True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 104: Everything is Bad
Aired: 2020-10-02
Duration: 01:45:24


=== Potential Fires in East Bay (04:15) ===

[00:00:00]  Uh brace, how is it in California?
[00:00:02]  Fucking awful.
[00:00:04]  Yeah, that's what I heard.
[00:00:05]  Well, it's not, you know what, honestly, I haven't been outside today, but it's really hot out and I'm uh I'm not that's not pleasant for me.
[00:00:13]  I've been getting a lot of warnings about um fires in East Bay, potential fires in East Bay, but seems like so far, so good.
[00:00:22]  Yeah, no, it looks like it's just hitting uh, it's hitting Santa Rosa and like wine country and I think further up north.
[00:00:29]  I don't know, it's it's it this is just this is gonna keep happening.
[00:00:32]  It's uh, it's it's not like black out there today or like red as it as it as it was, but uh still not a big fan.
[00:00:40]  You know, I was planning on going like a 20-mile, 30-mile run today and had to put it put it off for another couple years.
[00:00:50]  It's my it's my decade.
[00:00:52]  Uh, I go I go on a one-man marathon every three decades, and uh, I was planning to do this one, yeah, yeah, yeah, I was planning my inaugural one, and uh, and it looks like you know, the season.
[00:01:06]  You gotta put it off, nature intervened, yeah, exactly.
[00:01:11]  I've just decided to get really into astrology instead.
[00:01:22]  Hello, everyone.
[00:01:37]  Welcome.
[00:01:38]  New episode of Truanon.
[00:01:40]  Hello, greetings.
[00:01:41]  Is this a free one or a subscriber one?
[00:01:43]  Yeah, it's free.
[00:01:45]  Okay, oh, then I won't say it then.
[00:01:48]  Uh, welcome, everyone.
[00:01:49]  I'm Liz.
[00:01:51]  My name is, oh, well, sorry, had a little heart poppetician there.
[00:01:55]  My name is Brace.
[00:01:56]  You know, when your heart.
[00:01:57]  It did not sound like that.
[00:01:59]  Yeah, it's like your heart sometimes.
[00:02:01]  It's like, whoops, missed one.
[00:02:02]  When it beats too hard.
[00:02:05]  No, it just didn't beat.
[00:02:06]  Oh.
[00:02:07]  That was the problem.
[00:02:09]  It's like when you see a pretty lady, well, no, when you see a pretty lady, it starts going.
[00:02:12]  Yeah, it goes out of the chest, and then your tongue rolls out onto the street.
[00:02:16]  And then you're like, does he steam comes out of your ear?
[00:02:19]  Oh, exactly.
[00:02:22]  That's what happens.
[00:02:23]  That's called a stroke.
[00:02:27]  But, but my name is Ron Paul.
[00:02:29]  My name is Bryce Melden, and we are joined, of course, by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:02:35]  And we've got a hell of a guest for you guys today in an insanely long interview, one of our longest.
[00:02:40]  Who we talking to today, Liz?
[00:02:42]  We've got Mike Davis on the podcast.
[00:02:44]  I'm real excited about this one.
[00:02:47]  You guys might know him from reading some of his books.
[00:02:50]  City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocaust.
[00:02:55]  Which Marianne Faithful has a song called That.
[00:02:58]  That's uh she read the book.
[00:03:01]  Love Marianne Faithful.
[00:03:02]  She probably didn't read it.
[00:03:05]  I don't know.
[00:03:06]  She might have read it.
[00:03:07]  What are you basing that off of?
[00:03:09]  I don't know if she's interested.
[00:03:12]  How do you?
[00:03:13]  I love what do you think?
[00:03:14]  Marianne Faithful doesn't read?
[00:03:16]  I don't know.
[00:03:17]  You think she just came up with that series of words on her own?
[00:03:20]  Yeah, maybe.
[00:03:22]  Okay, well, we're going to talk about it.
[00:03:24]  Once Marianne comes on the show, we'll ask her.
[00:03:27]  All right, let's just get to it.
[00:03:40]  All right, ladies and gentlemen, cutting through all the smoke with us today, we have a hell of an interview for you.
[00:03:45]  We have Mike Davis, a writer and activist who, in his own words, has written too many books.
[00:03:50]  No doubt some of you assholes have read one or two of them.
[00:03:54]  He is here joining us live.
[00:03:56]  Well, actually, this isn't live.
[00:03:57]  We're recording this.
[00:03:57]  It's probably going to come out in a few days.
[00:03:59]  But, anyways, he's joining us here from San Diego to talk about, well, I think first to talk about probably the giant fires that are engulfing this very dry state.
[00:04:10]  Mike, how are you doing?
[00:04:12]  I'm fine, all things considered.

=== Overdevelopment's Wildfire Factor (16:09) ===

[00:04:15]  Like everybody in California, I'm mourning the loss of so much of the state's beauty in the mega fires of this decade, which will continue undoubtedly to be the norm through the rest of the century.
[00:04:34]  Things can only get worse from the standpoint of the natural conditions for fire.
[00:04:41]  Yeah, this summer, last summer in particular, have been, or you know, have been particularly bad.
[00:04:50]  Last year in Malibu, of course, and then now currently in Napa Valley, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz was completely demolished, and countless other places throughout the state.
[00:05:04]  And you've written extensively, particularly about the Malibu fires and kind of what's causing them.
[00:05:11]  These kind of decades in the making causes of these wildfires.
[00:05:18]  Well, fire has changed radically in the 21st century.
[00:05:24]  The fires I wrote about in Malibu had become so famous because of the stupidity of putting mansions on hilltops in an area that burns almost at maximum frequency.
[00:05:43]  It burns again whenever the coastal sage shrub has been restored and is aged inflammable enough.
[00:05:54]  So it was insane to build there because the canyons are aligned with Malibu Canyon, Topanga Canyon, are aligned with the Santa Ana winds.
[00:06:06]  You in the Bay Area call them Diablos, which blow every fall and they act as bellows.
[00:06:14]  Fires can come roaring out of these canyons like a blowtorch at 50 miles an hour and they burn houses right on the beach.
[00:06:25]  But that's an old pattern.
[00:06:27]  That was a major land use disaster to allow the development of.
[00:06:34]  But now we're faced with a different reality, a new fire regime.
[00:06:40]  And you could imagine it as a triangle.
[00:06:44]  And one apex is climate change, longer, more frequent droughts, and also extreme summer heats that ensure that even in a normal, what we'd consider a wet year, the soil moisture and plant moisture is lost to the terrific heats in July and August.
[00:07:11]  You recall that it was only a few weeks ago that it was 121 degrees in the San Fernando Valley.
[00:07:21]  So that's the climate change factor.
[00:07:26]  The next factor, of course, is the ex-urbanization of California's rural areas and wildlands.
[00:07:37]  There's also, of course, suburbanization that builds right on the edge of wildness, what's called the wildland fire interface.
[00:07:46]  But even more of a factor is building homes in the middle of forests or totally surrounded by chaparrals.
[00:07:56]  And to some extent, this is driven by high home prices in California, ever-increasing housing inflation that drives poor people to places like Paradise in the Sierra Nevada households or just simply average Californians, particularly retirees, who want a piece of the beauty.
[00:08:20]  But the major force behind it, the real engine of this, is that wealth from the coast is migrating inland in search of second homes.
[00:08:31]  And it's now common in real estate literature to hear people talking about starter castles.
[00:08:39]  Actually, some real castles, by the way.
[00:08:41]  Starter castles?
[00:08:42]  Starter castles, yeah.
[00:08:43]  I gotta let us use my literary agent as an example.
[00:08:51]  She has a really nice large home at the beach here in San Diego, but it's not large enough to house her entire art collection.
[00:09:00]  So she and her husband bought at least 5,000 square foot house in the backcountry, a magnificent location, and I spent weekends there.
[00:09:14]  And of course, like all people who've ex-urbanites, they expect fire services to pull out the stops to save these new homes.
[00:09:26]  So the whole question, which most California politicians, including liberal Democrats, are afraid to address, this question of overdevelopment and ex-urbanization in the wild ones.
[00:09:38]  But the third factor, which is really only discussed by the scientists and foresters, I've never heard a public official talk about it, is the invasion, the climate change-driven invasion or expansion of alien plants, above all grasses, particularly the tribe that are called bromis,
[00:10:04]  which include things like cheat grass and red brome, false brome, and also plants that those of us who live along near the coast are startled every spring to see when the hillsides and empty fields turn bright yellow.
[00:10:25]  That's called black mustard.
[00:10:27]  It dries out very quickly and it's a superb fire starter.
[00:10:32]  So what's happening is that fire frequencies increase through a feedback cycle between dryness and enhanced conditions for burning and these invasive weeds, which have evolutionary advantages over native plants.
[00:10:58]  They spring right up after fires.
[00:11:02]  They're better than most plants and using carbon dioxide as fertilizer.
[00:11:08]  They love polluted air.
[00:11:10]  They have shallow roots unlike, for instance, native chaparral.
[00:11:17]  So they no longer stabilize hill slopes and the like.
[00:11:24]  And they also burn at twice the temperature of shrubs.
[00:11:30]  And fire is allowing them to invade even areas that were considered invulnerable to weed growth, these kind of weeds, like in the closed canopy coastal forests and so on, where millions of oak trees have died from a pandemic plant disease, opening up spaces in the forest that are immediately colonized by weeds.
[00:11:58]  And finally, let me just point out that every time we have a major fire, the governor goes up to the microphone and tells us that this is global warming, a new reality.
[00:12:14]  And we have to do everything possible and as quickly as possible to reduce emissions, ignoring both the problems of overdevelopment and the problems of these new emergent fire ecologies.
[00:12:29]  From the beginning of August until the middle of this month, fires in California, burning 4 million acres, have emitted more carbon dioxide than the entire state did in 2019.
[00:12:46]  So all the measures that being put in place, new emission standards and so on, are in fact counteracted by fire.
[00:12:58]  And the weeds I'm talking about also have the ability to turn areas that were considered carbon sinks, vegetation communities that absorb part of the new carbon added to carbon sources.
[00:13:14]  In other words, they're emitting more carbon than they're absorbing.
[00:13:20]  And in some ways, this is an almost irresistible development.
[00:13:25]  I think that you're absolutely right with Newsom, one of my favorite people to talk about, who I've known for a long time from growing up in San Francisco.
[00:13:34]  I mean, not personally, but just, you know, media-wise.
[00:13:39]  Well, I'm a Gaddy, so I had such a time with him.
[00:13:42]  But that, you know, I think progressive politicians, and Newsom is no exception, have learned very quickly to use global warming as a kind of a way to deflect away from the exact causes that you're talking about.
[00:14:01]  But particularly when it comes to talking about overdevelopment, land use, all of those zoning, all those sexy conversations.
[00:14:10]  But because it would, I mean, you know, Newsom, and he's no different than any other politician in California that gets so much money from developers, right?
[00:14:20]  And depends on, I mean, the California economy depends on this obscene housing market that it keeps, that just keeps running and running and running.
[00:14:34]  And they become very savvy at using climate politics to really distort the conversation away from those things.
[00:14:42]  Well, I think you're actually exactly right about all this.
[00:14:46]  And it's just the rule of electoral politics in this state that you do not question from the right or the center or even the soft left private property or development rights.
[00:15:04]  But unless you directly challenge land markets and unless you introduce planning on a regional or state scale, you'll never be able to deal with gentrification of inner cities or the mega fires in the backcountry.
[00:15:26]  And it always amuses me that all this was pointed out 150 or 60 years ago by California's greatest radical, in fact, the most influential radical of the late 19th century in English-speaking countries.
[00:15:48]  And that's San Francisco's Henry George.
[00:15:52]  And he wrote a famous book arguing that land inflation, monopolies of land, and increasing land values rewarded people who contributed absolutely nothing to the productive economy of the state.
[00:16:09]  Instead, they stifled the productive economy.
[00:16:13]  So he proposed a single tax on land that would basically appropriate all the new value added to land as land, for instance, the coastal areas became scarcer.
[00:16:31]  That's why Proposition 15, as weak as it is in some ways, is the absolutely necessary step to take and why it's supported by public sector unions and environmentalists.
[00:16:47]  But it looks right now, the polls have shown, it looks like it's going to be defeated by another mobilization of developers and Proposition 13 supporters.
[00:17:02]  Yeah, that's something that, I mean, I've been pretty involved in efforts to repeal the entirety of, or at least parts of Costa Hawkins for a little while now.
[00:17:14]  And just from Those efforts, boy, it is really difficult to kind of go up against the housing market in any in any form, whether it's developers, whether it's landlords, any part of it.
[00:17:26]  It's such a powerful part of California's fabric, I guess.
[00:17:31]  It's political, social, and I mean, it really, their tendrils kind of go through every single parts of our lives.
[00:17:38]  And like, you know, growing up here in the Bay Area and specifically in San Francisco, you know, I've seen just how much of an effect all of this has had on not only my life, but the lives of everyone I know.
[00:17:48]  I mean, this city is totally bare of basically everybody I grew up with, save like a couple of people who, you know, like myself managed to hang on to rent-controlled units.
[00:17:58]  But like you were saying with sort of the pushing people further out into more further into these sort of rural fire zones that they're going to have to live in eventually.
[00:18:08]  You used the example of Malibu in that article you wrote about, you know, why should we rebuild Malibu?
[00:18:15]  And then there's also sort of the example of places like Paradise, which is very poor, or at least, you know, below sort of the median in California.
[00:18:24]  And that seems to be like more and more the case now.
[00:18:27]  I mean, friends of mine are having to move out sort of exactly where you described, essentially like the Sierra Mountain area.
[00:18:32]  For those of you who aren't familiar with California's geography, that's basically like the mountain ranges and some sort of lowlands near the Nevada-California border, where it's way cheaper.
[00:18:43]  And so now these areas are sort of gaining more, a larger and larger population.
[00:18:49]  And these are really wooded areas.
[00:18:51]  And when Paradise burned down, all I could think about when they were making these sort of efforts to rebuild is this is going to happen again and again.
[00:19:02]  And I'm not really sure there's any real way to prevent this in totality, maybe to mitigate it to some extent.
[00:19:09]  But yeah, and so like, I mean, that leads us with sort of a big question is like, what do you do with like the massive amount of people who live their lives, have their businesses and their jobs and their families in these places that seemed essentially just destined to burn all the time because they can't afford to move to the cities?
[00:19:29]  Well, this week is going to be very sinister because two of the places that were destroyed or partially destroyed by previous fires, the large loss of life, are probably going to burn today and tomorrow.
[00:19:46]  And one is Paradise itself and the other is Santa Rosa.
[00:19:50]  Santa Rosa, where the totally unexpected happened and wildfire, or rather the embers, Lifted, set aloft by a firestorm and descended from the sky on houses in an average California subdivision next to freeway with supermarkets and the like,
[00:20:14]  the places that you never think are dangerous, and burn it to ground overnight, killing senior citizens.
[00:20:22]  So they're burning again.

=== Moratorium on Natural Regeneration (14:51) ===

[00:20:25]  And the increase in fire frequency prevents even the California vegetation that has co-evolved with fire from regenerating itself.
[00:20:38]  A chaparral needs at least 8, 10, maybe 12 years to regenerate after a big fire and become theoretically flammable again.
[00:20:48]  But when you have a fire every year or every few years, and in the case of Santa Rosa and Paradise, we're talking about two and three years, the alien plants invade.
[00:21:02]  And once they have a strong purchase on an area, they prevent the native vegetation in most cases from growing back.
[00:21:15]  And yes, mitigate is all we can do, but it has to be a different mitigation from what, for instance, Diane Feinstein's talking about.
[00:21:28]  She's got a bill supported by Governor Knudson, who spent a lot of money clearing litter out of forests, clearing away brush, encouraging homeowners to build even larger defensive spaces.
[00:21:46]  But this has an Achilles heel.
[00:21:50]  John Keeley, who really is the world expert on fire in Mediterranean ecosystems, particularly Californias, completed a study last year, the first large-scale study of fires in the last decade, and found that clearing brush around houses, whether it's 100 feet perimeter or 300 feet perimeter,
[00:22:15]  did almost nothing to save those houses.
[00:22:21]  What it did do is create space for grasses to flourish.
[00:22:28]  So even clearing away all the vegetation will only allow the invasive grasses to start.
[00:22:39]  So to really mitigate fire, you have to do a couple of things.
[00:22:45]  The first is we should impose right now at least a year-long moratorium on new construction.
[00:22:54]  Or I live in San Diego, In the backcountry where I grew up, there are now 10,000 new homes approved for construction in areas that are described as extreme fire hazard areas.
[00:23:10]  That's the official designation.
[00:23:13]  None of them provide affordable housing.
[00:23:17]  They're all upper end developments.
[00:23:21]  But the other thing we need to do is we need to enlarge the California Conservation Corps from a couple of thousand young people to 20,000 or more, working not only in traditional brush clearance and preventive burning where it's possible, but above all, attacking the weed problem and trying to prevent the broms from receding after a fire.
[00:23:49]  This will never work completely, but it's a necessary measure because the things that are proposed now by Feinstein and by the state simply won't work unless you address the invasive weed fire cycle.
[00:24:13]  And I've never heard a politician talk about this.
[00:24:17]  Something I do hear a lot from certain quarters, especially those very closely linked to developers, is that one of the big solutions to this is actually to build more housing of all types, but essentially more luxury housing in urban areas like large condos, large luxury apartment buildings, thinking that this will sort of stem gentrification and thus like stop the flow of people sort of leaving the cities for these rural or these more fire dangerous areas.
[00:24:45]  What you're proposing is a total moratorium on all construction.
[00:24:50]  All construction in high fire.
[00:24:53]  In high fire areas.
[00:24:54]  Yeah, yes.
[00:24:56]  Because I think like it's something you point out and I think the Malibu writings is that like these actually, these fires and these disasters are actually opportunities for developers because not only can they rebuild people's homes, but occasionally this opens up entirely new parts of wilderness for building because they don't have to clear forests or anything anymore.
[00:25:20]  They can just build whatever they want on whatever given hillside.
[00:25:24]  And it's just like, you know, with what you're saying on that and with how closely linked this is also to just like the vacuum created by these fires in terms of the ecology of the areas and the moving out of the grasses, I mean, it just seems like such a multifaceted, it's like all of California's sins are being visited upon her in sort of this perfect combination summed up by the fires.
[00:25:48]  Well, I mean, what's inevitable and what's happening right now, if you read the major publications, the major research groups looking at global warming and drought, is that the equator side of Mediterranean ecosystems, south and the northern hemisphere, north and the southern hemisphere,
[00:26:16]  are gradually becoming aridified.
[00:26:18]  They're turning into deserts or desert steppes.
[00:26:21]  Mediterranean vegetation in turn is adapting by moving northward and replacing forests eventually in areas like southern Oregon or even Washington.
[00:26:36]  And that really can't be stopped.
[00:26:39]  And it's happening all over the world.
[00:26:42]  And in California, we're losing or we've lost essential parts of our natural beauty, of our iconic landscapes.
[00:26:52]  And while we can mitigate to some extent the speed of this conversion, the long-term trend, which is already fixed in place by the amount of carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, will change.
[00:27:10]  And this horrifies me.
[00:27:13]  I'm a native California, and I spent a lifetime, a very long lifetime, hiking and camping in the mountains and the back countries, country of California.
[00:27:26]  And the thought of losing so much of California is almost unbearable, really, when you sit down and think about it.
[00:27:34]  Think of your favorite uh, your favorite places.
[00:27:38]  The other thing that's sort of making this um what's happening currently even kind of more complicated is the, the Covid19 pandemic, right and.
[00:28:08]  And I think, you know, when you mention like a moratorium on developing, that seems almost politically impossible in the wake of COVID-19, which is presenting some, I mean, I don't even know what to say.
[00:28:26]  Like developers are just salivating, it seems, at the opportunities, especially in big cities like New York and San Francisco, as more and more small businesses close, more and more, I guess you would say, like small landlords, or I don't know how you want to describe them, have to be liquidated, et cetera.
[00:28:46]  And I know you've written a lot about the kind of bizarre changing landscape of American cities.
[00:28:58]  And I'm thinking specifically about a kind of, I think you've said that it's, as people move into the cities, it's like an urbanity but without urbanity, right?
[00:29:08]  Or it's an urban landscape without any kind of the social relations that actually make up a real urban landscape, right?
[00:29:18]  And it seems like COVID is accelerating that trend in development.
[00:29:28]  Well, I mean, COVID is, first of all, dehousing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Americans with no clear option as where they might go or find new residences.
[00:29:44]  Secondly, wealthy people are moving out to, they're following the routes of ex-urbanization to smaller towns up the Hudson River or in New England to get away from the city.
[00:30:01]  Yet paradoxically, this doesn't relieve pressure on gentrification.
[00:30:06]  And you focused on the essential point here, that's development opportunities.
[00:30:13]  My eldest daughter, who's Irish from Northern Ireland, has been living in Manhattan.
[00:30:21]  And she was thinking, oh my God, the silver lining here might be that rents are actually affordable.
[00:30:27]  That's not proven to be the case, the case at all.
[00:30:31]  So all the bad antisocial qualities of metropolitan development are only enhanced by the epidemic and the way that it's the pandemic and the way it's been handled by the Trump administration.
[00:30:53]  And just as we have to recognize that we live in a world of permanent fire on a whole different scale and frequency than in the 20th century, we have to recognize that COVID is just the overture.
[00:31:06]  We'll live in an age of pandemics.
[00:31:11]  For instance, avian flu, which is now several subtypes in China that successfully passed to humans and killed humans, is as much a danger as it was when I wrote a book about this subject 15 years ago.
[00:31:31]  I mean, we're in a profound civilizational crisis, and there's no way out of it unless we change the infrastructures of private ownership and private economic power in this state and the United States as a whole, everywhere in the world.
[00:31:51]  So you say change the infrastructures of, or basically change how we do things.
[00:31:57]  And could you elaborate a little more on what you mean by that?
[00:32:00]  Because I think a lot of people feel the same way.
[00:32:02]  I mean, they can look around and even people who aren't really like very familiar with some of the more theoretical concepts or even more practical concepts bandied about maybe by people, you know, adherence to the science of Marxism.
[00:32:16]  But they know that things aren't working, something's wrong, rents are going up.
[00:32:21]  It seems like nobody can afford them.
[00:32:23]  Nobody has health care and the earth is getting hotter.
[00:32:27]  And nobody really has like, it seems like that clear of an idea of what to do besides not this and to change this.
[00:32:35]  And even then, if you suggest that a lot of people are like, well, you know, you can make America better, but what about China and India or something like this?
[00:32:43]  Of course, these countries did not get to go through the same industrial revolution that America did hundreds of years ago, which helped cause all of this.
[00:32:51]  But what sort of, you know, I hate to be a guy who's like, you know, what prescriptive things do you have?
[00:32:58]  But like, but like, what ideas are you talking about here?
[00:33:04]  Well, I mean, just to give a couple instances, what the COVID pandemic has revealed is the disastrous state of public health in this country.
[00:33:15]  After the 2008 recession, 60,000 jobs in county public health departments and the like were eliminated and haven't been restored.
[00:33:31]  Hospital chains have been buying up hospitals and particularly in areas where medical care is scarce and few between in smaller cities and rural areas.
[00:33:47]  And the whole hospital industry, including religious-owned hospitals, have been operating for a long time on the same principle of just-in-time inventory as private industry.
[00:34:06]  They've eliminated a million, million and a half hospital beds, reducing surge capacity in the case of a pandemic like this.
[00:34:18]  The pharmaceutical industry, Big Pharma, has advocated research.
[00:34:23]  They spend a lot more on advertising.
[00:34:25]  And the products they find That they actually develop are ones that they find very profitable, like the sexual dysfunctions of males my age or heart medicines.
[00:34:39]  We're no longer developing the antivirals or antibiotics we need.
[00:34:44]  In this emergency, the only reason that many of the big pharma are advancing vaccine development is simply because we're paying billions of dollars to them.
[00:34:58]  And the whole industry is capitalized on the basis anyway of research and knowledge created in public universities and then licensed cheaply.
[00:35:10]  Look at any UC campus these days, what surrounds it.
[00:35:14]  It's a research and development.

=== Migrant Crisis Rising (15:35) ===

[00:35:16]  Oh, I was going to say, hopefully, one day a very tall, tall fence.
[00:35:21]  Yeah.
[00:35:23]  So, you know, that can be, you know, addressed.
[00:35:28]  And thank God that Bernie Sanders, in creating a new political agenda based on socioeconomic rights, put universal health care at the top.
[00:35:42]  But it needs to be far more reaching.
[00:35:45]  And the other thing, of course, is what we've been talking about.
[00:35:48]  The need to control development by intervening in private land markets, controlling land prices.
[00:35:59]  Otherwise, gentrification will always happen when the market conditions are right.
[00:36:08]  And you might say, oh, this is kind of a Bolshevik demand.
[00:36:12]  I mean, how would you imagine doing that in the United States?
[00:36:16]  Well, in fact, other capitalist countries have done this to some degree very successfully.
[00:36:23]  Most large Canadian cities own the perimeter of the cities.
[00:36:29]  They have publicly owned greenbelts to prevent sprawl.
[00:36:35]  You go to England and you'll find in the most valuable real estate on earth, the west end of London, they're actually public housing projects for ordinary people.
[00:36:50]  This is the heritage of past labor governments.
[00:36:55]  I mean, in general, we have to be the partisans of the necessary, not the politically realistic.
[00:37:03]  And I'm very, you know, emphatic about that.
[00:37:09]  But at the same time, we recognize that reforms are possible as long as we can build a base.
[00:37:18]  Even in the Trump lands of rural gentrification, there are large minorities of people who understand the problem, want environmental controls, partially because they don't want any more neighbors than they already have.
[00:37:36]  But I consider it virtually impossible that a Biden administration or traditional mainstream Democrats can even articulate much less place on the table the real solutions that we need.
[00:37:55]  Yeah, I mean, I don't think either myself or Brace have any illusions about a possible Biden administration.
[00:38:04]  I think, yeah, we'll have more stuff to say about him in a couple episodes.
[00:38:11]  But I think him and the Democratic Party at large, I mean, like I was saying earlier, they have become very adept at using progressive sloganeering as a way of distracting from essential political confrontations, we'll just say, you know, and you see that time and time again with the way that climate politics gets used at the federal level.
[00:38:36]  I think it's been, I don't know, pretty depressing to see, you know, the federal response to attacking a climate problem has been very limited to its, you know, to investing in green technologies, which as we all know, or I think many listeners of this podcast know, is not at all a threat to fossil fuel companies, right?
[00:39:05]  In fact, both can coexist very easily and actually are right now.
[00:39:10]  Sometimes it's the same company.
[00:39:12]  Yeah, sometimes very much.
[00:39:14]  Yeah, usually it actually is.
[00:39:16]  You know, the oil companies have become very adept at, again, greenwashing a lot of their own practices.
[00:39:26]  But also, green technology completely then elides the issue of mining, which is an incredibly destructive practice.
[00:39:39]  And where that happens, well, where that happens, as we talked about on this podcast, is in Latin America and Africa in places like Bolivia, where Joe Biden oversaw the Obama-era Latin American policy.
[00:39:54]  So I don't have any, I don't think, yeah, we don't have any illusions about what a Joe Biden climate project would look like, to be honest.
[00:40:03]  Embedded in the center of the current trajectory of global politics is the threat of genocide on an unimaginable massive scale.
[00:40:18]  In other words, the people who live in the poor countries that did not create the emissions in the first place, as we all know, are the ones who are going to face the most dire effects of climate change, which, for instance, is a direct threat to the largest irrigation system in the world, the Indus River.
[00:40:42]  Millions of Pakistani farmers who depend on that are facing grave dangers.
[00:40:48]  Agriculture is under threat everywhere, even in a world where, as we're told again and again, grain output has to increase by 50% by mid-century to feed the growing population of the world.
[00:41:07]  But what's been the reaction to that?
[00:41:10]  Well, rich countries agreed to set up an adaptation fund for the most imperiled poor countries.
[00:41:19]  They haven't even met their, paid their dues for this.
[00:41:24]  They've embraced it, but they haven't even put up the money and it's far too small.
[00:41:29]  And in the absence of major world expenditure on adaptation, we're talking about the poorest fifth of the human race.
[00:41:42]  Where will they go?
[00:41:43]  Where they won't die on a boat in the middle of the Mediterranean or butt their heads against the wall.
[00:41:53]  We've already fortified the world against necessary, against the kind of migration that global warming necessitates.
[00:42:03]  And part of the absurdity of this is some of the countries that face the greatest problems of an aging workforce and a lack of workers are the ones most fanatic to prevent any kind of immigration.
[00:42:18]  But what this will lead to by mid-century, and what we've already accepted in a way in our reaction to catastrophes across the world, is that hundreds of millions of people could die or imminently face in a world food crisis, as the FAO has pointed out.
[00:42:48]  I mean, there's imminent starvation already in parts of the world.
[00:42:52]  But if you just extrapolate from that, I mean, we're talking about a genocide on a scale that dwarfs what national socialism did.
[00:43:08]  And what concerns me most about the progressive movement in the United States, and even its explicitly socialist components, it's been the lack of internationalism.
[00:43:20]  Not at one point in the Democratic primary debates did anybody talk about the food crisis, the sanitation crisis, the debt crisis, anything that affect the lives of the poorest half of humanity.
[00:43:37]  And there's been a very great danger that we're recreating a left-wing version of America-first politics.
[00:43:47]  I was interviewed by this and somebody said, well, isn't that inevitable given the problems we're having here?
[00:43:52]  No, there's huge constituencies in the United States, working-class immigrants from all around the world that send money back home, that maintain the closest of ties to their ancestral communities and so on.
[00:44:07]  This is a big unmobilized force for international aid and putting the global issues at the forefront of progressive agendas.
[00:44:21]  But I don't see, apart from the people who work so admirably around the migration crisis and the imprisonment of children and families, I don't really see much initiative coming out of the left so far.
[00:44:35]  That has to change.
[00:44:38]  Yeah, it's interesting because you don't even see, I mean, I share a lot of your criticism and I, you know, you don't even see from the left really even an outspoken, you know, no one really brings up why migration is happening in the first place, a lot of which has to do with United States intervention in the global south, right?
[00:45:03]  I mean, and none of those pull factors really even get discussed to begin with.
[00:45:11]  Of course, I mean, we're facing all the nightmare legacy of Reagan's interventions in Central America and U.S. imperialism generally.
[00:45:23]  But there's a new force added to this.
[00:45:25]  If you look at the huge crisis in the Middle East, the Eastern Mediterranean, well, millions of people have been driven off the land by the largest droughts in centuries.
[00:45:44]  And that's going to be the new normal.
[00:45:47]  A friend of mine, a very Wonderful cutting-edge drought researcher named Richard Seeger at Lamont-Doherty just says matter-of-factly, there is no more fertile crescent.
[00:46:01]  That agriculture can't return to normal.
[00:46:06]  And combined with civil war and foreign intervention, you'd see the kind of catastrophe.
[00:46:13]  Seeger and other drought researchers will also point out that amongst the most hard-hit areas by climate change and by aridification are the Caribbean and the Central and Central America.
[00:46:26]  So we're now seeing a huge water crisis in El Salvador.
[00:46:30]  Hundreds of thousands or more Hondurans faced with the failure of banana harvests and crops wilting in fields have been thrown into the migration stream.
[00:46:43]  And the very loud and definitive answer of the rich countries is: no, you're not welcome.
[00:46:51]  We won't let you come.
[00:46:55]  I mean, this is the kind of horrible landscape in which we have to maneuver.
[00:47:00]  And if I can make one final point, just think about the complexity of the current situation politically.
[00:47:07]  Up to January, we saw the reappearance for the first time since the 60s of Left New Deal politics, socioeconomic Bill of Rights.
[00:47:22]  In other words, a mild form of social democracy in the United States.
[00:47:28]  And everybody thought it was possible.
[00:47:32]  Certainly those who voted for Bernie did.
[00:47:36]  Since January, we're an entirely different world where the demands of the Sanders campaign and other progressives remain as important as ever, particularly universal health care, but a whole set of issues that are similar to what people faced in the 1930s.
[00:48:01]  Triumphant neo-fascism across the world, the loss of so many of the economic and social rights that have been established by unions, massive and permanent structural unemployment, all the things that dictate high levels of social violence.
[00:48:26]  So we're caught trying to negotiate our way between these two agendas and two landscapes of change.
[00:48:36]  And needless to say, this is going to be a very difficult transition and adaptation for all of us because we're facing both the unmet needs of period, a long period of growth, and now all the urgent issues of the depression.
[00:48:59]  And I'm not even sure I see any starting point for discussing this right now in the major organizations of the progressive movement.
[00:49:09]  Well, something that I think about a lot is that like, yeah, there are a lot of sort of analogs to the depression of the late 20s, 1930s.
[00:49:19]  But there's no sort of poll like there was with, for instance, the Soviet Union where people and like, and sort of the associated movements with that, these sort of like large, you know, workers' movements throughout the globe.
[00:49:34]  That doesn't really exist right now.
[00:49:35]  I mean, like the sort of all the mild social democracy in the West, at least, has been pretty much roundly defeated in the past decade.
[00:49:44]  And so there's this, it feels like this year, to me, like something I've thought a lot about is especially one day when I walked outside my small apartment in the inner city and I looked out and the sky was totally black.
[00:50:00]  I would have had to be wearing a mask that day no matter what, even if there wasn't a pandemic.
[00:50:05]  And I walked around and I was like, this just, this feels like the beginning of sort of like a new epoch of like, you know, things are going to get just much worse.
[00:50:16]  Like this is, like you said before, like this is like an overture.
[00:50:19]  And it seems like we're on this sort of train that just has absolutely no breaks.
[00:50:25]  But of course, like that, that's how it seems right now because we haven't really acclimated ourselves to the situation.
[00:50:31]  I don't think people have really understood how big of a sea change sort of the world is going through in general.
[00:50:36]  And in this country is no exception to that.
[00:50:40]  But yeah, I think people can't really get, you know, I hear people I know talk about, well, like, you know, when climate change comes, we're all fucked.
[00:50:49]  It's like, well, a lot of us will be fucked, I guess.

=== World's Unseen Shift (14:44) ===

[00:50:51]  But like people really in semi-industrialized, beginning to industrialize countries, you know, in the global south, I mean, that is going to be a fucking nightmare because, you know, these countries do not have, first of all, the wealth that the United States does.
[00:51:07]  And God knows if they'll even be allowed to industrialize.
[00:51:10]  I mean, I'm sure that many of them will try after just the extent of what's happening kind of becomes apparent.
[00:51:16]  And that just seems like it's going to add on, like you're saying, to a crisis of refugees, to a crisis of migrants.
[00:51:24]  Because the fact is, Western Europe and America got this head start on industrialization.
[00:51:30]  And this is something I think about a lot.
[00:51:34]  We went through these periods of terrific growth, and of course, with that, terrific environmental destruction.
[00:51:40]  And we're sort of threw everything at the wall.
[00:51:43]  And then when you see countries like India or China attempt the same thing, you know, countries that are much larger than the U.S., you know, of course, decades and decades and decades later, it's sort of like thought of as this really selfish thing that they're doing.
[00:51:57]  But I don't really see any way around that.
[00:51:59]  Like, of course, India and China are going to have to industrialize more.
[00:52:02]  That's like what any country would do given their situation.
[00:52:07]  And I wonder if you think that there is a model that's being shown for how to sort of mitigate these kind of climate disasters on a national scale, at least, if any government's even beginning to model some of those policies.
[00:52:22]  I know for many of us, Vietnam's response to the coronavirus pandemic was really admirable.
[00:52:27]  I mean, they really went kind of all out on both providing their citizens with aid and also, you know, a really effective public health campaign.
[00:52:37]  But I was wondering if you felt like there was any country that showed that they even had the possibility of doing that same thing for the climate.
[00:52:46]  Well, I mean, there are admirable examples in the COVID crisis.
[00:52:53]  Norway was one of the first to step up and say that vaccine development had to be available to the entire world and needed a massive solidarity effort to get medical aid and supplies to countries that in many cases lack even rudimentary public health systems.
[00:53:16]  The Cuban doctors are always heroes and so on.
[00:53:19]  Of course.
[00:53:20]  But when you get to problems on a global level, imagine that you're in the RAND Institute in Santa Monica.
[00:53:29]  I usually do, but it's armed with an M16.
[00:53:31]  I'm just kidding.
[00:53:32]  I'm just kidding.
[00:53:34]  We have fun here.
[00:53:35]  Yeah, careful here.
[00:53:38]  And this was a think tank set up at the Air Force in the early 50s to talk about how to make nuclear war feasible.
[00:53:49]  And it was one of the major centers for the development of game-theoretical models, not only of nuclear exchanges, but of everything else.
[00:54:00]  So-called scientific approach to the unthinkable.
[00:54:04]  But you're in the RAND Institute right now, sitting in Santa Monica, and you say, okay, carbon emissions require global reductions.
[00:54:16]  But the major emitters are almost certainly going to feel less effects from climate change, at least in the next 10, 20 years, than the poorer countries.
[00:54:32]  So somehow you have to convince the rich countries and the rich classes to set aside one, two percent of their GDPs in order to adopt the third world and speed up climate change.
[00:54:47]  That's assuming that you even are making progress in the battle of mitigation, of decarbonizing the economies.
[00:54:57]  And what would be the conclusion drawn by RAND corporation modeling?
[00:55:03]  That there's no rational reason for rich countries or rich classes for this kind of solidarity.
[00:55:14]  Okay?
[00:55:16]  It does not directly benefit them.
[00:55:19]  And history has shown that they're only concerned with what directly benefits them.
[00:55:25]  Particularly now when we live in an age where the upper middle classes of the world and our rulers base themselves on this principle to devour and enjoy all the good things of earth in our lifetime and leave nothing behind.
[00:55:46]  This is a lot different from even capitalist mentality in the 19th century.
[00:55:51]  For instance, what happened when in the so-called hot 1969 period in Italy, or no, actually earlier, in the time of Gramsci in 1921, the workers occupied the largest auto plant in the world, the second largest auto plant in the world.
[00:56:13]  And the head of Fiat said, okay, I'll let the workers run it, but you have to promise me one thing.
[00:56:23]  Don't destroy the machines.
[00:56:25]  Well, now one of the principal modes of capital accumulation is for private equity companies to take firms and sell off the means production, wreck them for short-term profits.
[00:56:40]  I mean, this is a totally piratical culture.
[00:56:46]  And it aims at only one thing, which is speeding up the deterioration and the looting of the earth.
[00:56:54]  And we need to be very clear about this.
[00:56:58]  I mean, if I might just add, I, of course, was very enthused by the Occupy movement, but I thought the idea of the 1% was silly because consistently 40% of the American population is back reactionary politics.
[00:57:18]  That was in the election of 1936 or Goldwater in 1968 or today the apparently unshakable Trump base.
[00:57:28]  We just have to face up to that, that even with the best organizing and the best appeals, you're not going to win over but a small segment of that base.
[00:57:43]  And it's saturated with this ethic of immediate wealth, immediate pleasure.
[00:57:52]  And in a sense, it's also a gerontocracy, which you now see characterizes not only the greatest generation, but my baby boomer generation as well.
[00:58:07]  Screw the kids.
[00:58:09]  Screw other people's kids.
[00:58:10]  Screw the game, you know, the grandkids.
[00:58:14]  I mean, how, as you explain this phenomenon, we're the west side of LA.
[00:58:19]  People mansionize their homes, and you end up with a demographic where the largest family units in Los Angeles are living in the poorest housing in the smallest amount of area,
[00:58:35]  while old couples whose children have long ago grown up enlarged their habitats from 2,000 or 2,200 square feet to the little McMansions, three, four, even 5,000 square feet.
[00:59:02]  This is a world that we have to find ways to resist in new ways that point out always the centrality of private property and private economic power.
[00:59:16]  My other criticism of Occupy was that it talked about economic equality, reducing income gaps.
[00:59:25]  But it did not talk about economic power.
[00:59:28]  And economic power is the essence of what we're fighting against.
[00:59:33]  The concentration of the ability to make the decisions, you know, the major and global decisions about whether a plant will open or close, whether a region will decline or thrive in the hands of a very small group of ultra-wealthy people and their minions.
[00:59:58]  Economic power must always be a question at the forefront, I believe, of our politics.
[01:00:06]  I think that that's a real legacy that you point out from Occupy, and it's a shame.
[01:00:10]  I mean, I still see that strand.
[01:00:12]  I think that animates a lot of left imaginaries or left thinking or the kind of lens through which a lot of people view politics now.
[01:00:23]  unfortunately.
[01:00:23]  It has nothing to do with control, like you say, control over decision making or workers emancipating themselves, right?
[01:00:38]  It has to do with distribution or getting more of what we thought we were promised.
[01:00:45]  It's kind of, you know, I think the point about the 1% is also true that like it's a shame because, you know, we are the 99% versus the 1%.
[01:00:57]  Like that's not a useful way for viewing, I think, as you rightly point out, how financial capitalism operates in the United States or, you know, in the West, like at all.
[01:01:09]  And in fact, that doesn't tell us anything about who owns or controls what, right?
[01:01:15]  Because there's the problem of private equity and wealth managers and the way that that entire system trickles down, not to mention, you know, Silicon Valley and the way that all of that management is structured, right?
[01:01:32]  So it really doesn't, I think it's unfortunate because that did more to mystify or obscure the political potential political confrontations and the contradictions within our society rather than clarify.
[01:01:59]  And to me, that's been one of Occupy's legacies that the left really doesn't want to acknowledge, let alone kind of work through or grapple with.
[01:02:10]  No, I think that the politics of investment are the single most important terrain, at least ultimately, in progressive politics.
[01:02:21]  To democratize the process and control the resources invested in the economy, which then control the future direction of the economy.
[01:02:33]  And you have to think about democratizing the biggest corporations, banks, and utilities at the very least.
[01:02:44]  How to build a new society that doesn't repeat the sins of the Soviet Union, for instance.
[01:02:53]  And to do that globally is a question that only the next generation can begin to address.
[01:03:05]  And I feel particularly guilty talking about this because my generation did not do enough.
[01:03:15]  I mean, there were great heroes like the student nonviolent coordinating committee in the black power movement who moved mountains.
[01:03:26]  But by and large, we did very little to resist the coming of the new right or to understand its significance.
[01:03:35]  So upon my four children, on their shoulders, are laid all these Herculean impossible tasks.
[01:03:50]  But when we think it's all hopeless, we open our doors and windows.
[01:03:56]  And there are the 16 and 17 year olds marching in the street, shouting, you know, brave as hell.
[01:04:05]  So even if we don't have blueprints of the future, even if so much is indeterminable at this point, there's a tremendous amount of energy, courage, and radicalism in this country that could be our salvation.
[01:04:24]  I mean, my two youngest kids are still in high school, and I find it impossible to convince them if they were a couple of years older.
[01:04:34]  I find it impossible to convince them to vote for Biden.
[01:04:38]  They want structural, radical change.
[01:04:40]  And their friends, they go to an inner city high school, largely black and Latino.
[01:04:47]  And their friends all feel the same way.
[01:04:52]  I feel like I'm a Menshevik trying to address adolescent Bolsheviks these days.
[01:05:00]  I think both kind of both what you and Liz were talking about here with this sort of like kind of misunderstanding or mystification of the way that like financial, the financialization of the economy came about and kind of what that means now is it's difficult for me to understand.
[01:05:17]  This has been sort of a long-running theme of our show is Liz trying to explain sort of these basic concepts of like of high finance to me because I am a real moron and it's it's difficult for me to understand a lot of this stuff, but I know I don't like it.

=== Incredible Climate Conflicts (04:00) ===

[01:05:36]  And it just seems like – I think it's one of those things where at least it seems to a guy like me that like some of these concepts are just so – not only – and this is sort of playing to what you're saying.
[01:05:47]  They're not only so complex, but they're so vast and like awesome as to be insurmountable.
[01:05:53]  And that can have like a real like deletrious sort of subconscious effect on a lot of people.
[01:05:59]  And so that like – I understand why people sort of went with like the 1% versus the 99% thing.
[01:06:06]  because that's a lot easier to understand.
[01:06:09]  I think America's place in the world will probably eventually be challenged too in a more real way.
[01:06:16]  I mean, we sort of already see inklings of that happening right now.
[01:06:19]  And certainly those on the right who, I mean, to be fair, have been warning about this for a while, but with various different countries kind of in the place of where China is now.
[01:06:30]  When that sort of hegemony begins to get challenged more, more so than it already is, I think we're also going to see like a series of kind of new breed of conflicts spring up because of that, new kinds of economic warfare, new kinds of hot warfare, new kinds of cold warfare.
[01:06:46]  And yeah, it does sometimes seem like we're just heading towards this like perfect storm of incredible problems that are not unique to our age, but that the way that they're happening is ways we haven't seen before.
[01:06:59]  And combined all that with like what we've been talking about, this just really incredible effects of climate change, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be tough for people.
[01:07:12]  And I can expect sort of a big wave of subtle repression to come out of the government.
[01:07:21]  And I think like to what you guys were talking about earlier with the kind of greenwashing stuff from the oil industry, I think a lot of it's going to come along with that.
[01:07:28]  I mean, to me, at least, when Gavin Newsom went on TV, you know, when these fires were happening, he said, somebody do something.
[01:07:36]  To me, that had like a shocking effect because I thought, well, you're the governor, for Christ's sake.
[01:07:41]  Like, somebody do something.
[01:07:42]  Who the hell are you talking to?
[01:07:44]  There's like four guys ahead of you in the country.
[01:07:49]  And I think we're going to see a lot more of that where our enemies sort of try to mystify exactly who's on what side here.
[01:07:57]  And everybody eventually is going to become kind of these green warriors.
[01:08:03]  And we sort of already see that happening.
[01:08:06]  And I just, you know, I sort of urge people listening to this is, you know, if a rich person tells you something, well, you know, don't take it with a grain of salt.
[01:08:17]  But yeah, I mean, I just, I'm sort of worried about like not only just like a new wave of this repression, but like a green warfare that America is going to try to wage on other countries if they're, you know, if by them doing something, you know, in the environment that they're not supposed to do sort of prevents us from doing all the shit that we want to do, you know, ways of waging economic warfare because of that.
[01:08:45]  Well, very definitely.
[01:08:47]  Climate adaptation is going to be a major arena of class struggle in this country and around the world.
[01:08:57]  Why should America send billions of dollars of aid elsewhere when we need to defend all those homes in the Sierra foothills and deal with the risk of storm damage and flooding on our Atlantic and Gulf seacoast, with of course wealthier homeowners and residents shouting much louder than the poor people who live on the coast?
[01:09:24]  Well that's going to be true universally in the world.
[01:09:28]  These are major redistributive issues and they'll be fought viciously.

=== Future Of Globalization (07:26) ===

[01:09:36]  And this is where the my country firstism is the perfect context for inaction on all these issues.
[01:09:50]  But let me talk about the question of what is the future of globalization.
[01:09:55]  One scenario that's been put forward is that China will do on an even larger scale what it did in 2008 when the recession that started in the United States threatened to become a depression and a global one.
[01:10:13]  The Chinese injected a huge amount of spending and investment into the world economy and it was Beijing, not Washington, that played the role in keeping the global economy going completely off the edge.
[01:10:34]  China, I don't believe, is capable of doing that today.
[01:10:41]  As China watchers have been saying for years, countries full of huge, unexploded contradictions in terms of debt, of incredibly large-scale misallocation of resources, like building millions of high-end apartments that don't meet the needs of ordinary Chinese people.
[01:11:07]  We could go on and on.
[01:11:09]  So the idea that China could replace and play the same role the United States did in the 1950s through the 1980s doesn't seem to me to be very likely.
[01:11:24]  And again, by analogy to the 1930s, we're seeing the slow decomposition of a globalized world economy, globalized production systems, not just finance and investment.
[01:11:42]  In the 1930s, the gold standard, of course, collapsed almost immediately, and countries turned to their colonies New sources of profit, new opportunities to investment.
[01:12:01]  You had a great increase in the rate of exploitation of India, for example, by Britain during the recession.
[01:12:08]  The United States turned inward, looking more toward Latin America than across the Atlantic.
[01:12:17]  And a kind of situation where a large national economy defines a control or captive region, which then in turn becomes the major arena for its investments, is what economists call autarky.
[01:12:37]  And that's exactly what's beginning to happen today.
[01:12:40]  But it's more complicated because you also have China's huge rodent belt system trying to create an infrastructure for economic unification of Eurasia.
[01:12:53]  Will that give capitalism a second life in Eurasia?
[01:12:58]  It's almost impossible to know.
[01:13:01]  But one thing I believe is absolutely certain, which is that you will see in your lifetimes, and probably the next 10 years, a regional nuclear war.
[01:13:13]  And there are a half dozen plausible scenarios for this.
[01:13:18]  We should note that the treaty that the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have signed with Israel is at the bottom of it about acquiring Israeli nuclear technology.
[01:13:36]  Maybe partially under Israeli control.
[01:13:41]  You look at what's happening in the eastern Mediterranean, this complex struggle between Turkey and Greece and other neighboring countries.
[01:13:52]  Azerbaijan and Armenia, too.
[01:13:54]  That might not get to a nuclear exchange.
[01:13:57]  I don't think that will, but it's certainly not a good sign.
[01:14:00]  India, Pakistan, the absolute monarchs of the Arab Gulf against Iran.
[01:14:15]  I mean, there's so many different possibilities here.
[01:14:18]  And of course, as we all know, atomic bombs are, my God, those are granddads technology.
[01:14:26]  Some kid years ago produced an internet blueprint for making the first atomic bomb just off non-secret sources and basic things.
[01:14:41]  The major obstacle has been miniaturizing bombs to be put in missile warheads and having missiles with sufficient range.
[01:14:49]  Well, that's occurred already a long time ago, 10 or 15 years ago.
[01:14:55]  Nobody talks about the threat of nuclear war or disarmament.
[01:15:01]  I mean, really.
[01:15:02]  Yeah.
[01:15:03]  When did you hear anybody even mention the Trump administration's cutting off and ending its commitments under non-proliferation agreements and intermediate range missiles, which they've all abolished.
[01:15:25]  And this is something we have to be acutely aware of.
[01:15:31]  As much as in the days when I was 16 years old with my girlfriend sitting on top of a hill in my car, listening to Buddy Holland waiting for the Soviet missiles from Cuba to land in San Diego.
[01:15:45]  By the way, we weren't particularly scared.
[01:15:47]  We hated our hometown so much.
[01:15:48]  We thought, well, at least everybody, all the teachers we hated and stuff will go with us.
[01:15:55]  Well, at the point if it happens here in California, we might not notice because of all the smoke already.
[01:16:00]  True.
[01:16:01]  And in fact, as I pointed out in a recent article, you have to model what's happening as the equivalent of nuclear war.
[01:16:10]  The Australians a long time ago, eight or ten years ago, modeled one of their worst fire seasons.
[01:16:21]  And physicists calculated that the destructive energy released was equivalent to 1,500 Hiroshima bombs.
[01:16:30]  The fires that have so far destroyed 4 million acres of California, you're talking about something much larger.
[01:16:41]  So in effect, the natural equivalent of nuclear warfare is now part of the California that we live in.
[01:16:51]  We just cannot underestimate the permanent damage that's being done or its contribution to global warming.

=== Rise of Pentecostalism (08:05) ===

[01:17:19]  I wanna just pivot for a second.
[01:17:22]  And this is maybe a pet interest of mine, but you've written a lot in the past about the rise of Pentecostalism.
[01:17:31]  And I think that recent estimates have the global evangelical population at like, I think it's about 660 million.
[01:17:41]  You know, that some of that is highly concentrated in the United States and China, but of course, also massive populations in Nigeria and Brazil and all throughout Latin America and Africa.
[01:17:54]  And it's a really interesting phenomenon that I don't see many on the left really grapple with.
[01:18:02]  The rise of evangelicalism as a kind of self-organizing movement of the poor.
[01:18:07]  And we've seen the ramifications of that.
[01:18:09]  I mean, it was a pretty decisive population in the election of Polsonaro in Brazil, for example.
[01:18:17]  And, you know, I know that in Lagos, for example, there are evangelical megachurches that are building their own urban infrastructure that are basically these like micro-city communes with power plants and their own police force and their own supermarkets and their own banks that provide to their residents.
[01:18:38]  And you wrote in Planet of the Slums that today, populist Islam and Pentecostal Christianity occupy a social space analogous to that of early 20th century socialism and anarchism.
[01:18:51]  I wonder if you think that still holds and what you think of the kind of recent developments of those populations in what we would call, I guess, the global south.
[01:19:02]  And like what to, you know, maybe we can tease this into maybe more questions about that I have for you about the kind of you know the now 53% of the population that live in what you detailed at these the rise of these megacity slums in urban populations in the global south.
[01:19:27]  Well, if you were to ask me, as the historian of Los Angeles, what is the single most important event from the perspective of world history to have occurred in LA in the 20th century, I would answer immediately that it was the presence of the Holy Ghost in a rented room during a revival held by poor black people,
[01:19:55]  poor Italian immigrants, poor Mexicans.
[01:19:59]  This was, LA was the birthplace in the so-called Azusa Street Awakening of Pentecostalism.
[01:20:05]  And its social base was very similar to that actually the IWW.
[01:20:13]  And it spread across the world as the most important event in Christianity since the 18th century as a poor people, an urban poor people's religion.
[01:20:33]  And the politics of it were not in any way determined by doctrine, which Pentecostals who are not traditionally evangelicals don't have a lot of doctrine.
[01:20:50]  What they have is loads of emotional intensity to give voice to the poorest, most unheard people.
[01:21:00]  Also provides for community and solidarity between them.
[01:21:05]  So this is the quintessential urban poor people's religion.
[01:21:12]  And it was ignored or even despised by the big battalions of Protestantism for generations.
[01:21:22]  But now it's become a major profit center for evangelical churches who have adopted the emotional drama of Pentecostalism.
[01:21:39]  And it's not without real economic effects.
[01:21:44]  When I was in high school, one of my friends decided to become a Mormon, completely indifferent to the doctrines of the LDS, but he thought it was to his economic advantage.
[01:21:54]  Well, poor people get small but real advantages from joining these.
[01:22:01]  Now the megachurches, these new forms of evangelical, more evangelical-like Pentecostalism, have become absolutely major political forces, as you say, in West Africa, Central America, Brazil.
[01:22:24]  But it's still complicated.
[01:22:25]  Some of the key leaders of Lula's movement in Brazil, of the Labour Party, were Pentecostals.
[01:22:38]  Hundreds of thousands of Pentecostals supported the left.
[01:22:44]  But Pentecostalism is being gentrified in a sense.
[01:22:49]  It's adopted the gospel of wealth and other kind of Ponzi schemes that evangelical ministers play upon their poor congregations.
[01:23:01]  But it was a huge mistake for some people to believe earlier that Pentecostalism was homogeneously reactionary force and would always side with authoritarian rulers when in fact has made important contributions to the Latin American left.
[01:23:21]  Now, our new Supreme Court justice, if nominated, will bring a Catholic variety of this kind of amalgamation of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism.
[01:23:38]  She belongs to charismatic strand in Catholicism, which speaks in tongues, receives the Holy Ghost, has much of the ritual and emotional effect of classical Pentecostalism, but is completely allied with the wing of the church that opposes everything Pope Francis stands for.
[01:24:04]  You also write in Planet of the Slums, particularly kind of questioning like what this now, this new kind of form of urban geography is, that it is this kind of development without clear delineations, development on top of each other,
[01:24:32]  that it has become difficult to kind of map as a kind of bordered locality, right?
[01:24:40]  And that the populations within the slums, favelas, whatever you want to call it, tend to be poor people without homes, basically, economic homes, people that are not kind of mobilized in the world economy, as it were.
[01:24:58]  Either they're in precarious labor or they're in kind of, you know, difficult domestic labor situations, what have you.

=== Growing Informal Economy (14:26) ===

[01:25:08]  And, you know, about like 10, I mean, I guess when you're writing this, it was like 2005.
[01:25:14]  There were a lot of books at that time kind of examining whether or not this growing urban population in these megacities, this growing urban, extremely poor populations, whether or not they had, you know, potential, for lack of a better word, like agency potential as kind of political movers.
[01:25:42]  And I'm wondering if in the kind of intervening years since, if any of your thinking has changed or if you've seen any kind of developments in these cities that has, yeah, has changed your thinking.
[01:25:58]  Well, when I wrote the book, one of the examples I used was Mumbai, Bombay, because it had the strongest and most left-wing urban labor movement in India.
[01:26:12]  Textile workers were a basically left or communist-led union that united Muslims and Hindus, Maratha speakers and Tamil speakers.
[01:26:27]  In other words, the whole diversity of the Bombay working class was represented in it.
[01:26:32]  But when the mills closed, tens and tens of thousands of people were thrown out into the coal, into the informal economy.
[01:26:45]  Now you could say the informal economy is just a euphemism for structural unemployment.
[01:26:51]  People who survive by doing things from recycling from urban ways to pulling rickshaws to running little businesses, sweatshops in their homes, and so on.
[01:27:09]  But one of the worldwide characteristics of the informal economy is that it actually consists of a limited number of niches.
[01:27:22]  I mean, there are too many people trying to pull a rickshaw, sewing garments at home, running a shabin out of their house in Soweto, picking through trash, and so on.
[01:27:37]  So as more and more people move into the informal economy, the competition increases.
[01:27:45]  And in the case of Africa and South Asia, what steps into this crisis are identitarian movements.
[01:28:00]  So that in the case of Mumbai, originally it was a kind of gangster organization of Maratha speakers, who started using every means possible to control entrance into these niches and then rationing out opportunity to members of the linguistic group.
[01:28:26]  This eventually was transformed into Hindus only.
[01:28:35]  And you see this process of political movements, identitarian movements, energized by divisions, taking control of informal resources and then rationing them only to their members, only to their adherents.
[01:28:57]  And this can be on the basis of many different things, race or religion, language, even just simply what part of the country you come from.
[01:29:10]  And so when you look at the growth of gangs and sectarian movements of all kinds in the mega cities of the South, I think this in a nutshell is the economics that explains it.
[01:29:25]  However, there's one great exception, and that's Latin America.
[01:29:33]  I mean, there are countries where racial divisions are very deep, mainly the countries in which indigenous people still comprise a large part of the population and maintain their customs, whether in Guatemala or Peru, probably above all, Bolivia.
[01:29:52]  But Latin American slums have not seen the same kind of sectarian violence and division.
[01:30:01]  And all the situation may be changing for the worse.
[01:30:07]  What you saw instead was unemployed Bolivian tin miners taking their union organizational skills and memberships into El Alto, one of the highest and one of the largest slums in Latin America.
[01:30:26]  You saw in Rio de Janeiro on its outskirts slums the urban labor movement recreating itself as a movement and informal workers and using the one power that people who,
[01:30:41]  poor people who live on the periphery of big cities have, which is to impede the movement of people and goods and picateros, block the streets, set up roadblocks until the government makes secessions.
[01:30:57]  Keep people aware of the social power that they have, even if they've been expelled from traditional industries and workplaces.
[01:31:08]  So on a global scale, it's quite mixed.
[01:31:12]  The thing that's novel about this period is that the gains that slum people have won in cases like Brazil, with the safety net that Lula created for the poor in Brazil.
[01:31:32]  Well, that's being lost.
[01:31:34]  The number of people forced into informal housing and employment is growing right now astronomically as a result of the economic crisis.
[01:31:45]  In the very largest sense, you have to say that for at least 20 years or so, capitalism has not been a global job creator.
[01:31:54]  Yes, millions of jobs in China and Vietnam.
[01:31:58]  But in the rest of the world, countries that were once celebrated as new industrial countries like South Africa and Brazil, they've actually seen very large-scale deindustrialization.
[01:32:10]  And the majority of people in Latin American, urban people in Latin American countries in Africa are in the informal sector.
[01:32:19]  Formal jobs are simply not being created.
[01:32:22]  And now hundreds of thousands more people, millions more people are losing them.
[01:32:28]  And what we'll have to recognize very soon is the growth of an informal sector in the American economy.
[01:32:36]  It's partially always here in terms of contingent workers and part-time jobs.
[01:32:41]  This is going to become the survival sector for an increasingly large part of people and particularly for younger people, even college graduates.
[01:32:53]  Well, what you said about slums really reminded me of something that like last time I was in Los Angeles was not very long ago.
[01:33:01]  I was shocked because, you know, I'm from San Francisco, but there's always been a pretty high proportion of homeless people compared to the proportion of people in houses in the rest of the city.
[01:33:12]  But the last time I went to Los Angeles, I was just, I mean, shocked to see how many of these sort of tent cities, these encampments have been set up everywhere.
[01:33:22]  And it occurred to me that, like, well, if the United States had looser building codes, there would absolutely be favelas in parts of the cities.
[01:33:33]  I mean, that strikes me without a doubt.
[01:33:36]  When I worked at a factory until pretty recently, and I had a couple coworkers who lived in their cars, stuff like that.
[01:33:43]  I mean, pretty much every job I've had, I've known somebody there who's lived in a car or crashing on a couch or something.
[01:33:52]  It occurs to me that this has sort of coincided with the rise of this sort of like semi-employment, this sort of what Americans like to call hustling.
[01:34:04]  Although that's sort of a wide net they cast.
[01:34:06]  I mean, that's really what a lot of this is, is people going around picking up cans, working whatever job they can.
[01:34:13]  Certainly government assistance is not very generous here in this country.
[01:34:18]  And so I, yeah, I don't know.
[01:34:20]  It just, it struck me just how huge of a homeless population Los Angeles had in comparison to how it was and how much worse that all seems to be getting.
[01:34:31]  All of the solutions I see, even the sort of the radical solutions or whatever, are really only able to stymie the flow of homeless people to an extent, you know, house some or put band-aids on here and there.
[01:34:44]  But at its core, it's almost like an insurmountable problem with the economic system that we have.
[01:34:49]  I mean, this will simply just get worse as everything else does.
[01:34:53]  Well, in the 19th century, in the first half of the 20th century, there was a kind of informal recognition of the right of the unemployed to camp.
[01:35:05]  Coxie's Army of the Unemployed in the 1890s set up a big encampment to the jobless next to the LA River.
[01:35:13]  That's where there was a Hooverville in the 1930s.
[01:35:16]  What's happened since the 1970s?
[01:35:20]  And remember, it was only in the 1970s that there was homelessness.
[01:35:27]  People who were traditional hobos or had major addiction projects were still able to find cash working as casual laborers, for instance, or niches in the downtown economy like elevator operators.
[01:35:46]  And they lived in those miserable apartments celebrated in noir movies, you know, on Bungu Hill and Flop houses.
[01:35:53]  Flop houses, but they were, you know, they were sheltered.
[01:35:57]  They didn't live on the streets.
[01:35:58]  That didn't happen until the 1970s.
[01:36:04]  And as homelessness increased through the 90s, city after city adopted ordinances against camping, against sleeping, sometimes against sitting.
[01:36:18]  And even, you know, criminalized people who were simply trying to give food to homeless people.
[01:36:27]  So while under the California Constitution, it's not illegal to be homeless.
[01:36:33]  It's illegal to sleep anywhere.
[01:36:36]  Yes.
[01:36:37]  And cities have done this also in order to push homeless populations into the next jurisdiction, which then adopts the same kind of punitive laws against homelessness.
[01:36:51]  But the composition of the homeless changes over time, sometimes very rapidly.
[01:36:57]  Back in the time of the early 1990s, when I wrote this book, Ecology is Fear, most of the homeless were single males.
[01:37:09]  And the city's misguided, LA's misguided efforts to shut down liquor stores had only created a big market for crack cocaine.
[01:37:18]  Go to LA today.
[01:37:20]  What's shocking is the number of women and children, particularly children.
[01:37:26]  And now there are hundreds of thousands more Californians on the edge of homelessness.
[01:37:34]  Okay.
[01:37:35]  And one of my kids showed me the other day this, what's the big company that provides the equivalent of cab service?
[01:37:51]  Uber.
[01:37:52]  Uber.
[01:37:52]  Okay, there's this Uberhead to hire people to help in evictions, housing eviction.
[01:38:00]  Oh, yeah, I saw that.
[01:38:01]  Yeah, it's like an Uber for evictions.
[01:38:03]  Yeah, it's like there's no company.
[01:38:04]  I mean, in other words, but this is testimony to the volume of evictions that are going to occur.
[01:38:14]  And what happens simply that you shuffle homeless populations around, like in Southern California, trying to deport the homeless populations to the inland empire, Riverside and San Bernardino County, or even into the desert.
[01:38:29]  The firestorms that are occurring right now have revealed huge homeless populations in areas where they officially didn't exist.
[01:38:39]  In national forests, for example, many of them very young people.
[01:38:44]  They're not the old hobos of your.
[01:38:49]  You know, this is part of Generation Z.
[01:38:54]  I believe that it's impossible to address the homeless situation comprehensively unless you allow people to build encampments, that you provide alternative housing.
[01:39:10]  And that has to be based on a confrontation with private land markets and with the NIMBY attitude of neighborhoods, particularly wealthy neighborhoods.
[01:39:22]  I mean, right now, if you look at south-central LA, Mexican immigrants who created vibrant neighborhoods, but whose jobs have already been lost or are at risk.

=== Actions Rooted in Solidarity (03:55) ===

[01:39:35]  What's going to happen?
[01:39:36]  Home ownership has been the most rational strategy and life goal traditionally for working class households.
[01:39:50]  But it's going to diminish very dramatically in the next few years.
[01:39:54]  Oh, yeah.
[01:39:54]  I guess just one last question I have for you is: I think a lot of people have, you know, called you kind of like a doomsdayer or that your writing tends to be a bit dark and gloomy and difficult to read.
[01:40:11]  And I mean, I think that, you know, today we've talked about a lot of things that people prefer not to think about because it can kind of lead to feeling pretty hopeless, right?
[01:40:23]  And I think at least for us on this show, we always stress how important it is to be very clear-eyed about the world and being very, you know, rigorous in an analysis of the actually existing reality and the forces that govern that reality.
[01:40:45]  Because otherwise, you know, you're going to have, you're going to be totally lost as to what to do, right?
[01:40:52]  And I think that one thing I would offer and count, and I'm curious what you think about this, but to counter those that say that, you know, your work and your writing causes a kind of immobility or feelings of hopelessness is that there is a kind of like courage in hopelessness in that it is seeing things for as they are.
[01:41:17]  And it allows you to kind of have a bit more freedom of, you know, in understanding what possible possibilities are out there when you're, you know, when you're clear-eyed and when you're, you know, very direct about what's happening in the world.
[01:41:36]  Yeah, I don't believe that hope is a scientific category.
[01:41:41]  And I actually don't believe that personal morality and character should be grounded on hope.
[01:41:46]  Yeah.
[01:41:47]  That is, in some calculated probability of things working out the way that you want them to wake up.
[01:41:53]  Like, oh my God, you know, I've been a member of the socialist groups for three years.
[01:41:58]  I don't see any American Revolution.
[01:42:00]  I'm going to go get my MBA.
[01:42:04]  Fine and well.
[01:42:05]  But we need people who are grounded in the belief that there is a single humanity and that battles are fought whether or not you can calculate that there'll be successes.
[01:42:22]  The struggle must be our very existence.
[01:42:26]  And we must never accept the limitations of the political realistic.
[01:42:33]  We must act on what is necessary, necessary in the most basic sense for the survival of ordinary people.
[01:42:42]  And I guess I encourage a kind of, you know, Solingrad attitude almost toward the world.
[01:42:50]  We're the 18-year-old Russians menaced on all sides.
[01:42:56]  And it doesn't look like we're going to survive it, but we still fight like hell.
[01:43:01]  In fact, we become better fighters, knowing that it's the fight itself is the most important things.
[01:43:09]  I don't know, maybe these are strange or antiquated values.
[01:43:14]  I still believe in character.
[01:43:17]  That people produce themselves through the moral choices and actions that they take, irregardless of calculations of success or wealth or anything like that.

=== Actions Rooted in Love (01:53) ===

[01:43:30]  Actions that are rooted in solidarity and love for other people in the common condition.
[01:43:55]  That was, well, you know, the good news is while we were doing that interview, they put out all the fires.
[01:44:03]  If you guys are still with us, thank you so much for listening.
[01:44:06]  I think there's a lot of good stuff that Mike talked about and hopefully, you know, some good takeaways there.
[01:44:14]  So yeah, I applaud all of you who got all the way to what we in the biz call the outro.
[01:44:21]  Wait, we call this outro?
[01:44:23]  Yeah.
[01:44:24]  I always call this the third brace part.
[01:44:26]  No.
[01:44:27]  No, you don't.
[01:44:28]  I don't say my name.
[01:44:29]  Oh my God.
[01:44:31]  I like deal through our episodes.
[01:44:32]  I'm like, okay, I say my name at the beginning.
[01:44:35]  Sometimes I say my name at the very beginning and then I say my name at the end.
[01:44:38]  And so first is like maybe first brace part, then second brace part after the music and then at the end third brace part.
[01:44:44]  What about this part?
[01:44:46]  Well, yeah, I just assumed you call it Liz part in your head.
[01:44:49]  I don't know.
[01:44:49]  No.
[01:44:49]  We never really talked about it.
[01:44:52]  Well, speaking of brace parts, my name is Brace.
[01:44:56]  I'm Liz.
[01:44:57]  We are, of course, joined by our producer Young Chomsky, and we will see you next time.
[01:45:03]  Bye-bye.
[01:45:22]  Come on.
[01:45:24]  Come in.