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Episode 4 - Okieberta
58 Plays5 years ago
Alberta has a doppleganger state down in the US but it's not the one you're thinking of--it's Oklahoma! They've got nearly the same population, same dependence on oil and gas and same reactionary conservative politics we have here in 'Berta.
This week on the pod we've got a real live Okie in the flesh to talk about what can we learn from this near failed state. Also, we accidentally break some news about AIMCO divesting from private prison companies that were making money off of Trump's concentration camps.
Recommended
Transcript
Criticism of Alberta's Billionaire Class
00:00:00
Speaker
Murray Edwards, much like our, I don't know, who was the Oklahoma City oligarch who brought that? Harold Ham. No, he's the famous. No, the one that brought in the thunder and then killed himself going 80 miles an hour into a wall. The day before his like, he was supposed to testify or something. Yeah, but it was apparently not a suicide. But it was totally- Aubrey McClendon. Aubrey McClendon. He was the one he brought. He stole the thunder from Seattle, right? Seattle, yep. Anyways, similar- You got your own, yeah? What?
00:00:28
Speaker
stole. You got your own, uh, Aubrey McClendon in
Scrutiny of Calgary Flames Owners
00:00:31
Speaker
Calgary. Well, no, I mean, Murray Edwards is just like local oil and gas billionaire, but, um, but no, like, yes, officially mad about fucking billionaires because, and the flames owners, cause Murray Edwards owns something like $860 million of CNRL stock.
00:00:47
Speaker
He very graciously only takes a dollar a year in base salary, but he clocks ... CNR has quite a good dividend, and every quarter he clocks $8 million in dividends. Dividend payments. Dividends are taxed less than income, and there's all sorts of tax advantages to declaring your income from dividends as opposed to income.
00:01:08
Speaker
I mean, when you look at the arena deal that they just got, right? Like 8 million a quarter, like that's, that's, that's the fucking mortgage payment on a new fucking, like put a down payment on it. Like any other fucking person would on, they were buying a house or building a new like capital expense. Anyways.
00:01:26
Speaker
And then the other one of the other owners who's kind of viewed as this like kindly old white haired man, this like son of Russian immigrants. Alvin Leiben is his name. He's got a bunch of like stuff named after him at the University of Calgary. He made his fortune in a bunch of different ways. He owned a hotel and he did this. He had this, he had this investment company or whatever, but
00:01:44
Speaker
He was also the founder of something called Extendacare, which is, from what I can tell, the largest privately run extended, not extended care, but like long term care company that exists in Canada. So like literally this ghoul has made his fortune, like sucking money out of the private system to take care of our elderly people.
Recap of Previous Podcast with Kate Jacobson
00:02:06
Speaker
Um, anyways, that's just two of the owners of the flames that are for, but the other two are a little more, a little shadow where they don't have their stuff, uh, in like public companies anymore. Like Alan Mark and also I think co-founded CNRL. And then, um, uh, this other guy, I can't remember his name. He has this, he's a trucking magnate. He's also one of the owners, but they took their company private like three years ago. So there's no, there's no details. You can't, you can't go into CDAR, uh, which is the like Edgar equivalent and just like,
00:02:34
Speaker
check the management and information circulars and do all that digging like you can for public companies. Those are the four owners? Yeah, those are the four owners. Four owners of the flames. So I'm just mad about that. But that's not why we're here. We did cover that in the last episode. I don't know if you had a chance to listen to it. No, but I will go back and listen to it now. Yeah, yeah. Well, I wish I had known then what I had known now. We could have gotten some more rage out of it. But Kate Jacobson was who, and it was really great. And Kate Jacobson from the Alberta Advantage podcast was our guest co-host for that segment.
Introduction of Russell Cobb
00:03:25
Speaker
But anyways, we're ready to roll.
00:03:32
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. Recording here from a dimly lit basement here in Treaty 6 territory, our guest co-host today is the one, the only, Russell Cobb.
00:03:46
Speaker
Russell is an associate professor in modern languages and cultural studies here at the University of Alberta. He's also a writer. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Slate, New York Times, and This American Life. His This American Life story on Carlton Pierce, a popular preacher who fell out with the church, not because of the usual sex or drug or embezzlement scandals,
00:04:09
Speaker
But no, he fell out and fell out with the church because he lost his faith. And that story was not only a This American Life episode, but also got made into a Netflix movie starring Chiwetel Ejiofor. He's also working on an intriguing book that will inform part of our discussion today, but let's not give it away all in the beginning.
Alberta vs Oklahoma: Economic and Cultural Parallels
00:04:27
Speaker
Russell, welcome to The Progress Report.
00:04:29
Speaker
Hey, thanks Duncan. Happy to be here. Yeah. So, okay. The slate, the slate article, was it, was it a slate pitch pitch style article or what was it? Were you retelling? No, actually it was actually a, well, it was a slate pitch. I was going to say it was, it was a, it was a pretty boring book review, but it definitely had a slate pitch angle to it because I, if I remember correctly, what I was trying to say was that.
00:04:52
Speaker
All of this fretting about the white evangelical takeover of the Republican party was not that big a deal because evangelicals, if you follow them, and it ties back into my story on Carlton Pearson, if you follow them, they get so picky about dogma that they will just destroy themselves.
00:05:19
Speaker
Yeah, that was pretty slate pitchy. Cause I didn't really didn't know. They got right. They got right behind Trump. They got right behind Trump. Despite him being a terrible Christian. Um, I mean the other, I mean, so your slate article was not about how like puppy mills are actually good or how Nickelback is a, is an underrated band.
00:05:36
Speaker
but was in fact a legitimate piece of like literary criticism. It was supposed to be. Yeah, although I do think I think someone needs to go do Slate pitch on how flip-flops are actually going to save Western civilization since the most emailed story of all time on Slate is that is that takedown of people wearing flip-flops.
00:05:58
Speaker
Yeah, flip flops engender a lot of feelings and people. I can't be, I don't get it, but yeah. I really don't care. Exactly. Okay. So the reason you're here today is not to talk about your slate pitch or even your movie, but
00:06:15
Speaker
Um, a wider discussion about where you're actually from. So Alberta often gets compared to Texas, right? This is the kind of really easy. Yeah. The Texas of Canada. Yeah. I keep hearing it all the time. It's the, it's the really like simple, easy comparison to maker, you know, there's like big hats, there's Cowboys, there's lots of oil, there's lots of capitalism.
00:06:32
Speaker
But really- And ranches, cows- Yeah, meat, beef. Yeah, meat, beef, and hardcore conservatism. Yeah, exactly, right? But Texas is really its own freaking country, right? At the end of the day, it dwarfs Alberta in almost every way.
Oklahoma's Political Landscape and Public Services Impact
00:06:46
Speaker
Well, it dwarfs almost every other state in every way, yeah. So you say there's an economic doppelganger state in the United States, but more directly compares to Alberta. What state are we talking about here?
00:06:57
Speaker
Yeah, I make the case that actually Oklahoma is the most is the closest parallel to a US state in Alberta. And for a lot of reasons, I mean, they're, they're essentially, they're roughly the same size, Alberta is a little bit bigger in population, but you have two cities that control the economic and
00:07:18
Speaker
cultural life of the place. But there are these things that people think that Texas and Alberta have in common. Again, the cowboy culture, the much more right wing than the rest of the country. There are other things as well. Oil was what really made Oklahoma, Oklahoma.
00:07:44
Speaker
And yeah, so there's all kinds of comparisons, all kinds of parallels. And you're an Oakey as well. Yeah, and I have this unique position of being from Oklahoma, being an Oakey and living here and seeing so many of the parallels that often I'll just put up a photo of like landscape in Oklahoma and people can't
00:08:09
Speaker
decide whether it's Oklahoma or Alberta because there's a lot of sort of wheat fields and pumpjacks and you name it, right? Big skies, pumpjacks, agriculture. No, I can totally see it. So you said the two cities that dominate. So these are Tulsa and Oklahoma City, right? Right, right. And so the comparison is Calgary and Edmonton. So there's a strong like Springfield, Shelbyville vibe there as well. Yeah, yeah. And I'd definitely be Springfield, man, because I don't like Oklahoma, Oklahoma City. And just the same way, you know, your beloved Calgary. I ain't got no time for that.
00:08:38
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Given what you just told me about the rich people and the breaks that they get and what happened with the swindle that they just pulled with the new arena, I like it even less. Yeah, I mean, I'm actually from Calgary originally. I know, but I moved up to Edmonton nine years ago. Actually, I'm actually a true Edmontonian now because I did go to Heritage Festival over the weekend. Well, congratulations. I still haven't gone.
00:09:03
Speaker
And it is a little terrifying experience. It's just like so many people, so much meat on a stick, but I did have fried dough from a country. I did have meat on a stick from a country. My daughter freaked out. It was great. I had a great experience. It was really hot. Those are all reasons why I don't go. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So back to Oklahoma. So walk us through the political situation in Oklahoma and
00:09:27
Speaker
And especially I find that Alberta and Canada typically are just like five to 10 years behind Canadian, sorry, five to 10 years behind American politics. And we are kind of really just pulling up and coming up behind what Oklahoma has already
Teacher Strikes in Oklahoma
00:09:40
Speaker
done, right? Right. Yeah. And I mean, that's another thing that Oklahoma and Alberta very much have in common. I mean, until this sort of NDP interregnum, this sort of rule of a conservative party,
00:09:51
Speaker
Very much parallels what happened with Oklahoma's is the Republican takeover of the state house is complete all statewide elected offices are held by Republicans and have been that way for a while and So they really got carte blanche to to carry out an experiment the past you know starting when the the last Democratic governor
00:10:16
Speaker
I think it was 2007, we switched to a Republican governor, Mary Fallon took over and then they had the both sides of the state legislature to basically do what they wanted. So they got to, they got to just
00:10:35
Speaker
go whole hog to cut taxes, cut everything that you could possibly think of. And with the promise that it would all pay off for people because, again, like Alberta, oil and gas, there would be incentive to drill, more jobs created, less corporate taxes, more investment, more take-home pay, and everyone would be happier.
00:11:04
Speaker
It was a complete – well, I don't even have to – I mean, I don't have to tell you or really anyone that would be listening to this podcast how that situation turned out, but it turned out so badly, so badly that Oklahoma, which has been dominated by the Republican Party and is also considered one of the most apathetic states – actually, the single most apathetic state in the union in terms of voter turnout and civic engagement.
00:11:30
Speaker
used all this massive walkout by teachers that surprised everyone. And the support for the teachers was overwhelming. And that was not just the teachers itself, but the support staff for schools. And they basically brought the state to a standstill. They occupied the legislature and achieved some small victories and really a moral victory as well.
00:11:55
Speaker
And this was part of a wave of teacher strikes in the United States, especially in these like really, um, like down in the dumps, Republican run States for the most part, West Virginia, Oklahoma. There's a couple other I'm forgetting.
Consequences of Conservative Governance in Oklahoma
00:12:07
Speaker
Arizona, Kentucky. Yeah. So those, those, yeah, exactly. Those, those States where the Republicans had such a free hand to do what they wanted. They, they were the places that had the most, the most supportive and the largest walkouts of teachers.
00:12:23
Speaker
Oklahoma was one of the first ones wasn't it? I think it was right after I think it was the second one I think it was after West Virginia I'm not totally sure and it was just a case of like I'm mad as hell I'm not gonna take it anymore right like it wasn't it wasn't like leadership of the teachers unions down at Oklahoma where like we're going to war over this over X issue it was like teachers are what having to beg and plead for school supplies and are getting paid thirty thousand dollars a year or whatever
00:12:46
Speaker
Well, there were a number of things. And yes, I mean, that's one of the things I think that's super fascinating about it is it was totally grassroots. It was some guy on Facebook, literally some guy on Facebook going, our teachers union really isn't doing anything. We've got to do something. Because one of the things that was happening was there was a massive teacher exodus from the state. And all of these things, it's important to keep in mind that with this Republican
00:13:12
Speaker
revolution of these tax cut revolution, it just things went from bad to worse. So teachers started leaving for other states where teacher pay was higher. And then this had another effect, which was that they had to bring in unaccredited teachers. So all kinds of teachers who have no accreditation, no training whatsoever, get emergency certification to become teachers.
00:13:36
Speaker
Some of the things that happened are truly horrific. There are cases of unaccredited teachers who came in who just had no training whatsoever. They were abusive sexually and physically to students. And then they cut the school week short.
00:13:54
Speaker
75% of the school districts at one point, school weeks were down to four days a week, which also made things worse on working parents because all of a sudden now you have to decide whether you go to your job or you stay home with your kid.
Oklahoma's Healthcare Challenges
00:14:10
Speaker
So things just went from bad to worse and it really became a terrible situation.
00:14:16
Speaker
And people rose up and they literally occupied the state house. They demanded to see legislators. And I remember one guy in particular said, I'm not used to actually having to meet my constituents. I just don't do this. Who are these people? And they had all kinds of crazy interviews where the
00:14:37
Speaker
the legislators would say things like, you know, if y'all are behaving like a bunch of teenagers, you know, that you're not getting, you're just throwing a hissy fit and nah, nah, nah, nah. And it was just unreal. Actually, I was the governor that said that, that they're like a bunch of spoiled teenagers that not, they're not getting the car they want. This is from the woman, Mary Fallon, who, you know, is just like gave away
00:14:59
Speaker
hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks to the oil companies and cutting the gross production tax. And the people of Oklahoma got literally nothing for it. Now we're getting into it. So that's really the like, you know, Oklahoma is just five, 10 years ahead of Alberta, right? Because Alberta is well on its way to cutting corporate taxes, to having the lowest corporate tax cut in the country by a wide, wide margin. It's funny you bring up the teacher exodus. One thing that gets brought up all the time, I know a bunch of people who are either nurses or work for the teachers or for the nurses union.
00:15:29
Speaker
And under Ralph Klein, similar concepts, similar thing that happened is that the conditions were so bad under Ralph Klein that there was essentially an exodus of a generation of nurses from Alberta.
00:15:41
Speaker
And the nursing profession essentially had to spend the next 20 years after Klein figuring out how to fix this generational gap in its workforce. But again, that's some prior neoliberal bullshit. I mean, we're just going to get another cycle. Well, it keeps cycling back, right? I mean, it's not like once they consolidate power, it's not like they're going to sort of
00:16:03
Speaker
through a bunch of crumbs. And it wasn't just the education system too, right? It was the entire social safety net that was essentially slashed a bit. Oh, it's horrific. I mean, there's so many things. I mean, one that I actually had personal experience with because my mom was...
00:16:19
Speaker
She was ill and in a long-term care facility was Medicaid. You know, Medicaid is the health safety net of last resort for Americans because if you're absolutely totally poor, Medicaid will step in. But Medicaid, the rates that Medicaid was paying out to hospitals and nursing homes
00:16:38
Speaker
and such was also slashed.
Is Alberta Following Oklahoma's Path?
00:16:41
Speaker
So then you have these hospitals and nursing homes going, okay, we want to accept Medicaid because we want to take care of our indigent, but Medicaid is paying so little that we can't pay our staff, so we're not going to accept Medicaid.
00:16:54
Speaker
Like I had this experience to go to a nursing home and be like, okay, I need, you know, it looks like at some point she's gonna need Medicaid because she's gonna just run through her savings. I mean, these things cost like $300 a day. And which ones will take Medicaid? Well, there's just these few and they're terrible. You can see their ratings, they're the bottom. They're like all kinds of social issues. So you're getting this, so you get this two tier system, right? Which I think,
00:17:21
Speaker
really worries me about Alberta. I mean, as an Okie, like I come in here and I feel like the social, like from my perspective, it's like the social safety net is okay. You know, it could be better, but it's okay because from what I come from, it's like these two completely different societies, right?
00:17:38
Speaker
Like there's the people who can afford private school and those private schools are quite good. And then there's the public schools which are just getting worse and worse. There's private Medicare, there's private nursing homes which are quite good. And then there's the rest and those get worse and worse.
Oklahoma's History with Indigenous Peoples and Oil
00:17:55
Speaker
To me, what I see is what I see coming, right? I see all of that coming here and it really freaks me out. And I don't understand why people aren't, you know, like just listen to people like back there, a lot of them who are even Republicans or Independents that aren't at the super wealthy end of the spectrum and they're shocked, they're terrified of it.
00:18:20
Speaker
You know, they may not be the most engaged, ideologically committed progressives, but when they see it and when they feel it, they know it's wrong.
00:18:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's it is scary to see kind of what Jason Kenney has for the his plans are for, you know, our education system, our social safety net. And it's and, you know, I do believe I do firmly believe that he is like a true ideologue when it comes to this stuff and that he sure is. He wants to tear it all down and start from scratch and and really kind of, you know, Margaret Thatcher 2.0 here in Alberta. And one of the other things that is kind of one of the interesting parallels between Alberta
00:18:59
Speaker
And Oklahoma is its relationship to its, to the indigenous people who are original. That's true.
Christian Influence on Oklahoma's Oil Industry
00:19:05
Speaker
Oh yeah. And that, uh, Oklahoma has, um, simply just like a brutal and kind of like, and then, and then extremely intertwined history with its indigenous folks. Like a lot of the, like, a lot of the stuff that's going to be in your book is about the like Lance Wendell stuff.
00:19:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's about, and again, yeah, like you said, it has a lot to do with indigenous sovereignty and oil. This is just, it's something that I don't think we were, I was never taught in school, certainly, and it's not something that the state celebrates or even really recognizes. But really, the very short pricey of the state, of the birth of the state of Oklahoma is that
00:19:48
Speaker
Pre-1907, the place was Indian territory. It was by treaty. It was the place where all the tribes that had been displaced from the southeast, so the five quote unquote civilized tribes, the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, et cetera, were all removed there and they were granted by treaty that would be the Indian territory, would be there for as long as the waters would run and the grass was green, et cetera.
00:20:11
Speaker
Once oil was discovered, all of that was, no, we're gonna have to have that too. Actually it's ours now, yeah. Oh, that was a great idea, but it appears that you have oil there. Are you saying that a settler colonial state broke its treaty, Russell? Surprise, surprise, right? It's always like, the justifications are always so, you know, they always bend over backwards. So I'm really, what I'm working on now, and this is in my book is,
00:20:40
Speaker
about the other logic of that, right? Because I think it's so current. It's not like, it's not, I think people have this idea that it was the wild west and cowboys and Indians shooting each other off horseback. No, this actually took place in courtrooms. It took place in the state legislature. It took place in oil company boardrooms where they decided, okay, here are these major oil fines. We don't even know how much oil is there, but we know a lot of oil is there. What is a way that we can get at it
00:21:09
Speaker
without like starting another sort of battle of, you know, whatever, like an armed insurrection. I mean, United States and Canada are both, you know, settler colonial states, you know, based on land theft and genocide. But when you get to the like those, it's when you get to the edge of the frontier, right? Like when you get to the Albertas and the Oklahomas that
00:21:31
Speaker
That stuff is much more recent history and it also is just kind of its brutality is much more evident and much more memorable to even just the people who experienced it. Yeah, right. It's much more it's much more recent and I think because and also I think because of our
00:21:47
Speaker
our oil economies, right, is tied up in natural resources and the extraction industries, whereas probably the sort of, you know, the settler colonialism of two or three hundred years ago had a different history, had a different impetus, whereas this one is all about an industry that is still so much driving our economy and driving so many of the divisions that we see that it feels very current.
00:22:12
Speaker
One thing where Oklahoma also has, I think, a very interesting leading the way, where Oklahoma is perhaps leading the way when it comes to Alberta on this, is intertwining the oil industry with Christianity. Yeah, right. And so we have, I mean, the ethical oil argument hasn't really made its way to God is good
00:22:34
Speaker
But it kind of undergirds it and underpins it, right? We were blessed with this natural resource. We must develop it in order to, you know, enrich ourselves and our people. And that we're somehow just like enlightened people. We are exceptional. We will be good stewards of it in ways that those brown people won't be.
00:22:54
Speaker
Yeah, exactly, right? And so, I mean, the state government in Oklahoma is extremely intertwined with the oil and gas industry. I mean, the state and the provincial government here in Alberta is extremely intertwined with the oil and gas industry. But one thing that stood out to me when researching this episode was really
00:23:11
Speaker
Um, just how intertwined both the state, well, just maybe just how much more religious the state of Oklahoma seems to be.
Environmental Impacts of Fracking in Oklahoma
00:23:19
Speaker
Perhaps that's the kind of one difference that stands out to me in between Oklahoma and Alberta is just how like, uh, kind of state Christianity seems to just be so de facto intertwined.
00:23:28
Speaker
with the state of Oklahoma, the government of Oklahoma. And the kind of culmination of this does seem to be, you know, governor Mary Fallon proclaiming, you know, October 13th to be, uh, oil field prayer day. Yes. Oil field motherfucking prayer day.
00:23:45
Speaker
Actually, technically, first it was Christian prayer day. Okay. Because it was going to be a specifically Christian prayer. That wasn't woke. That was exclusion. And somebody said, you know, Governor Fallon, could you at least include the Hindus and the Jews?
00:24:04
Speaker
Maybe not the Muslims, but Hindus and Jews. She was like, fine. We'll drop the Christians. Okay. So the official proclamation is, is, is hilarious and kind of speaks to what we were talking about, right? Here it is. Oklahoma is blessed with an abundance of oil and natural gas, allowing the state to be a prosperous producer of these valuable resources. Oklahoma recognizes the incredible economic community and faith-based impact demonstrated across the state by oil and natural gas companies.
00:24:32
Speaker
Oklahomans were urged to thank God for the blessings created by the oil and natural gas industry and to seek His wisdom and ask for protection. His wisdom. I love it.
00:24:41
Speaker
And patriarchal God, no less. Of course, his wisdom. And then wasn't there like a 5.6 magnitude like earthquake that happened the same day? Oh yeah, yeah, very same day. Yeah, in Cherokee, Oklahoma, yeah. 5.6 is no like, that's actually a pretty substantial earthquake. Yeah, well that year, 2017, for the first time ever, Oklahoma actually had registered more earthquakes than California.
Deregulation and Scapegoating in Politics
00:25:07
Speaker
And that is almost exclusively due to a horizontal drilling, fracking, et cetera. Yeah, they're not on any kind of plate or anything. No, no, no, not at all. There's another quote from this Washington Post story on the oil field prayer day that I do have to say here. It's from Jeff Hubbard.
00:25:25
Speaker
a member of the Oilfield Christian Fellowship, which is the Oil Patch Chaplains, they were a part of the festivities around Oilfield Prayer Day, we have a saying, the oil field trickles down to everyone. Yes, indeed it does.
00:25:41
Speaker
And you have this thesis that you've kind of brought up here, like you've seen kind of what happened in Oklahoma in when, you know, the Republican governor took over, the Republicans essentially took control of everything. And they had this essentially two step process to kind of like maintain and build their control of the state. And what was that? Yeah. Well, the first, the first step is you just promise the world, right? You say, well, because people are,
00:26:08
Speaker
Because our understanding of history is so shaped by a sort of petro, a white petro Christian worldview, people don't really understand the historical background. So when someone comes in and says, we're going to deregulate and we're going to put money in your pocketbooks, we're going to drill and we're going to-
00:26:28
Speaker
Yeah, jobs, plentiful investment. Ah, people are like, yes. And let's do this. And yeah, so that's sort of the first step is you make all these promises and you think, and then when they don't, when inevitably,
00:26:45
Speaker
Right? Because they're by design, not going to. When capitalism fails to produce bounty for everyone. For everyone. Surprise, again.
Scapegoating Immigrants in Oklahoma
00:26:54
Speaker
Then you have to find a way to make excuses to blame someone. Who's to blame? Right? To define an external enemy. Find that external enemy. So who's that external enemy going to be? It used to be communism. And back when this sort of Petro
00:27:11
Speaker
Petro-Christian worldview emerged. And by the way, Alberta has an interesting chapter in Petro-Christian worldviews. I think some of the founders of tar sands were very fundamentalist Christians. You know, this sort of belief that sort of we're anointed with this oil and it's your bounty and it's a Christian duty to protect it and extract it. Anyway, when that doesn't trickle down,
00:27:37
Speaker
then yeah, you find an enemy. In the Cold War, it was communism. Now, well, we've been rooting around for an enemy and I think we found it, immigrants, right? Yeah. Like people coming up from Mexico and Central America. From Mexico or even, or Muslims.
00:28:03
Speaker
I can't help but laugh. It's just so ridiculous that at one point Oklahoma passed a state constitutional amendment banning the use of Sharia law in Oklahoma courtrooms. They passed it as an amendment, which is hard to do, right? You have to have a super majority to do it.
00:28:25
Speaker
And they knew immediately that is clearly in violation of the First Amendment restricting laws around religion. You're basically saying one religion can't, so one, no one had ever used Sharia law. It's just fake. It's like ridiculous. And two, it is clearly unconstitutional. And so it was struck down by the courts like in no time.
00:28:48
Speaker
Um, but that wasn't the point. The point is that we found that we found a foreign, we found an other, we found the other. So even though Oklahoma isn't on the border, there's still enough of a population of immigrants that they were like, we found our bad guys. We found our enemy.
00:29:02
Speaker
Well, one of the things that's just totally mystifying to me, and maybe you can tell me, talk to me, we can talk about this about in terms of Alberta, because I think Alberta has a similar thing going on. What's mystifying is that the immigrants drive economic growth in Oklahoma, such as it is. I mean, the western part of the state was like the heart of the Dust Bowl. When you hear about like the Dust Bowl and the Okies and Steinbeck and all that stuff,
00:29:30
Speaker
That part of the state has come back in recent years due to like massive factory farms, wind power, solar, things that require a lot of labor. And that labor has come almost exclusively from Mexico and Central America.
Jason Kenney's Political Tactics
00:29:46
Speaker
These people, like some of the counties out there in the panhandle of Oklahoma, like in a really far west part of the state,
00:29:53
Speaker
They are majority Hispanic and they are driving the economic growth of the state. So what I like, it just seems so strange to me is to see the party of capitalism of corporate America also ginning up
00:30:14
Speaker
animosity towards the one group that seems to be capable of driving some sort of economic growth. Tell me about it. Capitalism does have its inherent contradictions. Okay, so I think you bring this up, they found their enemy in Oklahoma. I think Jason Kenney has clearly found his enemy, his external enemy here in Alberta, right? And it's foreign funded environmentalists who are spreading
00:30:39
Speaker
you know, disinformation, skya about, um, you know, our lovely, lovely and glorious oil sands. Um, there's again, he's following what happened in Oklahoma. It almost to a T right. Promise the moon, find an external enemy. He didn't even have to wait for the economy to be bad to find an external enemy. He built it into his campaign.
00:30:57
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Yeah. And then, but what, what happens, what's going to happen when he, when the war room runs its course or whatever they put out there and they do all this, this, this blue ribbon panel and they find, they find all these things and then, and then what?
00:31:16
Speaker
You know, at what point do people, I always just, it just astounds me at what point do people sort of figure out this isn't all just a big sweat hole. Like they're just being lied to.
Vision for Left-Wing Populism
00:31:25
Speaker
Like when do you figure that out? If there's one maxim I want to impart to all our listeners is that conservative politics is a grift. But, um, but yeah, I mean, ultimately it's a huge grift and,
00:31:36
Speaker
I mean, what is the next external enemy after foreign funded environmentalists, right? Well, that's where I think we circle back to what you said a few minutes ago and that I've been kind of stewing over for a while about Canada being five to 10 years behind the US in terms of political movements, because to me, that's what comes next, right? Is immigrants, right? And you're already seeing this. I mean, get this, my sundry is the uptick.
00:32:06
Speaker
outright racist views in Canada towards visible minority immigrants. Yeah. We got our yellow vests and our Maxine Bernier, our People Party of Canada cranks. Right now they're not in power. Right. Right now, the Conservative Party is tiptoeing around that line and that ideology, but it's, yeah, if we're five to 10 years behind, it's not extreme. It's not a very happy place we're headed to.
00:32:30
Speaker
One thing that I think we gotta close on here is that this isn't all just doom and gloom, right? And that there is a way forward here when it comes to how we can appeal to people to not only like inspire social movements, but also bring about positive electoral change. And that is that left-wing politics must broadly appeal to people who regular working-class people. And when I talk about regular working-class people,
00:32:54
Speaker
Broadly, that doesn't mean white men in hard hats with lunch pails. Broadly, that means women, it means people of color, it means people working for less than 15, either around or quite close to minimum wage. That's what the working class is these days.
00:33:13
Speaker
And so like a broad muscular left-wing populism is kind of what has to take its place, right? If we were to have any hope of actually combating this.
Addressing Working-Class Issues Broadly
00:33:25
Speaker
Absolutely. I mean, yeah, I think what you said is just so important. It's crazy that we hear this stuff about the working class and the sort of
00:33:35
Speaker
the image that pops in people's head is exactly this white man and nut in a hard hat. I mean, it's the people that are suffering are generally like women, families, immigrant populations, like those are the people. Yeah. And you connect to those issues. I mean, I think that that's one of the lessons of Oklahoma is in the victories that did come out of post teacher walkout in the midterm,
00:34:02
Speaker
the midterm victories of some Democrats, some of them actually quite progressive Democrats, was that's what they spoke to is just, they actually didn't talk about Trump. And there's one in particular I've been following and I spent some time with her and she is an ex-homeless, she was a lesbian woman who was homeless, then retrained herself to become a social worker.
00:34:30
Speaker
and won her seat in a very, very conservative district in suburban Tulsa. And I just thought, how can a homeless lesbian woman win in a district that went by 30 points Donald Trump? And she told me, she said, well, one thing I did is I never mentioned Donald Trump. I just went and talked to people about
00:34:52
Speaker
about Medicaid, about Medicare, about education, about minimum wage. And once I just talk to these people about basic fairness, economic justice and social justice without using the buzzwords,
00:35:07
Speaker
It was like absolutely resonated with them. This is the thing.
Oklahoma's Radical Political History
00:35:12
Speaker
Melanie Thomas, University of Calgary academic has done a lot of work on this and it's worth talking about, which is that conservatism in Alberta or even in Oklahoma is largely an identity. It's an identity. It's not a coherent set of political beliefs. Interesting.
00:35:26
Speaker
And people see the signifiers of the social identity and they cling to them. But again, when you talk about the ideas, when you talk about fairness, when you talk about justice, when you talk about people having the economic freedom to go to the doctor and not be bankrupt, to go get their teeth fixed and not have to worry about going bankrupt, to go to a therapist and have their fucking worries about the world listened to and not worry about having to go bankrupt.
00:35:51
Speaker
People will respond to that. They sure will. They sure will. And so, yeah, I mean, we talked about, what'd you say, a graft or a grift of the... The conservative grift. The conservative grift is to basically constantly find a way to change the conversation so you don't talk about that, right? Because if you do, it's clear they're not giving you anything that's going to help with that. They're not materially improving your life. They're just giving you a reason to be angry.
00:36:22
Speaker
Okay, I think that's a great way to close it. One thing that we do want to mention briefly about Oklahoma is that you are working on a book about Oklahoma. What is the title? What's coming out of it? It's called The Great Oklahoma Swindle, Race, Religion, and Lies in America's Weird Estate, and it will be out March 1st, 2020. It's published by Bison Books. There you go. March 1st, 2020. This very interesting book on Oklahoma is coming out.
00:36:49
Speaker
I mean, one thing that I think you cover off in your book and that is worth maybe just circling back for one last, one last thing on this subject is these people can be convinced. And from what I understand, Oklahoma does have a relatively radical political history. It does. You know, Eugene Debs, a socialist candidate did, did quite well. That was his best, his single best state in 1914 was Oklahoma.
00:37:11
Speaker
And like, you know, the, the Canadian cooperative, um, the CCF was created here in Calgary here in Alberta, right? Like, like radical ideas quite often and radical political movements quite often start out on the edge of the frontier. They don't start in like the densely populated urban political centers.
00:37:29
Speaker
And, and, and so we, we've had like 80 years or a hundred years since Eugene Debs, 80 years since the CCF of like, you know, this radical socialism past has kind of been sapped from our living memory, but it, you know, these movements are coming back and it's, and it's time to think about, it's, you can't just write off Oklahoma. You can't just write off Alberta.
00:37:48
Speaker
That is, that is a really good point. Yeah. I think that's the thing that's always important for me is when they hear people talk about, Oh, that's red America or whatever it's flyover States and, uh, just let them succeed. I think it's, it's crazy. It's, I mean, that is not the
Alberta's Investments in US Detention Centers
00:38:02
Speaker
point. The point is to re-engage and to rethink and also re-examine your own history, right? I mean, there's some of the most like incredible radical thinkers came out of Oklahoma. Exactly. Okay.
00:38:13
Speaker
Next up, we've got an extremely troubling story that I think seemed to have passed Alberta Media Buy and the large portion of Alberta Buy. It was mentioned in a July 11th CBC story with the headline, Ontario's teachers plan hedge head shares in company that runs controversial US migrant detention centers.
00:38:33
Speaker
And just a point we go further on, when we're talking about controversial U.S. migrant detention centers, we are talking, in fact, about concentration camps, and that, I mean, that's just kind of the cowardice of the CBC. You're right. I know, yeah. That is some controversial, like, it's not controversial, it's dehumanizing. Come on, be specific with your headlines. I mean, it's criminal, it's unethical, it's immoral.
00:38:58
Speaker
But the important part to us here in Alberta wasn't the fact that the Ontario Teachers Plan had shares in these companies. What's more relevant to us is that the Alberta Investment Management Corporation, AMCO, currently has shares in those companies that are making money off of renting concentration camps.
00:39:14
Speaker
Here's the relevant portion from the story. The Alberta Investment Management Corporation, AMCO, which manages many public sector pensions and other government funds, has shares in both Geogroup and CoreCivic, worth a total of about $4.8 million as of March 31, according to its filings.
Efforts to Divest from Detention Center Investments
00:39:30
Speaker
So I went back and double-checked these filings. You know, the SEC has something called Edgar, which allows you to kind of go back and check this. All the available evidence shows that AMCO has, I went back and checked the math. It was $3.8 million. It doesn't matter. Millions of dollars worth of shares in these two companies, CoreCivic and Geogroup. These are private prison companies that are making their fortune off of, partially off of running these concentration camps.
00:39:58
Speaker
You know, aimco, we should probably offer a bit more context on aimco as well as a crown corporation created in 2008 that manages 31 different pension, endowment and government funds. And they essentially like they run all the pensions as the kind of their biggest job. Russell, have you heard about this and you have a kind of a, I hear in our brief chat before you like had a personal connection to this too.
00:40:20
Speaker
Yeah, I heard about it because a colleague of mine brought it to my attention and said, at least step one, we need to find out how much of our pension at the U of A is actually invested in these companies and just trying to get the information. My colleague was like,
00:40:43
Speaker
basically blocked from getting the information. So then she had to organize a petition and led to a very long chain of emails and then a lot of hemming and hawing and hedging about what was actually being invested. They didn't really want us to find out, but eventually we did find out. So we got an email that indeed there were investments
00:41:07
Speaker
in the university of Alberta professor's pension that you're a part of, you're personally, not just aimco globally or just not in the things that aimco manages altogether, but you want to have it in these, in these, um, yeah, in, in these, in these particular
00:41:23
Speaker
companies and I'll just read you like a little update I got from her yesterday is that she that Yeah, the it was the UAPP. So that's our pension plan is partially managed by aim Co but and did hold shares and geo group and and core civic but aim Co has since divested because So many of us rate is raised a stink
00:41:47
Speaker
And that's a great victory.
Successful Divestment Campaigns Elsewhere
00:41:49
Speaker
But who knows if AMCO or the other investment management companies for our pension has stock and different for profit prisons. OK, well, that's interesting to hear. So I've reached out to AMCO to their corporate communications people over the past week and even a bunch of times before recording here. And I haven't heard back. So I would be curious to know what the exact status of their investments in these concentration can companies is because
00:42:15
Speaker
Um, we need to fucking stop it at the end of the day, right? Like the details coming out about the conditions in these concentration camps are enough to make you physically ill. You know, children as young as seven or eight sleeping on concrete floors, you know, being denied soap and toothpaste. Oh, they're terrible. I mean, and to tie again, to go back to Oklahoma, they were going to send them to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which was established basically as a concentration camp. It's where they put.
00:42:40
Speaker
the last Native American prisoners they put the Japanese detainees during World War II is a brutal dehumanizing facility. First, but you know, again, people protested and they put that plan on hold. And yeah, again, like with some good news, Duncan, like I just think that like, I was just reading over the an email that we got from
00:43:05
Speaker
from the director of the pension plan, saying that they had because of these concerns, quote unquote concerns, I love how they're always like just using the just the most lame language, that after careful consideration, AMCO notified us yesterday they had decided to divest from these investments.
00:43:27
Speaker
Well, I think we may have broken some news here. Yeah. Yeah. So there you go. That was actually yesterday. That's what I heard. I also think it's worth having this discussion that I don't want to diminish the terrible record that Canada has when dealing
00:43:47
Speaker
with what they're calling irregular migrants or people who are seeking asylum. Canada has an extremely problematic record of detaining these people for months, years on end sometimes, without any type of hearing, without any type of legal recognition or standing. We have
00:44:03
Speaker
A history of treating people just as poorly in the United States as they have in Canada. We just haven't like industrialized it and privatized it like they've done it in the United States for profit industry Yeah, like there just isn't any like I your pension isn't invested in Canadian concentration camps That's all just still just that those are Union government jobs still at this point. At least I assume yeah but
00:44:27
Speaker
But yeah, like it's worth noting that this only happened that this pressure that was put on. So, so Ontario's teacher plan, um, they had shares, they divested the Canada pension plan, they had shares, they divested. There was a, there was a campaign from an organization called lead now and another organization called some of us. Um, there was extremely effective in putting pressure on.
Rising Anti-Immigrant Sentiment in Canada
00:44:48
Speaker
to onto the Canadian pension plan to divest of these shares and I've spoken with Those folks and I've kind of learned a bit of what they learned and learned a bit of what they did and how they accomplished their goals So I'm gonna keep looking into this just to confirm whether aimco is really divested from this or not But if they haven't I think it's I think we're obligated to kind of move forward with a campaign to put pressure to gather people together to talk about what to do next and to put pressure on aimco to divest from these things and
00:45:22
Speaker
So finally, our final part of the show called sundries. It's really cribbed from our newsletter. The progress report also called the progress report, the best goddamn political newsletter in Alberta. If you are not subscribed to it, subscribe to it. Russell is subscribed to it. It's good. I was just telling, I was just saying on the way in, it's like, you know, you get those, all those email digest every day and like 90% of them, you're like done, done, done that one. I always read. There you go. You get it Monday morning.
00:45:45
Speaker
Okay, well I mean that's a nice little bit of encouraging news.
00:45:46
Speaker
It's really good. Jim Story, our producer and editor, writes it. It's fantastic. But this is a time to bring up the kind of short little hits that we didn't kind of have over the course of the show. And Russell, what do you got?
00:45:57
Speaker
Yeah, so I hate to go to a really dark place. We had a semi-positive note, but I'm just so troubled by the shooting in El Paso. It's just really on my mind. It's just really bothering me. And it made me think about the connection to Donald Trump.
00:46:19
Speaker
considering that the shooter really mimicked a lot of his rhetoric about invasions, Hispanic evasions, and also made me think about what's happening in Canada. I found this study that shows that for the first time that I could find that Canadians in 2019 actually expressed more concern about visible minority immigration than immigration in general.
00:46:42
Speaker
20 years ago, there was concern about immigration taking away jobs, but it wasn't necessarily- Brown people. Brown people, right? But now, for the first time, you see more people concerned that it is actually
00:46:58
Speaker
People of color, immigrants of color is more problematic than just immigration as a phenomenon.
White Supremacist Violence Comparison
00:47:06
Speaker
And yeah. I mean, my grandmother and my grandfather were immigrants from England, right? But my grandfather was a teacher. My grandmother was an administrator. And did anyone question whether like by, you know, could they be seen as fully Canadian? Because that's another thing that you see with Republicans is they're questioning whether that now a majority of the Republicans
00:47:25
Speaker
question whether an immigrant of color could actually be fully American. Or were they seen as like taking away jobs of like qualified Canadian teachers too, right? Probably, yeah. Oh, they're just enlightening you with the mother, the mother countries. They did have an accident. They were very, they sounded very smart, I'm sure.
00:47:42
Speaker
I mean, this is something that's been going around the internet kind of post El Paso that I think is worth bringing up, right? Is that like Anders Breivik, the like the Norwegian guy who like killed 80 people, like his political manifesto, like his, essentially the stuff you brought up about great replacement theory has essentially like 10, 12 years later, whenever that happened, Jesus, I don't even want to think about how long that happened. That has become like de facto internalized politics for like the right wing in North America. And, and, and, and not just like white supremacist fringe, right? But like great replacement theory permeates
00:48:12
Speaker
Kind of the entire kind of like broad right wing of conservative politics in North America I mean now that and it's and it's growing like I've noticed that it's in the in this survey It seemed like it was in since 2013 that that consensus that that sort of idea Which was yeah, like you said French is now consensus and 60% of Republicans long same in a similar survey said that
00:48:40
Speaker
that the prospect, which is likely to come to pass in the next 20 to 30 years of the United States becoming a majority minority nation, is a negative thing. So outright racism. What else could you possibly call it?
00:48:55
Speaker
Well, that the ideology behind this has inspired so many mass shooters, right? This is a violent, organized, international political movement that, you know, everyone kind of, every, you know, everyone tore their hair out after 9 11 happened about, you know, Wahhabism and violent Islam.
00:49:16
Speaker
This has killed more people, killed more people in North America already, and is happening right now.
Journalistic Ethics Controversy
00:49:25
Speaker
Right, yeah. And I don't see any new departments of Homeland Security being created to curb, no, in fact, the Trump administration has done the opposite, right? They've refocused some of their attention towards domestic terrorism, towards international terrorism, even though domestic terrorism, white domestic terrorism,
00:49:44
Speaker
is clearly a bigger killer. Yes, all right. Thank you for that real cheery sundry. I have something, I mean, this one is, if not fun, it is at least, I at least get to feel good about a bad person getting some comeuppance.
00:50:05
Speaker
Um, it's broke late on Friday afternoon, early evening from a reporter named Sean Craig, who's on Twitter. It is at SDB Craig. He essentially broke this, the news that Leisha Corbella long time post media columnists based in Calgary.
00:50:22
Speaker
is in fact a card carrying member of the UCP and voted for, presumably, Jason Kenney in the last election. Did you hear about this? You told me about it. Did she not disclose that at all? There was absolutely no disclosure to her readers or to her employer about the fact that she was a card carrying partisan.
00:50:46
Speaker
And then, I mean, not only was she a card-carrying partisan, but she, I mean, if you have the displeasure of reading her stuff, and we have read out multiple sections of Leisha Cravella's terrible dogshit articles on this podcast. She is, I mean, it's not a surprise that she's a card-carrying UCP member. As she is an enthusiastic bootlicker of Jason Kenney and conservatism and capital in general, but like, yo, you gotta like, if you're gonna buy a membership,
00:51:13
Speaker
Like there are still some journalistic norms and standards that do exist, and one of them is like disclosing. Disclosing. If there's a conflict of interest, right? Like if you're going to the point of buying a membership in a political party and voting for a particular person to be that leader,
00:51:32
Speaker
you're clearly invested in this person succeeding. And to then write years and years of articles, um, licking Jason Kennedy's boots and going after Rachel Notley on the Alberta NDP without telling people is a gross, um, you know, just a gross, gross thing to do.
Conclusion and Promotion of Russell Cobb's Book
00:51:48
Speaker
How did, do you know how, how, how'd they find out?
00:51:51
Speaker
I don't know. Sean Craig's article. I know Sean Craig is working on an article. It's supposed to be coming out very soon. So keep your eyeballs peeled on that. Um, but I mean, she hasn't denied it. The Calgary Herald put out a message to their readers, a little like 80 word statement that was buried on a two of, of.
00:52:09
Speaker
the Calgary Herald on Saturday, this, this last Saturday and said, by the way, Alicia Corbella did this thing. Um, so that, I mean, that's presumably all of the consequences that she's going to face, but, but I mean, I'm not, I'm not super hopeful that post media is actually going to do anything. Well, yeah. I mean, how often do there.
00:52:25
Speaker
Like with other parties, have they had reporters or writers disclose? I mean, there was this there was this example that was getting brought up on Twitter of some I don't even remember this was like 10 or 12 years ago during Stelmak of some post media person getting fired just for like
00:52:42
Speaker
like running talking points by the Premier's office or something. I mean, we're clearly well past that at this stage. But anyways, it's rotten, it's gross. Post media, burn post media to the ground. Leisure Corvella, retire. And I think that that's the end of that sundry.
00:52:58
Speaker
Um, I think that's it for this episode of the progress report. I want to thank you so much for coming in. Russell. I want to thank everyone who, uh, who's listening and made it all the way to the end. If you do like this show, please take a minute to leave a five star review and a generous blurb. This really does help us pick up new subscribers. If you have any notes, thoughts, comments, death threats, you know, constructive criticism, send them to Duncan, not to me. Yes. Please send them to me. I'm on Twitter at Duncan Kinney. And, uh, but you can reach me by email at Duncan K at progress, Alberta.ca. What's the best way for people to find you online, Russell?
00:53:27
Speaker
Um, well you can, I, I, I'm more of a lurker on Twitter, but hey, still follow me anyway. Uh, scissor tail. And by the way, scissor tail, scissor tail flycatcher, that's the state bird of Oklahoma. So I am scissor tail 74. Okay. It's not some like weird sex thing. It's like a bird.
00:53:42
Speaker
Well, you don't know it, don't you? Maybe you'll find out someday. And I do want you to take a second to plug your book, your upcoming book again. Oh, yeah. And please, I'm really looking forward to all the discussion that's going to come out about Alberta and beyond with my book on Oklahoma. There is a little chapter actually about the immigrants from Oklahoma that ended up in Alberta, the Black, the Exodusters. Anyway, that book is called,
00:54:09
Speaker
the great Oklahoma swindle race, religion, and lies, and America's a weird estate. And that drops March 1, 2020. Okay. Thanks so much, Russell for coming in. Thanks so much to cosmic family communist for our amazing theme and goodbye. Thanks.
00:54:31
Speaker
La Horma where the wind comes sweeping down the plain And the waving wheat can sure smell sweet When the wind comes right behind the rain
00:54:45
Speaker
Oklahoma every night, my honey lamb and I, sit alone and talk and watch our hawk making lazy circles in the sky. We know we belong to the land and the land we belong to is burned. And when we say, go! I-F-I-O-A. We're only saying, you're doing fine, Oklahoma.
00:55:23
Speaker
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
00:55:43
Speaker
and talk, and watch the hawk make lazy circles in the sky. We know we belong to the land. And the land we belong to is free.