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The Beautiful Idea: Mass Deportations Loom as Trump Moves to Amass Power; LA Mutual Aid Groups Organize as Fires Burn
57 Plays4 hours ago
Welcome back to The Beautiful Idea, a new project from a collective of several anarchist and autonomous media producers scattered around the world. We’re bringing you interviews and stories from the front-lines of autonomous social movements and struggles, as well as original commentary and analysis.
On today’s show we feature our Behind the Barricades roundup of movement news, events, and updates. We then speak with Autumn from Nor Cal Resist, about the looming threat of mass deportations and then look at the attempt by the incoming Trump administration to consolidate executive power. We then sit down with a member of the Black Rose Anarchist Federation in Los Angeles, to talk about the unfolding ecological disaster in Southern California and how mutual aid groups are mobilizing.
Music: Seaside Tryst, Breakaway, Evolve "Reality Guerilla" and "Nightmares/Dreams," and David Sandström "1968."
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Transcript
Introduction to The Beautiful Idea podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello. You're listening to The Beautiful Idea, a podcast from a collective of several anarchist and autonomous media producers scattered around the world.
Podcast focus and listener engagement
00:00:18
Speaker
We're bringing you interviews and stories from the front lines of autonomous social movements and struggles, as well as original commentary and analysis. Follow us on Mastodon and at the beautiful idea.show. Thanks for listening.
Discussion on Trump-era policies and organizing mutual aid
00:00:45
Speaker
On today's episode, first we speak with Autumn, an organizer from NorCal Resist in the Sacramento area of California, about the impending threat of mass deportations under Trump, and then we speak with Tom about the consolidation of executive power in the new administration, especially as central Project 2025 figure Russell Vaught has been placed in a key role in the incoming government. We then sit down with Neil, a rank and file member of the Black Rose Anarchist Federation, about mutual aid organizing in the wake of devastating fires in the Los Angeles area.
Activism spotlight: Protests and tenant solidarity
00:01:18
Speaker
But first, the news.
00:01:24
Speaker
Welcome to Behind the Barricades on The Beautiful Idea, a roundup of action news and upcoming events across so-called North America. In Smyrna, Georgia, a small but dedicated group of protesters rallied outside the headquarters of Bratsfield in Gory, the general contractor responsible for building Cop City, demanding that they drop the contract. The Seattle Solidarity Network continues to hold demonstrations outside of a local restaurant in protest of wage theft and to demand back wages.
00:01:54
Speaker
The Montreal Autonomous Tenants Union reported on a recent action outside of a landlord's home, reporting, On Friday, December 6, the Montreal Autonomous Tenants Union, otherwise known as SLAM, came together in the north of Montreal to pay a collective visit to a landlord's extravagant waterfront property.
00:02:13
Speaker
We gathered in support of a fellow tenant who became unhoused after the city condemned her apartment. The wealth of landlords is built with the wages we are forced to give up to remain housed. This wealth was on full display as SLAM members set up our banners in front of the landlord's home and took to singing and chanting.
00:02:31
Speaker
Picket lines like these are a demonstration of power, tidings to the landlord's neighborhood, and a message that this tenant isn't in this fight alone anymore. Power needs to change hands. Protests at our landlord's homes, especially if they become common and second nature, go a long way in cementing the beginning of a shift in power.
00:02:50
Speaker
In Tacoma, Washington, members of the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW, joined La Resistencia as part of a car brigade action at the Northwest Detention Center in support of the Abolish Prison Slavery Week of Solidarity called on by jailhouse lawyers speak. Hunger strike actions remain ongoing inside the facility.
00:03:11
Speaker
In Montreal, the anti-eviction brigade carried out a leaflet display in front of a real estate speculator's office, who is famous for his eviction practices. He has made a specialty of targeting homes inhabited by vulnerable people, pushing them to leave through harassment and threats, then renovating and drastically increasing prices.
00:03:30
Speaker
Quote, the homelessness, the broken lives, the suicides, all of these slices of life that are just stories for some. For us, communists, anarchists, inhabitants of the working class neighborhoods, we experience the suffering of our class, brothers and sisters in our flesh.
00:03:48
Speaker
Anyone capable of the minimum of empathy should do the same. Owners, even the worst of you, are covered by the political system that absolves itself of all responsibility. You are protected by the bourgeois justice of the TAL and the cops are your armed wing. We will not beg
Inter-union solidarity and civil rights concerns
00:04:04
Speaker
anymore. We will do everything possible to prevent you from harming ours. At 4750 Ontario or elsewhere. War on landlords.
00:04:13
Speaker
Also in Montreal, the IWW mobilized to support postal workers on strike. Local Wobblies reported, IWW members gathered to help our striking comrades from the Canadian Union of Postal Workers to blockade a sorting plant. The line of stalled trucks was impressive. Inter-union solidarity is one of the best weapons of the workers movement.
00:04:34
Speaker
Pro-choice activists in Florida are dealing with repression after facing charges for writing graffiti on an anti-choice center. As the Civil Liberties Defense Center, CLDC, wrote, Florida politicians, federal prosecutors, and anti-choice religious extremists sought to use the FACE Act for the first time against pro-choice activists for very minor criminal mischief. Graffiti.
00:04:58
Speaker
The FACE Act, Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, was enacted in 1994 to protect doctors and patients from the upwelling of murder, fire bombings, and violent assaults perpetrated by the violent anti-choice religious extremist movement during the 80s and 90s.
00:05:14
Speaker
The four reproductive rights activists in the Florida case were federally prosecuted for spray painting the outside of three, quote-unquote, crisis pregnancy centers, fake clinics in Florida in June 2022, following the Dobbs decision and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The Florida attorney general and one of the fake clinics also filed separate federal civil lawsuits against the four.
00:05:37
Speaker
alleging civil RICO and face act violations. Fortunately, we were able to get those two civil lawsuits dismissed. Amber Smith Stewart and Annarella Rivera were both sentenced to 30 days in federal custody and 60 days of house arrest. Caleb Freestone was sentenced to a year and a day in prison and Gabriela Oropesa was just convicted after going to trial and will be sentenced in March 2025.
00:06:03
Speaker
The four remain steadfast to their political ideologies, non-cooperation and solidarity with each other and their communities, despite the fact that their extreme prosecutions were unexpected in severity. Follow South Florida Anarchist Black Cross and Fort Lauderdale Food Not Bombs for more updates and ways to support prisoners.
Opposition to military ties and corporate involvement in conflict
00:06:23
Speaker
In New York, on December 12, NYU students and professors were arrested after they bound themselves together and blocked the school's library in Lower Manhattan during a pro-Palestine protest demanding divestment from Israel. In New Jersey, on December 14, protesters marched on City Hall following revelations that the logistics giant Mayersk has been shipping thousands of tons of military cargo to the Israeli regime from the Port of Elizabeth, New Jersey.
00:06:50
Speaker
Pro-Palestinian protesters wrote, the people will forever stand against war profiteering. We have the power to take action and enforce a people's arms embargo against warmongers and weapons companies. Join us in the streets of Jersey City to send a clear message to Mayersk that the mask is off. They have been exposed and we will not stand for it.
00:07:11
Speaker
In Emeryville, California, in the Bay Area of California, a communique claimed responsibility for vandalizing an office belonging to Mayersk over its role in helping to carry out the ongoing genocide in Palestine. An anonymous report posted to Indie Bay stated, The night of December 8th, we attacked Mayersk's Emeryville office because they are merchants of death. They ship military cargo for the Zionist entity to use in their genocide of Palestinians.
00:07:38
Speaker
This includes parts for the F-35 jets bombing Gaza right now. We did this autonomously, in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance. Workers like us have no military to defend our interests or stop this genocide. This is because the merchants of death, like Mayorsk and UnitedHealthcare, control the state. They grow rich on our taxes and suffering while we fight to pay for basic needs.
00:08:01
Speaker
Every bomb dropped makes them richer and us poorer. If the government will not stop arming Israel, then working people will. We call on you to join us. The veins of imperial capitalism are open, fragile, and poorly guarded. Their supply lines of death can be choked.
Justice and accountability in law enforcement actions
00:08:18
Speaker
As Unicorn Riot reported, the parents of slain forest offender Manuel Tortugita Paez Taran have filed a civil rights lawsuit against three Georgia law enforcement officers they say are most responsible for the death of their child in January 2023.
00:08:34
Speaker
Nearly two years after police killed Tehran and a year after the state refused to bring charges against any of the state troopers responsible, Tortugita's parents are still seeking answers and accountability for the death of their 26-year-old child. Tortugita's mother and father are suing Georgia Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Ryan Long as well as Georgia State Patrol Troopers Mark Lamb and Breyland Myers in federal court claiming that the raid that led to their child's killing violated Tortugita's civil rights.
00:09:03
Speaker
Tortuguita's family still hasn't gotten clarity on the circumstances surrounding their child's death nearly two years after the fatal shooting. Lawyers representing the family hope that the civil suit will uncover some of the yet unknown details of the raid that ended in police killing the forest offender. Calls for an independent investigation into the shooting rose in the immediate aftermath of the killing.
00:09:25
Speaker
While the family was able to secure an independent autopsy, to date, there hasn't been an independent investigation into the circumstances surrounding tort's killing.
Systemic issues: Police brutality and homelessness
00:09:34
Speaker
In Pittsburgh, protesters gathered in front of Mayor Ed Ganey's home, demonstrating against an increased crackdown on homeless encampments. Over the course of about an hour, protesters chanted, no housing, no peace, and banged on drums and noisemakers in the street in front of the home. They bore signs that read, sweep solve nothing, while denouncing Ganey's war on the poor.
00:09:55
Speaker
Workers at Starbucks and Amazon carried out strikes during the holiday season, facing arrests from police outside of Amazon facilities in New York. In Chicago, organizers outraged by the recent decision to drop charges brought against a police officer accused of beating a 17-year-old in 2022, picketed the Cook County State Attorney's Office in downtown Chicago.
00:10:17
Speaker
On New Year's Eve, noise demos outside of jails and prisons were held across the U.S. and beyond in several dozen cities. For a full roundup, check out It's Going Down.
Threat of mass deportations and immigration enforcement
00:10:27
Speaker
In Knoxville, Tennessee, high school students protested the killing of their 18-year-old classmate by three sheriff deputies. Protesters demanded the release of any police videos of the encounter and demonstrated outside of a Knoxville City Council meeting.
00:10:41
Speaker
Council members voted to approve an expansion of police surveillance cameras and monitoring in the city, part of a $27.5 million dollars contract with Axon Enterprises. In San Francisco, California, BDS and queer activists held a demonstration which shut down part of Market Street and held a picket outside of a Chevron gas station. According to indibay.org, the rally for Palestine and BDS began at the intersection of Market and Castro streets.
00:11:08
Speaker
After some speeches and slogans, the crowd crossed the street to the Chevron station. Chevron oil maintains an oil platform off the Gaza cost and supplies oil to Israel's military as it perpetuates the Gaza genocide. Pittsburgh activists Pepe and Crystal, who face charges stemming from a protest against a far-right anti-queer speaker on a college campus, have been sentenced, with Pepe receiving five years in prison and Crystal three years probation.
00:11:34
Speaker
as the Civil Liberties Defense Center, CLDC, wrote. When a married couple, Kristin and Brian Pepe de Pippa, amongst an estimated 250 community members, protested the transphobes on the Pitt campus, the state alleged that one of them had lit two homemade smoke devices and a commercially available firework.
00:11:53
Speaker
What would normally have been a state misdemeanor charge became a major federal investigation under the pretense that a civil disorder had occurred. The investigation included a raid of the defendant's home by the ATF, FBI, and state and local police, resulting in a large seizure of computer equipment. Pepe has remained incarcerated without bail to this day and faced a sentence of over a decade in federal custody. Crystal, although not charged with the explosives felony, could have received an equal sentence to Pepe based on the conspiracy.
00:12:24
Speaker
The police had previously executed a warrantless search of the couple's garbage, where they found printed information discussing Atlanta's Stop Cop City campaign, as well as other anarchist zines. The seizure of these items as evidence points to an overtly politically motivated use of the civil disorder statute. In an attempt to not only scare rank-and-file activists into submission by fear of spending decades in prison,
00:12:48
Speaker
but also to send a clear message that prosecutors and judges are willing to highlight political beliefs to keep activists confined pre-trial without options for bail. The judge in this case cited sentiment supporting anarchism, as is justification for keeping Mr. D'Pippa locked up. Check out show notes for more info on how to support Pepe and Crystal.
Impact of immigration policies and regional differences
00:13:08
Speaker
As this episode was being recorded, horrific fires, fueled by climate change, broke out in Southern California, with tens of thousands of people being forced to evacuate.
00:13:18
Speaker
Please listen to our interview later in the show for more info and check out Mutual Aid Disaster Relief and local groups like the Mutual Aid Los Angeles Network and the LA Tenants Union for ways to plug into local mutual aid responses. And here are some upcoming events.
00:13:34
Speaker
January 18th, festivals of resistance events across the U.S. February 1st, Austin Anarchist Book Fair in Austin, Texas. February 28th through March 2nd, Florida Abolitionist Gathering in Gainesville, Florida. April 5th, Houston Anarchist Book Fair in Houston, Texas. May 15th through the 21st, Constellation Anarchist Festival in Montreal, Quebec. And June 7th, Inland Empire Anarchist Book Fair in San Bernardino, California.
00:14:04
Speaker
And that's it for now for Behind the Barricades. Enjoy the rest of the episode. and
00:14:31
Speaker
I'm Autumn and I'm an organizer with Merk Howell Resist in Sacramento. Great. And we wanted to talk to you today about threats to immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees, as Trump comes in. It's been a few weeks now. There's been a lot of podcasts, lots of articles written about the threat that Trump poses. As we were talking about before we started recording, it's sort of been a mix of people talking about the very real threat that this poses for people, not only in terms of a continuation of US border and immigration policy, but just in what Trump has said he wants to do. But also there's been a lot of folks that have been talking about just structurally, a lot of this stuff just does not make sense. And there's been different things said by Trump in advance and other people in the administration at different times. So just to start off, like what are you thinking now that we're a few weeks out from this thing?
00:15:29
Speaker
Is there more of a clear picture and like, what do you think things are going to happen? And obviously you're in California and it seems like things are really going to start maybe in Texas and other places where there's Republicans that are willing to play ball. But what do you see happening now that we have maybe more of a picture of what the tea leaves look like, so to speak?
00:15:48
Speaker
Well, I think the first thing that we're going to see that's sort of the low hanging fruit is that the border is basically shut down. And that's kind of our expectation. Like we we rent shelter space, like we rent apartments where we house asylum seekers when they cross the border. And at this point, we've sort of made the determination that they're not going to let anyone cross the border, which is hugely problematic when you have refugees, asylum seekers, who are in serious life-altering situations, dangers, who do need to cross the border to access their right to apply for asylum. But we we think that's going to be the first thing that they do is just not let anyone cross. But secondly, totally right. I think you're going to see
00:16:41
Speaker
Most of the big enforcement action happening in southern states and states where governors are willing to provide. The resources that are needed needed to do these big enforcement actions so i think you'll see.
00:16:56
Speaker
sheriffs and maybe even national guards ah assisting in these big enforcement activities um in a way that just really can't happen in California. Not that we don't have sheriffs here who would love to get in on it, but we have some legal protections in California that don't allow it. So for folks who are already in the system, like for example, people who are already in immigration detention, which is at any given moment under any administration, thousands of people.
00:17:30
Speaker
We're definitely concerned that those people will be targets for immediate deportations. And then folks who are in the system already. So for example, wearing the ankle monitors or carrying the ISAP phones, iapp phone but but tracking phones that they've kind of moved to, moved to like phones and like arm wristbands. Those people are just so easy for them to target.
00:17:58
Speaker
because they're expecting to be called in anyways, right? Those folks have regular check-ins with ICE with immigration and our concern is that people are going to go in for those regular check-ins and not come out, um just basically be taken into custody and moved to deportation. So we think that those are like the immediate things that they can pretty easily start doing day one because it doesn't require this mask mass amounts of new staff. They're always going to have problems hiring. I'm sure they've got hundreds and thousands of openings vacancies right now. Like who wants to work for ICE? Hopefully nobody. So I i think some of the bigger plans that we've heard from like the real super hardliners, the fascist types on their side are are harder to
00:18:47
Speaker
Immediately begin, but that doesn't mean that those things aren't coming down the road. They're looking right now to try to find somewhere in Northern California to build a new facility to house folks. To get them into this deportation pipeline, but luckily jurisdictions in Northern California don't.
00:19:08
Speaker
don't want to have it there that doesn't mean that they won't eventually find some space like federal land or whatever to build those things but that kind of stuff is going to take longer to get into place so I think that we'll see the impacts of this larger ramping up kind of down the road. So you think it'll be essentially just more of the same utilizing the infrastructure that they have and the people that are sort of already on their lists or in the system as opposed to massive workplace raids you know door-to-door type stuff is sort of the imagery. um Yeah I mean I think for the most part it is
00:19:43
Speaker
hard to move away from business as usual. The federal government is just such a massive entity and it's a bureaucracy like getting to do something entirely different really, really quickly is just going to be logistically very difficult. But I do think that it's a priority for them just as a propaganda fear type thing to do some big events in sanctuary jurisdictions in places that have been in the past like safe places like churches and schools historically ice does not go into those locations but I think you're going to see them just in order to like rattle rattle everybody basically and to to kind of throw down the gauntlet and make the threat I think you are going to see them go into places where in the past they haven't just to show us that
00:20:36
Speaker
they mean business and this is how it's gonna be and to keep people scared. And then I do also think that because they have this like ongoing grudge with sanctuary cities and jurisdictions and states and Gavin Newsom, I think you're gonna see them try to do a couple big showy things early on.
00:20:58
Speaker
In those jurisdictions to make a point about power and who's in control so we're trying to be ready for that you know just because. I think it's coming it's probably not going to be how most people end up. In the system those are just going to be kind of like one offs because they're going to be hard to organize logistically and.
00:21:19
Speaker
the manpower and all those things. But I do think that's where the media attention will be, and that's where like the Fox Newses of the world are going to focus. So I do think they will be doing those kinds of activities as well. ah You're located in the San Joaquin Central Valley of California. There's been a couple of interesting articles that have been written recently about the contradiction of a lot of business leaders that are backing Trump in agriculture now sort of saying like, well, we didn't think the leopard would eat our face, realizing that if all of their workers get deported, I mean, they're just in a very bad spot economically. How do you think that will play into things both in the Central Valley and beyond this contradiction that these people want sort of draconian ah racist policies in place because they want to scare people and stop organizing and people advocating for better conditions and better wages.
00:22:15
Speaker
But they also want people to stay where they're at and they want workers there that they can exploit. Yeah, I mean it's such a frustration to see these industries that rely on on migrant workers and immigrant workers again and again selling them out each each time and it never changes and they don't seem to learn their lessons and I think that what we're seeing in agriculture right now is this really strong push to move towards as much automation as possible to try to
00:22:47
Speaker
who have less reliance on these workers because it it seems like the real the real interest is in having as few workers as possible who can be as exploited as possible because they're not even asylum seekers or you know people with some kind of work permit but truly undocumented people people who are living in the shadows which is something that the immigration movement has been trying for so long to like make it less than less of a need to live in the shadows to at least give people opportunities to get health insurance and to be able to exercise their rights as workers and all of these things and and i think that there's really
00:23:30
Speaker
this bigger interest among these very powerful agribusinesses to undo all of that work, to streamline their workforce down to as few people as possible and for those people to be as exploited and as marginalized and as powerless as possible. So it's really kind of a ah bunch of really bad things meeting up at once and this merger of like These fascist tech folks with this racist movement is is so troubling on so many levels. And I think that this is one one area where we're going to see those two those two interests kind of working together to exploit exploit very vulnerable workers in a really important industry, which is our agriculture industry. So you're saying that these attacks in many ways may push things like automation?
00:24:24
Speaker
Even though that like a lot of them are sort of ah saying, like oh, we don't want all our workers to be deported because then you know all this stuff would economically collapse, you think that will actually push the tendency towards more automation in agriculture?
00:24:40
Speaker
Yeah, I think it pushes towards that tendency. I think it helps the bigger fish in the industry eat the smaller fish. i We already don't really have that many family farms and family agricultural operations in California. It's mostly a giant agribusiness landscape, but I think you're going to see that consolidate even more and become even more of like this very tech driven kind of industry.
00:25:05
Speaker
Well, I guess the other side of the coin is what will this mean in terms of resistance on the ground? You know, in 2006, we saw massive wildcat strikes and walkouts against ah draconian anti-immigrant legislation. A unicorn riot just has an article up that was published recently about calls for people to engage in like strike action. If some of these things that Trump is talking about comes to fruition.
00:25:34
Speaker
What do you see? Do you see a lot of folks talking about the need to organize and push back? I think that people are in a wait and see position right now, which is kind of interesting. But I think there's a lot of exhaustion and just not knowing like what's going to happen. People were were not happy with the Biden administration. They didn't really feel like they got anything. They haven't got anything from the Democrats in forever. So um I think there's a little bit of, well, yeah, this guy's bad. But like how bad is it really going to be? And is it going to impact me?
00:26:07
Speaker
But I do think that it makes it ripe for poor activity if they really do go after people in the way they say they are. I think right now for a lot of immigrant folks, especially those who are like newer to this country and aren't as you know familiar with our political system and are our spectrum, the way that we are, they're kind of feeling like, oh, well, I'm being told that This is just the target the bad guys and i'm not a bad guy i'm someone who's in the system i'm going to court and doing all the things i'm supposed to do so i'm not going to be targeted. Where is i think that those of us who are kind of more you know.
00:26:48
Speaker
Understanding of where the Trump movement moon and the MAG movement, like we understand it's just a racist movement and that they will be targeted. And I think once people like start seeing that targeting happening, attitudes will shift. And if you don't have anything to lose, like you're going to be deported anyways. These people are telling you they're going to get you out of the country. Then I think people will be willing to stand up and to strike and to do what they need to do to protect themselves and their families.
00:27:15
Speaker
What would you encourage people to do listening to this if they want to get involved in pushing back against this? If people are in sort of a wait and see moment, I think the question for activists and organizers is sort of like, what should they be doing as this kind of plays out?
00:27:31
Speaker
Well, and what we've been doing locally and you know nothing nothing is perfect, but we've been reactivating our hotlines. So a lot of jurisdictions, a lot of areas around the country, activists, coalitions got together and created these hotlines that people could call when ICE was in the community um and then would dispatch folks to go and observe. Just basically kind of like a cop watch legal observing thing, but specifically for ICE. So a lot of those hotlines are getting stood back up now if they went dormant during Biden, which many of them did. And this is a really good time to get trained to do that legal observing cop watch work and to be ready to to go out and to respond. I think
00:28:14
Speaker
In some ways they they want us to watch you know because they want to make a spectacle and they want to scare us. But in other ways, you know despite that, it's important that we show up when they're in our communities and that we show solidarity with the folks who are being targeted. So I think we need to be ready to do that and to rebuild the the networks that were built during Trump 1.0 of legal and media and all the different you know roles that all of us with our different skills can bring to the table to rapidly respond when ICE is in our communities and to push back. Because the first time around, we were able to get people released and we were able to reunite people with their families, but it was only because we worked
00:29:00
Speaker
really, really fast. And we've had times where we responded and and we were not fast enough. And the person was on a flight out of the country like by the end of the day. So you really have to like have all your your pieces ready to go and and practice. like i mean I think that's what we're kind of doing right now is just reestablishing all of our roles and relationships and and getting ready to do that. So I would totally encourage folks to Plug into their local network if one exists and if one doesn't exist, there's some great resources out there. There's an organization called Attention Watch Network, and they can plug people into their resources to help set a rapid response to the imaginary area. And it's not hard. You just need a core group of folks who are willing to take on these different roles. And then it's really kind of
00:29:51
Speaker
ah Like with anything in life, it's trial and error and practice and you learn as you go. And I hate that sometimes folks feel like they have to be an expert in something to participate. Like when I started doing the immigration work, I didn't know anything about immigration law or any of this stuff. And it's really just been a learning experience. And anyone, like truly anyone can can educate themselves and get themselves to the point where they feel confident to participate in this kind of activism. So I think that's really the the best the best thing we'll be doing right now until we see, which we're going to see very soon, like what what their first real targets are and what they really what they really decide to focus on. The last question I wanted to ask you is that from your vantage point, you're in California, which is a blue state. There's been lots of talk about how Newsom, the governor of California is going to push back against Trump. like How real is that? Is that going to be a factor?
00:30:50
Speaker
What do you see happening? I think it's gonna be a lot of lawsuits again and you know, that's a tactic and it it can have more or less that it Helped with some things last time. I'm gonna say it didn't like it certainly it's it shut down some really bad Legal changes that they made and it it did provide some cover for for folks doing organizing work But I mean, I'm not gonna Rely on them to like to do the on the ground grassroots work that needs to get done because at the end of the day, like. There's certain things that a governor is just they're going to still side with, you know.
00:31:31
Speaker
law and order over protecting folks. So at the end of the day, the the folks who protect each other, they're going to have to be us. But yeah, i I am glad that they will be hopefully, you know, doing some of those high level legal challenges and things like that that might provide us some thumb cover as as things change very fast.
Power consolidation under Trump's administration
00:32:13
Speaker
um Okay, we're here talking about the incoming Trump administration. We just talked to Autumn with NorCal resist about immigration issues. We're now going to turn and talk a little bit about sort of the broader picture with the incoming administration.
00:32:30
Speaker
So before we started recording, you were making the point that everything that Trump is doing, although it's being contested, there are some roadblocks. There does seem to be a push towards really autocratic power and getting the government to basically be a rubber stamp for what Trump wants, but also like money stuff. So lay that out for us quickly, like make that case.
00:32:54
Speaker
Yeah. So you know when this administration got elected, we were talking a lot about um over on This is America, we were talking a lot about how you know the initial couple of weeks it looked like what they were going to do is they were going to put a bunch of like, quote unquote, normal people in positions, right? Like people that would realistically occupy another administration, even if they're somewhat extreme, right? But people that wouldn't be as sort of like outside of the realm of rationality, right? And then that's what they didn't do, right? They started appointing Pete Hexeth and Matt Gaetz and RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard and people like this who, you know, are being appointed largely for these kind of transactional reasons, right? Like they have these kind of micro constituencies that in aggregate are enough to kind of push Trump over the line. And so, you know, he's really leaning into this, like trying to dominate like the wellness community and conspiracy theorists, like all this stuff.
00:33:49
Speaker
And for a while, it looked like what was happening was relatively incoherent. But what's been going on behind that more quietly is actually starting to round up into something that looks like a relatively coherent plan forward, right? And it kind of coalesces around kind of three different primary moves, right? Which are all centered around largely budgetary or appointment, like budgetary powers or appointments in the executive branch. so historically in the Constitution the way that powers are separated is that Congress decides what money is spent on and the executive branch is responsible for carrying that out like when they pass a budget bill it is a law and you're required to follow the law right now a couple of things have happened in the past
00:34:44
Speaker
ah you know, number of years which have really eroded this to a degree, right? The first is that there was a ruling in the Supreme Court last year around what was called the Chevron deference, right? So, the Chevron deference was a guideline in US, you know, bureaucracy which was backed up by the courts which said that when there was an ambiguity about the application of a law that the interpretation gets sort of deferred down to the agency that's responsible for that. So like the ATF.
00:35:18
Speaker
is always in court about stuff like this. like They pass a gun law and the ATF goes, okay, well, that means that you know if you've lost four teeth in the last five years and you can't own a handgun, right like something like that. And then the NRA goes, well, that's not right. That's ridiculous. And then they sue the ATF in court. great All of that was based on the idea that the ATF was functionally allowed to decide the implementation of policy.
00:35:42
Speaker
Right. And that would that apply to every agency that was meant very specifically to devolve power out of the central part of the executive branch into the agencies. Right. And to create a political centralization when the Chevron deference got overturned last year.
00:35:57
Speaker
What that meant now is that an executive branch administration is able to just sort of decide how certain things are going to be implemented, right, in ways that they weren't able to before. And it gives them this extreme amount of power over implementation. So that's one thing that that sort of got taken away was this sort of deference down to the agencies. The second thing that got taken away last year was The idea that presidents could commit crimes, essentially, that when the Supreme Court ruled that a president is immune for official acts, that essentially means that no longer the president has to follow the law. That includes budgetary laws, right? That's what they're arguing. And that's not contrary to the Supreme Court ruling at all. So now we get into the very specific things that they're doing.
00:36:41
Speaker
And the first move that they're trying to make is around something called impoundments. So Russell Vaught is one of the primary authors of Project 2025. He is also a guy who's openly called for dictatorship in the United States and openly called for rounding up like radicals and putting them in prison camps.
00:37:01
Speaker
He's the guy who came up with the idea of evacuating the federal bureaucracy and appointing a bunch of right-wing conservatives in people's place. This is all his stuff. He has been put in charge of the Office of Management and Budget, which is essentially the government's accounting office. They get to decide what money goes where, essentially. So generally, that would mean nothing. right He would have to follow the law. But what they're trying to do is they're trying to get rid of restrictions on what is called executive impoundment. So impoundments are what happens when the executive branch decides that, you know, Congress passed this, but they don't really like it that much. So they're just not going to fund it, right? So they're essentially making law by withdrawing money or giving money to certain things. Trump tried to do this the last time with Ukraine and he got impeached for it.
00:37:53
Speaker
Right. And case law for the entirety of American history has moved against this idea that the president can just impound money. Richard Nixon tried to do this. And there is literally a law that was written in the 1970s, which very directly declares that the president can't do this. Right. But they're trying to overcome that.
00:38:14
Speaker
And they're trying to overcome that by saying that in the Constitution, it says that there's an Article 2, it says that the President's job is to faithfully execute the laws of the United States. And what they're arguing is that faithful execution can also include non-execution.
00:38:31
Speaker
It's a ridiculous argument, but that also doesn't matter considering that the right wing controls the Supreme Court. And so one of the things that they're going to try and do very, very, very early, and they're already talking about this, is they're going to try and unilaterally decide that money that was appropriated by Congress in this can well this past congressional session can't get spent for a certain thing, that they're just going to stop it from happening and that's going to cause a court fight. And if the administration wins that court battle,
00:38:58
Speaker
The entire idea that Congress controls the spending of the federal government disappears completely. It's just gone, right? The second thing that he wants to do is he's been pushing for recess appointments, right? So recess appointments are what happens when Congress is out of session and historically there's some emergency situation that requires the administration to appoint someone to be like the secretary of defense. And that's only supposed to last until Congress comes back into session.
00:39:28
Speaker
Now, nothing actually says that anywhere. Recess appointments are a sort of congressional norm that has been accepted by Congress, um but it doesn't say anywhere that those appointees can't just stay in their positions. And so what Trump is trying to do is he's trying to convince the Republicans in the Senate to essentially let him just appoint everybody during congressional recess, which would functionally undo the power of the Senate to confirm or deny appointees of the executive branch, therefore giving the executive branch dictatorial control over federal personnel, right? The third thing that they're trying to do is they're trying to sort of use a number of congressional processes to sort of overcome the possibility of there being any pushback in Congress. So one of the things that Trump tried to do and what tanked the budget bill would almost shut the government down last week.
00:40:23
Speaker
was they had negotiated a budget bill. It would have funded the government through March. Trump wanted at the last minute, decided that he wanted in that bill, a suspension of the debt ceiling for two years.
00:40:37
Speaker
right So, what the debt ceiling is, is the debt ceiling is ah limit is an artificial limitation on the amount of money that the government can borrow. So, say the government's a billion dollars in debt, it's way more than that, but say it's a billion dollars in debt and it has to pay a hundred million dollars in interest because they got a really bad loan deal or something like that and they don't have that hundred million dollars, right?
00:41:00
Speaker
Well, if the debt ceiling is set at a billion dollars, even if they financially could borrow the money to make the interest payment, they're not allowed to unless Congress decides that they can take out more debt. And this is why in the past number of years, the US has almost defaulted on its debt a number of times. It's not because it can't pay. It absolutely can. It's not because it can't borrow. The US government could probably deal with some economists say up to 40 times as much debt as it currently has and still be able to service the interest payments, right?
00:41:28
Speaker
The only reason that's ever even been a possibility is because of this artificial limitation called the debt ceiling. Now Republicans have used this for decades as a way to sort of disrupt democratic administrations. And now Trump is demanding that it goes away.
00:41:45
Speaker
right? He wants to do that alongside this other process that's getting used in Congress called reconciliation. So what reconciliation means is that in budget bills, so bills that relate to budgetary matters purely, there can be a process in which a majority vote gets taken in the House and a majority vote gets taken in the Senate. And if The bills that are passed in both the House and the Senate are somewhat different. There's this thing called the reconciliation process where those bills become the same bill. There's one bill and then both chambers have to vote on it again. Now, the reason that they would do that is because it allows them to bypass the filibuster process in the Senate. And again, this is a Senate rule. This is not written down in law anywhere. This is Senate rule that budget bills are not subject to filibuster if they go through the reconciliation process.
00:42:39
Speaker
And so he's trying to use this reconciliation process as a way to bypass congressional oversight. right So when you start to combine all of that with this idea that he wants to use the military domestically, and you start to combine all of that with this discussion of you know appointing whoever he wants to to whatever job, and you start adding that onto him creating artificial government agencies that don't really exist like Doge and then giving them power.
00:43:08
Speaker
right? All of that is about power consolidation, all of that. Like there's no other way to read that. And we don't have to interpret this, right? I think like this is one of the podcasts I highly recommend everybody listen to is the Know Your Enemy me podcast. It's amazing if the two of y'all the hosts that show are listening to this, both I'm very flattered. Secondly, shows awesome. And they really go through a lot of the dynamics of the conservative movements in the 20th century. And one of the the dynamics that they talk a lot about is this sort of tendency towards dictatorship that's existed in the right definitely for the last hundred years and like the area that they're studying and before that as well. right And what this tendency has had to do for this entire time is kind of played a dual game where they have to sit there and they have to go,
00:44:00
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we really believe in strong government, but you know not like dictatorship. And we really believe in the free markets, but we really also want to crush the unions. And there's always this kind of like back and forth between a rigid understanding of social normativity that they want to impose through the state and this kind of lip service they have to pay to the ideas of liberty and autonomy, right? What has happened now is that that paradox doesn't exist any longer.
00:44:24
Speaker
because the idea of liberty and autonomy isn't relevant in that world anymore. right They have purely moved into a mindset on the right in which their objective is nakedly, without any sort of dressing it up at all, their objective is to accomplish their social goals. They do not care how it happens.
00:44:46
Speaker
It doesn't have to have the dressing of democracy. It doesn't have to have all of the niceties of public participation. It doesn't have to have any of that. Because once they consolidate power, there's little we can do. That those kinds of consolidations are more or less permanent. One of the other things that we really need to watch for And this happened during the first administration too, but it's going to happen much more overtly this time and much in a much more focused way. There are certain norms that we have in the US government and sort of US political culture that we rely on heavily, even though they're not ever written down anywhere or official. And one of the major, major, major norms like that is this assumed separation between the executive branch and the department of justice.
00:45:37
Speaker
like There's always been this assumption that there's supposed to be presidential DOJ separation and that the DOJ is supposed to be independent of the executive branch. That is not written down anywhere. That's not a law. That's not even officially written down as a policy or a guidance or anything. That is just a thing people have done. But there's no legal need to continue to do that.
00:46:02
Speaker
And so if you just decide you're not going to, you just don't have to. And so that means that this idea that he's going to use the DOJ to go after people is firmly within his already existing powers. It's just other precedents have respected the norms of the office enough to not do that.
00:46:19
Speaker
when someone comes in that doesn't respect those norms, it doesn't have any attachment to those norms. I think the reality of the US state is that there is very little that stands between us and dictatorship. Most of what stands between us and dictatorship are sort of tacit agreements people had kind of made between themselves and sort of upheld through historical practice, but they're not actual limitations to state power, right?
00:46:44
Speaker
And I've said this before, and I think it bears repeating, but one of the things that we're sort of seeing is we're kind of getting this kind of mask off moment for liberal democracy, right? And this is something that like Carl Schmitt talked about in the 30s, which is the idea that liberal democracy presents itself as a state which limits itself, that it claims absolute state power for the purpose of limiting state power.
00:47:09
Speaker
Right? That if you decide to try and fight your way out of liberal democracy and make decisions another way, well, you have to face riot police, right? There's an uprising. There's still a state of emergency. There's still a military to call out. That really democracy is about niceties. It's about tacit agreements, but it doesn't undo the fundamental element of the state, which is the state is and is a structure of policing.
00:47:36
Speaker
And so what we're seeing now is we're seeing all of those kind of window dressings that made that difficult to see fall away. Because the reality is is that they weren't there to begin with. Right. Sort of assumed that they were because we had been told this, but they're not actually written down anywhere.
00:47:55
Speaker
So with this in mind, the consolidation of electoral power, you know, through the established political process, I mean, how do you see it playing out in the first couple of months? ah yeah It sounds like this is going to play out in a lot of court hearings and cases, or is it something beyond that? So there's a number of things are going to do right at the beginning. And the first one they already announced today. So they're going to put forward a what Mike Johnson is calling it a very Trumpian way, a big, beautiful bill. Literally, that's a quote, big, beautiful bill, which is supposed to have like $2 trillion dollars of tax cuts and like spending cuts and also all of the border policy, all of the deportation policy, pretty much everything that they want to do all in one big, huge bill. And the reason that they're going to do that is because they can at least tacitly claim that's a budget bill and shove it through reconciliation.
00:48:50
Speaker
right Now, whether that sticks, because there's a lot of non-budgetary things that would be in a bill like that, I don't know. How long it's going to take to pass a thing like that? Because remember, they only have a one-vote majority in the house? I don't know, probably a really long time, but that's their plan. Now, why would they do that? It sounds dumb. It sounds inefficient. like It's going to take a really long time, and it will. But the reason they want to do that is it allows them to shove a bunch of their policy priorities into something that they can ostensibly claim as a budget bill, so it doesn't have to have a public debate.
00:49:20
Speaker
and that allows them to hide all kinds of stuff. For example, Elon Musk was on Joe Rogan just a couple of days ago talking about how like the US s government's collapsing budgetarily and you know they just might have to end social security in order to save it, right? That's not gonna show up in a congressional debate. They'll shove that through in a budget bill.
00:49:40
Speaker
right And so we have to really be paying a lot of attention to the way that they're trying to structure legislation here, because they're doing it in a different way than normal. So like normally, the legislative process is one where you see the kind of superficial separation of powers in the United States actually become something meaningful.
00:49:59
Speaker
right You have the executive branch proposing a budget. You have Congress debating it. People vote. There's protests in the streets. like That's ostensibly how things in the ideal sense are supposed to work. And all of that is a process of Congress asserting its power over the executive branch. right What is happening now is that Trump is trying to very overtly convince them to give that power away to him.
00:50:24
Speaker
Right? Every one of these bills that they've brought up, every single one of these policy proposals that they brought up, their whole argument that killed the budget bill a week ago, all of that was about getting Congress to give its power to the executive branch voluntarily. Because they know that they can't just take it. It has to be given to them. And so what they're doing is they're asking for it. And when they don't get it, they're demanding it.
00:50:51
Speaker
And that's what we really need to watch. right It's not about like, oh, they want to pass a bill that that justifies mass deportations. That's one thing. But the question is how? What is the mechanism that they're talking about here? What is the relationship of executive power to the decision to deport people? How is that related to the court system? right like Those are the things that they're undermining.
00:51:12
Speaker
It's going to look and sound like a normal bill when it gets summarized in 20 seconds on the news. But when you dive into the minutiae, that's where we're going to see all of these little tiny like legal maneuvers happening. A guy like Russell Vaught. Russell Vaught's a really important person for people to study and understand because Russell Vaught doesn't have any ambition about getting elected to office. He doesn't care if people like him. He doesn't care if people call him a fascist. He doesn't care if you know people say that he's like using government. but He doesn't care about any of that. He is a laser-focused person. And his goal is, regardless of how it happens, to impose conservative orthodoxy on every single person in the country.
00:51:59
Speaker
And he doesn't particularly care how that's done. He is way more of a marker of what's going to happen in this administration than probably any other single person. And so all of you should go out and research this guy, Russell Vaught, V-O-U-G-H-T, Russell Vaught. He's been a Heritage Foundation person for a long time. He's been a right-wing operative for a long time. But if you really want to know what's going to happen,
00:52:24
Speaker
If you really want to get that preview of what's going to go down, read the things Russell Vaught has written, because he'll tell you, and I've been saying this for years now, but if we want to know what they're going to do, we just have to listen to them because they tell you what they're going to do. Suddenly, often indirectly, but if you learn to read their language, they are going to tell you what they're going to do, and this is what they're telling us they're going to do.
00:52:50
Speaker
They've just leaned into it more and more and more over the last week or two. And what I'm seeing starting like today, yesterday, today, any sort of idea that they were going to try and dress this up with the niceties of democracy are also gone. They're not even talking about that anymore. Like this is just about consolidation of power unapologetically.
Mutual aid and community resilience during wildfires
00:53:36
Speaker
My name is Neil. I am a member of the Black Rose Rosenegre Anarchist Federation and an organizer doing work doing, I started the mutual aid group, LA street care and mutual aid, and have been involved in sort of trying to escalate mutual aid organizing into like an unhoused people's union in LA area. Well, great. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
00:54:05
Speaker
So just kind of give us an overview. I think most people are aware that they're listening to this, that there's you know something very big and bad happening and in the Los Angeles area. but Tell us a little bit about the size, scope, and the degree of impact and and why this is such a big deal right now. So at this moment, um there are six active wildfires in l LA County, and there have been at least 11, I think maybe even 12 in the last 10 days or so. And when I went to bed last night, there were seven active wildfires, but it looks like one of them went out. The biggest one is in the Pacific Palisades, and that's at about 20,000 acres with 6% containment.
00:54:45
Speaker
The second largest is called the Eden Fire, and it is located in Pasadena and the Altadena area of Pasadena. It's about 14,000 acres, and it's a 3% containment. The Lydia Fire is in the San Gabriel Mountains, almost near Palmdale, which is like on the other side of the mountains in the Antelope Valley. And that's not as big. It's at about 400 acres. There is the Hurst Fire, which is at the northern part of the San gabriel valley or san Fernando Valley, sorry which is what people commonly refer to as the valley. And that is at about 770 acres and growing
00:55:27
Speaker
The Kenneth Fire is the um on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains from the Palisades Fire, and those two are actually looking like their evacuation areas are starting to grow toward one another. But the Kenneth Fire is basically at the border of LA County and Ventura County. So this is like a huge, huge swath of land that these fires are on right now. And part of the reason why, and this is the worst, I've been here in Southern California for about, coming up on 14 years. And this is the worst state of wildfires I've ever seen. And it's particularly bad because
00:56:08
Speaker
We have a windstorm that has dropped the humidity to around 10 percent or lower. So it's like perfect conditions for fire to to spread and get and because it's windy, it's blowing the the embers everywhere. And so it's really a very dangerous situation. at the mill and So there's various levels of impact and like different scales as a result of that. So like there are people directly impacted who must evacuate.
00:56:38
Speaker
um and that right now and like they're gone and maybe their homes are burning down um or have and that number is in the tens of thousands or more then there are the people who are waiting to find out if they need to evacuate um which is likely more like in the hundreds of thousands and then there are people like me where I live in in Long Beach at the moment I'm 20 miles south of the closest fire and I'm getting ash raining down in my my backyard and the sky is yellow and we're where we have like air quality warnings where we're not supposed to go outside unless we're wearing a mask. um And that's probably in the millions of people and it's a very large chunk of Los Angeles County which has I think 10 or 11 million people living in it. so
00:57:23
Speaker
there are there's impact on cultural and historical sites the gethetty center which is one of LA's art museums is being, I'm pretty sure I heard a report that it was burning, but I know that the fire is at least surrounding it. And then the Eaton fire in Altadena is going up towards the Mount Wilson Observatory, which is where Edwin Hubble discovered black holes. And yeah, most of Palisades neighborhood, which is, yes, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in um the country, but also is a place, you know, of a lot of like,
00:57:57
Speaker
historical homes like the Eames had their home there has been predominantly burnt down. And then I think there's even subtler things that are probably going to play out in a long term, which a friend of mine and I were talking about it and he's in the film business and he's an electrician and he's completely considering changing careers because the film business was already volatile and he's pretty convinced that it's going to take a long time for it to come back.
00:58:26
Speaker
there's there's a lot of impact um on the people around here. Well, I'm wondering if you you can talk about what the response has been or or the lack thereof from the state specifically, and then we'll talk about other other groups. Sure. and And there might be more that I'm unaware of. I've mostly been getting like direct information from the rapid response networks, not so much following CNN or anything like that. so but It's pretty wild, I will say. The first night, i was we were i have we set up an ICE rapid response network or you know to go and do support for ICE raids that they're popping up. And that's where I first learned about the fire in Pasadena. And people were listening to the scanners, so I was getting like real-time information about what what the fire department was like calling for and they
00:59:21
Speaker
They called for 20 tenders, and it turned out that the department only had one, and they ran out of water at one point and were and also completely lost water pressure at another point. So they were completely unprepared and under underfunded for a situation like this. and like can you um and there is A tender is just one of the trucks that that like ah is like that that comes that helps helps them like either connect to the water line or it carries water itself. got so And then they also made the completely unprecedented call to volunteers, anybody who had anything remotely close to a firefighting experience to come and help. So it was like very, yeah, what but what's the word? Unprepared, I guess is the the kindest word I can give.
01:00:14
Speaker
And then I know Gavin Newsom was scolding people in the media for not evacuating fast enough. they The state has sent Cal Fire and eight at least 800 prisoners who are getting paid a dollar an hour to put these fires out.
01:00:29
Speaker
And then I think like bigger picture outside the situation, the state has responded by claiming anyway that they're like doing controlled burns and and trying to like manage this situation outside of fire season, which I don't know if that's true or not. And then, um you know, most of the big insurance companies are taking these opportunities, not at the moment because they're not legally allowed to right now, but after this fire is over, many of them will probably pull out of California. And so California has created a fire insurance policy for people who can't get it otherwise, um or home Homeowners Insurance Policy. People pointed out that the LA Fire Department probably would have been better equipped to deal with this if the LAPD wasn't getting $8 billion dollars a year and just taking up so much of our city's budget. And during this, we both have seen the the schedule. So the city was still scheduling homeless encampment sweeps during the um during the fire
01:01:27
Speaker
And also we've been getting a lot of reports that ICE is in Southern California using this as an opportunity to start trying to round people up. Oh, and additionally, Karen Bass said that she was going to call the National Guard on looters. So it seems to me like I would define the state's response as like,
01:01:45
Speaker
business as usual. You were talking about the response from the state. How do you see or expect this to like expand the existing crisis that's unfolding in Los Angeles? How is this going to impact you know the vast amounts of houses folks, the housing crisis? i mean i think that I think there's several ways that I can just see right now and and maybe you know in and a month or two, I'll have more ways of thinking about it. but you know A lot of people's houses are burning down and we have a severe housing shortage and that's a very immediate problem. most Many of the homes that are being burned are wealthy people's homes, but not all of them.
01:02:24
Speaker
And Altadena, as I said, is one of the LA area's oldest black communities. And so resources, both from like probably from the state, from insurance companies, from and builders and developers are going to have to go to rebuilding homes, which takes energy away from you know potentially takes energy away from other projects. But I think it's going to increase home ah homeowners' insurance costs and the cost of building homes and building multi-family or single-family homes, so which is just going to drive rent and mortgages up. So it's going to make housing even more unaffordable, I think, at least in some sort of midterm. But I think, yeah, also long-term, because I don't think insurance companies, there they need they're going to want to make a profit. So they're going to drive their rates up. And fires themselves are one of the driving factors of
01:03:23
Speaker
homelessness. I have a friend who whose house was burned down in Santa Cruz in 2020 and um he's still living in a sprint event four years later because he wasn't able to rebuild. you know As we know, the state's method of dealing with homelessness is through the carceral system. They have lots of little, lots of euphemisms that they like to use like care sweeps and care courts, but they're just really violent um processes of um displacement and they have no like meaningful long-term solution that they've shown that they're willing to engage at least at this point. I think it'll probably be unfortunately unless there is like an intervention from you know
01:04:08
Speaker
people, I would say, from below, that it's just going to be a vicious cycle of dumping more money into cops so that then prison isn't policing because the numbers of unhoused people increase and the housed people continue to complain and be the loudest voice, then that's the solution that politicians lean into every time. And then I think that there are just like the health, short-term and long-term health impacts of living outside while having to inhale smoke, which is obviously not good for your health. Something I wanted to just back up on and and double. Sure. You said that so many insurance companies are actually... I just want to clarify if you said this or not. Sure. that insurance companies are
01:04:52
Speaker
dropping out of California, like they're no longer going to insure people who are housed in California and that the state of California is going to swoop in and create its own insurance policy for homeowners. No, that that's exactly right. And they they have already done that. So but you can get, I can't remember what it's called, but you can get a homeowner's insurance through the state of California. It's not like a, it could be described as like relatively bare bones and not any cheaper than like any other insurance companies. But yes, insurance companies have been pulling out of California for the last 10 years or so now and been refusing to insure homes. Another thing they do is they will try and price people out by just driving up their rates really high.
01:05:35
Speaker
And I think that relates to the next question, which is around how, how do you think the state and the incoming Trump administration specifically will interact with this expanding crisis? You know, you're talking about increasing housing, increasing insurance rates, greater sort of separation between rich and poor, but yeah, do you have anything else to add to that?
01:05:56
Speaker
I'm thinking of it really in terms of like an ecological environmental crisis. so and And I've seen the state, especially the United States, their strategy for dealing with this is to um steal the land or the resources and seal the border.
01:06:16
Speaker
And I definitely think Trump is going to continue to lean into that. and i And he will push the narrative that the people on the streets are illegal immigrants and ah increase an atmosphere of like the need for further carceral solutions. I definitely see him being willing to lean into that. And and I think long-term you know, something that had come up a lot in the last year with the genocide going on in Gaza um is that Gaza kind of seems like a trial run from the ruling class or capitalist perspective of like what they can get away with. And i you know, Elbit Systems is the company that built the turrets on the wall in Gaza. They're also putting similar things on the U.S. border wall. So I think that like
01:07:06
Speaker
And they're doing it like very low key. They are monitoring the Tohono O'odham reservation in Arizona and in Mexico because it crosses the border. And they've they've justified this by saying that it's a place where illegal immigrant immigrants come into the country. So I definitely see, you know, this being used as an opportunity to stoke fear, but then also like further justify sealing the border from from anybody coming in. What do you think about Trump's and knew some sort of a back and forth. I mean, Trump is pushing as per usual viral misinformation. It's a good question. And i I think like, and maybe this goes to one of your further questions that you were going to ask, but I definitely think that like it's, it's an opportunity, it presents an opportunity for people who are doing like real deep community organizing to push the wake up call. But you know, I don't definitely don't see that coming from Gavin Newsom, certainly because
01:08:04
Speaker
I think he's pretty invested in you know maintaining some semblance of the status quo in California, even if he does, like it wants to push like some and environmental like policies or whatever that are that are good. He's definitely not interested in building power from below in any way. But I do think that there is, I agree that they're gonna put the blame on on anyone other than what the real problem is, for sure.
01:08:34
Speaker
I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how autonomous mutual aid groups are responding to this given the lack of support from the state. how What are the different initiatives you're seeing people engaging in? So one of the unique features I would say about l LA is that we have a very robust sort of coalition network ah and that is becoming formalized and or had been becoming like increasingly formalized up to this moment. and And so we were able to really mobilize a lot of resources very quickly. and so
01:09:11
Speaker
there's There have been a combination of like yes mutually autonomous mutual aid groups um and small businesses that are like-minded who have been serving as like distribution points for any kind of resources that people would need from food to like you know, water, blankets, clothes, masks, anything like that that. And when it started, maybe they were staying open a few extra hours, but now they seem to be like 24-hour distribution hubs. People have been coming from all around the county, dropping stuff off at the various hubs. Other ways have
01:09:48
Speaker
have been like doing evac evacuations. So a lot of people have been going up into like the areas near San Fernando Valley and Pasadena and helping unhouse folks or people who don't have cars or whatever get out of the area into someplace safer. And then I've seen an initiative started that is circulating through a lot of the different like groups and chats that I am connected to to meet and to use as as to use this as a moment to push that sort of increasing formalization into actually a formal like um organization ah that like can sort of exist across the city and build increasing power against the state.
01:10:34
Speaker
and And through, like yes, mutual aid and rapid response networks, but also yeah all sorts of things, jail and court support, many different types of facets. And I think we we started it a couple of years ago with a campaign against Mayor Bass's inside safe program called Inside Starving and like came up with demands and we were able to to get a um meeting with the mayor, which was somewhat rare, I heard, but you know she just It basically brushed us off, but but I think that that was this can be a catalyzing moment to get back into actually like making serious demands of power and building real community power. I know this is still a developing situation. How do you see these mutual aid responses kind of growing? Because i mean it looks like this thing is still playing out. It's going to be devastating. you know how do you see i mean I've seen like posts from like the LA Tenancy Union. There's things like,
01:11:29
Speaker
mutual aid Los Angeles network, how do you see these things either coordinating or kind of building off of this? Like, cool I guess, where can this go? Like, what's, what do you see is the horizon of this mutual aid work, especially when it's like,
01:11:45
Speaker
in terms of something happening in an area like as large as the Los Angeles area? That's a good question. I think my goal is to push but always towards increasing organization and increasing militancy. And as I mentioned, ah the we've been trying to grow into a homeless people's union and that homeless people's union is at least parts of it are rooted in like a landless people's movement so and have ah are approaching it in that way. So like I think like what what I would like to sort of organized around and pushed for is like real land reform, like like landless movements have pushed for in you know so South Africa and and in Brazil and Namibia and elsewhere. And like where, you know, because unhoused people, they're living in public, and but they're not but that land is is not really public. I mean, it's owned by the corporation that cause it calls itself the city of Los Angeles or the city of Long Beach or whatever, and they they set the rules for how people can use it. but like
01:12:45
Speaker
I think you know we need to really like build power and I do think that this is a moment where people are seeing that in in terms of like the more immediate I've just seen the the response become increasingly organized and like increasingly efficient in this moment in a way that I don't know that I did in 2020 but I think in 2020 when the fires came that it was a much smaller situation it was basically just it was a similar area to the kind of kind of it was the west side of LA like near the Getty Villa or Getty Center where where there's part of the fire now but like
01:13:21
Speaker
it was It was nowhere near as big and nowhere near as impactful. It didn't come anywhere near as close to people's homes. It was like predominantly on on like hillside and stuff. so So this is an unprecedented moment and I think it it presents real opportunities to continue to like to build power. And I think not just like rooted in the kind of direct aid that that people are providing right now, but like actual like trying to build power around like getting to each according to their needs, from each according to their ability in like a real sort of powerful way. Speaking of that, where can people get more information and plug in? Mutual Aid LA on Instagram is a great
01:14:04
Speaker
ah resource. they have a bunch of They have a link to all of the various like LA Fire resources that people can either go to or donate to. Sidewalk Project is doing a lot of really good work right now in Skid Row.
01:14:20
Speaker
LA Street Care and Mutual Aid on Instagram is another group doing a lot of good work. Etna Street Solidarity um is up in San Fernando Valley. they're They're the folks that have started the San Fernando Valley Homeless Union. They're doing a lot of really good work and could use any kind of support that people can offer. I think at this moment, I wouldn't encourage people. I know that there's been some discussion of people coming from Northern California.
01:14:45
Speaker
I wouldn't come right now. It's a pretty dangerous situation to be driving into, but I do think that we will need that kind of help like once once the fires are under control. They're not very controlled right now.
01:14:59
Speaker
I think something else that this is bringing up for me is a curiosity around how to maintain this power that you're talking about even beyond like once the crisis is quote unquote over, how do we sustain that level of organization? And I think part of that leads into this, this larger question of like, how, how do we respond to the crisis beyond just mutual aid work, but actually make it a crisis for the state?
01:15:29
Speaker
Yeah, I think that um that, you know, I would give the same answer that I give to anybody that we need to gather our people and organize and organize in a directly democratic bottom-up manner around the issues that are are like directly affecting us and and not, you know, this like sort of, quote unquote, polarized like Democrat Republican manner, but like open to anyone bring them in go to your neighbors like build the relationships and and like really like You know, there's there's something like the called the Olympia assembly up in Olympia. I'm down here in Long Beach at we've had a fairly robust amount of Palestine organizing that's been going on here, but I've only been living here for
01:16:14
Speaker
for three months so um I haven't been down much but I've been sort of encouraging us to start an assembly model where you know we meet as like maybe a broader Long Beach community every three months and discuss the issues that are directly facing us and then we break off into like maybe our various localhood local neighborhood areas and um work on like developing plans around that and then come back in three months and continue to do that kind of like that kind of really deep organizing that is I think the kind of thing that will enable us to sustain relationships in the long term and to sort of change the way that we relate to one another because right now
01:16:59
Speaker
This, you know, people, we can't, we're never going to do it if we stay remain as individuals. It's never, and that we like look at this problem as like, well, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to compost more. Like, yes, that's a good thing, but it's not going to create a rupture with the state. And I think so we need to find those like organizations. If you're in a union, like, you know, talk with your union members. If you're, if you're in a school, you're a teacher or student like organized around organize ah race consciousness around like what needs to actually happen. if i mean In prisoner prison, you can as people who are not incarcerated, we can help coordinate organization for prisoners within prison so that like we can really create these like multifaceted movements.
01:17:48
Speaker
Yeah. And I think um we were talking about this before we started the recording, but also sort of ah related to that and and related to the to the idea of building new relationships with people that maybe you're not used to building relationships with or starting new initiatives. Like I'm curious to also hear any comment from you about the fact that, as you said, Pacific Palisades is one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country and was largely decimated here and like how maybe that's being talked about, given that a lot of narrative around climate crisis is that poor people, and and it's true, poor people and poor communities are most directly affected by climate catastrophe. And here we have, as you said, the like like one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country that's been basically completely obliterated by these fires.
01:18:39
Speaker
Yeah, and and what I hope is that that it can serve as a wake-up call and an opportunity for for people who are organizing to like because you know those people are now unhoused. and Yes, many of them are wealthy, but but you know there are actually like there there are lots of trailer parks around Palisades, and so it's it's definitely a mix mixed-class area. but the So I would i would hope that like that there's an opportunity there to to really like rebuild those relationships and see, like create empathy between people. because i you know
01:19:18
Speaker
ah California has taken a very hard right turn in the last four years, and it's almost exclusively been, at least in my eyes, related to homelessness. And the so when you see a large amount of people who are used to sort of denigrating young house suddenly become unhoused, I think that presents an opportunity for for narrative shifts and for like cultural shift. and So I think that there is an organizing opportunity here for sure.
01:19:46
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, the reality is, though, that many very wealthy people, they're going to be the first in line to get their whatever that it is they need. And and hopefully, um we can yeah use this moment as an opportunity. I mean, I think it also begs the question of what sort of like collective responses could be made of people. i mean I think the first thing is this idea that you know capitalism is just assuming that people are going to keep going to work and paying rent. and right I think this is like i mean this is something that people in northern North Carolina were articulating to after the hurricanes, but like ah why are we paying rent when people can't even go outside and like do basic stuff?
01:20:32
Speaker
I think the same question you hear, people should be pushing for a rent moratorium and and all that stuff and connecting that to this wider crisis. Absolutely. And and actually I have seen, and I don't know like what the the organization is, but but I do think that there are opportunities for us to like continue to meet and and discuss this. But I have seen calls for like ah an LA wide general strike. And you know i that was one of my first thoughts like when i because I was bringing supplies up to LA the other day and I was just like, why is anybody going to work right now? And you know all of the people that I'm connected to and who are still up in the city were terrified to go out onto the street and drive and like um and I'm like, how are they acting like business is normal or business as usual? We really need to say no.
01:21:21
Speaker
and i think that this is definitely an opportunity And if if we can't use it as an opportunity now, we can use it as an opportunity to get it organized. So when it happens again in two or three years or whatever, at that point we are ready to stand up and say no.
Conclusion and future coverage
01:21:43
Speaker
Thanks for listening to today's episode of The Beautiful Idea, news and analysis from the front lines of anarchists and autonomous struggles everywhere. Catch you next time.