Hello, hey, welcome to Bar-a-Long.
Speaker 2:Thank you. It's been a long time since I've been on. It's been good to be back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's been almost like a year and a half to year or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I feel so, since the book came out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the book which I literally called the wrong name for an entire show. I realized that at the last minute. I was like what is that called Borderlines or borderlands? I can't remember what borderlines and we were calling it borderlands.
Speaker 2:But, I included you and me saying it Right.
Speaker 1:But just funny because I was just like I should have just remembered the city lop or something it would have like. But anyway, I'm here with them, hello, and we are talking immigration now, three years into the Biden administration, and things look they're very different and very much the same than when we talked last time and our discussions off here. I mentioned to you it seemed like we got about three to six months of like Some brief immigration Discussion, reforms, a bunch of amnesties were granted to like people who were in churches, stuff like that, and then, as soon as it got hard at all, you had Harris going down to the board to believe Guatemala to talk about the cope migrant caravans and then Border policy took a hard reversal back to Trump. There are norms.
Speaker 1:At the very beginning I remember liberals like trying to spin this to where they were saying like, oh, this is not, this is not as in. Yes, there are similar policies to Trump but it's not as inhumane. But after about a year you just heard people basically shut up about it. They didn't attempt not to cover it and it really did seem very similar to the way anti war stuff went. It was mainstream Democrats through the first Obama admin that there was an attempt to like bury this element and that, while you know dedicated activists you know, not just socialist ones have still been taking it seriously. They're larger NGO support structures are. Media coverage has completely gone away. So you know, with that being my understanding, first of all, do you agree with me?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no. So like to just like do like a quick three year recap, right. So, like you said, right like, initially, biden, you know sort of started to deliver on some of the easy rollbacks of, you know, some of the restrictions at the border, and then, you know, was actively, you know, trying to get rid of some of the more, like you said, inhumane policies. And then you like, and also, like you said, once things got hard right, like once the numbers picked up, especially after, you know, slowed down and things like Title 42, which was the public health law that they were using to bounce people, not even like put, process them through the system, but immediately turn folks around. You know once that once that stuff stopped being a viable means of sort of of avoiding the topic in any meaningful way for the Dems, yeah, things just went full tilt the other direction to where you know Biden has since, like the administration has reinstituted a lot of the like asylum bans and requirements to like seek asylum in countries on your way to the US and using that as a grounds to keep people out. You know we've gotten the Department of Justice has just like hook, line and sinker bought this that same sort of approach of like litigating again. You know so. There's been a number of Supreme Court cases that the administration could have readily like, either decide or at least not fought so vigorously that would have been, you know, boons for. For, you know, at least smaller groups of immigrants have consistently defended Trump era policies and laws in the court system quietly, right, but done it all the same.
Speaker 2:The weird thing that's happening now, right, is that they actually are getting a little bit of a boost from these. Like Republican, we should talk about this to have, like, states taking stuff into their own hands now. So you've got, you know, abbot in Texas, and then putting on these, like you know, show stunts gives the Democrats a little bit of a scapegoat, right, because then we can turn the discussion away from what the fuck are we going to do about the border, about migration, about the system, and we can talk about how awful Abbot is for putting which it is awful, right, like putting buoys with sauce in the water in the Rio Grande or DeSantis, you know, and all the anti immigrant legislation that's been passed in Florida, or even shipping migrants to New York. Those things all, at least for now, take the attention away from the bigger problem, which is that nobody has a fucking solution for what's happening right now, and so, other than you know, reverting back to the kind of very hard restrictionist policies.
Speaker 1:I've thought a lot about that, about the way that you've seen this use of Abbot in particular, but also DeSantis, is stunts, and the one of them are stunts to distract from the fact that, like there's been a large concession to Trump era policies and I mean, and it's a political feeder that benefits both sides, because you know these are these figures like Abbot and DeSantis can pretend that they are pushing back on a liberal president who's liberalizing Trump era immigration policies when in reality, like most of Biden's immigration policies are more or less identical to Trump's. There's you know, a couple of small things, and so that benefits their side. So they can make them sound like, you know they're more harsh than they are and, who knows, maybe, like in a second Trump administration did, second Trump administration will be more harsh, but what I've actually the pattern actually has been historically the other way around that immigration is actually tends to be harsher under a Democratic president because the Democrats take more heat on it when they aren't harsh, and immigration immigration tends to be attempted to be harsh under a Republican president, but they also get more pushback from their. But now and these are all post 2004 concerns I do want to point out that long time. They're actually very different. But what's interesting to me is I want to get what you think about this before we come back to Abbot and DeSantis, because in some ways I'm Abbot and DeSantis are real big problems, but they're also obvious.
Speaker 1:Right, like I think, is all these pundits really shift select free so far, yeah, for example, a year into the Biden administration, even a year and a half into the Biden administration. As soon as inflation hit, he started pushing Biden on being too harsh on immigration, because if we allowed more and he would say this on air that we allow more cheap labor and from Latin America, that it would actually be a wage suppressant, it would fight inflation, which wages is only like at most 1% inflation anyway. But whatever, that was his theory and he was actually stating it openly. But very recently I've seen him call for a total ban, a total ban on asylum seekers. Another person like Peter Zion, kind of a liberal interventionist of the center variety, has also, you know, and he will say that like oh no, biden policies are basically Trump's. He'll say that out loud. But then he'll also say something like well, the reason why Bidens are essentially the same as Trump is actually this is popular with the US or something like that, because there's been a move of liberal pundits on one hand to attack Abbas and DeSantis legitimately and, on the other hand, to actually try to like move from being to the left of Biden on immigration to the right of Biden on immigration, which I can only think is triangulation. So I don't notice that like the Biden administration has really moved away from any commitment it may have from progressives, and when people go oh, progressives are very popular. Yes, you are right, I talk about that all the time.
Speaker 1:What is interesting about this is this has been corresponded directly with the ability of Republicans to pick up the Latin vote. Like we have seen a market increase in in people being willing to lean Republican on land vote. Now I want to point out that between 1980 and 2004 the land vote was Republican anyway and I think most people don't know that, but it's a kind of truth. And it wasn't just the Cubans, it was only basically like left Chicanos in in the Southwest, particularly the the West Coast in the Southwest, were particularly left wing before the odds, and that's because opinions on immigration were about 5050 and both parties, whether liberalizing or not, were not going to give them time when Bush pushes for immigration reform in his second term, there's this great conservatizing move and shift in the GOP and I think people just I think people think this has been the long deray case. It's not. It's a great move. That, and also Barack Obama's particular ethnic concerns, seem to have pushed the Latin vote squarely into the Democratic Party and it has remained there until relatively recently.
Speaker 1:It is still true that the majority of Latin individuals in the United States are Democratic, but what I find interesting is that majority is getting thinner and thinner literally by the month. So what I can't tell is is this partly because I guess we're going to speculate on the why their cynicism here Partly because the Democrats have given up on like the BIPOC boat, or at least the Poc part of the BIPOC boat as part of their base are, and because every current demographic indicator actually says that they're growing, primarily amongst college educated white people? Or is it that, um, like, there's been such a demoralization, lack of inaction on the Democratic's part that, like in, the Democrats don't see it in electoral way. They're just kind of willing to risk it. Is it both? Is it like what? What do you think's going on there?
Speaker 2:My, my like, again just reading tea leaves, like, my sense is that it's, it is a bit of both, though probably more heavily the latter, because I feel like, in in watching how they've kind of squirmed under the current, you know, stresses on the immigration system. Is that I mean for starters, right, like if you were to grant amnesty tomorrow, right, which is not going to happen, but like assuming that you could get Congress to do it. That group of people doesn't have any voting power. They don't right now and they wouldn't probably under any version of amnesty. So what does that actually win you electorally? Nothing or very little, right, except maybe some goodwill from you know family, from you know the people who were already voting for them on the hope that they were going to do something anyway, right?
Speaker 2:So I guess, like in a way, I think, that they, they've just given up on the idea that this is a winning, a winning electoral move to like take a hard stance here in any kind of pro immigration capacity, and then, you know, then the flip of that then becomes like, okay, well then, if there's not much to win, there's a hell of a lot to lose.
Speaker 2:When the Republicans are able, then the conservatives are able to ride, that that trains are out of. Like this is what's destroying you know that nonsense, right Of like what what's tearing the country down is all of this, you know all of these migrant flows from South America and Central America. So, yeah, I just think that they've never had a, you know, a positive program around immigration and tinkering around the edges. You know, like Obama passing DACA, that kind of thing right, might have given them a little bit of an electoral boost for a while, but now the backlash seems so intense that I wonder if they're just like this isn't, this just isn't a winner for us, so we're going to pick something else.
Speaker 1:I suspect that that's a large part of it. It's like with climate change and actually I'm going to tie these two things together but like if climate change has a really perverse thing, say you do all you need to do to stop climate change, there's going to be plausible deniability that it was ever a threat because you took out the threat and let's say you don't do anything about it. Well then it might be a mess for the other side to clean up and there's all kinds of perverse incentives right now and progressive and liberal talking points like, for example, after dots, I don't really see there to be a strong move to nationally re legalize abortion, because now they have this as a motivator in red states and, yes, they might move to re legalize it in specific states.
Speaker 1:On, a state by state basis, but they're not going to move to like fix the Supreme Court or any of that, because it's a it's actually not in their electoral strategy interest to do so, and that's something that that is interesting about the Dove's decision that I'm pretty cynical about, right, but I think we see this immigration too that Republicans benefited for literally four decades for making this an issue, but an issue that they never actually really truly deliver on. And if they ever deliver on it, they will demotivate their most motivated religious base and then they'd have to deal with other problems around that. Well, now, under Dove's, this is great for both sides because the Republicans don't have to give up their motivation. But now you have a way to push back on Democrat, on Republican rule in red states, and strategically this leads to a whole bunch of perverse incentives. You want to talk about the problem, but you definitely don't actually want to fix the problem, because if you fix the problem, it is no longer a electoral motivator. And this is like quadruply true on immigration. The only time we've seen immigration reform of any significant mass in the late 20th century was actually under Ronald Reagan, and the reason why he did it was, quite frankly, they realized there's going to be a demographic problem if they didn't do it even more severe than what we have, with the baby boomers leaving the economy, like that was a rational calculation by Ronald Reagan, but that also kind of won them the loyalty as I mentioned earlier for a long time of a lot of the land vote. And that was undone when the contradictions and the Republican party were pointed out in 2006 when George Bush tried to do another round of kind of compassionate conservative immigration reform which also polarized the electorate around immigration in a way that it was not before.
Speaker 1:Now, as a dirty Marxist, I actually don't care if the Democrats really win. I'm just going to say that outright. But I do care about these immigration issues and one of the things that I just want to point out to people why I'm really concerned about this tightest in the climate change. This is only going to get worse because the places most affected by this heat are the places we're getting people from now, and I am one of these people who really does believe that all this immigration from like North Africa and from like Central America a lot of it in Central America case has to do with the drug trade. We can talk about that.
Speaker 1:You and I both really know a whole ton about this, but a lot of this also has to do with the increasing difficulty of traditional cropping methods under climate change in these economies, and between those two things together, it's kind of a perfect storm, and one of the things that I one of the reasons why I mentioned free Zikaria is there is actually a rational truth to the fact that, like we are, that right now, the United States actually is having a demographic problem on getting enough workers to do, to not have to pay out the wazoo to keep workers employed, etc. You know AI may take AI, lms may take some of that stress off, but it's not going to take a lot of it in labor intensive professions, because that's more about. You know that can more make you know white color professions more efficient. But it's home healthcare workers, though Right Exactly, and we're about to see a major crisis in about a month In regards to this are actually, when this comes out, should start to happen, where all these subsidies for home healthcare workers and whatnot are going to go away and daycares are going to go away, but we're already dealing with astronomical daycare prices now, and so we're going to lose even more female workers from the workplace more than likely to childcare because it's astronomically expensive.
Speaker 1:Now, you know, in my perfect socialist world we can fix that, but we don't live in my perfect socialist world. So this leads us in a pretty interesting situation. And yet immigration has now seen is so toxic that even for economic reasons, they don't seem to be willing to pick this up, which I do think like. To me, this is a weird game of chicken that I didn't predict, so like yeah, what do you think about that?
Speaker 2:No, yeah. So like to first of all, to like just validate, like the climate change piece of this like it is absolutely you know, I'm on that same journey it's just like I think that climate change is, is going to be, the increasingly like the biggest, single biggest push factor globally, right, and I don't mean that in like it's going to get hot, hot everywhere and everybody's going to leave right now, but like there's all kinds of other conflicts that arise and prop up around climate change related events. And, to give a small example, like I was on a call this last week actually, where there was a whole bunch of NGOs together talking about how the fuck are we going to be able to like squeeze US asylum law to try to fit people displaced by climate change? Right, because the law just does not, like it's already shit and it wasn't set up for a lot of the kinds of folks that are coming out, certainly not going to handle, you know, like accommodate in any meaningful way.
Speaker 2:Like people displaced by climate change, like, for example, like in Honduras, right, like you have stuff like a hurricane come through, record coastal economy. What ends up happening, I just recently found out, is like on the back end of that is that with the local, you know agriculture economy, decimated cartels are coming in, clear cutting, like displacing people from land, clear cutting, massive things to start, you know, either planting other things or even just raising cattle fronts for other portions of the drug trade of other criminal enterprises. So all that to say is that like, but for climate change wrecking those spots in the first place, you don't have all of the other stuff that then comes behind it and further pushes people out of their homes in search of anywhere else. Right, and of course, a lot, a lot, a majority of them are coming this direction.
Speaker 1:I mean one of the things we have to talk about in these shifts here and I think this is important like the quote migrant caravans on quote that are coming up from Guatemala on daughters in El Salvador. These are not people looking for work, actually like in the same way that you see all like massive immigration from like Pabla and Oaxaca and Southern Mexico in the late 90s after NAFTA, in the first wave of this. What what's going on now is these are people who are so like. These are women and children, get in and have an area that is effectively worn.
Speaker 1:Yeah, while there are maybe a couple of neighborhoods in the United States I can think of some actually Skid Row and LA most Jackson Mississippi that are as dangerous as a general murder rate in, say, on daughters, the murder in Honduras is truly astronomical, like it's really kind of hard to fathom and it is literally more dangerous than a good deal of war zones. That is something to ponder when you're wondering why, like a bunch of desperate women and children with their children up alone, or women and children who try to brave Mexico, which is not an easy task, I may add, at all, like not just braving the cross in the border.
Speaker 1:braving getting through Mexico is a difficult scenario in and of itself. Amlo has kind of frankly spoken out both ends of his mouth on this.
Speaker 1:I know it's not popular to criticize Amlo, but I'm going to Um and it seems like this is not going to get better and I can only see the the climate change conditions exacerbating this in the next decade. Um, I don't know what to say to do, because I also don't like where I got, I used to be. Well, you know, we could do a developmental aid on Doris and it from the standpoint of the United States it wouldn't even be that expensive like um. But I don't think that's a pot. I actually have been increasingly of the opinion that that's not really a possibility soon. Like to really do that because of the climate change.
Speaker 1:The backals in these places are going to be too bad. Um, so there's no way to turn on Doris into Costa Rica. So you know, like it'd be lovely if it was. Yeah, that'd be great, Right, Um, um, and I also could easily foresee like we having another immigration incident out of southern Mexico, although we don't right now, because the Mexican economy is actually decent and it was even before Amlo Sam was done some good stuff for it.
Speaker 1:So I mean like this is where we can praise him, but it's, it is not a situation like, just put it this way, there are water problems in northern and southern Mexico now Do you think that's going to go away Like? These are just things to consider as as, uh, we deal with the situation here in North America. And one thing I will say, one thing I've really pushed actually for social start thinking about. We should not, like. I'm big on internationalism, but usually most people's internationalism is far away, Um, frankly, or it's like projecting our hopes and dreams on whatever pink tide is happening in South America, usually somewhat delusionally, Um, not always, but usually um she was fixed.
Speaker 2:All right, like I mean like anywhere that's gotten a new constitution is good to go, Like it's great.
Speaker 1:No, peru totally went well. Um, you know, uh, things have gone out so well in Argentina. The Peronist have have totally swept this up. The left Peronist have totally swept this up Totally, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And and as a person who studies Latin American history, I have seen this before and I wish that the people at Jackman magazine would not, would not talk about this on the upswing and not do analysis of it very hard on the downswing, like, but regardless, I do think we have to think of North America as our first. Like you build internationalism with your neighbors and our neighbors are Mexico, canada, cuba, dominican Republic, honduras, guatemala, el Salvador, panama and Costa Rica, um, and the Bahamas and the Virgin Islands. So it's, you know, and when people talk about like multipolarity or whatever, this is still our spare of influence under any regime, like any world regime. So we have to have, as a left, a very serious analysis of these states and of how to support these people and how to deal with this. And, yes, immigration is a huge part of that. I do think it has to be more than that. Frankly, like, I don't think we can stop with immigration, but it worries me Because, to pivot this back over to you and a question that's almost apocalyptic.
Speaker 1:I can foresee these tensions over the potential movements of people, if climate change continues to accelerate faster than expected over the next 20 years, to be nation destroying in all directions. Um, historically, that kind of movement of people which we have seen historically before. But that's like when all the empire fall in their new empires and weird shit stops happening. Like it, it like just in the grand array, not just talking about capitalist society, it's like you know you start talking about like the 11th century BCE or like the fourth century CE or the 16th century CE. Stuff happens when this kind of stuff happens and I know that the great powers think that they can just military their way out of that. But I don't know. I'm not sure that a million dead bound parties at the border would even be enough to stop that stuff from happening. So it's good.
Speaker 2:I was just going to say it's like we're not, you're you're, you're right, we're not going to enforce our way like, yeah, we're not going to like, enforce our way to an immigration solution. That much, hopefully, is clear now, you know, over the last just even just US history alone. But the I think the other point that you raised, right, and I and I sadly, like you know, also share a level of you know, because I actually think that, like these displaced people and I know that Hannah Arndt is not a Marxist by any means, but I do think that her phrasing here is pretty close to being on point is that it actually, like the refugee and the Assyli, present an actual fundamental problem to liberal democracy and to conceptions of rights. Right, because what is a citizen if not somebody who belongs in a certain place, which is defined by the people that you keep out, right? And so all of these displaced people who no longer have any meaningful state to look to and are, in essence, like all those folks you know, from Honduras, from Guatemala, some of the other, or Afghanistan, right, coming from there and going to Mexico, all those people, the border, are stateless, stateless individuals, and so this present, like this growing body of people, literally presents like the absence of a solution To the problem of like citizenship.
Speaker 2:Specifically, it was just like there's no, there's no way to accommodate Including everybody, because you have to define inclusion by what's excluded, so you have to find us citizenship by all the people who are not us citizens. So how do you then Fix that? And so it's like this idea again, like there's like universal rights, well, like in what? Again? That that actually bigger concept falls apart in this context. So I had to say, is that like yeah, I think that it it presents more than just like a practical economic or even like day-to-day, you know, enforcement problem at the border. It actually presents like a much bigger question of like what do you do with people who belong nowhere?
Speaker 1:Well, this was the thing about about a state building as a modernization stuff that even Marxist were into, and like their discussions of the of World historical peoples, and then like the national, the national problem, etc. Because on one hand, the workers of the world unite and, on the other hand, we do nations as administrative apparatuses to finish up with revolutions to make socialism possible. And also, internationalism does actually imply the existence of nations, although by nations we do not necessarily mean nation states. All that for our Marxistly informed audience is to say, even we don't have a good framework for this, because when you start seeing the breakdown of states in this severe of a way, and you start seeing large groups of effectively stateless people, the administration of universal rights which is something, by the way, we've never actually believed in, I mean like, and I say we, yes, america, obviously because they didn't sign on to the Hague Treaty to enforce the universal decoration of human rights of which it was one of the primary authors, which is hilarious, but also Because we never intended for anyone to uphold the universal human rights which, by formal legal decree, of which the US is a signatory to this, even though we're not a Signatory to what enforces it, and I don't know why being a signatory to universal rights even matters, but nonetheless, I've gone through the, the enumerated human rights recognized by the UN, the international liberal body.
Speaker 1:No one on earth has ever actually Delivered on it, including like your Scandinavian countries, like they're supposed to be freedom of movement, relative freedom of movement and marriage everywhere on the planet. And that is not the case. And I could go through the other ones that were clearly in violation and remember when the US drafted this, we still had Jim Crow loss. But it is interesting for me to think, because one of the things that this points out to me is Is like the liberal dream of universal human rights and universal rights is recognized in a legal regime is administratively Impossible, and it becomes very clear by stuff like this that we never actually meant it. Yeah, it's like that. Oh yeah, it was a lie from the beginning. Well, I think.
Speaker 2:And can't. I mean and to your point is like I, it's it's hard to conceive of, of an alternative, because that is how much that idea has taken root and at the same time, how much, how empty it really is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you start talking about the critique, because I do. I'm what I'm not. People say this and I think I'm some like neo reactionary, but I'm like, look, human rights, the entire framework of human rights, has always been a coherent, particularly when you're justifying it, both on natural laws it was traditionally justified and utilitarianism, which are directly opposed, even though they're both liberal frameworks of understanding the world. But beyond even that, we have only ever recognized them in their breach, like in. It's in some way designed to be recognized in the breach, because the the protectors and enforcers of a of Of human rights in a given nation is the nation of which you have to be a citizen to To get that.
Speaker 1:Now, in the United States, we have this weird legal code when some rights go to everybody who happens to be here like we go, residents, etc. And some rights do not, and then we have places like the border crossing where no one has any rights, including you as citizens. So it's, it is a A. It is something that, if you really think about it, one of the reasons why the immigration crisis seems more for liberal states than just a practical matter is that it actually exposes Fundamental and deeply rooted contradictions in the entire concept of the liberal nation state, and before us Marxists get a hottie about that. We don't really have an answer to it either.
Speaker 2:So, right, and you know, and I think that, like, even under us, in a socialist world, right, you're still gonna run up against this problem of, like you know To use a Gombe in terms like sovereign and bare life kind of situation where it's like, how do you establish something that has the authoritative ability To in for, protect and enforce rights that also doesn't have the ability to restrict and remove them?
Speaker 2:Which you know you don't yeah, and so the liberal trade-off to that was is that we're gonna pretend that we believe this when we don't right, right and then, and that, practically speaking, is not going to ever come about. But now, like you're saying, right like this, these, these escalating crisis crises expose that lie and also expose the fact that no one has an alternative, and so, like to again to T Lee forecast, like I suspect what's going to start happening is that States like the US, right, are going to push the enforcement piece off of Themselves on to other countries where it's easier to bottleneck. So, like, mexico is in a great position To basically be the new US border All on the south, because it's such a narrow piece of land Right down there, right, and so if you can just get Mexico to do that part for you, you're probably, like the, in the US eyes, like less of an issue now, right now, what'll happen? I'm sure there will be plenty of other things that you know.
Speaker 2:Grow out of that, but at any rate, right, like the, only and I think this is why the Dems, you know, suck at this even more than than than they should is just that like they're unwilling to just Buck up and admit right that it's like we don't have a solution for this because there isn't a good one or there's an easy one and all of them hurt what are we gonna pick? And so I think that also actually has historically probably been Accurate degree and maybe that's why, like a Reagan is able to actually get something done is because I Don't have to sell this idea to Gain electoral points. If we can actually manage to bring about a positive boost on the back end of things and if we can, we've seen it won't be seen as as just, you know, another Liberal gesture towards humanism or whatever.
Speaker 1:Exactly. It's another Nixon to China moment, to use a cliche, but I mean it really is. Conversely, which is why the heating up the immigration debate really starts with NAFTA and not with the economic and immigration reforms in the 80s, because one comes from a a Republican president and, I believe, a Democratic Congress but and the other comes from a Republican Congress but a Democratic president, president under actually executive prerogative for the most part, and so this becomes really clearly a Kind of big issue. And I want to say a little bit I I On this, on the difficulties of this. I've looked at the immigration studies. Under capital it does seem like on margin there are advantages to the overall economy, that To fairly significant immigration, but there has been a lie, perpetuated double Democrats, about the fact that it didn't hurt certain kinds of people or that just like, say, white workers Don't want these jobs, are Etc like well, no, the white workers don't want these jobs because they're literally paid less than minimum wage and you can't even give them these jobs. Are you know like? Or they can't socially reproduce themselves in the same way, whereas now we're, we're leveraging the difference and cost between a very poor country in a very rich company country in both directions. And so it's not just like, oh you know, rich white people and even black people don't want these jobs, it's like, no, they're only viable because of the differences in uneven development and and the In the gold population.
Speaker 1:One thing I would like to add to that is that that world, now that China now, china's having its own problems right now. Well, people always get mad at me when I say China's having problems, but it has like a 19% youth unemployment right now. It does have problems, but but you, in a very real sense, china is no longer going to be the off sourcing for a lot of this labor and a lot of hiding the costs that have been done mayhem through cheap Chinese production in the 80s, 90s and past, and so a lot of these economic contradictions are going to come to a head very quickly where they've been hidden in the past. Just like how Brexit really proved that the only reason England had a viable economy in Europe was that it was leveraging the difference in the money laundering worth of the pound versus the cost of Polish and Estonian people coming in to do all the cheap labor in the UK. Like, and Brexit ended that, but it also made the economy immediately a basket case by ending it, because it always kind of was. And it was just what? Even more than the US, because the UK was a productive economy. These, the leveraging of this Eastern European labor that would lead to the Brexit backlight itself in a very real sense, was holding the economy together. But it's holding the economy together partly by suppressing the differences, and that's real Socialists.
Speaker 1:If we want to deal with this, we have to admit that just saying, well, you know, overall it's a benefit to the economy, when we're also trying to benefit working people is a lie. Like, yes, it is an overall benefit to the economy, but for whom? Is an entirely different thing and that has led to a lot of reaction. I think that's why. Like that's why I both care about immigration, but I also think we have to be very honest about this and like, yeah, we can do this and we can do it and we're not expense to an American worker, but we have to completely reorganize the economy for it not to be a huge expense to the American worker. Like, we can, we can do it, we have the power, we have the capacity, we have the materials. We really do probably take a decade to do, but we could do it, but we're not. So and that's the thing, and even socialists have kind of.
Speaker 1:This is one of my frustrations with Bernie Sanders and like you're talking out of both ends of your mouth on this, bernie Sanders is not will push back on on immigration. Actually, I think I think people you know then occasionally he get cornered and then he kind of liberalized on it. But, but I'd be like I was always like no, we have to really talk about how radically we have to think about the structure of the economy, because we actually do need this labor. Ultimately we do. And while at one time I would have said, you know, let's invest in the Honduras, guatemala, el Salvador fuck, we kind of owe them reparations don't call them that because I leave the backlash but like, like I'm not going to invest in them. Also empower them to minister it.
Speaker 1:I know there's some corruption, but it's worth dealing with so they don't get seen as like American stew states and and do that for our own stability. That's what I would have said 10 years ago and, like I said earlier, I don't think that's a possibility now. I don't think that would be enough. I think the damage is so much done in some of these areas. That people leaving them is going to be how it's resolved. How do we handle that? And I think you're absolutely right. We're hoping to out solve, outsource the dirty work, not even to the Border Patrol anymore. We're hoping to outsource it to Mexican border patrol and maybe even Mexican cartels, if we're honest.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we've already started, like I mean that that that relationship has been there for a while and you know, at the US will I again tea leaves, but, like I am, with fair amount of certainty we there will be an increase in amount of pressure from the US, from Mexico, to make the, the amount of people coming Mexico's problem.
Speaker 2:right, like, figure out a way to make this Mexico's problem, because I think you're also right about the eight piece, right like there is no spending our way out of out of this, at least not in any kind of like short term and I say short term like a decade sort of horizon, right like it. Just there will be no spending our way out of it. But I think the other thing too is like in terms of like radical reorganization, right. I think that also is sort of like what ties this back into like international socialist struggle, is that like there is a fix for it? It's that the way that stuff is set up right now is just untenable, right, and so, like to go back to the labor piece, it's like, yeah, americans don't want to take this job because the pay is shit. Well, the pay is shit because it has to be that in order to sustain the you know, lower cost of food and all that other stuff which even now, right, is increasingly not enough for families anymore, and so it all just comes round full circle that way of of. We depend on exploitation, the exploitation still pays the bills elsewhere, so people are going to keep coming, even though they know that you know the conditions are our shit.
Speaker 2:And conversely, then that becomes a conservative talking point when we're talking about taking jobs from people and you know, the whole system just gets reconstituted over and over and over again along those lines until again, like there's litter and I don't know what the I'm terrified to think of, like what the actual breakpoint is with all of this.
Speaker 2:But even even just large scale, like a Reagan Amnesty, would not fix this anymore. There's just too many other things happening right. And then you have you interweave stuff like the uptick in fentanyl and how that's moving across the border. Now, again, just like the number of globally displaced people that are finding a way to make it to the States. You know the number, the amount of, like Ukrainian citizens, just to use a really small example, like shot up tremendously in terms of the those traveling to Central States and trying to try to make border crossings, then something that, like you know, 50 hundred years ago would not have just, practically speaking, would have been very difficult for large amounts of people to move all the way across the globe to try to resettle is now, practically speaking, is very much a reality, right, like a suitcase in $1,000.
Speaker 1:I said this, haven't done it myself, it's a suitcase in a grand like it may be cheaper depending on where you're from from, so like, and no, you can't get into the US like by that airplane, but you can definitely get into Honduras, guatemala, maybe Mexico, like it's not. You know, think about all those Haitians come up to Mexico, for example. Like it's not expensive anymore. In the same way, and yes, the TSA has an international like border regime, literally kind of established by the TSA has a whole different topic we talked about one day.
Speaker 1:I used to deal with it all the time In a very real sense, like there's only so much they can actually do, particularly now the things are kind of decoupling. One thing I want to emphasize you know people like, oh, multi polarity, like multiplayer, isn't going to solve this. Like Central America, no matter what is the US spirit influence, it is like that might be plays in South America to go to China stuff, and yes, it was. A lot of these countries are going to try to trade with China and so much they can. They don't have a big enough economy a lot of times to be able to really leverage that in a meaningful sense, like Costa Rica, maybe can Panama, maybe can Mexico can, but like El Salvador cannot, honduras cannot, guatemala cannot, it's.
Speaker 1:It's like we have to be realistic here in. You know, my stance as a socialist is like well art, historically we fucked this up and this is very much us who fucked this up. Historically fucked around with these countries, going all the way back to right after the Civil War and in, directly and indirectly, since the establishment of the Monroe doctrine. Now, sometimes that helped nations out. Like you know, we fought a war with Mexico and then reestablish the president that we fought later on when the French mesh with them. But it was very much like that's our bullied neighbor. The right Europeans don't get to do that, only we do.
Speaker 1:That's my little brother, you can't take on it right, exactly, it's like we can fuck with Mexico, you can't fuck with Mexico. France, like, but. And so there's the. I mean it.
Speaker 1:I've studied Mexican history and Mexico when I live there, and it was not as a student, as I was a teacher, but I would go and listen to lectures on Mexican history and US Mexican relations, which is very interesting as an American, because there's a lot, you realize that like I was kind of told this in a footnote in school, right, but like Not really, but in the south it's, it's even more. It's very much a living history. Like you know, I live in Utah, which was uninhabited, weird separate estate that was settled, colonized by Spain and then a bunch of LDS came in to like take it over, because they didn't think Spain really wanted it, because they didn't establish a mission here, and then like later on, as acquired by the US in the Mexican American war. You know the other part that I like, that we know. I like to remind people all this was stolen, even when you're talking about a ceiling from Mexico was also still an indigenous land with Mexico. Took it just to remind you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and not nicely either, like casually, like can we have this?
Speaker 1:No, it was not. It was not like the Mexicans were better on their federal colonial policy. They were a little better after, I think after what second independence or what are like, depending on what you're talking about. But like, just to remind you, literally the Spanish Inquisition was unleashed on indigenous people. Like, like you know, that Spanish Inquisition really was brought to the Americas and leased on Keechie Mayan and another Nawa speak and Nawa speakers and all that like so.
Speaker 1:So don't think that everyone's nice in that history, but that's not the focus of our thing today. And also most people who tell you that usually do that to try to excuse us atrocities, and that's not what I'm here to do. My point is that, like, this is a very, this is a history that Americans generally don't know and they have some inkling of it now because it kind of makes the news media. Like I think people kind of know a little bit the summer what's messed up with Central America has to do with their cartels and somehow that has something to do with us. Yeah, like, just vaguely, like you know, probably because they sell it here. Like, like I don't think people know the extent of it, how it's tied into border policy, like I always talk about like hey, the Zetas were trained at the border patrol school of the Americas and Fort Benning, and like, which is still there, by the way.
Speaker 1:It just renailed itself, like they did change the name because it got so infamous in the late 90s. That's all they did Like, and no one's ever paid any price for that, except for maybe, desiders themselves where El Chapo got them. And then, oh, you wonder why it took us a long to get El Chapo. I wonder, maybe it was because, like I know I'm not gonna get conspiratorial, but there are times where I'm like we go after certain narco figures at certain times for particular reasons, like and I think that's something that we have to just admit that US foreign policy in our immediate neighbors, except for Canada, is tied into narco policy, which is also part of why we can't totally end the drug war, like because it's actually part of our foreign policy apparatus at this point.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And even the inadvertent thing like we. Obviously there's a rich sort of fucked history around the entire drug crime world, the gang world, that's just absolutely decimating Central America. But it's like, yeah, we literally transplanted the gang problem to Central America, like we rounded all of those young men up, disassociated young men who had, just, you know, started to find some level of identity in local gangs and then deported them back to their homes where they took that and ran with it and have, yeah, made you know MSD, you know it's all those folks In the aftermath of hunters and civil wars, of which we sponsored Siza, and to fight communism.
Speaker 1:Like this is like there's a just to remind people. That's how that happened, like during these pushbacks on these very like authoritarian, you know, scytoclonian nation states in Latin America that started getting indigenous put back by the brutality of their liberalization process, often held together by our own corporations, the biggest one being the bananas I mean, that's what the banana Republic literally comes from. But just in general, then when there's indigenous pushback to that, we empower right-wing hunters in those areas to fight the communists through the Cold War apparatus and then when we deport all these people who got inducted into US gang culture, which tied into our own impoverishment of our own cities, that they came back to broken states where this was the option, and now they learned it from us and took it home and those states are more broken. Also, there's more actually, believe it or not, an easier ability to get big weapons and thus the acceleration continues.
Speaker 1:And I'm not gonna say there's no local autonomy. I don't wanna take out like all local autonomy, but there is a very real way when, no matter how you look at this, the United States is a major contributor to these areas, and there's a couple of states that we spared it, and that's Costa Rica and Panama. And why we did that seems complicated. It supposedly seems to be about like trade, actually, and the proximity to trade routes there, but I really do think people need to think about that. When we talk about why things are so bad in these areas, it's not even just that like, oh, it got economically so bad there, so the gangs were the only option. Well, that's true, but where do you think they learned the gang technology from?
Speaker 2:Yeah, literally. So yeah, like to your point, like literally, in an inadvertent way, right by our own material conditions, just in local and published neighborhoods, and sending these folks back. But then, like you were saying, like actively training folks at places like Fort Benning in everything from counterinsurgency to torture, all that good stuff, right, and all of that knowledge just got dispersed far and wide amongst everything from again gangs to the Hunter leaders that we were trying to get to do the dirty work for us. So, anyway, all that to say is that, yeah, obviously this is a huge like it is our problem. As you know, it is a US problem.
Speaker 2:Well, if economically and morally like but to your point, I don't know that like a reparations kind of approach, like even if tomorrow we were like, hey, we did this, this, this and this, we're gonna pay out boatloads of money. It's not going to upend the international drug trade, it's not going to reverse climate change and it certainly is not going to make you know, abbot and DeSantis, stop being awful in their corners of the US.
Speaker 1:Right. I mean the biggest thing we could do to upend the international drug trade would be to pull a portrait goal. But I'm not gonna say that doesn't have a cost, because it does. Barn is not here to lie to you Like, yes, I don't really care about weed legalization, but legalizing narcotics would probably lead to less death in the United States, but it would still have a cost. There is no way around that. There is a social cost to that.
Speaker 1:If I had my way, I would make recreational narcotics not exist anywhere on the planet by magic. But I don't have magic and not even socialism is gonna immediately fix that. So it's just something we have to be honest about. I do think it's worse to have it be illegal. I do think the black market is far worse than a gray market would be, even and definitely then a white market, but nonetheless massive narcotics use social costs like just I mean, really we can look at, you know, even with alcohol, just look at the post-Soviet Russia for the cost of that. You know, losing 40% of your men really quickly from drinking themselves to death after economic depression is a pretty big traumatic thing, and so you know, I just wanna emphasize, I don't wanna think this is down hopeless, because I don't think like I do think, for example, we could accommodate these immigrants.
Speaker 2:We have the space.
Speaker 1:We have the capacity. We can't accommodate the current way we, however, organize our economy. We can't, like it would be highly unstable and particularly poor workers, but there's no reason. It has to be and I'm not just saying that in like a utopian sense like there are very specific things you could do relatively quickly to help with that. You know, even if it's weird, like resettling people in the middle of Nebraska where there's currently a city, but like all that that would create jobs, that would. You know. You do all kinds of things with that, but we're not doing that because it would be politically unpopular. And I do think this is kind of a pushback to my, to my vulgar Marxist tendency like everything's explained economically. I don't actually believe that because, honestly, this can't. It can be explained geopolitically, but it can't really be explained purely economically, because right now we actually would. There actually would be a pretty immediate benefit to the capitalist if we liberalized immigration. It would lower labor costs, it would.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean you would be dumping, you know huge amounts into the reserve army of labor, just.
Speaker 1:But we've been totally okay doing that in the past.
Speaker 2:That's why we had prisons. Yeah, which is what we pivoted to largely is right, like well, in the alternative, like we're just going to put and detention centers are growing right, it's like we're just going to put all these people in jail because that also, at least in these rural and a lot of them crop up in rural places. So it's like it is sort of like the weird twisted version of what you were saying, right, is that? Like we are doing it to some degree, we're just putting, we're just warehousing folks in rural places and creating a small job and instead of serious economic Instead of private prisons, we're creating private detention centers in place.
Speaker 1:I have fought one in Evanston, wyoming, because it was for, because we won that battle in Utah, believe it or not. And then the ICE decided well, we're going to do the same thing, but we're doing Evanston. Evanston isn't economically depressed in any city. That's counter-cyclic. The only reason we won that was COVID, and the locals realized that these prisons actually can collapse. Public infrastructure and a lot of these rural places barely have it. So it's an immediate boon to the economy, but then it actually is a drain later on and we were able to convince locals of that.
Speaker 1:But that's hard to convince desperate people like, hey, you need jobs right now.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you, in five years this is actually going to cost you more jobs than it's going to bring in, and in a lot of cases it absolutely will. But you need jobs right now and I think it took both that and COVID for us to win that fight. And if it was to happen right now under the Biden administration, we wouldn't win it because we wouldn't have the NGOs and I even doubt we'd get the ACLU on our side, who are our major organizers in Wyoming, the way we did then, and my partner played a bigger role in that than me, but we both were very adamant on this, and one of the things that we've seen here is the NGO money for a lot of these, like immigrant organizations or even just Latin community organizations, has dried up under the Biden administration to turn it back to where we're beginning, and so it is very hard to find the same supports and, because it's not in the news cycle, we can't even find like silly anarchist volunteer bodies.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and because I'm not trying to like give anybody a pass, but it's like this fight has been going on for so long and the intensity continues to ramp up that I think folks are just burnt out, because it's like you said, right, you fight this fight, you get it shut down in Utah and what do they do? They turn around and do the exact same thing, except in a spot that's twice as hard to do anything about.
Speaker 1:Yep and I'm sure they still open this somewhere. I don't know where they opened this it was further away from us, but I'm sure they still opened it somewhere. Like that's the thing, like the one thing I learned in fighting this is like do you guys know that the largest federal landholders and state level landholders in the country are private prison corporations? And part of that has to do with the detention centers, which are not even technically prisons. They're literally like government subsidized real estate organs at this point that own massive amounts of real estate. Like it's absurd to learn, like it's just like it's truly mind opening to do that.
Speaker 1:Also, I guess people do kind of know that like prison labor is a whole lot of like very cheap and manufacturing internal to the US. It used to be more than it is now. Actually, I think in the arts was like the high point of this is something like at that time during the Bush administration like one in 10 things manufactured in the United States to prison labor hands. But and while in most states it's not truly slavery, even though slavery is legal cause, an exception carved out in the 13th Amendment only for criminals. Hence Chengengs, why they were the way they were. Hence the rational, the rational corner to the New German Crow argument. There is some truth to that. The most states did have reforms where they have to pay prison or something, but it's like $2 a day $2 a day.
Speaker 1:A dollar a day, like enough to buy like a Twinkie at the commissary, like once a week, Maybe slightly better than that, but not much. I mean I've had some family members in prison, so I've heard about this directly. And with these detention centers there's not even that, and which means, since it's not economically exploitable, the conditions are going to be even worse. And I know that sounds horrible, but let us remember, as a good Marxist, we know that the only thing worse than being exploited by a capitalist is to not have capital and not be exploited by capitalists.
Speaker 1:Be, ignored by them. Yeah, yeah, like if the only good time to not be exploited by capitalists is if you own capital or if you're their patron in some way, like you're some politician or some petty, petty bourgeois arts project or something. But in general if you get ignored by the capitalists. I'll talk to people about this. I'm against gentrification, but in most scenarios, if we are honest, under current conditions, if we don't gentrify, what happens to these areas? It's not like they stay good community centers. In most cases they're allowed, they get cut off from any development and they turn into squalor and that's what happened to my hometown. So like, wow, I'm utterly against gentrification. Just stopping gentrification is not a fix to this, because if you just stop gentrification under current conditions, you are often condemning a community, so like it's a damned if you, damned if you do a situation. And with a lot of these issues, particularly tied to immigration, as we said, under the paradox of citizenship that emerges out of this, all kinds of paradoxes become immediately obvious when you deal with this Like and it's something that I say even Marxists can't deal with. For example, I'm going to pick on Angela Nagel, but Angela Nagel's whole immigration quote where she like kind of. I think I'm not going to say her intentions because I don't really know them, but she quotes Marx, quote, and then drops the end of it. So it means the opposite of what it says, like, but what Marxist is pointing out is like the hostility towards the Irish is unfortunately, systemically rational and will lead to a call for increased suspension of immigration and increased like hostility towards the Irish, but also that, like, honestly, socialists shouldn't support the, the immigration restrictions for other reasons, because it has reactionary results and also it it actually makes the you know, encourages nationalism and the proletariat this easiest for reactionary forces to exploit, which is the other part of the argument she doesn't quote, and I think we have to be more honest about the problems of immigration and the capital but also say, like we can't handle this, there are means, but don't let them like, don't let the neoliberals be the person driving the pro immigration argument, because that's going to be a disaster. And if you think it's bad, here I look at Europe, where this is worse and left and like left governments are in no position, they're even in the worst position, to handle the problem Because and the demographic problems in Europe are worse than ours, because they have never had strong immigration and naturalization policies.
Speaker 1:So this is something that I think is on the horizon and what I don't know what's going to happen is I think we're also going to be getting to see this in East Asia, definitely in Japan and Korea, and probably eventually in China, and I have no idea what China is going to do, just not, I don't know. I like not even going to speculate. Like China has been a multi ethnic country before, so I'm not saying it can't, but like this is this is not been hard to deal with in Japan, where, like, for both imperialist reasons and for nationalist reasons, and it there are good reasons why there's some fear of, like massive amounts of immigration. At the same time, like they've there's there's been a real push to try to handle this, because they just don't have, they realize that their population is going to age out and they're just not going to even exist If they don't handle this in some way. But it hasn't been easy and it hasn't really happened yet. Like same is true in Korea. So I don't just think we're going to see these problems here, I just think, when we talk about this, North America is where, like, it's really absurd Because, like, okay, japan and Korea are small countries, right, they just are and they have, and like they have limited resources.
Speaker 1:We are geographically, even during climate change, in a pretty decent situation, like we could be food independent if we wanted to be. We could be energy independent if we wanted to be. We are going to have problems with the green transition because a lot of the early developments of rare minerals are in Russia and China, but we even have some of those. We just don't utilize them and you know we could get some of those from like Bolivia, particularly if we did it. Honestly, it would be nice, you know, and fairly, we don't have a long history of that, but which is why it might be harder otherwise.
Speaker 1:But if you look at North America as a whole, we're in a good situation and yet I think our inability to handle this stuff is going to be, is going to make us politically unstable and we can't really utilize that and we could definitely accommodate a lot of these people.
Speaker 1:It's not like there's bajillions of people in Central America. It's not geographically large enough, but like it's. It's just something, for I think we really do have to think about it and I, like you, also think we're going to use. We're going to start using proxy state enforcers the way we do proxy wars. Like that's what I see is happening and what I the real dark part of me that is almost conspiratorial is just like and we're going to do it in the gray and black market world too. Like it's never going to be formal official policy and I don't think anyone's going to plan it, but they'll sure as hell turn a blind eye to it. Like and I mean we kind of already are. Like you know, we could have done a lot of stuff about this in the in, for example, the narco trade. If we wanted to in the 90s, it could have been done pretty fairly easily back then, not now.
Speaker 1:Not nearly as small or contained a problem as as it's as depressing as this conversation has now been for the last half an hour. How would you encourage leftists to think about this? Because the one thing I will say, what I've been sort of disappointed in and I have not always been the best on this myself, because I haven't been I have so many things I care about. This is not something I always talk about, but it does seem like this is kind of falling off the radar of discussion and I know people are going to go like no people are still talking about it and I'm going to say yes, there are a lot of people still talking about this, both in the activist world and in leftist spaces, but they don't have a microphone anymore. Like you know, in 2019, you could get 538 or even something like that to talk to immigration activists. That's not happening now. So how could we help and what are points of possible hope for mitigation of the situation?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think that on a very immediate, tangible level, what you were talking about local struggles you're like oh, is there really something going on there? Absolutely is. There are between detention fights and just overall struggle. There's probably something local to you happening where you can pitch in and try to work on material conditions for folks, immigrants, local to you. So there's just that like practical activist, if you will, sort of approach.
Speaker 2:But I think that the other thing that, like, we need to get fucking serious about is thinking of a positive, pro and I include myself in this right like a positive program around immigration, a radical sort of rethinking about how we can structure, you know, push to restructure the economic situation and then deal with this problem of like, how do we incorporate large numbers of folks into? Because, again, there will be no enforcing our way out of it. We will push the problem off. We might make some distance, like, but there's not going to be a fix through enforcement. So the question then becomes is, like, what do we do with all of these folks? And I think to your point right, it's like will it mean that there's a you know a level of like, wealth redistribution or even, like some you know more radical socialistic policies around this that might come up.
Speaker 2:I think those things probably rise and fall together in terms of a solution for immigration, but we don't. It's like and I say this as someone who's thought about this problem a lot, and I don't have a great solution is that we also are going to have to start reconceptualizing what it means to be part of a politic, like a body politic and not, and what the criteria are for being included as part of, like that economic thinking too, and so all that, all that is to say that it's like I do think that we we even under just a very like kind of blah, you know not, bernie, ask sort of world, we could actually do a great deal to accommodate, you know, and to take in large number of folks. I the part that I am still hung up on is that I think a lot of folks are rightly concerned about, like what the political blowout will be from some kind of large move to restructure both the economy around this issue and, ultimately, like the legal framework that we use to think about and process folks coming from other countries.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and, as we said, this is definitely a challenge to the US Constitution, but it's also, I think it's a challenge to like liberal conception of laws tote court across the board. Not just, not just this is not just a US constitutional problem, like it's also a problem in Mexico, it's also a problem in the Latin and Central American countries that we're talking about themselves. Like as a person who has been, I used to call myself an accidental illegal immigrant, but I've been told if not kosher, even for yourself so I was an accidental undocumented person because of political circumstances. I came in. I came in legally and and stayed my visa, but, like was asked to do a job under the auspices of the government illegally under their own law. It's fun, interesting I'm not going to say where fun things happen in a certain part, but but it led to me being technically an undocumented person for a year and so, like for people go, what is Varncare?
Speaker 1:You know my partner and I had a discussion about this is about skin in the game and she was like, well, part of the problem with me in immigration is I don't really have skin in the game. And I was like, yeah, but I I have, I don't know, but I really have had skin in the game and I have, you know, korean family who married in. Now Koreans who marry Americans get special treatment on immigration services. I don't know if people know that they do, but I also have friends who are, you know, who are intermarried couples between the border of Mexico and the United States. I have lots of those friends, actually because I've lived in both Mexico and the US, so it didn't happen. For those of you who don't know, there are more US citizens in Mexico than any other red place in the world. I know you think we all go to Canada, but actually it's a lot easier to get into Mexico. By the way, Love you.
Speaker 1:Jason, yeah, I've been one of them. There's whole communities in San Luis Epispo that are mostly gringos, all towns of expats just hanging out Before. That's even before all these people started making pissing people off. But going to hang out in the hip spots in Mexico City and running the prices up, don't do that. Go to some some place that actually is used to expatriates in Mexico. Come on now.
Speaker 1:But I used to remember good, all these kind of well off liberals would be like I'm going to go to Canada If Trump is elected. I'm like, well, if you had real cojones, you go to Mexico, because A they kind of want you and B like that would actually prove you're not racist. I mean, it wouldn't actually prove you weren't racist. You can still be racist, you're not in Mexico, but it's a much stronger card than going to the wider country, not to say that Canada's multiculturalism is well known, but their immigration policies are only slightly better than ours, which is why it's hard for even us to move there. It's something that I think a lot about. I would encourage people to try to have real skin in this game. I cannot stand how many things we have a five second memory for in left wing organizing and even in socialist organizing, and how we might have a memory.
Speaker 1:In some ways I'm a contributor to this because I'm also, like I'm in super interested in history. I talk about history all the time, and what is the understanding of our own history? And a lot of times we don't. But sometimes I feel like people know more about 1917 and 1980. And that's a problem, which is not to say you shouldn't understand 1914 to 1917. It is to say that you have a moral responsibility to be intelligent and to study as much as you can personally cultivate. I do realize we all have different talents and I do realize we all have a different interest and we don't have to know everything. I don't think I expect all of you to become constant students. That's not going to be useful for me. But if you're going to talk about this stuff, you should be informed about it. Go read Dan's book. I'm going to point that way I'm going to forget this. Go read Dan's book. That is Borderlines, published by Zero. I believe we accepted it when I was still there.
Speaker 2:Yes, you were one of the readers.
Speaker 1:actually, I read the book after it came out. For reasons that we discussed off-show and I'm not willing to discuss on air, I got to the point where I made sure I read the book before and after it came out to make sure it was the same book. I'm not going to mention how many times that happened, but it was more than once. I've read Dan's book twice and I couldn't remember if I was like did I read it twice for me or did I read it once as a Zero reader? Yes, I'm pretty sure I'm one of the people who accepted it. Go out and read it, even though I don't make any money from it anymore. I can't be accused of being corrupt here because Zero books hasn't given me a paycheck in three years. Congrats, I guess. Also, by the way, I only ever made 10 pounds for book accepted, so you never gave me that. I can say that now that it's not.
Speaker 2:I don't want to. It's so much work for 10 pounds.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, also because of the international exchange rate in Brexit it got less and less valuable. So when I started that was like $21 and when I ended it was like $12.
Speaker 2:So far, speaking of outsourcing and exploiting, capitalizing on the exchange rate.
Speaker 1:Let's not talk about left-wing publishing because, like it's, it's, I make a lot of enemies and I've worked in that world, and when I say worked, I volunteered in that world, because almost nobody who isn't on the top end of it Makes any money. So, you know, organizations like current affairs magazine only wherever profitable because they were dumping donor money and trust some money into it, like or, or, for example, my colleagues over at strange matters magazine, whom I love, but their editorial staff that cooperatively runs the magazine, I think for, goes pay so that they can pay their writers, like, because the only way for them to do it which is crazy, you know. So I mean, I guess I admire that decision, as opposed to the decision that a lot of left-wing magazines take, which is like we pay ourselves and not our writers, right, yeah, but uh, but still um. So now you guys have a little peek into the depressingly, the depressingly hypercapitalistic world of Marxist publishing.
Speaker 2:Do like a tiny plug like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no.
Speaker 2:I appreciate it. Mike Watson and I started a small press where we're going to attempt to do things a little bit differently, including better cuts just for authors and a lot more transparency around how that works. So anyway, revol press, revol presscom we're still I think it might say that we recently closed for manuscripts. Shit, send us your stuff, you know, or if you know somebody who's got a good book in them. We we are really hoping to try to adjust the culture around left publishing In our own little corner of the world anyway.
Speaker 1:Yep, as much as I hate to be an endorser of Petit Pujo projects, as a person who is currently on a Petit Pujo project I have to say anytime you can do this ethically, it's better, it's more rewarding. I can say that, like I don't have a you know Varm vlog doesn't have a bunch of interns, do you know why? Because I don't believe in not paying people, so so not not to call any any other people out specifically, but that's that's why and, honestly, the, the, the economics of a lot of these beers. If this is, if you're trying to support a staff on like a patreon, if you know there's power law, if you're a certain kind of podcast who came in at the right time, you can go buy houses and and Silver Lake and pay your staff, all honestly, not gonna name who that is, but people who know know and there's nothing wrong with that, even it's just timing and and. But if you're one of these people who come in later, even if you have a big name, you often do not have the capacity, off of patreon donations, to actually have more than one or two Per people on your staff and pay them anything like fairly. So it's, it's the way that goes.
Speaker 1:So all of you who are thinking you can make influencer money by the way, influencer money also, most influencers don't make I Off of podcasting. I hate to tell you that that ship has sailed, if it was ever real in the first place. But, yes, support, all right. For listeners who I'm for, people just listening to this I'm just screwing up pointing to Dan support we vote press, support small presses in general. Yes, they're petite, bourgeois, but petite bourgeois projects, some are better than others, and I Would also add to that that, uh, that I really do wish people would support a more viable and ethical model of left-wing publications Because, as a person who who more or less crit writing articles because they got sick of writing articles for free, which is pretty much the only way to get published, is to do it for free, right?
Speaker 1:I mean I'm willing to do that for poetry, by the way, for people go with, don't you publish a? Yeah, and also the poetry market so bad that unless you're an established name and you know, kind of let myself, you have to pay to to be to be rejected, which is ridiculous. But I'm willing to do it for poetry because I know nobody's making a whole lot of money off poetry, unless, I guess, your Billy Collins or somebody, but I don't think he's making a whole lot of money. But maybe Roopie Carr. I mean Roopie Carr is made, made silver like money off of poetry, but in general most people haven't made that. So I'll do it for that.
Speaker 1:But I'm not doing it for left-wing articles because I don't want. I don't want the whole art. Like the idea that those of us who are fighting exploitation have to literally submit ourselves to exploitative conditions To advocate for anything just seems absurd to me. Extra fucked, yeah, yeah, particularly when most of the left-wing publications are businesses and some of them are multi-million dollar businesses. There there are some left-wing publication houses that used to be party presses even that are now multi-million dollar presses with ties to major, you know, corporate industries. I mean some, I mean the.
Speaker 1:The most obvious one is Verso, like which, you know, this distributor is like ping-a-pinguin random house and, like you know, they started off as like I think it was new left-press and they had some ties to like British sectarian movements but like it's a completely corporate gig now, which is not to say that there aren't good left-wing people editing there. There are, and that's it. They're great. Sometimes great folks coming out there there are, but there is the reality of this market scenario. So if someone like repo press comes out, then you should support them if you can. So I'd like to thank Dan for coming on, check out his press. If, when, if submissions are open or when they become open again and you're a writer and you want to get your full-time in this world, it's probably gonna be. New presses are a good way to start. As a person who has literally Been publishing poetry books off of the new president why it is a tire life I will totally endorse that and I think what you guys are trying to do is a niche that's not currently Filled.
Speaker 2:So if you would like to talk a little bit about the mission of the press, actually before he in the show, yeah, you know, I mean, we, we really are hoping to, to, to kind of ground the whole thing and like based around the authors process, right.
Speaker 2:And so I think, like a number of left-wing and I'm not here to just like slander other left-wing publishers right, I think that, like, folks have taken steps right. But one of the a couple of the big things that we're trying to do differently is number one Just like a better royalty split across the board for authors. But then number two, that is like we are really hoping to sort of help cultivate, give folks the boost that we got, you know, from, you know not to blow spoke, but like folks, like barn, you know, I just had so many folks along the way Give me little nudges forward in getting the book off the ground, in getting it in front of other people. I stuff to where it went from. You know I was had no support to. I got to go on Sam's theater show, right, like whatever but I never got to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I.
Speaker 2:You're a little too.
Speaker 1:Say I'm not say like everyone's, like Varn, go on, sam's here so, and I'm like for what? Why would Sam Cedar undermine his organization?
Speaker 2:Beautiful lose lose. Proposition for Sam.
Speaker 1:So it's even sort of like lose, lose for me because it's like and I just lost all my cred forever. I already lose my credit enough by being close friends with, with a few people in the social democratic sphere that I've just known for like 15 years and you know I love them and and their allies, even if a lot of times I'm like it's okay, it's okay that you're a pinko and not an actual red. I can live with it. I'm okay Because every now and then someone will say that about me and it's really funny. They're like my favorite, my favorite insult is when people call Varna social Democrat. I'm just like, if my social Democrat you mean like August Babel in 1911, maybe, but like in general, no, I.
Speaker 2:Would you know? I'm not sure that the label label has ever cropped up in my mind.
Speaker 1:I've been caught a lot of other things Sucked him that one All right, socked him as a new one. That started only recently and I've just been like that's fun. But Check out Dan's press, check out board board of lines. I really do in my life, really do endorse the book and guys follow this immigration stuff. It's really going to matter.
Speaker 1:I think it's up there with climate change and politically and politically destabilization moves that unfortunately, the current geopolitical realignment, it's kind of put in the background and I also think the Democrats have been, as we said earlier and just to re-enter this point as we finish, the Democrats have been able to play this both ways and able to be shocked at the, you know, to feign shock at the seeming barbarism of Of like what Abbot and DeSantis are doing, not that it hurts Abbot and DeSantis often to do that actually helps Abbot and DeSantis with their base, but also To basically continue Republican immigration policies, but because they can point to Abbot and DeSantis as the, as the new face of that, that they don't have to change anything or even admit that they've capitulated and it's great for both sides. You do need to hold people accountable for pushing that, my friends. I do think you should, even if you're, even if you're a milk toast, sock them. Even if you're a Sam Cedar fan, look, I don't hate Sam Cedar either. You know, my favorite thing that people got mad at me about was like, likes, I said Sam Cedars just a Democrat, and people got all mad at me. I was like, look, I'm just saying with Sam says, like, like Sam has admitted, this is not even me, like he's just a Repeating, just saying what he, what he has publicly stated. Don't you know what it reminds me of.
Speaker 1:I'm rambling people, forgive me, I'm a little bit hyped up for caffeine right now, but, um, it reminds me of all those people who thought Obama was a rabid anti-war, anti-war president Because of what he said about Afghanistan and just totally missed it. His policy On Afghan, excuse me, what he said about Iraq, but his policy on Afghanistan was actually completely consistent the whole time. People were mad because I think they didn't realize that he was actually telling the truth about his chances, which is, you know, rare for a politician to do. But I I just remember going like you guys made him into this anti-war president. He was only anti the administration of the Iraq war and maybe the timing, but he was not an anti-war president but, yeah, and that was.
Speaker 1:I Sometimes feel this way with a lot of like left media figures, with the left media figures actually very honest about their, about their politics, yet people read them as more radical because I guess they want them to be, are like radicals sometimes come on their show or whatever, and I'm, like you know, I'm not even mad about it, like at all. I think Sam Ceter's fine for a progressive Democrat like I. Actually, you know kind of like him on the spectrum that, but like I also know what he is like. You know I don't get mad at like MSNBC for being in SNBC. I get mad about MSNBC for being full of shit, but like, but like I don't get mad at their politics because I know what they are like. I never had any delusions about that and I think that's maybe another thing to remember.
Speaker 1:As a media consumer, some of the responsibility is to actually like listen to what people say and Evaluate it, not by what you want to believe about, by what is said. That's what I don't know it we're way off topic, but thank you, dan, so much for coming on show for the show. Dan Molo and Mike is also a friend of the show. He's been on the show, although very long time ago. He's kind of in a place where it's a little bit hard to schedule getting him on the show.
Speaker 2:It's been, it's been, it's been quite the time like trying to meet and sort out the press, but we're doing it, yeah.
Speaker 1:Lately I've been having a lot of guests from New Zealand and Australia and it's been like, okay, well, I got to stay up till like 11 at night and call them at like six in the morning their time, or vice versa. This is the only way this impossibly happened, you know, but I get it. I used to be the guy who was who was Doing a show from from either Egypt or South Korea. So you know it's, it's fun. For those of you who wonder why Vaughn and the Ottens had a lot of British guests on his show, it was because they were in a closer time zone. Just for, if you've ever like suspected something there, that was why. Yeah, just, you know, just, it wasn't that like I love the British Running joke. That's totally not a joke, is that I don't?
Speaker 2:love.
Speaker 1:In fact I would say I have an irrational prejudice against wafts even for, like you know, not that wafts are good or anything, but like I have a irrational Rational prejudice, gets crossed, it's like, uh, anglo-saxon Protestants gross Anyway, and on that note I'm gonna end the show before I say anything that incriminates me and or Dan. So