True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 71: Listen, I Wanted Quar Gossip Too
Aired: 2020-05-25
Duration: 01:12:15


=== Call Her Daddy Drama (03:04) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey, this is Dave Portnoy.
[00:00:04]  I can't do it, man.
[00:00:05]  I fucking.
[00:00:05]  When did you learn his name?
[00:00:09]  I'd heard it before, but I learned his name when he took over the feed of a podcast I really like and announced how he helped ruin it.
[00:00:19]  But recently, you know, I'm looking into this guy.
[00:00:22]  I don't really understand.
[00:00:23]  How is this guy this rich?
[00:00:25]  Podcasting Empire.
[00:00:28]  Jesus Christ.
[00:00:28]  He's Irish, it sounds like.
[00:00:30]  Portnoy.
[00:00:33]  I'm sorry.
[00:00:33]  I don't understand.
[00:00:34]  What's the story with the girls?
[00:00:37]  I really was hoping I wouldn't have to talk about this on air, but there is a podcast in the Barstool Sports Podcast Network called Call Her Daddy.
[00:00:47]  Yeah, you talked about this, by the way.
[00:00:48]  You're an early adopter of Call Her Daddy.
[00:00:50]  Extremely.
[00:00:51]  Yeah, yes.
[00:00:52]  I'll just say I adopted it in its infancy.
[00:00:57]  That's a very, it's a, it's a, I mean, I, you know, it's like, they're like, I kind of think of them as like coworkers of mine, right?
[00:01:02]  Like, I'm a podcaster.
[00:01:03]  They're podcasters.
[00:01:04]  Like, I podcast with a girl.
[00:01:06]  Each of them individually podcasts with another girl, being the other girl.
[00:01:11]  And, you know, I talk about a bunch of things.
[00:01:13]  They talk about a bunch of things.
[00:01:16]  And their podcast ended.
[00:01:18]  What?
[00:01:19]  Wait, it's over?
[00:01:20]  Well, they stopped.
[00:01:21]  I think they put their last episode on like a month ago.
[00:01:24]  They're on podcast strike.
[00:01:25]  Yes.
[00:01:26]  Yeah.
[00:01:26]  Yeah.
[00:01:27]  There's some deal with, you know, they were trying to shop it around.
[00:01:30]  Apparently one of the girls' boyfriends, which I was very disappointed to learn existed, maybe works for HBO Sports or something.
[00:01:39]  I couldn't really follow it.
[00:01:41]  But at the end of the day, they're not putting out new podcasts.
[00:01:44]  And it's been, I'll be honest with you guys, it's been tough.
[00:01:47]  Like, it's been tough for me.
[00:01:50]  But you're making it through.
[00:01:52]  Yeah.
[00:01:52]  I mean, I've been recording sort of my own fan tribute, Call Her Daddy, episodes.
[00:01:58]  What's it called?
[00:01:59]  Call me daddy.
[00:02:24]  Welcome to call me daddy.
[00:02:25]  No.
[00:02:26]  Brace's podcast about being a young girl in a big city.
[00:02:32]  No.
[00:02:33]  Nope.
[00:02:33]  Stop.
[00:02:34]  Fuck.
[00:02:34]  Oh, sorry.
[00:02:35]  I didn't.
[00:02:36]  Sorry.
[00:02:36]  I thought it was Thursday.
[00:02:38]  It's Friday.
[00:02:38]  Cool.
[00:02:39]  Welcome to Truanon.
[00:02:41]  My name is Brace.
[00:02:42]  I'm joined here by...
[00:02:44]  I'm Liz.
[00:02:45]  Hi.
[00:02:45]  Hi.
[00:02:46]  And join, as always, by producer Young Chopsky, who also, of course, produces Call Me Daddy.
[00:02:54]  We're back in the game, baby.
[00:02:56]  71.
[00:02:57]  Episode 71.
[00:02:58]  Here we go again.

=== Parents Accused of Trafficking (04:12) ===

[00:03:04]  I'm excited for this one.
[00:03:05]  I love doing research.
[00:03:10]  Love digging into the archives.
[00:03:12]  Yeah, this is, how do I say, we're trying to stay on the pulse, the media pulse.
[00:03:20]  We're out in the streets.
[00:03:22]  We're seeing what the kids are talking to.
[00:03:24]  We're on the trending topics.
[00:03:26]  And we've got a trending topic this week.
[00:03:29]  Yeah.
[00:03:30]  Would you mind giving a little bit, start sort of giving the background of this for listeners of ours who didn't sort of see what happened?
[00:03:38]  All right.
[00:03:39]  So last week, I believe it was last week, time like barely exists for me now.
[00:03:45]  Was it last week?
[00:03:47]  I don't know.
[00:03:47]  It depends.
[00:03:48]  I mean, let's just say it was last week.
[00:03:50]  I think it was last week.
[00:03:52]  I mean, we're recording this in what, January of 2020?
[00:03:54]  This is one of the ones we're going to put out in May, I think.
[00:03:57]  Yeah.
[00:03:57]  Okay.
[00:03:59]  Okay.
[00:03:59]  So last week, the New Yorker staff writer and I believe New York Times best-selling author, Gia Tolentino, who I think unironically has been called a voice of a generation or a voice of the generation, excuse me.
[00:04:18]  Gia Tolentino age.
[00:04:20]  It's my generation.
[00:04:21]  So she last week she posted a personal blog.
[00:04:27]  I think, you know, I should say, I think our listeners might be familiar with who she is, but she's quite famous.
[00:04:32]  She started as a blogger at Jezebel and Glocker, went to the New Yorker.
[00:04:38]  She, like I said, best-selling book.
[00:04:40]  It's called Trick Mirror.
[00:04:44]  It's quite popular.
[00:04:44]  Anyway, so she posted a blog post last week at gia.blog slash listen dash I dash wanted dash core dash gossip dash two.
[00:04:59]  So it's called I Wanted Core Gossip Two?
[00:05:03]  No, that's the name of the hyperlink, but I wanted to say it out loud because it's very odd to me.
[00:05:08]  And basically, she has this blog post where she's detailing a rumor that I had actually never heard before, but she said was circulating around the internet that her parents were human traffickers.
[00:05:24]  And this is her words, by the way.
[00:05:27]  And this is something that I actually was not aware of as a rumor.
[00:05:32]  Were you, Bryce?
[00:05:33]  Do you know how excited I would have been if I had heard that a journalist's parents were human traffickers?
[00:05:39]  No, I hadn't heard this.
[00:05:40]  I mean, I'm sort of like, I'm aware that this person exists, but I don't, you know, I don't think I've read anything.
[00:05:52]  Maybe I have, but like, I'm not like familiar with her auviur.
[00:05:57]  Uber?
[00:05:58]  Uber.
[00:05:59]  I'm not familiar with her Uber.
[00:06:01]  Fuck, I thought I was doing that right.
[00:06:03]  I was looking at your guys' faces to see.
[00:06:05]  I literally thought, yeah, I thought you were, I don't know.
[00:06:07]  No, no.
[00:06:08]  But anyways, I know who she is.
[00:06:11]  I actually didn't know she wrote from New Yorker.
[00:06:12]  I knew she worked at Gawker Jezebel, one of those things.
[00:06:15]  And I know she put out a book.
[00:06:17]  But I had not heard the human trafficking stuff.
[00:06:19]  So it must have like, I mean, obviously it's out there, but it had not made it out there enough for me to see.
[00:06:26]  And I feel like I'm a pretty good bellwether.
[00:06:29]  Yeah.
[00:06:30]  I think that she, my sense is that she was trying, she was like, maybe she fancied herself a kind of like public relations operative and was like trying to get ahead of the story or something.
[00:06:44]  But it kind of, to me, it just sort of came out of nowhere and I was very confused.
[00:06:48]  Yes.
[00:06:49]  But so she writes, a post was circulating on Tumblr about it and on Twitter.
[00:06:54]  This was the week that quarantine boredom escalated to the point that on Monday, people were trying to get Mitzki and Arca literally don't know what that means.
[00:07:06]  Are those people?
[00:07:07]  I don't know.
[00:07:08]  Arca sounds like a brand.
[00:07:10]  Yeah, I don't know.
[00:07:12]  Mitzuki and Arca for their parents being respectively CIA and wealthy.

=== Details Matter (15:03) ===

[00:07:17]  And by Friday, everyone was rejoicing in what passed for an Allison Roman scandal.
[00:07:23]  People were posting about how my parents were human traffickers.
[00:07:29]  Bom.
[00:07:29]  Dropped a bomb.
[00:07:30]  No idea.
[00:07:31]  So she continues, around the time I was born, my grandmother founded an agency placing nurses from the Philippines in U.S. hospitals that were experiencing a skilled labor shortage.
[00:07:42]  Soon after, she and a business partner began placing Filipino teachers in U.S. schools too.
[00:07:48]  When my family moved down to Houston from Toronto in 1993, my dad joined the company, which continued to bring nurses and teachers over through a lawful process, typically of the many recruitment agencies of this kind.
[00:08:03]  Specifically on the side of the teacher program, the company sponsored school district personnel to travel to the Philippines and meet with qualified teachers who they might be interested in hiring.
[00:08:15]  The company began the lengthy process of bringing them to the States with H-1B visas, filling a petition, waiting for approval and issuance.
[00:08:22]  So she kind of like, she goes through, she says, my dad worked to get those teachers rehired in other districts for the batch of teachers for whom once they had arrived in the United States, they no longer had jobs, right?
[00:08:39]  She tried to get those, he tried to get those teachers rehired and placed all of them but for successfully.
[00:08:46]  ICE, then a brand new agency with a directive to protect America from illegal immigration, investigated the displaced teachers whose visa petitions bore the name of the school district that they had extended the job offers before declining rather than the school districts where they eventually worked.
[00:09:03]  In 2004, to their horror, my parents were charged with a battery of things that, if they were found guilty, would add up to over 100 years in prison for each of them.
[00:09:11]  The counts included alien smuggling, harboring, and transporting aliens, conspiracy to defraud the government, money laundering, and more.
[00:09:19]  The company's open, earnest, lawful work helping fellow Filipinos move to America for good jobs and teaching had been swiftly reframed as hideous criminal activity.
[00:09:34]  So, you know, the blog post is much longer than this.
[00:09:38]  And basically, it keeps going, you know, not really into a lot of detail, which I don't falter.
[00:09:46]  I don't really falter for, I guess.
[00:09:48]  I don't really know exactly what she was trying to do here.
[00:09:50]  I just, I'll be honest with you, I would not have written it in the first place.
[00:09:54]  No, no, I would not have either.
[00:09:56]  I know, I know.
[00:09:57]  I don't really totally know what to say to any of this.
[00:09:59]  But she, you know, the post kind of turns, and then she, you know, as is, you know, from what I've read of her writing, this seems to be sort of a signature move.
[00:10:12]  She sort of turns it back onto herself to kind of reflect on how this whole situation is for her.
[00:10:20]  And, you know, she writes on, you know, she talks about how, you know, this moment is so intense.
[00:10:26]  I, you know, I don't know how to process this.
[00:10:30]  You know, I don't have the emotional capacity to be angry about it.
[00:10:35]  I mostly wish I weren't so far away from my family right now.
[00:10:37]  I wish that I could write long paragraphs here about my parents as the people close to them know them.
[00:10:42]  Blah, And so it's quite long.
[00:10:48]  I mean, I don't know.
[00:10:49]  I guess we can direct people to the post.
[00:10:51]  What's your sense of it, Brace?
[00:10:53]  I found it very vague.
[00:10:56]  And once I sort of looked into the details of this and just in the details of how this process works, not just in this specific case, but in the cases overall, I did notice that there were some things emphasized and some things either absent or totally de-emphasized.
[00:11:13]  Like the human trafficking angle, you know, like I, you know, that, that, it sort of starts saying about, you know, it's talking about this really shocking proposition, right?
[00:11:21]  You know, my parents were accused of human trafficking.
[00:11:25]  And of course, that's ridiculous.
[00:11:27]  And I mean, when you actually get into the details of how these schemes work, I mean, you can make the case that it's human trafficking, absolutely.
[00:11:34]  I mean, more specifically, I would think you would call it labor trafficking, but it's some of the other details that aren't even necessarily illegal, necessarily illegal, that I found a little troubling.
[00:11:44]  And again, once like once I are extremely troubling, I should say.
[00:11:49]  We'll get into it.
[00:11:50]  And so, you know, when I first read this post, I had not read any articles about the specific case.
[00:11:57]  I knew generally how these things worked.
[00:12:00]  And so I immediately had my suspicions.
[00:12:03]  And, you know, it's, I hate to be when there's smoke, there's fire guy.
[00:12:09]  But sometimes the smoke is of a, of, of, of, you know, there's enough of it, right?
[00:12:15]  To where you know that something must maybe be going on.
[00:12:19]  Well, what's, I think what was so weird just from the blog post is, and we're going to get into this, you know, toward the end of the episode, but basically she posted this and, you know, and I should say this is how she ends the piece.
[00:12:34]  No matter how many ways I tell them how grateful I am for the bone deep familiarity with injustice that I acquired through watching what happened to them, their case solidified my ethical commitments.
[00:12:46]  It clarified my understanding of power, of truth, and complication.
[00:12:50]  I learned from their life trajectory as I had to.
[00:12:54]  And I hope one day under a different administration that I get the chance to report it all out.
[00:13:02]  So, you know, there's this very like odd angle that she takes where she is somehow the victim in this situation of scandalous rumor-mongering.
[00:13:15]  Yes.
[00:13:16]  Which is technically a capital crime in places like Singapore.
[00:13:20]  But I think what was really shocking and what really ended up kind of, I mean, catching even more like ire than even her initial blog post was the insane response that it received from what I think we could call the first responders of Twitter media.
[00:13:41]  Yeah, it was, it was like, I mean, it was an atom bomb of love and adoration and, ugh, this is so terrible.
[00:13:51]  I'm sorry that people are such meanies.
[00:13:54]  And I think that is, like you said, more than the blog post, or not equally to the blog post itself, just blew my fucking mind.
[00:14:04]  Yeah.
[00:14:05]  Yeah, the like amount of like fist pump emojis and like, we got this and, oh my God, I'm so sorry for everything you've had to endure, et cetera, et cetera, love and solidarity that came from what is now people who kind of called them out as the blue check mafia or whatever we want to call them on Twitter.
[00:14:32]  You know, were proffering was just like, I couldn't believe it.
[00:14:37]  I have never seen that was the most, that was the most solid form of solidarity that I've seen in like a decade.
[00:14:48]  And what struck me so much is how completely across, I mean, supposed ostensible political lines it went.
[00:14:56]  Like you had from basically the left to the, you know, to the liberal left to the actual, you might call them quote unquote socialist left to the to the liberal right.
[00:15:08]  Basically everybody uniting in literally saying solidarity to you, which I think is what sort of drove me crazy because we saw, I mean, we'll talk about this more later, but seeing sort of the language of labor repurposed to show your adulation and your adherence to this sort of code of like, you know, we're all in this together, us being people with New York media jobs.
[00:15:32]  Right.
[00:15:34]  Yeah.
[00:15:34]  But, you know, I do want to like kind of pivot for a second because I think, you know, much to, I would, I think the dismay of Gia, this story actually isn't about her.
[00:15:46]  No.
[00:15:47]  And it's, you know, I want to be clear here.
[00:15:49]  Like people are not responsible for their parents, right?
[00:15:53]  No, absolutely not.
[00:15:54]  No, yeah.
[00:15:55]  Like that, that's why, like, when I said earlier, like, I just wouldn't have commented on it if I was here, her, because it's like, you know, you're, you are not your parents.
[00:16:04]  Like, you don't, you, you know, I mean, in a case like this, I, I, you know, I don't know what I would have done either if I was in that situation.
[00:16:11]  But like, you know, it's, it's the sin, you know, you can't visit the sins of the father and the son, blah, blah, blah, or in this case, mother and daughter.
[00:16:20]  But the actual like details of this are pretty fucking abhorrent.
[00:16:26]  And I think it's like, you all, you don't have to, you don't, you aren't responsible for them, but you also don't have to cover for them.
[00:16:31]  Yeah, I also want to say too, like, Truanon isn't in the business of like a cancel culture or we're here to cancel Gia.
[00:16:39]  Like, I'm sorry, I don't care enough about this person to even want to cancel her as if that was something I believed in.
[00:16:46]  But like, when we say this story isn't about Gia, like, we mean that.
[00:16:50]  Like, this story actually is much bigger and deeper and more important than a blogger for the New Yorker.
[00:16:58]  Because something noticeably missing from that blog post was, well, who were these teachers, right?
[00:17:03]  And like, what sort of situation did these teachers find themselves in?
[00:17:07]  Yeah, well, I think they found themselves in a situation that's unfortunately very common in the United States.
[00:17:15]  Yeah, I talked to some, even just specifically to Filipinos, although this is not at all just, you know, just specific to them.
[00:17:26]  This is actually when I described this case to a friend of mine who works in the, let's say, Filipino freedom and democracy movement.
[00:17:35]  Yes, yes.
[00:17:37]  She basically said, like, oh, yeah, you know, this exact same case happens all over the country.
[00:17:43]  It was literally down to the same details, down to the same dollar amounts.
[00:17:48]  Yeah.
[00:18:11]  So I think like we need to I think it's useful to then talk about the Tolentino case very briefly because, you know, and again, we should say that, you know.
[00:18:25]  we looked into this case and looked into some of the legal documents.
[00:18:30]  And so we're taking, you know, our read of the case from that.
[00:18:34]  We're not here to report the case.
[00:18:37]  We're not litigating the case.
[00:18:39]  We're not, you know, putting judgment on this person.
[00:18:43]  And legal judgment, I mean.
[00:18:45]  Yes.
[00:18:46]  And so it also goes without saying, actually, it actually definitely does go with saying this is all allegedly, right?
[00:18:53]  Like this is, believe me, back to that old faithful right here.
[00:18:57]  This is allegedly.
[00:18:59]  But a lot of people did allege it.
[00:19:02]  Yeah, yeah, a lot of people.
[00:19:03]  So why don't we get into it?
[00:19:05]  So there was a pair of companies, really just one company with a couple different names, Omni Consortium, which is, I got to say, kind of badass name.
[00:19:16]  And then, you know, a subsidiary of that, Multicultural Professionals.
[00:19:20]  And so what this company did is they functioned as basically recruiters.
[00:19:24]  They would take school administrators on all expenses paid trips to the Philippines with the caveat of for every one administrator that comes, 10 teachers must be hired, right?
[00:19:37]  And so a lot of these school districts, especially in this stage, because I think this is certainly true in other cases with the no child left behind policy of Bush, teachers, or excuse me, school districts found themselves needing to hire a lot more teachers.
[00:19:54]  And so, you know, meanwhile, while they're meeting with these school districts, and this specifically happened in, I think, West Texas, they had their other people, other members of the Tolentino family in the Philippines meeting with teachers.
[00:20:06]  And what they would do is they would basically recruit them and start charging them basically from the get-go.
[00:20:14]  Immediately $10 to submit a resume, $130 to take a test, $175 to have their credential evaluated.
[00:20:23]  And then once the administrators got there, $100 to be interviewed.
[00:20:28]  Now, that's just to apply for the job.
[00:20:31]  That is $10, $140.
[00:20:33]  I can't do all this math, but that's like, we're getting near, you know, like $400 there.
[00:20:38]  And in the Philippines in the early 2000s, that was a lot of money.
[00:20:43]  Yeah.
[00:20:44]  Right.
[00:20:44]  And so, you know, you might wonder how they're getting this money.
[00:20:48]  Well, let me tell you about a few more fees and then let me tell you how they got the money.
[00:20:52]  So after they got the job, they would then have to pay $850 in legal fees, $110 for a visa, $1,000 to expedite the processing of the visa, and $6,000 for a quote-unquote security bond.
[00:21:08]  I will say that security bond, you know, when you hear like a bond, it's like when you give a bunch of money at like the Motel 6 and they're like, we'll give this to you after, you know, you don't do a Steve Bannon thing to our bathtub or anything.
[00:21:19]  They give you the money back.
[00:21:20]  It's a deposit.
[00:21:21]  After these teachers landed in the United States, allegedly they would be told by the Tolentinos that actually, no, that security bond was not, it was more like a permanent donation.
[00:21:35]  And so you're a teacher in the Philippines trying to get to America to provide a better life, better job for your, you know, or for yourself and maybe some remittance for your family back home.
[00:21:46]  Well, you don't have $10,000.
[00:21:49]  Luckily, the Tolentinos have a couple of friends, a guy, well, I'll name him, CJ and Owen.
[00:21:55]  I won't just say their last names in case that's weird.
[00:21:58]  CJ and Owen would be introduced to the teachers and offer loans and loans at a interest rate, which even I as a Jew blush at.
[00:22:12]  Oh boy.
[00:22:14]  These interest rates were total.
[00:22:17]  I do.
[00:22:17]  I am blushing right now.
[00:22:19]  The interest rates.

=== Deportation Threats and Overseas Labor (10:49) ===

[00:22:21]  Also, the teachers have to pay a $1,500 fee to some other company in the Philippines, which is kind of unclear what company that was.
[00:22:28]  So that's over $10,000.
[00:22:30]  And their interest rates was 60% annually.
[00:22:36]  60%.
[00:22:37]  60 fucking percent annually.
[00:22:40]  Now, if they missed a payment, if they missed a payment, that would be raised to 10% in addition to the 5% monthly one.
[00:22:49]  So that would be that would add an extra, you know, if they miss one payment, their annual rate becomes 70%.
[00:22:57]  That ended up basically with the teachers paying $1,200 to $1,500 per month when they were in the U.S. and working to this company.
[00:23:06]  Oh my God.
[00:23:08]  I think it's important too for people to understand that like the way this process unfolds in this case, as it does, like, you know, kind of as, you know, we'll talk about how these schemes are replicated throughout the country.
[00:23:23]  You know, these basically these are like intermediary companies that work as consultants for employers, right?
[00:23:33]  or contractors, consultants, contractors, or whatever.
[00:23:36]  So in this case, as is the case in, you know, many other times, they don't actually have jobs for these people as they're recruiting them, right?
[00:23:48]  So something really, really I found scummy that they would do is, you know, in basically every case, they work with the Omni, Omni Consortium worked with three different school districts.
[00:23:59]  In every one of those cases, the teacher, the administrators, who obviously in this case are, you know, seem like they've done something pretty bad too.
[00:24:07]  You know, they go to the Philippines, they promise to hire all these teachers, or, you know, someone says that, I don't know, maybe it's a miscommunication, but maybe someone's lying.
[00:24:16]  I don't know.
[00:24:17]  At the end of the day, they decided not to hire that many teachers.
[00:24:20]  I think in one case, it was only two teachers after having promised to hire something like 40.
[00:24:25]  However, Omni Consortium would still tell the teachers that they had jobs in America.
[00:24:32]  And in fact, would allegedly forge paperwork to that effect.
[00:24:35]  And so they would bring up, you know, they're all getting hired at one school district.
[00:24:39]  They gather all the teachers in the Philippines before they leave.
[00:24:42]  You know, they tell them everything that's going to happen.
[00:24:44]  It's sort of like a briefing or whatever.
[00:24:46]  And at one case, one of the teachers was like, okay, well, do you have the paperwork?
[00:24:49]  And the lady's like, you know, I think, I believe the Tolentino's grandmother would say, oh, I forgot it at home, but would eventually produce what amounts to false papers for quite a lot of these teachers.
[00:25:01]  And then they would get to America and there would be no jobs.
[00:25:06]  Now, in Gia's blog post, this is what she refers to when she talks about, she said, my dad had exposed himself legally for trying to find a solution to the displaced teachers' plight, working to get them rehired in different districts.
[00:25:21]  If he had left the teachers to figure out their awful situation on their own, his legal position would have been stronger, but he would never have done that.
[00:25:30]  Well, so he seemed to be so dedicated to that task that in fact, he would not let these teachers out of his sight.
[00:25:37]  Particularly, he would gather, and this is according to the testimony of the teachers themselves, not in necessarily the court documents, although I think it's in there too, but to actual like newspapers and stuff in the Philippines, that the teachers would be living 10 or 15 people at a time in dormitories.
[00:25:54]  They were not allowed to leave.
[00:25:55]  The ones that did get jobs were not allowed to buy their own transportation and had to be delivered to and from school in a car driven by an employee of Omni Consortium.
[00:26:06]  If they did get a car, they were threatened with deportation.
[00:26:12]  This threat of deportation happens a lot in this story.
[00:26:16]  If the teachers complain, they are threatened with deportation.
[00:26:20]  If the teachers do not pay, at one point, the loan sharks come to America and go to DC to, I don't know if they threaten them.
[00:26:31]  I don't know.
[00:26:31]  I can't say what happened, but they made it very clear that these loans were expected to be repaid promptly.
[00:26:37]  And in fact, had to backdate checks to that effect.
[00:26:39]  The loan sharks would also, and this is according to testimony, threaten physically the family members of the teachers in the Philippines who had also had to co-sign on the loans so that they could be sued or messed with in Philippine court in the Philippines too.
[00:26:56]  And so this was a big deal, right?
[00:26:58]  This is pretty wild.
[00:27:01]  Yeah, this is, I mean, this is a quote.
[00:27:04]  We had incurred such debts in the Philippines to get here and we had no jobs to return to if we went home.
[00:27:11]  Every night we prayed the rosary.
[00:27:12]  We could not sleep until the wee hours of the morning.
[00:27:14]  We were stressed, worried about our families back home and often wept.
[00:27:18]  And I think your point about, you know, deportation being used as a threat constantly is really important to stress because it's not just the authorities that threaten deportation crucially, right?
[00:27:36]  Employers use it all the time.
[00:27:39]  All the time.
[00:27:40]  I mean, I know from my personal experience and the experience of friends of mine, you know, doing labor organizing is that is that oftentimes people who are immigrants, whether they live here legally or not, are terrified of being deported.
[00:27:54]  And oftentimes employers, this didn't happen in my case, but many, I know a lot of people that have have reported this.
[00:28:02]  Employers will threaten people with deportation if they organize or if they complain or anything like that.
[00:28:07]  But this isn't even the employer.
[00:28:09]  This is supposed to be the person.
[00:28:10]  This is basically the recruiter threatening with deportation.
[00:28:13]  And so I have a hard time seeing this as anything other than basically indentured servitude.
[00:28:24]  Right?
[00:28:24]  Like, I mean, it's, it's, I think that's like a really like, I mean, that, that term is actually thrown around a lot when it, when, when people talk about cases such as this, um, because, you know, if you are stuck in a contract from another country, no matter, you know, whatever, where you have to pay half of your salary to a company that is charging you more and more money each month.
[00:28:48]  I mean, I'm not a math guy, but 60% interest is a fucking lot of interest.
[00:28:53]  And in other cases of other companies, I mean, sometimes it'll be even higher than that, where basically you're paying almost all of your entire salary to these places.
[00:29:02]  And, you know, you have no, you're not allowed to get a car.
[00:29:06]  You have to live in specific housing and you can't decide where your money goes.
[00:29:12]  I mean, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's a serious thing.
[00:29:15]  Like, you know, I don't know what people want to call it.
[00:29:18]  If they want to call it labor trafficking, whatever.
[00:29:21]  But, you know, these are the facts laid out in the indictment in this.
[00:29:27]  And, you know, it's, it's, I'm inclined to think that like, because of the similarity to other cases, you know, I, I, I, I don't have really any compunctions about basically believing it.
[00:29:37]  Well, I think it's important, you know, kind of as we stressed at the beginning of the show to kind of broaden our scope here, because like we said, this is not a singular case.
[00:29:50]  And actually, this is really just exemplary of like an entire, you know, industry.
[00:29:59]  And, you know, I think, you know, a really horrible underbelly of the United States labor system.
[00:30:08]  Yeah.
[00:30:09]  I mean, I, I, it's, it's in the case of like a lot of these recruits, a lot of them come from two countries, the Philippines and India.
[00:30:16]  In fact, something, I think this is even mentioned in the blog post, something like 11% of Filipinos work overseas, which is a ton.
[00:30:25]  I mean, the situation of the Philippines is pretty similar to India.
[00:30:28]  I love the, I'm sorry, the way that that's framed is so funny.
[00:30:31]  They work overseas as if they're like, you know, this is their commute.
[00:30:35]  It's like, no, they literally like labor is one of the Philippines' largest exports.
[00:30:43]  That's, that's the thing.
[00:30:44]  I mean, the Filipino economy, much like the Indian economy, is basically semi-feudal, right?
[00:30:50]  It's run by landlord class and some, you know, there are a couple industries, but not many.
[00:30:57]  The two big exports are raw materials and people, right?
[00:31:03]  The thing is with being, getting medical training in the Philippines, I had a, again, this friend of mine I was talking to earlier explaining to me this earlier that if you are training to be a doctor in the Philippines, they will teach you how to treat frostbite.
[00:31:18]  They won't teach you how to treat tropical diseases because the expectation is that you're going overseas.
[00:31:23]  In the 70s, the Marcos regime basically set up a scheme to send people overseas and they still, the government really profits from this.
[00:31:31]  The government of the Philippines, Duterte's government, also extorts the overseas worker.
[00:31:36]  I mean, something, I think 10% of their GDP comes from overseas workers, which is fucking insane.
[00:31:42]  Yeah.
[00:31:42]  Well, and basically what it does too is it continues the lack of full industrialization of the country.
[00:31:50]  Exactly.
[00:31:51]  Exactly.
[00:31:52]  Because there's no need for the landlord classes making money, you know, exporting people and raw materials.
[00:31:59]  They don't need to build factories.
[00:32:00]  They don't need to make the Philippines even close to self-sufficient because they can just get money by sending people to go work in hospitals overseas.
[00:32:09]  Or the thing with it, like a lot of maritime trade is basically done by Filipino crews and oftentimes on ships and such, oftentimes it's basically, they're basically floating sweatshops.
[00:32:25]  Like they're horribly abused.
[00:32:28]  But it's this, it's this thing.
[00:32:30]  It's under development, uneven development, right?
[00:32:34]  Yeah.
[00:32:34]  And, you know, this is, you know, I mean, this is a legacy and feature of the, you know, global capitalist system.
[00:32:44]  Right.
[00:32:45]  It's, yeah, exactly.
[00:32:46]  It's, it's the periphery feeding the core.
[00:32:48]  Exactly.
[00:32:49]  So, you know, again, I, you know, I think we're going to touch on this a little later, but to have these issues sort of reframed as like a blogger being victimized is really difficult for me to stomach.
[00:33:05]  I'm just going to, you know, I'll leave it at that.
[00:33:08]  Yeah, I'll second that.

=== Indentured Servitude in Body Shops (14:34) ===

[00:33:10]  And, and I mean, I don't want to say anything else here, but so like we were saying,
[00:33:39]  this is not just, uh, you know, the case of Omni Consortium.
[00:33:43]  There are many cases exactly like this.
[00:33:45]  And in fact, in a American Federation of Teachers that this, this, this sort of booklet they put out talking about this migrant teacher abuse, they focus on a few cases, including Omni, but another one is Baltimore.
[00:33:59]  And see if any of this sounds familiar to you.
[00:34:01]  In 2005, Baltimore City Public Schools hired 108 teachers from the Philippines to help meet staffing shortages.
[00:34:08]  These recruits were placed primarily in schools labeled persistently dangerous by the state of Maryland.
[00:34:14]  Just four years later, more than 600 teachers are working in Baltimore, constituting nearly 10% of the city's teaching force.
[00:34:21]  These overseas trained teachers are fully covered by the district's teaching contracts and are members of the Baltimore Teachers Union, which I guess is under AFT.
[00:34:29]  Each of them paid between $5,000 and $8,000 to a recruitment agency for their placement in Baltimore.
[00:34:36]  The district incurred no extra costs for hiring them, which is, by the way, something that happens, you see a lot in these cases, is that it's the district basically pays nothing for the recruitment.
[00:34:46]  They are just given the teachers, which I believe is illegal.
[00:34:52]  In fact, the recruitment agency paid for multiple trips to Manila for human resources officials with accommodations in luxury hotels.
[00:35:00]  The majority of these teachers live together in several apartment buildings where they form a tightly knit community.
[00:35:05]  So that is basically the same thing, right?
[00:35:10]  Yeah.
[00:35:11]  A similar company, Teachers Placement Group, which was out of India, you know, they operated a totally similar scheme.
[00:35:22]  I don't even know.
[00:35:23]  I was trying to like note that.
[00:35:24]  Classic scheme.
[00:35:26]  I know.
[00:35:26]  I was trying not to say that, but I just, I don't know what else to fucking call this.
[00:35:29]  So the stipulations in the contract with the teachers bordered on indentured servitude.
[00:35:35]  One clause required teachers to pay the agency, the placement group, $15,000 if they return to India in the first year of the contract.
[00:35:43]  So you can't quit the job.
[00:35:44]  Yeah, you can't quit or you can't go home.
[00:35:47]  Huh.
[00:35:48]  Quote, recruiters have a financial interest in making the pull factors seem as tempting as possible and may mislead teachers by encouraging inflated and inaccurate expectations.
[00:36:00]  I'm wondering if one of those inflated expectations would be a job.
[00:36:04]  Or yes.
[00:36:05]  I feel like that would be a crucial pull in getting me to leave the country where I'm from to move somewhere else would be a job or the ability to have my own car would be pretty good too.
[00:36:17]  I even just want to stress too, before I continue with the rest of the contract with this teacher's placement group in India, is that like I don't think, you know, I don't know, even saying like just, it's just, you know, for me to move for a job, it's like not like that.
[00:36:35]  This is upending the rest of your life because you know this is the only way to provide for your family.
[00:36:42]  Yeah, like your country is underdeveloped.
[00:36:44]  Your family probably does not have much money.
[00:36:47]  I mean, enough for you to go to school or something, but like you are going there to not only provide for yourself, but to provide for other people too.
[00:36:55]  And you're changing your entire life.
[00:36:56]  I mean, you're going somewhere across the globe with basically you have no experience with anything that's about to happen to you.
[00:37:04]  You know, they don't tell these, well, we'll get to that in a second, but they do not prepare you very well to move to America at these recruiting agencies.
[00:37:12]  And so this is a big fucking deal.
[00:37:14]  You know, this is not you moving to New York to get a job at Beacon's Closet.
[00:37:20]  Well, I just, you know, I'm not a fan of like privileged discourse, but I think Americans have no fucking clue what they are talking about when they blog about personal hardship.
[00:37:32]  I'll just say that.
[00:37:33]  Yes.
[00:37:36]  So, you know, I'm just going to continue from this bit.
[00:37:42]  $10,000.
[00:37:44]  So they would have to pay $15,000, remember, if they returned to India within the first year.
[00:37:49]  $10,000 if they returned in the second year and $7,500 in the third.
[00:37:54]  The union was outraged by these provisions and pressured the school district to stop payment on the $180,000 check they had written to Teachers Placement Group to pay for the 42 teachers.
[00:38:07]  The school district paid Teachers Placement Group TPG only $45,000 with the rest be paid in the next year.
[00:38:14]  They required that the clause be removed from the contract and also forced them to assist the teachers in bringing their families to the United States.
[00:38:21]  Now, This was the TPG employed teachers in Philadelphia were not so lucky.
[00:38:29]  The teachers were dissatisfied with their salaries, were not told about income taxes prior to their first paycheck and had less than comprehensive health insurance.
[00:38:37]  But they were not able to negotiate since they were not employees of TPG, right?
[00:38:43]  We should talk about that for a second.
[00:38:44]  And therefore not covered by the collective bargaining agreement.
[00:38:49]  So again, like as we're kind of explaining this, it's really important to remember that like everyone is basically a subcontractor of another person, right?
[00:38:59]  So the agency is contracted by the school district or in other industries, the company, which removes them from liability from the teachers.
[00:39:09]  And the teachers are contracted to the agency, which allows the teachers to not have any kind of actual recourse when it comes to any kind of labor negotiation.
[00:39:22]  Yeah, I mean, to work at the school.
[00:39:23]  There's another case.
[00:39:24]  Actually, I didn't put this in the notes, but I did read about this earlier.
[00:39:27]  There was a case in Baltimore where it turned out that basically the schools, not in Baltimore, excuse me, I think elsewhere in Maryland, where it turns out the schools had hired all these Filipino teachers and then paid them like a third of their regular salary.
[00:39:43]  Yeah.
[00:39:43]  Like it's, it's, it's a, it's a system that is basically designed for super exploitation.
[00:39:52]  Yeah.
[00:39:52]  And by the way, it's designed like, yes, what you said, it's designed for super exploitation.
[00:39:58]  These people are not taking advantage or or like figuring out a new way to game the system.
[00:40:05]  Like this is the fucking system.
[00:40:07]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:40:08]  Like H-1B visas and the way that they're used in so many industries, it's not like a mistake.
[00:40:15]  Like it's funny to hear the term H-1B visa abuse because basically the way that so many of them are used, I mean, you know, it can't be all of them, but certainly many of them are used isn't abuse of the system.
[00:40:31]  It's the system working perfectly well.
[00:40:34]  Everybody comes out a winner except for the worker.
[00:40:37]  And that's by design.
[00:40:39]  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:40:40]  And it's not just like teachers that this happens to.
[00:40:44]  No, no.
[00:40:45]  So one of the biggest, you know, in the most recent years, this has really been an issue in Silicon Valley.
[00:40:52]  And, you know, it's unfortunate because, and I just want to say that like I don't know what has happened to the left on these issues.
[00:41:05]  And I don't know if it's because of the kind of like dismantling of the anti-globalization movement or what we'll get into about the kind of like woke washing of the immigrant experience that that comes with some of the way that people talk about these politics.
[00:41:22]  But like, there's absolutely no way that like there's there should be, there shouldn't be a way where the right is able to only to like capitalize on this shit because these people don't care.
[00:41:36]  Do you know what I'm saying?
[00:41:37]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:41:38]  I mean, when Trump talks about fixing H-1B visas, he's not talking about fixing it in the way that I might talk about fixing it.
[00:41:46]  Well, it's just like, yeah, it just really frustrates me because then the knee-jerk reaction is to say, well, if Trump wants to fix H-1B visas, it means H-1B visas are good.
[00:41:57]  And the way that they are currently used by, by the way, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon is perfectly fine.
[00:42:08]  And it's not.
[00:42:09]  So this is from an NBC report alongside the Center for Investigative Reporting.
[00:42:15]  They did a huge investigation onto what they basically call body shops that operate out of Silicon Valley.
[00:42:23]  That's kind of like the term they use.
[00:42:25]  So they discovered an organized system that supplies cheap labor made up of highly educated and highly skilled foreign workers who come to the U.S. via H-1B visas.
[00:42:32]  Consulting firms recruit, then subcontract out skilled foreigners to major tech firms.
[00:42:37]  Those who work for these third-party firms skirt the law.
[00:42:40]  They're often called body shops.
[00:42:42]  Sometimes they get caught.
[00:42:43]  For example, 2014, a Cupertino man involved with one body shop pled guilty and was sentenced to 19 felony counts of visa fraud where he admitted he knowingly applied for work visas for foreigners who had no job offers, filling out applications for fake jobs for a Silicon Valley tech firm.
[00:43:03]  Quote, it virtually makes these employees a slave, said one worker who came from India more than a decade ago.
[00:43:12]  You know, they house these people.
[00:43:14]  They call them body shops because they basically, I mean, I just don't know what to say.
[00:43:19]  They operate the same way as all of these other cases.
[00:43:23]  There's a consulting firm, a recruiting firm that subcontracts out, applies for as many visas as they can without any real jobs.
[00:43:34]  And, you know, basically puts workers under the mercy of predatory loan sharks to keep them connected.
[00:43:47]  Often connected.
[00:43:48]  Or in fact, I would probably say it's like the always connected to the body shops themselves.
[00:43:54]  Yes.
[00:43:56]  And, you know, to keep them compliant.
[00:43:59]  Yeah.
[00:43:59]  It's just, it's, you know, it's horrifying.
[00:44:01]  They keep them in these, you know, in this report, you know, they keep them in what they call guest houses, which, you know, again, this is, this is something that keeps coming up.
[00:44:10]  A guest house is a small apartment or home where as many as eight to 10 workers stay at once.
[00:44:14]  A dozen different interviews confirmed that the guest houses are commonly used by body shops.
[00:44:18]  One worker from India described how the body shops explained the guest houses when they arrived.
[00:44:23]  We are placing you in the guest house.
[00:44:25]  Until you get the job, you have to stay in the guest house.
[00:44:27]  You should not go out even for a walk.
[00:44:31]  This worker too asked remained to ask to remain anonymous because of fears he will jeopardize his future job prospects.
[00:44:38]  He stayed in the guest house for several months, not leaving.
[00:44:43]  My family's in India.
[00:44:44]  I have a six-month-old baby and I want to see my son and they want to come to the U.S. and stay with me.
[00:44:50]  But because of the living conditions, the worker said there's no way they could join him.
[00:44:55]  They made him pay $2,300 to get the visa, which by the way is illegal.
[00:45:00]  They kept 30% of his $60 an hour contract salary for expenses and taxes.
[00:45:06]  And this was in addition to the federal and state taxes withheld.
[00:45:10]  So they kept about $35,000 of his salary a year.
[00:45:15]  I mean, this kind of, I think the best allegory for this is pimping, right?
[00:45:22]  Is pimping and skimming.
[00:45:25]  Like, it's, it's someone, I mean, having one fucking boss is bad enough.
[00:45:30]  Like, boss, by the way, that, that extracts surplus value from you.
[00:45:35]  This, like, this guy's just, these people just steal from you.
[00:45:38]  You know, they keep you in their fucking stable, their body shop.
[00:45:41]  They pimp you out to whatever employer.
[00:45:42]  They don't, I mean, people are brought to the, to the U.S. on false pretenses, right?
[00:45:47]  Like saying you have a job, but when there is no job, which like, I get it, people want to come to the U.S. and make a lot of money, but that is, there's basically no way you can excuse lying to somebody and telling them that they have a secure future when in actuality, they don't.
[00:46:03]  And their future rests even more in your hands to see if you can get them whatever job.
[00:46:07]  And when they get that job, you take that money.
[00:46:09]  You take money from them.
[00:46:11]  A substantial amount of money.
[00:46:12]  It's brutal exploitation.
[00:46:14]  $35,000 a year is more than I made in most years of my life.
[00:46:19]  You know, it's incredible.
[00:46:21]  I mean, it's, it's, and that's like, it's so common.
[00:46:25]  Why do you think Mark Zuckerberg started forward.us with immigration grants?
[00:46:31]  Oh, right.
[00:46:32]  It made a bunch of noise when it first came out.
[00:46:34]  I don't know what they really do anymore.
[00:46:37]  But a lot of people were like, damn, I didn't know Mark Zuckerberg was so interested in immigration reform.
[00:46:46]  It sounds like people don't know that much about Mark Zuckerberg's company.
[00:46:50]  But it's all of these, a bunch of tech companies banded together and would like have, I believe it was in the 2016 election, wrote an open letter to both the Democratic and Republican parties asking them to reform H-1B visas, which I have a feeling does not have the interest of their workers in mind.
[00:47:12]  No.
[00:47:13]  Because with the H-1B visa, they can also, I mean, they're assured of one thing in particular.
[00:47:18]  And this isn't just tech companies.
[00:47:20]  This is any of these companies that use these workers.
[00:47:23]  That worker will not complain.
[00:47:26]  That worker will not unionize.
[00:47:28]  That worker will make no waves and do everything you ask for him because his life could be ruined in an instant by not only you, but by the recruiter that you work with.
[00:47:40]  I mean, it's a gun to somebody's head, basically.

=== Tech Workers Silenced (08:22) ===

[00:47:44]  Yeah.
[00:47:45]  And it's rampant.
[00:47:48]  I mean, you know, it probably made some of the technology we're working on right now.
[00:47:54]  Yeah, well,
[00:48:21]  speaking of that technology, we need to address the other elephant in the room, which we teased at.
[00:48:29]  But that was, I suppose that's a transition I could use.
[00:48:34]  I was about to say, speaking of pimping, we should talk about Twitter, but I kind of like the way I went with it first way.
[00:48:43]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:48:43]  You know what?
[00:48:44]  Keep them both in.
[00:48:46]  So we mentioned at the top of the show that what that, you know, even the recent, so it's funny.
[00:48:53]  So, okay, so I'm going to let the listeners in behind the curtain, behind the veil, whatever the expression is.
[00:49:02]  I don't know.
[00:49:03]  She is wearing a veil right now.
[00:49:04]  It is, it is in full wedding dress.
[00:49:06]  Not, no, I'm wearing, I'm wearing a full wedding dress.
[00:49:10]  Liz is in Mufti right now.
[00:49:15]  Is that, so when this, when, when Gia posted her blog, when she blogged, I love saying that.
[00:49:23]  I'm sure it feels derogatory, which is why I kind of like it.
[00:49:28]  When she blogged late, whatever night it was last week, I texted Brace at probably like 10.30 or 11 that night and was like, yo, you got to check this out.
[00:49:38]  And I kind of think we should talk about this.
[00:49:40]  And he said, I don't know.
[00:49:42]  I don't really care.
[00:49:43]  Yeah.
[00:49:43]  And then let me tell you, this man right here went on a journey of self-discovery because what suddenly I was sending him, I was sending you links to some of the replies on Twitter.
[00:49:58]  Then you started deep diving into the replies on Twitter and you started to lose your mind.
[00:50:03]  I went fucking berserk.
[00:50:06]  I felt like I was going crazy because when Liz said that to me, I'm like, I don't know what this lady's getting canceled for something.
[00:50:13]  I don't give a fuck.
[00:50:16]  And then I read it and I was like, something, something sticks out to me about this.
[00:50:22]  My true nonsense is tingling and vibrating every one of my humors.
[00:50:28]  And so I looked into some people had posted the court documents.
[00:50:32]  I looked into the court documents and I was like, Jesus fucking Christ, if a single one of these things is true.
[00:50:37]  And these court documents were posted in the replies.
[00:50:40]  So any of the people replying, you know, all my love and solidarity, could easily see these.
[00:50:47]  And in fact, many of them were replied to with these court documents.
[00:50:50]  I started going insane because it was like, are these people?
[00:50:56]  What the fuck is wrong with you?
[00:50:58]  Well, okay, before we get there, let's read off some of these things.
[00:51:02]  Gabs in your soul there are.
[00:51:04]  So, you know, this is what Gia posted on Twitter.
[00:51:09]  So May 20th.
[00:51:10]  So I guess that was last week.
[00:51:11]  Oops, that's just like three days ago.
[00:51:14]  My parents recently pointed to me that some misinformation about them had been spreading online.
[00:51:19]  It's since taken off a life of its own and morphed into petty internet gossip.
[00:51:23]  I wish I hadn't had to write this, but I wanted to make some things clear.
[00:51:26]  She links to her blog post.
[00:51:29]  15.1k likes, 1.1 retweets, 676 comments.
[00:51:35]  Now, some of those comments have since been deleted, which I think is funny.
[00:51:39]  But this one here is what, so when I say like all the blue checks are there, reading these again.
[00:51:48]  I know.
[00:51:48]  I mean, it's like, this is the biggest media event of quarantine.
[00:51:54]  Like, everyone's here.
[00:51:56]  The gang is all here.
[00:51:57]  So here's Emily Basilon, who's a staff writer at the New York Times.
[00:52:01]  She's a senior fellow at Yale Law.
[00:52:04]  She is, of course, a fellow podcaster over at Slate Media.
[00:52:08]  Take her out of the guild.
[00:52:11]  She's a two-time national best-selling author.
[00:52:14]  Gia, I've admired your work for a long time.
[00:52:17]  Now I'll admire it more.
[00:52:20]  No one should have to go through what your parents went through.
[00:52:24]  I'm so sorry for all the heartlessness.
[00:52:28]  I am losing my shit all over again.
[00:52:31]  What your fucking, what your fucking parents.
[00:52:35]  Oh, I'm sorry.
[00:52:37]  Your parents, two new BMWs were taken by the government.
[00:52:43]  These teachers, literally, they brought over 200 over.
[00:52:48]  Less than 100 actually had jobs.
[00:52:53]  This is Dara Lind, Dara Lind.
[00:52:56]  I don't know how to say her name.
[00:52:57]  Never heard of her.
[00:52:58]  I literally had never heard of her.
[00:53:00]  She's the co-host.
[00:53:01]  This is why I've never heard of her because she's the co-host of Vox's The Weeds podcast, a top 15 political podcast on Apple podcasts, by the way.
[00:53:13]  She's a apparently decade-long immigration reporter for ProPublica and also a graduate of Yale University.
[00:53:22]  Shut on, baby.
[00:53:24]  She tweets, limiting myself to what I can say that would be helpful to you in this moment.
[00:53:32]  This is already better than 95% of immigration reporting.
[00:53:37]  And if you ever need anything in that regard, I'd be honored to help.
[00:53:43]  This is, I think this is, is this prostrating?
[00:53:45]  I think this qualifies, baby, as prostrating.
[00:53:49]  This is, this one drove me up the fucking wall.
[00:53:53]  This is what broke your, your, your good friend Bryce Bellin right here is this one.
[00:53:58]  This is not immigration reporting.
[00:54:01]  Yeah.
[00:54:02]  This is a fucking blog post.
[00:54:05]  Where's what rep?
[00:54:06]  What?
[00:54:07]  What are you reporting on?
[00:54:08]  Your feelings?
[00:54:10]  Well, yes, no, she is.
[00:54:12]  And I, you know, I'm going to get into some, you know, I have something to say about that in a little bit, but I just want to say, you know, you know, there's a ton of people.
[00:54:21]  I don't even, you know, this is really like a who's who of media, blue check, eliites.
[00:54:27]  Jill Filipovich, I don't know how you say, is that how you say her name?
[00:54:30]  I don't even know how to say her name.
[00:54:31]  She was, isn't she like a, I'm going to mix them up.
[00:54:34]  I think she's the granddaughter of Chetnix.
[00:54:38]  I don't know.
[00:54:39]  Emily Neussbaum, Clint Smith, Jenna Wertham, Eugene Carroll, who, by the way, accused Trump of rape.
[00:54:46]  Linda Ops.
[00:54:48]  There are so many like major media people in the replies.
[00:54:52]  This is what Linda Ops had to say.
[00:54:55]  I wish you hadn't had to write this.
[00:54:57]  This seems to be the common theme with these responses.
[00:54:59]  I wish you hadn't had to write this.
[00:55:01]  Now, dear listener, let me remind you, she did not have to write this.
[00:55:06]  No, no, no.
[00:55:07]  In fact, I would say she was, it was, she was dumb to write this.
[00:55:14]  She should not have written this.
[00:55:16]  I wish you hadn't had to write this.
[00:55:18]  I feel, I feel that your parents did enormous good for immigrants looking for a better life and that they were smeared for it and you were made to suffer is yet another atrocity that you had to lay, that you had to bear, bear B-A-R-E.
[00:55:38]  If you had to bear any discomfort for it now, again, is inexcusable.
[00:55:46]  So, you know, SIC, I guess, and just by the way, that wasn't me.
[00:55:51]  Sweetheart.
[00:55:52]  There's only one person capable of excusing this.
[00:55:54]  In fact, there's about 257 people excusing this.
[00:55:58]  I don't think any of them have, as far as I know.
[00:56:01]  You know, so I want to just, you just said, what is this reporting on feelings?

=== Reporting On Feelings (12:51) ===

[00:56:07]  And this is like a really interesting example of that because yeah, it is.
[00:56:14]  And, you know, it's really interesting.
[00:56:16]  I think, you know, we talk about like journalists and blue check.
[00:56:22]  You know, we use blue check as a fun signifier.
[00:56:25]  The invisible enemy.
[00:56:27]  Yeah, for the kind of like, you know, the media class, right?
[00:56:32]  Which, you know, I am, I personally am very afraid of uh becoming a part of, but that's my own kind of shit that I need to work through privately.
[00:56:43]  Don't worry, baby.
[00:56:44]  I will, we have ruined that forever.
[00:56:46]  You have no chance.
[00:56:48]  You know, yeah, you'd be surprised.
[00:56:50]  I don't know.
[00:56:50]  Anyway, just saying, I'm a lot more self-conscious about it than people probably think.
[00:56:58]  Well, we do know human trafficking is okay.
[00:57:00]  So, no, but you know, I think this is such a, it's such a like useful or instructive example of how the media operates.
[00:57:13]  And you say like personal reporting, you know, I've been thinking about this a lot because there's this like trying to understand how our contemporary like media apparatus works is really difficult and really like difficult to get into, like kind of, at least for me, difficult to kind of.
[00:57:33]  It's elusive.
[00:57:35]  Yeah.
[00:57:36]  And kind of like break down.
[00:57:37]  But there is this way, you know, I mentioned where like, you know, it's like personal narratives have taken the, have taken the place like from actual reporting.
[00:57:53]  And I don't even mean like hard scrabble reporting, but it's like within this like think piece economy, which is basically every, it's like every content mill is, you know, just, you know, it's all the same, right?
[00:58:07]  Yeah.
[00:58:08]  So it's like all of it is this like the most vulgar expression of like the personalist political, you know, where it's like suddenly every personal story is something that is like a vehicle for political engagement, right?
[00:58:28]  And so you get this way in which like Gia's blog post about like a really horrific instance, you know, is like doing journalism work and doing political work.
[00:58:47]  And you see that reflected in these like blue check responses, not to mention just the like the complete like, I mean, I don't, you know, you, people listening to this can't see me, but it's like the only thing I can imagine is just like a huge bird with its wings just like wrapping itself around.
[00:59:03]  It was just like the fucking protection unit just like swooped in and it was, you know, it's like I say, it was like the most extreme expression of solidarity I've seen in like a fucking decade.
[00:59:15]  And they don't even have a union.
[00:59:17]  Well, I think one thing that journalists, I mean, and a lot of people who are not journalists who are just into politics do is that they think it's this very peculiarly, I think, American, although I believe it's been exported now, thing, where if you achieve some degree of like self-realization or self-actualization, then you are doing politics.
[00:59:40]  And in fact, I think it was ironically to quote Murray Bookchin here, although to paraphrase it, is that like, you know, he mentioned like the anarchist scene, I think in the 1990s, where it was the goal wasn't like politics as we understand them, although it is technically political.
[00:59:58]  The goal is actually the full realization of the self.
[01:00:01]  And politics isn't, you know, affecting the world and creating a new order or anything like that.
[01:00:08]  Politics is actually something to do.
[01:00:10]  It's ecstasy and it's healing and it's emotion, it's agony, and it's it's it's it's beauty of the self and it's all these things that you do on your own.
[01:00:19]  It is this, it is this selfish sort of navel-gazing American thing that you do where you do politics when you work on yourself.
[01:00:29]  Yes.
[01:00:29]  Well, I would argue that that kind of anarcho-liberal, you know, people get mad at me for that, but whatever, tendency has been institutionalized.
[01:00:39]  And now we are seeing it in the upper echelons of people that have been, that have kind of graduated the training institutions of America.
[01:00:46]  And by that, I mean universities and the media, you know, apparatus writ large.
[01:00:52]  But I think that you're right.
[01:00:54]  And I think that there's, you know, I guess that's kind of what I meant when I say like the way that like things get like woke washed.
[01:01:01]  And I don't mean it in, you know, people get mad at that term, but I really mean it in this sort of like that language, that kind of like activist HR kind of soft language where it, and you see it now being kind of weaponized as if it is like it does have political, there are, you know, that they are call to actions.
[01:01:23]  You hear politicians say this all the time or media people, you know, everything needs to be like, we need to think through.
[01:01:29]  We need to address.
[01:01:30]  Have a conversation.
[01:01:31]  We need to acknowledge how do we take this in.
[01:01:34]  It's like, you know, and it completely, it does the work of completely removing or negating any actual politics.
[01:01:47]  Well, the goal, the goal becomes having a conversation.
[01:01:50]  It's like, we need to talk about how workers in this country aren't getting paid enough.
[01:01:55]  And that becomes the goal.
[01:01:57]  Right.
[01:01:58]  Because that, that I think, that at least the powers that be will let you achieve.
[01:02:02]  Right.
[01:02:02]  And then you're not letting anybody down because your goal wasn't to get workers higher wages.
[01:02:07]  Your goal was to have a conversation or to start maybe, you know, it's like how people say that like, well, you know, at least Bernie started a conversation.
[01:02:15]  Well, it's like, yeah.
[01:02:16]  Well, yeah.
[01:02:17]  And I think for a lot of people, the end goal of having a conversation is to have a piece published where you're telling people to have a conversation.
[01:02:26]  And then suddenly your career becomes one where you are talking to people about conversations that you've had with yourself about things that speak to larger conversations.
[01:02:36]  Right.
[01:02:37]  One thing from this stuck out to me is a, it's a, it's a parenthetical statement in I believe the second to last paragraph.
[01:02:43]  It's been interesting in observing the gossip about this to see the way many white people implicitly see criminality as a status that is only achieved through egregious, malicious actions.
[01:02:53]  Many black and brown people understand that this is not at all the case.
[01:02:57]  And it's it's this sort of flattening there of like, well, there's no difference between a, you know, poor black in America and a rich Filipino who makes their money off of other people working at jobs.
[01:03:16]  You know?
[01:03:17]  Maybe she's trying to say there's a difference between a politically person of color person and a culturally person of color person.
[01:03:24]  It becomes this like, because that sentence was particularly astounding because like, well, you know, maybe nothing they did was illegal.
[01:03:31]  I literally don't know.
[01:03:32]  I mean, I think the Visa stuff might have been, but that's, you know, the actual legality of that is, as I think pales to the actual, you know, sort of moral criminality shown elsewhere, specifically with the loan sharking stuff.
[01:03:48]  But I also think employment of this language that like is a signal for all of those other journalists who also speak in this same language, right?
[01:03:58]  Of bodies and spaces or whatever.
[01:04:01]  You know, we make that joke a lot, but like, this is how they talk.
[01:04:05]  And it's a signal to be like, I'm okay, baby.
[01:04:09]  Like, I'm on your side.
[01:04:10]  This, my fight is your fight.
[01:04:13]  Yeah.
[01:04:13]  And I also think it's not even just vulgar careerism.
[01:04:19]  I really don't.
[01:04:20]  I think there's something like much deeper at play here.
[01:04:23]  And it's, there's a way in which this insistence on the primacy of the individual, the primacy of subjective experience as political vehicle, you know,
[01:04:37]  as the kind of thing to, you know, the thing that needs to be thought through and addressed, like this ingrained response to regard politics as like a self-expression of one's consciousness that's now done through this kind of individually commodified,
[01:04:57]  extremely branded, by the way, think piece media economy that it completely negates, and I think this is by design, it completely negates our collective ability to even have a politics.
[01:05:14]  It's funny.
[01:05:14]  It reminds me basically of like the secret and new thought, right?
[01:05:18]  And there's, there's actually ways that the right wing employs this too, although they're much more adept at it, specifically because they all believe in magic, which I'll get into in another episode.
[01:05:28]  But it is, it's just like, it's, it's just, it's becoming, it's self-realization.
[01:05:34]  I don't know.
[01:05:35]  I, you just, yeah, I mean, but it's really pernicious.
[01:05:38]  It's like, it's a very, it's a deep, deep mystification.
[01:05:42]  And like, I don't know the way out, which is what's like, I, I, I've just been thinking about it a lot, particularly in the wake of Sanders and like what to make of the kind of landscape of the quote unquote left.
[01:05:56]  And like, and also I should say, like, I'm not removing myself from this condition or saying that I'm completely outside of it.
[01:06:04]  I think it is a condition and we are all in it.
[01:06:07]  Yeah.
[01:06:07]  But I don't know how to escape this without getting sucked back into kind of unending cultural battles that get us nowhere.
[01:06:16]  Do you know what I mean?
[01:06:18]  So like no one has less interest in that than me.
[01:06:21]  Yeah.
[01:06:21]  And I don't know what to do, but this is the reality of our moment.
[01:06:24]  And like, I don't know what to do.
[01:06:26]  Well, I do think it's interesting how much of this language is basically mirrored on the left, because I think many people that the left is influenced by are, of course, trained at the same sort of elite institutions and are in the same sort of cultural milieu.
[01:06:40]  And I think it's funny because that does exist at a certain level.
[01:06:44]  But when you actually, of course, everybody knows this, when you work with most workers or anybody who's not from that, I mean, some people do talk like that.
[01:06:52]  Some people do sort of use that framework in their mind, like this of self-actualization of whatever.
[01:06:58]  But it doesn't really, it's useless in politics.
[01:07:03]  It's useless.
[01:07:04]  And people are obsessed with it.
[01:07:06]  Because I think that in America, like, you know, we've been losing for so long, but the one thing you can change is yourself.
[01:07:14]  You know, you can't make America less racist, but you can make America less racist by you being less racist or whatever.
[01:07:21]  And that thought is extrapolated onto everything.
[01:07:27]  And it's enlarged.
[01:07:28]  And it's, I mean, people just want to look into a mirror, I guess.
[01:07:34]  Like, that's, that's, that's, people want to look into a mirror and masturbate.
[01:07:37]  And it's, and it's, and I, I, and I get it because you're basically told that is what you're supposed to do.
[01:07:42]  That is how you do politics.
[01:07:43]  That is how you talk about politics.
[01:07:45]  That is, that is how you exist as a person.
[01:07:47]  Or that's how talking about politics is done, rather.
[01:07:52]  Exactly, exactly.
[01:07:53]  But you notice it never, it's never, it's never, they never talk about politics.
[01:07:57]  They always talk just about personalities.
[01:07:59]  But on the other hand, too, like, there is, you know, I have found the best way to basically fight back against this is to just, I mean, obviously this podcast, I don't think subscribes to that very much, but it's, it's just to like to to, I ignore it because there's nothing like that's so far from my world, you know, like it's not anymore, really, now that we do a podcast or whatever, but like their whole shit, like the way they talk is like,
[01:08:27]  it's like so far out from how I think about it.
[01:08:30]  I mean, I interact with people like this too.
[01:08:32]  And it's like, it's mystifying.
[01:08:34]  I can't do it, you know?
[01:08:35]  And so I just, I, I can't engage.
[01:08:37]  I just don't engage with it because it's fucking, it's, it's, it's, it's diseased, you know?
[01:08:43]  I don't want to catch it.
[01:08:46]  Well, on that note, I did want to end the episode just really quickly with a quote that I think might kind of sum up what I think we're trying to get at here.

=== Why We Refuse (03:16) ===

[01:08:58]  Um, okay.
[01:09:00]  To use Amazon, which I did regularly for years with full knowledge of its labor practices, is to accept and embrace a world in which everything is worth as little as possible, even and maybe particularly people.
[01:09:15]  The author continues.
[01:09:17]  I tell myself that these tiny scraps of relief and convenience and advantage will eventually accumulate into something transformative.
[01:09:26]  That one day I will ascend to an echelon where I won't have to compromise anymore, where I can really behave thoughtfully, where some imaginary future actions will cancel out all the self-interested scrabbling that came before.
[01:09:42]  This is a useful fantasy, I think, but it's a fantasy.
[01:09:47]  We are what we do and we do what we're used to.
[01:09:51]  And like so many people in my generation, I was raised from adolescence to this fragile, frantic, unstable adulthood on a relentless demonstration that scamming pays.
[01:10:05]  Who said that?
[01:10:07]  Gia Tolentino.
[01:10:34]  So we wanted to direct you guys at the end of this episode to a couple of organizations.
[01:10:40]  The first one is the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns, which is a national alliance in America for Filipino organizations dedicated to helping workers in the U.S.
[01:10:53]  The other organization is Migrante International, which is another sort of organization led by, run by Filipino overseas workers that is also involved with the democracy movement in the Philippines.
[01:11:08]  And so check those two organizations out.
[01:11:11]  Yeah, we'll link to those in the show notes as well.
[01:11:15]  Oh, yeah.
[01:11:16]  As always, baby Lincoln.
[01:11:17]  We got good at doing that.
[01:11:18]  We used to always say that and then just immediately forget to do it.
[01:11:22]  Now we do it.
[01:11:23]  But now we do it because now in the group chat, I'm always like, oh, hey, young Chomsky.
[01:11:28]  Also, here are the links.
[01:11:30]  Yeah, actually, that's me that does that.
[01:11:32]  What?
[01:11:33]  Who is?
[01:11:34]  I'm just kidding.
[01:11:35]  I'm just kidding, baby.
[01:11:36]  My God.
[01:11:38]  Just stealing valor left and right.
[01:11:40]  Oh, well, it's telling that you think sending a couple links is valorous.
[01:11:43]  Personally, I think, I think pretending that you did is more valorous because acting is the most honorable profession.
[01:11:56]  Well, thank you guys so much for joining us on our journey.
[01:12:01]  Yes, yes.
[01:12:02]  This was fun.
[01:12:04]  My name is Brace.
[01:12:07]  I'm Liz.
[01:12:08]  Joined by young Chomsky, who's producing and does the music.
[01:12:12]  And thank you.
[01:12:13]  We will see you next time.