Ep 168 - Happy Birthday, Bay Of Chuds
Added 2022-01-12 21:09:04 +0000 UTCOn the one-year anniversary of the media spectacle that was the Jan 6 Capitol Hill 'insurrection,' the Antifada crew look back on what happened on that fateful day, how it compared to the George Floyd uprising, what's going on with liberal democracy, and how the anti-capitalist left should relate to all of it.
Outro song: Sick of it all - Insurrection
Fundraiser for families affected by Bronx fire: https://www.gofundme.com/f/relief-for-families-at-333-e-183rd-st
Comments
SOIA outro 🔥🔥🔥
Luke Cragg
2022-01-14 14:27:26 +0000 UTCGenocide on the frontier; it’s what we do best! What to do when there’s no more frontier & the house or cards real estate scam built one level atop that & rickety rando collection of Ponzi schemes/scams one level up mostly finally collapses & is ‘too big to jail’ 2008+ hmmm Scrape everyone’s data & turn their brains into slurry w/ eyeballs on screens every waking moment/place on the digital frontier with no presumption of innocence or sincerity sucking everyone’s blood & treasure? Sounds about right? The beatings, spectacle & end zone dance for the powers that be/that won the class war will continue, regardless of morale!
Jim
2022-01-14 13:03:00 +0000 UTCBut you can’t keep cutting the old growth trees no more, private equity bright & shut down one of the mills since, the railroad is in terrible shape with sporadic service that’s often late owned by a private railroad company given as deeded land on the ‘new’ oregon territory right before the civil war. Still, there is infrequent unreliable slow non punctual car train service, but not to every lumber mill for cargo, small farm & small town from Portland at the huge southern terminus of the great northern RR, eastern terminus of the western pacific RR, northern terminus of the southern pacific & Sprint telegraph/cellular with the train station across the street from the highway USPS now with a chain link fence around it reserved at tax payer give away to the developer weasels with homeless pushed out, condos & yuppies everywhere snd skids, flop houses & hobos & wandering musical tramps takin’ their licks & run out of town or in jail or a leaky tent freezing i the ice, inhaling smoke or freeway noise/exhaust, insane on the pavement or on fire on a hillside or at the gun point of vigilantes / Pinkertons near the slopes by the tonier old gentrifying former railroad & dock ‘colored peope’ worker N. Portland section of town… Tear down the churches, skids, build the freeway thru the black/white ethnic working class neighborhood/keep them away from us, force the postal workers ti commute to airport way industrial with no public transit & usps to pay ti construct a new giant windowless facility instead of windows downtown & sort the mail on the train like they used to up to 1960 and were a public bank up to 1969 with low markup end mile delivery & parcel lockers for person-person wholesale for small business to BFE & any USA territory or imperial military outpost (same low rates!) under the 110 octane low-lead piston engine AV gas fumes at the new facility that sinking into the swamp/Columbia slough with all the concrete poured over what was a wetland…
Jim
2022-01-14 12:55:28 +0000 UTCYasha Levine & Brace Belden had a good little blurbs/bits (I’m too fat & lazy to find the minute mark/trueanon clip or link to yasha.substack.com) about PG&E/Enron scam & a public ballot initiative to buy out the grid for a co-op or PUD around the time of the willie brown mayoral election with a bunch of ballots/ballot boxes that somehow mysteriously wound up in the bay…. Similar up in Portland with Portland General Electric PGE/also captured by the Enron scam. Tho in Portland it was a poorly written ballot initiative and went down in flames with the long-established private utility in a record low voter turnout year during the Iraq invasion while the economy & locally owned industry/economy was still cooking along pretty good with cheap gasoline, bills & no labor actions to speak of, whatsoever. There was some silver lining; the business lobby/lumber mills in Columbia country 1 to the north still needed cheap ‘roll on Columbia roll on’ low markup BPA tier 1 (first in line if you’re a local PUD downstream) kilowatts and in 1999 local distrust of Enron/outside Capitol was so great that they stuck it on the ballot & it passed overwhelmingly, they have some of the cheapest ‘clean’ (the Bonneville dam’s already built/environmental scar’s already there anyway, might as well use it?) hydropower in the country with rates dropping ~1/3 from PGE’s former rate, outage & tree trimming response times are 1/2 & there’s no board of corporate parasites or corporate phone tree & you can speak with a member of your community paid a union wage with a public pension on the phone if you need to at the PUD in seconds!
Jim
2022-01-14 12:42:05 +0000 UTCAlso, I've got to be annoying here and fact-check that St. John's Episcopal burning down claim. There was a large debris fire set outside the church that did zero damage, but got some breathless media coverage at the time. As far as actual damage, there was a small fire in the basement of an outbuilding that was quickly extinguished, a broken exterior storm window, and some graffiti. That's it.
Ian H
2022-01-13 18:31:38 +0000 UTCAround the 20 minute mark, I think the hosts miss the most fundamental reason that the left can't do their own capitol riot, which is that they would be fucking slaughtered. Even if you don't think that J6 was orchestrated directly by elements of the security state (and I think there's too many facts pointing in that direction to rule it out yet) it's clear both from live video and first-hand accounts that Capitol Police/other security forces present didn't use full force against the rioters, and repeatedly stood down/retreated from shockingly small groups of essentially unarmed people (the FBI's own estimate is 2,000 total active rioters). Compare this to the George Floyd uprisings only a few months prior, where every major city in America saw massively larger, militant crowds get absolutely brutalized by overwhelming police violence, including by the same police who suddenly seemed so impotent on the 6th. As in previous historical eras, the state doesn't see right-wing political violence as a true threat. It's at worst an annoyance, and at best a crucial ally in suppressing the militant left. If that crowd had been made up of the multiracial working class with an anti-capitalist or liberatory demand, it would look a lot less like a rowdy sports riot and a lot more like Ludlow.
Ian H
2022-01-13 18:19:43 +0000 UTCJus wana say that those caravans of MAGA & Proud Boys were not just yelling. They were beating up minorities on the street n shooting people with paintball guns
Turtle Bugg
2022-01-13 17:52:34 +0000 UTCIt has certainly been the case that some of the Proud Boys/Patriot Prayer rallies in Portland that haven't been counterprotested heavily have resulted in homeless encampments being targeted and that bystanders have been attacked. The primary targets of the violence are nonviolent counterprotesters, though. The first purpose of the line of black bloc is to stand between the nonviolent counterprotesters and the fascists.
Violet
2022-01-13 08:10:08 +0000 UTCI didn't really get that. Like does he think that we shouldn't organize with striking workers or racial justice protestors if they don't self-identify as communist?
Graham Carpenter
2022-01-13 07:04:02 +0000 UTCAndy's claims about "giving the Proud Boys what they want" about an hour in sounds unpleasantly similar to all the blue check liberals discouraging people from counter-protesting fascist rallies. To my knowledge the Proud Boys and other outfits have been known to go after homeless people and bystanders if they can't find any Antifa. I just don't see why the left should allow fascists to maintain a physical presence in the streets.
Graham Carpenter
2022-01-13 07:02:01 +0000 UTCThis is genuinely my favorite podcast when the three of you are together. I'm looking forward to the bonus! Also, I agree with Sean that the left is no longer a concept worth organizing around, if it ever was.
PrinceVocalFry
2022-01-13 01:04:16 +0000 UTC
