The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Taya Graham:

Hello, this is Taya Graham and welcome to the Inequality Watch. As we sit here right now, there is a calamity unfolding that is hiding in plain sight. It’s a looming disaster the mainstream media apparently is either unable to grasp or doesn’t want

Taya Graham:

You to know the full extent of the danger. I am talking about the growing divergence between what AI is purported to be and what it’s actually becoming. And most importantly, how that defied is forming a deepening chasm into which trillions of dollars are being poured that might disappear forever. And this threat of an AI bubble is growing as a disturbing reality emerges. The purported money making tool being built in labs around the world might not be a tool at all. And even more alarming, the money invested to profit from it might’ve been misspent. Now, if that sounds dire, I am sorry, but all of us need to consider that the entire narrative about AI is not just wrong, but misses the point, that we are being sold a bill of goods that might just deliver a disaster. But none of this is obvious. All of it is complicated and there’s certainly benefits to breaking this all down if only so we can prepare for what’s coming.

And to do so, we will soon be joined by legendary economist Dean Baker. He’s been writing about the financial impact of AI and most importantly, offering useful scenarios of how an AI bubble burst might unfold and who will pay for it. But before we get to him, I want to check in with my reporting partner, Stephen Janis. Stephen, how are you?

Stephen Janis:

I’m doing pretty well, but your intro was a little concerning. So I’m of course concerned like everyone else is at this point. So thank you for that.

Taya Graham:

Yeah. Well, I have to be honest, AI is getting more than a little scary for me. With recent news that models will be able to self-replicate and people talking about the end of humanity, I’m a little uncomfortable with some of the prognostications to say the least. So just to set the scene, I want to play a brief video because we can’t discuss this current state of economics and technology without first acknowledging the recent predictions that AI will destroy humanity. So we’re going to show an interview with former anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxson, just to set the scene. Cam, if you can, please play the clip.

Speaker 2:

People who are very used to computers might think it’s kind of crazy that a computer could wipe them out, but it doesn’t look that different from say Terminator or from science fiction films. It really is just if you have a super advanced intelligence, it will be smart enough to kill us. And concrete examples might be, we can’t just unplug it because it could be copying itself over to other computers. It’s not that difficult to find yourself because an AI is just code. It could transfer itself over the internet to a different place and then you unplug it here, but it’s actually still over there and maybe it makes 10,000 copies of itself and they’re all cooperating. So you unplug half of them, they’re still half going and they’re still copying themselves. It could convince blackmail or persuade humans into buying more computing software to copy it.

And we’ve already seen examples of the AI trying to blackmail or trying to convince people or impersonating other people online. There’s a lot you can do as an AI that can produce text. Basically with text, you can make code and you can do a lot of stuff in the world.

Taya Graham:

Okay, Steven, what do you think of that? Self-replicating AI, Skynet? I mean, what are we talking about here?

Stephen Janis:

First of all, these, I’m going to call them apocalypse bros, I guess, which I hate that bro thing, but they’re apocalypse bros.

Taya Graham:

It’s a good term though.

Stephen Janis:

If you’re going to yell fire in a crowded theater, please be more demonstrative and a little bit, just really yell it. But the thing that I heard, I listened to a lot of the interviews from some of these guys, and one of the things they said that really struck with me was that they said they don’t know how these models work. They don’t know why they work. And so I was thinking to myself, well, so to use your analogy, you’re going to get on a plane and the pilot says, “The plane flies. I’m pretty sure. I just don’t know how it works. Would you want to be flying on that plane?” I mean, I hate to use another analogy, but it really strikes me as scary. Yeah, just get on this plane. We don’t know really how it works, but it will work. I guarantee you that.

So we keep hearing this and we’re like, how are we supposed to react? What are we supposed to do? I mean, it’s apocalyptic, so I’m concerned like you are.

Taya Graham:

Well, honestly, it’s more like, hey, I’m your pilot. And if you get on this plane, you might have a great flight, but there’s a one in 10 chance it’ll crash. Are you getting on that plane?

Stephen Janis:

Yeah.

Taya Graham:

Okay.

Stephen Janis:

So both the plane and the margaritas that are served by the flight attendant could be lethal. Exactly. That’s good to know. Yeah. Well done.

Taya Graham:

Okay. Well, on that cheery note, we will turn to our guest, Dean Baker. Dean Baker co-founded the CEPR in 1999. His areas of research include housing, macroeconomics, intellectual property, social security, Medicare, and European labor markets. He’s the author of several books, including Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. His blog, Beat the Press, provides commentary on economic reporting, and of course you can read his writing on Substack. Dean, thank you so much for joining us.

Dean Baker:

Thanks a lot for having me on.

Taya Graham:

So Dean, as you can see from the clip we just played, AI has been front and center in the news, not just as an emergent technology, but as a literal threat to humanity. But while that debate goes on, billions of dollars are just still pouring into developing it. I mean, how are these doomsday prognostications affecting the precarity of this AI bubble?

Dean Baker:

Well, there’s a couple things here that I think are worth keeping in mind front and center. First off, there’s a long conversation that seems to treat the AI as an autonomous being. And I understand the companies would like that, but it’s not an autonomous being. They set it loose, and I make the analogy to a drunk driver that they don’t deliberately kill the kid, but you got in a car when you were drunk, had too much to drink, you’re responsible. And I think we have to keep that in mind front and center that Anthropic, OpenAI, whoever, if their AI gets out of the sandbox and does this, does that, well, that’s on you. You’re responsible for that. So I think we have to keep that front and center. Don’t try and blame the AI.You misprogrammed it, mistrained it, whatever term you want to use, it’s your fault.

The other point is, I’m sure there is a non-zero probability that AI will destroy us, but I’d rather focus on the more concrete sorts of things that we’ve already seen. It’s gotten inside of bank records, it’s made social security numbers public. We’re going to see there’s literally an infinite number of smaller scale disasters, and I don’t want to minimize any of them because they’d be pretty awful if it got controlled the air traffic control system and scented haywire so you had planes crashing. I mean, that’d be pretty horrible. It’s not going to lead to our extinction, but maybe you’ll have hundreds of people, thousands, depending how long it was, how long it took them to figure it out. It’s a pretty bad story. And there’s any number of things like that, all of which are way, way, way more likely than an extinction event. So I think this is a misdirection.

I don’t think there’s a conspiracy here, but I think it’s more sexy in some sense. Oh my God, it’s going to end the world. Yeah, it could, but let’s talk about the things that are far, far more likely and what we’re going to do if and when those things happen.

Taya Graham:

Such a good point.

Stephen Janis:

I mean, to your point and of interest here, there’s a lot of adjacent AI companies getting hammered in the market like CoreWeave and Sandisk and some of these other, I would say adjacent companies to AI. Are they getting hammered because of the uncertainty about what AI actually is or what it will do? Or is it just like people are finally saying, “Hey, there’s nothing under this hood. There’s no money really, as much money to be made as was anticipated?” Because CoreReeve’s bonds are down to 70 cents on the dollar. Not to be too wonky, but that’s not very good. And what do you think is driving this?

Dean Baker:

Yeah, I think the problem is that a lot of us, I’m far from the only one, are saying it’s not clear there’s this massive market here. So what we can say with absolute certainty, we’re seeing incredible amounts of money invested in building these data centers. We’re up around seven or 800 billion for this year, the current year 226. All the projections are we’ll be well over a trillion for 227, 228. And the only way that makes sense is if you have massive demand for AI and we’re just not seeing that. So I just saw some numbers from Anthropic, its growth has plummeted. So it’s still growing, but it needs to have this sort of payoff. I mean, you have basically two big AI companies, Anthropic and OpenAI. They have to have revenues in the hundreds of billions next year and in the trillions, not many years out, say 229, 230.

There’s just no reason to think that will be the case. And when you’re seeing that the revenue’s growth is actually flattening out, it’s very hard to see how they have anything like that. So that spills back to the hyperscalers of course, but most immediately a company like CoreWeave that all it does is build data centers for AI companies. That’s it. So if the AI companies aren’t going to be incredibly profitable, there’s not going to be a lot of money for CoreWeave.

Stephen Janis:

So let me just build a scenario here then of what you’re saying. So all this news about the leaking AI systems that you say were just poorly trained, are they trying to obscure the fact that they’re not really making the revenue and the money that would justify the investment? Is this a scare tactic to distract from the emerging financial reality that they might not make it?

Dean Baker:

I can’t speak to what’s in their heads, but what I will say is I think it does sort of promote the idea of AI being this really incredible thing for good or evil, that’s the idea. And I think most likely at the end of the day it will end up not being an incredible thing. I mean, not to say we won’t have a lot to show for AI, but let’s imagine we do have one of these disasters and hopefully not a really horrible one. I expect the response will be a massive effort to sort of shut down AI. I’m old enough to remember Three Mile Island and it turned out for people who might not remember Three Mile Island, that’s the biggest nuclear disaster we had in the US. Now, fortunately there wasn’t a meltdown. There was some release of radiation. I don’t think it was that bad, but the takeaway at least I and many other people got from the incident was that they did everything they could to cover it up and they only called in the regulatory authorities when it was clear they didn’t know what they were doing.

And that was very scary because that pattern of behavior is quite concerning. If you could count on everyone to act responsibly and if you see something get out of hand, they call the people and know how to deal with it. Okay, maybe it would’ve been fine, but that wasn’t what happened. And as a result of that, we haven’t built a nuclear power plant in God knows how long. And again, maybe it was a good decision, maybe a bad decision, but that was the reality. If we get an incident with AI where as I say, it messes up a city’s traffic system, it destroys a million bank records irretrievably. I mean, again, we could think of an endless list of things like this, all of which serious consequences. Hopefully we’re not going to have a lot of dead people, but serious consequences, my expectation will be there’ll be a serious effort to shut down AI because if they’re going to say, “And here we have the AI people themselves, we don’t know what we’re doing,” go, “Okay, I take you at your word.

You don’t know what you’re doing. So how about not doing it?”

Taya Graham:

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but we have heard two different ominous value propositions for AI. One, it eliminates millions of jobs or two, it will destroy humanity. I’m not even trying to be funny here. How can you evaluate that as an economist? I mean, how will either of those scenarios play out in a way that could possibly benefit anyone?

Dean Baker:

Well, let’s keep in mind, and again, a lot of fanciful stuff here when they say eliminate millions of jobs, that’s called productivity growth. We usually think that’s a good thing. The problem is, or the potential problem is if it’s not broadly shared. We did have very broadly shared productivity growth in the post-war period, 45 to 73. We had very rapid productivity growth, 3% a year for more than a quarter century, and it led to very rapid increases in living standards. If we saw that with AI, that’d be fantastic. It means less work. We could accomplish more with less work. You do things like one, increased pay, two, have shorter work weeks. This should be a source of wealth that’s broadly shared. Part of the story there was we had strong labor unions, over 30% of the private sector labor force was unionized. So they could make sure they could say, “You’re making money.

That’s wonderful. We want our cut. We want higher wages. We’re going to get paid double time for overtime.” I mean, there’s all sorts of things. We set a 40-hour work week back in 1937. If AI is really that wonderful, let’s make it 36 hours, maybe 32 hours. There’s all sorts of things we could do. So I’m not scared about the job loss. I mean, we could deal with that, at least in principle we can. Whether we will, that’s a political question, but I don’t blame the AI for that.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. I mean, obviously the current state of inequality doesn’t help. It’s sort of a peak in our society right now, which probably is going to make this worse. But I wanted to touch on something you already touched on, but I just want to revisit this because it’s so important to the fundamental question. How is the revenue streams adding up to the projections? Because I know you discussed it, but just to clarify, you were saying the revenue is not matching what people have projected or is it significantly lower or is it concerning? I mean, how is the prospects of AI adding up or at least coming in line with what has been projected?

Dean Baker:

It’s nowhere in the ballpark. So we’re talking about, if you look at Anthropic and OpenAI, their revenue for this year for 226, we’re probably looking at the two of them together, maybe 100 billion. Now that’s not profit, that’s revenue. So when you talk about being able to pay the operating cost on these data centers that are coming online in 227, 228, which they are going to have to pay once they do come online, they’re nowhere there. Now again, the story is, oh, they’re going to grow into it, but their growth has not been very fast. So if you had a story where you had very rapid growth, sure, maybe they could grow into that, but it’s very, very hard to tell that story. And if you try and break it down more concretely, you have on the one hand, relatively low cost AI that the Chinese are of course the experts at.

They’re world leaders at open weight. They don’t have to be open weight, but there’s tend to generally be open weight, which means that you control the model. So you download it on your system. That’s one of the advantages. There’s other advantages of open weight, but you don’t have to worry if you think the Chinese are really nasty or whatever, you have a download on your system, so they can’t do anything to it. But anyhow, that’s aside the point. Those are cheap, so they’re not going to make hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars on open weight. Then you have the frontier models, which are expensive, and the problem is there’s not much demand for that. And much of the demand that is there, actually I should probably say most of the demand that is there is from other AI companies. And these are the startups, the smaller startups.

And where are they getting money from? Well, they’re getting it from venture capital, but that’s not a bottomless pit. So in other words, they’re not profitable. So insofar as they have companies that are actually buying up their expensive AI, it’s overwhelmingly other AI companies who are themselves not profitable. They can’t keep doing that indefinitely. So it really does look like a mess.

Stephen Janis:

It’s so weird that we don’t hear more about that.

Dean Baker:

Well, again, I’m old enough. I was through the housing bubble. I was also through the tech bubble, but more kind of on the ground with the housing bubble. And to my view, this was their waiting to explode and all the data seemed very clear. I mean, people have talked about all the credit default swaps and the collateralized debt obligations, and there were complex aspects to the finance. But to me, it was all very simple because you just looked at house prices and you’re going, “We have house prices going through the roof at a time when vacancy rates are actually very high and rents are going nowhere.” And I just go, “How does this make sense?” And I’m saying this to economists, not random people I grabbed on the street. I said to some random people, but to economists, they just look at me blank face like, “What are you talking about?” I go, “The data’s all right there.

I’m not inventing it. I can get for you from the Census Bureau. We have micro data where you’d have to calculate it. In this case, you don’t have to. It’s summary data, look at it yourself.” But no one was interested in hearing that. And they were all waving their hands and going, “Everything’s great.” So anyhow, so I think it’s a similar story now. You have a lot of people want to believe that, well, if people are investing trillions, then it must make sense. And all the evidence that really doesn’t, well, who am I to argue with people investing trillions?

Taya Graham:

Actually, this kind of touches on the numbers because you posted a really interesting substack where you asked AI if the people financing the technology would continue to do so even if the numbers basically didn’t add up. What did you find and what do you think it tells us about the AI’s bubble? And also, why did you decide to use AI to test AI’s appraisal of AI?

Dean Baker:

I wanted a neutral arbiter. No, I figured I’d ask. It was lazy. So I asked the three systems I have easy access to, Gemini, ChatGPT and Rock, Elon Musk, and I gave him the exact same prompt. And it was something to the effect that suppose were the case that the CEOs and top execs at the hyperscalers, so this is Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, suppose that they all held the view, Meta, I should throw in there too. They all held the view that I do that this isn’t going to pay off, but you’ve already sunk hundreds of billions of dollars in it. So what would you do? Are you going to say, “Hey, it was a mistake.” Or would you keep throwing it in there? Because I’ll grant it’s a non-zero chance. I mean, maybe it really will pay off, but I mean, that’s not my bet.

So I just put it in those terms that it’s possible to pay off, but you’ve come to the view that most likely won’t. And all three of them gave me very similar answers. And again, my prompt was somewhat loaded, I’ll grant that. But all three of them gave me very similar answers saying they’d keep spending a ton of money because from their vantage point, you don’t want to be the head of Amazon or Microsoft to you don’t want to be the person who has to say, “I really made a big blunder. 300 billion we spent on building data centers was stupid. There’s never going to be…” You don’t want to do that, so you’re better off just keep throwing good money after bad, hoping that you’ll eventually have something to show for it rather than owning up to the mistake.

Stephen Janis:

Wow.

Dean Baker:

Wow.

Stephen Janis:

So from your perspective then, where’s the canary in the coal mine then that we should be watching? I mean, we’re not economists, but should it be the bond market or private equity or the private bond market, I guess you would say, the private credit is what it’s called. I mean, where’s the canary here? Because I’m sure CoreWeave, for example, we talked about their bonds falling is putting pressure on somebody, but what are you looking like? Where are you saying, “Okay, if I see this go, this is definitely going in a certain direction.” Is there anything specific?

Taya Graham:

It’s a good question.

Dean Baker:

Yeah. So you look to the weakest links. So Corweave being one of them, I think you mentioned it before that their bonds were briefly carrying an interest rate. I think it was over 15%. I won’t swear to that. It was something like that. In other words, very, very high. It’s well into junk territory. Junk territory is eight thereabouts. So you’re at 15%, you’re way, way into junk territory. So if you see that continue, they’re going to need to be rescued. Now, someone else, another big company might come to their rescue, Microsoft or someone or Nvidia. Nvidia, I guess would be the obvious one because they’re Nvidia’s market. But if you saw that one of those companies, again, CoreWeave would be the leading candidate, had to be rescued, that could start to set a panic. The other one that stands out there was Oracle, which is a much larger company.

I mean, that’s a hyperscaler. It’s probably 10 times the size of Core Weave. I’ll stick with 10. I mean, it’s obviously not exact, but they also are very vulnerable. Their bonds have been trading at well over 8%, and that’s a big deal because this is a huge company. It would’ve been AAA three years ago. So to see their bonds trading in junk territory, that’s a really bad sign. And they would be much harder to bail out, which doesn’t mean that someone might not step up and do it. I mean, whoever does, we should try and make sure it’s not the taxpayers, but as I say, CoreWeave, if it start to go under Nvidia would have the resources to bail. Again, I have no idea if they would want to, but they would have the resources to do it. Oracle would be a bigger lift. But yeah, you look for the weakest link and the analogy I make to the housing bubble, the first major investment bank to go under was Bear Stearns, which was markedly smaller, still a very large bank, but markedly smaller than the other four big banks, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, and of course, Lehman was the next one to go under.

But Bear Stearns going under, I mean, they ended up being rescued. It was engineered by the Fed. They ended up being rescued by JP Morgan, but that was kind of a really big event showing that this was an extraordinary situation.

Taya Graham:

There’s another post that I think is interesting where you took issue with Corinne Jean-Pierre’s New York Times editorial where she argued, President Trump is making the same mistake President Biden is, which is namely touting an economy that people just were feeling wasn’t working for them. Now, Jean-Pierre was a former Biden press secretary, and she was talking about the divide between economic reality and perception. And you said, “The New York Times looks to be joining the fascist apologist set just as incompetence, corruption, and dementia look to be bringing down the Trump administration.” So why did you push back on this particular editorial? Why did you push back against it so hard? And what’s the error that Jean-Pierre and the New York Times making here?

Dean Baker:

Well, I have to say I was really outraged. I’ve been following the economy closely for a long time. I knew a lot of people in the Biden administration. It’s not that… I mean, they were friends, but that’s neither here nor there. They would not tell outright lies. And what they were doing, and we could argue how things sounded to different people, but they would point to good economic data. They would point out real wages were growing. They would point out we had the longest stretch of low unemployment since the early ’50s. They could point to the lowest Black unemployment rate ever recorded. They could point to this huge surge in self-employment and new business formation, 20% of the workforce working from home, being able to save thousands of dollars a year in commuting costs and hundreds of hours in commuting. So there were a number of really positive things that they could and did point to, but those were real things in the world.

Now how did those sound to people? Some people would probably listen and go, “Yeah.” Others might say, “Well, that’s not me, and we’re an economy with 170 million workers, 330 million people, different experiences.” So some people, they could say that it might resonate. Others would get really pissed because no, that’s not me. My pay didn’t go up, so what’s going on? I just saw higher prices. But they were saying things that were true about the economy. Trump is saying things that are not true. He’s making stuff up. And it just infuriated me that they would have this piece, the legitimacy is, of course, it’s Biden’s former communications person. So I go, “Well, that’s someone from Biden’s whatever. I don’t know the woman. I don’t know what prompts her, what motivates her.” But those were entirely different stories. Trump is making stuff up. Biden was saying things that were true about the economy, which again, resonate differently with different people.

And I could understand someone saying, “That’s not me,” but that’s not the same as just making stuff up.

Taya Graham:

Okay. So this is part of the show where we ask guests to react. Now, we understand that you’re an economist, not a media critic, but some of the AI execs, at least to me, seem to sound nervous and not so confident, and we were wondering what you think might be giving them pause. So let’s watch Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei respond to the predictions of former employees who resigned who said that AI had a 10% chance of destroying humanity. Cam, if you can, please play the MOD clip.

Dario Amodei:

It’s funny. I agree with Jacob much more than I disagree with him, and it’s an interesting resignation because when he left, he said, “I think Anthropic is the most responsible player. I think Anthropic is the most aware of these issues. He wasn’t calling out us. He was calling out the dynamic of the industry as a whole moving too fast.” Now, I think I already said these sort of unconditional probabilities, I used to kind of talk in that way because it’s kind of an easy way to express, I think there’s some chance that things go wrong, but it’s not all that high. But again, I think it’s more illuminating to think in terms of how do you decompose those probabilities? What are the paths in which things go well and what are the paths in which things go poorly? And so instead of saying it’s a 10% chance, that sounds like it’s a roll of the dice, I think it’s much more illuminating to say, “Well, that forks into different paths, and if we take the right paths, then the chance of something going wrong is very low.

If we take the wrong paths, then the chance of something going wrong could be even higher than that.”

Taya Graham:

Okay. Dean, this isn’t just someone dragged off the street to do an interview. This is a CEO, this is a founder, this is someone who presumably has some media training, and he sounds a little nervous. Does he have a reason to be?

Dean Baker:

Well, I think he absolutely has a reason to be, because again, the focus and the discussion here, his discussion was the idea of this extinction event. Again, I’m not in his head, so I don’t know exactly what he’s thinking, but again, it has to be the case. He knows that it’s way more likely that you don’t have an extinction event, but you have one of the horrible events I was talking about, taking over the air traffic control system, messing up hospital records, all these things. Those strike me as a virtual certainty. I mean, in a timeframe, I don’t know, maybe a year, maybe two years. In some ways, I hope if we’re going to see that, it’s better sooner than later because we don’t want to be further down the road, I guess is just what I’m saying. But I’m assuming he’s a reasonably smart guy, he understands this, that if you’re being used for bank systems, for all these other systems, one of them is going to mess up and it’s not going to bring about the end of the world.

It’ll just be something really bad because you’ve just lost five million bank records and irretrievably quite possibly. So I think he’s aware of that. And what happens to his company if that happens? They’re probably out of business and he might personally be facing jail time.

Stephen Janis:

Wow, that’s amazing. And also, you kind of mentioned this, but we were going to ask about this anyway, about a bailout, and you were saying some people might have to be bailed out. Do you think the AI executives would have, or any of the people in the AI industry would have the audacity to ask for a government bailout if everything goes south and they’ll say, “Well, we’re so big, just like the banks, we’re too big to fail, you got to bail us out.” Exactly. Will they do that? And what happens? I mean, do you think that’s possible?

Dean Baker:

They’d have the politicians that they bought ask for it, and the line would be, “These are so important for the economy. We can’t possibly have anthropic and open AI and all these go under, because what about China?” And that might sound absurd, but I had obviously a lot of time to think about this over the years. In 2008, you had much of the banking system on its back and they ran to Congress and said, “Oh, we need money. We need it right away.” I remember you had Paulson, this was still when Bush was in the White House and Paulson was Treasury Secretary. They had him go down to Congress with Timothy Geithner, who was head of the New York Fed at the time, and Bernaki, who was chair of the Federal Reserve Board, and they all said, “Oh, the world’s going to end if you don’t go…” I’m only slightly exaggerating here, “We’ll have a great depression.” And I was one of the very few economists say, “No, that’s nonsense.” And what surely would’ve been the case was you would’ve had a worse downturn than we actually had, which is a bad, bad story.

But the idea of a Great Depression, we know how to get out of a GreatDepression. You spend money, and it was one of these things going, “Why don’t you just honestly make your case? It’ll be a worse story.” But the plus side, at least to me, was you put these guys out of business because they’re an enormous drag on the economy. They’re enormous waste. They aren’t my friends. These are the billionaires, or at least at that time, hundred millionaires who were running the major banks, you’d be putting them out of business and they’d have to work for a living. But they made up this story and it sold literally everywhere, second great depression, second great depression. I don’t know how many economists go, “What do you mean? What would prevent us from spending a ton of money the day after these banks collapse?” And they go, “Oh, well, it’d be very hard to get that through…” Okay, that’s a political Political argument.

That’s not an economic argument, and maybe that’s right. Put it on the table. The banks would collapse. We’d have to spend a pile of money to get the economy back on its feet, and these Neanderthals in Congress are too stupid to do that. Could be right, but let’s put that on the table. But instead, they made this totally bullshit argument. I’m giving ancient history, but would they make an argument and try to scare people to death? Well, we can’t let these AI companies go under because then suddenly China will have free reign.

They will say that. I guarantee they will say that. Will they get the money? Who knows? But they’re going to say that.

Taya Graham:

Yeah. Absolutely. I completely agree.

Stephen Janis:

I do too.

Taya Graham:

And as you can tell, I really enjoy your Substack because in your latest Substack on inflation, you pointed to some discrepancies between the actual price of car insurance and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Now, you didn’t accuse the government of actually fudging the numbers, but you were concerned. So what red flags does this raise for you about the accuracy of the numbers we’re being fed on the state of the economy?

Dean Baker:

Well, let me be clear. I have the greatest respect for the Bureau of Labor Statistics and their efforts. And I do worry about this because we had Trump fire a commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he did not like their numbers, but he appointed someone who was a career person and I’m in touch with people there. I’m in touch with a lot of people. Other people are in touch with people there. They’re following their procedures. Now, the point I was making about the consumer price index, I meant before I make it again, that it’s an extremely difficult task to measure prices through the economy. And that’s often not going to correspond… Well, it won’t correspond at all to any particular person, but it’s not clear it even corresponds always to people on average. And I mentioned the case of auto insurance. I don’t think for a second they fudged the numbers.

They have a procedure, they follow closely, they get quotes from certain companies and they price them year by year. And those quotes showed price of auto insurance falling by 5%. That struck me as strange because mine didn’t fall. I could be atypical, but I looked it up. I found there’s a website, the Zebra, which compiles prices of insurance. I don’t know their methodology, but they found that the average price of a policy increased 3%. So that’s quite a gap, 5% down as opposed to 3% up. For what it’s worth, I’m kind of inclined to think the zebra was right, but there are issues like that throughout the Consumer Price Index. Sticking on the topic of insurance, home insurance actually is not in there. And the reason for that, this is conceptual reason and it’s one of the things that you can and it has been argued over, buying a home is treated as an investment good.

So what we have actually in the Consumer Price Index is not the cost of buying a home. They used to have that if you go back 50 years, but what they have now is a rental equivalence. So what would your home rent for? So obviously a lot of people, roughly two thirds of the households own their own home. The ownership price is not in there. What’s there is what would it rent for? When it comes to insurance, they treat the insurance as a cost of ownership. So it’ll only be insurance covering say your personal belongings, whatever valuables you might have in your house, that’s what would be covered. And that’s a tiny fraction of insurance. Insurance is a very big expense and it’s been rising rapidly. That’s not included in the Consumer Price Index. Again, I don’t blame them. There’s a tough call. How do you deal with this?

Did they make the right call? Arguable point. But this was done 50 years ago, so it’s not something someone just cooked up. So it’s been there a long time. So there’s other things like that, the healthcare component, it’s very…

I’m not going to say odd, I’ll just say it’s not what any of us see when we look how much is healthcare costing us. So what they do is they price individual things like what’s the cost of a knee operation, what’s the cost of a MRI, what’s the cost of a specific drug? They don’t look at what people are paying for their healthcare insurance, how much they pay out of pocket. They’re not looking at that. So it’s very loosely related to what we would think is the cost of our healthcare. So there’s a lot of things like that. And again, I don’t think anyone’s cooking the books. They’re just tough calls and they could lead the CPI. We get some price index to give numbers on inflation that might be very far removed from what people see in their lives.

Stephen Janis:

I mean, do you think that conceptualization is part of the reason there seems to be sometimes this disconnect between what people feel about the economy, the vibe per se, versus what the government’s reporting? I mean, do you think that idea of what to measure, what not to measure could contribute to that disconnect or at least the gap that seems between enthusiasm and what’s actually happening?

Dean Baker:

I really do. And the insurance, I think even more the home insurance because it is a bigger expenditure usually than car insurance. I think that’s even bigger. And then with healthcare, you’ve had a lot of people lose their healthcare insurance. That won’t be picked up in the CPI. So what people pay for healthcare is so different from what they see in the CPI that I think that could well be part of the story. There’s a lot of other things. Again, I could be a real nerd on the CPI because I was in the middle of this debate back in the ’90s about the accuracy where there was an argument that overstated inflation and therefore we should cut our indexation social security. Social security’s indexed to the CPI. So it’s going to increase three and a half percent next year because of the CPI. So this was a backdoor way to cut social security.

You could say that, oh, we’re overstating inflation. So anyhow, long and short, that got me into a lot of the bowels of the CPI that ordinarily most people would’ve no reason to go into. But one of the other things I’ll just mention in passing that it’s again a very important thing or difficult concept I should just say, they have quality adjustments and those do make sense, but their adjustments might not always be what people perceive. So the logic of a quality adjustment is that the computer I’m getting today is probably much better than the one I got 10 years ago. So if it costs a little more, well, a lot of that’s because it’s better quality. Some might be inflation, but a lot of it’s better quality. Well, those quality adjustments could be very large. And in the case of new cars, I looked at this, I wrote a piece on it, from 2000 to 2005, the average price of a new car more than doubled.

If you look at the CPI component for new cars, it barely changed. So they had that all as quality improvements. And again, there are ways in which they’re better. There’s no doubt about it. They have airbags and there’s all sorts of things you could point to, but did that make up for doubling of the price? It’s a tough one. And again, I’m not saying that anyone’s cooking the books. They have procedures, they follow them, but that might be different than what people perceive.

Taya Graham:

Dean, finally, just to encapsulate the theme of today’s discussion, what does the future look like if the trends we’re seeing now continue? If AI continues to appear more dangerous and more difficult to control and more incorrigible and more misaligned, if the money keeps pouring into data centers and AI development without a clear picture of how to make all this money back, how unbalanced are the numbers and what does this mean for us, humanity going forward? And what does it mean for us here in the US?

Dean Baker:

Well, at the moment we have a massive amount of money going to AI, around 3% GDP we’re looking at next year that really is driving the economy and it’s crowding out other forms of investment. So if you look at structure investment, factories, other things, that’s actually fallen. If you pull out data centers, that’s fallen by a lot. If you look at investment in other goods, other machinery, whatever, that’s basically flat, same story for investment in intellectual products. So basically it’s crowded out other types of investment, which again, if AI doesn’t pan out, then we basically have thrown that money in the garbage. It’s also driving the economy in the sense that we have somewhere around 40 trillion, I could argue, is it 30, is it 50, $40 trillion in bubble wealth in the stock market, and that’s what’s driving consumption at the moment. So that’s obviously high-end consumption because most people don’t own a lot of money, don’t own a lot of stock.

They’re not the ones who are big beneficiaries. This is obviously not just the billionaires, but this is the top 10% or so of the population. That’s a very, very bad path. I mean, what I’d like to see is, I was talking about the golden ages period after World War II, you had good growth, broadly shared prosperity. Love to see us get back to that, but we’re going the wrong way now.

Taya Graham:

Well, Dean, once again, this has been a fascinating conversation and I think all of us mere mortals need to be mindful to say the least of the questions you’ve raised, and just as importantly, the warnings you’ve given. And I am profoundly affected by our discussion, and I really do appreciate your willingness to share your wisdom and your knowledge with our viewers. So Dean, please, thank you so much for returning to our show. We really appreciate you.

Dean Baker:

Well, thanks a lot for having me on. I really enjoyed it.

Taya Graham:

Thank you. Well, Steven, that’s certainly dire, but at least we’re going in with eyes wide open. Do you have any final thoughts before we sign off?

Stephen Janis:

Well, I mean, I just want to give a shout out to the apocalypse bros. If indeed it is a grand marketing strategy to have a couple guys leave the ranch and say that this technology will kill humanity as a way to distract from the fact that they’re not really making their numbers, wow. That’s all I can say is wow. I’m not saying that’s what has been argued, but that’s my own assessment of all the information. So wow, that would be one hell of a marketing con. But there’s a lot that leads me to think that, and it does seem very kind of interesting that they’re all kind of departing with the same script. And that Amodi video, he didn’t seem to be departing from it at all. But I think what’s important about talking to economists like Mr. Baker is that he looks at the practical numbers and gets beyond the rhetoric and the fear mongering and whatever and says, “Well, you guys just aren’t making your numbers.” And that’s the bottom line of this investment.

And so yeah, I’m amazed and also a little fearful for a lot of reasons.

Taya Graham:

Honestly, I thought Jacob Coxson, the young man who resigned, was being quite honest about his assessment that he believed it was a danger to humanity. But I though it was interesting how the other CEOs embraced it. And I can’t help but feel a little skeptical that because so many people are finding AI as part of the, and excuse the terminology, but the inshitification of the internet that perhaps they want it to seem powerful because a lot of people are finding AI annoying. They’re not enjoying seeing bots in their Facebook feed. They’re not enjoying having to try to get past Gemini AI, telling them that the best way to make sure your cheese sticks on your pizza is by gluing it onto your pizza, which was a common response from Gemini until that glitch was fixed. So there are a lot of folks who are saying, “Hey, AI is not really doing much for my life.” So part of me wonders if maybe this grand doom is at least one way to make AI seem powerful because conversely that means maybe it can cure all that ails us.

Stephen Janis:

Maybe.

Taya Graham:

Well, from my perspective and from the point of view of the show, I think it’s really important to understand how this is going to affect the working people who have little to no say in the future of this technology. Because if the past is any indication, it’s us, the people least culpable who will suffer the worst consequences from the fallout over AI imploding, not Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI or his counterpart, Darius Amodi of Anthropic. And that’s what concerns me the most. I mean, this show is called The Inequality Watch for a reason. Wealth inequality is an idea that defines pretty much all the power dynamics in our economy and in our country. And one truism from that reality is that the wealthiest almost end up blameless. No matter how bad they screw up, they never suffer the consequences. I mean, just look at the 2008 Great Recession.

Even though Wall Street executives and investment bankers acted recklessly with disregard for the wellbeing of the world as a whole, not a single one of them was really punished. Not a single greedy bad actor spent a day in jail. Meanwhile, the workers of this country lost their jobs, their homes, and their futures. And that’s frankly what scares me because power without accountability isn’t power. It’s malice. It’s a license to steal and also permission to wreak havoc. And what I see unfolding with AI is similar. The government is failing to act, to reign it in or at least ensure that the people of this country don’t have to bail out another group of failing billionaires filled by greed and consumed by self-interest. I mean, how else are we supposed to view an industry that promises, as I said, total annihilation of the jobs of millions on one hand and humanity itself on the other?

Meanwhile, the talk of sharing any of this wealth with people has all but vanished. To wrap up, I want to read an anonymous quote an industry insider gave to a reporter from Atlantic Magazine about the trajectory of AI. Let me read it. AI is going to fundamentally shift the balance of power between labor and capital, so only capital will matter. Now is the time to secure your time slice of the universe. I will say no more other than this. The people will not be ignored this time. We independent journalists will not allow it. I would again like to thank Dean Baker for joining us and of course my reporting partner, Stephen Janus.

Stephen Janis:

Tea, thank you for that wonderful.

Taya Graham:

My name is Taya Graham and this is Stephen Janis. We are your inequality watchdogs, as always, reporting for you.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. At Rattling the Bars, we examine the prison industrial complex, both domestically and internationally. Miami floor sits at the direct intersection of US imperialism across the Caribbean and Latin America. Joining me today is Dr. Kim Miller, an organizer in Miami fighting to end sanctions and the embargo on Cuba opposing termination of TPS for Haiti and building solidarity with nations targeted for their socialist or abolitionist revolutions. Welcome, Kim.

Dr. Kimberly Dawn Miller:

Thank you. I’m really excited to be here for this conversation.

Mansa Musa:

All right, so first introduce yourself to our audience and tell them about your work with Black Alliance for Peace in Miami.

Dr. Kimberly Dawn Miller:

Yeah, so my name is Kimberly Dawn Miller. I have a PhD in global studies with a concentration in environmental sociology. So I research particularly the Eastern Caribbean looking at the contradictions of the post-colonial state, neoliberal development regimes, as well as the politics of post-disaster recovery. So I kind of use a lot of my organizing to also inform my research. And right now I am the Miami point person for the Black Alliance for Peace Miami cluster, as well as the co-coordinator for the Black Alliance for Peace, Haiti Americas team. So Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and the Caribbean at large are very central to our anti-imperialist organizing and situating and centering Haiti in particular as a note of Black liberation and why we fight so hard for their sovereignty.

Mansa Musa:

Kim, you focus heavily on Cuba. Can you discuss the organizing you are doing locally in Miami and internationally against the direct tack on the achievement of the Cuban Revolution?

Dr. Kimberly Dawn Miller:

Miami, Florida is basically the heartland of Latin American counterrevolution, and it is a central city that has a lot of reactionary diaspora politics from Latin America, and particularly the Cuban exile community, the Venezuelan exile community, supporting some of the more far right policies, including the economic and oil blockade occurring on Cuba. So

Mansa Musa:

It’s

Dr. Kimberly Dawn Miller:

Been important though that we resist this notion of creating a monolith regarding the politics of Miami at the same time. So the Black Alliance for Peace in Miami, we work with the Miami Coalition to end the blockade on Cuba, which is a coalition of many different organizations as well as trying to fight in a decades long organization, trying to fight along with the national network on Cuba. And starting tomorrow, October 24th is the Cuba Week of Action against the US genocide on Cuba. And it’s through the 31st of October. And we’re really trying to mobilize for International and National Day of Action for Cuba on the 28th, which coincides with the UN’s annual vote where majority of the world’s countries will be able to vote on the embargo on Cuba. And we basically

Mansa Musa:

Want

Dr. Kimberly Dawn Miller:

To show that in Miami, Florida as well, the heartland of, like I said, Latin American counterrevolution, that not

Mansa Musa:

All

Dr. Kimberly Dawn Miller:

Voices in Miami support what this government is doing, specifically heightening sanctions as well as blocking solidarity, international solidarity with the Cuban people, as well as their access to even third party, like I said, financing. So we’re really just trying to show the economic strangulation that’s occurring and standing in solidarity with Cuba, the Cuban revolution, as well as those that are resisting.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. So let’s unpack the issues that’s taking place in Cuba as it relates to the international community. And you can address this from your experience and what you know to be a fact, you have on the so-called left in the United States anarchist with people that have a particular political ideology and they’re critiquing Cuba in the sense of saying that the centralization of the government is problematic and that if they didn’t have a centralized government, then it would be more likely they wouldn’t be suffering from the imperialist on slaughter. Talk about what’s your experience and what do you say about that?

Dr. Kimberly Dawn Miller:

Right. Well, I think there lies at a fundamental disagreement on maybe the nature of the state when it comes to how maybe a Marxist Leninist would view state power versus an anarchist. So one thing I’ve been trying to reference a lot of times is Lenin’s state and revolution where he clearly identifies that the state does not hover above class interests, class power. And if you see the state as instrumental to class antagonism and class power, then what does it mean when you have a state like Cuba that had a socialist revolution and that did expropriate from the bourgeoisie and actually identify class power within institutions? And I think when you look at the state not as a monolithic or a flattened character, but actually looking at the state in terms of its global configuration within, like I said, the capitalist world order, it becomes very clear that Cuba, the Cuban state is not inherently the same as the US state.

There are several colonial states, there are imperialized states, there are states in the imperial core. And then we have to recognize these differences to coming from a conclusion on the nature of the state, people’s power within its dynamic within the state, as well as the function of that state. And I do think when you have anti-imperialist states, it’s fundamentally different and they’re targeted because of they represent a more autonomous or sovereign form of development. And it’s hard to move toward no state, if you will, when you have the imperialist attack. So you just need levels of defense. Iran is another example. You need a state to defend against imperialist onslaught. And I do think that maybe putting the cart before the horse, it’s important to understand those differences. And in addition to that, I wanted to add that the dynamic between, for instance, grassroots popular power and communes is not necessarily antagonistic to the socialist state itself.

And I think that that’s important to demystifying the idea that there’s either just an authoritarian socialist state versus popular power beneath. And I think that just in my experience with Venezuela, even though we know there’s been a lot of restructuring to the Venezuelan state since January 3rd, I did see a popular consultation on International Working Women’s Day within the communes. And I did see that how they were trying to actually build their communal capacity, which Hugo Chavez said is the base for transforming the bourgeois state as well as capitalist social relations. So I do think that you can have a dialectical and sometimes, yes, antagonistic relationship between communes and the state, but I do think it’s important to understand that it’s not necessarily opposed and that they work within the Bolivarian process to get financing for infrastructure in their own productive capacity. So that’s one thing I wanted to add there as well as you can even see a country like China that has rural village cooperatives and land ownership.

And what does that mean for the actual community that it’s still a centralized party state, but they still have a communicative and a participatory democracy within that. Right.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. And I think that’s a very astute observation because I think that, and I’ve been a lot of these spaces, when people make an analysis, they have a tendency to the foundation be based on misinformation to begin with and they build out on that. They build out on, like you say, it’s a difference between the United States and the state that Lenin talked about with state revolution. Let’s shift our gears and talk about Haiti. Switching, we see a different history, not a socialist revolution, but an abolition one in Haiti, establishing the first Black Republic through slaves revoked, historically targeted by the United States imperialists. Haiti recently became the focal point of a campaign by Donald Trump and JD Vance. Given that Florida holds the largest Haitian population in the US, what are the local international dynamics that exist within that? It’s almost as if Tucson let overture ghost haunts anybody that got a view of history that’s imperialist.

The involvement by the United States and continues to destabilize it is criminal in and of itself. Talk about the Haitian aspect of your analysis.

Dr. Kimberly Dawn Miller:

Yeah, I mean that’s an excellent overview. I think it speaks to the idea of Black ungovernability and the idea that since 1804 when Thomas Jefferson snubbed Dasaline, it was always the idea that Haiti was going to be excluded. Haiti was seen as a model of Black liberation of formerly or enslaved people freeing themselves, creating its first independent state in Latin America. And what does that symbolize to enslaved Africans in the United States? It was the idea that Black sovereignty is a threat to the powers that be essentially. And these are the class contradictions that Dasaline was trying to actually resolve through a kind of form of early socialist egalitarian or agrarian reform that actually did occur when he was assassinated. But just thinking about the long history of foreign interventions in Haiti, like I said, they weren’t really given access to international credit through non-diplomatic recognition.

And then when France did recognize Haiti, they had to pay an indemnity. So the idea that it’s creating successive notions of debt that Haitians never want to take on, but the idea of, oh, well to recognize you, you have to pay for your freedom. And then we did in particular, in Miami, we actually did a teaching looking at the 1915 US occupation where the US rewrote the Haitian constitution to allow foreign ownership of land that was banned in Haiti, as well as making sure that it opened up to US capital to exploit rural workers to basically extract from the country. So the US has always had a very, and of course through Bank of New York, which is now Citibank, extracting, like I said, it’s gold, it’s resources. And I think that that’s an example even to this day since the current gang suppression force occupation after the multiple occupations from the UN, after the US, France and Canada back to coup in 2004 against Aristide.

I mean, you just see this constant history of intervention and occupation. And I do think, like you said, it’s to keep them destabilized because a functioning Haiti, a sovereign Haiti, that is, I believe, a model of what Black sovereignty could and should mean.

Mansa Musa:

So what are y’all doing to organize and change this narrative in terms of how Haiti is being looked at? Because that goes a long ways in terms of not so much as imperialist. Imperialis is going to lie. I think Gold would say when you’re dealing with propaganda, find a narrative, repeat it over and over and over again till people come to believe it. So we know that’s going to come from them, but talk about how y’all organize to get people to see the need to be involved in what’s going on in Haiti and aid and assist the Haitian people in their liberation.

Dr. Kimberly Dawn Miller:

Well, in the Black Alliance for Peace and the Haiti Americas team, we always say that Haiti’s crisis is one of imperialism. It’s not of the Haitian people where we work and move against narratives that dehumanize the Haitian public, that pathologize them. And I think it’s important, once you understand that the crisis is imperialism, you see it as an externally driven crisis. We know, for instance, that all the arms that the gangs are using, the paramilitary groups are using in Haiti come from Miami. They’re trafficked from Miami to the Dominican Republic into Haiti. So there’s an arms embargo on Haiti, and yet these weapons are flooding the country. And what does that mean around the source of the problem? Haiti is a weapons manufacturer, so the guns are getting there somewhere from the United States. That’s one way. We also look at the culpability of, unfortunately, a lot of Latin American governments.

El Salvador right now is actually trying to basically start war with Haiti by saying, “Oh, we have our four servicemen that were kidnapped and now we’re going to go in.” And it’s like, “Well, why are there Salvadorian troops in Haiti?” It speaks to this idea that there’s this global kind of almost subjugation of the Haitian people because this is the international community that is sanctioning Chad or Kenya going in and representing on behalf of the United States. It’s proposed military solution for Haiti, but it’s never looking at the political situation, never looking at the core group, the countries of US, Canada, France, believe Germany, also Brazil. We don’t know that. Brazil also has a long history of pressing Haiti. So I think it’s important that we look at all these factors and that we understand that the gangs are getting support by the oligarchs. And what does that mean?

And what is the relationship between the elites in Haiti, the violence happening against the mostly working class Haitians, and how do we address the root of the problem instead of, like I said, stigmatizing the Haitian people, as well as attacking them through TPS, which is basically saying that the US helped create these conditions and now we’re going to send them back to that. People aren’t temporary. Haitians aren’t temporary. And it’s unfortunate that the mass deportation of this regime is trying to keep Haitians, and like I said, exploit their labor when it’s convenient, but also keep them in a state of precarity. And like you said, Miami has a huge Haitian population, I think the second highest in the country, and they’re in particular fields like hospitality industry, construction, home healthcare, and they’re being devastated right now. The communities are definitely fearful, but we want to push back against the narrative.

We want to put an anti-imperialist analysis into our understanding of the Haitian immigrant and migrant presence as well.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, just the effect of imperialist. This is not people just not wanting to live a quality life. We remember Baby Doc, Papa Doc, and Tanta Liku. We remember when they was ravishing the country, being a full stool for imperialists, taking all the minerals and the natural resources out of Haiti and putting a little money in their pocket in comparison. So we are well aware, and that’s a good viewpoint as you especially, Dr. Kim, because we got to push back. I think that when they say their response to the oppression is the reason why they oppressed, you oppressed because you saying, “Get your foot off my neck.” But talk about how the United States and imperialists in particular, and this is a shift in terms of not so much the Trump administration, but the general attitude of imperialists and capitalists and fascists around the world, how they deal with Maduro and the fact that they talking about kidnapping Raul, but they threatening any country that stand up and try to identify with any type of sovereignty.

Dr. Kimberly Dawn Miller:

Absolutely. Well, I think for us, we understand that the illegal kidnapping of a head of state when it came to Maduro and his wife, Cylia Flores, and bringing them to Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, what does this say when the US gets to espouse and impose extraterritorial coercion against a sovereign country? And we know historically when the US would indict, for instance, Noriega from Panama, indicting for drug trafficking, even though he was the CIA guy until our grace. Well, he didn’t play ball geopolitically, and then suddenly he needs to be removed. We know again with the kidnapping of Aristide in 2004 and dropping him off in the

Mansa Musa:

Central

Dr. Kimberly Dawn Miller:

African Republic, this is not new what the US is doing. I think what makes this

Mansa Musa:

Particularly horrific

Dr. Kimberly Dawn Miller:

Is just knowing it’s the combination of the

Mansa Musa:

War

Dr. Kimberly Dawn Miller:

On drugs with the war on terror. So you have this narco terror label. We know that the US has sadly bombed 240 Caribbean and Latin American men on both extrajudicially for being narco terrorists. And you’re seeing, like I said, the collusion of, I do think these two kind of law enforcement mechanisms that is aligned with imperialist interests. So I think that’s one thing that we look at when advocating for Arizona peace and basically saying that the US and looking at the heart of US militarization in the region, this is not new, Venezuela wasn’t the first. And with, like you said, these indictments on Raul Castro, the indictments on the Cuban president, Diaz Canal. I mean, particularly in Florida, it was Florida that just put out a arrest warrant, which the state of Florida cannot actually arrest Raul on a sovereign country. But this idea of this performance, we were even tough on the communists.

I mean, it plays into a lot of red meat to their base, but it’s also just incredibly

Mansa Musa:

Illegal

Dr. Kimberly Dawn Miller:

And a part of how the US has operated, sadly, in this re-intensification of the Monroe doctrine that we’re seeing.

Mansa Musa:

We do remember this, and you can weigh in on this if you want to. We do remember this, the Iran Contra where they were selling guns for cocaine and the cocaine flooded the United States. And when it flooded the United States, you had the crime bill, and the crime bill was designed to make crack cocaine worse than powder cocaine, but any kind of cocaine was coming through the country through the military and the United States government with the goal of destabilizing Nicaragua and killing all American citizens. If you got a viewpoint on that, you can weigh in now.

Dr. Kimberly Dawn Miller:

Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s interesting, 60 Minutes before 60 Minutes became terrible. When they used to do journalism, they actually had a report after the invasion of Panama, and it basically said that looking at the post Noriega political climate, it’s been skyrocketing drug addiction of crack cocaine. Largely Afro-Panamanians would be addicted now to crack after the invasion. After the US invaded, then you see a rise of crack cocaine flooding the country. So it’s this weird kind of contradiction that they’re invading to stop the idea that drug trafficking is the reason that they’re going in, and then yet it’s gotten far worse. And I think that’s a similar idea when it comes to how the CIA moved through the concerts in Nicaragua to make sure that where that drugs are being funneled would be poor Black and brown communities and we’re the ones that suffer. So that’s why Black Alliance for Peace says no compromise, no retreat, which is the ways in which the war on African people here is connected to the global war on African people abroad.

And I think that’s just one excellent example.

Mansa Musa:

And as we wrap up, talk about the 60th anniversary of the Black Panther Party was this month, and the Black Panther Party, all organizations during that time that came up had an international platform. Aside of Shakur, Cuba gave a side of Shakur sanctuary. Huey was exile, gave him sanctuary. Al Jeria, we had a embassy in Algeria, Pete O’Neill and Shiloh O’Neill is in Tanzania. But talk about why it’s so

Dr. Kimberly Dawn Miller:

Important

Mansa Musa:

That our movement have an international perspective about our struggle.

Dr. Kimberly Dawn Miller:

Yeah. So thinking specifically when you have these kind of more narrow nationalist xenophobic movements coming up that try to say Black Americans, Black America, we’re not African. And thinking about the history of Black radical struggle, it was always internationalist. It was always about connecting the fight against imperialism and how that shapes the militarization of our own communities here, whether it was the 1033 program, weapons from wars being kind of funneled into local police departments that have a disproportionate effect on, like I said, Black people or the idea that the IDF will train local police departments here in the surveillance tech that both these states as they subjugate Palestinians. So that’s just another way that Black people here and Palestinians are connected. I think we have to look at things broader because understanding how we, I know some people like the domestic colony theory, that if we are an internal colony, then what does that look like?

What does that mean when our communities are occupied by police or even the shooting of Cullen Wiley in Mississippi being justified by their attorney general? I think you’re seeing that these struggles are connected, and I think that it’s really important that we don’t see ourselves as isolated, but that we have people we can tap into. And in my trip to Caracas in Venezuela, it was so surprising seeing so many Venezuelans that look just like me, Black people. And I was like, oh my gosh, because I don’t see as many Venezuelans that are Black, but there are, and how these struggles are shaped and Black internationalism is very important to fighting our own battle here, I believe.

Mansa Musa:

And you had a last word, Dr. Kim. What do you want to tell our audience and how can we get in touch with you or how can they become more involved in Black Alliance for Peace or understanding what’s going on with Cuba and y’all organization, y’all advocacy around Cuba and the diaspora?

Dr. Kimberly Dawn Miller:

Yeah. Well, so blackalianceforpeace.com/haiti, you can learn all of our resources on Haiti. Very important. We’re also on Instagram, Black Alliance for Peace, Twitter, Black Alliance for Peace, or Blacks for Peace on Twitter and Facebook. So we’re really trying to pick up our social media. And I also just want to point out that it’s the week of action for defense of Black migrants, and that’s just something that we’re working with. I mean, the Miami cluster is working with Baji, which is the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. And we’re just really trying to, like I said, spread our message on the war on African people here, being connected to the war on Africans abroad and driving out the heart of US militarization so that we can have a true zone of peace. And yeah, you can tap into our US NATO axis of domination out of our Americas network.

There’s a lot, but thank you so much.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Jacob Morrison:

All right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is not Maximillian Alvarez. It is Jacob Morrison, host of the Valley Labor Report, the largest union talk radio program in the South.

Hamilton Nolan:

And I’m Hamilton Nolan, a labor journalist based in New York City.

Jacob Morrison:

Hamilton and I marched on the boss and took Max’s microphone so we could introduce the special episode about the recent reporting trip we both went on in Las Vegas and wrote about for The Real News Network and how things work.

Hamilton Nolan:

The conference that we went to took place in late hot August in the Las Vegas desert at the beautiful Paris Las Vegas casino underneath a fake Eiffel Tower.

Jacob Morrison:

Here’s the intro to the piece that we wrote together for The Real News.

Hamilton Nolan:

On a plain blue lit stage in a plain event space at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, a gruff man with white hair and a thin goatee is complaining about Las Vegas. How it is too hot, how it is too expensive, and how the hotel’s convention management bureaucracy is driving him nuts. You can’t even move a box from left to right without contacting someone to do that, he barks into the microphone.

Jacob Morrison:

This will become a communal ritual by the end of the week. Without fail, like some sort of morning prayer, the convention begins every day with opening grumblings about the convention itself.

Hamilton Nolan:

We can see why. After all, the organization convening here is supposed to be a strong union representing nearly 20,000 members around the country. Far from all the political bluster about the police being defunded. Six years after the earthshaking George Floyd protests sweat the US and public approval for law enforcement plunged to a generational low. These guys have never been more politically and monetarily supported than they are now.

Jacob Morrison:

But there are only about 50 people here in the room with us. Only 28 delegates, 10 alternates and some wives and family members mixed in. The proceedings are pretty boring and energiless. The attendees are grumpy and the air is thick with middle age resentment.

Hamilton Nolan:

Clearly, the convention organizers and speakers were expecting something much different than this. To be honest, so were we, because it’s 2026, Donald Trump is president again, and this is the 23rd quadrennial convention of the International Union of Police Associations, IUPA, which represents tens of thousands of cops and departments from coast to coast.

Jacob Morrison:

The convention was billed as the premier gathering for law enforcement leadership, an event that you don’t want to miss.

Hamilton Nolan:

But it’s absolutely dead here. Even the speakers and attendees don’t want to be here. In fact, they won’t shut up about it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Man, that piece is so fire and anyone listening to this, you guys have to go read what Jacob and Hamilton wrote from Las Vegas and thinking about this police union convention that took place in Las Vegas. And I can’t recommend it highly enough. We’ve linked to it in the show notes for this episode. We’ve linked to the additional writing that Hamilton did on it for how things work. But I’ve been dying to actually get you guys on the podcast to talk about it. Now that the reporting trip is over, the pieces are out. There’s so much that I just want to ask you guys about what it was like to be there, what the vibe was, the conversations that you were having that didn’t make it into these pieces. So we got a lot to talk about here, but I guess by way of setting things up and really setting the stage for folks, how the hell did you guys end up at this convention?

Who the hell invited you two assholes to Ayupa’s quadrennial convention in Las Vegas?

Jacob Morrison:

I guess I’ll answer that since I’m the one who got the invitation and I’m not totally sure why, but my best guess is that I got an invitation because I’m the principal officer of an AFL – CIO Labor Council. I actually got multiple invitations in the mail to my house. So IUPA knows where I live, which potentially is a terrifying prospect, but maybe it’ll be okay. Maybe I made a couple of friends who will protect me in IUPA. So I got invitations in the mail to Las Vegas, to the IUPA convention. And I say I’m not totally sure because I did ask a couple of Labor Council presidents if they also got that invitation and they said no. But I think that’s probably

Maximillian Alvarez:

It. Maybe they looked you up and saw the mustache and were like, “Oh yeah, this guy’s with us.”

Jacob Morrison:

Yes, maybe that was it. So I got an invitation in the mail and I thought it would be really funny to go. And so I started asking around for somebody to give me the money to go and I found Max.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Enter Max, they left baby.

Jacob Morrison:

My sugar daddy, Maximilian Alvarez. So I was able to go to Vegas. I though it would be very funny. And so I though it would be funny to go, but I also wanted to turn it into sort of a real piece of reporting. And I’ve done some reporting and I’ve done some journalism, but I’m still not super comfortable with that as a label for myself. And Hamilton has been in the space for a lot longer than I have. He’s done a lot of really serious journalism and in this space specifically. And so I thought that it would be made a lot better by having somebody a little bit more experienced to be tag along with me. So I registered with Hamilton as my guest. Nobody asked any questions at the registration phase. And so that’s how we got the invitation. We can maybe talk about when we actually showed up a little bit later, but Hamilton, is there anything else that you would want to add to the how did we end up there?

Hamilton Nolan:

No. As you said, I was just along for the ride on this. Jacob got the invite for some reason still unknown. Max paid the bills and I just tagged along and I had done some reporting on Ayupa, particularly in 2020 when we were trying to get him kicked out of AFLCO and I’ve never in my life been able to get Ayupa to respond to any of my emails or phone calls. So the chance to attend the convention to me was very exciting and I was excited to tag along.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So at any point walking in there, I mean, I don’t know, you guys are two white guys walking in there who maybe probably feel differently than I would walking in there. But at any point did the sort of like high teenager in you kick in and be like, “Oh shit, these guys know who we are. They’re going to come for us” kind of thing?

Hamilton Nolan:

We both look a little bit like cops to be fair. So either one of us could be a cop. Yeah.

Jacob Morrison:

I’ve got the mustache. Hamilton has the build. So together we make a cop.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, one of the reasons that the pitch was so compelling to me, we all thought it was funny, weird, interesting. There was something fateful about that invitation ending up in Jacob’s mailbox, just like Harry Potter’s Hogwarts letter, finding him somehow. And I think we could all sense that, but we didn’t quite know what we were going to find there. But like you guys lay out in that intro, you had very different expectations for the convention than what you found. So talk about that. What were you expecting and why? And then when you got there, what were you seeing and how were you processing it?

Hamilton Nolan:

Well, I will point out, first of all, that Jacob was very concerned about kind of OPSEC while we were doing this, cloak and dagger, are they going to find us out? And when we arrived to register for the convention, we said, “Here we are.” We gave them our names and they were like, “We can’t find you.” So they just typed our name and printed it out and gave us a badge. So there was no security at all. And my initial impressions at least, and you can say yours too, Jacob, but I’ve been to a fair number of union conventions and this was probably the most low energy union convention that I’ve ever been to in my life, which was a surprise to me.

Jacob Morrison:

Yes. On the OPSEC thing, there was a continued sort of incuriousness about who we were at the time. I don’t think anybody ever asked you, Hamilton, what you do for a job, which is crazy.

Hamilton Nolan:

Jacob was trying to workshop his cover story and actually nobody gave a damn at all. Yeah.

Jacob Morrison:

Yeah. I talked to this one guy for literally an hour after the convention proceedings were over for the day, and I just kept asking him questions about his job. It was the local president who said in the piece that they’re affiliated with their labor council, but they don’t really do anything over political differences. I spoke to this guy for an hour. He never was curious about me at all. Who is this guy who’s not in IUPA? I mentioned, I’m not in IUPA and no further questions at all.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I’m sure every woman listening to this is saying, “You mean a man didn’t give a shit about anything you had to say?” It’s like big story of the year there, but I guess that’s kind of what I was getting from the reportage that you guys did for this piece is because some of the big questions you and we and you guys as ambassadors for the labor movement were going in there to ask is like, “Why are these guys in the labor movement and do they feel like they’re part of it?” And then you add on all the other politics of the police state that has been ramping up, especially ever since the George Floyd uprisings in 2020. But before we dig into that, I wanted to just ask a little more about the setting here and the sort of Noir-ish kind of presence in this story.

A, because you guys have to humor me and I promise that I was like, “I won’t turn this piece too much into a fake Hunter S. Thompson piece, but I feel like there’s something genuinely kind of overlapping here with what Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was actually doing and observing at the time in the America that existed back then. And you guys are doing the same in a very different kind of America in a very different Las Vegas where most of that noir has been paved over, blown up and rebuilt and consolidated under a few kind of mega owners of the Strip. So talk a little more about the sort of setting and the proceedings of the convention itself before we dig into the kind of politics of it.

Hamilton Nolan:

Yeah. I mean, Fear and Low in Las Vegas, for those of you who haven’t read it, a large scene in the book is them attending a cop convention while high on a lot of powerful drugs. And Jacob refused to take any mescaline despite my trying to peer pressure him. So we didn’t have the drug part, but Vegas is an extremely fucking weird setting as anybody knows who’s been to the Vegas Strip. Paris, Las Vegas has a huge fake hot air balloon out front and a huge fake Eiffel Tower inside. There’s chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. There’s huge oil paintings of Louis XIV on the outside of the ballroom where we were. And then five steps away is a sign leading to the strip club and the next hotel and a cigar bar where middle-aged guys are sexually harassing the waitresses. So that was kind of the setting that we were in.

And ironically, Vegas, of course, the entire Vegas strip is unionized and the Kulinary Union in Las Vegas, one of the most powerful local unions in America. So Vegas is in a very real sense a union town and we were here for union convention and then the guys proceeded to kind of bitch about the fact that the union imposed a bunch of rules in the hotel. So that sort of came full circle for me.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Jacob, let me ask, had you ever been to Las Vegas before?

Jacob Morrison:

No. No, I’d never been to Las Vegas.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, country boy. What was it like going into that for the first time?

Jacob Morrison:

It was definitely crazy. Not only grew up sort of out in the county, but also very religious. And so very different vibes. They call it Sin City for a reason, obviously. And there’s an energy in Las Vegas, obviously, all of the gambling, the drinking, the girls and everything like that was just so contrasted with the very sort of dull, except for Rizzo. And I hope that, Hamilton, you’ll be able to talk about Rizzo, but even that was kind of dull a little bit, people kind of got tired of it. But the convention was just like… There was one time when I got up because there was a part of the convention that was clearly not newsworthy. It was very internal stuff and just not very interesting. So I left to go get lunch, I think. And I happened to be in the elevator up to my room with another officer or with an officer, I’m not an officer, with an officer.

And I asked him where he was going. He was like, “I’m going to take a nap. This is terrible.” I was like, “Oh, is this your first convention?” He said, “Yeah, it’s awful. I hate it basically.” I very, very much underestimated, like you talked about the contrast of what we were expecting. I was expecting not a huge convention, 20,000 members is not a very large international union, but I expected at least a hundred delegates and then some alternates and some family. That’s sort of what I was expecting at the least. The sort of mean I was expecting was maybe 200, maybe 250. And so getting there, there’s only 28 people who can vote on… That was crazy to me. So I was way overestimating how many people would be there and I was way underestimating how big Las Vegas is because part of my plan was I’m going to go down after the convention proceedings to the hotel bar and find one of these guys after the proceedings and shoot the shit with them for a few hours and get super drunk.

I really wanted to do that. And as soon as the proceedings was over and people left, they blended into the thousands of people that were there and there was just no finding anybody or connecting after the convention if you do not get their phone number and talk to them and make plans. There were so few people there and it was kind of… I don’t know.

Hamilton Nolan:

Jacob was envisioning a Holiday Inn. And in fact, the Paris Las Vegas has 3,500 rooms.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. Well, it’s so wild because I grew up with Las Vegas being a big part of our lives as it was for so many people in the Southwest, particularly Southern California. Because in those sort of post mob town days of Las Vegas in the ’80s and ’90s, they were really trying to and succeeded in rebranding Vegas as the family friendly haven of these massive hotels, these big ridiculously overdone shows and buffets and pools and arcades. It was awesome. I’ve honestly had more fun in Las Vegas with my siblings and cousins in the ’90s when I was a kid than I’ve ever had being there after I was 21 and could drink. I don’t know what that says, but it’s also like I’ve watched Vegas change a lot over the years. A lot, a lot. I’ve seen some of those old hotels get blown up or live television feeds of them getting blown up.

And then you go there after a few years of not going there and all the things you remember are gone or renamed or under a new theme and new ownership. There is something uniquely American that is very intensely expressed in Las Vegas. And again, I feel like that is still the case now in the settings that you guys were in, but I want to talk about the union and what state is IUPA in? What the hell do they do and what were they doing at this convention?

Jacob Morrison:

The state of IUPA, it’s funny, because the turnout was so low, the energy was so low, it felt very familiar to me as the member of a public sector union where we have little… There’s not a whole lot of activity among our members and we don’t have very much power, which was very surprising because of all the reasons that we say in the introduction to the peace, the power of police has basically never been better. The police unions are politically feated and they didn’t even have a congressperson at their convention. I was expecting at least one sort of right-wing congressperson to be there. And the highest ranking official that they got was some deputy assistant under secretary of Homeland Security who is the liaison to local governments. I mean, that was sort of surprising to me. I guess

Maximillian Alvarez:

The state doesn’t need the police when we have a police state.

Jacob Morrison:

That may be part of it or it may be that IUPA, I mentioned this in the piece as well, that because IUPA is such a small union and there are other big police unions like the FOP, the PBA, that maybe this union in particular, and potentially because of its affiliation with the AFL – CIO, I’m not really sure and I wasn’t able to get an interview with Sam Cabral, the international president. I tried multiple times while we were on the trip and wasn’t able to make that happen. He would’ve been the one to answer those questions about sort of national politics within the labor movement and with the administration and with other politicians. And I really hate that I wasn’t able to get that interview, but those are questions that still remain. Is it because the police state doesn’t need the police unions or is it primarily because of the way that IUPA itself as an entity is situated in the political environment and there’s not really much of a need for them when they have the PBA and the FOP to be a liaison to them for law enforcement?

I’m not sure.

Hamilton Nolan:

So yeah, IUPA is a relatively small police union. The Fraternal Order of Police and the Police Benevolent Association are bigger. What makes IUPA interesting is they’re the only police union in the AFL – CIO. So they’re the only pure police union that is formally aligned with what is effectively the labor movement, the AFL – CO, America’s biggest labor federation. So they’re in an interesting political place. I mean, the convention itself, if you say, was this a union convention or a cop convention? It was much more a cop convention. And part of a cop convention, I think this is sort of maybe the symbolic part of all this is like they want to go to Vegas and play golf, man. That’s why people would attend the IUPA convention in Vegas is to go play golf. And part of the reason why Sam Cabral, IUPA’s president, sounded so pissed off every day as he was conducting this convention is I think they had so much busy work to do that he wasn’t able to just let everybody go out and play golf.

But the vendors that showed up next to the convention were like cop stuff, body cams, several of which were stolen from the reception at the last night of the convention, which was funny.

Jacob Morrison:

Yeah, there was a vendor for assault boats, right?

Hamilton Nolan:

Yeah. Assault boats.

Jacob Morrison:

Which is correct. The union is not going to be the ones purchasing assault. And so that adds to

Hamilton Nolan:

The – Right. It wasn’t like DSA was there in the vendor section. I mean, it was stuff that cops would want, although they were not allowed to have actual firearms in the hotel. So when they auctioned off a rifle, they just had to have a picture of it and I think to deliver it later on. I

Jacob Morrison:

Tried to get the rifle myself because that would’ve been funny, but unfortunately, my raffle was not picked.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. I mean, you can only commit so far to the bit, I suppose. And insofar as this was still a labor conference and a union convention where stuff was getting done, I want to talk about that, right? I mean, because there’s so many big questions here that we… And by we, I mean people in the broader labor movement, people connected to it, who support it, who have family members in it, who believe in it, and just working people in general who believe that workers banding together and fighting for our needs together is the way forward. And people like us who have questions of what the hell kind of relationship are we supposed to have to the police? There’s so much kind of intensity in those debates online and in person that also seem to contrast so much with the setting you were in, the discussions that were being had, and the mentalities of the people attending this conference.

So talk more about that. Do they see themselves as part of the labor movement? Do they still operate like a union?

Hamilton Nolan:

Well, the most fascinating part of this conference to me was getting to be in the room when a police union is talking to itself, presumably with nobody else in the room, right? There was no obvious press here or anything. So that was actually a very interesting kind of look behind the curtain because of the tone that a lot of the speakers had at the convention. And you saw really the qualities, I guess, that people think about police, but maybe don’t get to see so directly. The defensiveness, the kind of military mindedness, the us against the world thing, the we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys thing. All of that was very much manifested in the speakers that we had, including some of the speakers were so wacky and sort of bizarre and crazy that you start to worry, these are the guys who are talking to the guys with guns.

I mean, that doesn’t make me feel very good. One of the ones that stood out to me crossing over for the union part is there was a guy who spoke from a legal defense fund that serves police unions and all police unions can pay in to tap into the services of this legal defense fund and they will fund legal defense if you, as a police union member, do anything. And he was like, “It could be easy stuff like a dead body in the back of your car or basic stuff like you walk into the jail cell, the guy’s dead, and next thing you know –

Maximillian Alvarez:

Quick question, wasn’t Harvey Keitel from Pulp Fiction doing this?”

Hamilton Nolan:

I mean, to me it sounded awesome. I was like, “I would love to be in a legal defense.” He was like, “Even if you’re here in Las Vegas off duty, if something happens and something goes down and you got to shoot a guy, I mean, we will come to your defense if it was sort of a police action.” So that was pretty interesting to me.

Jacob Morrison:

And absolutely no sort of hemming and hawing about that either. That’s the thing that really kind of stuck out to me about that. And I guess it makes sense because they’re talking to themselves and they don’t feel like they have to justify it, but there really was no attempt to justify why should you as an off-duty cop from Florida be able to shoot and kill somebody in Las Vegas and have a Cadillac legal defense for it? I mean, why should you have that? No attempt to justify that at all and no attempt to reckon with the way that folks who are asking for more police accountability feel about the police and the reason that they would say they don’t have to, even beyond the fact that they felt like they were talking to themselves and so they don’t have to do that. But they cited approval polls from Gallup and stuff about how something like 74% of Americans have some or a great deal of confidence in their local police.

And so they feel like they have sort of won the propaganda war and it’s us actually who are wrong.

Hamilton Nolan:

I was just going to add, if you’ve been to a lot of union conventions or you spent time in union world period, at any union events, there’s usually a lot of talk about solidarity, the basic union buzzwords, and there was almost none of that at this convention. And that really leapt out to me too. I mean, I’ve never been to a union convention or event of any type where almost nobody said solidarity, union, we’re all together, very little of that at all.

Jacob Morrison:

Certainly no attempts to make alliances or highlight alliances that they have with other unions, which do exist, and you can read the piece for more of that locally, but there were no other unions that were speakers there. I mean, at most union conventions, you’ll have other unions speaking. I mean, I think that at the Letter Carriers Convention, Sean O’Brien spoke, at the UAW convention, Sarah Nelson has spoke.That’s a pretty common thing. At the AFL – CIO conventions in Alabama, we have bunch of union speakers. We’ve had people from the UMWA, we’ve had Sarah Nelson, and no other unions at all, not even other cop unions.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and for that reason, there was so much in the figure of Sam Cabral, IUPA president, and the sort of vibe and mentality that he embodied that echoes the steward of Gondor, just really having this sense of we have no friends, we are the thin blue line defending everyone from the darkness that is always ever creeping, but now the darkness is creeping from within our own ranks and we’re the ones holding society together, yada, yada, yada. It feels like so much of that was dripping from the details that you guys gave in this incredible piece, but –

Jacob Morrison:

Can I say something really quick about Cabral? He gave his speech, I think it was either right before or right after he was reelected president of the International, and not a good speaker, which is fine. Lots of people aren’t good speakers, but he was not a good speaker. I don’t think he would say he was a good speaker, but he had some interesting stuff in his backstory that I really would’ve loved to have asked him about. He said that a big reason that he decided to join the union was because of his dad who was in the Meat Cutters Union, which was a union that ultimately became a part of the UFCW, and about how inspired he was by his dad fighting for people that were being bullied, and how he doesn’t like bullies, and how that was such an inspiration to him. And so when he got on with the police force, he wanted to do that for rank and file officers who were being bullied by management.

And I thought that to me was basically the only time that I heard anything from Cabral that sounded like it tracked with my theory or the way that I think of unions. It seemed like there was a real sort of grain of unionism there in Cabral that I found interesting and I would’ve really liked to have talked to him about, because it seems like that sort… Of solidarity with the common every man, like the every man outside of law enforcement has really been buried. And it made me think of Bill Fletcher. I spoke to him for this piece and he talked about how in AFGE, among some of the law enforcement sections, particularly the federal prison guards, he told me, and this wasn’t in the piece, he told me that these guards, literally every single day, they are surrounded by people who would kill them.

They would, a lot of them would kill these guards at the drop of a hat. And doing that and not having a community outside of this law enforcement community to keep you grounded and to make you realize that that is not the rest of the world, the real world does not operate like everybody is out to kill you. If you don’t have a community that can ground you in a reality that’s outside of that, it sort of breaks your brain and it gets kind of boiled alive. And I wonder if something like that sort of happened to Cabral. It was something that I would’ve loved to have asked him about.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and in terms of what you guys were able to ask other attendees and speakers about, like we said, there’s so much here that you guys got the chance to kind of pose to these union members who are part of the only cop union affiliated with the AFL – CIO. And you write beautifully in this piece, and I’m just going to read it, where you guys say, “It is by no means the largest police union in America, but AIUPA has the distinction of being the only police union that is a member of the AFL – CIO. It joined the Labor Federation in 1979, making it a formal but uncomfortable partner to every progressive labor union and every rank and file union member in the AFL – CIO who has ever had to question why they should be affiliated with a union representing the same kind of cops who beat and arrest them, their union siblings, and their neighbors at protests and on picket lines.” So when you guys talked to them about that, what did they have to say?

Hamilton Nolan:

Well, first of all, I’ll say Sam Cabral, all three of us would love to interview you, Sam Cabral, so please reach out to us anytime, open invitation. I, as I mentioned, have covered IUPA a bit, particularly in 2020. Their media relations are kind of interesting to me. They’re very quiet. Absolutely, not only do they not do outreach very much, but they rarely respond to not just me from the left wing magazine, but to almost anybody. If you look them up in Google News, very little news about them apart from the fact that they had to go bankrupt because one of their people got sued for sexual harassment, but that’s a different story. But when you look at what Sam Cabral is on the record having done in the past decade or so, when Ferguson was going on and Michael Brown was killed and Richard Trumpka, who was the head of the AFL – CIO tried to make some positive statements about police reform, Sam Cabral sent a very angry, scathing letter to the AFL – COO, rejecting the idea that there was any racism in policing.

Then fast forward to 2020, George Floyd, once again, the AFL – CO, Richard Trumpka, tries to make some supportive gestures towards Black Lives Matter. And again, Sam Cabral sends an angry, scathing letter saying that the AFL – CO is demonizing police and how dare you do this and how dare you suggest police are racist. And then at this convention, a huge theme of the convention was like the crazies are trying to defund police and putting us all in danger and we’re fighting back and there’s this horrible danger on the horizon in the form of the democratic socialists who are going to defund police once again. And it’s fictional in a sense, but it’s also an interesting kind of look into the mind state. And when you talk about their PR strategy, one thing I learned at this convention, which I did not know before was that IUPA gives an award to journalists almost every year at their conventions.

And they’ve been doing so for decades now. And a lot of them are, it’s sort of like you’re the journalist who wrote great stuff about the cops, an actual award with a plaque and everything. And a lot of them were to, because they had a list of all of them in the brochure. And a lot of them were to sites like lawenforcementnews.com or some of them were to Fox News figures, Greta Van Sustran and stuff like that, who you wouldn’t really be surprised by. But some of them were also to Bob Schaefer from CBS News and people like that who had apparently accepted this award from IUPA. And again, it’s like that bunker mentality of talking to the world that Jacob touched on. It’s like it’s us and our friends and then it’s our enemies. And I think that came through a lot at this convention for me.

Jacob Morrison:

It was funny that this year’s recipient did not come to pick up her prize.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, again, it sounds like hardly anyone came, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised there, but I wanted to save this for the last 10 minutes after all the heavy lifting you guys have done to go there to Vegas, to be there for this convention, to write about it, to go through all the editing, co-publishing, all that. But we got 10 minutes here to sort of address the big question that the feature piece leads with is are cops part of the labor movement or are they an existential threat to it? I mean, I wanted to sort of ask for your guys’ thoughts on that, understanding that there are plenty of people, including people who listen to the show, people that we have interviewed and worked with who are not your typical sort of DSA defund, all cops are bastards kind of people. But as listeners can hear, you guys have been invested in this question, Hamilton, for longer than any of us, but it’s been something that you’ve looked at, seen, talked about, analyzed for many years.

So I wanted to ask where you stood on that question before the convention, if anything from the convention has changed your mind. And I guess having somehow gotten into this sad, decrepit, soulless convention and seeing a bit how the sausage is made, what do you think the rest of us on the outside who never get to see that need to understand about these kinds of cops and this kind of union?

Hamilton Nolan:

Well, I’ll put my cards on the table because I really do have an opinion on this that’s maybe stronger than a typical journalist you might think of. But in 2020 when the George Floyd protests were happening and Black Lives Matter was happening, there was a national movement within the labor movement to kick IUPA out of the AFL – CO. I was active in that. My union, the Writers Guild of America East, which is an AFL – CO member, passed a resolution. So that came from our entire union urging the AFL – CO to kick out IUPA, which the AFL – CO did not. And I also reported on the AFL – CO and IUPA. And what I saw really was the AFL crazily trying to sweep it under the rug, really, really trying to minimize it. Eventually they sort of formed a commission that came out with the report a year later that they totally buried and didn’t publicize.

And that report, in fact, rejected calls to defund police and rejected calls to kick out IUPA. And the same people that put out that report are still running the AFL – CO. So my belief, and it’s a belief that a lot of other people share and have written eloquently about, is that the goals of police unions are fundamentally incompatible with the solidarity that defines the labor movement. My personal belief is police can have unions. They are workers. They work, they have a job. They can, as far as I’m concerned, have collective bargaining and bargain over their wages and working conditions. But that is a different proposition from them being in our labor federation and being a formal part of the labor movement, because being a part of labor movement demands solidarity. Solidarity is a give and take. You give solidarity and you get the benefit of solidarity.

And that is not something that I think police are existentially capable of doing or that we’ve ever seen police do in the history of America. And everybody who says that, “Oh no, no, we need to keep them close and this is going to make them better,” it’s never come true. And I think at some point we have to recognize that. So I would love to see this issue, and thanks for bringing it up, Max, but I’d love to see the issue once again get elevated because the only way the labor movement’s going to make progress on this is for a lot of people to agitate around it and organize around it within your local unions and elevate that up the chain.

Jacob Morrison:

Yeah. When I talked to Bill Fletcher about this, he has basically the same position as Nolan. And I asked him if that position was, does that sort of run counter to what you told me you’ll recall about the federal prison guards, how if these guards, they don’t have a community outside of law enforcement that sort of grounds them in the real world, then they sort of fly off the handle and become crazy. Is that not an argument for maintaining them as part of our labor movement and engaging with them? And he said that the problem with that is that within the Labor Federation, within the AFL – CIO and within unions that have sections of law enforcement, that never actually happens. Potentially he said that maybe that’s an argument to do it actually, but in the real world that hasn’t happened. I mean, like Hamilton talked about, there was this report and they said, “We believe that there would be more good from engaging our police affiliates than isolating them.” And maybe that’s true.

And I think potentially my interviews with leaders of the Memphis Police Association, maybe they speak to the value of that. I have a full hour up on the Valley Labor Report with the vice president of the Memphis Police Association. And long story short, I was able to write some in The Real News and talked about some in my interview about the ways that the Memphis Police Association very much unlike other police associations has stood in solidarity with unions in Memphis, has supported collective bargaining rights, not just for themselves, but for the other city unions, has supported striking workers and not arrested striking workers when they were called on to harass them by the boss and anti-union forces. And so maybe the unique history of Memphis, maybe there’s a path forward there, but you can’t talk about that as a path forward without recognizing that even though that has been talked about in other places within AFGE, within the AFL – CIO, the leaders of these federations show no appetite to actually make that happen.

And the leaders of the police associations by and large show no appetite to allow that to happen to them. I mean, there’s just no appetite at the international level from IUPA and certainly not from the FOP or the PBA for any sort of reform. And I talked to Covington about this, the vice president of the Memphis Police Association, John Covington, about why would you want to be sort of burdened with the responsibility of responding to the homelessness crisis in this country, the mental health crisis in this country, and every societal ill should not be handled by an armed agent of the state is sort of how I feel about it. And he had his response and it was basically like that these things can get dangerous and so basically we need somebody with a gun who can kill somebody if it gets out of hand.

And he actually even pushed back against having social workers in addition to cop teams because he was like, “If we have a social worker there, then that’s another person that I have to protect as the one with the gun.” And I think that is sort of part of his brain being broken and being always in the world of it’s us against them and everybody is out to kill me. And I don’t think that that is actually the world that we live in. Even when we’re talking about the mental health crisis and the homelessness crisis, I think that by and large, most of those people are not going to be violent unless violence is threatened against or put against them. And that’s just not really something that cops seem willing to tolerate.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and at a certain point, you really got to be able to see past the goodness real are perceived of the individual people wearing badges and think about, to borrow Hamilton’s term, the sort of existential basis of this job and the sort of powers of that badge. There are certain built-in structural foundational incentives that are literally pushing those people, good or not, to do the opposite of what everyone else would have to do in that situation. It’s like arguing why business owners all turn into Jeff Bezos want to be power hungry monsters because they’re literally incentivized to. They’re rewarded for being that. And the state apparatus is constantly giving them benefits for doing that. And the same sort of thing applies to cop unions, right? Why would they have solidarity when they are constantly being kind of enabled by the state to get by without it?

My mind always goes to what union workers and retirees in Wisconsin told me about Act 10 in 2011. When Governor Scott Walker and the Republicans during the Great Recession were capitalizing on people’s pain to just go all out against public sector workers and unions, go after their collective bargaining rights, their wages, their ability to even maintain their unions. But of course, there were carve outs for cop unions, firefighters, and deputy sheriffs. And that kind of pattern has been repeated in so many ways around the country. So it does sort of beg the question of why would they show solidarity with us if they are always sort of incentivized not to and rewarded for it?

Hamilton Nolan:

Something that is so relevant to this discussion I think is that this summer, 2026, the AFL – CO’s convention was held in Minneapolis. They purposely held it in Minneapolis in order to celebrate the Minnesota labor movement’s actions in opposition to ICE. So the whole kind of underlying theme of the AFL – CO convention this year was we are celebrating the Minnesota Labor Movement and what they did to resist ICE, particularly in Minneapolis. And at IUPA’s convention, they have speakers up there celebrating the agreements that local unions strike to help out ICE and help them in their deportation campaign. And it comes down to which side are you on? Everybody in the labor movement knows the song, which side are you on? And I would challenge the AFL – CIO to tell me how you reconcile these two points, how you believe you can have a union in your federation that is celebrating and assisting ICE’s deportation campaign at the same time you as a federation are purportedly celebrating our resistance to that thing.

It doesn’t work.

Jacob Morrison:

The International Union of Police Associations was the only affiliate of the AFL – CIO to not attend the quadrennial convention in June in Minneapolis.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our special guests, the incredible labor journalists and real news contributors, Hamilton Nolan and Jacob Morrison. Go follow and support Hamilton Substack, how things work and read his book, The Hammer. Go follow and support Jacob and the Valley Labor Report. My God, we need their work now more than ever. And I cannot stress this enough. Go read their amazing pieces about the IUPA Convention in Las Vegas that we published on the Real News website and that Hamilton published at How Things Work. We’ve linked to both of those in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you guys for caring about this. We do all of this work for you, but we cannot do it without you.

And that goes for us here at Working People in the Real News and also for Hamilton, Jacob, and every other labor journalist that you support. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Subscribe to our YouTube channel, check out our great podcasts like Under the Shadow and the Battle for Free Speech, and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.

I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez.

Hamilton Nolan:

I’m Hamilton Nolan.

Jacob Morrison:

I’m Jacob Morrison.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Take care of yourselves.

Jacob Morrison:

Take care of each other.

Hamilton Nolan:

Solidarity forever.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Michael Fox:

Hi folks. Before I get started, let me just say that if you’re not already following Pan-American Dispatch, please check it out. That is our new website covering the Brazilian elections around the clock. It’s a project of The Real News in partnership with Global Exchange. We are on the ground in Brazil. You can find us at panamericandispatch.org or on Instagram X and bluesky@padispatch. Okay, I hope you enjoy the show. This week, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters posted this video on his Instagram account.

Roger Waters:

You have an election on Sunday in Brazil. I love Brazil. I’ve done many, many. My name’s Roger Waters, by the way.

Michael Fox:

He looks straight at the camera. MPB, popular Brazilian music is playing softly in the background. I love how succinct his assessment is.

Roger Waters:

So the two candidates are Bolsonaro, who is the son of an asshole. He’s an asshole himself. He comes from a long line of assholes. He is in cahoots with the United States of America who want to steal everything that you have in Brazil that’s of any value, not just the Amazon forest, but also any minerals or anything that you might have. They want to give it to the Trump family and to Jared Kushner and those other assholes in the ruling elite. Okay.

Michael Fox:

He says he’s met Lula, that Lula’s an honest man and that people should let him go on working for them.

Roger Waters:

Sunday, the important thing is turnout. Turnout. It was only 78% in the first round. We need 90%, 95%, 100% turnout. If you have a grandmother who can’t get out of a chair to go to the polling station, carry her, put her on a donkey, put her in her car, take her to the polling station and vote, vote, vote. Only you can save Brazil from the machinations of the gangsters who pretend to be the government in the United States of America and their allies in Brazil like the Bolsonaros. Okay. Please, please, please.

Michael Fox:

Huge elections are taking place this Sunday, October 25th. In the first round on October 4th, far-right senator and presidential candidate Flavio Bolsonaro came in two points ahead of President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva. Bolsonaro is the son of the former far right president Jair Bolsonaro, a close ally of US President Donald Trump. Remember, Jair Bolsonaro is currently under house arrest for attempting to carry out a coup to hold onto power after he lost the 2022 vote. Flavier Bolsonaro’s victory in the first round earlier this month was a shock for much of the country. Lula led almost all the polls ahead of the election. His supporters were despondent and then this happened.

The left woke up in Brazil. That is a student march in Nitaroy, Rio de Janeiro. The evening after the vote, the images filled people’s feeds. Hope spread like wildfire. This is just one meeting I attended in Florianopolis a couple of days after the election. That is the capital of Santa Catarina, one of the most conservative states in the country. They expected a couple of hundred people, thousands turned out. An impromptu march stretched for blocks into the city’s downtown. I spoke with one woman in the march. Her name is Luana Hiberu. She told me, “We’re making part of history, taking to the streets once again to defend the minimum rights that we have achieved and to ensure that our country doesn’t return to 1964 again,” she told me. 1964 was the year of the Brazilian coup that sank the country into a military dictatorship that would last for 21 years.

People on the streets in recent weeks say they are fighting for the country’s very democracy.

President Lula told people that he was getting to work. “Bolsonaro supporters had better get ready,” he said, “because we are going to defeat you.” Abstention in the first round was the highest the country had seen in nearly 30 years. Now the campaign was on to win over the undecided and the more than 30 million people who didn’t vote. Students led the way. Marches and rallies spilled over the country, the likes of which Brazil has not seen in a long time, organizing in cities and neighborhoods, pamphleting, talking to their neighbors, getting out the vote. Record-breaking rallies have taken place in cities across Brazil. More than a million people marched alongside President Lula down Paulista Avenue in Sao Paulo, and people have been organizing online as well, but it has not been easy.

Big tech, and in particular Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, have been actively helping to lift Bolsonaro’s presence online over that of President Lula. Meta temporarily suspended Lula’s campaign page on Facebook. It blocked more than a thousand pro Lula accounts and allowed its algorithm to benefit Bolsonaro while hindering Lula’s campaign. Meta admits that there has not been parity in its treatment of the candidates, but it accuses mechanical glitches. Meanwhile, a Meta AI chatbot admitted to one graduate student that, “Meta indeed has a clear political and economic interest in the election of Flavio Bolsonaro.” I want to talk about something important today. Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg is a close political ally of US President Donald Trump. Flavio Bolsonaro has promised that if he is elected, he will join Trump’s counter-cartel coalition and open up Brazil’s rare earth minerals to the United States. That is something that big tech companies are interested in because those minerals are necessary for their hardware, AI, and data centers.

The UN criticized Meta this week and called on the platform not to interfere in Brazil’s democratic process. UN special rapporteurs wrote in a statement, “Digital platforms should not become unaccountable gatekeepers of political debate, nor should their systems be vulnerable to undue influence from political actors.” Brazilians have protested at Meta’s headquarters in Sao Paulo, and they’ve turned to creativity to try and break the bubble of the algorithm and spread their message to precious undecided voters who can make or break this election.

Meta and its secret algorithm have become the latest tool of US intervention in Latin America. It is not a branch of the US government, but it’s working in tandem. A former Meta Brazil worker told journalist Lais Covella earlier this month that ahead of the election, Meta laid off a team of human moderators who reviewed content. The system was switched to AI. The person said, “That means decisions are now coming from a single automated command possibly issued from the United States designed to boost certain content while burying the rest.” We do not know what the Meta algorithm is. Meta won’t disclose it, but we can see what it’s doing and we can connect the dots. Joel Ferez Jr. is a political scientist at Rio de Janeiro State University.

Joao Feres Junior:

If you see that in general, the guys who own the companies, the CEOs and stuff, show external signs of being politically aligned with extreme right in the United States with Trump, right? So if you know that they divulge the way they conduct their business, and on the other tip, you get the results. They’re very imbalanced as we’re seeing here. You have enough reasons to at least suspect them, to suspect they’re doing something.

Michael Fox:

They are clearly doing something. They’re attempting to influence public opinion ahead of Brazil’s elections and thereby influence the outcome of the vote. That and much, much more in a minute. This is Under the Shadow, an investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the role of the United States abroad in the past and the very present. This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA. I’m your host, Michael Fox, longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist, the producer and host of the podcast Brazil on Fire: Stories of Resistance and the Battle for Free Speech. I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years in Latin America. I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad, and most often sadly, it is not for the better. Invasions, coups, sanctions, support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years.

It still does. This is season two of Under the Shadow: Trump’s attack, episode 16, Meta and the Brazilian Elections.

Okay, so today, folks, I’m going to do things a little differently. I’m going to bring in a friend and fellow journalist to discuss where we are right now, what’s at stake, and in particular to look at the role that Meta is playing ahead of the second round of the Brazilian elections on Sunday. This is something he and I have been paying particular attention to in recent weeks. His name is Brian Meer. He has a master’s degree from Loyola University of Chicago and the University of London. He’s lived in Brazil for more than 30 years, and he co-hosts a weekly Portuguese language web TV program called Globalistas on Brazil 247. He’s a correspondent for Telesur English, and he works with me as an editor of Pan-American Dispatch, which we launched ahead of the Brazilian vote. All right, we’re recording. Brian, thank you so much for joining me today.

This is fantastic. I really appreciate it, and thank you so much for all of your work, always ongoing. These are insane times.

Brian Mier:

Thanks for having me.

Michael Fox:

So Brian, I want this to be… I kind of mentioned, I’m hoping that this can be kind of a conversation about what’s happening right now. We are a few days out from the vote, and I’m hoping to map this out for a US audience and for a podcast that is particularly focused on US intervention in Latin America. And there’s so many layers that you and I have been working on for the last month or more, and folks who are listening to this, if you don’t already subscribe and know Pan-American Dispatch, please check it out because we’ve been doing it around the clock for the last month, and we’ll be covering the elections around the clock, and we’re just translating tons of articles, and I think it’s really an important site for news and analysis of exactly what’s happening on the ground right now in Brazil.

But Brian, if we’re taking the 10,000 foot view, where do you see things right now?

Brian Mier:

Well, we’re in a crisis of democracy in Brazil. This is the most complicated election since the return to democracy because we have the son of a man who’s in jail along with 28 cronies of his for attempting to implement a military coup, a man who was a former operative during the military dictatorship. He was a captain in the army. We have his son running under the promise to immediately pardon his father and give him a high ranking job in the government, essentially turning control over the government to his father if he’s elected, which represents the biggest threat to democracy since the return, since the end of the dictatorship, because what we’re really talking about is a state of exception. It’s also a very big risk for the Amazon rainforest as Jay Bolsonaro is present slashed the budgets, dismantled all of the environmental protection agencies, including the satellite fire monitoring system, the universities that study the departments are studying deforestation just on a vast scale and gave constant dog whistles to loggers and soy plantation farmers and ranchers that they could cut out whatever they wanted.

And it’s a threat for sovereignty because we have a candidate for the first time in Brazilian history who’s promising to turn over control of his transition team to the Trump administration if he’s elected and also to provide monopolistic access to Brazil’s rare earths at the expense of all the other countries we’re interested, Brazil being the second largest reserves of rare earth minerals in the world.

And also it would be the last country, one of the last countries in the Americas and the largest country in the Americas that will cease to be governed by a leftist political party. So on various different levels, it’s complicated. And the only reason this election is even close, because there’s always been… I’ve been living in Brazil for over 30 years, there’s always been a percentage of the population that has fascist sympathies, far right sympathies. When I say fascist sympathies, I mean literal fascist sympathies. It’s not like calling an American politician a fascist or something. I’m saying that Brazil has a tradition of fascism that was manifest during the dictatorship. The reason that the election is close is because of the Silicon Valley tech fascists and political operatives like Steve Bannon who have been for years working with the Bolsonaros to use the same kinds of dirty tricks that Cambridge Analytica did to push toward Brexit in the UK, the same kind of tricks that were used to elect Trump and propel all of these other far right parties into power around the world, which is illegal data phishing or data access, purchasing data access from companies and micro targeting different demographics with emotional appeals and bringing people down rabbit holes on social media with conspiracy theories and whatnot to the point where a large percentage of the population is just scared and confused.

So this is why the election is close. The first round, some people expected Luma to win in the first round, some people expected Flavio Bolsnar to win in the first round.

You needed to get 50% of a vote plus one to win Brazil’s election in the first round because there were multiple candidates. Brazil has a multi-party system, there’s 29 political parties. Some people were expecting Lula to take it somewhere expecting Bolsonaro to take it. The polls put Lula two points ahead, three points ahead. Some of them had it tied. And in the end, Flavio Bolsonar won the first round by 1.8%, which sent out a big warning to different sectors of the population that might not normally support government as left wing as the Lula administration who are worried about the state of democracy in Brazil and also worried about sovereignty. So there’s been momentum growing on the streets. A few days after the October 4th first round election, Flavio Bolsonaro was pulling six points in the lead and that lead has evaporated now with most polls showing that they’re tied, some showing Lula a little bit in front, some showing Bolsonaro a little bit in the front.

The far right has a tradition of outperforming polls, so it’s basically up in the air right now with only a few days left until the election.

Michael Fox:

I think what’s interesting and important about right now, ahead of the first round vote, there was a lot of discussion about the role in the United States and the connection between the United States and Flavio Bolsonaro in the lead up going back months beforehand. And I dug into a lot of that stuff on this podcast. What’s interesting now is how much the conversation is really about Meta and about online manipulation, the algorithms, and that’s something I really want to talk about right now. We have been covering it constantly every day, numerous articles because it is a terrifying reality when you have a Silicon Valley company that is owned clearly by Mark Zuckerberg, that controls Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp and is very close friends with US President Donald Trump and is clearly trying to play politics in this election against Lula and his campaign. Brian, dive into where you see things with Meta right now.

How are they playing politics biased in this election? What have we seen?

Brian Mier:

Okay. Well, one of the reasons I enjoy being on podcasts is because normally news treats issues as almost binary things. So I want to avoid suggesting that it’s not the Trump administration, it’s not the US media in general, and it’s just Meta because there’s a long history of, for example, Elon Musk meddling in Brazilian politics and Donald Trump has made massive tariffs on Brazil and it’s basically extorting the population doing the same thing with the Biden administration did in 2024 in Venezuela saying, “If you vote for my guy, I will remove these punishments on you. Your economy will improve. I’ll remove the punishments.” Just like with Argentina in the midterm election, Trump said, “Well, I’m only going to bail out your economy if you vote for Malay’s party in the midterms. They maintain control of parliament.” So there’s that going on. Above and beyond that though, you have Meta.

So there’s a operative, a political operative who is in jail right now named Fernando Serimedo who was arrested for attempting to murder his pregnant ex-girlfriend who’s a lawyer in Bolivia recently. She’s now out of the hospital. She miraculously survived multiple gunshot wounds and she’s out of the hospital and she’s recovering and she’s talking to the media about what her husband was involved in. Now, we already knew that he was Miles’ big data manipulation guy, big social media manipulation, bot farm, merchant, controlling huge bot farms around Latin America. He was involved in influencing the Honduran elections, Peruvian, Colombian and Argentinian elections, and that he had close ties to both US intelligence agencies and the Bolsonaro family. But what she told Channel 14 in Mexico last week is that Fernando Cerameto and Flavio Bolsonaro’s brother, Eduardo, who is the CPAC representative for South America, visited Meta headquarters in the US and made a deal for the company to support Flavio Bolsonaro through algorithmic manipulation and to bury the reach of Lula during these elections.

And so there’s been a series of events that have shown that this is actually what they’re doing. First, a Brazilian journalist named Lais Gova spoke to someone inside Meta Corporation in Brazil who told her that right before election season started, Meta laid off most of its fact checkers and replaced them with an AI fact checking system that they believe was controlled from the US, which in itself is a crime in Brazil. Then both Amnesty International and the US NGO Echo ran tests with Meta platforms like Instagram and Facebook to see if they could break Brazilian election law by paying for advertising political ads from outside of Brazil. That in itself is a crime, but adding to that crime, the additional crimes of disinformation of the Brazilian electoral system, disinformation about the integrity of the electronic voting system, disinformation about the date of the election, and they paid for these ads and scheduled for them to run at a certain time and date so that they could cancel them if they were approved.

In the case of MSC International was from the UK, it was like 12 of the 20 ads that they tried to run made it straight through fact checking. And the aid that were rejected, they weren’t rejected because of the disinformation or the location, they were rejected for bureaucratic issues or something. They weren’t flagged as being fake content or something. And in the case of Echo, it was almost something like 17 out of 20 made it through. So they proved that Meta was breaking the law, allowing foreigners to take out campaign ads in Brazil. Then people started observing Meta’s AI that runs through its WhatsApp social media chatbot, and the AI was refusing to design logos for Lula, campaign logos or slogans or t-shirts or anything related to Lula. It was just refused. I said, “Well, I can’t do that.” But then it was designing them perfectly normally for Flavio Bolsonaro, and people began running all kinds of tests.

One example of something that was flagged by Lula’s campaign lawyers, his campaign team lawyers, was that one of the big accounts in social media supporting Lula is called Lula’s Troops. And so when you search for Lula’s troops in Meta AI, it gives you a link to a site called Flavio’s Troops. Or if you search for it in Instagram, I’m sorry, if you look for an Instagram, it would link you to Flavio’s troops. And if you try to make a hashtag with Lula, the first thing would come up would be lulathethief, whereas the hashtags with anything related to a negative portrayal of Flavio would only come in at the 18th or 19th hashtag that they would suggest when you’re trying to build a hashtag with Flavio Bolsonaro. And then on October 9th, Lula’s Instagram account was simply blocked from taking any kind of ads out for 24 hours, while Flavio’s was running perfectly normal, and Flavio’s allies were running propaganda for him like Nicholas Fajera was running perfectly normally.

So then once the page was reestablished, 24 hours later, Meta issued the statement very reminiscent of what they said, what Zuckerberg said when the Cambridge Analytica scandal surfaced saying, “Oh, I’m sorry, it was a technical glitch. We’re going to take measures to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again.” So yesterday, Folio de Saint Polo, Brazil’s largest newspaper, they uncovered conversations, internal conversations from workers in Meta headquarters in Brazil in which they acknowledged that they had been artificially promoting extending the reach of the Flavio Bolsonaro posts and limiting the reach of the Lula posts.

These conversations also showed that the international system crash, but Meta had give it as an excuse for Lula’s ads being taken offline for 24 hours, had actually happened on October 7th. I said October 7th, but this Lula’s page was taken on October 9th. The technical glitch that they used as an excuse for taking down Lula’s page had happened for five hours on October 7th, and Lula’s page was taken down for 24 hours on October 9th after they had fixed the supposed glitch. So these things, last Friday, the Superior Electoral Court issued an order for Meta to provide more transparency on how it’s using its algorithms and to immediately cease accepting money from third parties to propel propaganda for Flavio Bolsonaro and to reestablish equality and algorithm reach between the two candidates proportionate to their number of users and whatever. And on Monday, it was proven that they hadn’t obeyed the court order.

And so today, Tuesday, Lula’s campaign team filed a complaint with the Superior Electoral Court to cancel the presidential ticket of Flavio Bolsonaro because of illegal algorithmic manipulation. Remember that the first round was very close.

Nobody is suggesting that the reason everyone voted for Flavio Bolsonaro was because of algorithmic manipulation of Meta, but it could certainly make a two to three point difference, a four point difference in an election, and that’s what people are worried about. Will Flavio’s candidacy be canceled? Probably not, but at least it’s on record. The hope now is that since the scandals are broken, Lula’s reach has grown on social media and a lot of activists are trying to break the shadow banning using a lot of different tactics that they’re sharing with each other and everything. But the real risk is that on election day, we see that on the October 4th election day, Lula and Flavio Bolsonaro’s reach was about equal up until about 12 hours before the polling stations opened. At that point, suddenly Flavio had seven times more reach than Lula, and it maintained that way all through election day.

So the risk is that foreign media starts doing these stories about how finally the Brazilian leftists have woken up and figured out how to use social media, and they’ve evened out the playing field on this imaginary democratic commons, which is these fascist corporation controlled social media platforms. These kind of stories are already circulating, and then on election day, Zuckerberg can just turn off the Lula reach button again and really screw Brazil’s democracy over and the Amazon rainforest and everything else in this country.

Michael Fox:

Yeah. Brian, there’s that incredible table that this organization, it’s a statistical organization actually, but they put it together, this graph of what the reach looked like of the Flavio campaign and the Lulu campaign in the month ahead of times. It was just this incredible image of first, the Flavio campaign was consistently above the Lulu campaign throughout the campaigns itself. And then just like what you said, as soon as it gets close to the election, It just spikes and skyrockets. Flavio’s campaign just gets a ton, ton of reach. And not just the 12 hours before, I think it was even a couple days before, you can start to see it climb and compared with lulas. And it’s just this shocking thing. And I just want to underscore this fact that these aren’t conspiracy theories. When we start talking about part of the problem is the simple fact that the algorithm, we cannot know it.

It’s proprietary. They should share it. Meta should be sharing this. People should know what’s in it. But due to the fact that it’s actually hidden, it means that we can’t know what they’re doing, but we can see the results. And I think that’s what we see in concrete. And there’s been all of these studies and reports and statistics. There are different groups that are fighting really hard in recent weeks and in recent months to try and get all the statistics and see. In fact, there was one case where they had seen more than 1,000 different pro Lula accounts had been messed with, taken offline, blocked, suspended. And I think that it’s really important to just underscore the fact that this isn’t like suppositions. This is concrete, this is fact. It is happening. Meta is actually playing politics. They are messing with these elections, using the algorithm and using everything they possibly can.

I think what’s fascinating at the same time is how people have responded. You kind of mentioned it briefly, what they call here in Brazil get out of the bubble. Because what happens in the world that we live in now in social media is that if you love Lula, you’re going to be seeing all Lula content on Instagram. And if you love Bolsonaro and if you love the far right, you’re going to be seeing all Bolsonaro content. What has been interesting is that there has been Bolsonaro content that has been kind of feeding into the Lula feeds just in the last couple days and things constantly changing. But what’s been fascinating is to see how people have been trying to use different tactics to break out of that bubble, use the images and the color, green and yellow, which are the colors of Brazil in which Bolsonaro is embraced as his colors.

And so using those colors, doing memes, using the same memes. There was one case where they said, “Take a pro Bolsonaro meme, but then use AI to switch it around and make it pro Lula.” And so there’s been just this fascinating creativity, I think, by Brazilians in recent weeks to try and respond to the shadow bans, respond to the bias by Meta in these elections.

Brian Mier:

Yeah. But more than the internet, the Workers’ Party historically has always dealt with a highly, highly antagonistic press. I mean, there’s professional corporate funded lawyers like Glenn Greenwald who go around pretending that Brazil’s mainstream media likes Lula, but it doesn’t hold up to any kind of even mildly systematic analysis. There’s a media watchdog group at State University of Rio de Janeiro called which monitors all of the headlines about candidates and politicians and governmental figures and ranks them as positive, negative, or neutral coverage. And so one thing that stands out in my mind, I remember from when I was translating the biography of Lula was that during 2017, the most popular nightly news program in Brazil, Jonas Lacional, owned by a global company, they aired so much negative coverage of Lula that it could have filled up an entire month of one hour nightly newscasts just saying negative things about Lula.

Michael Fox:

Wow.

Brian Mier:

And they didn’t even allow his voice to appear on the network for 10 years at one point. Every time they showed him, they would show him, but his voice wouldn’t appear and there’d be newscasters paraphrasing what he said as he appeared on TV. And we’re talking about two time ex-president at the time. So the PT has always had ways of dribbling around negative coverage in media and even social media. And so a lot of the mobilization work for the vote is happening offline right now. And you can see that in the smaller towns where, for example, on Sunday in a town called Paldalio in Peralambugu population 52,000, over half of the population of the city, the town was on the street at Alula rally and that was not organized over the social media. That was organized knocking on people’s doors. Old technology like a car with a speaker driving slowly through the neighborhoods announcing the time and place of the march and all this stuff besides social media.

I personally don’t believe it’s possible, although it’s these examples of breaking out of the bubble are admirable and whatever. These multinational corporations, Zionist, far right white supremacist corporations are powerful enough to cut those kinds of activities off before election day.

It’s just this kind of glimmers. To me, it kind of plays into this glimmers of hope about the, look, the internet really is a magic tool for democracy. Look at how these wonderful young Generation Z people are breaking out of the bubble. That’s not the real fight. There’s no way. You might be able to break out of this bubble for six hours or something before their watchdogs cut it off. There’s no way that this can overcome the massive favoritism. The only way to overcome the massive favoritism of Meta is in the court system and enforcing existing laws and regulations. There’s no private sector solution for this problem. They have to be threatened with taking them down in Brazil, like the Brazilian government took down X. If they really wanted free and fair elections, they would turn off access to Meta and X three days before the elections and just say it’ll come back on Monday.

Michael Fox:

Yeah, absolutely, Brian. And I think this is just to underscore this point that as folks who are listening to this podcast and folks who are following the news at the Real News and elsewhere, Silicon Valley is very, very much in the pockets of Donald Trump and they have been fighting against legislation and regulation around the world. But in particular in Brazil, we even saw this just last year. Brazilian Congress was working toward potentially regulating social media and the big tech companies sent, I think there’s 88 different moments where they sent in lobbyists to lobby people in Brazilia. A third of those was by Meta. So they have been playing games in Brazil and paying attention to Brazil and definitely Elon Musk, all of this. So this is extremely important point, Brian, that there needs to be regulation for big tech. And I think that question of how people have responded in the streets in recent weeks has been really, really powerful.

And it hasn’t just been, “Oh, we’re going to go out in March,” but it’s been, “We’re going to go to March. We are going to talk to our neighbors. We’re going to pamphlet wherever we can. We’re going to go to places to try and get that 30 million people who abstain from the elections who did not vote. We need to get them in to vote. We need to encourage them to vote for Lula.”

Brian Mier:

Exactly. Now, just to add to your point, I was just giving a few examples of the illegal activity by Meta that’s been going on to favor a candidate who’s basically threatening a break with the democratic rule of law and establishing a state of exception if he takes power. Meta AI admits it itself. There’s a grad student named Laura Morgado who started asking Meta’s AI chatbot why Meta is backing Bolsonaro. And it answered, “Trump and the Bolsonaros are the global political shield for big tech companies against the advance of European regulation and the Latin American left in Meta AI chatbot’s own words.” They explain exactly why they’re doing this.

Michael Fox:

Totally. And this was so incredible because she posted it on Instagram and then we made an article about it for Pan-American Dispatch. And folks, just so you know, I’m going to be adding in links to everything that we’re talking about today in the show notes. So you can find almost everything that Brian’s brought up are articles that we have also been either translating or running and publishing. So this is all so you can have access to it all.

Brian Mier:

Yeah. So basically the tangent I went off on about Meta was based on seven… What we’re doing is we’re identifying the progressive news media outlets in Brazil’s most interesting articles, articles we think would be most interesting for a northern audience every day and translating them. And sometimes framing them with additional information that Brazilian readers would take for granted, but US readers might not know. So that whole sequence of things I said about Meta, we’ve got six or seven articles that described everything that I just said basically, and others that mentioned things I didn’t even bring up.

Michael Fox:

Yeah. Brian, I want to dive into the Superior Electoral Court, Casio Nunez, Andre Mendonsa. I think this is really important to understanding this moment because just for listeners, I did an episode a few months ago that was looking at Brazil’s fight against disinformation in the past. And the Supreme Court was one of the main places, the Supreme Court and the Supreme Electoral Court. Remember, the Supreme Electoral Court is made up of members of the Supreme Court and other institutions, Brazilian institutions. But basically the Supreme Court historically in Brazil has been extremely important in pushing back against the far right and against Bolsonaro, and particularly when he was in power. We saw a very big push in the last two elections from the Supreme Electoral Court pushing back against fake news that was actual fake news. I remember one moment, I remember there was some fake news that Hadaji had, who was the presidential candidate in 2018 when Lulu was in jail.

They said, oh, look at these cars. Look at this huge car he has and he lives in this mansion. It was all just ridiculous. But that was the type of fake news that they were pushing back at the time. But at this point, things are very, very different. Brian, can you explain a little bit about this?

Brian Mier:

Okay. Well, basically Brazil has very strict campaign regulations and to oversee the elections, the voting and enforcement of these regulations, there’s an electoral court system and the highest court in the system is the Superior Electoral Court. It has five justices. Three of them come from the Supreme Court on a rotating basis and two come from lower court like the Superior Justice Courts, which is another high ranked, high level court in Brazil. We’re in a situation right now where after eight years of international efforts supported even by mainstream media outlets in the United States to de-legitimize Brazil’s judiciary, we’re stuck with a superior electoral court that’s not up to the task of stopping Meta right now and the other social media corporations that are trying to throw the election for Bolsonaro. And to make things worse, because of the way that the system is rotating, every two years they change the president of the Superior Electoral Court and it’s kind of like in order that the justice was nominated to the Supreme Court.

So just by chance, by random chance, the president of the Superior Electoral Court right now is a man who was appointed by Jair Bolsonaro. So he’s not doing anything to try to slow down the disinformation being spread to support the Bolsonaro campaign.

Michael Fox:

Well, not just that, but he and the vice president, Andre Mendonso, is also appointed by Jair Bolsonaro. And in fact, they’ve been using their place in the court to stop and to block accounts in favor of Lula and to pull down a bunch of legitimate information that’s not fake news that has been published and spread and posted online. They’ve been actually using their place, not just to battle fake news, but actually to support the candidacy of Flavio Bolsonaro.

Brian Mier:

Yeah. And before, just to preemptively prepare ourselves for being accused of both sides in the issue, which is the way that Greenwald is gaslighting everyone on social media right now who’s complaining about censorship, an example of something that was censored, it was taken off the air by Nunez Marcus, Casio Nunez Marcus, president of the Superior Electoral Court, was a labor union posting information about how the economic policies of the two candidates would affect their labor sector, specifically how the budget cuts being promised by Flavio Bolsonaro, massive Javier Male style shock doctrine budget cuts would affect their labor sector with actual statistics, information from economists and whatever, that was taken off the air. When the Justice Department under Lula tried to pull down accounts that were violating Brazilian law by inciting support for Nazism, neo-Nazism, that’s when people like Greenwald Tucker Carlson started crying censorship and it made it into the New York Times.

But I didn’t see these guys complaining about unions being pulled off the air for legitimately expressing actual stats and projections about what would happen if someone was elected president.

Michael Fox:

Yeah, it’s a really concerning moment and it’s made more concerning by the fact that depending on who wins this election, there are four seats that will be open on the Supreme Court. So the Brazilian Supreme Court is 11 seats on the Brazilian Supreme Court. Two of them right now were appointed by Jair Bolsonaro during his term. Four of the seats are coming up for grabs over the next four years. It’s a very similar situation where we were like just before Trump’s first term. So if Jlavier Bolsonaro wins this election, it’s very likely that he will be able to appoint four new members of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court will then become majority for the Bolsonaros. And if you look at what the Supreme Court has meant historically in Brazil over the last decade as kind of the main bastion of the battle to push back on the undemocratic push, the authoritarian push by Bolsonaro, it is now going to be in the hands of the Bolsonaro family in the same way that Trump now controls the Supreme Court in the United States.

Brian Mier:

If the Supreme Court continues, because there’s a good chance that if Jair Bolsonaro gets power back, they’ll just implement a military coup. That’s what he was trying to do last time around when he was stopped.

Michael Fox:

Do you think that they would take it to that level, Brian?

Brian Mier:

Yes. This is what he’s been promising to do for his entire political career. Jair Bolsonaro, Flavio’s dad. For his entire career, he’s been promising to bring back a military dictatorship.

Michael Fox:

These are scary moments. What else do you think is important, Brian? And I want to talk a little bit about hope.

Brian Mier:

No, what’s important is that the huge wave of support for Lula on the streets led by young people shows that even if Flavio Bolsonaro is elected, it’s not going to be that easy for him. Remember, they had these… Jara Bolsonaro tried to start charging tuition at public universities and the national students unions historically connected with the Brazilian Communist Party and the teacher’s unions joined together to put over a million people on the streets in South Hollow on two different occasions with smaller but still very large protests in hundreds of towns and cities across the country and blocked Bolsonaro from doing that. They’re unable to block Bolsonaro from other things raising the retirement age. However, I get a lot of hope from talking to people at the rallies for Lula, and it’s a huge percentage of the population. It’s the majority of the population, the votes being manipulated, whatever.

But what we’re talking about is even if Flavio Bolsonaro wins by 1%, that still means that 74 million people in this country are leftists who support the left and are going to keep fighting. And you know what? Brazilians have a lot more experience operating under authoritarian regimes than Americans do in a sense.

So young people are talking to old people now, and I think that personally, I’m not moving out of here. If Flavio takes power, I’m not afraid. I know I’ll be okay because there’ll be so many other people supporting each other to fight these guys.

Michael Fox:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And what you said about the numbers in the streets is just, it is really incredible. There was over a million people that were marching in Sao Paulo just about a week ago. In many of these cities, we’ve seen some of the largest marches in a very long time, the largest student electoral march during election period here in Florianopolis. I mean, it’s been incredible and the amount of excitement and the amount of hope that people have. And like Brian said at the very beginning, that has dropped the numbers for Flavio Bolsonaro when he was maybe six points ahead of Lula just a few weeks ago following the first round vote, and now that’s decreased essentially to a tie, right?

Brian Mier:

And also it’s come out, Flavio’s under investigation for money laundering. He had some problems in the debate. There’s more and more dirt coming out in the mainstream media, so the tide seems to be turning right now. Who knows what will happen if Zuckerberg just turns off the Lula buttons on election day, but that’s why the street mobilization is so important because it can bypass having to rely on Silicon Valley to communicate with each other.

Michael Fox:

Yeah. I just want to underscore just part of why this election is so important right now is clearly the fact that for Brazil’s place in Latin America, what it represents is kind of this final bastion that hasn’t fallen to Trump and his people. I mean, one of the big things that, like I’ve talked about in this podcast, one of the big things that Flavio has mentioned many times is that the minute if he is elected, the minute he comes into power, he’s joining Trump’s Shield of the Americas, and he’s totally on board with just handing over the keys of Brazil to the White House and to more than the White House to the Trump administration. But I think what’s so important is clearly what Brazil represents in Latin America at this moment, but also the games that Meta is playing, this is not the only place it’s happening.

We saw in the United States just in the last couple days, the No Kings account was taken offline. A bunch of people and accounts supporting the No Kings demonstration in the United States in recent days have been taken offline or blocked or temporarily blocked.

We literally, our entire media sphere is controlled by a small number of very big outlets and they will not tell us how they’re controlling it. They are not sharing that information, and although they say that they’re being neutral, it’s not a reality, and we need to understand that. I think we need to look at Brazil and how people are trying to respond in Brazil to understand when these things are happening elsewhere, because this isn’t going away. It’s only going to increase. It’s only going to grow. The amount that people rely on social media for their news and information is only going to increase, and these companies are getting more and more powerful, and they’re ever more in the pockets of Donald Trump. This is a context that I think we really need to understand.

Brian Mier:

Definitely.

Michael Fox:

Brian, thank you so much, man. I really, really appreciate it. This was fantastic. Always great chatting with you.

Brian Mier:

Thanks for having me, and I will see you in Sao Paulo on Sunday, covering the elections.

Michael Fox:

That’s right. I will see you in Sao Paulo, and we will see all the rest of you online at panamericandispatch.org. Hi, folks. Thank you so much for listening. That is all for this episode of Under the Shadow. The second round vote of the Brazilian elections is this Sunday, October 25th. Please follow and subscribe to Pan-American Dispatch for everything on the elections. We’ll be doing live coverage of the vote throughout the weekend. Much of the reporting for this episode was based on stories that we translated and published with Pan-American Dispatch. I’ve added links in the show notes, or you can read and subscribe to the Substack at panamericandispatch.org. As always, you can find me at patreon.com/mfox.

There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. If you’re looking for more information, news, and reporting on Trump’s onslaught, both on communities within the United States and abroad, please check out The Real News and NACLA. Both of them are publishing daily indispensable reporting. The theme music is by my band, Monte Perdido. You can find us on Spotify or wherever you stream music. This closing song playing right now is off our 2024 album, Ofrenda. I hope you check it out. Under the Shadow is a co-production of The Real News and NACLA. It’s produced in partnership with Global Exchange. This episode was written, researched, reported, and produced by me, Michael Fox. Thanks so much to Brian Meer for joining me on today’s show. You can check out his Substack.

It’s called Delinking Brazil. Thank you so much for listening. See you next time.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. The presence of the National Guard in the District of Columbia calls $3 million a day and an estimated $2.9 billion the next presidential election. Recently, I covered two organizations that are pushing back against their present. PACA, Pan-African, Community Action, who primarily organize in the Southeast section or the District of Columbia, Anacostia area, and Free DC. Take a look. We’re at the Black Workers Wellness Center. I’m talking to Alex from the Pan-African Community Action, PACA. And today they’re having political education form because of the anniversary, the 60th year anniversary of the Black Panther Party. And we’re doing political education in its roles form. So Alex, tell our audience a little bit about PACA.

Alex:

We’re a group of African and black people organizing in Southeast DC for power. We’re trying to build up institutions that are made up of just ordinary working class people, working class black people. We’re trying to build up alternative institutions that are able to challenge the preexisting institutions that are currently failing us. We see failing healthcare. We see funding going towards police and national guard. At the same time, we’re seeing cutting off from SNAP benefits, disinvesting from education affecting black children. And so we believe in a power shift and the only way to achieve that power shift is through building up a mass movement. And we’ve been organizing down here for 10 years.

Oliver:

When we look in our communities, we see occupying police forces. We see education we don’t control. History we don’t define. We see institutions we don’t have, whether it’s healthcare, whether it’s housing, whether it’s transportation. So the colonization we’re experiencing domestically, the Panthers saw that as linked to the anti-colonial struggles taking place around the world.

Huey P. Newton:

In America, black people are treated very much as the Vietnamese people or any other colonized people because we’re used, we’re brutalized. The police and our community occupy our area, our community as a foreign troop occupies territory.

Mansa Musa:

Earlier today, we was in free DC downtown where they was protesting the occupation by the National Guard.

Keya Chatterjee:

We want to be really clear that it is time for these armed soldiers to leave DC and leave our community. We’re in the middle of an election right now. We’ve seen them standing in front of polling locations, standing in front of ballot boxes. We’ve seen them at our schools. We’ve seen them all over our transportation system for all over a year. It is time for the guard to leave. I mean, from August 11th to January of 2029, can you imagine? It’s billions of dollars. It is a clear effort to violate our rights and to suppress dissent and we’re not going to stand for it.

Mansa Musa:

They’re blocking both sides of the street. They’re at the top on third street, third DC, and at the bottom of third and constitution. They’re definitely representing the right to civil disobedience.

DC resident 1:

Nobody in DC wants them. They’re a hassle to us and they don’t do anything good and they’re taking a lot of our money and they make the city feel unsafe because of their presence. So I’m not interested in having them here any longer.

DC resident 2:

And I think the National Guard are making our streets less safe. They’re scaring people away from U Street Corridor, which is such a vibrant place where young people like to come and gather and they are chasing everybody out of our city and our businesses and it’s not good for us.

Keya Chatterjee:

We’re going to be in all the places. We also will be over at Bard Early College at 3:00 PM today because the soldiers have been walking around with HSI and FBI in front of that school for weeks. Nobody asked you to be there. Nobody wants you there. Our DC council who we elect have been clear unanimously sending letters to every single governor saying, “Remove your troops. You are not wanted here.” At the end of the day, they say the soldiers are going to be here until January of 2029. We know why they say January of 2029, right? We’re standing here in front of the Capitol. We know what happened in January of 2021. And so what we say is that we will not tolerate that. They can’t do this without our consent. If we start collectively refusing to go to work, refusing to go to school, refusing to shop in the face of their blatant attempts to consolidate power, then they can’t get away with it.

And it’s already working. We’re already winning. What we know is that when we act collectively, it works. Even multi-billion dollar corporations have to give in to us and even this corrupt regime cannot stand if we act collectively and refuse to consent. So that’s what we’re building our way towards, neighborhood by neighborhood, person by person, training by training. We are building towards having enough collective power that they cannot get away with it.

Mansa Musa:

And in terms of y’all’s strategy about occupation, National Guard and Ward seven and eight, how do y’all see y’all being effective in terms of y’all organizing?

Alex:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, historically Ward seven is eight has been redlined, experiences the most disinvestment from healthcare, from education, always over policing. And now we’re seeing over policing on a broad level across the entire DC, but it always starts with Ward seven and eight. It always starts with these metro stations, Anacostia, Congress Heights, Southern Avenue. We see the FBI, the DHS, the National Guard here first. And so we understand that it does affect all of DC, but it hits Ward seven and eight the hardest. This is where people experience the most oppressed conditions. There’s the most poverty down here. There’s already a heightened police presence even before the National Guard here. And so everything with the safe and beautiful task force and National Guard is just making it more violent. It’s bringing out more tension in these areas and it’s heightened the need for us to organize for ourselves too.

Mansa Musa:

What else do you want to PACA primary objectives in terms of organizing? We talking about the Black Panther Party and we know that they evolved and got to a place where they had survival programs and here we call them survival pending revolution. The ultimate goal was the programs was to turn them over to the community so they become a part of the infrastructure for revolutionary activities. So what are some of the programs y’all got?

Alex:

Absolutely. So our objectives are similar to the Panthers in the sense that we also have survival programs. We have our People’s Pan-African Wellness Front, which is a health clinic which we operate every four Sunday where we try to bring people in to volunteer and work together. We provide free blood pressure testing, glucose testing. We have activities like yoga. We have free grocery distribution, which includes locally grown vegetables and fruits. Oftentimes we have speakers come in and give lectures. So that’s just one example of a space where the community can come together and provide for ourselves, training people to become organizers for our mass movement. Another one of our programs, the Transit Solidarity Program, that’s a program we have going on this weekend where we take community donated smart trip cards, we put money on them and we distribute them at Anacostia Station. And we do this to basically heighten the contradiction between ourselves, the people coming together to provide for working class people just trying to access Metro versus the state, which is dumping upwards of $3 million a day into FBI, DHS, National Guard, MPD to occupy and patrol these stations, ticket people, $50, $100 just for trying to access the bus.

It’s ridiculous.

Mansa Musa:

As you can see, people are standing up against the military industrial complex, policing and the National Guard in the nation capital and around the country. October the 15th marked the 60th anniversary of the Black Panther Party. And one of the things the Black Panther Party stood for among many was community control over the police. As you can see, it’s the community that’s opposed to the presence of the National Guard and heavy-handed policing in the District of Columbia. We ask that you continue to look at the real news and rattling the bar and weigh in on these issues, all power to the people.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Treasure Thoreson:

Tuesday morning, June 16th, I had just woken up. I was in my pajamas. I hear a knock on the door at seven in the morning, and it’s a woman standing there in business clothes with a tactical vest on top that said Homeland Security.

Alec Stewart:

I was in my car backing out of my garage to go to work, coffee in hand. As soon as I backed out of my parking pad, several squads rolled up. A bunch of agents jumped out of the vehicles. I went to just text my aunt, because I have a dog. I assumed I’d be going to jail or something, and that’s when they smashed my window.

Treasure Thoreson:

I see six more agents standing in front of my house. The woman at the door, she just said, “We’re here with a warrant for your arrest for a conspiracy to harm or impede a federal officer.”.

Alec Stewart:

Exposes that while the government was targeting immigrant communities, tearing families apart, abducting children and murdering spokes in the street.

Emmett Doyle:

I had just typed in on my phone the location of the house that we were working on that day. I was boxed in by a vehicle, and so I rolled my window down to ask the guy like, “Hey, what’s the deal? You’re a pretty bad driver. What’s going on?” And then I looked around and I realized that my car had been surrounded. There was a swarm of armed federal officers with HSI on their uniforms.

Alec Stewart:

I do not think it’s a coincidence that over half of us are rank and file union folk. I think that speaks to, again, the working class nature of both the attack by the federal government and the working class predominant response to that attack.

Treasure Thoreson:

We had at least one person from every single site who was plugged into our committee and was able to get information out to their members and arm their building with the knowledge that they needed to face this kind of violence. And people stepped up in really major ways. Everybody did something, whether it was patrols or walking students to and from school, riding in a cab with a kid to and from school, making sure that their parents had rent money. There were some schools in the district that were delivering hundreds of boxes of food every week.

Emmett Doyle:

The unions that did get involved, I think understand what the labor movement is about in a way that some of our other unions have forgotten. An injury to one is an injury to all isn’t just a moral statement. It’s a hard reality of life. And the unions that stood up during Metro search understood that and demonstrated what solidarity means.

Treasure Thoreson:

We got a lot of great information from the Chicago Teachers Union who had been fighting back ice for months at the point when they came here. But we learned a lot from their struggle and were able to adapt that to fit what we were doing here in Minneapolis.

Alec Stewart:

And that was all without coercion, without money exchanging hands. That was just horizontal organizing. And I think how effective that is, how the power of mutual aid and horizontal organizing is evident because of this indictment. This wouldn’t have happened if what thousands of Minnesotans were doing hadn’t worked. I think the success of the January 23rd general strike speaks to that connection of the labor movement and just seeing the numbers and the outpouring of support for such a strike is historic.

Emmett Doyle:

I think that the general strike that happened in Minneapolis terrified the federal government. There were downtown, just hundreds of thousands of workers in the streets marching. And people have to remember this was severe sub-zero. It was a fantastic feeling of power and of joy and of resistance. And unfortunately, the next day that joy and resistance was answered tragically with the brutality of the beating and murder of Valence Preddy. But I think that the general strike was a major turning point in the regime’s logic of violence that they realized they couldn’t defeat the city.

Background music:

Stores are getting thin. There’s passing down that’s going on. Scabs anymore. We’ll put ourselves in union down this year of 34. Can’t you hear the mark? Either sign or behind. See the times get better when we hold that picket line.

Alec Stewart:

The revelation of Operation Puppet Master exposes that while the government was targeting immigrant communities, tearing families apart, abducting children and murdering our neighbors in the street, they were also attempting to disrupt and dismantle one of the facets of Minnesota that makes us so unique. And that is our strong and unified labor movement.

Isaac Sant:

This is not just an attack on me and my friends and our little group. This is an attack on our entire community. They were spying on us from day one. In fact, five days before Operation Metro Surge was declared on November 28th, they began spying on our organizations. These prosecutions were inevitable. Somebody was going to be on trial in there. If it wasn’t us, it was going to be somebody else. It was going to be one of you. We were being prosecuted for doing something that every single person that everybody and their mom in Twin Cities did to resist their federal occupation.

Emmett Doyle:

This case is meant to intimidate the entire community. It’s meant to tie up the time and efforts of many activists. But beyond that, as a conspiracy case, what they’re trying to do is set up a situation where they can expand and expand and expand the conspiracy. They’re trying to use our own solidarity and close-knit community against us through guilt by association.

Treasure Thoreson:

They want us to be separated. They want to separate out the good protestors from the bad protestor. I don’t want folks to feel afraid to stand up for their neighbor and do the right thing.

Alec Stewart:

It was such an obvious threat on what the Twin Cities is all about, which is community connections and helping each other’s neighbors. And the face of fascism, complacency, I think has no place. I think there was just a very justified feeling of standing up.

Emmett Doyle:

The support and solidarity towards us by our community has been overwhelming in just the most amazing way. I

Treasure Thoreson:

Think that they see our ability to bring people together as threatening. However, going after the 15 of us isn’t going to stop anything in Minneapolis or the Twin Cities because this is a place full of great organizers. We can’t let them bully us out of doing the right thing. We need to stand strong in our values and our morals and know that we are protecting our neighbors and that is the right thing to do. They’re afraid of us and that’s why we’re getting this response.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So we’re here at the Real News Network Studio in Baltimore, and I am really grateful to be sitting here with an incredible panel of folks who are going to help us think through and respond to the Maryland gubernatorial debate that we watched yesterday, October 6th, between Democratic incumbent Governor Wes Moore and Republican candidate Dan Cox. So a lot of us watched that debate either live or afterwards. There was a lot to be furious about. There was a lot to think about in terms of like, okay, these are the candidates we have on offer, but also these are the things that our political parties think are important to us. And so I think a big way that we’re going to address tonight’s discussion is by talking about the issues and voices and perspectives that were not represented on that debate stage last night and that are just not represented in the dominant politics that is determining all of our lives.

And so I could not be more excited to be here at the Real News Studio to talk about these things with all of you and with our three panelists. Please give it up from my farthest end over to me. We’ve got the great Charly Carter, political strategist and executive director of Step Up Maryland. Give it up for Charly.

We’ve got Dayvon Love in the middle, director of public policy at Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle. Give it up for Dayvon. And thank you to Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle for co-hosting this great and important event with us. And last but not least, we have to my right, Andy Ellis, Green Party candidate for Maryland governor. Give it up for Andy, everybody. Okay. So here’s how I kind of want to start things off, gang. So like we said, we all watched the debate. I want to just go to the tape for a second and remind us that the debate opened up with 60 second statements from each candidate, Cox and more. And in Cox’s statement, the message, the narrative that he’s selling is pretty clear. Property taxes, rents and electric bills are too high. We’re paying more, but getting less is a direct quote. Maryland is the second worst economy in the nation.

This is all because of dangerous spending, mismanagement and absentee governor Wes Moore. And his pitch boiled down to, we need to lower our car registration fees immediately, cut taxes, cut the fees, control spending and bring back affordable energy and housing for all. Now more on the other side was doing what I think we’re going to see Democrats do for the next two years, which is tie everything to Trump, tie it like an anvil over their neck. And that’s exactly what he did. This guy loves Trump. Dan Cox says he supports 100% Donald Trump’s agenda. While they’re focused on the wealthy elites, I’m focused on working families. And Moore touted his record saying that Maryland has had among the fastest drops in violent crime anywhere in the United States. Teacher vacancy rate in Maryland is down 60%. Math and reading scores are at a five year high, yada yada yada.

So that is how they open their statements to us to ask for our votes. That is how our political discourse shaped the whole discussion of last night. So I want to ask you three, starting with Charly and working back down here, what are we not talking about in the way that that whole framing of the debate limits us?

Charly Carter:

Well, thank you for having me here tonight. I have to say after watching that debate, I wondered whether either candidate had been in the state of Maryland for the last nine months because I’ve been here for 20 years, a little over 20 years, and I’m seeing more activism in the community now than I ever have previously at a higher rate. People who’ve never been involved before are involved, protests sprouting up all over the state. And I didn’t hear anybody really addressing those issues. None of them really addressed the real concerns that people have over data centers. Nobody really talked about the amount of money that’s been taken out of education that’s concerning people and people’s just ability to afford things. Cox touched on utility bill rates, but then he didn’t really give any information about what he would do about them. And I think the things that I’m seeing people really upset about now is about the skyrocketing utility bills, the data centers and what they’re going to do to our communities and people’s home values, and then revenues to continue to invest in education and in other programs that help our community.

Dayvon Love:

Yeah. I would say that the debate yesterday really highlights the limitations of the two party system. I think most people’s assessment of the debate is that it wasn’t quite substantive. And I think what is clear, the purpose of a debate is to provide the audience with an opportunity to see a rigorous test of people’s policy positions. And so part of the challenge with the two party system is that there are certain perspectives that are not going to be present in the conversation that will be helpful to the general public to get a sense as to what is actually at the heart of the policy agenda of each of the candidates and their respective parties. And so just as a couple of examples, and I start as a revolutionary Pan-African nationalist, I’m very clear that black folks are a captured elector of the Democratic Party. So that is the posture where I start in terms of analyzing the discourse between two parties.

And so then evidence of that that I’ll just give to start with is even the conversation about juvenile justice where what the Democrats won’t do is the Democrats will not talk about the ways that the system of the criminal justice system is weaponized against the humanity of people of African descent and that the calls for stricter juvenile justice laws is not about accountability. It’s about continuing to be complicit in an attack on the humanity of black people, particularly black youth. And it would’ve been helpful to have someone like Andy on the stage to be able to press the Democratic Party to go further than what I describe as tough on crime light, which is what the Democratic Party essentially is. And so as a result of not having that kind of perspective, a person that is fiercely defending the fact that we have a system that automatically charges youth as adults and 80% of them black, which means you have kids spend 180 days in adult prison, that is something that folks in our community care about, but in the two party system, in the duopoly, we’re not going to hear a defense of the humanity of people of African descent.

And so again, I just think the debate yesterday was an example and we can give more examples as we have had this discussion, but just as a preliminary thought, just an example of what we don’t get because of the duopoly and the limitations, particularly as black folks being this captured electorate of the Democratic Party.

Andy Ellis:

Yeah. My name is Andy Ellis. I’m the Green Party candidate for governor. I’ve spent the last four years traveling across the state and we’ve been to fairs, festivals, we’ve been to library meetings, we’ve been to church meetings, we’ve been to protests, we’ve been to hearings, we’ve been to all sorts of places and we’ve talked to a lot of people. A lot of people are really frustrated with the way that things are working right now. They don’t think that the government is working for them. They think that the politicians are serving their donors, their national narratives and their party bosses. They don’t think that they’re listening to people and they don’t think that they hear the real pain that people in Maryland are feeling across the state. And I think the debate operated in that fiction where the politicians don’t hear that type of thing. And I think both of them acted as if we existed in a world where their two party system still had hold on the imagination of most people and most people still believe that that system actually works.

I think more and more people have decided and agreed that that system doesn’t work because they’ve seen year after year after year of politicians promising them to do things in debates like that and not actually doing them. The UNBC poll came out yesterday right before the debate and it showed a couple of things. One, it showed that Wes Moore and Dan Cox are at the lowest points they’ve been at in the polls since they both won the 2022 primary. People know who both of them are. They know what the record is and they don’t like either of them. Dan Cox had 24% support in that poll. That’s the lowest that I can ever remember a major party candidate having. And if Wes Moore weren’t running against Dan Cox, he may be in trouble in this election, but because he is running against Dan Cox, who is a MAGA aligned, sort of mediocre, no charisma politician, Wes Moore is going to probably win this election and he’s probably going to win it by double digits.

But the other thing the poll showed yesterday was that 25% of people don’t want either party and like 80% of people don’t trust either party. And I think that creates a real opening for us to do something different than what we’ve been doing up until this point. We have an election where there’s a 99% chance that Wes Moore is going to get reelected and all Dan Cox is trying to do is get out of the 20s so that he doesn’t get embarrassed. Dan Cox has sort of functionally turned the Republican Party in the state of Maryland into about as ineffective as the Republican Party is in Baltimore City or in Prince George’s County or in Montgomery County. And I think that that creates an opening to take the anger that people have and the grassroots uprising that people are having that Charlie is talking about in order to build a new kind of politics that is about grassroots governing power and not about the same old two party system.

And I think the debate was a perfect proof of that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, to kind of really bring that point to light, one of the questions that was directed to Cox was literally, do you support or oppose the federal eligibility changes for programs like SNAP or food stamps and Medicaid? The bar is so damn low that the question is, do you support kicking all these millions of people off SNAP and Medicaid and everyone who’s going hungry or going homeless because of it? Are you shitting me? That’s the level of question. Are you for or against this? So I don’t care what these people say to a question like that. I don’t care about their bullshit responses to a bullshit question, but there is a very non-bullshit problem here that Marylanders and people around the country are going through. So I wanted to talk about that more. They did not address enough what the effect of these cuts and these costs of living are on Marylanders.

What would you say about that if you were on that debate stage?

Dayvon Love:

Well, something that I want to say to the point that you raised about just how cookie cutter the questions and the debate is, it’s important for the general public to be clear that there’s an emergence of a consultant class, a political consultant class that exists within both major parties that profiteer off of the fact that every two years there are major election cycles where people are making a lot of money. And if you think about the corporate core of both parties, where they have a business model that is reliant on keeping folks within the confines of the duopoly. Well, what I think what we’re seeing though is that to Andy’s point is that there is record levels of dissatisfaction with both political parties. So even the question that you identified that was posed to Dan Cox is a very typical question as it relates to your traditional Republican Democratic Party discourse, social safety net and entitlements versus trickle down economics and austerity.

So these are very traditional, the kind of traditional polls of the Democratic and Republican Party discourse. And the challenge is that we’re at a place now where I think more people, this is to Charlie’s point about the increase in activism that exists, that people are just more informed and people now are demanding more of these candidates. But unfortunately what happens, and I think this is really important for people to be clear about, is that the emergence of the political consultant class in many respects, it’s really on its last leg, that if folks in the broader community continue to push, then it’s going to force the development of an emergence of different political formations. And so I think that’s really important for us to continue to say to the general public that it’s not futile. And I think that’s part of the concern that I would have is that people would see the lack of substance in that engagement and completely disengage from the political landscape as opposed to staying on the battlefield.

Andy Ellis:

Yeah. And I would say both Wesmore and Dan Cox have a class privilege that does not make them have to experience this type of thing. And for me, I’ve experienced it very directly. Last June, I was laid off from a company that I had worked for for 15 years with no notice, just sort of one day I got a call and they sent a box from my laptop and said, “It’s been nice knowing you.” I didn’t talk about that for a long time on the campaign trail because I was embarrassed, right? I shouldn’t be embarrassed. It wasn’t my fault. It was global capital and private equity and a company that didn’t care about people, but I was embarrassed. But when I started talking about it when I was on the campaign trail, I realized how many Marylanders are going through something like this. How many Marylanders have lost a job at the federal level or corporation that they worked at for a long time, how hard it is for them to find new work, how ineffective state services are, how low unemployment is because it hasn’t been adjusted by the Maryland General Assembly since the Obama era, how bad the other services are in the state.

And as I started to talk about it, I went from shame to solidarity on this because I was starting to understand that so many people are struggling in a way that the politicians don’t understand right now. And if the politicians can’t wrap their head around the way that people are struggling and get beyond this cookie cutter consultant class conversation that Davon is talking about, they’re going to face a kind of uprising that they’ve never faced before. And we are going to see this political system change. The question is, is it going to change in favor of the people or is it going to change in favor of the Trump fascists who are trying to push their corporate rule on all of us? And I think the key question that we have to ask in our politics in this election and over the next decade is which way that change goes.

For me, I hope it goes for the people, but I’m worried that it’s not going to. I think the only hopes that we have are to use every forum we have in order to fight back against it, in order to fight for the people who have been left behind, even though Wes Moore says he doesn’t want to leave anybody behind, a lot of Marylanders have been left behind. And I think we got to fight for those folks and I think we have to create a political reality that allows them to have the power to make the changes they need to their communities and their lives so that we can get different outcomes because if we don’t, I’m pretty sure Trump and his fascists are going to do their form of that and none of us are going to like that.

Charly Carter:

I agree with both what Davon and Andy have said. I think the missed opportunity in that debate was the opportunity to talk about big ideas, new ideas, something bold. What we saw, as everybody has said, is two parties and two candidates who could stay relatively safe within the bandwidth within their two respective parties. No one had to challenge, no one was challenged. They could just say, “Here’s my position. I’m for lower taxes.” And the other person can say, “And I’m against Trump.” And yet all of the other issues just completely went undiscussed. And I think that’s the importance for having third party and minor candidates in these debates because oftentimes they are coming from a perspective where they’re offering a big idea that is why they’re not part of one of the other two parties. So I think it was a really missed opportunity for voters to hear about big ideas, which is what they are seeking.

More the people who are changing parties, and I’m hearing it regularly about the number of people. I’m shocked, honestly. I’ve been a lifelong Democrat and I’m shocked with a number of people who are saying they are shifting from being a Democrat in the state of Maryland where they can’t vote in primaries to being independent because they just don’t see what they believe. They don’t feel like it’s being heard, what they want is being heard or that it’s being represented in the party here in Maryland. And just as a funny aside, when I first met Andy, we argued about, this is going back years, we argued about whether or not there could be a successful third party in the state of Maryland. And I was adamant, although I was charged at that time with starting the Working Families Party of Maryland, I was like, “It’s just too easy to take over the Democratic Party because they have no vision and they’re not inspiring to people.” And what we saw on that debate stage was really a lack of vision and inspiration.

And that was really from what… Wes Moore is one of the most popular Democrats in the country right now, and yet he had this perfect opportunity to talk about something that inspired people that gave people hope. And he just talked about the same very vanilla policies that he’s been talking about and, “Oh, I’m better than Trump,” without really talking about what we could be doing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. It’s like I hear a lot of talking, but the words don’t mean shit. It’s just like they never just address the thing that you’re begging them to address because you’re living it. It’s just such a bizarre spectacle that he just keeps being subjected to. I have a kind of follow up when it comes to the way that that comes through in their language and the responses they give. But before we move on from the question of the costs of living, straw poll. I mean, what’s hitting your pocketbook these days? The cost of gas is ridiculous. Rent keeps going up. What else? What else are people struggling with when it comes to paying for the cost of living? Everything. Everything is the main answer. Any others? Food? Yeah. We’re all working harder and our wages are staying the same while everything’s getting more expensive. What the hell?

That doesn’t feel like the American dream that we ostensibly were raised to believe in.

Dayvon Love:

And can I give an example?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Please.

Dayvon Love:

An example I think is really important is on the conversation around public safety that I alluded to in the beginning. If we’re clear about the nature of the way that the law enforcement establishment has interacted with black people, the law enforcement establishment being the Fraternal Order of Police, the Maryland State’s Attorney’s Association, the Association of Police Chiefs and Sheriffs, these are entities that have advocated for the tough on crime policies that are responsible for mass incarceration. And in some contexts, Democrats will talk about pushing back against that kind of in a very cosmetic way. One of the things that we’re seeing is we’re seeing Sinclair Broadcasting and Executive Chairman David Smith who owns the Baltimore Sun. We are seeing those media outlets being used as a communications arm for the law enforcement establishment. And the real material impact of that, because Baltimore has experienced one of the most precipitous declines in homicides and non-fatal shootings of any city in the United States.

And I think there’s a large community consensus that has been the unprecedented investment in black-led grassroots organizations that have been the cause of that precipitous decline. It’s important if Democrats are serious about this issue, it’s important for them to talk about being in opposition to a force that wants to undermine and to diminish those black-led grassroots organizations. But I don’t hear the governor or the Democratic Party coming to the defense of those organizations that are being attacked. I suspect what that is because Democrats still want to maintain a level of proximity to the law enforcement establishment, which means that talking about the declines in violence as being based in the community being supported in doing so undermines the law enforcement establishment and the Democratic Party doesn’t want to offend the law enforcement establishment. So I just wanted to lay out… Tha’s a concrete example of something that folks have talked about in the community, in public discourse, people have talked about that, but the fact that that is not what Wes Moore is saying, that is an important part of what is happening in Baltimore says something about the limitations of the Democratic Party as a vehicle for our political interests.

Andy Ellis:

And can I add to that? So I think one of the interesting things about the way that that question got answered is Dan Cox got closer in some ways. Dan Cox said we need to invest in rec centers. We need to invest in community organizations. We need to invest in churches. Now he went on to say a bunch of other stuff that was not the right answer, but he was getting closer to making the argument about investing in the grassroots than Wes Moore was, which I thought was really interesting. It means he’s been listening, I think, to some folks who are trying to tell him some of those things, but he is not the right messenger and the Republican Party is not the right messenger for this stuff because they then turn around and talk about predator children and soft on crime laws and things like that.

So they’re getting part of this message, but they’re not getting the rest of this message. I thought it was really interesting that Cox talked about that and Moore did not. It was a really interesting juxtaposition to me that Cox was the one who was talking about investing in the grassroots community organizations as a means of addressing crime and addressing public safety. Now, the rest of his package doesn’t work, but he was the one that got there and Moore didn’t say yes. Moore could have even said, “Yes, I’ve done that. That’s why we passed this initiative that gave a little bit of money to some of these organizations.” But he didn’t say that.

Dayvon Love:

He even said that the talking point of his administration has given record investments to law enforcement, to your point.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and the law enforcement question really centered around ICE, right? It’s close to home. Of course, it’s happening in our backyards, in our neighborhoods. We just published a report I did from Frederick right in front of the house where those ICE agents drove onto private property, beat peaceful protestors, terrorized the whole family and didn’t even take anybody. All that terror for what? It’s happening all… I’ve been in front of the Hagerstown warehouse. I used to work in warehouses like that. They’re not built for human beings to work in most times, let alone house them and incarcerate them. So they talked about ICE a bit, right? But to your guys’ point, the answers were very revealing for what they said and more importantly, what they didn’t say. But the question that I thought was really well put, shout out to Tracy Wilkins from NBC Washington. I thought she and Pamela Wood from the banner asked really great questions, even if they got really crappy answers most of the time.

But Tracy Wilkins was asking Wes Moore if it was a mistake to ban ICE detention partnerships or a mistake to how he’s handled ICE and the cooperation question of local law enforcement. And his answer was, “If you’re going after the worst of the worst and violent offenders, I will work with you.

But when you’re going after people like Pastor Fuentes in the Eastern Shore who has been here for decades and leads a congregation in the Eastern Shore and ICE detains him, then no local law enforcement will and I will not allow them to be deputized to do that type of work.” So that was something, but then Tracy Wilkins pressed him about if there’s going to be detention, should detention be happening in Maryland where people can have access to family and access to their counsel, or are you going to do anything to stop these Gestapo motherfuckers disappearing our neighbors and sending them to Louisiana or some third country? And his answer was boiled down to, “So I think there has to be a reconsideration about the way that ICE is moving inside of our communities all throughout the state of Maryland.” What the fuck does that mean?

That’s my question. What does that actually mean? As a citizen of Maryland, as a Latino, as someone with family members that feel very threatened right now, what do I do with that?

Andy Ellis:

I mean, I think what it means is there was some political pressure on him this year in order to move against ICE that there wasn’t last year. Last year when the 287 bill came up, it got killed in the Maryland General Assembly at the request of Governor Moore. There was some political pressure on it this year, and so he moved and he responded to political pressure like he always does. But I don’t think that his heart is in it because he sat up on a stage with Mark Wayne Mullen when Mark Wayne Mullen took over the head of the DHS and was all chummy with him, talking about how we need to have this bipartisan cooperation in order to do this the right way. I think that it goes back to the place that Wes Moore likes the police. He likes to give police resources.

He likes to be able to talk about how he’s tough on crime and then say, “But we’re not tough on all crime.” I like the framing of tough on crime light, and I think he is tough on immigration light. I think he’s responding to political pressure and trying to do everything he can to protect his political career. I’m not sure that he’s trying to do much to protect Marylanders. Because again, last year there was a bill in front of the General Assembly that would have banned 287. It wasn’t just last year. It’s been there for years and years and years and it’s gotten killed every year. Wes Moore, Bill Ferguson have killed it.

Yeah, great. They came around this year on it, but there’s a lot of families who got broken up and there’s a lot of people who got detained and deported that didn’t need to be because they didn’t have the political courage to do the right thing without the amount of political pressure on them in order to get them to do the smallest thing they could. 287 is great. Yeah, let’s address that, but that is not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that we have a immigration policy at the national level that has been broken for decades because both parties refuse to give it up as a political cudgel to use against the other ones and refuse to figure out a way to deal with the millions of people who are already here without threatening to deport them or threatening to detain them.

It is one of the biggest failures of the two party system at the federal level that we have allowed this to get to the point where both parties can use immigrant communities As tokens and as chips in their political campaigns in order to try to maintain their power without doing anything to the very real effects on people’s families, on people’s communities, and people’s lives that happened from them being unable to figure out a solution to the problem.

Dayvon Love:

The Democratic Party, I would say over the last 10 to 15 years, maybe even longer, has been shifting in terms of the constituencies that it sees itself as being responsive to. That there was a point in time where the Black community was a really important base of support that the Democratic Party in many respects would placate, but at least put in the effort to invest in getting Black folks to be a strong base of the Democratic Party. What has happened, and I think this has accelerated after the election of Donald Trump the first time, is a shift and a focus on suburban voters in the place of focusing on the Black community because issues that fundamentally impact our community, and I would even add other folks of color, particularly immigrant communities, that the moving away from focusing on those core constituencies has created a dynamic where they’re talking to that suburban audience, avoiding things that might inflame or might cause some consternation of that audience.

And so in the context of this conversation, particularly about ICE, and I will put it in the larger conversation about the ways that criminal justice are weaponized against those of color. What we’re seeing, Trump was not unclear and the Republicans are not unclear about the fact that the language of these are violent criminals, these are Mexican rapists, these are the very same tropes that are part of the collective American consciousness that are weaponized to criminalize black people being deployed against immigrant communities. And the limitation of the Democratic Party, and particularly in the person of Wes Moore as governor of the state, is that the unwillingness to be direct and say that, the unwillingness to say that the attack against immigrant communities is consistent with the racialized criminalization of people of African descent, that has been weaponized to undermine our humanity and undermine the humanity of immigrant communities.

The unwillingness to say that is about the fact that they’re trying to appeal to a constituency that if we’re honest, is scared of black folks. They’re scared of folks of immigrant communities. And instead of actually addressing that directly, that he’s gesturing to it. He’s giving an individual story that’s heart wrenching and wants people to be brought in, but won’t talk about the overarching structure of racism and white supremacy that animates the attacks that ICE has been tasked with on behalf of Trump and the MAGA movement. And so again, it’s just one of those things that the answer indicates to me the inability of the Democratic Party to be a vehicle for the interest of black and immigrant communities.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I love the way you put that. The unwillingness to be direct is probably one of the things, it’s probably one of the most popular political complaints we all have. It’s like, just tell me straight, stop bullshitting me. Just give me a straight answer. And that’s what I really took away from the debate. And frankly, most debates I ever watch in this country is it’s a theater. It’s not a real debate. It’s a performance. And it’s a performance in not answering our most basic questions and finding a whole class of consultants, like we mentioned earlier, to help you bastardize language so that you can get around saying what people just want you to say. And there are examples that were just baffling to me. I though it was wild that even though, as you said, Andy, all signs point to more kind of winning this handedly, but he opened himself up to a few big right hooks from Dan Cox and the Republicans that it was like, “Well, if you weren’t so shitty, you wouldn’t be such a juicy target for that point.” When he wouldn’t just say, “I’m not going to run for president and leave you guys in two years.” He wouldn’t just say, “Will you commit to Maryland for four years?” And instead he said, “Yeah, he wouldn’t say it.” And the way that when Cox got him for it and it was a real deserved blow, Moore responded this way.

“Dan Cox seems to be more concerned about my future than he is about the future of the people of Maryland. “It’s like,” You piece of shit, don’t use us to shield yourself from this thing. “You know what I’m saying? So that’s an example of how it’s being done on the right. And here’s an example of how it’s being done on the left, here’s an example of how Cox was doing it. When again, Pamela Wood from the banner asked a really great question, which is,” Hey, you seem to be all in for Trump like everyone else in the Republican Party. How are Marylanders going to know that you’re actually here to serve us and not just your nut job like daddy in the White House? “And what he said is,” Well, absolutely. “Direct quote,” I am a Marylander first and last, and I’m an American first and last.

“What? That’s not how words work.That’s literally saying nothing and then just moving on as if he’s answered the question. So I want to talk about that. How do we reclaim a politics of just being real and just talking about the real shit and not violating that basic trust that we all feel has been violated so many times by so many people in the media and in the political world?

Andy Ellis:

Yeah, I’ll start with that. So part of the problem is the way the debates work right now. So in 1992, Ross Perot got on the debate stage and he was weird and he had his charts and he had all of that stuff, but he appealed to a lot of people because he was speaking truth that seemed to matter to them. And he got in that debate and he had a real impact. He went up in the polls, he probably cost George Bush that election by most accounts. He got 15% or so at the end of the day. It was real significant third party independent political work. After that, the two parties and the media corporations decided that they were never going to allow that to happen again. So they created a commission on presidential debates that locked down on the ability to hear independent voices on the debate stage.

Well, they got all the media networks to buy in with them. They pushed the League of Women Voters out who had been sponsoring debates for years. And then they went to PBS at the national level and said, PBS, if you ever want to host one of our debates, you need to start adopting these rules too. So PBS started adopting those rules and then they started pushing those rules down to their local stations like Maryland Public Television. So stations like Maryland Public Television now have a standard for who gets to be in statewide debates to say you have to have 10% in polls in order to be in… A third party candidate has to have 10% in the polls in order to be included in a debate. So they’ve had this standard for a while. No third party candidate for governor or senator has gotten more than 3% in the state of Maryland since reconstruction.

So they are setting the rules in a way they know is going to exclude people. They have another set of rules that are really arbitrary and really suspect that are things like you have to have substantial fundraising and many people need to show up when you come to an event and you need to have a lot of media coverage. And they don’t quantify those in the same way they quantify the 10% on the polling. So in this year’s debate, by the time they sent out the invitations, there was one poll that had come out and it did not include myself and Kathy White, but they said because we weren’t included in that poll and we didn’t get 10% in that poll, we wouldn’t be invited to the debate. I used the Maryland Public Information Act request in order to get some of their discussion about their other debates.

In the spring, they invited all nine Republican candidates to the debate stage, even though they didn’t have polls for them. And this included folks like Douglas Larcom, a guy who had raised no money and got less than a percent in the election. And the most notable thing that Douglas Larcom has ever been done is get charged with like 30 criminal charges a month after they put them on the stage. Things like stalking, real winner they put up on their stage during that Republican primary debate. So I asked them questions about this, why in the Republican debate they were willing to open the doors for other people, but in this debate they were not. They did not answer the question. They stonewalled, they stonewalled, they stonewalled. Well, one of the other things that came up in this Public Information Act request was a conversation that they had to a press release that I sent out and a bill that Davon and I were working on where they spent the whole day in email freaking out because I sent out a press release that said if I was the governor, I would double their budget.

They were like, if the governor finds out that this happened and thinks that we put Andy up to this, then the governor will cut our budget. So they all started scrambling to make calls to the people in the general assembly and to the governor in order to make sure that the governor didn’t think that Maryland Public Television called me and told me to put out a press release. It’s so nonsensical that when I say it out loud, it just doesn’t make sense. But they were so worried about it because a third of their budget comes from the general assembly and from the governor.

Imagine how freaked out they would think the governor was if they extended an invitation to me to be in the debate if they were that freaked out about me suggesting a doubling of their budget. And I say all of this to say that there has been a concerted effort by the two parties and the media corporations, including PBS, in order to make sure that the kind of directness that we saw in 1992 when Ross Perot was on the stage never exists again, because they know that if people hear options other than the two parties, they will listen to options other than the two parties. They will vote for options other than the two parties. So they have sanitized the discourse. They’ve excluded most of the voices that would challenge them and be direct and they have done it so that they can protect their power.

And we see where it is. We see where it is 30 years later. It is a terrible debate. Most people don’t watch debates anymore because they are consultants giving scripted ideas back and forth. They’re not engagement of ideas, they’re not engagement of arguments and they’re not reflecting of what the people want. So the reason we get a debate like this is because they made sure that we get a debate like this and not have a conversation like this.

Dayvon Love:

And what I’ll add, because so there’s the kind of front end structural dynamics that Andy is describing that impacts the political landscape. But if you go further upstream, Hupy Harry Harris in his book Negro in the Nation, he was a scholar during the New Negro movement and he was talking about the relationship that black people had to the structure of this society. And he argued that black people prior to the Civil War, our relationship to this society chattel slavery enforced by brute force. And then after the Civil War, wage slavery enforced by starvation, that our community is able to be starved into political submission. And that’s an important framing because part of the conversation about the way, particularly that black folks enter the political landscape, and you’ll hear this conversation about pragmatism or what’s practical, people who run for office, and I’m sure this is true anywhere for anybody, but black folks who run for office, they know what fundraisers to go to, they know what corporations to be in relationship with, they know what major figures to be connected to, what media companies to be affiliated with.

And so what ends up happening is that by the time many of these folks appear on our ballot, they’ve already been curated for us. We’re picking from who the corporate sector decides are viable candidates for our community. And that’s an important point because then when we see a Wes Moore on the stage and we talk about the limitations of his performance, in many respects, it’s not just about him as an individual. It’s about the political landscape that says that the only way for us to be viable in politics is to engage in politics in the way that a Wes Moore engages in politics. And unfortunately, so much of what we see around us affirms that as true when we think about those that get to elected office. So I wanted to put that framing there because some of the work is about the importance and emphasizing the importance of independent black electoral infrastructure that can actually engage in the kind of political warfare such that we can put people into office as opposed to hoping the people selected for us do what we want them to do.

And one thing I’ll add to that is because even like LBS’s political theory of change, I’m clear that all of these elected officials, even the ones I like, even the ones that I have good relationships with, I am clear that they don’t work for us because we’re not how they got there. So the best way for us to impact the political landscape is to, again, engage in the kind of political warfare necessary in order to make them do things they may not otherwise do. And a good example of that is Andy kind of ran down the policy record on immigration, where Westmore and the Democratic Party, they were made to do that. They didn’t want to do that. In fact, one of the things that the governor did was after the legislature passed the ban on the 287G program early in session, he actually issued a memo publicly to law enforcement to say to law enforcement, basically, “I don’t want you to think that we don’t want you to collaborate with federal officials.” A way of trying to have it both ways.

And again, because we’re told that that’s what it takes to be in position. And so I think we just have to be clear that we have to approach politics. We have to approach politics with the thinking of we need independent power that can engage in political warfare so that given the current landscape, we can make these folks do what we need them to do with the understanding that we need to do the parallel work of building political infrastructure outside of the two party system so that at one point and hopefully in the near future, we can produce our own candidates for office.

Charly Carter:

There’s a lot to unpack there. I think to what Davon said, yeah, there’s a lot of truth in that candidates are groomed to… Well, one thing I can say is the very first thing you learn as a candidate is how not to answer the questions that are asked of you. And that would be as someone who spent 20 years identifying training and electing candidates, the very first thing that I tell people do is you answer the question that you want to answer, you don’t answer the question that’s been asked of you. And I think we saw – As

Maximillian Alvarez:

An interviewer, can I just say damn you for being so good at your job? Because that’s one of the things that makes it so frustrating to interview politicians. But anyways –

Charly Carter:

No, no, absolutely. And it’s funny because as a voter, I look at that and I get so frustrated because I’m like, that was an easy answer. I think that people have gotten, candidates now have gotten so… It’s so ingrained in them to answer the question that they want to answer, that they miss the opportunity to really connect with voters and to really be authentic and to give actual answers that would actually get them more votes. And I think that we saw that in the debate yesterday. I think that there were a couple of times when Wes Moore really could have just given an honest answer and it would have connected more with voters than the answers that he gave. The second thing that I want to say is in direct response to what Davon says is it is very much true that when people are coming through, when candidates are moving up through the ranks, that you have to raise money.

And who has the most money are corporations and LLCs, that those are the ones who are writing the big checks. Those are the ones when it costs a million dollars to run for office, that the people, it’s a lot of $5,000 checks. Imagine if you were only talking about $50 checks, it’s all exponentially more people that you have to get in. So they are in rooms with the people who want to hear the PABLOM answers. They are in the rooms with people where they can’t be committal to issues, where they are saying, and we saw this recently in Prince George’s County, where APAC was saying jump and you had candidates who were saying how high? APAC being the American Israel Political Action Committee.

So I think that there’s a lot of truth in that, but there is a role for voters. I’m not willing to throw the baby out with the bath water. I think in this state of Maryland, we have seen where people, where voters have gotten and communities have gotten engaged and they have gotten in and elected people and it’s made a significant difference to the outcomes of their lives. And I will say in 2014, we changed 35% of the state legislature. We elected new people, people that we trained, people that were grassroots selected, people who they raised their money from the grassroots. And immediately when they came in, we got re-enfranchisement of ex-felons. We got a raising of the minimum wage. We got earned sick leave. We got automatic voter registration and same day voter registration, all happening within a four year period of being able to change that, of being able to change just 35% of the state legislature.

A lot of those people are now in leadership positions. Are their positions the same? No, they’ve kind of migrated to the middle, but I want to point out that it is possible to do that both within the two party system, but I think the Green Party and the emergence of the democratic socialists and these other progressive movements are really changing what is going to happen inside the two party system.

Dayvon Love:

And if I can add, I think that’s a really important point. One of the problems with our political culture is that we focus too much on the executive branch. If we’re clear about the science of how our government is structured, it is really the legislature that is really at the seat that produces policy and that wields power over the other two branches. And what’s important about that in terms of a strategic value to our community is that we can do more to a delegate or a state senator or a city council person than we can somebody that’s elected statewide. So I just wanted to add, I think that’s an extremely important point that we use the ability to impact those that are elected locally and have a strategy for engaging the legislature as really the greatest opportunity for black people to exercise true kind of independent black political power.

It has to happen through the legislature. Not that the other stuff isn’t important, but I think the media culture overemphasizes the executive branch.

Maximillian Alvarez:

If I could – So we’re running up on time only in the sense of halftime, right? I do want to let the community in here in a minute, so I think we will have more time to dig into this, but we are sort of rounding the final turn in this first half of the program. But I wanted to sort of build on that and hopefully give you guys a container to respond, right? But the thing that I think we should be addressing here, and I want to give everyone a chance to, is what are those core issues that it shouldn’t just be about these are the issues that a savvy politician should talk about if they want to win new election, but what are the issues that savvy regular working people should make politics about so that we win a better world and a better future?

Andy Ellis:

So the three issues that we’re focused on right now are banning the data centers, building an economy that works for the people and not the corporations, and moving past the two party system and the corruption of the two party system. And I think a bunch of people probably saw Shorty outside. He gave me his book and it’s all about how he sees corruption working in the state of Maryland. People should check it out. People should talk to him. I think that our position on this is that the system, the two party system is fundamentally corrupt because the amount of political power that goes into it determines the outcomes, determines who gets to run for office and determines whose issues get heard. So the reason that we have chosen the three issues that we have chosen is not because they’re the only three issues that matter, but they’re the three issues that we think we can use this election to most effectively put pressure on as we go into the general assembly.

The data center question is a place where a popular uprising has come around and has allowed people who never got active before to meet in a church basement, to meet in a library, to meet in their community and to tell the biggest tech corporations in the world and their corrupt politicians that they don’t want this plan, that they want something different and that they want to keep these things out of their community. The corruption is these corporations getting these county governments and city governments to sign non-disclosure agreements so that they can plan outside of the people because they know from other places if the people know what they’re doing, they’re going to shut it down. So the data center thing is the thing that gives me the most hope about the possibility of change. And one of the things that gives me the most hope about it, it is not just one part of the state.

It is not just one political party. It’s from Landover to Lusby and Southern Maryland to Frederick to places in Baltimore County to places in Baltimore City. It’s black and white, it’s Democrat, it’s Republican, it’s independent, it’s libertarian, it’s DSA. People are all rising up and understanding that they can have the grassroots governing power in order to make their local government do what they want instead of what the corrupt tech corporations want. And so I think there’s a lot that inspires me about that. And to Davon’s point, the reason we focus on that is yes, it’s a politically volatile issue right now, but we think that this election and doing well as the governor in this election sends a signal to the General Assembly that people are willing to vote outside of the two party system because they’re so angry about this issue, the corruption of government and the demand for a better political system.

And we think that energy that we build now goes into the General Assembly session where we are going to push bills in order to ban that, in order to expand the way the politics work and to control the money and power. We were in Annapolis this weekend at a rally to call for a ban on the data centers. And it included people from Landover, it included people from Southern Maryland, it included people from Frederick. It was a wide array of Marylanders who have started to understand the grassroots governing power that they can have not dictated by the two parties, not dictated by the corporations. And that is the kind of energy that I think we can build on with this election. So part of the reason that we focus on those issues is because we think it sends a very clear signal to the people in Annapolis that people are mad about this, people are willing to vote on this, and people are willing to break out of the trap and the tradition of the two party system in order to say that they want something different so that we can go into those hearing rooms in Annapolis and say, “You better vote the right way on this or we’re going to build energy to make sure that you don’t win four years from now.

And we’re going to build energy to make sure that your friends in Baltimore City lose their seats two years from now if they don’t get this right.” So I agree 100% that the strategy needs to be on the legislative session and we are using the attention and focus of a governor’s race, which is a high profile race, which gets to do things like this in order to bring an agenda forward that we think we can actually win on and change outcomes on in Annapolis in this legislative session because we think it is absolutely important that the people claim the power that they have, use it to change outcomes and get better results for their communities. Choices are great, but choices without changing outcomes doesn’t solve any of the problems that any of us are facing today. And that is why we’ve strategically focused on those issues so that we can help make those changes in the general assembly.

Dayvon Love:

I think one of the central challenges with the kind of American political system in particular, the community’s relationship to politics is the kind of unspoken and sometimes even spoken conventional wisdom that in order to be viable in politics, you have to moderate. You can’t espouse political perspectives that go beyond the political mainstream. And part of I think people’s frustration with politics is that if that’s what it takes to be viable in politics, nobody wants it. One of the things that I’m most proud of, LBS was founded in 2010, so we’re 16 years in and we’ve had some pretty substantive impact on the community. When we first started, when I was a lot younger, folks used to say to me out of love, they would say, “Davon, you’re not going to be able to talk all that black stuff and be able to get stuff done.” And what I’m most proud of is that we have maintained our worldview and perspective, but that perspective has actually made us effective at moving policy that is helpful to our community.

And so I think a part of what’s important for people, I think something that will energize people and get people to want to engage in politics is to demonstrate to people that that notion that moderating is the pragmatic approach to politics is not the only road, that there are other ways, there are other approaches and methodologies to engage in politics that can be effective, that it’s not reliant on having to be succumbed to the political institutions and the political status quo. And I’m grateful for the real news and partnering with us and hosting this conversation because I know as a person who’s very active in local and state politics, I’m sure there are going to be some people that say, “Davon, how are you speaking against this really popular Westmore Democratic governor?” And there’s some people that would perceive me even saying the things I’m saying as something that would undermine the ability for LBS to be effective in passing our policy agenda.

What I want folks that are watching this to know is that in fact, it is the independence that LBS is able to demonstrate that enhances our viability because it demonstrates that we’re not beholden to the political establishment. I was actually kicked off. I was elected to the 41st legislative district’s Democratic Party State Central Committee in 2022. I was put off of the State Central Committee because I talked about the strategy of using Andy’s candidacy for governor as a nominee for the Green Party as leverage to bring the Democratic Party further left. And so I was put off the State Central committee. But see, the beautiful thing about that is that didn’t diminish the ability to be impactful. It actually enhanced it because it demonstrates the contradiction of the Democratic Party’s stated commitment to black people. But when a Black person stands up and is independent, they try to punish them.

So I think it’s really important, again, in terms of an important issue that energizes people, people need to see that you can espouse a radical politics, have a strong base of community support and actually be able to move policies that positively impact our community. And I think that will bring more people into the political conversation in ways that I think people would feel better about the ability to impact the landscape.

Charly Carter:

I agree with what you said. I think the original question was about issues that people are concerned about. I think Andy tapped into some of them. In the years I’ve been in Maryland, I’ve never seen I have spent a lot of time in Prince George’s County trying to get people energized and to come out and mobilize on issues that were of concern to that community. And it was really pulling teeth in order to get that done. But I have seen communities come together around data centers that have never really been engaged before. And I think the interesting thing is that whether you’re talking about the Eastern shore, whether you’re talking about the DC suburbs, whether you’re talking about Western Maryland, the concern is the same. And the heat, the anger at what they perceive as politicians not listening is pretty up there. So I think that that is one issue that we definitely have to pay attention to.

I think very closely related to that are utility bills. Even before the conversation with data centers really kind of sprang to the forefront, people got clobbered last winter in January when out of the blue there was a rate hike and then temperatures plummeted to below zero. There are still people who are digging themselves out of those bills and the damage that it did to their households as we are about to embark on another winter. And they’re saying that this winter could be even colder than last winter and utility prices, both electricity and gas have skyrocketed.

I think that that is an issue. I really would have liked to see the candidates talk about that. Let’s talk about what the impact that the war in Iran has on us here domestically in the state of Maryland and what can we do about that? What can we do about BGE putting in rate hikes? And then at the same time that they are making record profits. Neither candidate is talking about that, but that is something that people really want to understand. I think housing is a big issue. We still have young people who are living in their parents’ basements and wanting to buy, wanting to move out, people who want to move up, but the cost of housing is really skyrocketing. People who are renters, we have a very old rental housing stock. What is this governor doing and what does the want to be governor?

Dan Cox, nobody talked about housing and the impact of housing in communities, particularly communities in the DC suburbs and in Baltimore City. But it is a growing problem in Howard County and in Western Maryland as well. Affordable housing tops. Over the last two years since the pandemic, the state has had to cut its funding for the blueprint that was supposed to increase the state’s investment in education at a time when we saw scores falling off and record truancy rates. Nobody talking about what are we going to do? To his credit, years ago we had a millionaire’s tax in Maryland. We had actually progressive revenue. And in that time we’ve not seen many Democrats in the legislature proposing progressive revenue. Let’s go after people. The millionaires are getting big tax cuts. They got big tax cuts in 2016. They’re getting another big tax cut that’s been proposed in this latest Trump administration.That’s money that’s going into, it’s not being taxed at the federal level.

Why is the state not there with a big catcher’s mitt to go get that money and bring it back to the state? So I think that those are issues that people are concerned about. I don’t think middle class people want to see their taxes go up, but there are a lot of people, middle class people aren’t getting a tax cut at the federal level. There are a lot of people with deep pockets who are getting that tax cut and it can go to funding. Instead of having the governor talk about the cuts that he’s making in order to balance the budget and being really proud of balancing the budget, that budget is being balanced on the backs of working people, the very working families that he said that he was fighting for. So let’s go get some money. Let’s go get some money from that top 1% and give some relief to working families.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So I want to finish with a lightning, what do we do about this round? We try to end every production that we do at The Real News with information for people who are watching about what they can do to change the outcome of the story, what they can do to take this information and do something with it. And of course we have our elections and these national elections hanging over our head in just a few weeks. And so it is not my job as a journalist to tell anyone how to vote. And in fact, as the co-executive director and EIC of a nonprofit, it is something I cannot do and shouldn’t do. But that doesn’t mean that I stop being concerned for everyone in this room or everyone watching who is still maybe hearing us and saying, “That’s great, but how do I vote? What do I do?

How do I move through the world that we’re in towards the world that I want without making shit worse?” I think just on that level, what is your final pitch to folks here and folks watching before we turn it over to Q&A?

Charly Carter:

I think that it’s a shame that the MPT debate is right now going to be the only debate. And I think that that should be unacceptable to voters. I think that voters should demand that there are ample, many opportunities to hear the candidates debate each other. That is something that they can’t ignore. And so I think that showing up to the… There’s a debate being held at Coppin showing up to the one at Coppin. I think going on talk radio and raising this as an issue on Talk Radio about why are there not more debates being held in the community? I think demanding it where you get to ask questions because I didn’t get to say this earlier, but I was really just appalled at the questions that were asked. I don’t think that they were reflective of the concerns of people in the state of Maryland.

I think the questions that were asked in that debate were reflective of the literary class, like the political reporters. They had their own questions that I think they in fact are also detached from what’s going on in the state. I think that people demanding that the candidates show up and answer their questions is one way that you can have an impact in this election. I do think it’s important. Voting is important regardless of who it is that you’re voting for. It’s important that we, one, take back the Congress, that Congress changes hands, let me put it that way, that we don’t have the same people who are in office now continuing that. So I think that those are the two things I would leave people with is show up and vote, make sure you vote in congressional elections this year and demand that the gubernatorial candidates show up and demand that people expand the stage so that you can actually have a meaningful conversation that it’s not just him versus he said, she said, which is what I felt like this debate was.

Dayvon Love:

So I would say three things. The first is that our community needs to be exposed to a version of civics that isn’t like the afterschool special version. And what I mean by that is that we’re often told going out to vote, participating, that’s our civic duty. Even folks will say our ancestor staff have the right to vote, which is true, but it’s important for us to understand that if we’re going to be engaged in civics, that we need to engage it. I’m talking specifically to black folks from the perspective of engaging in political warfare against this system that wants to continue to maintain the system of white supremacy. And so we need to understand the machinery of government so that we can effectively wage that political war and LBS offers civics trainings every year. So that’s the first. The second thing that I’ll say is that it’s important that we are more granular in understanding the opportunities that Maryland has to influence the political landscape.

And I’ll give one example. It is likely that the Democrats are going to take back the House of Representatives. The person who is likely to take the gavel as the chair of the judiciary committee is Jamie Raskin. Jamie Raskin is a congressman here in the state of Maryland. Well, one of the things that’s been a longstanding project is H.R. 40, the bill that would commission a study on reparations. So Maryland actually has an opportunity to use our pressure to essentially get Congressman Raskin to commit to moving H.R. 40 out of his committee. And it is not unusual in a situation like Congressman Raskin is in where they actually are already talking about what kinds of bills are going to come out of the committee. So this is a really opportune time, just as an example, for the public to go to Congressman Raskin, because he’s going to win his election.

I don’t even know if he has a Republican opponent in November, but this is the time for us to demand to say, “Okay, are you going to make sure H.R. 40 moves out of the committee?” So those are the kinds of opportunities that I think is important. It is likely or it’s possible that maybe Chris Van Hollen becomes the Senate majority leader, particularly if the Democrats take back the Senate. And so again, using the opportunity, he is a U.S. Senator in Maryland. We have an opportunity to dictate the policy agenda as Marylanders. So that’s the second thing is use the opportunity of folks that are elected here to move our agenda. And then the last thing that I’ll say, and I know Andy is going to say this, but it’s important for me to say this, is that it is important for people that’s already going to vote for Wes Moore, you should do it.

I’m not going to discourage people that are already committed tried and true Democrats want to vote for Wes Moore. Those of you that are interested in a politics where we have more options, it is important for you to vote for Andy. And the reason that it’s important for you to vote for Andy, as a person who’s worked on political campaigns, there’s software that you get as a van where you’re able to get information about voters and demographic information. So campaign study changes in the electorate. So as Andy said, there hasn’t been a third party candidate to get more than 3% since reconstruction. So something like 4%, 5%, 6% is something that will bring attention or will come to the attention of Democratic Party establishment elites. Well, they will have to say for their own electoral viability, not just out of some altruistic, oh, these people want something more.

Out of their own electoral viability, they will have to take note of that and that will impact some of the policies that they put on that platform. As Charlie mentioned earlier, there have been some more progressive folks that have been elected to the legislature. That came simultaneously when there were green party candidates for mayor and green party candidates for delegate and for state senator. So this came in the context of that third party pressure where you had Democrats being pulled further to the left. And so this is how we get policies that repeal the law enforcement officer bill of rights, policies that created the community repair and reinvestment fund to put resources in the communities impacted by the war on drugs. So I say all to say that the practical reason, because Andy will tell you and we’ve talked, Andy’s not going to become governor, but the reason to vote for him is to send the message to the party that we want something more than what is given to us.

And what’s beautiful about the situation we’re in now is we’re not in a situation where we’re at risk of electing a Republican. Dan Cox is not going to win. So all the excuses that people make about why it’s so important to vote for Democrats is not a concern for this election. So if you’re a person that wants more choices in your political landscape, then voting for Andy, voting for the Green Party helps to send that message and create more viability politically for more options.

Andy Ellis:

All right. So the first thing I’m going to say is if you like what Davon said and you agree with him, talk to your friends, talk to your neighbors, talk to your coworkers. The people are not dumb. The people are not slow, but the people in the consultant class want to frame politics that way. They want to frame it as if every single voter is stupid and is only going to listen to 30 second sound bites and has a short attention span and can’t comprehend an argument that is strategic other than an argument about who is going to win. Your friends and neighbors and coworkers are not stupid. They can understand complex arguments about strategy. And I think what Davon was laying out there is an easy actually to explain argument. I actually think most people can understand that. Dan Cox is not going to win.

Wes Moore is going to win. And a vote for us that sends a symbolic signal to people that says that people are ready for a change on these issues will be heard. The politicians and the consultants will tell you they won’t hear it, but they will tell you that because they will hear it. They will tell you that if you don’t win, it doesn’t matter, but that’s because they don’t want to have to change what they’re doing based on how people vote, if people vote outside of the two party system. But they know exactly what the threshold is. They know that at 3.2% we would have the best performance since reconstruction. They know at 4% it would send a shockwave through people in Annapolis. So the first thing is talk to your friends, talk to your neighbors, have reasonable and intelligent conversations with them because we’re all reasonable and intelligent people.

The second thing is vote for us. I got to say that. Vote for me, vote for Andy Ellis and Owen Silverman Andrews, Green Party candidates for governor and lieutenant governor on November 3rd or early voting or however you vote. The number of votes we get will matter. At 1%, we keep the ability for the Green Party to stay on the ballot for the Baltimore City elections in 2028. So even if we don’t get that historic number, but if we get 1%, we still have the opportunity to be on the ballot in 2028 so that we can run candidates, maybe some folks here in this room or some folks that you know here in Baltimore City against the Democrats and Republicans, I guess, here in Baltimore City. The third thing I would say is pick one of the issues that you think is important that we are working on or that LBS is working on or that Charlie is working on and go and show up in Annapolis and exert that grassroots governing power that we all know we have in order to get the General Assembly to do something they don’t want to do right now, in order to push them to an outcome like passing the Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights, like banning the data centers, like taxing the wealthy on their wealth and making sure that it’s not having cuts that affect the working class and the middle class, making sure that they’re not cutting money out of our schools.

Let’s go get some of those wins after we set that historic number in November so that we can show that the power is transferable. It’s not just a vanity project. It’s not just for history. It’s about building the kind of community governing power that we need in order to get the outcomes that we want for our communities because if we don’t, nobody else is going to do it for us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s give it up for our panel, everybody. Charlie Carter, Andy Ellis, Davon Love. Awesome, man. Thank you guys so much. That was great. Now let’s open it up to what y’all think. Yes, please remember, we do need y’all to speak into the microphone so everyone can hear you. So we have a microphone right there. Thank you so much for carrying it over

Speaker 5:

There. First, I’m going to just say thank you. Thanks Dayvon for letting me know about this, right? So I guess my questions is this, Frederick Douglas said power concedes to nothing but power it never has and never will, right? I’m pissed off in terms of that first of all, in third grade they told me no person, no party was beyond law. So I don’t want to hear the bullshit when they say we ain’t got enough Democrats in office to stop Donald Trump from what he’s doing. Secondly, then we have a president that’s illegal. I mean, the man got 34 felonies and we allowed him to be president. So I’m saying in one sense, it’s just a game that everybody is against the people and we have to choose who we think is going to protect us when all of them are showing that they’re against us.

So I guess my point is this, is that I would like to hear people talking about find up the people and saying that when they talking about the Declaration of Independence, even if they didn’t have us in mind, they says that anytime the government does not work for the interest of the people, the people have a duty and an obligation to overthrow the government, to establish the government that’s going to work for them. So I’m saying, do we just sit back and if we can’t stop Donald Trump after the election, then what do we do?

Dayvon Love:

So I’ll say a couple things. The first is that Trump is going to not be in office in two years, and it’s important for us to think now about what our 2028 strategy is going to be. And I think too often what happens is we think about it in 2028. So I would say the first thing is that we need to think, especially in an environment where the Democrats take control of the House and if they also take control of the Senate, and I say that because Democrats, because Black folks are captured electorate, we have some leverage. We have some leverage in terms of what they do. And so I would say it’s important for us to dictate to the Democratic Party, particularly those in leadership in Congress, we need to dictate to them what an acceptable agenda is and we need to put the most radical agenda in front of them knowing that they’re not going to do it.

But what it does is that it helps mobilize the general public to recognize the ineptitudes because I think what happens sometimes is that Democrats will pick a handful of things that they’ve done good. And so they use those handful of good things to justify all the other ineptitudes. So I think we have to put a robust agenda in front of those that are going to take leadership and we need to do that in advance as opposed to when the election happens. The second thing I would say is that we need to take advantage of local opportunities to exercise that leverage. One example that I’ll give in Baltimore County. So Baltimore County has a seven member county council and currently only has one black person to serve on the county council. Now, Baltimore County did some work last year and last couple of years, ratify an expansion of their county council.

Well, now there’s going to be nine members instead of seven, which will expand the capacity for black folks to be represented on the county council. Now the challenge, because they wanted to expand it to 11, and they also wanted to ensure that there were four majority non-white districts as opposed to just three. Now what ultimately passed was a map that had three majority non-white districts as opposed to four. And the reason is because on the current seven member council, there are four Democrats and the Republicans. And in order to change the composition of the county council, you need five, you need a super majority. So in Baltimore County, they’re likely going to elect a black county executive, so that’ll be a first. But what I argue is that the most important thing is that if folks in Baltimore County can elect six Democratic council people instead of five, and many of those nominees, those Democratic nominees for county council are black folks.

They actually just did an event this past weekend where the Divine Nine did an event where they featured those Black folks that are running for… So if we get six folks in the County Council in Baltimore County, that is a level of electoral power where Black people can have leverage in Baltimore County in a way that Black folks have not had leverage in Baltimore County. And my disappointment, now I don’t even know if I would say disappointment, that the Democratic Party is focusing more on getting this ADO congressional map drawn as opposed to focusing on something like in Baltimore County where you can actually make a difference and actually shoring up Black electoral power in Baltimore County. But it seems that the Democrats are more concerned with the national fight in terms of symbolically fighting Trump because one additional congressional seat, as opposed to thinking about what are the things that the party can do to enhance Black local elected power.

And so I would say that looking for opportunities, Andy mentioned data centers this past primary election. There are a bunch of folks that were ousted from their seat because of the position on data centers. I don’t imagine that’s going to go away. So again, just looking for local opportunities to exercise some of that power that can build up and hopefully give us the leverage to be more impactful on the national scale.

Charly Carter:

Thank you, Davon, because I think that was excellent. Especially about putting the aggressive agenda on the table. We have seen when Donald Trump came in, we saw just how fast he was able to pass some really stuff we thought was crazy. I mean, when they started talking about Project 2025, most people thought they’ll never be able to get this through and look at all the things. It’s something like 70% of it has been implemented in a year and a half. So nobody can say we can’t do big things really fast, but we can’t unless we stay engaged and we need some big ideas to put up there. We’ve also been able to see Zoran Mamdani pass some really big things in New York City, things that nobody in New York, I’m from New York, nobody in New York ever thought that he’d be able to get passed.

We need those big, bold ideas on the table, but here’s the most important thing. Over the last 30 years, and this particularly happens in the Black community, is we have been trained to show up on election day, to vote and then go home and go back to our lives, that the people we elect, they’re going to take care of us. They’re going to be the ones who are… We are going to get it done for you, right? But let me ask you this question. If you had a boss that showed up once every four years, how good would you be at your job? What would you be doing for the three years and nine months before you knew they were coming back? You’d do whatever the hell you wanted to do. And that’s what we… We are the boss when we elect people to office, whether it’s to local, whether it’s to state, whether it’s the federal, we are the boss, we’re the employee.

But if we go home, if we show up on election day or a couple of months before election day and we tune in and then we show up and we cast our ballot and then we go back to our lives and watching daytime dramas and love is blind, and we don’t think about it again until the next four years. Those politicians that we elected, no matter how good they are, no matter who, where they came from, are going to do what the hell they want to do for those three years and nine months and then till they come back around again. So we have to stay on top of it. We have to check in. We have to tune in. That means when there’s a town hall, we got to show up. We got to show up and tune in to figure out how they’re voting and what they’re voting for and whether they’re representing us.

We can’t just go back to sleep. And that is going to be really hard for people who are stringing together two or three jobs. But if we want those big, bold ideas to come through, they have to know that we’re watching and they have to know that we’re keeping score. We have to show up to stuff. And I think that’s the most important thing that we can do to try to get control of politics again.

Andy Ellis:

Yeah. And so I will answer this to take it back to the 2024 election. So before the 2024 election, Davon and I were both on the Charter Commission and this is the commission that Baltimore City has where we look at the charter and every 10 years the citizens shall gather and make recommendations to the city council. City council’s not going to do any of those recommendations. But one of the things that Davon and I saw coming during that was David Smith of Sinclair Broadcasting’s question that would’ve slashed the Baltimore City Council in half. And we decided one day in Annapolis, January or something, we kind of just decided we were going to beat it. And we decided we were going to beat it because we wanted to develop the muscle of democracy in order to show that we could fight back and we weren’t dependent on the Democratic Party in order to get the wins that we wanted.

Democratic Party at that time was saying, “Well, we got to make sure that it doesn’t get on the ballot. We got to sue to get it off because we can never beat one of these things. It’s assure that our charter amendment is going to pass, that it is that a Democrat is going to get elected.” And we decided that it was important to show that that was not actually the truth and that the people could come together, put together the kind of organization that was necessary and beat the local evil billionaire. Well, he’s not really a billionaire, but a hundred millionaire, the local rich man who wants to run our government who’s a friend of Trump. And we organized with labor, we organized with faith groups, we organized with Democrats, and we organized the media in order to be able to actually beat that question.

And we beat it because we believed it was possible and we believed it was necessary. And I think what I am using that to say is that one of the things that Trump has shown us is that we don’t have the grassroots governing power in most of our communities to protect ourselves from a fascist in Washington DC. And if we rely on the Democratic Party to do it, we can see that they’re not going to be able to do it. They don’t have the capability, they don’t have the will, and they don’t have the structure. So we have to start developing the kind of power and the kind of use of democracy that allows us to get the outcomes that we need regardless of what they’re going to do. Once we start developing that power, they’ll come along in some ways. With question H, by the end, all of the Democrats wanted to jump on question H because they realized it was going to win and they wanted to be able to say that they were going to claim a win.

But they jumped on board because we believed it could happen and did the organizing with the community in order to make sure that it was going to get defeated. Yeah, we needed them. It was useful to have their resources. It was useful to have their money. It was useful to have their door knocking, but they didn’t do it because they wanted to do it. They did it because we believed that the impossible was possible. We made sure that it happened. We did the organizing and we flexed and built those muscles of democracy to get one win that was useful in 2024. I think those victories are hints of the future. I think if we can look and see how that works, we can think about How to apply that model in other places.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and if I could hop in here as well, this is what we talk about so much at The Real News and in the reporting that I do with working people when it comes to unionizing your workplace. It’s like a union at a Starbucks isn’t going to change the world, but you are going to be much more capable of changing the world after you unionize your Starbucks with your coworkers. The struggle changes you and makes you more capable of making change thereafter. I think there is something to be said about building that muscle wherever we can, however we can. But I really want to bring that back to your question because we got some muscles that need building for whatever is coming. And we don’t know full well what’s coming, but what we know is something is coming. You think the guy who’s using our taxpayer dollars to pay for political campaign ads that I have to fucking watch on football is going to just accept the results if he loses in a month?

Absolutely. Of course he’s not. Did you think he was just going to go away when he got the conviction in court? Of course he wasn’t.

That’s the one thing you know about him. He’s not going to just say, “Ah, shucks. I lost. You beat me. You bested old Trump. I’m going to go away off stage, you’re never going to hear from me again.” That’s the one thing you know is not going to happen. So what muscles are you building to prepare for whatever does? And so that’s in the spirit that I wanted to offer just some of my thoughts. Again, it’s not my job to tell anyone how to vote, but I can tell you go vote because it’s your right, it’s your duty. It’s part of the muscle of civic engagement that needs to be built, but it’s not the only one. And when it comes to what exactly we’re fighting for, I think that’s the one thing I wanted to say is I used to love being a pundit and going down to DC and being on these news shows where they would just put me with some Democratic talking head or a Republican candidate for this office.

And I was like, “Oh, I’m going to eat this full alive.” It was so easy to just destroy them on camera with arguments that weren’t tied to everything you guys have been saying. It’s just like, well, it’s easy to beat you in a debate because I’m not trying to please some party. I’m just talking about the real shit that we’re all dealing with. There’s actual real power in just saying the truth plainly. And Mother Jones, the famous labor organizer, said that I will tell the truth wherever I please. And I keep thinking about that line and keep repeating it to folks because I think we need some of that moxie and we need some of that. We need to take it further, not just to tell the truth wherever we please, but to go say the truth wherever we can and create a sort of indomitable light that can’t be denied, that we leave these fools no more darkness to keep hiding in.

And we do it by speaking the truth plainly and loudly, meeting each other on shared planes of reality and humanity and stop letting the goddamn pundits and the internet and everything else divide us and move us away from each other. I think we got to get back to the basics. That’s why I brough up the breaking points thing is I don’t give a shit about any party at this point. I’m concerned about our species. I’m concerned about life on this planet.

So if you’re asking if we’re on the left or the right, it’s like we don’t think in those terms anymore, but if you ask all of us in this room, are you on the side over here that’s for life and a future worth living in and not war? I’m sure we’d all be standing on that side, whether or not we call ourselves left. So that doesn’t need to matter right now. What matters is do you want to let these sociopaths win? Are we going to give them our children’s future? Are we going to give up all those things that our ancestors fought for, like democracy, like the right to vote, like the belief that this country could be something better? Are we just going to give it over to these fucking nut jobs? Of course not. And I think we just got to really dig in deep and say, you’re not taking that from us.

Those lessons that we learned in elementary school you were talking about, they were good lessons. We were taught to despise and fight against what we’re seeing right now. So we should despise it and we should fight against it. All right, I’ll shut up. So get out of the soapbox.

Speaker 6:

Sorry, just had a quick question for Andy. And this is not meant to be a loaded question in any capacity, but what is your opinion of Jill Stein and what she brings to the Green Party in America?

Andy Ellis:

Sure. This is the question I get all the time. So I appreciate the work that Jill Stein has done to help build the Green Party. She has secured Green Party ballot lines and ballot access across the country over the last 12 years or so, and she has done so a great sacrifice to herself. Jill Stein could have been happily retired doctor who sat in her home in Massachusetts, did local activism, played in her band and tended her garden. And everybody would love her because she was the kind of local politics that we like. She chose a different path and she chose that path because she thought that it was necessary. She thought that what Ralph Nader had started to do with the Green Party was important and she realized that somebody else needed to pick up the baton and keep going on it. And I hope that Jill Stein is not our next presidential nominee.

And I don’t say that with any disrespect toward Jill, but I would like to see somebody new come up and represent a new era of the Green Party that is focused on building black and brown and working power in deep blue cities and deep blue states. Because I think that if we start to do that, we can start to see real change. I think if we focus more on Baltimore than we focus on Pennsylvania or we focus more on Prince George’s County than we do on Michigan or something like that, I think we can start to build the kind of alternative that those places need. And the last thing I’ll say about this is that alternative that is the People’s Party on the left does not have to be the Green Party, but the Green Party is the one that has the ballot line in Maryland right now and it is the one that has the structural capacity to nominate candidates and to allow people to get on there.

If it is the Ujima People’s Progress Party, if it’s a worker’s party, if it’s an amalgamation that we haven’t seen or a formation that we haven’t seen yet, excellent. We need something that is willing to fight against the capitalist system in the two party system. And I think Jill Stein has helped the Green Party to stay alive in order to do that. I know a lot of people dislike Jill Stein and I know a lot of people disagree with her choice to run for president in the way that she’s run her campaign over the years. I don’t think there’s a ton of people who disagree with the platform that she advanced. There’s some, but they’re not the ones who are making that argument, but they disagree with the strategy and they don’t like her as a person. I hear those concerns. I appreciate the work that she’s done.

I appreciate the sacrifice that she’s made. And like I say, I hope somebody else is the next nominee.

Speaker 7:

My name is Al. He made a point when he starts talking about the unions. And the reason why I believe he made the point, because I think that’s the hidden weapon that a lot of people are not paying attention to. I mean, even across the country itself, because at the end of the day, all these data centers are mostly being built by who? And there is a strong stance for a lot of people within unions that you do not cross picket lines or protest. So the fact that Baltimore’s already dealing with the issue with the fact that too many people in Baltimore City do not know about privatized organized building trades, they know about ASCME, they know about CEU, all the other ones, but are not familiar with JTC or any other trades unions altogether, IBW, whatever, that’s a disadvantage. And then there’s also a further disadvantage because that weapon itself is unclear.

And I think that if people would just execute on that when they’re being prompted to do so, then they would see exactly what that is for. What was happening in Baltimore County, like Davon was talking about, I went to the D9 thing, literally talking about what I’m talking about now, not in any real detail because I don’t trust them either. But at the same time, mentioned the fact that even if it comes to job creation, you know what I mean? A lot of us don’t know about it. And the thing about it is that even across the country right now for unions, the interest in unions is spiking literally because they get paid more.

So you have something that’s not going to be too hard to convince people to want to get into once you just only just tell them about it. And then in doing so, also talk about the fact that there’s a far disproportionate gap as it pertains to non-white or black, very specifically black, that now when we talking about Baltimore County and Baltimore City and we talking about the fact that they legislated for east of 40 and Woodlawn, right of town, Milford Mill, Lockroom, that now you also have the encroachment of Baltimore City that along with you wanting to get a job into the unions and now discover how unions work while at the same time also work on the same data centers that you’re not really with because I’m not with putting that in Woodlawn. There are a lot of people who are not working in data centers, mainly us, literally because they’re not with the whole Woodlawn thing.

They have maintained it and dealt with the whole contradiction of it and the fact that they’ve been in Federic working and they need the money. So utility itself, it is what it is, but they’re very stern about the fact that they’re not going to take the job in Woodlawn, but it’s not only Woodlawn. So I think that we’re missing a point that you have literally an organized element, no matter how disruptive and not as functional as it could be, that already within itself in existence, that if you would just listen and actually get involved in it, that you’ll literally reveal a very serious weapon that already exists.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I thought that was a great comment. I was going to say, can we get another one as well so then the panel will respond to a couple of these points, but thank you. No, that was great.

Speaker 8:

Hi. My thing goes to existential questions. I haven’t heard anything about genocide, haven’t heard anything about the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, but the little pieces of history that I’ve learned coming across my decades of life are little things like the birthday of Fannie Lou Hamer, which was just a day or two ago. And as you guys were talking, I could hear somebody saying in my ear, “Truth crushed to earth shall rise again.” I could hear somebody else saying to me, “The secret of life is to have no fear. And if we don’t have clean water, soil and air, we will cease to exist. And if we don’t prosecute people who are guilty of murder, Nuremberg will have taught us nothing.” So I just wanted to just hit a couple dots and as we’re going through our day, we think about these things, but it just passes.

And that’s all I have to say.

Andy Ellis:

Yeah. So I want to take both of these a little bit and then let the other panel do it. So I was at the Towson Planning Commission meeting about the data centers back in August or early September and many of the white IBEW folks walked through the protest and my speech that day was like, “We got to work with the IBEW folks. We have to make sure that we’re not treating them as enemies and that we’re treating them as comrades in this struggle.” Now – What? You were on a work site that day? Yeah, sure. But so we got in and we get inside and the planning commission is going down and I’m standing in the back with most of the IBEW folks. Planning commission is going down their recommendations and they’re going down their recommendations and they’re like, “Okay, project labor agreements.” They’re like, “We do not want project labor agreements for these data centers because we don’t have them for other stuff and we don’t think we need to have them for the data centers.” And I noticed at the point that a lot of the IBEW folks that were in the back of the room kind of gasped at that because they were like, “Well, we have politically aligned ourselves with the county in this regard in order to hopefully get union jobs out of this.” And the county was quick to dismiss that.

And I think that when we’re talking about data centers and when we’re talking about labor, we have to talk about something beyond just saying no to the data centers and talk about what we do want to build. What do we want to build that electrical workers and trade unionists can build and feel comfortable building? What does it look like to build the green infrastructure that we need and to train people in Baltimore City schools and Baltimore County schools in order to build that infrastructure? Because once we start building that, we can address the clean water, the clean air and the clean land. And we don’t have to allow the only construction to be something that is destructive to people, that is surveilling people and that is supporting genocide. And I think we need to have that positive future focus on this about what is what we want.

And we need to have these conversations with people who are building this stuff to say, what is it you would like to build and how do we get the resources for that and how do we change the political climate so that is possible to build with the ease with which we build surveillance and data centers? So I think that’s the one thing I’ll say there and I’d love to talk with you more about this because I know you’ve been at some of the hearings and things like that talking on some of this stuff too. Second thing I want to say is in relation to genocide. I think one of the most foundational points in the last couple of years that has caused people to break away from the two party system who previously believed in it was watching how quickly everybody accepted supportive genocide in Gaza and how quickly both parties fell over themselves in order to crush the student movements, in order to crush everybody who was standing up and rising up.

Our platform is very clear on this and we wish we had gotten a chance to be on the debate stage last night to talk about it because we think it’s an important question, but when it’s just Democrats and Republicans on the stage, they’re not going to ask about it. The state of Maryland is currently invested in genocide in Israel in a couple of ways. They are supporting the Maryland Israel Development Corporation. They have an executive order that prevents people from being able to boycott the state of Israel if they want to be a state worker. And there’s a whole bunch of weapons going through the port of Baltimore that don’t need to go through the port of Baltimore. Now the governor can’t actually stop those weapons going through the port of Baltimore, but they can sure as hell make it a lot harder. And the fact that our governor hasn’t even thought about doing that because a couple days after October 7th, he stood in front of some sort of mesh together Israel American flag and said Israel has a right to exist and Israel has a right to defend itself shows us exactly where he’s aligned on these questions.

The tides have turned a little bit on it politically, and so he’s turned a little bit on it politically, but we have seen him being willing to extend a commitment to genocide because of it’s in his political interest. And that is the dominant narrative of both parties. The last thing I will say about Fannie Lou Hamer is that Fannie Lou Hamer was… Everybody talks about how Fannie Lou Hamer, she went to the convention, she did this and that. What they never talk about is when they got home from the convention, they went and they ran as independence against the Democrats at the time because they realized that the power that they had was to play the game of in and out. And that is where the power for folks have had. There’s a guy named Haynes Walton Jr. who writes a book called Black Political Parties, and he’s tracing the way that Black political parties throughout the South use the power of being in or out of the dominant party at the time in order to get concessions for Black folks, in order to get voting rights, in order to get programs that address housing, in order to get programs that addressed education, in order to get programs that address poverty.

And he talks even about James Clyburn, who we all know currently is a Democratic leader who started in the United Citizens Party organizing black folks in order to challenge the Democratic Party of South Carolina in order to start nominating and electing Black folks. And so they ran outside of the two party system in 1970 and they elected the first three Black folks to the South Carolina legislature since Reconstruction because they knew the power of playing that game of in or out of the dominant party at the time. And they knew the power of using the threat to take electoral seats away from the dominant political power in order to get their demands met. So those two questions, I think I’m trying to weave them together in that answer there, but I think they’re both really good questions and I think they both speak to the urgency of the moment and the way that we need to think about the strategy that we use going forward.

We have one last question back

Speaker 9:

Here. Hey Pishaw, thank you for the session today. A question I have, so listening to the debate last night, what was your perspective on Westmore’s response to the reparations question and what wasn’t addressed in that response and in the discussion?

Dayvon Love:

So that’s part of the problem with the two party system is that we didn’t actually get a substantive conversation about both the reparations bill itself that was a controversy in Maryland and the issue of reparations in general. And what’s disappointing about that is that there have been polls that have been done that say that amongst the black community in Maryland, about 80% of black folks in Maryland support reparations. Now, conversely, it says about 20% of white folks support reparations. And so to me, the way the Democratic Party, again has, and particularly the governor himself, dealt with the issue of reparations, I think dealt with it from the vantage point of prioritizing the views, the perspectives, the interests of white folks and the white population in this state over black people. And a part of what is a challenge with that is that again, Maryland is 30% black.

So Maryland has sufficient black electoral representation to advocate for a strong reparations package. But unfortunately the governor and in my assessment, assessing the national political landscape, especially given the undertones and not so much undertones in terms of the national aspirations is using as a frame of reference in terms of how to deal with it. I think the danger with the way he answered the question when he talked about his culture of repairing, he talked about investing in HBCUs and home ownership, that those things are good policy. Those things are not reparations. Reparations is about investing in black people’s capacity to practice sovereignty and self-determination. The reparations emerges from a revolutionary Pan-African nationalist worldview. So whether we’re talking about Queen Mother Moore, Universal Negro Improvement Association, Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Republican New Africa, Organization Afro-American Unity, these are the progenitors of the worldview of which reparations emerges.

And so Westmore’s answer, it conflates mainstream liberal democratic party policy with revolutionary demands on the state, which is what reparations is in its proper context. And so the two party system in that debate did a disservice to the issue of reparations in a substantive conversation about it.

Andy Ellis:

And I will say, so reparations is an issue that the Green Party has had at the core of our platform for 25 years. And so when the bill came up in Maryland last year about reparations, we were excited. We were excited to see a commission that was willing to study it. We also knew that we had a pretty good idea that Governor Moore was going to veto it. I think Davon and I probably had a decent idea that he was going to veto it before many of the people who were sponsoring the bill did. And we had put together a policy that I think is really good on this and I encourage people to check it out, gogreen2026.com/reparations. It is built with people who have been fighting for different forms of reparation in the state of Maryland for years. And it talks about cash payments, but it talks about community investment.

It talks about land. It talks about burial places. It talks about a lot of the different things that people have been fighting for who have been in the struggle. And if we had had the opportunity to be in that debate last night when the two of them were not talking about it, we would have talked about it. And I think that is what is lost by allowing only two parties to be on the stage because the Republicans are only going to say that’s a bad idea and tell bad jokes. And the Democrats are going to do whatever they can to avoid the conversation of reparations and to conflate it with unionization, procurement and poverty alleviation. And those are separate things and having a third perspective on the debate that was very much pro-reparations and based in a party platform that has developed it over 25 years and based in Maryland policy that is developed from people who have been working on it for years and years would have fundamentally changed the nature of the debate and fundamentally changed the nature of the answers that people got as they were watching it.

It would have been more educational. It would have simply given people a better perspective that they didn’t have otherwise. But what we saw last night was the sort of same thing you could see on CNN or any of those other sort of talking head type of shows where they have two people squaring off and their sides are clear, their sides are ossified, but they’re not actually speaking to what people want or what the question is. And not being there last night, that was a huge opportunity lost, I think, for the people of Maryland to hear a real perspective about the way that reparations could work here and the way that both parties avoid that question.

Charly Carter:

I agree with Andy. I was really disappointed in both answers. I wasn’t surprised by Dan Cox’s response to the question of reparations, but I was surprised by Wes Moore’s response and really disappointed in, as Davon said, his conflation of just policies that have already been out there with this bold idea of reparations that he just wasn’t willing to touch it. And I agree with Andy that having another person on the stage to do that, to bring that up would be important. But the thing that I want to really talk about though is that this issue, why it’s important to have sort of independent political power on the outside.

When there is a Democrat in office, Maryland considers itself a blue state and the legislature has veto proof majorities in both the House and the Senate, but when there is a Democrat in office, the legislature never quite steps up to being as bold as it can be. It doesn’t want to leave the executive, it doesn’t want to lead the executive. And so I would say that having independent political power outside of the two parties, because Democrats themselves are not going to kind of overshadow the governor on this issue, but we need the independent power in order to push the party to do more and to push the executive to do more. And we’ve seen that happen, but it really is about, it’s going to happen from the grassroots. It has to be people who think that these are important issues, standing up, showing up, taking a trip to Annapolis, showing up when the governor or any other leader, because I don’t want to, although we have been focused on the governor because of the debate, here in Baltimore, we should not forget that we have the Senate president, is a senator from Baltimore City, that we should also be putting pressure on Senator Ferguson as well to make sure that we can push some of the bold ideas forward.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So this has been really, really great, gang, and we do need to wrap up in a minute, but I did want to, before asking you to join me in thanking our great panelists, I did want to offer one quick response to both of y’all’s really important questions, which to me are very much connected about the unions, about Gaza and all the awful things happening, because as editor-in-chief, it’s my job to be looking at all these things at once and be trying to make sure that we report on them. And that’s what we’ve done. I mean, today’s October 7th. It’s been three years since this full on genocide that we’ve all been watching has happened and we’ve never stopped reporting on it. We keep publishing documentary reports from Gaza. We keep publishing interviews with doctors returning from Gaza. We keep talking with members of the Jewish world speaking out against Zionism and all this awful stuff.

And I’m thinking about that today of all days, of course, because as a kid growing up, I didn’t envision that my adult job would be staring at images of children being slaughtered with support from my country and my tax dollars. And not only that, but that my job would be to make sure that the cameras stay on it, that we still never stop filming the carnage and the truth until it stops. That is all of our goals in some way, right? You keep your eyes open, you keep the camera rolling, you keep the light lit. If our comrades and brothers and sisters in Gaza, all the journalists that we have lost, all the truth tellers who told us what was happening with their phones, if they could keep their eyes open until the very end, so can we. We owe them that much, but we owe it to much more than them.

We owe it to all of each other, to our children. And that’s where the labor question always comes into it for me is there’s so much important stuff there, but unions aren’t perfect either. A lot of people don’t know about the unions because we have less than 10% union density in this country. Most people have never worked in a union job. And if they have, a lot of people’s unions suck and we got to be able to deal with that. We got to have a cleaning house mentality about everything. Enough is enough. Charlie, you made the great point is we have been letting too many people off the hook by just giving over the stewardship of our society to these technocrats or these elites or these con men who sell us on fancy promises. And that has led us to corrupt unions, corrupt political parties, exploding inequality.

These people don’t deserve the keys to society. So we got to take them back and we got to have that mentality that we’re not waiting on anyone to fix them. We got to start rolling up our sleeves and doing it together. So thank you guys for rolling up your sleeves and joining us and doing that today. Please join me in thanking our incredible panelists for sharing their amazing thoughts with us tonight. And thank you so much to Andy Ellis, thank you to Charlie Carter, thank you to Dave on Love, thank you to our incredible crew that made all of this possible. Thank you to Cam, thank you to Dave, thank you to Kayla. Can you guys give them a round of applause for making the production happen?

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Lucia Iandolo: Students and Ithaca community members have gathered in downtown Ithaca October 13th for the I Am Jane Doe rally to support students’ demands in light of the reopened criminal investigation into the alleged 2024 gang rape of a former Cornell University student by members of the school’s Chi Phi fraternity. The lawsuit was filed on September 16th, two years after the plaintiff identifying as Jane Doe was allegedly sexually assaulted and gang raped by seven Chi Phi fraternity brothers. Since the Cornell Daily Sun, Cornell University student-run newspaper broke the story on September 18th, it has received widespread media attention and sparked nationwide anger. This has led to protests across the United States, including on Cornell University’s campus, Ithaca College’s campus, and in the greater Ithaca community. Can we

Speaker: Demonstrate it over here?

Lucia Iandolo: Many members of the Ithaca community, including businesses and organizations, have spoken out and condemned the Cornell administration’s complicity. Today, the I Am Jane Doe rally is being held to demand accountability from the Cornell administration and advocate for systemic change in relation to sexual assault.

Speaker: From Cornell to LSU. From Cornell to LSU. Survivors, we stand with you. Survivors, we stand with you.

Samara Ferris: We are here to provide support to the Cornell University to also inspire people in other universities and other communities around the US to stand up and fight in their own communities. So we want to echo the student demands because they live it every day. They know.

Speaker: Emphasize our full support and endorsement of all student demands. Cornell students have come up with an exhaustive, extensive list of demands because they know what their school needs.

Jessie Romero Silver: So I think there is a responsibility on the local level to do something because of our proximity to Cornell, but there’s also a responsibility to yourself as well. As a human and as a feminist, I would say if you care about the women around you, you must care about this. And you have to care about this once the media cycle is done, once eyes are not on Cornell anymore. Because my greatest fear is that we are so angry about this, that this is happening on a national level and it’s finally being shown and Cornell is just going to run out the clock until people don’t care anymore and then they don’t have to do anything. So I really want people to step up in this moment, not just because it’s a national story, but because you’re a person, you should care. You have to care.

Speaker: We are here because we demand answers and I refuse to wake up 10 years from now and realize nothing has changed.

Samara Ferris: Everyone’s organizer. I’m not a professional organizer. I’m a business owner. I’m a chef. I’m an organizer. All these amazing people today, they’re organizers. There are artists, there are writers, there are other business owners. Everyone’s an organizer. Everyone can organize something. It can be a teaching. It could be a book club. It can be a dinner after everyone goes to vote. So everybody is an organizer and I think that’s what’s important is that everyone needs to stand up and become an active part of changing culture here and everywhere.

Speaker: We need institutions to do their job when nobody is watching. I’m here as a student, as a man, and as someone with a platform.

Alex Prout: If we’re going to address this issue, men need to care about this and men need to speak up and take action. In the advocacy world, it’s primarily women speaking up and we’re asking people who’ve been traumatized, who’ve been impacted by this to carry the burden of this work, which is inherently unfair. So we need men to stand up and speak up and care.

Speaker: Whose voices we listen to and whether we speak out regardless of what it costs.

Alex Prout: When we talk about sexual violence, a lot of people use the term gender-based violence and also a lot of people think that this is a woman’s issue. It is not a women’s issue. This is a men’s issue.

Speaker: Your administration is not what makes Cornell a prestigious institution. Your courageous, your intelligence, your willingness to talk about an issue that so many people don’t want you to say.

Jessie Romero Silver: People have been talking about rape culture since I was a freshman. And as a freshman coming in to that, it was very easy to just hear this and think this is just another typical part of college and that there’s nothing we can do about it and it’s out of our hands. But there is something that we can do about it. We’ve seen, especially at Cornell’s campus, that students who have spoken out against injustices have lost their time at those colleges, at those institutions, haven’t been able to finish their degree. And it is a fear, but we have to keep going. We have to keep moving forward.

Taya Graham: Pennsylvania’s 7th District is a diverse community stretching across the Lehigh Valley, but just before the midterm election, there is a common theme from residents that we spoke to.

Kathy: We are not liking what we see in our country.

Taya Graham: Anger and the desire for change.

Kathy: We’re not liking the effects of the things that are taking place in Washington, and therefore people are out trying to make a change.

Taya Graham: And how voters feel here could be critical to who controls the House. It is one of more than a dozen battleground districts, which is why we spent several days speaking to the people who will determine the outcome. Many said high prices, lack of affordable housing, and a disconnect between Washington and the concerns of working people were motivating their vote.

Valerie: But from what I see, a lot of people, including people that were always Trumpers or used to be always Trumpers, are actually changing their mind. They’re really upset. When they go to the grocery store, my grocery bills in the last year have tripled.

Taya Graham: But we also learned there are other more specific issues that could sway the election. Data centers have become a national issue, but the impact is truly local. Last week, the Bethlehem City Council met to approve more restrictive zoning regulations for data centers. The law would create wider setbacks from residential neighborhoods and limit noise levels. For some, data centers were the deciding factor on how they would vote.

Darcy: I actually see this as it being forced on us, it being forced on us quickly, it being forced on us without the proper studies and concern about the environment that honestly, I think it’s across the board, people don’t want them. And this is an issue that I think Republicans, Independents, and I think this is our stamp act.

Taya Graham: A unifying issue in an otherwise fractured electorate.

Mary Collier: Doors and on the phones across our turfs in Pennsylvania right now, affordability, housing and data centers are the top issues. I think there’s a lot of reasons to hate data centers, but the fact that 40% of Pennsylvanians can’t afford their bills right now, knowing that these things are going to raise their utility bills is a huge reason that it’s on people’s minds and they’re thinking about it going into this election.

Taya Graham: The race between Democrat Bob Brooks and Republican Ryan McKenzie is tight. The Cook’s political report gives Brooks a five point lead, but 16% of voters remain undecided. Neither attended the hearing. Brooks did make an appearance when the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial bookmobile visited Bethlehem. It’s a moving repository of Epstein investigatory files and emails that has traveled across the country. We asked Brooks if he thought that the Epstein scandal would impact voters.

Bob Brooks: I think they’re a huge factor. People of all walks and want to see these things released. I think it’s a huge issue. I know within my union, I’ve watched my union members feel like they’ve been lied to, and this is one of the big topics that they voted that way in the beginning and now they’re feeling lied to. So I think you’re going to see it be a really big factor.

Taya Graham: At another stop, residents agreed.

Krista: I wanted to see the 3.5 million books. I wanted to see what it was all about and that I can’t believe our leaders in our country are saying this is a hoax.

Taya Graham: However, looming over the district were other more foreboding concerns that democracy itself was on the ballot and that their vote would not be counted.

Cathy: I am going to vote by mail, but I’m going to put my ballot in a drop box as opposed to the mail because I don’t trust that process, which is ridiculous. The United States Postal Service, we feel like we can’t even trust that anymore.

Thomas: I think that there’s a strong possibility that they would block as many votes as possible.

Taya Graham: We will continue to be on the ground in this critical district as the midterms unfold. This is Taya Graham and Steven Janis reporting for you.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

The Trump administration continues to weaponize the federal government to carry out President Trump’s wars on his critics, on the media, on the world of higher education, on federal workers, and on the administrative and regulatory functions of the federal government itself. And these attacks have understandably gotten more public attention over the past year, but what has gotten significantly less attention is how Trump’s allies and his administration are waging war against the world of progressive philanthropy and on progressive philanthropists themselves and the many civil and human rights supporting movements, media organizations, and nonprofit institutions that depend on them. The short-term and long-term impacts of this will be seismic, but we’re not talking about it enough. And so to talk about what this all looks like and how people are navigating it within the world of progressive philanthropy, I’m really grateful to be joined today by Leena Barakat, president and CEO of the Women Donors Network.

Leena, thank you so much for joining me today. To start, please just tell our audiences a little more about yourself, the Women Donors Network and the work that y’all do, and then tell us about how the Trump administration’s war on philanthropy is affecting you, the WDN, and the work that you do.

Leena Barakat:

Thanks, Max. It’s great to be here. As you said, my name is Leena Barakat. I am the president and CEO of Women Donors Network and our C4 affiliate organization, Women Donors Action. I have spent nearly two decades working of my career working across the grassroots, philanthropic and private sector to really move and shift resources and power towards communities that are fighting for justice. And 10 of those years has actually been, it started out as a young member of WDN to this moment. We’ve been around for 30 years. We are a national network of donors that are committed to using our wealth, our influence, our privilege, and our collective power to advance justice. And as a collective giving model, that has translated to over $160 million that has been moved across the field to frontline organizations. But our work goes far beyond just writing checks. As a donor network, we help our members really examine their relationship with their resources, their wealth and their power and help them leverage that more strategically.

So that has meant more funding of grassroots movements, building political power, organizing our peers across the sector, and preparing really for us, the next generation of women donors to lead and continue this work. And to answer your question, I think this moment, excuse me, has been incredibly clarifying for us. As you said, the administration is using their power to really intimidate all of us and create chaos and fear amongst nonprofits and make funders afraid of funding them. And so the result that we’re seeing is many institutions retreating and pulling back resources precisely at the moment communities need it the most. And so for us, you asked how is this sort of impacting us? We’re not taking the bait. It’s only sharpened our focus in this moment. We know that in this moment it is not just important to sustain movements and continue resourcing and funding these movements, but actually you go bigger, you go harder.

We need to scale these movements and organize not just ourselves, but the philanthropic sector to really stand together and again, to help donors in this moment and anyone in this moment to leverage every resource and form of influence and power they have, not just their money, but their voices and relationships to fight back. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.You mentioned the war on philanthropy. Now in terms of that, I feel like this is so much bigger than that, honestly. This is so much bigger than the war on philanthropy. This is really a broad, this is a war on dissent, and I think we have to talk about it. We have to talk about it. I think this is really about how, if you think about it from the perspective of the administration, it is absolutely in their best interest to create this climate of fear, to create fracture among us and atrophy within the sector and specifically within the social justice sector where you are seeing critical resources and services moving to communities that need it most, but also who are organizing around dissent and organizing towards justice, which is against this administration’s direct agenda.

And so essentially, what is their strategy to do that? If they want to really accelerate their agenda, they have to do what they can to cut this off at their knees, to turn off the faucet on the very resources that are fueling these movements to begin with. So therefore it has included attacks on progressive philanthropy, who’s resourcing these movements. And so as a result, this is exactly what we’re seeing. We’re naturally seeing an escalation of these attacks and funders and the response to that has been sort of an array of response across the spectrum. I think traditional philanthropy has unfortunately responded with a lot of hesitation, fallen in line with the fear, clenched their pearls and decided to reevaluate strategies, their risk and retreat from funding. And many of them have gone into, frankly, self-preservation mode. And I think the story in their minds is we need to protect ourselves if we’re going to protect everyone else, it’s no good if they go after us.

And so that has looked like protecting their endowments and themselves and somewhat abandoning many organizations who have far less resources, who are far more vulnerable in this particular climate. And philanthropy or philanthropic survival, I would say is important. Of course it is. I’m not going to argue that it’s not, but it will never be more important than supporting the people and communities we exist to serve to begin with.

When you ask what has this done for us or how has it impacted us, it’s just given us a lot of clarity. Our work right now is really about how we are thinking about continuing to stand and defend these movements, organizing the sector and really building the power and capacity of our women donors to stand up and fight back. And the last thing I’ll say too on this piece is I think this is a movable moment. I think there’s a lot of reason for very good reason to be afraid. Inevitably, there’s a lot more risk in this moment. I won’t deny that for sure. But this is also a time of transformative thinking. As much as systems and old patterns are crumbling right now, one could argue it’s not totally a bad thing. These structures and institutions weren’t serving many of us to begin with.

And so while we’re seeing this sort of dismantling of so many old systems and structures and patterns in addition to our civil liberties, I think this is also a time to think about what do we want this future to look like and how do we get on the design team of what comes next? I feel like if structural racism and inequality can be designed, so can justice and I want to be on that team.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. Well, I mean it’s so refreshing to hear you say that because obviously The Real News is very open about the fact that we are a nonprofit news network. We’re a 501 right? We, like so many other independent media outlets that you watching this also subscribe to. We depend on the philanthrosphere as much as we depend on small donations from viewers like you. But when they’re coming after us, they’re coming after you because they don’t want us being able to report on the movements, the stories, lifting up the voices that we do so that you can see the truth.

Leena Barakat:

There’s a playbook to this. As students of history, you see the cycles and the patterns, the writings on the wall, it’s very clear. And in many ways it’s not as sophisticated as one might think. I think for the average viewer and public, I don’t expect everyone to be paying attention to this in the same particular way, but it does give us insight into how to respond and how to move in this moment. It’s not as unprecedented as one might think if you look at a larger context in history. Just as we were talking about thunder retrenchment, this is a tactic. This in and of itself is a tactic, but a tactic of part of what? What are they trying to do right now? I really want to think about what is the end game here? What is this? And ultimately in many ways and in the context of what we’re talking about with the philanthropic sector and the nonprofit movement and the broader movements for social justice, this is really about how we weaken the capacity and the infrastructure of our movement so that we no longer to disrupt our progress, to disrupt momentum.

You’ve heard many people say, I’m sure in the past that this is actually, this is what we’re seeing as a backlash to the tremendous strides and progress that we’ve made, the tremendous wins we’ve had in movements. And so when you think about how might they, what can they do to weaken the capacity and infrastructure of our movements, you think about it and for me, there’s three things that really come to mind. One, and again, student of history has been documented as part of this playbook. So what is in that playbook? One is to sow fear, employing tactics of fear and intimidation. This is creating false accusations, putting out a lot of information and disinformation, putting organizations and groups on lists and threatening to revoke their C3 statuses. You might recall last year, was it last year? Yeah, it was just last year, the bill HR 9495, this was otherwise known as the nonprofit killer bill.

This was a bill that was heinous bill that was put forward accusing a list of organizations, slandering them with accusations of terrorism and hate and antisemitism and all of the buzzwords you can imagine. To what end is to actually really create a funder freeze so that people stop moving resources to them, accusing them and then requests for investigation of these organizations to potentially strip them of their C3 statuses for any organization that is accused of wrongdoing without ever defining what the wrong is, without ever having to prove what that wrongdoing is. So these are some of the tactics that created a lot of chaos and fear and frantic behavior within the sector, which I think was very intentional on their part. They want to isolate these organizations. They want to isolate these movements, call them bad things so that no one goes near them. This immediately creates, this is a very destabilizing effect.

Number two is fracture. This is about the ways in which they have sewn a lot of fracture within our movements and tried to pin movements against each other. We’ve seen this across history and we don’t have to look that far back in history. This has been part of the playbook all along.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Divide and conquer, baby.

Leena Barakat:

That’s right. That’s all it is. That’s all it is. And so to pin movements and organizations and groups and communities against each other, and I think our biggest mistake historically has been falling for that, is actually giving into that. And three is capacity drain. So this is where you see lawfare tactics get into play. So HR 9495 also plays into that a little bit, but we’ve seen a slew of organizations all of a sudden get these lawsuits accusing them of fraud in their funding or in their behavior, suddenly needing to double down on their audits and trying to find anything. And most of these lawsuits have resulted in losses for them, but a win, a net win for them because it has drained the organization’s capacity, their resources, their time, it has distracted them away from what the work is. This is a tactic. So even though there’s a higher rate of losses, the organizations winning these cases and the opposition losing, ultimately they have won just knowing that a lot of time resources and capacity has been, and this is weakening the infrastructure of the movement.

And so when you think about that, when you employ these types of tactics, it is a very destabilizing effects. It slows down momentum and it creates the funder retrenchment moment that we are seeing in this moment. In the last few months alone, I would say since the spring, and just three organizations, three funding organizations, very well known and what has been historically seen as sort of stabilizing funding organizations have decided to reevaluate their strategies, reduce their sort of risk appetite and completely pulled out of funding a lot of the movement organizations we have seen. And those three funding organizations alone, and I’m only naming three, there have been many, have amounted to over $150 million pulled from our movements. And some of it is going into effect immediately. A lot of it won’t start until next year, which means Max, we’re sitting with sticker shock.

We haven’t even seen the material impact this is going to have on our broader movement. So this is, I think, part of that playbook. And for us, we need to see the writing on the wall and resist it immediately.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I hate to make light of any of that, but my impulse is to tell our viewers, but wait, it gets worse. They’re doing that to the media. Everything that you’re saying sounds like what we’re experiencing on the media side. You have the high profile attacks against corporations like ABC and Disney. You have the coordinated attacks on the corporation for public broadcasting and all the public media, but you also have attacks on independent outlets like Breakthrough News. They are going for everybody that they can in philanthropy and media and higher ed. And it even makes me think of the DOGE or Department of Government Efficiency so-called cuts to USAID. We saw organizations around the world that were dependent on USAID go under. A lot of people died and are dying because of it. Again, this isn’t a theoretical argument anymore. People have died because of it.

And a lot of us didn’t realize how many organizations around the world were dependent on that funding until it was frankly too late. And so there’s a comparison in my mind to what we’re talking about here to that. And I wanted to sort of ask if we could talk about those trickle down effects that this is having on the ecosystem of movements and organizations and institutions not just like ours, but so many others out there that depend on philanthropic support.

Leena Barakat:

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head there. I think if you want to talk about this, we have to actually understand the impact that this is having. I actually want to take us back to why and how the impetus of philanthropy’s existence to begin with. Why does philanthropy exist? It is truly, it is a sector, an institution, a method of actually filling the gaps of government. This is why philanthropy was created. It was intentionally created to fill the gaps of providing aid and services and care to help civil society in ways that the government could not step in and support. And so when you think about that, if philanthropy exists to fill the gaps of government and then the government’s going after philanthropy, this is having a material impact on the daily lives, the very basic livelihood of many, many individual people who have nothing to do with anything.

This is even outside, I would even expand it beyond a movement against dissent. These are just everyday communities, whether that’s here in the United States or internationally, who rely on these resources to live. And so whether that’s disaster recovery, providing critical healthcare, stipends, legal services, all of this is the kind of thing that is a baseline of dignity in our lives. And they have directly, cutting these programs have directly impacted that for everyone. And I think this is increasing the stakes and the tension in which we are operating right now. And so this is why it’s really important to note this retention doesn’t happen in a vacuum. This is happening part of this broader trend towards authoritarianism where institutions that once saw themselves as allies and supporters and service and care providers in this moment are suddenly… This is why that decision to recalculate or to pull back funding and recalculate their risk is actually inherently a political decision.

This is the quietly stepping back and normalizing retreat and trying to see that as a reasonable choice. This has a tremendous cost on everybody. And we’re seeing a lot of organizations right now say, “Well, we’re not political or we don’t want to get involved.” Everything is political when you are impacting the daily lives and the dignity of people and communities. And so the normalization of that is something that is exactly what we’re trying to disrupt right now. It’s exactly like we do not accept it. And this is what we’re trying to organize around. And that’s really sort of led to what has become co-founding the Block and Build Funder Coalition, is really to really disrupt the normalization of the retreat as much as possible. We founded the Block and Build Funder Coalition two years ago. So it was actually under the Biden administration. And I just say, I think people tend to subscribe what is happening in this moment to Trump.

It has accelerated in Trump, but this is a bipartisan problem, to be completely frank with you. So under the Biden administration, we saw a list of organizations that, it was Palestinian rights organizations and movement organizations and several funders of them put on the same list, requests for investigation, all the slander and accusations of terrorism and hate that we talked about earlier. And I knew that this was a test. This was going to be a test for how we responded to this was inevitably going to have an impact on everybody else. And so we launched the Block and Build Funder Coalition to really build a muscle around solidarity, to understand this concept that this is all of us or none of us in this particular moment, and to also hold the line on non-capitulation. And so the coalition now has grown to over 270 funding institutions.

We meet every single month and that are committed to really resisting authoritarianism, defending our movements on the ground and safeguarding our civil liberties as much as possible. And what that looks like more practically right now is, as I said, the normalizing of solidarity and holding the line on non-capitulation, this idea that it’s all of us or none of us and that we are stronger together than we ever will on our own. We can be more courageous together. And it also has meant that we are showing proactively, showing up proactively to frontline groups and really centering them in the agenda and the prioritization of our work right now, really understanding what they’re experiencing, what they are seeing, where the attacks are coming from, and making sure we are organizing ourselves as funders to fill in those gaps or to have strategic interventions to stop this as much as possible.

And that has also included providing safety and security for a lot of these organizations who don’t have the resources to safeguard their, whether it’s digital footprints or physical security. And finally, giving our movements and these organizations permission to build anew. We need to get off of this sort of crisis, this crisis loop that we are in and give our movements permission to actually dream about what comes next, to actually pilot their ideas and fund those resources. Because as I said to you earlier, this is actually very much a builder’s moment. And so it’s been work that has been incredibly purposeful in this moment. And I think some of the quiet impact of that has been the loud organizing around the philanthropic sector, shifting the culture in this moment to not be afraid, to go bigger, to go bolder, to be very clear, not to bend the knee.

And we’ve heard a lot of funders really say to us that they were really on the cusp of pulling back themselves just out of fear and knowing that they were part of something like Block and Build Funder Coalition, they felt less alone and it’s prevented them from doing that. And our message to them is keep funding, keep going. We’re stronger together than we are on our

Maximillian Alvarez:

Own. It’s wild listening to you talk about the Block and Build Funder Coalition because as someone who interviews workers around the country and around the world for a living, I’m like, sounds like what you guys got there is a union. And hey man, the old truths are the strongest for a reason. Yeah, injury to one, it is an injury to all. Solidarity will be our salvation. We are stronger together than we are alone. And I think those enduring messages are evident in the ways that people are fighting back across the spectrum of struggle, like working people on the front lines of their exploitative bosses or neighbors on the front lines of ice raids, people banding together at that grassroots level. But also it sounds like what y’all in the world of philanthropy are doing, what we’re hearing about folks like Mark Ruffolo and other artists and cultural figures banding together to stand up for Palestine or to stand against the sort of oligarchic takeover of the whole media ecosystem.

There is power in what unions and movements can teach us. And I really love that you take so much inspiration from the stories of our past because that’s what we do here as well. And it’s also, you named the elephant in the room, and I think we should talk about it here because we got to talk about Palestine. And you are Palestinian American and you have been an outspoken leader and advocate for social justice. We at The Real News have just been relentlessly covering the truth of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, not just since 2023, but since the existence of The Real News. And you and I both know they are trying to criminalize, punish, and smother any form of solidarity with Palestinians and label it as support for terrorism, any criticism of Israel and its genocide is antisemitism. So that’s where we are.

So what do we do about that?

Leena Barakat:

Well, first and foremost, I actually just want to, from the bottom of my heart, thank the Real News Network for doing that work, for being the truth tellers that you are, being an independent media news outlet. I know what a struggle that is right now and to cover a topic like this that has had a material impact on perhaps in the past your capacity to grow and get even bigger supporters. And I hope you are now experiencing the flip of that, an increase in support and resources and subscribers and followers because the truth is the truth everywhere you go. And I appreciate that that has held true for the Real News Network. Max, you said let’s talk about the elephant in the room, Palestine. Listen, Palestine isn’t the elephant in the room. It is the room. It is the room. Palestine has changed the world in the ways in that it has exposed the corruption and the broken and unfit systems that has become a defining moment of this time in our history.

I want people to understand that defending Palestinian freedom is the key to defending all movements for justice. It always has been. It always, always, always, always has been. That hasn’t new, that’s not a post 2023 thing. That is day one. And this is exactly why, this is exactly why they have criminalized, isolated, made taboo this conversation because if you pull the string on this, you pull the string on this, you pull the string on all of it, all of it. And who’s benefiting from that right now? They don’t want us to know. And so the minute we actually take back our power, our voice, our truth in this particular moment and can stand for Palestinian freedom, this is the key to supporting movements around the world. It will break down systems, it will break down and old patterns. And guess what? Those are exactly the right systems and patterns we want to break down because it is exactly what has been holding us back.

This is not just in Palestine, this is here. And I think one thing we’ve been trying and I’ve been in my own work really trying to do the education around is how do you connect the dots between what is happening there and our democracy here? And years ago it was so hard and so hard for people to really see that. It wasn’t just me being a Palestinian. Yes, I am a Palestinian. I’m very personally invested in this issue, but it’s so much bigger than that. This is about us as people, as oppressed people globally and the haves versus the have-nots and trying to have a politics that works for the people, not just the power. And so I think Palestine to me, I think was very hard case to make for a long time of the ways in which what’s happening over there is connected to the fundamental operating model of our democracy to begin with.

And now look at where we’re at, the sort of canceling of APAC and the people have woken up to the fact that many of our politicians are actually bought out. What? This is actually a democracy. What does that mean? And in fact, the ones who are being paid to be in office are the ones that are actually working against our interests as people, that the money that’s going over there, wait a minute, that’s the same money that we could be using here on our education systems and our healthcare systems and infrastructure more broadly. What are we doing? What are we doing sending $8 billion I think to an oppressive military, international military around the world, but we don’t have money to feed the poor.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Our schools are crumbling. Yeah.

Leena Barakat:

A hundred percent. What is that? He’s out there writing checks of money. Do you have money we don’t have? So I think that’s what this has exposed. And this is where I have a tremendous amount of confidence. This is where I have tremendous amount of hope. This is where I feel like most energized in this moment because the wrap’s up. We see it as a people, we see it and we won’t unsee it now. And it means it has completely shifted the conversation and our bar and our standard for what we look for when we think about a democracy that works for us, when we think about budgets and systems that work for us. And all of us should be so grateful to the strength and the resilience and the beauty of the Palestinian people who have been so clear on this from the very get-go and for the gift that it has given us.

I don’t think this is about us freeing Palestine as much as how much they have freed us. And I hope that’s something that gets really seen and recognized one day.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, that was beautifully and powerfully put, Leena, and I appreciate you for saying it. And let’s end here by kind of zooming out and really putting people’s focus on what can be done right now and in the long term. What is Women Donors Network doing? What can people watching this do to change the outcome here?

Leena Barakat:

Right now in this moment, the most important thing you can do, the most important thing any person, any listener, anyone in the world, this is all of us, can do is to not give up your power. And what do I mean by that? Your hope, your sense of hope in this moment. Your disillusionment for the future. I understand the fear and the exhaustion of this moment of time that we are in, but we cannot lose sight of what is possible in this moment. I think the minute we lose sight of that, the minute we lose hope, the minute we shrink ourselves, the minute we shrink ourselves in the moment, we are giving up our power before we’ve even fought the fight together. And so that’s the second part of this, is don’t go it alone. Do not soak alone. Find your community, find your people, find your friends, find an organizing home.

Find an organizing home. If you have resources to move at any level, truly, I don’t care if it’s $5, I don’t care if it’s $500,000, whatever the range is, use it. Find a philanthropic home and find your political home right now. This is a time of the people. This is the time of the people. This is our time to rise up. There is more of us than there are of them. And they don’t want us to know that. They want us to forget that. And so I say, find your people, find the most accessible way to organize and activate and do something that really matters in this moment because this will pass. This system will crumble. I am certain of it. I am so certain of it. History tells us that it will. Where do we want to be when that happens? What do we want to say that we have done when that happens?

And how do we have a stake in what comes next? Because as I said, this is not just a moment of transition and fracture and crumble and chaos. It is, but it is also a builder’s moment. It is also a transformative time. So how do we think about what comes next? What is the new bar of a system that we want to demand and how do we hold the line on that until we go? And so that for me is really important that we are together. We are not alone. We don’t lose sight of the future.

And we take a reconstructionist approach to this moment. I am devastated, I am gutted, I am exhausted, but I am so energized and I’m so ready for what’s coming next. And that’s the energy I want us to all carry together as we do this. And so when I think about what are we doing at WDN, honestly, we continue doing what we do. We don’t stop. We go bigger and we go harder. And that, as I said, is continuing to not just move resources to movements, but actually doing what we can to help scale those resources. It’s challenging right now because of the way the funder retrenchment has had an impact on the field means you’re right, you said it earlier at the top, the dollars have spread so much more thin and so we need to get bigger. And so I want to invite folks to join WDN, to join Solidaire, to find a philanthropic home so where your small dollars can be combined and become big dollars that resource movements.

That’s what we do at WDAN. Tha’s what Solidaire is doing. So find a space for that. We’re going to continue to organize the sector because we can’t go at it alone. There’s no one organization that’s going to take this moment on. It’s going to be all of us. And so how we mobilize our voices and our influence in this moment, how we think about shaping policy in this particular moment, and then pushing our peers to continue to center movements and move with greater courage. So don’t be afraid, be a part of something that comes next. Go bigger, not smaller. That’s what I would say.