It Could Happen Here Weekly 253

0:01 Call zone media.

0:03 Hey, everybody.

0:04 Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

0:29 We live now in a world defined by the near total victory of the capitalist class. Their wildest fantasies are inflicted upon us all. They burn the earth we live on and poison the air we breathe to create their hideous mechanical god. While the human personification of the housing bubble orders wars and ethnic cleansings from his garish golden palace.

0:56 An age in which the words the genocide cannot unreasonably be answered with the question which one demands an explanation. And here I have a partial one. The capitalists, the bourgeoisie, the people who make their money by owning things and stealing the labor of those who work for them have been allowed to rule the world. To ask how this came to be is to ask another question. How did the greatest enemy of the international workers' movement come to be so totally destroyed? This is It Could Happen Here.

1:42 I'm your host, Mio Wong, and that, today, is our task. To chart, at least in part, the decline and fall of the international workers' movement. It is easy to forget that the workers' movement once seemed to be the inevitable protagonists of history. As the anthropologist David Graeber remarks, the ruling class in Chicago in the late 1800s were so sure of the coming revolution, they built their mansions on a road to the nearest military base. That revolution, obviously, never came. So what, precisely, went so wrong? To answer this question, We follow the unraveling of two threads that together wove the fabric of the workers' movement. The first thread is that of assembly. Before anything could be accomplished,

2:40 it was necessary to create the image of, and then the organized reality of, the collective worker. It was necessary to assemble the movement, to gather the working class together from among its thousand nations and thousand tongues, and forge an identity and then a movement that could change the state of things. This alone was a Herculean task. As the journal Endnotes points out, class was perhaps the least immediate form of collective identification. Sure, class could be argued to exist on an objective sociological level, defined by one's relationship to the means of production. But it does not cause people... to speak the same language. In this way, it was easier to adopt other identities, nationality, race, gender,

3:35 even more localized ethnic backgrounds, than it was to believe oneself to be part of a single united working class. And so this became a great task of the workers' movement, to create an identity capable of displacing or at least joining, other forms of identification, which would then allow collective action.

4:00 But once this identity existed, the movement still had to act. And here arose the second problem. What was the workers' movement to do once it actually assembled? And this is no simple question. It is, in fact, one of the questions by which the movement came to be divided against itself. And once that division happened, it became easier to attack the material basis of the formation of the movement itself, to destroy the conditions that made the first phase of assembling the collective worker possible. And that is how they did it, how the ruling class maintained its power even with vast swaths of the world nominally arrayed against them.

4:46 They first helped the workers' movement divide itself and began to exterminate each other, And then, in the world that conflict created, they, and the process and unfolding of capitalist history itself, began to unravel the movement at its core, to destroy its ability to form the collective identity necessary to even make those mistakes in the first place. So let us begin then, perhaps counterintuitively, with action, for it was here that the workers' movement first began to unravel.

5:23 This unraveling began, perhaps paradoxically, in what seemed to be the moment of their great triumph. By the end of the 1800s, the movement had, in certain places, accomplished the seemingly impossible. They had, in fact, managed to assemble, in various forms, a great collective worker. It was an age of confidence, full of the certainty of inevitable, historically ordained victory.

5:53 of a sense that history inexorably unfolded towards the victory of the working class. Even in the wake of its defeat in the crushing of the Paris Commune, it had assembled veritable states within a state in places like Germany, with the great social democratic parties and emerging unions, built a massive network of cooperative mutual aid. These institutions seemed to be the shell of the new world being birthed in the ashes of the old. And that world seemed to hold great promise. It was a world in which workers administered the schools and daycares and welfare programs themselves, in which they made decisions collectively and democratically. But the movement quickly faced a series of questions of what fundamentally

6:47 it was going to be. That question Who should actually control the means of production? And moreover, what does control actually mean would haunt the movement for its entire history? This question, as we have somewhat already stated, was really two questions. The first, who should legally and socially own the means of production? Which is to say the tools, the factories, everything used to produce things. And thus, who should be able to divide the results of that production?

7:25 Should the capitalist own the factories and divide its proceeds how he sees fit? Should the state own the factory and do likewise? Should the workers own the factory directly? Should ownership itself be abolished? This is the classical form of what was known in the 1800s as the social question. It is the conflict that is passed down through the generations as the great conflict between capitalism and socialism. The question of who would own the means of production. But there was always another conflict lurking just beneath the surface.

8:05 How would production actually be organized? Who was making the decisions about how a paper mill is run? Are those decisions made by a boss? or realistically a series of bosses, but we are operating here in a series of abstractions. Is it a boss who answers to the capitalist owner of the company? Is it a different boss who answers to the state? Would workers make decisions collectively? And if so, how?

8:34 Would they elect their own bosses? Would they vote on their decisions together? Would they begin to form consensus about what should be done and how? This question is significantly less explored, but is perhaps just as crucial as the first. It is not hard to tell why this question is ignored. Liberal democratic capitalists, fascists, social democrats, and Bolsheviks alike would come to the same conclusion. One man rule in the factory.

9:08 The boss tells you what to do, and you shut up and listen. This was no mere rhetoric. The social democratic parties went to war with their own bases, ripping decision-making power on the Schottflur itself away from their unions, and attempting to de-skill those workers, giving that power to managers in the name of efficiency and better building a collective worker. Endnotes has an account of the German Metalworkers Union doing this precisely to their own metalworkers. but it was a broad and general process. The Bolsheviks, who had once come to power under the slogan, and I cannot emphasize this enough, quote, all power to the Soviets, that is to say, all power to the workers' councils, would,

9:58 one year after their reformation, be singing a rather different tune. Here, as I have quoted before in this show, is one with Vladimir Lenin, writing in Pravda a few months after the October Revolution, in a piece called The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government. Quote, Unquestioning submission to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of labor processes that are based on large-scale machine industry. Today, the revolution demands in the interest of socialism that the masses unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of the labor process.

10:39 Quote-unquote Soviet rule in the factories, then, would be the same as capitalist, fascist, or social democratic rule. It would be unquestioning submission to a single will of the leaders of the labor process. Thus, the nominally socialist state itself would come to be comprised of a nightmare combination of forwardism, dictatorship, and bureaucracy. These decisions in the shop floor had social consequences as well. Bureaucracy and dictatorship would characterize all aspects of life in such societies. The welfare state, whether implemented by the Soviets or the Social Democrats, would be carried out not by the democratic organization of workers, but by the centralized bureaucratic state. The bureaucratic welfare state, as the

11:34 anthropologist David Graeber points out in his book The Utopia of Rules, was perhaps first implemented by arch-conservative Otto von Bismarck as a very explicit way to buy off the working class. Bismarck himself said of his efforts, quote, My idea was to bribe the working class, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare.

12:03 This bureaucracy, the state that Bismarck produced in order to crush the workers' movement, increasingly became synonymous with socialism itself. Marx had infamously foretold, that it would be the bourgeoisie who produced their own gravediggers. In reality, it was the workers' movement that worked tirelessly to produce their own destruction. The war of one-man rule in the factory, the clash between democracy and dictatorship on the shop floor, would become a key element of destroying the identity of the class itself.

12:40 And it is to this identity that we need now turn. What is a worker? What was the workers' movement itself? This, after the break. So let us now turn to the mythical collective worker. This was the workers' movement's interpretation of what Marx described as the class for itself. For Marx, the class existed, so to speak, in two forms. In itself, which is to say that there were, objectively in the world, a class of people whose survival was dependent on selling their own labor. That was the class in itself. But to become the class for itself, that class would have to realize this. It would have to create an identity.

13:43 Although Marx would never have put it in this terms, as Endnooth points out, It would have to create a class that was capable of recognizing that it was, in fact, a class, and then begin to act in its own interests, which, for Marx, although increasingly not for his successors, was to abolish the class system itself. But what did this identity, once it came to be forged, actually look like? From the journal I'd notes, quote, Supporting workers' claims to respectability was a vision of their destiny, with five tenets. 1.

14:23 Workers were building a new world with their own hands. 2. In this new world, workers were the only social group that was expanding, whereas all other groups were contracting, including the bourgeoisie. 3. Workers were not only becoming the majority of the population, they were also becoming a compact mass.

14:44 The collective worker, who was being drilled in the factory to act in concert with the machines. 4. They were thus the only group capable of managing the new world in accordance with its innermost logic. Neither a hierarchy of order-givers and order-takers, nor the irrationality of market fluctuations, but rather an even more finely-grained division of labor. 5. Workers were proving this vision to be true, since the class was realizing— what it was in a conquest of power, the achievement of which would make it possible to abolish class society and thus bring man's prehistory to a close.

15:29 These beliefs were at the core of the new identity of the collective worker, a worker being forged every day in the factories, drilled to work together by their constant labor on the assembly line. They were the builders of the new world, and they were its inheritors. But this identity, and the beliefs underlying it, just as all others, had to be constructed, and it had to be assiduously maintained.

16:01 If the underlying assumptions beneath it proved to be untrue or were challenged by other revelations, everything would begin to fall apart. and even during its opening phases during the nominal triumph of the movement. That identity was already being undermined. From Endnotes again, quote, Socialists and communists did not see that it was only insofar as workers had a hand in determining how production took place that they were able to identify with their work as what defined who they really were. Once that right and its corresponding experience disappeared, so did the workers' identity. Here, we see two crucial elements of this identity threatened simultaneously. Workers in a workplace need to be able to control and make decisions in

16:53 their workplace. And secondly, on an even more basic level, there had to be large-scale workplaces to begin with. The workers' movement, although with the assistance of the capitalists, was, by the midpoint of the 20th century, well on their way towards extinguishing the ability of workers to have control over their workplaces.

17:20 And the capitalist class had its sights on the second element, there being a large-scale collective workplace at all. And yet, the identity of the collective worker faced other problems. There were, in fact, other identities. And these identities, in some cases, proved to be more real than that of the collective worker.

17:46 As Endnotes and eventually even the most assiduous Marxists were forced to acknowledge, the collective worker, though it should not inherently have been, came to be a quote-unquote respectable man. And that he was a man, despite the attempts, both nominal and real, of the workers' movement to fight for the rights of women and the rights of people of other genders, stood until the workers' movement's death. This, obviously, is a problem. I need not mention, obviously, what percentage of the population is not, in fact, male. But there is another crisis here, one which the workers' movement would fail to engage in, or rather, its attempts to engage here were insufficient to the necessary task. Now, in the

18:44 old Marxist schema, there was production, the production of things. Under the capitalist context, the production of commodities to be sold on the market. But there was also reproduction, social reproduction. This was was another form of labor in which workers are produced and maintained in extremely literal senses of the term.

19:10 We are speaking here of having and raising children, of making food and washing clothes, of cleaning and doing dishes, of the forms of labor that create and sustain life. And we are speaking of forms of labor that the male collective worker broadly describes to be somewhat crude, did not give a shit about. It was able to not give a shit about it because it could assume that that labor would be done by someone else, by classes and genders of people who were excluded from the collective worker, or in into it only selectively. For there are, to take the name of a movement, no wages for housework.

19:59 This form of production, this form of labor, this social reproduction that makes life and the world possible, that is as much a core of the production and reproduction of capital, as the production of commodities itself, was never remunerated as such. This was as true in socialist period China, where women were not given work points for the domestic labor they did at home, as it was in the capitalist United States, where women were likewise not paid for the domestic labor that they did at home. These tasks were primarily done, of course, by women. And this was a sphere into which the capitalists would make a series of attacks by relying on the inattention and ability to divide the class that were twin characteristics of the sphere of domestic reproduction.

20:57 When neoliberalism came, it came with Reagan-era anti-feminism and homophobia. It came with the one-child policy in China. It came, in other words... with massive expansions of the control of the bourgeoisie into the process of domestic reproduction. And there were other problems, of course. The process of domestic reproduction does not produce, for capital, an unmarked worker. What do I mean by unmarked? To take a non-specific example, I, unfortunately, do not simply get to be a worker. I am a An Asian trans woman with all of the associated violences that those identities imply in a world such as this.

21:47 And this too was a work of production. Just as the workers' movement had to assiduously maintain its identity as the worker, so other sectors assiduously worked to produce women through constant disciplining violence. the totality of the social processes at play, were also busy producing race, even being allowed to access the proletariat itself, being able to reach the status of an exploited wage laborer and not a debt peon, a sharecropper, or a slave, or someone simply exterminated altogether.

22:30 This was the process of the production of race. It too complicated the simple collective worker, for even joining the exploited working class itself became a privilege. The suffering of the mere white proletarian was freedom to someone who had been enslaved. And in these distinctions, in these gradations of violence, in the structural and systemic racism of societies across the world, here, The constituent elements of the collective worker had other interests.

23:10 White workers in the US, instead of attempting to abolish their class, could reap material rewards by working with their employers to maintain segregation. So too could workers reap the rewards of nationalism. For there were, at least to some extent, real benefits to be found in imperialism and settler colonialism. Indeed, many working class theorists in the 1800s in the US, a time in which the contradictions between class and settler identity were perhaps at their most stark, believed that the class problems of Europe could be solved in America by simply continuing to steal land from indigenous people and giving it to workers. This violence would be replicated by the socialist states of various stripes. from the Indonesian conquest of

24:05 West Papua under Sukarno, to the settler colonial occupations of Tibet and Xinjiang, to, and I did once attempt to write a list of all of these and simply could not list all of them, the participation of socialist parties and their unions in effectively every act of colonialism that Europe has ever done. There were good factory jobs in building the bombs that fell over Vietnam. replete with union benefits and healthcare. Just as the social democratic parties of the 1910s had succumbed to nationalism and backed their respective countries in slaughtering each other in World War I, so too would workers back their nations in a path of untrammeled butchery leading right to Bosnia. The workers of the

24:57 world were slaughtering each other. And yet another question would come to haunt the movement. Would these workers even remain workers? It began, as we have discussed ad nauseum, to distribute production across massive supply lines, using massive containerized ships to produce parts in one country and ship those parts to another, pitting workers of every country against each other. in a fight for a rapidly decreasing number of jobs. The great urban factories that had been at the core of the formation of the workers' movement's identity and ability to reproduce itself were likewise replaced by smaller, decentralized rural factories built further from each other to make it more and more difficult for any kind of collective identity to emerge. Worse still,

26:07 the shift to massive supply chains was accompanied by the transformation of large parts of the working class into contractors or small business owners, lodged in various positions up and down the supply chain. The supply chain would still be controlled by massive corporations, but crucially, it would no longer own the various stages. Instead, portions of what were once workers would become the nominal owners tiny shops that made one part of a process that would eventually become a larger product. Every step meticulously and rigorously controlled by a corporation, but not owned by them. In this way, Nike, as Anna Singh points out in her famous work, Supply Chains and the Human Condition, does not really actually produce shoes.

27:07 It simply buys them by setting up a massive production process across a sprawling supply chain, each of which is run by nominally independent companies that are forced to act as contractors. This is offered up as freedom, as encouragement of workers to abandon their identity as a collective worker and become business owners themselves. This shift would have a massive impact on both the ability of the worker to form a collective identity, and also on the possibility of struggle itself. For this shift would displace the site of struggle from shop floors owned directly by corporations themselves to shop floors owned by petty producers who would once simply have been workers, thus neatly dividing the working class against itself,

27:59 while denying these new nominal small business owners the capital necessary to even accede to the demands of their workers themselves. The old class basis of social democracy and the core of the old workers' movement was thus shattered in a single stroke. The combination of the freedom of movement of capital and the unfreedom of movement of labor, as we have seen so horrifically in the deportation ethnic cleansing sweeping the United States, alongside the class-shattering effects of supply chain management and the transformation of the working class. into managers themselves, fundamentally shifted the terrain of global class struggle. They would in time become the emergence of the service economy. They

28:50 would herald the collapse of the industrial proletariat, the mass expulsion of workers from the labor process altogether. In a word, the conditions of modernity. But the effect was the same. Where once at least some workers were able to claim their part of the identity of the collective worker. Now, we face the near total atomization of most of the world's population. And yet, for all of the bourgeoisie's power, for all that it appeared that their victory was final, that history was over, and that liberal democratic capitalism had triumphed over the world forever, on the very day that NAFTA The crowning achievement. of the bourgeoisie in North America, came into effect, something else happened. For to misquote a

29:47 Langston Hughes poem, in the 1990s, it was not Lenin who walked across the world. It was Zapata. And so, to borrow the words of the great poet, Zapata walked around the world. Black, brown, and white receive him. Language is no barrier. The strangest tongues believe him. Zapata walks around the world. The sun sets like a scar between the darkness and the dawn. There rises a red star.

30:18 This is Ikarapanheep.

30:33 At the moment, there's a great deal of discussion about alternative currencies, specifically cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. But there is another form of alternative currency, one that is largely overlooked. I'm talking about local currencies, money that's created and distributed by a local community. Back in the 19th century, banks in America often printed their own currency backed by gold and silver, and the U.S. Treasury was not involved. The practice started back in pre-revolutionary times when the British did not mint enough silver and copper coins for the colonies.

31:09 To keep the local economies going, banks printed up paper bills to be used for goods and services and to pay back debts. After the American Revolution, in the 1800s, commercial banks in the U.S. began to issue their own local money in exchange for gold deposits. The dollar bills printed by the banks did not travel far since they could only be redeemed at those same local banks. Trouble arose during the Civil War, when the federal government began to print its own dollar bills. Those initial dollars, called greenbacks, became a common target for counterfeiters. And thus, in the years just after the Civil War, it's estimated that one-third of paper money circulating in the U.S. was counterfeit. The

31:54 chaos created by so much phony money in the U.S. led to the creation of the Secret Service. Before they protected the president, Secret Service agents' first order of business was protecting the American money supply. Then came the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. That legislation changed the whole monetary picture when it created centralized banking in the United States.

32:19 That same act also made the U.S.

32:20 Treasury.

32:21 the sole legal provider of dollar bills. With its passage, local banks stopped printing their own money. There were no more local currencies. The question we consider today is, what if we went back to that old model of local currencies? It's totally possible, and it's not illegal, as long as the money you print isn't dollar bills. Most importantly, this movement is already happening. Right now, there are communities all across the country that print their own money. And this keeps more of their money in the hands of the citizens of that community. So, would you like to learn how to print your own money? Not only is it legal to make your own money, it's surprisingly easy. And there are multiple ways to do it. For instance, in

33:08 1989 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the owner of a restaurant called The Deli needed capital to finance a relocation. And so he issued deli dollars. For customers who traded $ 8 of American cash, they received $ 10 deli dollars, which could be used at the new location to buy $ 10 worth of deli food. The deli dollars were essentially a gift certificate.

33:32 Over in Ithaca, New York, a man named Paul Glover offered local folks paper notes called hours. They were worth the average hourly wage in their small town, which at the time was $ 10. 00. Folks in Ithaca could trade those paper notes for goods and services in the community. In both cases, paper notes were printed up and the new money had a specific value in terms of the U.S.

33:56 Dollar.

33:57 You can do the same thing. Design some paper notes, print them up. Once you make the physical cash, you invite people to exchange dollar bills for your new notes. And then folks can trade your new money for goods, services, debts, all the same things that you can do with dollar bills. Now, it does work better if you can get a local bank to help out with the exchange of U.S. cash for your new money. If the bank is willing to act as the exchange point for the real U.S. treasury-backed currency for your new money, it helps your local currency to earn trust in the community and for you to handle the accounting. That's how easy it is to start printing your own money. It feels like this should be illegal,

34:39 but again, it's totally legal to make your own dollar bills. as long as what you print up isn't mistaken for U.S.

34:46 Dollars.

34:47 That's what keeps your new money from being considered counterfeit cash. As an investigative journalist and podcast host, I've long been curious about the idea of making your own money. So, doing what I do best, I tracked down an expert, a person whose job it is to administer a local currency, and asked him everything you'd want to know about printing your own money. The benefits, the challenges, the practical legalities.

35:12 And I asked about the financial freedom that comes from creating a local currency. We'll get into all of that in this episode. I'm Zarin Burnett from the podcast Ridiculous Crime and Very Special Episodes, and I'm the guest host for today's episode of It Could Happen Here, How to Print Your Own Money, the Case for Local Currencies. The idea of local currencies has always intrigued me. You see, back in 2010, in my hometown of Davis, California, a guy named Nick Berry created what were called Davis Dollars.

35:47 They were a local currency meant to benefit the economy of the small college town. Berry's goal was to create a way for the community to have greater control over how money flowed in and out of the town's economy. Davis Dollars promised to keep more money in the hands of its citizens and small business owners. The idea was well-intended.

36:08 But the adoption of the alternative paper currency was not what you would call robust.

36:13 Yeah, it was, you know, and I won't say a big deal. I mean, it's in the local paper a couple of times. So it got good play. I don't know if the TV stations in Sacramento did a piece on it. They probably did do a piece or two. If somebody got a hold of them, they probably didn't find it on their own. But yeah, the rollout was, you know, I think most people knew about it.

36:37 That's Bob Dunning. You could call him the voice of Davis. For 54 years, he was a columnist for the Davis Enterprise newspaper. As such, he reported on what all was newsworthy in our sleepy college town. And now, keeping with the times, Dunning has his own newsletter in which he continues to comment on what he's lovingly dubbed the People's Republic of Davis. As the respected chronicler of our town, naturally, Dunning has some thoughts about Davis Dollars. although he can't remember ever writing about the alternative currency.

37:08 Not unless they paid me.

37:09 You know, I don't think I did. I may have made passing reference, like, well, I better pull out my Davis dollars and go buy a snow cone at the Little League game or something. So only in passing reference because I like the alliteration.

37:32 When asked if he remembers ever spending one or if he ever saw an actual Davis dollar, Dunning recalled.

37:40 Oh man, making a Christmas stocking. I don't think I actually saw one.

37:48 While Davis dollars may have failed to capture the imagination of the townsfolk and students of Davis, this had less to do with the promise of a local currency and more to do with the timing. Davis Dollars was launched in 2010. At that same time, the world was still mired in the economic downturn of the financial meltdown of 2008 and 2009, which meant folks weren't looking for novel new ways to spend money. They were looking for ways to save the money they still had. Basically, it was a rough time to launch a new form of money.

38:21 Absolutely.

38:21 It's the worst time to do anything.

38:24 We hear it with COVID now.

38:26 Everything changed with COVID, and it did.

38:29 Despite its poor timing, Dunning does agree that, as an alternative currency, Davis dollars... Sounds like a good idea.

38:35 Sounds like a clever idea. But so many small businesses are on such a margin. So I think that hurt it a little bit. And so carrying a Davis dollar that you could only spend in downtown Davis, you couldn't go anyplace else with it. And even some merchants were... reluctant to be part of the program, I think it was ultimately doomed.

39:03 The failure of Davis dollars to win over the people is less of a critique of the potential of local currencies and instead a real world example of the challenges a community faces when they decide to make.

39:16 Their own money.

39:16 If you plan to launch an alternative currency, timing and practicality are key. It needs to serve a real need. It can't just be theoretically attractive. To investigate a far more significant real-world example of a local currency, we spoke with Peter LaRochelle.

39:35 So I work at the Schumacher Center. We're a non-profit think-and-do tank based out of Egremont, Massachusetts. So my primary responsibility with the Schumacher Center is to administer our local currency program.

39:50 To walk us through the hows and whys of printing your own money, Peter LaRochelle is here to discuss the vast potential and the practical realities of making your own money. Who better to explain the value of printing your own money than someone whose job it is to do just that? The local currency he administers is called.

40:09 Berkshires, which is an on-the-ground example of a local currency right here in the Berkshire region that the Schumacher Center helped found.

40:17 For the tourist-driven economy of the Berkshires region of western Massachusetts, a local currency was a savvy way to keep more of their economic power in the area rather than seeing money flow in and then quickly flow right back out. The Berkshires program was started back in 2006, and 20 years later, it's still going strong. The credit for that belongs to the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, which was founded by E.F. Schumacher back in 1980. The think and do tank, as Peter LaRochelle called it, advocates for a new form of economics. It's right there in the name.

40:51 Its founder, E.F. Schumacher, believed in something he called, quote, an economy of permanence. According to the Schumacher Center's website, quote, in today's global economy, national currencies have had the effect of centralizing ownership of wealth, and of widening the gap between rich and poor, all the while undermining local communities, devastating indigenous peoples, and polluting the environment. Standing in opposition to this global trend is the Schumacher Center. And a key tool to bring more economic power and independence to communities is a local currency. As their website argues, Decentralized regional currencies are an important counterforce working to redistribute wealth more broadly while supporting unique regional identities, cultures, and communities.

41:38 Back to Peter LaRochelle.

41:41 I think people want to feel like they have a say in the systems that dictate their lives. All of the Schumacher Center's projects that they've helped found and they support are democratic, people-based projects that are run by non-profits that are members of the community that run these projects, whether it's local currencies or community land trusts or any other project. The idea of really is that people should be able to have a say in the communities they live in.

42:09 I know this may sound like some weird libertarian crypto nonsense, but as we'll explain, it is a totally different thing. And to that point, Peter LaRochelle would like to assure you that the Schumacher Center is very much a capitalist idea.

42:23 I think the way Berkshires is structured should reflect capitalism at its best. We absolutely believe in for-profit enterprise capitalism. private ownership of businesses. And we believe that when it's done right, that's what makes a community thrive.

42:48 What the Berkshires program seeks to disrupt is the concentration of wealth. The trouble with centralized wealth is that it's typically controlled by people with no connection to a local community. That's why the Berkshires program acts as a bulwark against the conglomeration of businesses that.

43:04 Only speak to the values of shareholders who want to see more and more and more profits over time.

43:10 Local currency is a tool created to minimize the outsized power of billionaires, private equity and stockholder-focused banking interests. Because quite simply put, their monetary interests.

43:21 Are often what sucks the life out of communities.

43:25 In stark contrast to that dynamic, a local currency becomes a means for a community to tend to their own economic garden, so to speak. And that's why, as an alternative currency, it's meant to work in conjunction with the U.S. Treasury, not as a means to replace it. Or, as Peter LaRochelle puts it.

43:44 Businesses are taking Berkshires the same way they would regular U.S. dollars, and they do it to make a profit. So I don't think there's anything so dissimilar about Berkshires compared to regular capitalist systems. Other than that, we're prioritizing the little guys and individual communities and really a thriving capitalist business scene on your main streets and business corridors that are supported by a ton of different people and small businesses that fill in all the niche needs in their communities.

44:17 The Schumacher Center defines a local currency as.

44:20 An umbrella term for... any sort of currency that is place-based and intended to build a more sustainable or resilient local economy. So those are two key aspects to it. And I can think of examples that make this distinction clear. For example, a currency might be place-based, but if it's not intended to build a sustainable local economy, we don't call it a local currency.

44:46 Ultimately, this is what separates a local currency from, say, a cryptocurrency, which technically is another form of alternative currency. As Peter LaRochelle explains, this distinction was made clear during.

45:00 The crypto craze of the early 2020s, one such cryptocurrency was called MiamiCoin. It was place-based in that when people.

45:10 Mined the MiamiCoin.

45:11 Some percentage of the value that was created went to a wallet owned by the city of Miami. So in a way, it produced wealth for the city of Miami. It's place-based.

45:22 It's in the name MiamiCoin.

45:23 But it's certainly not about creating a sustainable or resilient local economy.

45:28 It was speculative.

45:29 It didn't really even represent a real currency in that it couldn't be used to purchase goods or services within Miami or within any other region.

45:39 It was purely speculative money.

45:41 Another form of alternative currency, one that is quite different from crypto, is the far older concept of scrip, or company dollars. For example, in coal country, there used to be company towns, and for their local money, they had something called scrip. It was a form of currency that coal workers and their families could use to buy things from the company's store, which, as Peter LaRochelle points out, that's.

46:04 A place-based currency, but it is not about building a sustainable community or community economy. We would never refer to that kind of thing as a local currency, and certainly we would never try to model a system after that.

46:16 Conversely, what the Berkshires program is designed to do is to give their community more control of their local economics. You see, a Berkshire is seen as a form of power, handing the power of a dollar back to the people rather than handing that power over to the banks.

46:32 Well, what comes to mind when I think of money having power is the ability for money to create more money. where you take your money and you store it in.

46:43 Some investment account off in the middle of nowhere.

46:46 And once you generate enough money, you can just keep generating more and more and more. Berkshires does not work like that. Berkshires is power. It's power on an individual level to shape your community. So money, the power in money is not about who you can influence or how much wealth you can generate for your own personal gain.

47:07 The power behind Berkshires is more about where you're spending your money and what kind of money you're spending. How does that impact the people around you?

47:15 How does that impact your community?

47:17 And that's, in a way, something that feels lost in traditional currency. People don't think twice about where it goes, where it came from, or who it's supporting.

47:29 Whereas with Berkshires, their local currency makes that same power of money manifest and highly visible for the local community. They know where their money is going and what good it's doing for their community.

47:41 Berkshires are place-based and they bring it back to those values of supporting a local economy and local resources for local needs. So I think that it flips power on its head by making people think not what money can do for yourself and what kind of wealth you can generate for yourself and where you can store your money.

48:02 to be able to influence the right people, but rather it's about empowering you and your fellow community members to shape the kind of community you want to see.

48:11 Since money is a form of power, a local currency is a way to take some of your power back. While local currencies may come off like some brand new idea like crypto, and while its advocates may pitch it as the sort of economic idea that Bernie bros could get behind and that aging hippies could equally love, A local currency is primarily a means for community members of all ages and walks of life to more meaningfully engage in the economic life in their cities, towns, and hamlets.

48:41 And as the local currencies of the 18th and 19th centuries prove, this idea is not new. Also, it's not unique to the United States. During the Great Depression over in Austria, a small town called Virgel was having a tough time. Unemployment was rampant, debts were skyrocketing, and infrastructure was falling apart. The town desperately needed money to combat all three issues, so they introduced a local currency called labor certificates. That Hail Mary economic act saved the town.

49:13 Unemployment fell by 25%, at the same time that it was rising by 19% across the rest of Austria. The secret to their success was that this new form of money stayed in their town as it circulated. Thus, their introduction of this local currency blunted the devastating impacts of their Great Depression. This unexpected success became known as the Miracle of Wörgl. Unfortunately, when the town's mayor shared stories of their success at a meeting of 170 other mayors, the Central Bank of Austria caught wind of it and outlawed their local currency. Guess they saw this local currency as too much of a threat for their business model of debt and centralized banking. More recently, in 1972, a man named Ralph Borsotti created a local alternative currency experiment

50:06 in Exeter, New Hampshire, called The Constant. It was called the constant because it was a citizen-issued currency backed by an index of world commodities to give the local currency real purchasing power and to keep that purchasing power constant as the years went on. Unfortunately, due to the ill health of Ralph Borsotti, his experiment with local currencies had to be discontinued. However, the spirit of this idea remained vital, particularly in the New England area where the Berkshires program would come to be decades later. Meanwhile, overseas, particularly in Europe, the idea of a local currency remained quite popular. In 2015, it was estimated that there were nearly 400 local currencies circulating in Spain. And in the UK, there's a local

50:52 currency called the Brixton Pound. Here on the west coast of the United States, where I live, we've seen a number of local currencies over the years. There's the aforementioned Davis Dollars from my hometown. And down in the area of California near Yosemite National Park, there's a local currency called the North Fork Share, which is similar to the Berkshire Notes. Up in Oregon, back during the Great Depression, the town of North Bend saved their local economy by minting wood-based coins called Myrtlewood money. Around that same time, in the town of Hepner, Oregon, locals created their own local currency printed on sheepskin. But once the Great Depression passed, those local currencies were no longer necessary. At the present moment,

51:36 our economy may not be as bad as the Great Depression, but the power of a local currency to protect the local community remains the same. As Peter LaRochelle points.

51:47 Out, The values that are guiding systems like Berkshires honestly often feel amplified in the modern age, where people are starting to recognize the disconnect that they feel through modern systems, whether that's digitally or a more globalized economy, when their communities don't have identity. I mean, there's almost a romanticization of the past right now. I'm seeing a lot in the urbanist field. It's very trendy right now, but it's because people are looking back at a time where they felt like communities had real identity and individuality and strength of their own. And people want to see a future like that. And I don't think there are many tools quite as unique as a local currency to inspire people

52:32 and create that hope and make people feel like the direction of their community is in their hands.

52:38 In order for a local community to grab hold of the wheel and steer their community through the rough economic seas ahead, La Rochelle believes that a local currency is one of the greatest tools available.

52:49 That's the beauty of a local currency is that we're not talking about big systems changing. On the individual level, we're just talking about where is your money going? Create a system, small nonprofit can oversee it. That takes some work. But on the individual level, you're creating change in your community just with where you spend your dollar and what kind of dollar you're using, which is something that I think a lot of people can latch on to. You know, like I said, I think I'm seeing a lot of movement within this country for people to do things more on a community level, on a face-to-face basis. And on a human scale, really. And that's where local currencies shine.

53:28 It's human scale. It's about a region. It's not about growth for the sake of growth.

53:33 As a thriving example of a local currency, the Berkshires program has enjoyed 20 years of success. The simple reason for its success is that it works well as a form of money. Let's check the numbers. There are currently 111,000 Berkshires in circulation. there are more than 300 local businesses that accept Berkshires as a form of payment. Here's Peter LaRochelle to explain how it all works on the local level.

53:59 So Berkshires are exchanged on par with U.S.

54:02 Dollars.

54:02 So it's $ 1 for one Berkshire. There's no secret reason to use Berkshires beyond supporting your local economy.

54:10 So let's say you want to spend a Berkshire. How exactly does that work?

54:15 The way Berkshires work, is anyone in the community can walk into one of our exchange points, which happen to be community banks. People walk into the bank, go up to the teller, and just do a transaction like they would any other time they walk into a bank. They ask for the teller to exchange U.S. dollars for Berkshires.

54:33 They do it pretty seamlessly. And once they have Berkshires, they can spend them at any business that's willing to take them.

54:40 When you use a Berkshire to buy something or to pay for a service, It's designed to be a painless exchange. There's no weird or wonky extra math to do since a Berkshire has.

54:51 The same value as U.S.

54:53 Dollars.

54:53 So an item that costs $ 10 would cost 10 Berkshires. Consumers can spend with that business in Berkshires, get their change in Berkshires or U.S.

55:01 Dollars.

55:02 Note that we do not have coins because it's against the law, but you are allowed to have paper notes. So if people need change in coins, they just get regular U.S.

55:11 Coinage. And then when the business receives that Berkshire, they have two options.

55:15 They can bring it back to the bank or they can go and spend it elsewhere in the community at other businesses that are willing to accept Berkshires.

55:22 Now, what happens when that business wants to exchange a Berkshire and convert it back into U.S.

55:28 Dollars?

55:29 Is that equally painless?

55:31 So business could take it back to the bank and then they would have freedom with their U.S. dollars to spend that money wherever they want. So that's probably the easiest decision.

55:40 There is a one-time transaction fee to convert a Berkshire back into U.S. dollars, but that cost is exceedingly low.

55:48 We do have a 1.5% reverse exchange fee. So when you're obtaining Berkshires, there's no fee. But if you're trading Berkshires back for cash, there is that 1.5% exchange fee. So that's lower than what businesses are used to, whether that's with credit cards or with mobile payment platforms like Venmo when they cash out. So it's not this massive barrier to participating in Berkshires, but it's a number that's high enough to make them think, maybe I would just be better spending them in the community rather than bringing it to the bank.

56:20 In other words, that 1.5% fee to convert a Berkshire back into a dollar is meant to encourage a community member or a business to continue circulating the Berkshire in the local economy for other goods or services.

56:33 And the reason that we support that is because we know when they're not bringing the Berkshires back to the bank, that money has to stay in the community and it stays within that tight network of local businesses that decide to take Berkshires. And it also encourages new businesses to sign on because maybe when business gets some good that they're selling, they do get locally and they say, I have all these Berkshires, would you be willing to accept them?

56:58 And then you get more people on board that way.

57:01 So that's as simple as it gets. We call that recirculation of Berkshires the local multiplier effect.

57:08 This local multiplier effect is another major reason for the success of Berkshires. A local currency holds the power to generate two to four times more local economic impact than, say, traditional money that gets spent at some big box store.

57:25 Study after study will show that spending your money at independent, small, locally-based businesses will generate considerably higher proportion of downstream economic effects within that local economy.

57:41 By keeping their dollars in their local economy, thanks to their local currency, the people of the Berkshires region strengthen their local businesses and protect the area from economic troubles that are wrecking shop in the larger economy.

57:54 That's really the selling point for Berkshires. So on your end, You bought a $ 5 item for $ 5 or five Berkshires, but your purchase has a little bit more power within your community. So you feel more empowered as a consumer to create local economic development.

58:11 This is also the key distinction for a Berkshire versus, say, Bitcoin or other crypto coins.

58:17 A local currency is place-based and it's meant to build a sustainable local economy. So a cryptocurrency... Could be either one of those things. But in general, cryptocurrencies are speculative. Bitcoin, Dogecoin, MiamiCoin, which we mentioned earlier, those are speculative. The purpose of cryptocurrencies is not to invest in your community, even in large geographic areas. It's about personal financial gain. And often they're not even treated as currencies. They're not used to exchange goods. They're used to hold and then sell when more people buy them and the price goes up.

58:54 Which raises an interesting question. Could a local currency like Berkshires issue its own cryptocurrency, one that is specifically designed for the same local community usage?

59:04 We did have a digital currency in a beta form in mid to late 2000s.

59:10 2022. There were a lot of benefits to the app.

59:13 We were bringing in a lot of new businesses that didn't really want to deal with the paper currency, but were happy to deal with a more frictionless platform. We saw a lot of people get excited over the fact that they could use Berkshires without always having to walk into a bank. It was as easy as taking out their phone and scanning.

59:28 A QR code. But there were many things that needed to.

59:31 Be fixed within the app and sort of systemic things that made it not sustainable at that time, including the cost of maintaining the app. So we do want to restart a mobile payment platform with Berkshares and other digital ways to use them. But we only want to do it if we're doing it exactly right. We don't want to roll out a product that is not meeting the needs in the community.

59:55 This leads to another key question. These days, who is still using paper money for their purchases? Well, we already know the answer to that, older generations. So does that limit the impact of Berkshires if younger people are less likely to use cash as a form of money?

1:00:12 Speaking to generational gaps, in general, we find that Berkshires are used more often in older populations, people who are more familiar with The nature of walking into a bank or even just using physical currency and keeping that on their person at all times, that is admittedly getting a bit antiquated, especially ever since early 2020s where it seems like every sort of digital platform, whether it's payment or even doing business digitally by purchasing things online, we find that younger people are using those platforms more often and many of them have never even walked into a bank in their whole lives. So that's where we start to see a generational gap where there's a lot of friction for a young person to use Berkshires because doing those

1:00:56 kinds of things are not part of their daily life.

1:00:59 They're not used to it.

1:01:11 While young folks aren't as likely to step into a bank to exchange dollars for Berkshires, They do tend to notice them when someone else spends them in a local business. The reason is immediate. It's the artwork that colors a Berkshire note. On each denomination of Berkshires, there's a different local hero who's celebrated, both for their value to the community and to our American culture writ large. For instance, on the $ 50 Berkshire note, you find a portrait.

1:01:38 Of Norman Rockwell, a legendary artist. whose artwork itself I think fits a lot of the themes of Berkshires. It's inclusive of everyone. There's no sector of American life that hasn't been touched by Norman Rockwell's artwork in some form or no kind of person who hasn't been represented in some form. So Norman Rockwell is natural for including on the Berkshires in that sense, but also Norman Rockwell has a long history in the Berkshires. Hundreds and hundreds of his paintings were made at his studio in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, which is in Berkshire County, just north of Great Barrington.

1:02:14 The Norman Rockwell Museum is in Stockbridge, and his legacy plays a really foundational role in Berkshire history. And people often drive down through Stockbridge or even other Berkshire towns and say, wow, this town looks like it's straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. And at least in the town of Stockbridge, that's because it is directly out of a Norman Rockwell painting. So we honor that history by featuring him on the $ 50 Berkshire and, of course, also honor the themes of his artwork as well, which often centered on small town life and the beauty of personal relationships at the local level.

1:02:55 For the $ 20 Berkshire note, the Schumacher Center opted to celebrate another famous son of New England, who's also another world-famous American.

1:03:04 We feature Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick. Herman Melville did not grow up in Berkshire County, but he eventually moved here because he found inspiration in the natural landscape of the Berkshires. He settled down at Arrowhead, or what is now Arrowhead in Pittsfield, which at this point is a museum. But at Arrowhead, that was his workplace. And In fact, one of my favorite hiking spots in Berkshire County at Monument Mountain in Great Barrington, Herman Melville frequented Monument Mountain to gain inspiration for his writings. And I think that's really cool that Herman Melville found that same inspiration in the Berkshire landscape that so many people who come here every day feel. So we honor his history

1:03:51 and the Berkshires on the $ 20 Berkshire.

1:03:54 As for the $ 10 Berkshire note, it celebrates a hero of the local agriculture movement. If you've ever taken part in community-supported agriculture, if you've ever signed up to receive a CSA box of fresh produce, you have Robin Van En to thank.

1:04:09 Robin Van En founded the first community-supported agriculture project in North America. Her work created a movement out of it. You know, now we find hundreds and hundreds of farms across the country using a CSA model to raise money before the growing season and lock in capital. And instead of having to pay it back with loans with ridiculous interest rates, they just pay back that money with really delicious food that they grow. We, of course, honor that history because it's so related to our mission of community supported industry more broadly. Community supported agriculture would fall into that umbrella. So she's on the $ 10 Berkshire. Notably, her CSA farm was located in Berkshire County. It was in

1:04:56 the town of Egremont.

1:04:57 It still exists.

1:04:58 Robin Van End passed away unexpectedly at a pretty young age, but the farm still has a thriving CSA program. It's on community land trust land. So there's a lot of connections with her legacy and the Schumacher Center.

1:05:12 Next up, we have the $ 5 Berkshire note, which features a local artist portrait of W.E.B.

1:05:18 Du Bois, which is actually, I think, a really inspiring story out of the Berkshires organization.

1:05:24 W.E.B.

1:05:25 Du Bois has really become the face of the town of Great Barrington and has been recognized as the son of the town. You'll find throughout Great Barrington, there are all sorts of murals and landmarks and historical sites that recount his history and are dedicated to him, you know, murals that include his face. The middle school actually has been renamed to W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School. And it feels like every month there's some new project in town to further honor and educate people on his history. Recently, a statue of W.E.B. Du Bois was added outside the Great Barrington Library, Mason Library. So in general, the town has taken on a much more active role in honoring his history, but Berkshire's has been doing that for a

1:06:11 long time. So we're glad to have played a role. We hope that we played a role in changing that perception and getting the town to more actively celebrate his history.

1:06:22 And lastly, for the $ 1 Berkshire note, rather than celebrate an individual, the Schumacher Center opted to celebrate a whole community.

1:06:30 It's the only Berkshire that doesn't feature a specific individual, but it does feature a Stockbridge Mohican. The Mohicans were not actually native to the Berkshire region, but they were pushed over here during colonial times. And I think it's an interesting story because nowadays they actually look back to the Berkshires as their homeland in a way, even though it wasn't necessarily where they.

1:06:56 All came from originally.

1:06:58 But the Mohicans were one of the only Native American tribes that fought alongside the revolutionaries in the Revolutionary War. But of course, they were pushed out of the Berkshire region eventually. But there is still an active presence with some local groups to maintain their history in the Berkshires.

1:07:22 And we hope that Berkshires is one small part in doing that to remind people of the people that were here before us.

1:07:31 Due to the 20-year success story of the Berkshires program, other communities across the country and around the world often approach the Schumacher Center for help to design, create, and distribute their own local currency.

1:07:43 We are kind of that go-to institution for people that want to learn how to start their own currencies or other similar systems. And the number one challenge that I bring up to them, challenge, but also what we see is the most important thing for obtaining success with a local currency in the United States, would be working with community banks. Berkshires is very unique in that we do not exchange currency ourselves. You don't walk into a Berkshires office and trade in dollars for Berkshires. You walk into a community bank. In general, when you're working with a small community bank, they have all the infrastructure needed to account for a currency.

1:08:27 This is equally key for the success of a local currency, since it is money, and it's important that people have full faith and trust in their money.

1:08:35 To build trust in that system, you can't tell people, I'm keeping track of how much money is where, and I'll be able to make sure you can always trade your money back in. That's not going to build trust. But when you're doing it through an institution like a bank, that has the resources to just manage Berkshires like they do any other account. So it's not a crazy load on their part. That's how a system like Berkshires can thrive for so many years.

1:08:58 If this sounds good to your ears, and if you'd like to see something like this in your local community, Peter LaRochelle has a few recommendations for how to make it happen.

1:09:07 So if you're looking to start a local currency in the United States, the challenge that you're going to have to face, but also probably gives you the best opportunity for long-term success, is finding a banking institutions that you can work with and work out of that share your mission. You're not going to be able to work out of the Bank of America.

1:09:26 This should surprise no one. Much like the Austrian local currency that saved a town but was outlawed when the central bank heard about its success, in today's banking world, a major transnational bank like Bank of America has similar reasons to not want to see the success of a local currency. it offers direct competition for their bottom line, which is what matters most to big banks. Back to Peter LaRochelle.

1:09:52 I say that all the time. If those are the only banks in your community, you might have to explore other options because they don't want to get involved with initiatives like this. You have to work with the kinds of banks that share your mission. And you can work through a credit union, perhaps. Or in the Northeast, we have mutual banks that operate similarly to a credit union, but Still, they're the small community-focused banks that actually have ownership within the community. So they're more likely to sign on on an initiative like this. And since they share your mission of local economic development, that's also an easy sell.

1:10:25 Norman Rockwell, who was mentioned earlier, celebrated small-town life and a local-based idea of Americana. And as such, his work serves as a reminder of the importance of embracing a local identity and as a point not just of pride of place, but as a source of community power in order to survive those storms that blow in from faraway places and threaten a community. Norman Rockwell serves as a beautiful reminder of the past and also what lessons we can pull from our history.

1:10:57 The people that we feature on the Berkshires, like Norman Rockwell or W.E.B. Du Bois, these are people who everyone in a community can rally behind and can share something with. We're speaking to shared values that I think Americans across the political spectrum, Americans across generations that they share. People want to see a vibrant, thriving local economy within their community.

1:11:23 And that's what we are ultimately looking for. And what's more American than teaming up with neighbors from any background, from all identities to identify shared values and Do work together to achieve that community and vision that.

1:11:39 You want to see. That's the American dream in a nutshell.

1:11:53 If money makes the world go round, delivery workers make New York City go round. From delivering morning coffee to sweet green bowl slop or midnight Taco Bell, food delivery workers shuttle snacks and treats 24-7 via bicycle and scooter, while a network of last-mile couriers fill my apartment lobby with Amazon packages. Seriously, one of my new, more well-off neighbors must, like, never go to the store. They get every single thing delivered. I'm talking almost 10 Amazon packages a day for the same person. But there's an odd little quirk. with how Amazon transports orders from the fulfillment center to your doorstep, in that they don't. The worker delivering your Amazon package may be wearing an Amazon vest,

1:12:47 driving an Amazon van, and peeing in a water bottle so they don't fall behind on a delivery route scheduled by Amazon, but technically, that worker is not employed by Amazon. They work for a subcontractor, which Amazon calls a delivery service partner or a DSP.

1:13:08 Why might that be? Picture this.

1:13:11 A hurricane is rolling into town, but Amazon still needs to deliver those prime two-day orders. While drivers are in the middle of their route, the storm suddenly gets worse, and a driver gets into a bad accident. Because that driver is technically employed by a subcontractor, Amazon isn't responsible for the well-being of the worker and can't be held liable for any damages. Then let's say those drivers unionize due to dangerous working conditions. Rather than negotiate with the union, Amazon can just terminate their contract with the delivery service partner.

1:13:53 I'm Garrison Davis, and this is It Could Happen Here. And this is one of those this is already happening type stories, and actually has been for some time, but now people are organizing to do something about it. About a year ago, the Teamsters teamed up with Democratic Socialist New York City Councilmember Tiffany Caban to introduce Bill 0518-2026, also known as the Delivery Protection Act, which, among other things, would require companies like Amazon to to actually employ the drivers and warehouse workers who handle the so-called last mile of delivery, getting your package from the local warehouse to your doorstep. The bill was reintroduced this past February, and for the past few months, the New York City chapter

1:14:47 of the Democratic Socialists of America have been organizing to push the bill over the finish line.

1:14:53 My name's Matt Maresca. Olivia and I are both on the Labor Working Group Organizing Committee for NYC DSA. I am the Legislative Coordinator, the Labor Legislative Coordinator for the group.

1:15:05 I'm Olivia, and I serve on both the Labor Working Group Organizing Committee, as well as the Steering Committee for the entire chapter.

1:15:15 Currently, anyone you see delivering packages in New York City to you, to your apartment building, to your house, wearing the Amazon vest with the Amazon truck, all of those people are subcontractors. They work out of what are called delivery service providers or DSPs. And these, again, kind of basic subcontractors. But the problem with that model is that Amazon does that to avoid all accountability either to their workers or to the city. So anytime that workers express dissatisfaction with the working conditions or seem like they're organizing because of those conditions, or if the city is noticing that one of these DSPs is causing way more incidents on the road than other providers of delivery. Anything like

1:16:00 that happens and they start, people start looking into one of these DSPs, Amazon will just cut their contract with the subcontractor and say, you know, that wasn't us. That was, you know, Matt Maresca LLC or Garrison Davis LLC. Nothing to do with me. You know, it sounds silly, but it's actually pretty strong legal defense, apparently.

1:16:19 The Delivery Protection Act seeks to change all that. The bill would require last-mile delivery facilities to obtain a license from the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection and establish minimum safety, training, and worker protection standards. But the big thing this bill would do is force Amazon and other companies that use third-party contractors to directly employ their delivery and warehouse workers. According to the office of Mayor Zoran Mamdani, the Delivery Protection Act would give the city the tools to regulate last-mile operations and ensure major companies like Amazon are responsible for their workers and the consequences of the business decisions they make.

1:17:02 So what this bill does is mandate that any package delivery service from Amazon or another large logistical company coming into New York City has to directly employ its drivers. So that means all of these drivers now in those vests, in those Amazon trucks, need to be directly employed by Amazon, which means that Amazon is both directly responsible for any problems they cause on the road or their emissions or things like that, and also means that if their workers start organizing, Amazon can't just cut them all and replace them with different people nearly as easily. So beyond that, that's the main bulk of it. It also does give workers extra protections for expressing their organizing rights on the job.

1:17:41 So it gets close to giving them what we might call just cause protections on the job, although it's not quite that strong. But that means it's much harder for them to be fired for speaking up. And then it also allows for independent safety inspectors to go into these warehouses and provide the education needed to make sure the drivers are safe. And also New Yorkers are safe when they're delivering their packages. So it's really a holistic bill to regulate Amazon in the city. And especially make sure that the workers are protected and have their rights to organize protected.

1:18:12 And that protection is really important. Because right now, if a delivery driver gets hurt or gets into an accident, because those drivers technically work for a, quote, third party, Amazon can't be held liable, even when it's Amazon who orders, quote, delivery service partners to send out drivers in dangerous weather conditions.

1:18:36 A Bloomberg investigation from earlier this year detailed a series of such incidents with a delivery service partner in Southern California. In summer of 2022, Amazon complained to the DSP that drivers were falling behind on their schedule while temperatures reached 107 degrees. The DSP manager told an Amazon rep that Amazon failed to apply their own policy on easing workloads during extreme heat and But the Amazon rep responded by saying it was too late to change the day's delivery assignments, and the manager would need a written affidavit to prove that workers were too sick to perform. And Amazon threatened breach of contract if packages were delayed. Later that winter, during a historic storm, an Amazon rep told this DSP that, quote,

1:19:33 delivery must be attempted despite. Flash flooding, road closures, and grounded flights. So drivers were dispatched out of fear that Amazon might terminate their DSP contract. But then a few months later, their contract was cut anyway after the workers tried to form a union. And this is not an isolated incident. Per Bloomberg, the Teamsters have filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board and accusing Amazon of terminating contracts with several DSPs because the workers unionized. Just a few weeks before the Delivery Protection Act was introduced last year, Amazon fired over 150 unionized delivery drivers in Queens by cutting ties with the third-party delivery service partner. Even calling DSPs, quote, third-parties is misleading,

1:20:33 because they don't operate as such. Everything about how they run is controlled by Amazon. Through a FOIA request, Bloomberg was able to obtain thousands of pages of confidential Amazon records related to an NLRB case against Amazon for firing that DSP in California after its workers unionized. A case, by the way, that was settled in favor of Amazon after Trump appointed a former Amazon lawyer to serve as National Labor Relations Board General Counsel. But that's another episode.

1:21:11 Per Bloomberg, these confidential company documents, quote, lay bare Amazon's intimate and intensive regulation of workers it insists aren't its employees, including governing which drivers DSPs can hire, when they work, what they wear, what they say, how they smell, and much more. Amazon requires that DSPs make drivers sign non-disclosure agreements and take drug tests when an Amazon rep deems appropriate.

1:21:42 On the job, drivers are required to wear Amazon polos and Amazon pants or shorts with the options of an Amazon hat, never to be worn backward, and an Amazon coat. Amazon also requires that drivers be, quote, neat and clean, including, quote, prevention of unpleasant breath or body odor, modest perfume slash cologne, and clean teeth, face slash ears, fingernails and hair, unquote.

1:22:12 If Amazon isn't satisfied with a particular driver, it can, quote, deactivate them, unilaterally terminating their authorization to deliver its packages. According to company records, Amazon also formulates performance rankings of DSP drivers and creates leaderboards for each DSP owner, ranking each of their staff. Amazon's systems also use bright yellow, orange, or red to mark, quote, areas where a driver has spent excessive amounts of time. Amazon also controls AI-powered cameras in drivers' vans, which are supposed to flag unsafe driving.

1:22:53 Drivers say, quote, the cameras can tag them with undue infractions for yawning or drinking water or just having breasts that obscure their seatbelt, unquote. And because of the high delivery quotas, drivers are still routinely forced to pee in bottles to meet their assigned deliveries. And due to these new AI-powered cameras, some drivers are forced to move around Amazon boxes to block the cameras from seeing their genitals before peeing. Amazon also has the live location of all of their drivers, and if something goes wrong, those drivers are supposed to call a hotline operated by Amazon, not the delivery service provider. Amazon offers DSPs templates for job listings and has to approve each new hire, who is

1:23:46 then required to attend a multi-day training program also facilitated by by Amazon. According to these internal company documents, Amazon outlines seven steps drivers must follow for a successful delivery and instructs drivers to, quote, help validate the customer's investment by greeting them with a smile, being enthusiastic, and thanking the customer for choosing Amazon, unquote. And again, Amazon insists that these drivers do not, in fact, work for Amazon.

1:24:22 even though Amazon tells these DSPs that these drivers, quote, represent Amazon to our customers. Bloomberg interviewed a dozen drivers from various DSPs who described these subcontractors as essentially shell companies that, quote, force Amazon's extreme rules, constant surveillance, and grueling quotas that in some urban areas can reach 30 stops an hour. One says her DSP manager suggested a funnel that she could use to pee into a bottle in her van. Others say their managers told them they must precisely follow any route Amazon software lays out for them, even if it makes no sense, to help the algorithm learn.

1:25:10 Amazon says that such characterizations are, quote, false. Algorithmic management is a big part of this model. how else could Amazon manage hundreds of thousands of drivers across thousands of allegedly independent subcontractors? Amazon plugs all the surveillance data from location tracking, delivery metrics, and live cameras into an AI which creates evolving minimum efficiency standards to apply to all workers like a form of digital tailorism. Contrast that with the Teamsters UPS union, who, in their last contract, banned inward-facing surveillance cameras and prohibited UPS from disciplining drivers solely based on GPS data, algorithmic metrics, or surveillance technology. Meaning, workers can't get punished just for falling below an algorithmically

1:26:11 projected quota. And if they do, they can file a grievance. But essentially, this subcontracted last-mile DSP model allows Amazon to maximize delivery speed without having to worry about the workers' well-being and the safety of both the drivers themselves and the neighborhoods on the delivery routes. Amazon gets to pass the buck to these, quote, third-party subcontractors. This whole last-mile scheme is just a method to evade accountability and for underpaying workers while forcing them to work at an excruciating pace in unsafe conditions. There are thousands of DSP subcontractors with hundreds of thousands of drivers who delivering your Amazon packages all across the country. In the past few years,

1:27:14 last mile delivery facilities have rapidly expanded in New York City. Since 2017, 18 such facilities have opened across New York City, 11 of them since 2020, driven by the pandemic era e-commerce boom. In 2017, about 1.1 million packages were delivered every day in the city. By 2024, That number more than doubled to 2.5 million packages per day, indicating that nearly a third of New Yorkers receive packages on a daily basis. According to a report by the city controller, between 2022 and 2024, more than 2,000 severe workplace injuries at last-mile facilities were reported to OSHA. The injury rate at Amazon DSPs was nearly five times higher than the national average. And after these last mile facilities opened, surrounding

1:28:14 areas saw a 137% rise in truck injury crashes. Currently, there are seven ongoing investigations into these third-party last mile facilities by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. According to the Teamsters, who have been fighting to organize Amazon workers in New York City for years, if the Delivery Protection Act gets passed, New York will would become the first city to outlaw this exploitative subcontractor model and require companies like Amazon directly employ and therefore be responsible for their last mile delivery workers. And this past summer, the NYC DSA Labor Working Group has been working with the Teamsters to pressure the city council into passing this bill.

1:29:05 How long has the Delivery Protection Act been something that the organization has been focused on organizing for?

1:29:12 So we decided it should be a priority in the spring. Our term on leadership started in January, and we did a process of looking through city and state bills that we wanted to work on. It really has gone to high gear over the summer, though. when we knew that our allies in the labor movement were looking to push this for a vote in the fall. So we really started our kickoff in July. And then we've been canvassing a bunch of different districts throughout the city since the start of August. And it's been going ever since.

1:29:44 Yeah.

1:29:44 And I should just note, you know, that's when we kicked into high gear. But of course, Tiffany Caban, our socialist in office and the city council has been working closely With the Amazon Teamsters and the workers, these Amazon locations for quite a while, and the team that helped draft the legislation and move it and introduce it in city halls, and we've been working on it for a lot longer. So we're building on a really strong foundation.

1:30:13 What has the organizing around this bill looked like on the ground and also in the digital sphere?

1:30:21 On our end, so as the labor working group, we've really been focused on a large-scale canvassing operation for the bill. So we've been having canvases every two weeks. Started in a council district of Rita Joseph in Flatbush. We printed a lot of literature with her face on it, demanding that she get onto the bill. And she immediately got on.

1:30:42 So I have about 4,000 pieces of literature that I can no longer use, which is a good.

1:30:47 Problem to have.

1:30:49 Since then, we made new lit that doesn't have anyone's face on it because we've been flipping more council members. So we did Three rounds of canvassing for four different city council members who are also not on the bill. We're going to canvass in Speaker Julie Menden's district because right now we actually already have a super majority on the city council. So really the only thing standing in our way is getting the speaker to introduce it for a vote because she ultimately really controls what goes up to a vote, even if the bill already has a super majority. So that's the main thing we've been doing.

1:31:21 But in addition to that, we've been working with a research team to look into the subcontractors that Amazon uses for these. They call them DSPs, delivery service providers, to get a feel for who actually owns and operates these and how safe they are for workers. And that's really been something we're working on closely with our Teamster partners.

1:31:40 And we've also had a number of rallies and things as well at City Hall. So that's all really been in the last few months.

1:31:47 It's not just Amazon who's using this last mile subcontractor model. FedEx also uses subcontractors called ground contracted service providers, and they too would be affected by the bill.

1:32:02 Obviously, Amazon is the biggest company that would be affected by this, but it's not specifically targeted at Amazon. It's targeted at any business that is operating what's called a last mile delivery operation. In the city of New York. So there are other companies that would be affected. I believe, you know, Walmart also operates sometimes on this model. But, you know, Amazon is obviously by far the biggest. They have the biggest market share. So, of course, they're the ones who are most afraid of this.

1:32:30 And afraid of it they are. As of August, Amazon has spent at least $ 5 million lobbying against the Delivery Protection Act. And according to DSA, that spending has only increased.

1:32:44 You know, you asked about in the digital space, certainly our opponents have been hard at work in the digital space. Amazon dropped how much how much money, Matt? Like millions of dollars.

1:32:58 It's at eight million now, I believe. Eight million dollars.

1:33:02 Yeah.

1:33:03 And it's not just Amazon. They got their friends in REBNY, the Real Estate Board of New York. to believe that this is also something that they should oppose. So they've been spending money against this, lobbying against this. And there are ads right now, there are digital ads, you know, trying to convince people that this bill is somehow going to be harmful to small businesses, which is ludicrous because, you know, Amazon is the biggest killers of small business.

1:33:33 Some of that money has gone to a corporate lobbying group called the Five Bureau Jobs Campaign. who commissioned a study that miraculously concluded that the Delivery Protection Act would raise annual delivery costs for New York households by $ 664 a year and threaten 10,000 city jobs. Amazon themselves told the city council that the Delivery Protection Act would prohibit their agreements with more than 40, quote, small businesses, that is, delivery service partners, and put over 5,000 jobs at risk. Now, the bill includes a retention clause requiring Amazon or whatever company to offer to rehire subcontracted drivers and warehouse workers who were previously employed through a DSP, before offering to

1:34:28 hire any other workers as employees. Brendan Griffith, president of the New York City Central Labor Council, put it really well, quote, to be clear, When these companies raise the alarm of fewer jobs, higher prices, or service reductions, they are describing choices that they may make, not in the best interest of consumers and workers, but to protect their bottom line.

1:34:55 And of course, any potential job loss would be the choice of Amazon, and not because of this bill. And it's not like Amazon doesn't already regularly lay off these workers. According to a Teamsters report, since 2018, Amazon has closed 35 DSPs in New York State, resulting in the loss of over 3,500 jobs. And that was without the bill, which would, of course, give those workers more protections. Remember, Amazon fired over 150 DSP drivers last year, in New York City after they unionized. The most insidious part of this delivery service partner subcontractor arrangement is how it allows Amazon to have this sort of workaround for union busting.

1:35:50 When these last mile delivery workers attempt to unionize, rather than recognize or deal with the union, Amazon can just cut off the entire subcontractor, putting all those workers out of jobs, while Amazon can just switch to a new non-union subcontractor. And this is apparently legal because these workers aren't directly employed by Amazon. So in effect, it's illegal union busting without actually having to do illegal union busting.

1:36:25 So you can see why this model is so attractive to these corporations. Because using these delivery subcontractors gives you this little loophole to avoid negotiating with a union. And it's insane that they're able to get away with this. As much as they fearmonger about how if there's unions, deliveries will cost each household 600 more dollars, that doesn't seem to be the case for UPS, who is still profitable after its unionized delivery drivers secured pay raises in their 2023 contract. To quote the famously socialist outlet, The Wall Street Journal, quote, a large body of research has shown that when companies stop employing their own workers for tasks and instead push those jobs out to smaller firms

1:37:19 or to freelancers, wages and other job protections tend to decline. The New York bill is, quote, very innovative, said Paul Osterman, a professor emeritus at MIT, and the author of Disposable Workers, a new book on the transformation of employment. His own surveys of work arrangements indicate about 12% of U.S. workers are contractors employed by intermediaries. So as I've already suggested, this model is a much bigger problem than just Amazon.

1:37:58 Amazon has also threatened that if the Delivery Protection Act passes, it would force them to, quote, consider relocating delivery operations outside the city. Specifically, Amazon has threatened to move its distribution centers to New Jersey, which they say would extend delivery times for New York City residents. But then in August, New Jersey sued Amazon, alleging their use of last-mile contracts is illegal, with New Jersey claiming, per the Wall Street Journal, quote, the e-commerce giant illegally used its dominance over its package delivery network to suppress wages and working conditions for thousands of delivery drivers while preventing them from organizing. Amazon has said the complaint is, quote, not grounded in fact, unquote.

1:38:54 So I think it's unlikely Amazon will actually move all of their facilities from New York City to New Jersey, because one, companies never actually move out of New York. And two, doesn't seem like they're going to have much more luck in New Jersey anyway, if the state is claiming the very same things that lawmakers have here in New York, which has prompted, quote, the Delivery Protection Act.

1:39:19 But that's the type of propaganda that Amazon is running to try to push back on the bill. And we mentioned Amazon running ads, but they're not just running ads. Around July, I got sent this very oddly worded survey from Amazon with all these leading questions about like, would I support a bill that made my deliveries more expensive?

1:39:46 take longer or force independent delivery drivers to work for big corporations. It had maybe like 10 to 15 of these questions that were all phrased very oddly so that they could engineer specific responses so that Amazon could have a survey that shows like X number of New Yorkers think this bill is a bad idea or think a bill that would do XYZ is a bad idea.

1:40:11 You know, they've been sending those all over. People keep texting me. I got the survey, Matt, or sending me pictures of the mailers. But in reality, we're actually doing the work and knocking on, I think we've knocked over 9,000 doors now. And you actually talk to New Yorkers about the bill. It's extremely popular. Olivia and I have both done a lot of canvassing for electoral candidates, people like Mayor Mamdani. And it's a lot harder to go canvass for electoral candidates. There's a lot of people who tell you, get out of my face.

1:40:41 But when you knock on.

1:40:42 A door and say, this is a bill that's going to get Amazon under control, it's going to help these workers organize unions and protect their rights, people are immediately on board. Sometimes all you have to say is, this bill is about controlling Amazon. People are like, where do I sign? So New Yorkers in reality are really ready to find a way to rein this company in that's more and more controlling every aspect of their lives. So don't worry. The survey, notwithstanding, the bill... seems to be extremely popular when anyone actually learns what it does.

1:41:24 Part of Amazon's fear around the Delivery Protection Act could also be due to the Mamdani administration's aggressive approach to enforcing worker protection's and cracking down on big corporations exploiting delivery workers. Last month, Mayor Mamdani and the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection announced a record $ 131. 5 million settlement from DoorDash for underpaying or even not paying their delivery workers.

1:42:00 This is the largest labor enforcement action in New York City history. the largest labor settlement in municipal history. Over $ 115 million will go directly to more than 260,000 workers who were denied the pay that they earned, with DoorDash paying an additional $ 16 million in civil penalties, including funding to build a city and worker-run wage theft monitoring tool to keep DoorDash accountable. Here's the deputy mayor for economic justice, Julie Su.

1:42:40 DoorDash built a system that was quietly leaving out categories of trips and on-call time so the real amount of work by deliverystas wasn't counted. Worse, that practice was hidden from workers, making it almost impossible for them to know when they were underpaid.

1:43:01 Some were paid late, some weren't paid at all.

1:43:05 This historic settlement is not just the result of increased investment in the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection by Mayor Mamdani, but also the tireless work of deliveristas, advocates, and organizers at the Workers' Justice Project. Affected DoorDash workers don't even have to file a claim. The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection has already identified all individuals owed money through their analysis of DoorDash's records, and will reach out to workers later this month. The department poured through terabytes of pay data to discover the huge magnitude of wage theft and systemic violations of New York City's delivery worker laws, like the minimum pay rate.

1:43:54 Now, two months ago, Tony Hsu, the CEO of DoorDash, gave business owners a piece of advice. A CEO, he said, has to take the greedy algorithm and keep going all the way to see if there is more. In computer science, a greedy algorithm is one that makes the most optimized, best short-term outcome choice at every step and never weighs the consequences. New York City and the tens of thousands of delivery workers who call our city home have reckoned with greed as a business model for far too long.

1:44:30 For years, DoorDash failed to count every hour worked by delivery workers. This was not a rounding error or an accidental mistake. In 2023, when the city began enforcing a minimum pay rate for delivery workers, DoorDash left time out of the count. Time on canceled trips and trips that crossed city limits. Investigators at our incredible Department of Consumer and Worker Protection went through terabytes of DoorDash's own data.

1:45:00 After analyzing 152 million payments and 110 million hours of work, they arrived at a staggering conclusion. DoorDash had underpaid more than 260,000 delivery workers across New York City between April of 2022 and June of 2026.

1:45:23 According to the mayor's office, these workers will receive compensation calculated at approximately... 200% of the amount that they were underpaid. Just last year, DoorDash spent over a million dollars to prevent Mamdani from being elected, and now they must pay over $ 131 million. After Mayor Mamdani announced this settlement, DoorDash took to social media to post a Notes app-style apology, reading, quote, We messed up. Our mistakes meant some NYC dashers were underpaid or paid late. That's unacceptable, and we're deeply sorry to the dashers we let down. We've reached a settlement with the city of New York, and we will make this right by paying every impacted dasher the amounts they are owed.

1:46:21 Unquote.

1:46:22 Bitch, you stole over a hundred million dollars. That's a big oopsie. You didn't just let some dashers down. Per the mayor's office, quote, this enforcement action builds on the Mamdani administration's broader effort to vigorously enforce the laws that protect delivery workers. The administration has already secured more than $ 104 million in additional tips by cracking down on deceptive app design. and $ 725 million in increased wages for delivery workers since January, unquote. Mayor Mamdani ended the DoorDash announcement with a warning to other companies.

1:47:12 And to any corporation that has built a business model on greedy algorithms and worker exploitation, consider this your notice. If you keep trying to rip off New Yorkers, we will be happy to make history again. This is New York City, where hard work pays and greed will cost you.

1:47:31 Thank you.

1:47:32 About a month earlier, on August 10th, Mehramdani publicly backed the Delivery Protection Act and made a slick little video explaining what it is and why it's important for workers.

1:47:46 To quote the mayor.

1:47:47 Quote, corporations like Amazon build billion-dollar business models that by insulating themselves from accountability through a system of exploitative subcontracting. As last mile delivery centers have exploded across New York, so too have traffic accidents and worker injuries. The Delivery Protection Act is a common sense regulation that protects delivery workers, safeguards the communities where these facilities operate, and ensures that the corporations benefiting from workers' labor are responsible for the consequences of of their business practices. New Yorkers should not be forced to subsidize corporate profits with less safe streets and more precarious jobs. The people that make these companies

1:48:31 run deserve dignity, stability, and a safe workplace. It's time to end the subcontracting model that puts profits over people and build an economy that works for working New Yorkers.

1:48:44 One of the best things we've had is we've had the support of the mayor. Mayor Zahra Mamdani and Deputy Mayor Julie Hsu come out really strongly in favor of the bill. There was like amazing press about that.

1:48:58 So a lot of earned media around that.

1:49:00 And a lot of our coalition members have also been hard at work doing a lot of additional research putting out really amazing press. In fact, just this week, there was a wonderful story that featured the work of our friends in Align. They did some really great research locating like all of the different traffic violations and parking violations Amazon has incurred. Because this bill isn't just a worker safety bill. This is a street safety bill and a climate bill. You know, Our SIO, Tiffany, loves to talk about how this last mile delivery sector is kind of like the Wild West.

1:49:40 It's just exploded.

1:49:42 And there really isn't a whole lot of rules of the road, of guidelines, of regulation. And so they're just kind of running roughshod. And this really uses the power of the city municipal legislation to really regulate in a very sensible way how these businesses should operate. for the safety of workers, for the safety of consumers, and for everybody out on the streets of the city.

1:50:07 As Matt from DSA mentioned earlier this episode, after sending over 100 letters and knocking on thousands of doors, City Councilmember Rita Joseph in Flatbush almost immediately flipped and signed on to the bill this past August. But she's not the only one who's changed tune since DSA and the Teamsters upped their organizing this summer.

1:50:30 We've had a big influence since we started the canvassing operation. I think in New York politics at this point, people know what it means when a bunch of people with DSA signs start showing up in your neighborhood and knocking doors. People get very freaked out very quickly, which is good for us. So like I said, when we knocked Rita Joseph's door, she decided to get onto the bill right away.

1:50:51 We also then got another council member named Sean O'Gray to flip onto the bill as well, I think the same day. It was also right around when Mayor Mondani put his video out. So I'm sure for a lot of council members, it was really time to get on board time between us and the mayor. But then since then, we also were able to move council member Camilla Hanks onto the bill as well. And she's really important to get on because her district is actually on Staten Island and overlaps a lot of the Amazon organizing going on there that goes all the way back to the Amazon district.

1:51:24 labor union and the ALU. So it was really important for us to make sure that Staten Island was part of our plans because those workers have been in the Amazon fight longer than anyone. And we're really proud of that one as well. So in total, in the last two and a half months, we flipped three people onto the bill. And we've also really developed a kind of citywide feeling that this bill is very, very important for workers' rights.

1:51:45 And we really see more and more people talking about it now. And I think that that has a lot to do with the publicity we've given it over the last couple months. So You know, again, we already have a supermajority. Now it's really just all about getting Speaker Menon to actually put it for a vote. And if she does, we're extremely confident that it will pass.

1:52:02 With a supermajority in city council, now the pressure is on Speaker Julie Menon to call the bill to a vote. Last Saturday, DSA canvassed Speaker Menon's district in the Upper East Side, and they plan to do another neighborhood canvas sometime next week.

1:52:19 We want to get the bill passed. on November 12th. So that's the new deadline. So we're going to be doing more canvassing, hopefully having more rallies.

1:52:28 DSA also has an online tool to help you send your city council member or Speaker Menon a letter expressing your support for the Delivery Protection Act.

1:52:40 You can send a letter to your council member or to Speaker Menon. I think sending it to Speaker Menon at this point is the most important thing. So anyone who's a New York listener should definitely do that.

1:52:50 In terms of rallies, DSA is planning a big last hurrah in support of this bill outside City Hall on October 22nd, which will be the last city council meeting before November when organizers intend for the bill to be brought to a vote.

1:53:08 So we're going to have a big showing right outside City Hall on October 22nd to really demonstrate our power. and really put out the call out there for this bill to be agendized and brought to the floor for a vote on November 12th.

1:53:25 Yeah, so if anyone wants to come out and canvas or come to a rally, this is really the final push, and we're feeling pretty confident that we need to end strong.

1:53:35 The Delivery Protection Act could be the wedge that cracks open Amazon. By strengthening workers' ability to organize through closing the illegal union-busting loophole, and ensuring that corporations like Amazon or FedEx can no longer get away with using third-party shell companies to shield themselves from liability. Samuel Levin, the commissioner of the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, put it plainly, quote, The Delivery Protection Act affirms a simple idea.

1:54:07 Those who profit from our labor and public spaces are must also be responsible for the people and communities that make it possible, unquote. Chipping away at Amazon's vast network of delivery subcontractors could also have national ramifications. If the Delivery Protection Act passes in New York City, it could provide a template for other cities across the country to start to regulate Amazon to protect last mile delivery workers and and shut down the hyper-exploitative subcontractor model dominating huge sectors of our economy. And if we succeed here in New York, surely it can be done elsewhere.

1:54:50 In New York State DSA, we really feel strongly that taking on Amazon is a really important existential battle for socialists and the labor movement. So we see this as really the first step in using the power we have in canvassing and the electoral arena, but also our ability to mass mobilize people to figure out a way to rein Amazon in and really help the labor movement take it on because it's more and more infiltrating every sector of the economy. They're going into entertainment. They are also going into groceries. They're going into web technologies and AI.

1:55:25 They're really everywhere. Set to be the first company to make a trillion dollars in profit. And if we're going to have a socialist future in New York and in America, really anywhere, we need to be Amazon and get it organized in the same way that they had to organize steel or the auto industry in the 30s. The fight now really does have to go through Amazon if we're going to see the socialist future we're all fighting for.

1:55:49 Yeah.

1:55:52 And I would just add, you know, for me especially, and I think for a lot of DSA members, what makes the DSA difference isn't just, you know, that we are taking on a big corporation and the way that the legislation really empowers workers. It's how we campaign.

1:56:09 It's literally the way in which we fight.

1:56:12 We are doing it, as Matt said, using all of the same tools that helped us win the mayoralty and helped us win big in recent primaries. It's just literally the basics of organizing. We are just talking to people. And lo and behold, as Matt said, none of them like Amazon. They want it to be regulated. You know, that is the DSA difference. We organize people. We have member-led and worker-led campaigns. That is transformative.

1:56:41 To keep up with the Delivery Protection Act, you can follow NYC DSA on Instagram or NYC DSA Labor. As mentioned, there will be a canvas in Julie Menon's district sometime next week and a, hopefully, final rally on October 22nd.

1:57:11 Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Dana Al-Kurd. I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today, I'm talking with Yara Asi, who is a Palestinian scholar, author, and public health researcher studying how conflict, structural violence, and political systems shape health and human security. And she's also a non-resident fellow at the Arab Center Washington, where I'm also a non-resident fellow.

1:57:34 And she's been doing a lot of excellent work highlighting the health impacts of Israeli policies and American policies in the Middle East generally, but also particularly in Israel-Palestine. So today we're going to talk about what are the health conditions in Gaza? I think that we have seen a lot of the spectacular violence. We understand and even the most unaware understand the degree to which Gaza has been devastated.

1:57:57 But she breaks down for us what that looks like and what are the policies that are being used to attack Palestinian health in Gaza and in the West Bank and then what it means for the Palestinian people. to be so de-developed, not only economically, but at every sector, including the health sector. It's a very bleak episode. None of my episodes are good, but this one is particularly hard to listen to. There's also a mention of sexual violence.

1:58:27 Not in detail, of course, but I do want to just put that out there for listeners as fair warning, because that is a very triggering conversation, regardless even if it is at the simplest level of detail. But without further ado, this is Yara about... health impacts of Israeli policy on the Palestinian people.

1:58:47 Thank you for listening.

1:58:51 Yoda, thank you so much for being on the show.

1:58:54 Thank you for having me.

1:58:55 So I want to start, we're going to talk both about Gaza and the West Bank, but I want to start with Gaza at the beginning here. Could you give us a rundown of what health conditions are like in Gaza right now?

1:59:06 Yeah, absolutely.

1:59:07 You know, this has been obviously the focus of a lot of health research over the past three years since the beginning of the genocide. And for good reason, because it's kind of a microcosm of every possible public health disaster you could imagine in a single, very small, very populated setting. So just, you know, some some top line numbers.

1:59:27 We know that at the very least, 74,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7th. And epidemiological projections estimate that the number is likely much higher, especially when you add in all of those that have died from starvation, malnutrition or lack of access to health care because they had cancer or they needed a heart surgery or brain surgery or something. We know that at least 20,000, around 20,000 people in Gaza, many of whom are children, require immediate medical evacuations for some sort of procedure.

2:00:03 Unrelated typically to trauma.

2:00:05 We're talking a lot of cancer cases, high-risk pregnancies, complex surgeries that they can no longer get in the Gaza Strip because the healthcare system has been essentially decimated. As of this past month, there's also more than 100,000 injuries. Many of those are life-changing injuries, amputations, nerve damage, spinal damage, brain damage that will require lifelong rehabilitation. And the obvious question is, Who's going to do that and who's going to pay for that and what's going to happen to those people? Less than half of Gaza's hospitals are even partially functioning. So prior to the genocide, Gaza had about 36 hospitals, many of which offered a variety of services, but some of which were specialized, you know, cancer care,

2:00:52 pediatric hospital. Now we're at a point where the hospitals that are even still open because so many were damaged, destroyed or just have no resources. are just basically able to do basic care, emergency care, triage, basic wound management. Israel is still restricting at the border medical supplies, you know, basic pharmaceuticals, medications, things that would be available in basically any other context on earth, even in low-income countries, are not available in the Gaza Strip. We know that 1,700 health workers and humanitarian workers have been killed in Gaza.

2:01:29 many of whom were directly targeted, either in their homes or in aid convoys. And, you know, it's an environmental disaster. So there's sewage in the streets. There's lack of clean water.

2:01:39 There's... Rats.

2:01:41 Rats, yes. Fighting people in their tents.

2:01:43 God knows what floating in the air that people are inhaling on a daily basis, including babies and children. So it is just as bad as we imagine. And, you know, we're about, what, a year now from this quote-unquote ceasefire situation. More than 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed since the, quote unquote, ceasefire.

2:02:04 And others are.

2:02:05 Dying in other completely inhumane ways, such as building collapse that we saw a couple of weeks ago. Because many people, to avoid the rats and the cold, because winter is coming, have just decided, I'm going to go back to a structure, even if it is half collapsed.

2:02:21 Damaged.

2:02:22 Damaged.

2:02:23 And we're unfortunately seeing that Some of these structures are collapsing with people and families inside. So, you know, although the health crisis in Gaza has kind of disappeared from the news as soon as the ceasefire process started, the health catastrophe is just as bad and it is not getting better.

2:02:42 You know, I get stuck on this question. It's like, like you said, what's going to happen to these people, even if the ceasefire stopped killing people, which, you know, like you said, there are still people dying. Like, we need something so... dramatic. And it shouldn't be the case that the rest of the world steps in to pay for Israel's crimes. Anyway, that's a whole other issue. But I want to highlight some of the work that you have been doing for the Arab Center Washington in particular.

2:03:13 And I'll put all of these in the show notes as well. But you wrote a piece for the Arab Center Washington about medical evacuation and that Israel is controlling this process and using it as a tool of war. So could you break down this argument for us and describe it to listeners who may not be as familiar.

2:03:29 Yeah, absolutely.

2:03:31 So due to the blockade in Gaza, we're talking the pre-2023 blockade, as well as the import restrictions in the West Bank that have kind of put a ceiling on what the local health systems are able to do. So certain medical equipment is banned by Israel from entering Gaza or the West Bank. And so the For decades, there has been a medical permit system that Palestinians have to apply to a permit, apply to Israel, mind you, receive permission from COGAT, paid for by the Palestinian Authority. So Israel is not paying for these medical evacuations. And they would leave the West Bank or Gaza to receive care, usually in East Jerusalem, sometimes in Israel, sometimes in neighboring countries like Jordan and Egypt. As of October 7th, Israel

2:04:20 essentially closed that process that had existed. And this was an already broken process. And I could talk to you all day about that process before even all of the current situation. But what has happened is Israel is really tightly constricting who is able to leave the Gaza Strip, even to go to the West Bank, which is both occupied Palestinian territory and to receive the medical care that they need. I was just at an event last week where the CEO of Augusta Victoria Hospital, which is one of the main hospitals in the East Jerusalem Hospital Network, which is where many Palestinians go, especially for cancer care, he said he hasn't seen a single patient from Gaza since October 7th. The World Health Organization has a list of, again,

2:05:05 approximately 20,000 cases of people that need to leave to receive care. And aside from the fact that Israel is often delaying approval of these permits, and anyone listening knows, when you have a health issue, you don't have infinite time. They're usually time-sensitive, especially if you're dealing with something like cancer or pregnancy, obviously very time-sensitive.

2:05:29 If you delay... you're going to need.

2:05:31 More care, greater care, and your prognosis is just worse. You're much more likely if you do have cancer. Wouldn't we rather treat it when you're stage one than when you're stage four and you're finally able to get the permit? So we are seeing people dying while waiting for these permits. We have heard reports that for some people who did manage to leave Gaza, to receive care, that they were being forced to sign forms that would basically not allow them back into Gaza. So yes, we will let you leave to get the care you need, but you can't return.

2:06:03 And we're just seeing a blockage of this system. So there have been countries that have been willing to pay for and take these medical evacuees. But even in some of these recipient countries, we're talking dozens of cases, maybe hundreds in a few. We need thousands of cases here. And also at the same time, we need to think about what rebuilding the health system in Gaza looks like.

2:06:25 So we don't need to engage in this medical permit system as broadly. Now that, I don't think we'll see that anytime soon. So Israel uses its control of the territories to affect health conditions inside, not just the health system, but also, as I said, sewage, lack of electricity, lack of nutritious food. Then it controls the process that Palestinians have to use to leave to get care, even if it is not Israel where they are going to get the care, even if Egypt is willing to accept them or Italy is willing to accept.

2:06:57 Them or the UAE or whoever.

2:07:00 Ultimately, this is an Israel permit process. And this has been a situation, again, since especially the blockade started in 2006 in Gaza. And we have long argued that this is unjust to put someone's.

2:07:14 Health in the hands of an occupying power.

2:07:17 And what we saw over the years was not just denials going up of the need for these permits.

2:07:23 But delays such that people.

2:07:26 Are missing appointments, people are not getting timely care, and people are dying while waiting for services. So This has long been a really unjust process. And now we're kind of seeing the inevitable outcome of not challenging that process, the impunity that Israel has had in controlling basically every aspect of Palestinian health. And now we have people who are dying while waiting for chemotherapy.

2:07:49 It's really inhumane.

2:07:51 I think at least some of us who follow this more closely, at this point, it's ridiculous how accustomed we have become to the news item that says, this person died at a checkpoint waiting to go to the hospital. But this on a massive scale, it's truly dystopian, the degree to which Palestinians have no control over any part of their lives. It's heartbreaking and dystopian. Also in December, you wrote about how Israel suspended 37 humanitarian groups, including the Norwegian Refugee Council, the IRC. And these groups provided more than half of Gaza's food assistance and supported the hospitals as well, if I understand correctly. So what justification did Israel give for suspending these humanitarian groups and what

2:08:50 is really going on here?

2:08:52 So Israel has used the same justification that it has used basically for every restriction that it has placed on Palestinian life, which is this kind of blanket, unquestionable, 100% urgent, necessary security needs. So all of this, the checkpoints, the permit system, the incarceration of Palestinians, the, I mean, all of it, this whole system is justified by Israel again and its allies as this kind of, we need this for security. And so we have seen that with humanitarian organizations as well. Now, I won't get too into the preamble of this, but even before this new registration rules for humanitarian organizations, Israel has been working very hard to whittle away the power and access that humanitarian organizations have,

2:09:40 perhaps most notably to your audience in UNRWA, which it has been discrediting, delegitimizing for decades. Because UNRWA is, for all its flaws, an organization that does recognize the rights of Palestinians to return to their homeland. And so Israel kind of placed all these accusations on UNRWA that members were aligned with October 7th or participated in October 7th.

2:10:06 It caused a lot of countries to cut funding. Now, independent investigations have since found that Of course, these accusations were completely unfounded in most cases, and at the very least did not justify kind of dismantling the entire organization. But as it has happened many times, nothing really was done.

2:10:26 I mean, this kind of happens. People say, well, gee, that's not fair. And then everyone just kind of moves on. So the inevitable has happened, which is now Israel, again, an occupying power, which is not in debate, according to international law. is trying to impose new restrictions on humanitarian organizations who are working, particularly in the Gaza Strip. And part of what they are requiring is the name and address of every local worker that works at these agencies. Now, let's think for two seconds about why these agencies may not want to engage in that. Humanitarian and health workers have been killed in their homes by bombs with their families there. Aid convoys that have been clearly marked. I

2:11:09 probably your audience is very familiar with the World Central Kitchen convoy and that kind of infamous image of this van with the logo on it with a bomb right next to it. And so many of these organizations said, we're not going to be able to do that.

2:11:25 We're not going to do that.

2:11:25 But we're essentially you're asking us to give you all the personal information of our staff.

2:11:31 Now, Israel had initially said, if.

2:11:33 You don't comply with these by March, at the time that I wrote that piece, then they would be deregistered. We've since seen many organizations come out and say that they would not participate.

2:11:43 Some have.

2:11:44 So we have seen some compliance by some organizations. And of course, their argument is always, well, we need access. And this is what we have to do for the access. So we have seen some delays in Israel's courts as to actual implementation of this. And organizations like UNRWA and.

2:12:01 Others that have a heavy local.

2:12:03 Palestinian staff presence on the ground, they don't need internationals to get entry permits, which Israel is blocking. And we've seen this increase in recent months. Basically, foreigners of all types, including foreign ministers who are trying to enter the West Bank, let alone Gaza, are being turned away. But we have seen those organizations are still functional to some level, but I have heard whispers and, you know, people are very, very concerned about what this means for the future of these organizations as it relates to their work with Palestinians.

2:12:36 Local staff need to be paid. They need to be sure that they're safe. They need to have the equipment and resources that they need to help people. And so, again, Israel creates rules and then basically says, you have to submit to these rules or you won't be able to do what you need to do, what you're tasked to do, and what you had previously been permitted to do. Again, the rules themselves are unquestioned. Again, we saw some condemnations of this, but primarily from the humanitarian organizations themselves, we saw quite a strong statement early on signed by many of them that.

2:13:10 Said, this is completely unacceptable.

2:13:13 But unfortunately, the global powers and the funders of these organizations have not meaningfully pushed back on this. Now, we're seeing a lot of upheaval, and I won't go too much into this, in the Israeli Supreme Court. And of course, Israel has elections coming up. So a lot of these processes have been kind of delayed and put on hold.

2:13:31 So we're really interested, to say the least, as to how a lot of this unfolds after Israel's elections.

2:13:39 Correct me if I'm wrong with this, because obviously this is not my area of expertise, but I was at a meeting with the commissioner general of UNRWA recently. I mean, let me, before I ask the question, also tell the listeners without bearing the lead, the reason they want to dismantle UNRWA is because it keeps alive this, or they think it keeps alive this issue of the right of return as if like that is a right that can disappear if UNRWA disappears. Now that said, UNRWA has been under attack. And like you said, they've attempted to dismantle it in a variety of ways, but Based on what I heard at that meeting, UNRWA does comply with the state of Israel. UNRWA does provide lists and fires people

2:14:19 based on Israeli suspicions. And at least this is what I got out of that meeting. Maybe I misunderstood the degree of coordination.

2:14:27 Yes.

2:14:28 So we could have a whole other episode, right? About critique.

2:14:30 About UNRWA.

2:14:31 Yeah.

2:14:32 And that would be a whole interesting conversation. But UNRWA has, rightfully so, been critiqued by Palestinians. So when you look at camps and they're really underdeveloped, overcrowded, very, you know, dusty, very thin streets. And then you look at the UNRWA school, big, shiny, the foreign staff that are coming in to overlook these schools and hospitals are paid much higher salaries than the Palestinian staff. There's a whole host of arguments about UNRWA.

2:15:02 And it's important to remember that when UNRWA kind of was founded in the late 1940s to deal with this new and expectedly short-term Palestinian refugee problem. At the same time, there was another, you know, kind of strain that was meant to deal with the political side. So Uderwa was never meant to be a political actor. It was only meant to kind of provide relief in these new camps that had sprung up that went from tents to buildings to basically towns. And so in some ways, they are critiqued for something that is not their mandate. They are a relief organization. And so as long as Palestinian refugees need relief, their argument is, we're going to give the relief.

2:15:42 Someone else needs to work out the political side.

2:15:44 And we can argue about how that relief and how humanitarian ecosystem as a whole has kind of enabled Israel's actions and made it so that Israel does not have to comply with its obligations as an occupying power to provide food, to provide medicine, to not transfer populations, for example, from occupied territory to Israeli jails. We can have a conversation about that. And UNRWA is very publicly, I would say conservative when it comes to critiquing the Israeli government.

2:16:14 So when you look at recent statements from organizations like Oxfam, Or even MSF, which typically really prioritized neutrality. Even they have been really willing to say now, you know, they've used words like genocide.

2:16:25 This is ridiculous.

2:16:26 Yes, this is ridiculous. This is a complete affront to the entire infrastructure of humanitarianism as we developed it after World War II. UNRWA is much.

2:16:36 More conservative with its statements. And again, it claims that its priority is access. It is the biggest service provider for health and education in the Gaza Strip, and it is one of the biggest in the West Bank. So, you know, it's this kind of catch-22 that the Palestinians that depend on those services are in. Now, as far as I know, because UNRWA is in the UN system, their argument is that they do not have to be subject to the same restrictions that Israel would place on non-UN humanitarian organizations. And recently we've seen other Israeli activities such as they bulldozed the UNRWA headquarters in East Jerusalem.

2:17:12 Like they are trying.

2:17:14 Both bureaucratically, administratively and physically to kind of remove this entity. But as far as I know, and things change very quickly on this, they did not comply with the new registration details. That said, they did really internalize these accusations that Israel had levied against them after October 7th.

2:17:32 They did fire some staff.

2:17:34 They, in the opinion of many, did not forcefully defend their staff as much as they could have. And when you talk to people that work with or work in UNRWA, again, they say, we are just trying to get through this period and maintain as much of an infrastructure as we can. And they have been through ups and downs before. I don't know if they've been through downs that are this down at any point. You know, the past, especially since the first Trump administration, we've seen really targeted attacks against UNRWA, which the Biden administration continues. But yes, it is undoubtedly UNRWA is not as vocal in terms of defending its staff, in terms of making political proclamations, in terms of, you know,

2:18:18 just what we would kind of hope that one of the primary actors that is tasked with protecting a very vulnerable population would do.

2:18:26 I mean, defending its own mandate.

2:18:28 Right.

2:18:29 Defending its own mandate.

2:18:30 Right.

2:18:30 To provide relief.

2:18:31 And it's kind of constantly and so much of the international community is kind of constantly playing by Israel's rules. Israel makes an accusation, makes a rule. And instead of being like that accusation is insane or this rule is based in nothing, people just start arguing about, well, how can we get against that rule or how do we defend against that accusation?

2:18:52 And this has been the playbook for a really long time.

2:18:54 I think UNRWA has not been very effective in defending against that. Again, I think they would probably argue that's not what we're supposed to do. There's supposed to be political entities that defend against that. And we have seen some of the funders that pulled funding initially after October 7th have reinstated funding. That said, Unruwa is in a very precarious position. And I and others are really interested in seeing in five years, what will Unruwa look like?

2:19:23 Will it be an organization kind of in name only? You know, there's so much uncertainty, I think, coming up. And they're a huge part of that. Because if their services go, we suddenly have hundreds of thousands of people with no school, no hospital, no clinics. And a lot of Palestinians that work for UNRWA with no jobs and no salary and to contribute to the already insane unemployment rate and, you know, kind of economic doom spiral that the West Bank and.

2:19:51 Gaza are in right now.

2:19:52 So it's a really complicated, nuanced issue. And there's just so much uncertainty. I couldn't even begin to speculate on what comes next.

2:20:01 Yeah, like you said, there's so much to talk about on that topic and on.

2:20:04 Gaza as a whole.

2:20:05 I just felt like despite how much they comply. There's no winning.

2:20:11 No winning.

2:20:12 That's it.

2:20:13 That's the main takeaway.

2:20:14 Yeah.

2:20:14 Israel isn't trying to cooperate, obviously.

2:20:18 Right.

2:20:19 Yeah.

2:20:19 So let's move on to the West Bank now.

2:20:21 Sure.

2:20:21 I've talked in a recent episode about how the West Bank is being ethnically cleansed. So listeners can refer to that episode if they want more info. But in July, you wrote for the Arab Center Washington about specifically the use of sexual violence in both territories. But since we're talking about the West Bank, How is sexual violence being used in the West Bank right now? How is the threat being used and by whom? And what is it accomplishing?

2:20:43 Yeah, this is a tough topic, you know, and that was a really tough piece to write just because I think part of what we as kind of Palestine-focused scholars or people, even just observers of the situation, there are just so many pieces and mechanisms of displacement and ethnic cleansing utilized by Israel. So my primary lens that I use to look at that is degradation, de-development, and destruction of the health system. But I think what we've seen, especially since October 7th and all of these accounts that are coming out of Israeli prisons, is that sexual violence is wielded as a tool of essentially abuse and torture, primarily of Palestinian prisoners. Now, as early as the Nekba, there were reports in villages that were being kind of

2:21:32 raided by Zionist militias of sexual violence of women and girls as a way to kind of show power. I mean, that's really the core of sexual violence. It is a way to show power. It is a way to induce powerlessness. It is a way to say, I can do this to you.

2:21:49 And there's nothing you can do about it. And I'm going to do it publicly.

2:21:52 And so there are many reports from the Nakba and the years afterwards that indicated that sexual.

2:21:59 Violence was being used.

2:22:00 And then the women, in some cases, were being paraded around Jerusalem as kind of a warning to other Palestinians. So it's been a part of this ecosystem, you know, for almost a century. So what we've seen lately is is many Palestinian prisoners, male and female, have reported sexual violence under Israeli guards. There have been, in fact, there was, I'm sure your audience is familiar with that famous video from, I believe, the State Timon prison of a Palestinian male prisoner who was being sexually assaulted.

2:22:33 He needed medical care for his injuries. And there have been many.

2:22:38 Reports that along with other forms of torture and medical neglect, so lack of clean food, lack of showers, lack of bathrooms, lack of care for medical needs, that sexual abuse and violence have been used against Palestinian prisoners. This includes stripping people publicly, including women. This includes sexual assault in some cases.

2:23:00 Sometimes it includes violence.

2:23:02 Threatening sexual assault upon people's families that are back home if they don't collaborate or cooperate or give information.

2:23:09 You know, it's all used as a form of torture.

2:23:13 And this is a very difficult issue to discuss throughout the Middle East. We have, unfortunately, very little good comprehensive data on incidents of sexual violence and assault. Much of this comes from firsthand testimonies of those who have experienced it. But there has been an undeniable increase in those reports I mean, Israel has imprisoned thousands of Palestinians just since October 7th, many of whom, no charge, you know, kind of under administrative detention. And there is no access to these prisoners by the Red Cross or others. Sometimes they won't even allow their lawyers or their families to talk to them. So all of this is kind of happening in secret. And it's those lucky prisoners who are released

2:23:57 or have some contact with the outside world that are able to kind of tell people what is happening. And so we've seen this increased brazenness with Israeli soldiers. They are kind of even boasting about their crimes online, posting videos, posting pictures, posting what they see as kind of funny stories about how they're treating Palestinian prisoners.

2:24:19 And we're seeing.

2:24:20 Sexual violence reported by them as well. So it's not just the prisoners reporting this. The perpetrators are also saying, yeah, we're doing this.

2:24:27 No one can do anything.

2:24:29 I think much of that has gotten lost in the conversation of what's happened to Palestinians because, you know, there's so much overt things happening, you know, the destruction of Gaza, the genocide, the settler violence throughout the West Bank. But the settler violence has also taken a tone of including sexual violence and abuse. There was this story that I recount in the piece of a man who was sexually assaulted by settlers, then kind of paraded through his own village.

2:24:58 So we are seeing this kind of tool of domination utilized more brazenly, more openly, more explicitly by both primarily Israeli prison guards and Israeli settlers. And again, the incentive structure is that you can do this and nothing is going to happen to you. And so in that kind of bubble of impunity, as we've warned about and many scholars have warned about and many observers and many Palestinians, the more you let them get away with crimes, even documented crimes, the more they are going to perpetuate these crimes and escalate when we're in the escalation phase right now.

2:25:39 Yeah, there's this dynamic of like also even the threat of sexual violence is pushing Palestinian families to leave because they're worried about their children, they're worried about their.

2:25:50 Exactly.

2:25:51 So, yeah.

2:25:52 It's really interesting because settler violence you know, it can come in several forms. It can be very explicit. They attack or threaten you. They attack your car. They kill your livestock. They burn your fields. They, you know, spread garbage on your crop.

2:26:09 Skunk water.

2:26:10 Exactly.

2:26:10 There's a million mechanisms.

2:26:12 And what we're seeing lately is that added to that list is either sexual violence or, as you said, the threat of sexual violence. And in that piece, I recount how some families said, That was the line for us. We were willing to stay. We were going to stay. We could deal with the physical attacks. But once it got to the point where I could no longer sleep because I was I felt feared for my mother or my daughter or my sister or, you know, people in my family at the risk of the sexual violence that was threatened, we had to go. And so you can see how it is a tool of the ethnic cleansing that you pointed out, because it is the way to without actually even doing anything. you know, enacting the violence,

2:26:55 you can force people to leave their homes. And what happens after people leave their homes is settlers immediately take over that land.

2:27:02 And we've seen that happen over and over again.

2:27:04 Yeah.

2:27:05 And it's not an empty threat because like you said, they get away with it. So if they did enact the violence, so like these Palestinian families are making... Rational choices. Rational choices, exactly. It's just such a hard topic.

2:27:19 Yeah, it is.

2:27:20 And just to note, we've barely even scratched the surface because we know that because of religious and cultural context, many people who experience this are simply too ashamed to share. They certainly won't report to a researcher or even a field worker, even if they're a local pal. and this happened to them. So undoubtedly this is happening to people and not being reported at a much wider scale than these publicly reported stories.

2:27:49 Yeah, absolutely. I always think also like first intifada, second intifada, like sexual violence was used and they weaponized that shame. They weaponized that secrecy.

2:27:58 Right.

2:27:59 And now we're just seeing it at such a scale that there are some brave people who are bringing it to our attention.

2:28:06 That's a great point.

2:28:08 It's become so unavoidable and overt that people are even willing to kind of overlook or overcome that shame and stigma. Because I think one thing that Palestinians have been trying to say forever is, look what they're doing to us.

2:28:24 Please just look.

2:28:25 At least acknowledge that you see that it's happening. And there's been a million instances of that and a million different, you know, ways that Palestinians have tried to tell their story.

2:28:36 And this is now, unfortunately, a horrific part of that story.

2:28:51 Finally, for today.

2:28:52 The publication Current History.

2:28:53 Yeah.

2:28:54 And an essay titled When Health is the Target, Violence, Restriction and Neglect in Palestine. You examine the systematic degradation of the health care infrastructure that's long been used, as we've been saying, like as a political and military tool against Palestinians. And you describe a lot of the tactics we just talked about. But could you explain to us specifically in this last part what de-development means and how Israel is pursuing that goal?

2:29:16 Yes, definitely.

2:29:18 And so de-development is kind of been, especially as it refers to specifically Palestinians, and especially in the Gaza Strip, was a term coined by political economist Sarah Roy, which described not an underdevelopment, which you would see with, you know, lack of money, lack of financial ability to build better things, to do more, but an active de-development, which basically placed a ceiling on the level of development that Palestinians had.

2:29:48 So it wasn't suddenly about how much aid was coming in or how educated Palestinians are. Do you have the specialists that can do this or that? Do you have college educated people? As we know, Palestinians are among the most educated populations in the Middle East. Lack of skill was never an issue. But through primarily this system of movement restrictions, import restrictions, preventing the movement of people in and out of Palestinian territory, Israel has been able to de-develop.

2:30:18 First, Dr.

2:30:19 Roy referred to this in the Palestinian economy. So Palestinians used to have a you know, it was a small territory, but a relatively important role in, you know, importing olives and olive oil and olive soap. Gaza had its strawberries, you know, Jaffa had its oranges. It was a country, it was a place, I suppose, that was active in terms of a global market.

2:30:44 And through first.

2:30:46 The Nekba and the establishment of the state of Israel, but especially through the occupation of And then, of course, through the economic restrictions of Oslo, Israel has been able to essentially, with a metaphorical dial, control how the Palestinian economy could grow. And by preventing, you know, collecting taxes, withholding taxes, preventing import of goods. So, you know, you want to be an entrepreneur now. How are you going to import the goods that you're going to sell? How are you going to export the goods that you create?

2:31:18 And we started seeing this across sectors, the agricultural sector. Palestinians couldn't import the fertilizer and the seeds that they needed. They were, you know, the land was getting smaller and smaller. So what we're seeing in the Palestinian health care system is this same de-development phenomenon. How it's enacted in the health sector is in a multitude of ways. So they prevent literal building materials from entering the territories, particularly Gaza.

2:31:46 I mean, we're talking cement, we're talking wires, pipes. They prevent import of those materials that would build the infrastructure that we need. But of course, infrastructure is not all the health system needs. You need educated staff and providers. They have limited the types, especially in the Gaza Strip, of specialties that medical schools can teach because they simply don't have the equipment or they don't have the staff Then they prevent Palestinians from being able to leave to get that training and then return to the Gaza Strip.

2:32:15 So part of what has been so horrific to witness in Gaza is not just the killing of health workers, but so many of them who had experience, who were specialists, who had gotten training in Switzerland or Saudi Arabia or somewhere, come back to Gaza. Now what we're seeing in Gaza is of the remaining health care system, a lot of it is new graduates or trainees.

2:32:39 You have lost.

2:32:40 decades upon decades of experience, of wisdom, heads of departments, deans of medical schools, you know, these people that kind of had the infrastructural knowledge and know-how and knew how to make things work and knew how to connect people together. You strip all that away, you have a quote-unquote health system, but it's very limited in what it can do. In the Gaza Strip, you had limitations on import of PET scanners and CT scanners and because of the argument that Hamas could use materials from that equipment to dot, dot, dot, security risk, right?

2:33:13 Don't ask questions.

2:33:14 We've seen a limited amount of import in the West Bank. In the West Bank, we also see destruction of ambulances.

2:33:21 Attacks on paramedics.

2:33:22 Paramedics of the Palestinian Red Crescent are now wearing bulletproof vests. We're seeing, as you noted, ambulances and other people stopped at checkpoints. There have been hundreds of births by birthing mothers at checkpoints who were on their way to the hospital. I include as part of the de-development of the health sector, the kind of environmental degradation. So health includes your.

2:33:43 Ability to eat good, nutritious, clean food.

2:33:46 It includes your ability to drink water. You know, the West Bank is under significant water restrictions at all times, essentially. And in the Gaza Strip, there's very little clean water, even prior to the genocide. It's something like 95% of the water was non-potable and had to go through different treatment facilities. You know, sewage in the streets, lack of public services. I mean, I could really go on and on.

2:34:08 So through its system of deprivation and restriction, Israel has essentially created a health care system that is never operating at 100 percent. So even when the WHO talks about fully functional Palestinian hospitals, there was still so much they could not do that their colleagues in Jordan or Lebanon or Syria or any other country, even in the region, can do simply because they can get the tools, they can get the specialists, they can get the skills. It's not a matter of, again, more money. We don't need more humanitarian agencies on the ground. It's Israeli restrictions that are purposefully kind of creating this environment where there is a ceiling to how well the health system can do.

2:34:53 And so the kind of pressure valve for that was the medical permits. So a huge part of the Palestinian Authority's budget towards the health ministry was paying for Palestinians to leave Palestine and in some cases get care in Israel.

2:35:08 So, I mean, think about the logic of that.

2:35:11 You have a struggling health system and sometimes your best option for patients is to.

2:35:16 Pay your occupier. Exactly.

2:35:19 Pay the occupying power. or pay the Jordanians.

2:35:22 You know, Jordan has an entire corridor for Palestinian patients because it takes so many of them. Similar, Egypt has specific hospitals that are well-known for taking Palestinian patients. Much of the East Jerusalem Hospital Network, which used to be the heart, the beating heart of the Palestinian healthcare system, was severed from the West Bank, especially after the second intifada.

2:35:44 And now Palestinians, even that live in.

2:35:46 Ramallah or Bethlehem that are, what, 45 minutes away, it takes weeks or months of waiting to get a permit.

2:35:54 And then it's not just you that needs a permit. Let's say you're sick.

2:35:57 Maybe you want your partner to come with you, or maybe you want your mother to come with you, or maybe your child is sick and they need you, of course, to come with you. Israel also controls the companion permits. And sometimes that is an entirely separate process. And then you need a permit for every visit. So there is not a single aspect of health care, whether it's in a Palestinian hospital, in Palestinian territory, broadly speaking, or needing to leave Palestine to get care somewhere else that Israel has not actively developed through deprivation and restriction. And so that is what we talk about when we say it's not just, oh, this is a war-torn country and if only they had more aid, if only they had more

2:36:37 this and that, things would be better. No, this is a artificial situation policy created by the Israeli state. And I mean, I guess fortunately for us, they've only become more explicit about saying what their goals are, which is this, what they're calling voluntary immigration, but is essentially kicking Palestinians out of the land so that they can take it.

2:36:57 And they have utilized every sector, education, agriculture, economy, and health, to enact that goal. And by public surveys and by what we're seeing, it is successful. There have been hundreds of villages ethnically cleansed in the West Bank in just the past few years. More than, what, 60% of the Gaza Strip is now basically inaccessible to people in Gaza.

2:37:21 And we have.

2:37:22 Seen polls of younger Palestinians who are saying, I can't do this.

2:37:27 I can't live here anymore.

2:37:29 If an opportunity comes for me to go somewhere else, to study somewhere else, to get a job somewhere else, I'm going to take it. And this is the voluntary quote-unquote immigration that the Israeli authorities are talking about, making life so difficult such that Anything you need is a challenge. Every journey when you leave your house is a question.

2:37:49 Will I come home? How long will it take? You know, my son wants to go to a wedding in a neighboring village. What will happen to him? I'm having, you know, cramping while I'm pregnant. Should I go to the hospital and risk it or should I just stay home and see what happens?

2:38:02 I mean, just think about like the daily stress and decision Palestinians.

2:38:06 The grind.

2:38:07 It's unimaginable. And, you know, I haven't even talked about mental health yet with you.

2:38:11 I know.

2:38:12 I mean, that's a whole other aspect of it.

2:38:14 We need you back on a different episode. Just like talk through like every single aspect of this, because it's like I am Palestinian. I was born in Columbia Hospital. I lived there. And I still can't fathom how bad it has gotten. I don't understand how people are living. I don't understand. They've been under attack to this level.

2:38:35 Yeah, I will say, you know, my family is primarily in the north, in and around Nablus.

2:38:40 And I mean, some of the elders in my family, you know, they, and I've said this many times lately, they lived through 67. They remember the jets flying over the village. They lived through the first Intifada. They lived through Oslo. They lived through the Second Intifada. Without exception, they are reporting that now is the worst I can remember.

2:39:00 And for the first time, because as you know, it's like a very Palestinian, you know, Samud, right? I would rather stay and die on this land than go somewhere else.

2:39:11 That is like such a- A rally and cry, yeah.

2:39:14 Cultural thing to grow up with. But for the first time, they're saying, I don't know if we can expect the next generations to do what we did. No one's getting paid. And if you are getting paid, there's very little to buy. And if you can buy something, you worry about going to the store. I mean, it's every level of life.

2:39:33 And imagine raising a child, trying to go to work. And, you know, the settlers, just the knowledge that they are out there. People are so terrified of going anywhere. I mean, not even leaving the village or the town, leaving your house. If you live near a settlement, leaving your house is a threat.

2:39:50 Yeah.

2:39:51 And they'll come to your house too. Like, don't worry about it. You stay in your house, they'll also come.

2:39:55 Right.

2:39:56 Yeah.

2:39:57 It's very bleak. I apologize that we ended on such a bleak note, but this is really the reality facing Palestinians.

2:40:03 No, it's important.

2:40:04 Yeah. And I really appreciate your time breaking all this down for us, that this is such a crisis on so many levels. But yes, like health, like human health and the human condition is so under attack in both territories. But thank you so much, Yadav, for your time. I really appreciate it.

2:40:22 No, thank you for having me and for asking, you know, I think such detailed questions so that we can... I mean, I feel like we've barely scratched the surface, but hopefully your audience has a good look at just how holistic and comprehensive the current emergency is. You know, we're past the point of, is this a humanitarian crisis? What is the political solution? This is an existential crisis for Palestinians at this point. And what happens in the next few years will, I think, really determine what happens to us as a people.

2:40:52 Yeah, no, I agree and hope that it isn't too late.

2:40:58 Yeah.

2:40:59 Thank you again.

2:41:00 Thank you for having me.

2:41:14 This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Robert Evans, James Stout, and Mia Wong. The whole gang back together. This episode, we are covering the week of September 30th to October 7th. James, I think you can take it away with your barrage of news.

2:41:40 All right.

2:41:40 So, yeah, we've got a lot of small things this week. Another person has died in ICE custody, making this the deadliest year on record with 37 reported deaths so far.

2:41:51 Of course, it's only October.

2:41:52 Yeah, like we're entering the final quarter of the year like this this week. Julian Kuro Churata died in Louisiana after being transported from the Richwood Correctional Center. The Richwood Correctional Center has a long and dark history of neglect and even homicide.

2:42:08 I've linked to an article about that in the show notes.

2:42:11 This week, the president suggested in a rally that it would be acceptable for him to allow Iran to bomb San Diego and Los Angeles.

2:42:19 A small price to pay.

2:42:21 Yeah, I remain neutral on the issue of Los Angeles, but we're not having that in San Diego. He's not so much remarkable. He always says crazy shit, right? His rallies, he just goes on a wild one. But like, what's remarkable, I think, is a response of the administration.

2:42:34 It is itself a kind of interesting thing for a president to say. It is a remarkable choice in the months before an election.

2:42:42 It's a little bit high.

2:42:43 It's a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe.

2:42:48 They can take out a city.

2:42:50 Let them take out Los Angeles.

2:42:52 Let them take out San Diego.

2:42:58 The cheering is what's also very interesting. I'm looking at the faces of the people immediately behind him. They're turning to each other. Yeah, they all look a little confused.

2:43:09 I'm going to read a post from Rapid Response 47. It's one of the White House associated Twitter accounts. The LA Times had said that the Trump had suggested it would be okay to take out Los Angeles or San Diego because that is a phrase that he said. Quote, no, he didn't, you buffoons. He was saying the US is fighting to stop Iran from having the ability to take out LA and San Diego with a nuclear weapon, which they would if they had the chance.

2:43:32 That's not true. That's just not what Trump said. That's just very clearly.

2:43:36 And this isn't taken out of context. He was saying that if Iran nuked, Los Angeles or San Diego, that would be a small price to pay for us to beat Iran, for us to then destroy Iran.

2:43:50 That's what he's saying. He was previously talking about gas prices. Yes, there's no other context. He was saying it would be awesome if this liberal city was wiped off the face of the earth because it would let us do what we're going to do already.

2:44:03 We also have, like most of the Pacific fleet, a massive Marine Corps base, fucking nuclear submarines. It would be very inconvenient for the United States if we lost San Diego. But Yeah, there's this line in 1984, the party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.

2:44:16 It was their final, most essential command. No, he didn't, you buffoons.

2:44:20 Yeah, people love to be fucking wrong about George Orwell. It is the bane of my existence. This is an excellent time to be quoting 1984 by George Orwell, because this is the kind of shit it is about.

2:44:31 Moving on.

2:44:32 A lawsuit in Texas has stopped the border wall construction, not just in Big Bend National Park, but also in the region at large.

2:44:38 Oh, wow.

2:44:39 Yeah, yeah. People seem a little.

2:44:42 Border wall construction is still ongoing in other places. There are other areas where there are still waivers for land protections.

2:44:48 Which they're still using.

2:44:50 And I think it's worth noting that the ultimate victory is at a temporary pause in the wall, right? The ultimate victory is the wall comes down and the land is restored as best it can be. Like this wall is still doing damage. The construction has still done damage. And I think sometimes people get a little lost in the source, but it's still a good thing. United States troops have completed their withdrawal from Iraq. leaving the Kurdistan region of Iraq especially vulnerable without the air defence that it's relied on so heavily. Since February, there have been a thousand drone and missile attacks on Kurdistan. Following this withdrawal, there was an Islamic State attack in Kirkuk last night.

2:45:28 It looks like they attacked a PMF position and killed one person, but they already claim responsibility for destroying a thermal camera.

2:45:36 Can you explain what the PMF is? Yeah, a popular.

2:45:39 Mobilization forces, like militia that was mobilized to fight the Islamic State.

2:45:43 Right.

2:45:43 In the fighting against ISIS in Mosul, you had like two primary, like non-state militias. There was the Peshmerga, which is like the Kurdish militias from the north. And then you had the popular mobilization forces, which were the Iranian backed guys. And the dudes you wanted to avoid when you were there, to be honest. They were not the least trustworthy of the Iraqi state forces.

2:46:04 Yeah.

2:46:05 Some of those guys run a wild one.

2:46:07 Yeah.

2:46:07 And remain on a wild one to this day in some cases. Yeah. Oh, boy.

2:46:12 I know Iraq is supposed to be doing some sort of regularization there, but they keep pushing back the deadline of that.

2:46:17 It's a big ask.

2:46:18 It is.

2:46:18 Yeah, that's a lot of people with guns who don't want to come back. Well, the Iraqi state has never in its modern incarnation managed a functional military without huge numbers of like non-state but state aligned militias.

2:46:33 Yeah.

2:46:33 And so it's just a massive change for them to make.

2:46:36 Yeah.

2:46:37 The monopoly they have on legitimate violence is very tenuous if at all. Like it's just it's just not. It's not the way that it is in the US. It's certainly not a monopoly.

2:46:46 The Iraqi state is like the Microsoft of having like.

2:46:50 A legitimate- Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like an oligopoly.

2:46:54 There's like an Apple out there. There's an Android, right?

2:46:58 Yeah, you got Samsung up in Kurdistan.

2:47:00 Yeah, yeah.

2:47:01 That's a good analogy.

2:47:02 Yeah.

2:47:03 I want to move to Spain, right? There's been a huge series of protests in Spain following the eviction of an 87-year-old woman named María del Carmen Abascal. She's known as Mari Carmen. It's pretty common to contract your name. People began occupying.

2:47:19 The Puerta del Sol.

2:47:20 In Madrid.

2:47:21 Many of you will remember this as one of the very early seeds of the Occupy movement, or of the movement that became known.

2:47:27 As the Occupy movement.