It Could Happen Here Weekly 205  ## Metadata - Author: [[It Could Happen Here]] - Full Title: It Could Happen Here Weekly 205 - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/ccb5cae5-34b7-4a7b-88a6-541b2cd53e56 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Property Rights Rooted In Violence** - Land ownership concentrated in elites enforces exclusion and extracts rent, causing homelessness and loss of public space. - Andrew Sage argues property rights arose from violence and are maintained by police and armies to protect landlords. Transcript: Andrew Sage The housing crisis, people are pretty familiar with the lack of affordability of housing, the way that housing has been speculated upon, you know, the way that more and more people Are finding it difficult to get something as simple as shelter. Yeah. And it's particularly generational, right? Yeah, yeah. James Stout Like, I don't generally love generational discourse, but it is a marked difference for our generation compared to the previous generation in terms of housing security. Andrew Sage The data bears it out in terms of the age at which people of previous generations were able to get housing versus, you know, what millennials and now Gen Z are dealing with where housing Is concerned. Yeah, absolutely. And then on top of that, we're also lacking a lot of public spaces, places to gather, places to reflect, to socialize, to game, to explore, to interact, to discuss. Land and housing and social spaces are really what's at the heart of human survival. You know, we speak of the hearth as in space where, you know, humans were gathering. But unfortunately, that ownership of that space has been concentrated in the hands of a few people, you know, rich elites and corporations, the state, and in some cases, still literal Aristocracies. Yeah. I'm sure you're very much familiar with that. James Stout Oh, yeah. Just thinking about the land I grew up on, for people who are not privy to Andrew and I talking before the show, I just spent some time with the Gwich'in people, like in the very north of Alaska there, just in the subarctic. And someone was asking me about how I related to my ancestral land. I was thinking about it. The village I grew up in was entirely owned by one family. They owned our house and every other house and my dad worked for them and so did almost everyone else who lived there. Like an extremely feudal relationship. Andrew Sage Yeah, that's unfortunately the experience of a lot of people through human history. The experience of landlessness or homelessness. Well, homelessness is relatively recent, all things considered, but paying extortionate rents, which a lot of people, unfortunately, would have experienced throughout that feudal Period into capitalism. James Stout Yeah, definitely. Andrew Sage But the thing is, for as long as humans have been humans, long before the states existed and long after the states existed, people are going to stay where they want to stay. They're going to be where they want to be. Right? And although the state could come up with all these laws and restrictions and property rights and all these things and criminalize a very natural human inclination, people are still Going to do it. Right? And that thing that people do is now known as squatting, right? But it wasn't always so chastised and criminalised with that terminology. Before it was just, you know, you find a piece of land, nobody else is living there. You go and you use that piece of land to survive. ([Time 0:03:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8ef19597-9731-46da-bb5f-bab7592e0787)) - **Postwar Squatting By British Veterans** - After WWII, British veterans squatted thousands of empty homes when housing stock was destroyed and government capacity lagged. - The state largely tolerated these squats because evicting veterans would have been a PR disaster. Transcript: Andrew Sage You know, after the second world war, it's no surprise anyone that Britain was going through it, right? Whole neighborhoods were flattened, housing stock was in ruins. And for the six years while the bombs were falling, not a single new home was built. So people took matters into their own hands. You know, across the country, families and veterans began to squat because they came home from the war and they had nowhere to live. In Brighton, a group of ex-servicemen calling themselves vigilantes, led by the legendary Harry Cowley, started cracking houses for families. The spirit of it eventually spread wildfire. Yeah. And abandoned army camps, which were once meant for demolition, soon became makeshift neighborhoods. By 1946, over 45,000 people were squatted in more than a thousand locations. And I mean, the government was concerned this could only lead to anarchy. But faced with tens of thousands of people who had self-rehoused, the state didn't really have any choice but to step back. You know, direct action solved an issue that their bureaucracy couldn't solve. And the PR of kicking out a bunch of veterans from homes was not a line they seemed willing to cross at that point in time. ([Time 0:17:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/44cc48d0-3532-421a-8b2d-54ab8f84f105)) - **Bangladeshi Squats Won Rehousing** - Bengali immigrants in 1970s London squatted derelict council blocks to house families blocked from official housing. - Organizers won rehousing after years of direct action despite racist violence. Transcript: Andrew Sage And the issue that single men couldn't get council housing unless they had a family. But they couldn't bring their families over into the UK without housing. So it was like a catch-22. They had all these rows of council flats sitting empty, rotten. And young men who wanted to bring their families over can't bring their families over, can't get housing, what are they going to do? They end up squatting, right? Organizers like Terry Fitzpatrick, working with groups like Race Today and later the Bengali Housing Action Group, opened up derelict blocks to Bengali families. Pelham House, for instance, which was slated for demolition, was transformed into homes for 300 people by the end of 1976. Over a thousand Bangladeshis ended up living in East End squats during that period. And eventually, through that taking that first step of direct action, they won. By the early 1980s, the council caved, rehoused the squatters locally, and they ended up getting to live right where they wanted to live. ([Time 0:19:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ed6cc6c7-a50b-4a11-8fd4-7f4f3336f6ca)) - **Squatting As A Seed For Commons** - Squatting can reveal property system cracks and seed collective use of land for farming and social spaces. - Andrew Sage frames equitable land access and rejecting absentee landlordism as central to future land use. Transcript: Andrew Sage You know, our resistance does not have to take on the same old forms of protest into the void, per se. There are things that we can do as ordinary people, whether we're black, whether we're gay, whether we're a Bangladeshi immigrant, a veteran. Just an ordinary person. You can also take on direct action to create homes, resist racism, build communities, and fight the state. James Stout Yeah. I think about a lot in Greece, right, where anarchists have squatted places that were built for like the era when people could come from Northern Europe to Southern Europe to spend their Money and then avoid the winter. And since, you know, general economic decline, that doesn't happen as much. Now people have squatted those hotels to allow migrants a dignified place to live right yeah that's a really beautiful project it's envisioning another world literally in the ruins Of the old world exactly i think it's a really beautiful thing that people do to to you know take that action to address not just to protest something but to say like the system which deprives People of even a safe place to live, even the dignity of being able to sleep in it under a roof at night. Like, we are going to take action that strikes at the roots of that to ensure that we give others the dignity that they deserve. I think that's really special. Andrew Sage Agreed. Agreed. And I mean, I don't want to romanticize squatting as, you know, just a easy way of life. It certainly is not. But to quote crime think, the lesson of history is that in times of housing deprivation, people squat the empties. The fact that this has been made illegal does not blind people to the empty buildings or to the use of squatting as a tactic. The Krakspeaker in Amsterdam East promotes the slogan, What is not allowed is still possible. Forgive my terrible Dutch. James Stout Yeah, mine's not much better. I like that slogan a lot like i think the issue of homelessness in the united states in particular is something that like i think about a lot because i travel a lot i remember sitting in A cafe in kurdistan and i'd just been i was outside i was just walking around uh and some people invited me to join their Domino's game. So I was playing Domino's, you know, like, practicing my terrible Kurdish. And these guys were asking me, like, is it true that, like, people, and, like, they were especially interested in, like, the veterans who had been U.S. Soldiers, like, sleep on the street in America? And I was like, yeah, that's a thing. And they were like, why? What's the deal with that? And the answer is that we have enough houses for everyone, but we've just treated them as a commodity to exchange, right? We've been told that people can't live there even though there's space for them to live. And even though it's actively hurting them living on the street, right? It's such a condemnation of the situation we're in as a society. Andrew Sage Indeed it is. What does the future look like? You know, none of us can really know. Yeah. But maybe we can sketch some outlines of how we can approach land use differently. We could look to the past and common traditions of the past as inspiration for what might return. And we could look to our own imagination of what the future can look like as we refuse domination. You know, we can squat, of course, to show the cracks in this concept of property. You know, we can collectivize and collectively organize spaces for farming or production. You know, we can really do any number of things. I think the guiding thread, though, has to be equity. You know, it has to be recognition that nobody has a right to land they don't use. That absentee landlordism is something utterly absurd and can be rejected outright. ([Time 0:28:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/420ea889-e3cd-4e1e-8bf6-9674871f1a08)) - **Steel Tariffs Reflect Systemic Overcapacity** - Steel tariffs symbolize broader trade politics and are driven by structural overcapacity, not just one country's fault. - Mia Wong links steel tariffs to global production imbalances and domestic political pressures. Transcript: Mia Wong We have tariff numbers on China that I'm not even going to bother to actually record right now, because by the time this goes out, the numbers will probably be different. There are supposed to be major negotiations underway between Trump and the Chinese government to attempt to come to yet another trade agreement and stave off yet another round of 100% Tariffs. Now, if you want to follow the sort of blow by blow of what exactly is going on, I'm going to just sort of refer you to my section tariff talk on executive disorder. However, comma, we need to take a deeper look at what structurally is going on in the global economy that is resulting in the demand for tariffs in the first place. And I think the place to go, if that's the thing that you're trying to figure out, and we've talked about the sort of ideological aspects of this in other episodes, we've talked about The ways that the sort of politics of fascism, the politics of anti-Semitism, the politics of masculinity lead people towards these extremely ultra-nationalist policies that are Specifically supposed to sort of protect the like domestic blood and soil national industry and are supposed to protect material goods over services. But there are things that are happening structurally in the economy that make it such that people would consider things like the tariffs that have been happening under this regime As a solution to things that are kind of structural problems of the economy. Specifically, and this is what we're going to be focusing on today, overcapacity and steel. Now, some of you may be asking, Mia, why are we talking about steel overcapacity? And I think there's a few important notes here. One, steel is in some ways emblematic of American tariff policy. It is, I guess you would call it the most material of the tariffs in the sense that it's the one where there's the most actual direct sort of material forces and direct lobbying groups Asking for these specific tariffs. The American steel industry has been lobbying to some extent for some measures kind of like this. Steel is also one of the industries where as tariff rates have fluctuated and got up and down and whole waves of like Liberation Day tariffs got put into place and then removed and some Of them got put back into place a little bit. The steel tariffs were set at 50% and they've stayed at 50% since they were set, basically. There's been a little bit of variation sort of before the 50% number was arrived at, but the steel tariffs have been one of the most stable tariffs. And the reason why it's been this stable, if people can think back all the way to 2018, which I know that was a long time ago, but there was a miniature trade war between the U.S. And China in 2018, and significant portions of it were focused on Chinese steel production specifically. And, you know, this is one of the sort of fights that was had out. Nothing really structurally changed much from those. There was kind of a back and forth and then both sides kind of pulled back. But, comma, that's not happening this time. And what's interesting, and the reason that I'm specifically talking about steel here, is that it's now not just Trump that is attempting to institute large-scale tariffs on steel. The European Commission for the EU has released a proposal to double tariffs on imported steel, up to 50%, which is matched in the U.S., and also reduce the amount of steel that could Be imported into the EU without paying any tariffs at all. And this is actually massive, because is an example of the EU effectively following U.S. Trade policy for very, very similar reasons as the U.S. And if we can get to the bottom of what is going on here, and I promise we will, and I promise this will go towards something that is explaining really, truly the macro dynamics of the entire Global economy and why it's fucked. If we can actually trace out what's going on with these steel tariffs, we can do that. So let's talk about steel overcapacity. Overcapacity as a concept is sort of convoluted. You know, you have to sort of ask the question, what is the quote-unquote correct amount of steel? Because overcapacity, you know, implies that there's capacity to produce steel over the amount that should be produced. So, okay, how do you figure how much steel should be produced? Ech, very nebulous. It's also very difficult to measure because, okay, we're going to try to measure steel overcapacity. ([Time 0:57:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6f415ae0-3bbd-4198-86a5-ac29114d4ca9)) - **Local Incentives Fuel Overproduction** - Local cadre incentives and GDP-focused evaluations help explain China's excess steel production. - Officials produce steel to hit targets, inflating capacity beyond genuine market demand. Transcript: Mia Wong So, okay, something that's very important to understand about the structure of the CCP is that Chinese government institutions are sort of run by these cadres, right? And so if you are, for example, I don't know, you are the mayor of a mid-sized city, right? You get performance evaluations. And those sort of yearly performance evaluations, sometimes they're less frequent than that, but those performance evaluations rank you at sort of how good you're doing your job. And obviously there's political maneuvering here too, but if you do a good job of hitting your targets, this is your path to advance upwards in the party and be moved from, you know, like Sort of running a small city to like being brought into cadre in larger cities and, you know, moving your way up the party, moving to national positions. These evaluations are extremely important. You can also get sort of busted down if your evaluations suck. Again, there's also like politics here too, but these evaluations actually do matter. And one of the issues with these evaluations, and these are also policymaking implementation tools, right? You know, the social government can decide what kinds of policies they want to pursue, and then they can use these cadre evaluations to make people at the sort of local level who are usually Semi-autonomous in ways that I think is not very well understood in the West. These cadre evaluations are ways to try to ensure that Chinese sort of local and provincial government policy kind of aligns with National Party policy. And the weighting on these examinations is such that it has very very weird effects and what i'm specifically talking about here is that gdp numbers are very very important to these Cadre evaluations and it matters that it's specifically gross domestic product because gdp is a very weird number. And there's a lot of stuff you can do to sort of juice GDP numbers that aren't really necessarily beneficial to an economy. So you can have a bunch of firms that are basically unprofitable or doing something that's like not particularly economically or socially useful and that can still boost GDP numbers And one of the things that happens with this is that you can boost GDP numbers by making a shit ton of steel that nobody actually really wants or uses and because of the priority that's Set on GDP numbers specifically and there's also a whole bunch of these sort of weird financial games that you can play that's also played a major role in the way the Chinese housing bubble Has played out and the way that the government has been unwilling to sort of, you know, and when I say the government here, I mean both the national government and also sort of these lower Level governments have been unwilling to sort of let a bunch of debt bubbles that they've accumulated pop because those things prop up GDP numbers. And the incentive on the local level is to keep these numbers up. This used to actually be one of the things that people would talk about when they talked about Chinese steel overcapacity. But it's complicated. Like you can't very, very easily explain this to, you know, like a right-wing Congress person and have them go, oh yeah, right, this is unfair to the American market. And so it kind of has like fallen out of favor and sort of like the explanation to steel overcapacity you see in places like the New York Times. But I actually think this is one the things that does to some extent cause Chinese steal overcapacity. ([Time 1:08:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e6a795f2-7744-42dc-9794-f40b6d28c9e9)) - **Overcapacity And Underconsumption Are Linked** - Overcapacity is global and tied to capitalism's tendency toward automation and underconsumption. - Endnotes' 'double construction' links wages, production, and systemic collapse in demand. Transcript: Mia Wong And the problem here is that overcapacity and overcapacity in steel is not just a Chinese phenomenon. It is a global phenomenon. It has been a global phenomenon for a long time. It is largely a product of the fact that we do not live in a global economy that can actually support the amount of production capacity that exists in the world. This has been a problem really since the 70s and arguably even since the 60s, where as countries rebuilt from World War II and as some sort of developments in global capital that we're Going to be sort of like talking about soon happens, the product of all of this is that production has, and this is kind of the thing that the sort of fascist right kind of intuitively understands, Production has become zero-sum, right? It's very difficult to increase production in one country without having it, you know, affect production in other countries. There isn't enough demand in the market to sort of, like, fuel all of these things. So why is there not enough demand to fuel the amount of supply that would be necessary to make there not be overcapacity? The answer to this in sort of Marxian theory is that, as they sort of put it, overproduction and underconsumption are doubly constructed. I'm going to read a quote from Endnotes, Volume 2, and then we're going to explain a little bit what that means. The wage allocates workers to production and at the same time allocates the product to workers. So what that means is that underconsumption and overproduction are in effect the same thing, right? Because the way that we allocate workers to what thing they're going to do and at the same time allocate products to those workers is the wage, which is one thing. So overproduction and underconsumption are the same thing, right? And they're caused by the same structural elements of the wage relation. Now, this means that the Chinese capacity crisis is actually part of a larger crisis, right? You know, the thing about the double construction, you know, of overcapacity and underconsumption, right? The fact that they are really the two thing that's unified in the fact that, like, your wage allocates what kind of production you're doing and what you can consume. The fact that both those things combined are realized in this sort of secular crisis in what's called Marx's absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. So what the fuck is that? The short version is over time in capitalist economies, there's supposed to be an increase of what's called the organic composition of capital. Basically, the organic composition of capital is a way to measure how much in the labor process is like fixed capital to variable capital. So it's like how much factory is there relative to the amount of worker there is. And Marx's thesis, which has generally been borne out, although we'll talk a little bit about that more later, is that this composition is going to increase. And as it increases, accumulation also needs to increase in order to maintain employment levels. This is sort of accomplished by things like automation, which reduces the size of the labor force. And thus, to quote end notes again, as accumulation proceeds, a growing super abundance of goods lowers the rate of profit and heightens competition across lines, compelling all Capitalists to, as Mark said, economize on labor. So basically what this means is like as capital gets turned into more capital and larger amounts of capital, this is the accumulation process. As this continues, right, you get this massive sort of increase in the amount of goods that are being produced. Eventually, that lowers the rate of profit in a sector. And eventually, what that does is, you know, in order to sort of economize on labor, capital increases the amount of automation, reduces the amount of people that they need in the labor Process. You know, this is what's generally known as automation and the sort of crisis of people getting kicked out of their jobs because of it. As this process is sort of generalized across sectoral lines, across different parts of the economy, the relative demand for labor decreases and workers are spit out of the wage relation, Which is the fancy Marxist way to say they become structurally unemployed. And, you know, the thing that happens when you get kicked out of the capitalist wage relation is you get kicked into informal labor and slums, which, you know, decreases demand and increase Overproduction at the same time overcapacity is skyrocketing, right? Because you have increasing numbers of people who have spat out the formal economy, who no longer have access to regular wages. The wages they get in the informal economy are less than the ones they would get in the formal economy. And as we were saying, right, access to like the wage both determines production and consumption. So if you lose access to the wage, right, and there's still more stuff being produced because of automation levels, what you get is a massive skyrocketing double increase in overproduction And underconsumption, right? Because there's just not enough money to fucking buy the stuff. And the result of this is immiseration. Everything gets fucking worse. This sort of used to be an academic argument. It is no longer an academic argument. It is just the terrain on which economic policy unfolds. ([Time 1:17:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6944e783-db9a-41f0-ba83-39dfbc482f95)) - **Use Comment Periods To Register Opposition** - Submit public comments to CBP during the Otay Mountain wall proposal to record environmental and cultural harms. - Eric Meza urges communities to email CBP and document sacred sites, wildlife impacts, and road expansions. Transcript: Eric Meza Yeah, well, hi, everybody. So happy to be here and not so happy to be sharing this news. But so what the announcement was recently by the Border Patrol, especially on the San Diego area, is the announcement of the approximately 9.7 miles of new border barrier system. And on top of that, uh, over 51 miles of what they call now system attributes. Yeah. And this is going to have a huge impact on the area. Uh, this is going to be, uh, about 2.9 miles west of the Tecate port of entry, going through an area that it is very remote, a mountain region. And some people here in this are more familiar than I am. I've actually never been, but I've been talking to some of the local organizations that do humanitarian aid in the region. And I know that Tecate Peak is in that area. And then you start going west into these beautiful mountains that are also the birthplace of the Tijuana River. That's exactly the area where it's going to go. So right now, CBP is accepting comments and asking people in the community what kind of concerns do they have? Concerns in regards of the environmental impacts of a project like this, what kind of social and economical impacts. So they open up this section on their website with an email address where people can share some of these concerns. As you mentioned, I'm part of an environmental organization, but we also have all kinds of concerns for a project like this, including the border barrier and the system attributes, Which are very poorly described of what they mean. Is the increase of lighting infrastructure, surveillance equipment, and new roads for access for border patrol vehicles. Yeah. So one of the things that we're going to expect that we have seen in other areas is more blasting through the mountain, especially on areas where the mountain is so uneven, the terrain, There is a lot of heavy machinery. It has to come into those places to start bulldozing, to level the terrain so they can start building this border wall. So we can expect some of that. And with that come a lot of issues because there is going to be the need to start drilling wells at the border to extract this water for mixing the concrete for the foundation if there was Any road out there they're going to probably widen the road two or three times to allow this having machinery to access these remote areas and this is just going to be the beginning uh Just setting up the panels but whenever you go to these places and start disturbing the native soil, you can expect all kinds of consequences in regards to invasive species of plants. You can also expect some flooding and removal of native vegetation. In some cases, there are some species that are rare in the area. Having these impacts can be long-lasting for them to be able to recover if they're able to do so. The area on the south side of the border is also an area where animals need to be moving back and forth. So species like the native mule deer, a colony that lives there, there is a mountain lion and other species of mammals. So pretty much everything that is four inches wide, that it's not going to be able to make it through that border wall. So yeah, we're just raising these concerns and sharing with the community. So they're able to also as well send an email to CBP, Customs and Border Patrol, and express these concerns. And also to remember that these areas have been sacred sites for the indigenous communities since time immemorial. ([Time 1:34:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e26f7970-8043-4f7e-90aa-477da3b94657)) - **Walls Push People Into Deadly Corridors** - Doubling border walls pushes migration into remote corridors, increasing deaths and fragmenting wildlife migration routes. - Eric Meza warns new roads and lighting permanently damage remote ecosystems and sacred indigenous sites. Transcript: Eric Meza That's correct, James. So exactly what you said. People in San Diego and like the border in Otay, you already have that double wall. So, you know, like having this hyper militarized area and how that is going to expand. And the consequences of that is, as you mentioned, you push people out further, more remote areas. And two things happen by doing that. First and most important, more people die. But also remember that these areas, like these remote areas, were also like semi-pristine wildlife environments that you never had humans moving through before. Now, as people have been pushed through these remote areas, you have this human traffic and not only migrants moving through, but you also have the border patrol chasing these migrants. And now you have border patrol wanting to build new roads to these wilderness areas. And all of this just keeps building up into what's already a very fragmented landscape. So by adding all these quote-unquote system attributes, because you're pushing and pushing people further and building these double walls, it's just going to end the last of the remaining Wildlife remote migration corridors as well. ([Time 1:44:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3e0bd2eb-97f8-43dc-af7f-b3af8354463f)) - **Mobilize Locally With Creative Direct Action** - Organize locally with art, performance, and decentralized actions to raise attention and protect valleys like San Rafael. - Eric Meza recommends grassroots coalitions and inviting politicians and tribes to amplify opposition. Transcript: Eric Meza After that, there is a lot of self-organized grassroots efforts on for border resistance, you know, and that encompasses humanitarian aid groups, environmental groups. And we are also organizing nowadays here in Arizona to do some direct action, try to show up to the San Rafael Valley, which is where the border construction is going, and start, like, Raising some national attention to this issue, trying to invite our politicians, invite our native communities to speak out, and using different methods such as art, performance, Bring up some different strategies together. ([Time 1:49:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/98ae67e2-ebee-480e-9e84-456fbc4f753f)) - **SNAP Shutdown Risks Mass Food Crises** - SNAP cuts during the shutdown risk immediate mass food insecurity and potential unrest if benefits stop. - Garrison Davis and Mia Wong stress community preparedness and mutual aid to fill government gaps. Transcript: Garrison Davis I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Ejaculator-in Jesus Christ. Wow. Garrison. Robert Evans Garrison. That's much worse. You made it way worse. How many of those videos have you not watched, Garrison? I think we're all pretty behind on the required trainings. Garrison Davis My labor conditions are intolerable. Robert Evans, James Stout, and Mia Wong, this episode we are covering the week of October 15th to October 22nd, and a little bit of the week before, because we were off in honor of the government Robert Evans Shutdown we ourselves took a week off because the CIA stopped paying us that's right that's right I've always considered us a branch of the U.S. Government you know yeah you and half of the anime people on Twitter Robert Evans We're back. Garrison Davis I don't know. It feels a little bit weird to be doing this White House Weekly episode, knowing that there's actually less White House than usual. There is. Trump has begun demolishing the East Wing of the White House to build a privately funded $250 million ballroom. Uh-huh. And I think we should all have a moment of silence for the East Wing. Robert Evans Oh, I was going to say a moment of celebration, because now James's people can finally shake hands with the United States government in destroying large portions of the White House. James Stout Yeah. I saw it was a Volvo excavator, too, so we also got these Swedes on board, I guess. Sure. Couldn't even find an American excavator. Sad. We don't make things in this country anymore. Garrison Davis Yeah, that's because we're still waiting for the tariffs to get fully enacted. Yeah, once we get that Swedish tariff on. We are almost four weeks now into the government shutdown, and there's not really a clear end in sight. And SNAP benefits, food stamps, are set to run out in a little over a week on November 1st. Mia, did you want to say something on this? Mia Wong Yeah, so we've been seeing sort of tech start to go out to people who are on food assistance in various states. There's one circulating from Minnesota that is saying that the food part of SNAP benefits are going to shut down in a few days on November 1st when the funding shuts down. This is a critical lifeline for food for an extremely large number of people. And this is also coming in a period where food banks are already being stressed by just the other cuts to SNAP and other food assistance programs that have already taken place. So yeah, we're coming to a very, very critical moment in terms of wide-scale food insecurity in this country for a whole bunch of the most vulnerable people in the country. And yeah, this is a good moment for if you have actual access to food, which is a very, very bleak thing to be saying, but, you know, something is going to have to try to pick up the slack or A bunch of people aren't going to eat. Right. And that's probably going to have to be us because it's sure as fuck not going to be the government. Robert Evans Yeah. Well, yeah, it's just the people's need to eat is inelastic. James Stout Yeah, yeah, yeah. Robert Evans Just to put some numbers on it like snap in 24 was 41.7 million people which is about 12 percent of the u.s population yeah this is a massive cliff i mean it's particularly bad in certain States for example oregon you know where i live is set to lose about three quarters of a million people's SNAP benefits. There are like four million people in the state. Yep. Yep. Mia Wong And it's also like those people are also disproportionately non-white and disproportionately queer and very disproportionately trans. Yeah, and this is something that if straight up the shutdown continues and we don't see SNAP benefits payout, this could also be a major source of instability because, you know, the Thing that happens very quickly when suddenly 40 million people don't have food is bread riots. What is going to happen with that is deeply unclear. But yeah, we are heading into an extremely bleak time. Robert Evans If you're looking at predictors of violent instability in countries, mass starvation is about top of the list. Yeah, yeah. Mia Wong Yep. Particularly bread riots usually are, in sort of the modern era, happens with two or three hundred percent increases in food prices, usually as a result of sort of IMS structural adjustments But if there was going to be another one this would be it yeah yeah ([Time 2:10:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d445e27c-9eb4-4867-8716-9ef8f870a54f)) - **Fact-Check: ICE Purchases Misreported** - ICE bought more weapons and crowd-control gear, but claims of guided missiles and chemical warheads were reporting errors. - James Stout fact-checked contracts showing 'guided missile' PSC codes often cover distraction devices and OC spray. Transcript: Robert Evans Famously, their budget is increased by something like 700 percent. A huge amount of that's being spent on, you know, bonuses in order to get people to join cash payments and whatnot, as well as retention bonuses. But a lot more of it's being spent on weapons. And right now, the number one thing I'm seeing people freak out about is the supposed idea from these documents that ICE is purchasing guided missiles and chemical weapons. I have heard people say this is ICE, which is obviously Trump's SS, you know, making their own Waffen SS, which were the armed units of the SS. I'm seeing a lot of shit like this spread. And as James is going to tell you, none of that's true. Yeah. I mean, the fact that ICE has a massive increase in budget and is buying a shitload of weapons is true, but they're not guided missiles. ICE doesn't have heat guided missiles? James Stout Yeah, we're not getting a death's head ice unit. Garrison Davis Come on. At the next Canal Street ice raid, they're going to be launching heat-seeking missiles into Chinatown. Robert Evans I'm not saying this isn't a problem, but it's not what people are saying it is. James Stout Yeah, sorry, James. All right. The source of its claim is a substack page called Popular Information, run by a guy called Judd Legum. And he has claimed in this piece, I'm just going to quote, I have purchased, quote, chemical weapons, and quote, guided missile, warheads and explosive components. I guess the main thrust of the piece was looking at the fact that ICE spent $9 million on Geisley AR pattern rifles. Border Patrol spent more than twice that. He appears to have missed that in his reporting. This reporting is extremely dishonest, to put it mildly. It's either deliberately misleading or massively incompetent. The piece in question doesn't link to the individual contracts, which are like on the face of its bad form, right? If you're going to be talking about contracts, your contracts are in the public domain, just link to them. The piece doesn't do that i went on usaspending.gov and i filtered by contracts that have been awarded by ice i gave a date range uh the date range that pertains to the things being discussed In the article uh and then i filtered by the product or service code for chemical weapons and guided missile warheads right two different product or service codes product or service Codes are like these these four digit codes that exist in federal procurement right to put things into buckets basically and i found the contracts the contract very clearly states The uh the guided missile quote unquote contract the contract with the guided missile product or service code very clearly states it is for multiple distraction devices yeah it's A contract with a company called quantico tactical i did call them yesterday something that again any competent reporter should do before publishing a piece uh that does not appear To have been done by the substat guy they gave me an email i sent an email uh more than 24 hours ago requesting comment or clarification i didn't receive a response at the time of us going To press. If I hear back from them before we release this, I will let you all know. Robert Evans The chemical weapons, it was O.C. Spray. It was pepper spray. Right. And a distraction device, by the way, folks, this is something like a sonic grenade, which sounds crazy, but it's a grenade that makes a loud noise to distract people. It's a banger. A flashbang is also a distraction device when used the way that they use in riots. You know, it's a little bit of a different thing when you're using one to like breach bang and clear a door or something. But like when you're throwing a flashbang at a riot, it's a distraction device because the goal is you've got a bunch of people moving towards an area you want to stop them from. You distract them by an explosion. Yeah, and it's distracting. Yeah. Mia Wong It's also, and this is, you know, one of the frustrating elements about this is that ICE has been using a whole bunch of these to blow down people's doors. Yeah. And it's really horrible. These are problems. It's problems that they're buying all this. And no one is talking about it because everyone's focused on this. Robert Evans When James put up their initial research just on Blue Sky and Twitter, I shared it and people were like, it's still a problem they've got that they're getting all buying all these new Weapons. Do you not care about? Yes, I care about that. You're not talking about that. Yeah, we care about the truth. You're talking about a fantasy. James Stout And like, it is bad that ice has flashbangs and pepper spray, right? ([Time 2:17:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/28990ab1-de2d-4a64-ad24-7eb76e86324c)) - **Antifa Panic Used To Justify Surveillance** - Right-wing influencers met at the White House to push 'Antifa' narratives and hand evidence to authorities for crackdowns. - Robert Evans warns organizers to assume public events will be recorded and weaponized politically. Transcript: Robert Evans The fact that these idiots are getting to speak this close to power about their theory which is basically that everyone they don't like or who has said anything they don't like is part Of a terrorist organization and should be put in prison or executed like that's the gist of what all of the people at that round table believe a whole bunch of like you know post-millennial Garrison Davis People and No, that whole genre of like, you know, right-wing Antifa journalist Twitter. Robert Evans It's pseudo-journalistic. Yes. Everyone I don't like equals terrorist. Yes. So that's really worrisome. That as a result of stuff like this, in case you somehow have not been aware of this, we're going to be seeing a massive ramp up in, you know, not just attempts at prosecution, but at attempts To like infiltrate and get gotcha footage and audio of different left wing and anarchist groups that are going to be used as pretexts for further crackdowns. I would say it's just a time to be aware of that and be aware of the fact that anytime you are speaking or at a public event where other people are speaking, you should assume that that's Being recorded and that people will be pulling out the worst parts they can from it and trying to use that to destroy people's lives. And I bring that up because there's been a couple of that just really broke today, some potentially pretty high profile examples of this. One of them is that at a panel for Firestorm Books, they had a speaker, a guy named Eric King, who was convicted of a firebombing. He's a left-wing activist. He spent almost 10 years in prison, had a horrific time in prison. I mean, just abused by the system in some of the worst ways possible, and is finally out. And Eric did a talk at Firestorm Books, and he made basically his statement that activists need to hurt them where it counts, saying we can force them to shut the fuck up when it hurts their Wallet enough, or you can find other ways to hurt them. Now, that's not saying anything inherently illegal. Again, he starts it by saying we can force them to shut up when it hurts their wallet enough. That's talking about like boycotts and stuff. But the phrase other ways to hurt them is vague enough that it's pretty easy for these guys to cut stuff out. And I'm looking at a post by a quote-unquote investigated analyst for the Manhattan Institute, Stu Smith, who's framing this as known Antifa firebomber calls for escalation. And again, that's not necessarily an accurate look at what Eric was saying, but it's easy to pull stuff out like this from something What appears to have been a fairly open Zoom call that, You know, is not hard for someone to get into and record and pull something out of to try and make the case that someone like Eric should be back in prison or that Firestorm Books is a party, You know, providing material support to an extremist organization. And what I'm not trying to do is say like, and so people should not talk and gather in public because they're going to be doing this. But you need to be aware that anything said at something like this that's in any way open, and even if you try to make it kind of more closed than this, they will try to get people in. This is something that is increasingly going to happen. And so people just need to be – you can't just kind of hope that they're not paying attention. You have to be aware of the fact that they're out there and they're going to be trying to infiltrate any sort of thing like this they can to get pretexts for further crackdowns. ([Time 2:41:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2b637922-b1fc-4970-9624-0898bdc4605a)) - **Alaska Villages Hit By Climate Disaster** - Alaska Native villages became climate refugees after a typhoon remnant destroyed homes and infrastructure ahead of winter. - James Stout highlights federal neglect and canceled flood protections worsening the disaster. Transcript: James Stout Um talking about something not so great in alaska uh but we normally do a fundraiser at the end so i wanted to put this here for those of you who are not aware because this has really got uh Not enough coverage in my opinion uh a massive storm in fact the remnants of a typhoon slammed into the west coast of Alaska, leaving more than a thousand people without shelter along The Yukon-Koskokwim River. These are Alaska native villages, and their inhabitants are now climate refugees. At the very start of winter, right, in the coldest place in the United States. These villages are very remote. I spent some time earlier this year in Alaska Native Village, not here in the interior, just in the Gwich'in territories. But these guys are really only accessible by small planes or by boats, which will make their recovery even harder. They're people who have lived by the ocean or by the river for as long as people have lived in the Americas, tens of thousands of years. A few months ago, the Trump EPA cancelled a $20 million ground for flood protection, which would have covered Kipnuk, one of these villages. Kipnuk now functionally doesn't exist. Houses were torn off their foundations. There are multiple videos of people's whole houses floating away. It's not just an instance of neglect or even a single failure here. It's an example of decades of ignoring the voices of indigenous people, especially Alaska natives, when they tell us that the climate crisis is real and that it's already here. When the media looks at climate change uh they tend to want to look at data they can measure in terms of numbers right according to the model of western science but i would argue that the Experience of indigenous people who have lived on the land for as long as human beings have lived anywhere on this continent and have watched the changes and seen this disaster unfold. It should be a warning to all of us that the climate crisis is already here. I reached out to some Alaska native friends to ask where to donate and they shared a page which will be in the show notes of the show. So if you're able to help, I think that's a very important thing to do. ([Time 3:10:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/37a95a73-11cc-4c1a-9284-2b56a10755d4))