your government monitors you 24 hours a day, which they do, we're the most photographed, monitored, eavesdropped, watched population in human history.
You can't use the word liberty.
That's the relationship of a master and a slave.
When you look at how they treat the most vulnerable within our society, especially with the prison system, you see exactly what they want to do to the rest of us.
And I think that awareness or consciousness is far more widespread, especially among younger people who have seen every avenue shut to them, are many of them struggling with tremendous amounts of debt peonage, student loans, and everything else.
I think they get it.
This is really an existential fight.
It is about the overthrow of a corporate oligarchy.
And I'm not naive enough to tell you we're going to succeed.
But if we don't succeed, then we are going to see established in the United States a very dark and frightening kind of corporate tyranny.
And finally, I would just say that resistance is a moral imperative.
It doesn't in the end matter whether we win.
As I've often said, I don't fight fascists because I'm going to win.
I fight fascists because they are fascists.
And that allows us to at least retain our dignity, our integrity, our honesty, and our own power in the face of the monolithic power of the state.
Did you ever just think of moving to France?
I lived in France.
I have a Swiss passport and a Canadian wife.
I'm covered.
Nicely done.
Okay.
Ah, geez, it's Vladimir Putin on the phone.
Yellow.
Do not yell on me, Jimmy Dorr.
You know who it is.
I know who you are.
I know it is me.
You know it is I. We know each other.
No?
Yes.
Whatever.
Hi, Vladimir.
You will not show courtesy to congratulations with me on our ceasefire with Ukraine.
Well, of course, that's good news.
You know what?
I blame Putin.
Like that, I crack myself up really sometimes.
But seriously, this is Susan Sarandon's doing in your face.
Seriously, I'd like to laugh with you, but I'm really tired of getting called a Russian asset, Vladimir.
I know what you mean.
I get called that all the time.
Oh, man, I'm on roll tonight.
Hey, you know, there's a lot more to that phone call, but we don't have time in today's podcast.
How do you hear the entire phone call?
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Today's show was written by Ron Placone, Mark Van Landowitz, Steph Zamarano, Jim Earl, Mike McRae, and Roger Rittenhouse.
All the voices performed today by the one and the only of the inimitable, Mike McRae, who can be found at MikeMcRae.com.
That's it for this week.
you be the best you can be, and I'll keep being me.
Don't freak out.
Do not do not freak.
Do not freak out.
Do not freak out.
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