Authentically Detroit
Authentically Detroit is the leading podcast in the city for candid conversations, exchanging progressive ideas, and centering resident perspectives on current events.
Hosted by Donna Givens Davidson and Orlando P. Bailey.
Produced by Sarah Johnson and Engineered by Griffin Hutchings.
Check us out on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @AuthenticallyDetroit!
Authentically Detroit
Introducing… The Black Detroit Democracy Podcast!
The Authentically Detroit Podcast Network in collaboration with Detroit one million present: The Black Detroit Democracy Podcast, hosted by Donna Givens Davidson and Sam Robinson!
The purpose of this podcast is to encourage Detroit's citizens to stay vigilant in the fight for justice and equality, with a special call to action for Black Detroit. We seek to build awareness of our history as a gateway to freedom, a beacon for justice, and a laboratory of liberation. Together, Donna and Sam will illuminate the complexities of Detroit’s unique political landscape and give residents a resource for navigating civic engagement and election season.
On this inaugural episode, they are joined by the one and only Reverend Larry Simmons, the Executive Director of Brightmoor Alliance who has been a fixture in the city of Detroit for decades. Topics of Discussion include:
- Emergency Management vs. DOGE
- Financialization of Detroit
- Race war vs. Class war
- Environmental Justice
- Immigrant labor exploitation and historical oppression of Black people
- The upcoming 2025 Detroit mayoral and city council elections
Detroit City Government is a service institution that recognizes its subordination to the people of Detroit. The city shall provide for the public peace, health and safety of persons and property within its jurisdictional limits by the city's officers, in seeking to advance, conserve, maintain and protect the integrity of the human, physical and natural resources of this city from encroachment and or dismantlement. Keep it locked. The Black Detroit Democracy podcast starts after these messages. The Black Detroit Democracy podcast starts after these messages. Detroit One Million is a journalism project started by Sam Robinson that centers a generation of Michiganders growing up in a state without a city with one million people. Support the only independent reporter covering the 2025 Detroit mayoral race through the lens of young people. Good journalism costs. Visit DetroitOneMillioncom to the Black Detroit Democracy Podcast.
Speaker 2:I'm Donna Givens-Davidson, President and CEO of the Eastside Community Network.
Speaker 3:And I'm Sam Robinson, founder of Detroit. One Million.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening in and supporting our expanded effort to build another platform of authentic voices for real people in the city of Detroit. We want you to like, rate and subscribe to our podcast on all platforms. The purpose of this podcast is to encourage Detroit citizens to stay vigilant in the fight for justice and equality. With a special call to action for Black Detroit, we seek to build awareness of our history as a gateway to freedom, a beacon for justice and a laboratory of liberation. Sam and I are joined today by the one and only Reverend, Larry Simmons, who is the Executive Director of Brightmoor Alliance and has been a fixture in the city of Detroit for decades. Welcome to the first episode of the Black Detroit Democracy Project. How is everyone today?
Speaker 3:It's amazing, it's a good weather day. It's almost 70 degrees outside.
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 2:That's wonderful, and you know I forgot to mention that you're also a pastor. What is your church?
Speaker 4:Retired now? Oh, you know, I forgot to mention that you're also a pastor. What is your church? Retired now? Oh, retired Baber Memorial, baber Memorial.
Speaker 2:When did you retire, Larry?
Speaker 4:Let's see, that was three years ago.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:And they kicked you out at 75 in the AB church.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:Probably illegal, but that's another story.
Speaker 2:It probably is. It's a good day for me. I am so excited about this podcast day for me. I am so excited about this podcast. It came to fruition really quickly, realizing that we needed to get some voices out, and you know, we all have limited time and the way that I've been able to communicate has been either through social media or podcasting. I definitely want to be in political organizing and, you know, in the streets, but my time is so limited, and so this becomes a way to move forward, and one of the exciting things about this is that we've wanted a network of podcasts, and this is the second in the Authentically Detroit Podcast Network, so we'll be adding this to the podcast network and, for anybody listening, if you have authentic stuff that you want to talk about, please feel free to share with us so that you, too, can join the Authentically Detroit podcast network. We need lots and lots of voices out here.
Speaker 2:I was on a podcast earlier today with a good friend Yodit Mesfin-Johnson has a podcast as well as she had Keisha Gray on there, who's another good friend and a member actually of the Stoudemire Wellness Hub, and we were talking about the fact that we don't represent other people when we speak, we can't speak for other people.
Speaker 2:We can try to channel voices, but people can speak for themselves, and so creating platforms where people can share their own opinions. We don't always have to agree Larry is a great friend and colleague but I can say that I probably disagree with Larry in public more often than just about anybody. And that's what makes it fun is because, you know, iron sharpens iron, and if you can make somebody think differently, then you're doing your job. So I'm excited because we are having this great conversation with somebody who probably has more history in the city of Detroit political arena than just about anybody I know, and so we're going to try to draw on that history, but also as a very forward thinking leader, somebody who's not stuck in the past but is really thinking about how do we get to justice still. So I appreciate your leadership.
Speaker 4:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all right. So word on the street. We want to talk. What's on the street? Sam, you have Detroit, one Million.
Speaker 3:Yes, I do, and I'm hearing a lot of stuff. I go up what's on the street? Sam, you have Detroit One Million. Yes, I do, and I'm hearing a lot of stuff. I go up to people on the side of the road. The bus stops there. Some of these bus stops don't even have a bench, it's just a placard sign on the thing. I think Malachi said it was like less than 5% of all bus stops have shelters, which is crazy.
Speaker 3:But if you just go out in public and talk to people about what's happening this August and November, we're going to get some new city council members and a new mayor. For the first time in a decade we're going to see someone else other than Mike Duggan. I say, guys, are you guys paying attention to what's going on? No, not. A lot of people regular in the public that aren't attending city council meetings or attending some city community neighborhood event. A lot of people are tuned out. The people who are tuned in, they're starting to have some stuff to say.
Speaker 3:One issue topic that I'm hearing revolving, one of the city council races that a lot of people, not just in Detroit but in Lansing, are talking about and cued into is District 6, southwest Detroit. Now, larry, I would go to these reparations task force. Detroit has a reparations council that's been meeting for two years now and there are members of this group of people that have been coming to the meetings, very involved participants who you know for lack of not knowing the exact name of these people's groups and organizations that they're affiliated with, I would just say, like national black nationalist groups, a lot of them are, you know, questioning why Hispanic people, latino people are involved in a reparations task force or involved in you know, programs like getting Detroit IDs to people that might not have an ID. They say, well, you know what could black? What could I do with my Detroit ID? Why can't I get one?
Speaker 3:Or, you know, thinking of the situation that happened with the two children that died, you know, pitting the incoming new migrants that we see in the Census Bureau is showing. You know, wayne County is growing. Who are the people that are coming as international migrants and they say is there room for us that these people are taking up? And in city council, where you have Tyrone Carter he's a longtime Detroit politician, state rep, and then Gabby Santiago Romero has been representing that district for a few years now. It definitely seems like the early conversation is going in that direction, which is just. You know. It's bleak to hear it at city council when people are just being openly racist toward.
Speaker 2:Gabby, you know? Yeah, I want to hear from you, larry.
Speaker 4:Well, donna and I have had these discussions in many contexts before. But in order to be racist in the way that I have used that term, you have to have power, systemic power. Now you can be prejudiced, you can have anti-feelings of one kind or another, but I don't want to launch into that discussion because we can go down a rabbit hole around our naming. But our language really ferments our division. It doesn't help bridge the division.
Speaker 4:And so I know both Gabriela and I know Tyrone. They probably share more political perspectives. Their political perspectives probably overlap far more than they differ, which is what you would expect in a city like Detroit, where the median income is $37,000 a year for the entire city, and this low income, defined by HUD as very low income, where we sit on that economic ladder I'm African-American making $26,000 a year, somebody else is Arab and they're making $22,000 a year. Guess what? All of us are in struggle. All of us are putting on our handle-it hat every day to get out in these streets and put these ends together. So I think it's unfortunate. I happen to know the kind of work that Gabby has done, if I may be so familiar with the councilwomen, and honestly I think the—well, maybe I should be careful about what I say here. Don't be careful, please, please. This is not a place for you should be careful about what I say.
Speaker 2:Don't be careful, please, please. This is not a place for you.
Speaker 4:I think too often people run for office because they're looking for a job and not looking for a mission, and I think anybody who pays attention to Gabby's record would be encouraged and enthused if they are somebody who sits under the majority, where the majority of Detroiters sit, and so I would really hope that Tyrone, for whom I have a great deal of respect, might look in other places for his next opportunity.
Speaker 2:Well, you know I have to say this we are one of our big focus areas is environmental justice, and Gabby's there with us. She shows up at our meetings, she invites us to meetings. She highlights some of the testimony that's given by people from our community. We're in southeast Detroit, she's in southwest Detroit and she works with us more closely than any other council person who is not representing our district. If I'm being really honest with you, I feel connected to her and I think it's important for us to understand also that you know people seem to think that you know transatlantic slavery is a US issue in the United States of America and it does not translate to other places. But I always try to help educate people about the transatlantic slave trade. That of the 6 million plus people who were kidnapped and forced into the Americas, about 500,000 or fewer came to the United States of America. There were more people going to Central America and South America than came to the United States of America. There were more people going to Central America and South America than came to the United States, with Brazil having the highest number. But you had large numbers of people going to other parts of Central and South America as well as the Caribbean islands, and they were all enslaved and in fact, slavery in some places was much harsher than it was in others, where the average lifespan of a person who had been kidnapped into slavery was seven years after their kidnapping. In South America, wherever you had sugar cane production.
Speaker 2:When you look at people who are coming here, they are people who are escaping conditions, just like we escaped conditions. They are not people who came from positions of privilege. You don't come to the United States, risk your life crossing a border because you're coming through privilege. You're coming escaping something, and I think we also have to be really honest about the privilege that we have in the United States economic privileges honest about the privilege that we have in the United States economic privileges that a lot of those are based on exploitation of economies in Central and South America that have made those governments and places unlivable. We create conditions and then tell people to go home to societies that we've destroyed not us personally, but we benefit from that destruction, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. I think that we are our brother's keeper and we have a shared responsibility.
Speaker 2:And the final thing I want to say about that is that one of my friends and colleagues accused Gabby of saying that black people were immigrants, and that is not what she said. She said that immigrants have a significant impact on Detroit's economy and we play a significant role here. We are black, we are brown, we are of different ethnicities. What she meant by that was not that black people were immigrants. She was acknowledging the fact that there are black people from across the diaspora who are immigrating here, who are also at risk. The erasure of black immigrants in all of these conversations concerns me as well. We have Haitian people, we have many African people. We have and we know what they're saying about Haitians we have people from all throughout the diaspora who are here seeking sanctuary. And, yeah, I just think it's important that we level set and that we understand that the United States of America does not work for people who are not rich and white, and I think that's your point.
Speaker 2:And men Rich white men were the intended beneficiaries of the formation of this nation, and it has never really changed that much since. When they talk about making America great again, what they're talking about is giving those people more power again and stripping it from the rest of us. And the easiest way to strip power is to get us fighting each other. So, whether we call it racism or prejudice, if I'm using whatever power I have to harm people because of their ethnicity, it's wrong, and that's just my opinion. If I'm celebrating somebody being kicked out of the United States, it's wrong. Celebrating somebody being kicked out of the United States, it's wrong.
Speaker 3:And we have to we keep hearing this more and more at city council. You hear from longtime seniors. I'll name drop, like one, betty Lyons, who has to get told by Mary Sheffield. Please, ms Lyons, please, can we be respectful, as she's saying well, I agree with the president that Palestinians are a bunch of troublemakers and we should kick them out of here. And you're starting to hear more and more people saying well, you know, trump is trying to take away my Social Security, but I do kind of agree with him about this group of people over here.
Speaker 4:But if you understand, if you look back at the long history of America, and if you look back at the long history of America we were talking the other day and I mentioned the Bacon Rebellion, which I think was around 1600, 1670, 1880, something like that. But it was a coalition of white indentured servants and African slaves. It was that rebellion which led to the formation of race-based laws separating people, because they did not want this working class group of folk coming back together again. That's when they passed the laws that no matter if one of the parents was free, the children would be slaves If one of the people were slaves. All those kind of laws emerged following the Bacon Rebellion. People say, well, that's 500 years ago, 400 years ago, 300 years ago. These things are true, but what you have to understand is they create a culture that gets passed from generation to generation. And so when you hear African Americans who have been systemically excluded turn their wrath onto other people who are being systemically excluded, they've acquired this prejudicial notion of the world. Because that's the way America sets up things. It sets things up in competition. I am so tickled by the. We were talking about politics and the Republicans are now complaining about. Democrats are too segmented in the way they approach the election. They're talking about black people or white people. Do you know where that came from? That came from Republican analysts 30 years ago who began this form of political targeting, and so when Democrats figured out what they were doing and picked up on it now suddenly it's a problem, they were doing and picked up on it, now suddenly it's a problem.
Speaker 4:I think we need to adopt and adapt language which includes us and talks about our commonalities. The people in Detroit, without regard to their ethnicity, the majority of people in Detroit who fall under that 37, or let me move it up a bit, let me say $40,000, who fall under that $40,000, are very similar in the challenges in their life as the people who live in the Traverse City MSA, where the median income is guess what $40,000 a year. But we don't talk to each other because they're white, we're black or Hispanic or Arab. I think that we just need to find a way to say how can we all work together to do this? And let me say this I know that white men are often justifiably, in my opinion the object of wrath.
Speaker 4:Most white men are not wealthy, most white men are not the super privileged, and I am not averse to extending my hand to that group of Americans to say is there a way that we can work together, that we might all prosper? If we think about the preamble to the city of Detroit charter or the preamble to the Constitution of the United States, it is the role and responsibility of the government to provide for the welfare of its people. It's the responsibility of it to provide freedom. It's the responsibility to provide justice, liberty. We just need to call on those who are in power to fulfill their obligation under the charter and the constitution.
Speaker 2:I appreciate that narrative, that framing, and I do want to tap into a conversation I was having with you earlier, sam. But I also want to point out that last summer Kevin and I went to Idyllwild for a jazz festival, and when I was a kid we used to go to Idyllwild and we go into Baldwin and Jones Ice Cream is still there. I was so excited to see Jones ice cream there. I was like, yes, right, and we go to. Um, there was a drug store and I get the Archie comic books I'm aging myself. Remember Archie and Betty and Veronica. That was like the greatest literature, right. And so, um, you know, I took this nostalgic tour. We left Inawild and I took this nostalgic tour to Baldwin and ran smack dab into a Dollar General store. I saw more yellow and black Dollar Generals on the way up to Idyllwild and through Idyllwild and then in Baldwin, where I remember we used to go places and it was so nice.
Speaker 2:And now the economy is rooted in a prison economy because the jobs have gone away, the manufacturing has gone away, and so now we have manufactured crimes in order to create wealth, but we don't talk about that, or at least create sustainability in the community. But even so, this is what people. This is the grocery store. Dollar General is not just a dollar store. In some places that's like your grocery store and I said you know, if all I had to eat was canned meat and canned vegetables, I'd be angry too. We're driving through places I couldn't get a cell phone signal. You know, in my privileged self I was like wait a minute, where's the cell phone signal? I was like stressed.
Speaker 2:But there's people living in places with no cell phone signals, no grocery stores, and I remember going up there when I was a kid and there were food stands, because this is in the summer, right, and you drive by my grandmother, drive by this one farm stand. We get tomatoes and strawberries. People were selling food on the side of the road. Nobody's selling food on the side of the road. All you have is family dollar general. And that's how you know America is not working for most people. America is broken in terms of the way most people are treated. But then you get into the blame and the problem is that people who live there, many of them, have a lot of misperceptions about what is happening in Detroit and the reason they don't want to work with us is because they believe that we are getting undeserved gains. So, just like there are black people who think that immigrants are taking our benefits, there are white people who think black people and immigrants are taking their benefits. And we were talking about this, sam, because you grew up in Midland.
Speaker 2:I did and I wanted you to sort of share what that experience was like.
Speaker 3:I was there in Midland for a while. It's interesting, saginaw and Bay City are all kind of the same tri-city community, so you know it's it's. I had the stat of like the census tract that I lived in about it was like a single digit number of black people that were on the census tract in the community where my parents address is still today. My mom spent 20 years in Baltimore, maryland. I was born there and she moved me back to have me be near where she grew up in Midland, saginaw. She worked in Saginaw for years and the things that you hear from kids who feel comfortable enough in their spaces to speak freely around me sometimes I'm eavesdropping or listening in on what they're saying.
Speaker 3:It's a complete, you know. It seems compromised, like it's just a complete and utter misunderstanding from people who some of your trust and are close to and are like really, this is what you think. Like no, this is not true about black people, whether it be we have an extra muscle in our knee and that's why they're all athletes, or you know well, black people get to go to college for free. So you know you're not going to have to pay for college, right, sam? Or um? You know what have you, um, you know we, we don't need to drink as much water because you know we, because our ancestors, all kinds of just racist misinformation that, um, you know white people, uh, uh, a lot of them share. Then you got to unlearn it too.
Speaker 3:I, you know, didn't have to unlearn that, but a lot of the people that I know in in our, you know, within city departments or working for the state of Michigan or whatever you know, will sort of I'll be like well, you know when you were a kid, the racism when you were a kid, right, remember when we were kids and everyone's racist. Yes, they do remember that. Xbox Live, what do you call that?
Speaker 2:Well, I think that not just them. As a black woman, I've had to unlearn a whole lot of stuff. Yeah, I had, you know, I grew up in relative privilege, and so I have to unlearn a lot of the elitism that I was birthed into, right, this idea that somehow I was on a different plane. I never believed that. My mother made it very clear that I wasn't, but some of that seeps through anyway, right, like I'm going to a better school and that's going to make me more educated than somebody who goes to a worse school, as though. And it took me years to realize that schools don't make people smart, that people are just born smart. God gave us all intelligence and the capability of learning and it took me back and I had to ask myself one day do I really think I'm better than my ancestors?
Speaker 2:My grandmother didn't go to college until she was 40. My grandmother was, if anybody knew her, she was the smartest person anybody ever met. She's the smartest person I've ever met. Still, she spoke English, french and Swahili. She taught Swahili, french and Spanish in Mumford High School after going to college at 40, okay, for the first time, she was absolutely brilliant. She was well-read, she was compassionate, all of those things. But she didn't have the privilege of a good education. She grew up in poverty. She was orphaned at 10. And her grandmother, who raised her, could not read.
Speaker 2:And if you understand where you come from, then you unlearn that. And that's true of white people and black people. We're all coming from. Most of us I'm not going to say all of us most of us have humble, you know histories and if we really want to feel like we're connected to that line of people, then we don't feel like I'm better than this person. We just understand that I have had more privilege and even more privilege, right. That doesn't even mean I'm happier than this person, because there were a lot of really unhappy, privileged people where I grew up, right. And so you know, when we stop measuring our worth and our value by things like skin color, education, wealth, income, then we can get back to humanity and tap into that part of us that's human, and for me it is. How do we create a society where humans have their needs met?
Speaker 2:Now, larry and I are part of Detroit 21, and it's a group of 25 organizations working inside of the community, and one of the most perplexing problems, the big problem we have is housing right. It's the biggest thing we have is housing justice. We build affordable housing that people can't afford all of the time and then we say, well, you know, it's the best we can do. But we never really ask ourselves and Larry forces this question how can we create housing that is universally, that is available to anybody who needs shelter? If housing is a human right, then we should not be about the business of recreating government programs that don't work for us. We should be trying to come up with new solutions. Is that kind of what you're thinking, larry?
Speaker 4:Yes, it is, and we have had this discussion a lot. You know, frances Cress Welsing, in a book called the ISIS Papers, talks about. It's a phenomenal book and she has some things in there which I flat out disagree with. But you know that's often the case. But she has a construct in which she says people who are oppressed she's talking particularly about African Americans they walk up to the edge of the abyss of white supremacy and they are so terrified by what looks, what they have to step into down this abyss that they retreat to religion, sex, drugs and materialism as means of managing the stress and the pain of the white supremacy under which they're being raised, the trauma of being raised and living in that kind of context.
Speaker 3:It sounds like what Kanye is doing right now. He's turning toward those vices, right.
Speaker 4:But you can see as a culture if you actually watch TV. Pay attention to what's being advertised on television. Drugs make up probably I've never done a research on this, but I'll bet you drugs make up 50%. Cars probably make up 50. So maybe they make up 40. 40% of the advertising on TV are drugs. They sell you drugs to lose weight. They sell you drugs to put on weight. They sell you drugs to get muscle. They sell you drugs to take away stress. They sell you drugs that make you stressful. The marketing in our society is about mitigating the pain.
Speaker 4:So, in the large sense, we say the Reagan tax cuts led us into the largest separation of wealthy versus poor, of managers versus workers in the world in history.
Speaker 4:Like managers make I don't know what the number is today, maybe it's 10 or 20 times what the workers in their organizations make this creates a context in which those of us who are workers, which is most of us are then forced to scramble and fight over the 2% of wealth that is actually made available to us. So, Elon Musk, do you know there are like was it, five people who make more than the other 99% of the American population? They have more wealth between these five people, not 5%. Five people and you know their names. It's Musk, it's Gates, it's Gates. You can look up the other three or four. How can we justify, in Detroit, a person thinking that the safest place for me to keep my children overnight is a casino garage and the annual income of the United States is $29 trillion this year, next year, the year after, If it only grows to 2%, we consider it a recession. Do you know how much 2% of $29 trillion is?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know what, larry? This is such a good point, and I want to bring this back to bear on Detroit in a minute. I do want to, before we take our break, just point out one thing you said about the pharmaceutical industry that I think is so important, and that is our government sold us opioids. Our government facilitated mass addiction and mass death. If we're being really honest, the FDA approved it that one family was able to bribe people in the FDA to turn their heads, and so when you have basically a government that does that, then you have to understand why some people are anti-science and anti-government, because science and government did not protect them.
Speaker 4:Abused them.
Speaker 2:We abused them, exploited them and actually facilitated the Sackler family to become so wealthy in the process of doing that, and nobody from the Sackler family has ever spent a day behind bars, despite things that should be considered criminal. But aren't we talk about people bringing fentanyl in from Mexico? Fentanyl is nothing compared to what the Sackler family did in our communities. The Sackler family did in our communities, and it's part of the anger and rage of people who supported this government dissolution, who no longer trust in it, and so I'm not trying to justify them, but I think it's important we're going to take a break and we're going to come back and apply all of this to very specific Detroit context.
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Speaker 2:All right, welcome back to the Black Detroit Democracy Project. We had some really exciting conversations where we kind of laid the groundwork for what causes injustice and what some of the sources are. Larry, is that philosopher who's going to start quoting people? So you know, I'm always a little intimidated. It's like, okay, I'm going to have some quotes next time, larry, but no, it's great.
Speaker 4:Who believes Donna is intimidated. I just want to see if I can get anybody who will raise their hand. You know what?
Speaker 2:see. My grandmother told me you never show your weakness. My grandmother, seriously. They said never let them see you sweat was how I grew up. So you know, you don't know it's there. But listen, when you start quoting stuff I'm like, ooh, wait a minute. I need to read up and be able to do that, larry. But no, I think it's a great conversation for us to have. I'm going to try to start this conversation by making one comparison. Can we talk about the differences and similarities between emergency management and DOJ? What's different and what's similar?
Speaker 4:I don't know. That's a very good question, donna. I'm not sure. There is a whole lot that is. I think DOJ is probably more constrained by law than the emergency manager is. So you've got courts who are now beginning to assert the Constitution and rein Doge in Now. This is going to be a long fight, so we don't want to declare victory before we have it, their victory before we have it, whereas the emergency manager basically ran roughshod over the law. There was a state constitutional amendment that said you could not take municipal workers' retirements. They just blew that, they just walked over it. Everybody lauds philanthropy for their contribution to the emergency management, to what they call the grand bargain. I think the philanthropists, the foundations, donated I don't know five million Foundations donated, I don't know $5 million. The employees contributed $8 billion. I believe this number is right $8 billion.
Speaker 2:It was the employees giving up their retirement that made the bailout possible, not giving it up, having their retirement forcibly taken from them. Yes, and it's the first time in American history that pensions were ever allowed to be reconstituted like that. So people believed that was unconstitutional. I put my money in the pension plan. That money belongs to me in perpetuity until I die, and then whatever. And so to find out that you don't even have the right to your pension was shocking. And yet you're getting at this, larry. The courts were silent. The courts permitted this. The main difference to me is that emergency management happened to over 50 percent of black people in Michigan, and Doge is for everybody.
Speaker 3:There's a good one.
Speaker 2:So in the class that I teach we use a textbook the 50-Year Rebellion and I'm getting copies of it. I'm going to give you one, larry the 50-Year Rebellion how the US Political Problems Began in Detroit, where Scott Kirshige, who's a former professor at University of Michigan and worked with the Boggs family before he actually was appointed president of the Boggs Foundation there's a men fighting going on, but he's the president of the Boggs Foundation and he actually wrote a biography for Grace Lee Boggs that was authorized by her. Scott is a brilliant researcher and he lays it out so that you make the case. He doesn't. Of course he didn't. He couldn't predict Doge right, but what he did predict is that our democracy is crumbling and Doge is the manifestation of that. That.
Speaker 2:Somehow, if you can begin to shrink people's rights, this is what you get, and we're seeing it. And so when you're talking about Detroit, you're talking about a city and a group of people who already saw democracy fail, and I think they don't necessarily buy into democracy in the same way other people do, simply because when it's snatched away from you, you no longer think it's viable. So I wanted to sort of have that conversation about democracy and the connection of people. You said you go to the bus stop, sam, and I don't know if it's fair to call you a guerrilla journalist, but that's what I think of you as.
Speaker 3:Certainly more than the journalists that are getting health care by the dailies right now they don't really go on the street.
Speaker 3:And that's my question of like you know who's going to talk to the actual people man the street? And that's my question of like, well, you know who's going to talk to the actual people man? Think about, you know just the news today of uh, they're in an effort to to prevent fraudulent claims, they're going to force social security recipients to show up in person, visit, visit the actual field agencies. And I just think about, like you know, my grandma is like 95. She can't drive anymore, and hasn't for 10 years. So now, on top of having to drive around to all of her other stuff, my uncle or mom is going to have to now do this. Like what?
Speaker 4:Now and keep in mind they've closed down social security offices, so it's not like they are everywhere like they used to be. So they're going to be. There used to be 10. Now they're going to be three. And you're telling all of these retirees, you got to show up at those three offices and wait five hours to pick up your check. But I'm going to tell you something. This is, and talking about this, that will give you another book.
Speaker 4:Nexus N-E-X-U-S is the book, and the author is a guy named Yuval Noah Harari, h-a-r-a-r-i. It's not an easy book, but I really encourage you to plow through it, and it goes to this question of democracy. He talks about the comparison between totalitarianism, between authoritarianism, between totalitarianism between authoritarianism. He sets up a construct for democracy which I don't really accept. But in trying to set these up, he gives a phenomenal history of how different people in history went about installing this. Now, he never, or at least he hasn't so far. I'm about halfway through the book, three quarters of the way through the book he's never called out any current American administration. He does do a lot of calling out of Putin, but no American administration. But the point he makes is this when there is a crisis, like those people who are coming into our country who are selling drugs. Nobody thinks of the family that sold Oxycontin. What's the family?
Speaker 2:Sacklers.
Speaker 4:The Sacklers. Nobody thinks of the Sacklers as dope dealers. No, that's exactly what they were. I had a knee replacement about five years ago. They were offering me Oxycontin this is not an exaggeration by the fistful they came out of the. The nurse came out of the back room and said do you need any pain medication? Here is some Oxycontin. I came back to the doctor because it was right after the surgery. A week later she walks out the same thing again another fistful, not in prescription bottles. I guess they're the things that the drug companies give. They call it samples.
Speaker 4:She's got a fistful of samples here. Take them Now. Because of my history as a radical, I don't use drugs. I'm only saved from that by my radical history. Many of my friends that come to it and are gone today. This thing that we are seeing, which we first saw in Detroit with the emergency manager and the erasure of decades of promises and value, saw the same thing with the foreclosure of the houses Decades of net worth wiped out. This is a. I'm not going to say it's a part of a plan, because I'm not that conspiratorial yet, but it is certainly part of a process which is sowing the ground for a dictatorial personality to emerge. It may not be Trump. I don't think it will be Trump actually.
Speaker 2:I think that we have a dictatorial Well. Well, we're talking about the strong mayor, because I want to keep it local for now right.
Speaker 2:And I think when you look at emergency management, what did it do? You laid off all of these bureaucrats, black people working in the trip bureaucracy, right. They lost their jobs A lot of. We shrink these systems. Now. Planning and development has so many people working for Mayor Duggan they need. They were building new floors to accommodate the water systems all of those workers who worked in Detroit. Water and Sewage are gone. When you look at the floods right now in southwest Detroit, there was somebody I think it was Simone Lightfoot said years ago that we got rid of the people who really understood how the system works because there's no real blueprints for how the system works.
Speaker 4:That's absolutely true.
Speaker 2:So there are people who just understood it because they worked there for 20, 30 years and you've gained this knowledge. All of the institutional memory gets wiped away, and now you have people coming in as amateurs. And so one of our colleagues was saying the other day well, there's nothing that can be done. She's an engineer. And I wanted to say to her you know, there were people who really understood this knowledge and they could pass that knowledge on to a next generation. We got rid of them and now they are replaced by technicians, by technical experts.
Speaker 2:But it also paved the way for just massive gentrification in the city, privatization of all of our assets, and I do think you're going to have to come back another time because we've got to get into the strong mayor piece, larry. But I also want to talk about financialization. Right, financialization is the end goal of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism liberates money. It doesn't liberate people. It is how do we take controls off of financial institutions and financial entities so that they can be as aggressive as they can to make money? And neoliberalism is at the root cause of so many things. Financialization is at the root cause of so many things.
Speaker 2:Every year we go to the State of the City. If you watch it, I think there's another one today I'm not invited anymore, but anyway the State of the City and the mayor comes out and he tells you all the great things that are happening in Detroit. You've heard it right. And then you think maybe I should move to Detroit and you're like, oh no, I already live in Detroit and so that doesn't help. So you go to the state of the city and you hear all of these great things and at the end of every speech he says and, by the way, for the seventh year in the row, detroit's bond rating has increased. It's not coincidental, because our city policy is tethered to increasing the bond rating. Bond rating says let's increase average incomes. Well, you can't increase average incomes if the four folks are still here. So if you have processes by which you benign neglect isn't that what Nixon called it where you just kind of neglect them and let them move away, then you can increase average income here.
Speaker 2:They look at the housing values right, and so housing values. The quickest way to increase housing values is get rid of low-income housing. Eliminate low-income housing and then you build new housing. Look at the increased rental rate. Those rental rates are not just driven by what's happening in neighborhoods, but largely what's happening downtown, midtown and all those other prioritized areas of the city. And so you have the mayor, not in a conspiratorial way, say, but saying I need our bond rating to increase, because our bond rating doesn't increase and we end up back in junk bond status, which triggered the bankruptcy. Then the city can't function. We need to borrow cheaply in order to maintain our city, because our city is so dependent on borrowing, and so, to me, it's the systems that we put in place that inevitably lead to prioritizing wealth over everything. What do wealthy people want to see? What the bondholders want to see and most bondholders in Detroit, of all these bonds, we're selling them to suburban people. We're not selling them to Detroiters. Do you own any municipal bonds?
Speaker 4:No.
Speaker 2:No, you have to have a certain amount of money to buy municipal bonds, right, but municipal bonds are not just purchased by corporations, they're purchased by individuals. That's part of an investment package, right? And so, when you look at, the investor class is really driving this and driving so many decisions Like why don't we have Art Van anymore? Why don't we have Toys R Us? Why don't we have so many industries? Because you have these processes by which financial entities are sucking the money out, cannibalizing these industries, but they're doing it to cities too. So there's a great article that explains all of this, called Financialization of Detroit, and there's a great article that explains all of this called Financialization of Detroit.
Speaker 2:And there's a book that an author shared with me called the New Masters of Capital. And if you read the New Masters of Capital and I can't quote chapter and verse, but I can just sort of summarize for you this is what they're teaching is that if you have capital, that whoever controls the financial interest can control a nation, can control a city. What they're doing right now will benefit and enrich bondholders, and I think that's the ultimate goal is to enrich the rich people, not to have government work for the people. And my question is this is this If our government is so bound and so controlled by these bond holding and the bond rating agencies Standard Poor's and Moody's, if our city is so beholden to them that they are going to design social policy to address their needs, then what happens to citizens? What about our needs? What about our rights? It's as if they have more power over governmental decisions than voters do.
Speaker 4:That's been true. Banks have the original financialization masters at your wall here in the studio with the copy of the Diego Rivera mural that's in the DIA. I think there is a brewing crisis in America, that this wall is a metaphor for People with money. What's the point of having money? It's to be assured that you have an abundance of whatever it is that you want. In order to do that, you've got to be able to use or spend that money in relative safety. You've got to be able to move around. You've got to have a space where you can move around without being afraid or having the need to have a phalanx of bodyguards with you everywhere you go. I've been in the company of some very wealthy people in Detroit and you would never know they were wealthy to look at them and they don't walk around with bodyguards Because, for all of the challenges that people have about safety in Detroit, detroit is, you know. Basically, you can go about your business and get where you want to go and nobody's going to bother you. The problem now is when Diego Rivera did this mural, most of the people who were here in Detroit were either working in a plant, like you can see them in this mural and, for those of you who are not in the room, you can go down to the DIA in the Great Hall and it's up against the wall and you'll see all these people. I think they're all men. I've never seen a woman, but there were women who worked in these plants and it's literally a sea of humans interacting with these machines, assembling these automobiles. If Diego Rivera came today to do the same mural, those would be robots. So where do all of these people go?
Speaker 4:And what you can see? You can see it on the east side, you can see it in Brightmoor that benign neglect. Brightmoor started emptying out 30 years ago 1990, for sure, for sure, and each decade since 1990, it has lost about 15% of its population. So we were at like 35,000, 40,000 in 1990. We're down to about 15,000 today and dropping. But what is happening is that that land that used to be filled with working class, lower middle class folk is now pristine and open. The majority of the property in Brightmoor is now empty, which means that the people in Brightmoor, the population that's in Brightmoor, it's not enough of them to pay the cost of sustaining Brightmoor. They don't have the income and it's not enough of us. And so that means that you've got to have some other people come in. Where do the people who are represented, or their grandchildren, in this mural? Where do they go now? They're in the near ring suburbs, which, over the course, sam is a real young guy, so I'm looking across the table. When you're as old as I am, those will all be brown. The city will be substantially less populated and it will be wealthy and white.
Speaker 4:There's a guy named Doc Siadis did a plan for Detroit Edison before Coleman was in office, so maybe this is back in 1969, somewhere along there it's in the library. I don't know if it's published, but Doxiatis is the professor's name. He was a professor at Wayne State. He predicted this. He said Detroit is going to be a white center surrounded by a brown donut. He said Detroit is going to be a white center surrounded by a brown donut.
Speaker 4:But how do you manage that in a way that people can be safe? And this goes to the point that you were just making, donna. When you have money, the one thing you've got to have is stability. You've got to arrange things in such a way that you can move around and your contemporaries can move around in relative safety. I don't know what the end of that play is. I don't know what you do with all of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those workers that are depicted in that mural, who today occupy Detroit, but it's clear that there is no concerted effort to sustain them inside the boundaries of what is Detroit.
Speaker 2:You can send them to prison.
Speaker 4:But sooner or later they're going to come out.
Speaker 2:Well, they are going to come out, but they're going to go. Well, they come back out and a lot of them go back in. We have a prison industrial complex and while they're in prison they work for some private corporations for pennies on the dollar, and so we don't talk Fifteen cents an hour. Can you believe that it's obscene?
Speaker 4:Nine cents an hour.
Speaker 2:And so, when you really look at how we've constructed things, we have criminalized people and even after there were, what did they used to call the laws when people didn't have jobs?
Speaker 4:Vagrancy.
Speaker 2:Vagrancy. You know this idea that you have to be employed in something constructive, but then we have to, you know, removed all constructive labor for you. Now what Trump is promising is we'll get rid of the Mexicans and you can go back down south and you can get back on those farms and be sharecroppers again.
Speaker 4:I suppose I don't think anybody's going for that. I don't think anybody is.
Speaker 2:But has the US ever existed without an exploitable labor force? Because now you have prison labor, you have immigrant labor. And it's interesting to me because even when you talk about immigration, we criminalize people being here. We don't criminalize the people who bring them here and have them working for them. If we decided to you and I, larry, if we decided to hire people without documentation and we didn't have our I-9s filled out, we might get a slap on the hand, we might have to pay a fine, but we're not going to prison, we're certainly not getting deported.
Speaker 2:I don't want to say it too loudly because maybe some folks will think that's a good idea. We'll just do this in cities. But the people who get penalized really are the people who are here for slave labor. And so if you know that you have no power, that your very presence here is considered a crime, then the employer has complete control of you. Who are you going to complain to? There's absolutely nobody you can complain to. If you act out and you do something they don't like, it can turn you into immigration.
Speaker 2:We've created a powerless class of people, and when you send all of these vigilantes and these ICE people out, to me, they're no better than slave catchers coming into our community, and we have to see that. If we don't see that, if we don't see the common humanity in the city of Detroit, we're in trouble. And I want to go back. I just want to tie one thing together real quickly, and I want to hear what you're going to say, but I just want to say that the way to stop Detroit from being in that dystopian vision that you just shared with us, larry, is for us to build power, and not just among each other, but among all of the ethnicities in Detroit that are facing, you know, being pushed out. If we can build power among all of these ethnicities, then we have the power to fight back, because the one thing billionaires can't do in Detroit is vote no, sorry.
Speaker 4:I wanted to make this point of going back to the book. Two of them, can I mean they don't?
Speaker 3:they might not live in the city of Detroit, but they certainly will use their First Amendment to boost the candidates we ought to. We don't have a bunch more, that's true. We might have a few more thinking about Detroit that might not are from here or live here.
Speaker 4:They are thinking about Detroit, which is because 75% of the fresh water in the United States surrounds us. Seventy five percent of all the fresh water in this country is here in Detroit. So Detroit is going to be a place where folks will come to get access to the natural resources of the city. But the point I wanted to make about this drift towards authoritarianism and this goes to the point that you made, sam, when this thing about having everybody report to the Social Security office. They also went into a nonprofit organization over the weekend that is not owned by the government. That was owned by the organization and when they would not allow them entry, they got the DC police to join with the Doge FBI folk I guess that's what they're using and they went in, escorted these people out of their property.
Speaker 4:What we are watching is the creation of a secret police. We are at the very beginning stage of a secret police. They're currently targeting those criminals from Venezuela. They're going to move to those criminals from Venezuela. They're going to move to those criminals from Haiti. Then they're going to move to all of those criminal left-wing Democrats who stand in the way of the great President Trump and his army of righteous justice child abuser collectors. I'm not making these words up, by the way. These are words that are being used in the echo chamber of the right.
Speaker 4:So, gradually, what started? Pointing at what that black woman that you made reference to agreed with? Oh yeah, I agree with the president. I think he should be going after them. She's not going to feel that way when they come through the door after her nephew and her, because once the secret police grab, hold and then the next step is to turn family members against family members. So, are you looking for a job? You getting money from the government? Do you have a job? Are you one of those? What's it? Fraud, waste and abuse. Are you one of those fraudsters, wasters or abusers? I'm calling the doge police on you.
Speaker 2:Right, and you know I'm going to read a poem, and unlike you, I'm going to read it, though, and we've all heard it right. The poem is by the Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller. I'm not sure if I even pronounced his name correctly. First they came for the socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Even now, maybe, I celebrated because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionist and I didn't speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came out for me and there was nobody left to speak for me. That's the problem.
Speaker 4:And we're watching.
Speaker 2:And in knowing this, I mean, how many people know this poem and still do the same thing, still feel so righteous in their anger? And you know, and it's become even bigger since Trump was reelected, because now we're in the blame game thing where you know everybody's like you're going to F around and find out, mm-hmm, look at that leopard-eating face. I mean we are celebrating these things like, oh see this Republican, they thought they could vote for him and get away with it, and it's great, we don't have to love them. But the reality is inhumanity, is inhumanity against people I like and dislike and we cannot celebrate inhumanity and be on the right side of justice.
Speaker 3:We heard Curtis Hurtel at the Michigan Democratic Party convention last month at the Renaissance Center say he's tired of hearing from members of his own party blame Arab Muslim voters for Kamala's loss. She lost, he said yeah, she did.
Speaker 2:I mean she lost and people are blaming Rashida Tlaib. First of all, don't come to me, because people come to my inbox. They're always trying to get me to dislike her. There's nothing you can say or do that will make me dislike Patricia's leave, because she's been fighting for the east side of Detroit since I've been here and I appreciate people who fight for us. So if you're my friend, I'm loyal. Know that. Okay, I don't come against people who've come for me.
Speaker 2:I think if I were in her shoes and my people were being bombed and my grandmother was in harm's way, I don't even know if I'd be as polite as she was.
Speaker 2:I'd be crazy, and I think we have to give people the freedom to be on a whole different plane when their people are under attack. You can disagree with her, but I just can't go there with you. I think that we have to have empathy and I think that we have to have concern. Despite Elon Musk saying that empathy was a weakness of the West, I think that we have to have more empathy and more solidarity than that and understand that people made decisions under duress. People made decisions while in pain. People made decisions without having any great decisions to make, because the reality is the systems that we are all mourning being torn apart have never really worked all that well for our people anyway. And that is not to say that I'm glad or celebrating that they're being torn apart because it is scary, but it is to say that I can understand why people who live in rural America are mad at America.
Speaker 3:What you just said underscores why a lot of young people that are my age don't care. We, frankly, just are tapped out, and have been since the pandemic. A lot of people that are my age think 2020 was the last of it. That was the last of their political participation and engagement. Well, it didn't work. So I'm just removing myself.
Speaker 2:I've heard that from so many young people. We have a family chat and we had to break it up because during the elections, like the young people and the old people were like in a fight and so we had to say OK, you have your own chat, we're going to have our chat. Let's not talk to each other, and I was trying to make everybody be nice and they formed a chat and kicked me out. So anyway, but I do want to talk about this election, how these things. So we have a few minutes. I just, in the closing minutes, I want you to think through how you think this will play out, because we have municipal elections this year. You know we're going to be able to elect a new Congress in a year or so, but we have municipal elections this year and I'm wondering how you see all of this chaos that's happening in DC, all of these forces that are undermining justice. How do you see it playing out? Are we going to become stronger and more engaged and, if so, what will it take to get us there?
Speaker 4:I am pessimistic about the near-term result of our municipal election. I don't think we have reached a point of pain where enough people are willing to take the risk, to take the risk of talking about the real situation. We are reacting to other people's initiatives as opposed to creating our own. You recalled when we had our meeting and I suggested that we should go and reach out to the folks who are up around Traverse City, whose median income is almost identical to Detroit's, and also, we can't do that until we have a healing first. Well, wait a minute. They are hurting up there.
Speaker 4:This acknowledging each other's pain is not what I hear coming out of our many of our some not all of our elected leaders, our many of our some, not all of our elected leaders. And the minute people get pushed into a corner, the first thing they drop as a way to try to get ahead is the race card. I see that happening more. I got in trouble. I got in trouble because I wrote a and I don't write much on social media, but I wrote a social media saying that I was going to give Sri Thanatar the room to show me he's going to support my community. I didn't vote for him. I'm not sure the way that he went about getting elected is something that I like, but there's no question it was a brilliant campaign and he won, and so I got vilified for saying this. But here's the thing If you don't like him being there, mount your case about what he's done that has not represented the people he says he's representing, and run against him and move him out. But we instead want to just drop the race cards. That's why I'm pessimistic.
Speaker 4:This is me. Maybe this is where my faith is replacing my brain. But I think as we begin, it becomes more evident as programs like this talk about what is emerging. Once it becomes emergent and people actually their hand to others without precondition, let's sit down at the table and talk, no precondition on me, no precondition from me. How can we work together to make life better for me and for our children? I think that's when this is going to happen. I don't think that's this election, If don't. If it is, I don't hear it yet.
Speaker 3:A lot of people are saying you know, we have absentee for the first time, early voting for the first time in a municipal election. Could that be the driver? I wonder, because a black woman was on the ballot and it didn't. It didn't bring people out in the way that we thought, at least in in Wayne County in Detroit. But you know, is that a fair comparison to make to the, to the mayoral? I think the same. When people say, well, 20,000 Detroiters voted for Trump, could that not then parlay? To James Craig? As a Republican, I say no, all 20,000 could vote for him. He'd still be facing an uphill battle. He's going to need to make inroads with Democratic voters.
Speaker 2:If James Craig and I'm putting this on the record if he becomes mayor of Detroit, I'm moving to Windsor.
Speaker 3:I can't do it.
Speaker 2:I can't. But here I think, a couple of things. One, this is the first time there's been a contested mayoral race since 2013. Duggan ran virtually unopposed each time he ran for reelection because there was never a candidate who was strong enough to really be a challenge to his leadership. So I think that we have to be cognizant of the fact that people are going to have more to choose from. To be cognizant of the fact that people are going to have more to choose from.
Speaker 2:My response to people were mad at Sheree. We had a forum here. We invited all of the candidates from the 13th Congressional District to come and make their case. Sheree was the only one who didn't show up. He said he got lost, whatever, but he didn't show up. Ok, fine, we had a forum here. We brought the community in. They listened to what everybody had to say and at the end they said we still don't know who we support.
Speaker 2:The issue is not the number of people who are running. The issue is that people are not running courageous campaigns where they're saying anything that's going to motivate people to get out of their chair and vote. If you want to be a congressperson, you cannot just run on name recognition and your family background, not in 2025, especially because all of your colleagues, a lot of the people you grew up with, are now living in the suburbs and cannot vote in your district. Okay, seen, not with Sheree, but what I saw with Rashida, what I see with Stephanie Chang and some other people who are making inroads, is that they are running on policy issues that are bread and butter issues for people who vote. If you want to run we can't run black elite campaigns anymore we have to run for an electorate that is largely struggling with housing, struggling with income, struggling with income, struggling with jobs, has family members who are mass incarcerated and they are looking for somebody who is going to represent their interest.
Speaker 2:My hope is that we can. Those of us in the grassroots can make a difference. I don't know if there's been a time in history where politicians have initiated reforms that did not also happen at the grassroots. I see it as our job. I see it as my job as a leader of a nonprofit organization to contribute to that, and one of the things I do want to have and, larry, I'm going to ask you if you're going to do this with me is a unity breakfast, to bring people together and say let's unify, let's come together, no preconditions, just come together because we're human beings living in this city and we care about justice.
Speaker 4:So let me take you, let me, I'll see you that and raise you one. Ok, you talked about Baldwin, curiously. I just looked up some information about Baldwin Michigan. Baldwin, michigan, the Baldwin schools are 16% African American. 71% of the students in the school qualify for free and what's it? Free and reduced lunch, which means that 71% of those children come from low-income households, even though only 16% of them are African-American. I would like to have a meal at the Baldwin Cafe, or whatever is the current restaurant in or near Baldwin, and invite people to come and sit down and break bread with us.
Speaker 2:I think that's great. You know, all these people going up to Idaho, just go a little bit further and go to Baldwin and let's have some conversations, because I think-.
Speaker 4:And then come back and have it on Baldwin Street.
Speaker 2:Oh, there you go, bring it home. But I think it's important that we don't wait for people to love us to show love. I think when you show love, you attract love. You're not showing love because you appreciate what the people do. You're showing love in the. You know what is the godly love, right? Agape, agape love, thank you, agape love. And agape love does not weaken you. There's this idea that if I show love to people who have harmed me, it makes me weak, and I think it's just the opposite.
Speaker 2:I think that we demonstrate strength when we show love, and I think it's got to start with us, larry. I think it's got to start at the grassroots. That's the point of the Black Detroit Democracy Project is for us to come up with a new way of thinking about politics that is not rooted in grievance, that is not rooted in anger, that is not rooted in the past, so that we can't move forward. And so I'm really excited. I think this has been a great, wide-ranging conversation.
Speaker 2:We do have to have you back, larry, because we didn't get your history in mayoral politics in Detroit and we've got to talk about that. We've got to talk about the history. That's great, because I know we're always going to have philosophical discussions if you bring us together in a room, right, but I think it's great to ground it in that. But we do have to talk about city council, we do have to talk about mayor. We do have to talk about city council, we do have to talk about mayor, and we can bring all of these ideas and these issues around justice, identity, ethnicity, all of these things around financialization home to talk about. Therefore, what do we see as priorities in a mayor's race? What do we see as priorities in a council race, and how do we mobilize people to get involved? I want to talk a little bit about the city charter and some other things, so you'll come back right.
Speaker 4:Yes, okay, look forward to it.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, thank you so much. This really means a lot to me. I was really looking forward to today, and it did not disappoint.
Speaker 3:No, this was great, larry, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 4:Great job, looking forward to it. Yeah, thank you, thank you.
