The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Taya Graham:

Hello, my name is Taya Graham and welcome to the Inequality Watch Report, a show that examines government policy and action through the lens of extreme economic inequality, the existential issue of our time. Today, we’re going to discuss a technology which we’ve been told will transform our lives, an invention that has been touted as the ultimate arbiter of our collective futures, whether we like it or not. Of course, I’m talking about artificial intelligence, but with the promise also comes doubt and questions and most of all, a lack of clarity on how we’ll impact the working people of this country. AI leaders have casually warned us that their products could eliminate 40 to 50% of white collar jobs more than the losses in the Great Depression. They’ve promised that technology will be so disruptive that even staunch capitalists have discussed providing a UBI or universal basic income for Americans who will be left out.

They’ve borrowed money at such predigious rates to fund data centers that even Wall Street is beginning to just say no. And now some of the biggest names are saying it’s not working out as planned and an America’s already historic wealth imbalance and government hamstrung by the self-interested impulses of a single man. And you have a situation that could brew a toxic stew of making the already rich even richer and leaving the rest of us even further behind amid all the societal chaos and upheaval. And are the cracks just starting to show? Just this week, one of technology’s greatest apostles made accusations that AI has become a nemesis for his business and others. And capitalists who have gladly loaned billions to build data centers throughout the country are now starting to push back at the ever increasing demand for cash. Of course, the point of this show is to examine this topic through the lens of inequality and how it affects our political and social institutions and what it means for working people.

And to do so, we are about to be joined by an economist who has been thinking and writing about this very topic with insight and clarity, Dean Baker. But first, I want to check in with my co-host, Stephen.

Stephen Janis:

Oh, hey Taya, how you doing?

Taya Graham:

Steve and Janice, it’s great to have you. Thank

Stephen Janis:

You for having me on.

Taya Graham:

Now first, can you give us a broad overview of how inequality and AI are teaming up?

Stephen Janis:

I think in a way, this is the greatest American kind of ripoff in the sense that they’ve spent about the past four or five years mining all our data, taking everything we posted online, and they’re regurgitating it back to us and want to charge us for it in some way. And so to me, I think what is most missing for me besides the promise of huge economic disruption is what the value proposition is for the American people. I mean, they took everything that we wrote and now they want to repackage it and sell it as some sort of deity that we have to worship. And so I’m a little worried, a little worried, a lot worried that we’re all going to be casualties of a great wealth concentrator, which remember, OpenAI was supposed to be a nonprofit. Now it’s a for-profit company. All these huge IPOs, I’m afraid they’re just taking everything we’ve created, sell it back to us and become even richer, and there’ll be a greater concentrate of wealth and power.

So it’s just a bit concerning to me.

Taya Graham:

Actually, Steven, when you mentioned it turning into a deity, we already have some issues with AI psychosis. Maybe we should discuss that on our next show. Yeah,

Stephen Janis:

We’re just going to be praying to the AI deity and offering 19.95 a month to it. So yeah.

Taya Graham:

Actually, that’s about right. And now I want to introduce our guest, Dean Baker. Dean Baker is the co-founder and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. For decades, he’s written about inequality, labor markets, financial bubbles, corporate power, and economic policy. He’s also written extensively about AI and how it’ll affect everyday workers and even journalists just like us. He wrote the book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy were structured to make the rich richer, and its newest project is the AI Bubble Monitor. Dean Baker, thank you so much for joining us.

Dean Baker:

Thanks a lot for having me on.

Taya Graham:

Well, we’re glad to have you. Yeah, absolutely. And I have the honor of doing the first question. And so my first question for you is this. Artificial intelligence has been described as the biggest technological revolution since the internet, and yet you’ve argued that the economic data simply doesn’t support a lot of the claims being made. What are people missing here?

Dean Baker:

Yeah, so I think to a very large extent, we have people who are really good at hype. People like Sam Altman, of course, Elon Musk, absolute master of hype. These are the Donald Trumps of the business world. They’re selling this stuff and they’ve been very successful. I mean, Elon Musk just had his SpaceX initial public offering, which is primarily AI. I mean, that’s their own assessment. I’m not trying to attribute things to them. If you read their registration statement, they say 90% of their expected market is in AI. So SpaceX is an AI company. So they’re looking to get rich by this. And I don’t mean necessarily because they’re going to have huge profits. They have huge stock prices. So Elon Musk became a trillionaire, not because SpaceX has enormous profits. It actually loses money hand over fist. He became a trillionaire because the stock price is ridiculously high.

So step one, is it creating inequality? Absolutely. By a stock bubble, bloated bubble. Now, in terms of what it delivers, they’re saying this, is it going to have massive impact? I’m sure it will. And the model I look to is the internet. Had massive impact. Does that mean that it’s going to lead to mass unemployment? Well, a lot of people lost their jobs to the internet. I mean, Amazon put a lot of small sellers out of retailers out of business.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely.

Dean Baker:

But you still have a lot of retailers there and everyone didn’t lose their job. I think think of AI the similar way. It will change the economy in a lot of different ways, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s going to lose their job. And if we look at the data, we look at productivity, which is what that means. If people are losing jobs, that means we’re producing more in an hour of output. They’ve actually been very weak the last three quarters. Now it’s erratic. So I’ve followed the data for a long time. So I know you could have real weak quarter and next quarter could be really weak. And then we’ll come around the second half of 226 and who knows, be 5%. Very rapid productivity growth. Could happen. But the point is we’re not seeing it. And there have been a number of economists I’ve tried to look through this very carefully and look at sector by sector, look at retail, look at healthcare, look at the different sectors of the economy.

And invariably, they find relatively modest impact of the studies I’ve seen. And I’m sure we missed some, but these are credible studies. The highest number was a half percent a year increase, half a percentage point a year increase in annual productivity growth, which matters. I mean, that’s noticeable, but that’s not massive unemployment. And one of the leading economists in the world, Darin Asamiglu, Nobel Prize winner, he had it at just seven hundredths of 1%.

Taya Graham:

Wow.

Dean Baker:

These people could all be wrong, but they’ve tried to be very careful in it and they find very modest impacts. I shouldn’t say very modest. I mean, again, a half percentage point a year. If you had that, that would be a big deal. But the internet, when we had the internet in the ’90s, the internet boom is about one and a half percentage points a year. So we’ve seen this.

Stephen Janis:

Wow. Dean, that’s kind of. But these people are hyping valuations. They’re borrowing billions and billions of dollars, I think, based on a higher rate of return. I mean, is this like a house of cards? I mean, they’re hyping this over and over again saying it’s going to be transformative. But now you’re saying the impact so far has not been. Does that put at risk all these billions of dollars they’ve thrown at this problem?

Dean Baker:

Absolutely. And this is why I’m calling it a bubble. I’m old enough, I’ve been through two really big economy moving bubbles. In the ’90s, we had the tech bubble. And I was out there saying, “This is bad news. It’s going to burst. It’s going to burst.” And it did. It burst in 2001. The S&P 500 big stock index fell 50% from peak to trough. The NASDAQ where you had most of the tech stocks, that fell 80%. And it had a huge impact on the economy. I mean, for stock investors, I go, “You should know what you’re doing. Many don’t, but you should know what you’re doing. So I can’t cry too much.” But it had a big impact on the economy. We lost jobs into the 2000 recession. We didn’t get them back till 2005. That was the longest period with our positive job growth since the Great Depression.

We had a longer one after the Great Recession. But that was a big recession from the standpoint of the labor market. Also, real wage growth just stopped. We’d been seeing good real wage growth in the late ’90s, just stopped almost instantly. So that was a really bad story. And then we had the housing bubble. Again, same story. And that town in turn was more severe. We had close to 10 million people lose their home to foreclosure. The unemployment rate peaked at near 10% in 2009.

So bubbles can have very bad consequences. So that’s why I’m very worried about this one. They’re selling this and Elon Musk undoubtedly is stuffing his pockets. And Sam Altman and the others, they’re stuffing their pockets. But no, I don’t see that these stock prices make sense. And when does the music stop? I don’t know. Both those bubbles went way longer than I expected them to. But all I could say is the sooner it bursts, the better it will be for the country.

Taya Graham:

It was really interesting that you compared the AI investment boom to the dot-com bubble. Maybe you could just go into a little bit more depth about some of the similarities that really concern you. Yeah.

Dean Baker:

Well, there are two things there. One, from the standpoint of the firms, that you started to see companies that were just pushing nonsense in essence. I’m going back to the dot-com. So it became almost a joke. And I shouldn’t say almost a joke. It was a joke. And this was in the business press. So the Wall Street Journal used to highlight the most ridiculous initial public offerings. So people were coming up with crazy public offerings and they could still raise hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars in their first issue. There was one company even that took the cake. I wish I could remember the name. They said, “We don’t know how we can make a profit.” So you work from the assumption, okay, they’re not profitable today, but they have this great plan, software, whatever it is. And two years, three years, four years, they’re going to be a next Microsoft.

That’s what people were betting on. And of course they weren’t. But you had one literally said, “We don’t even know how we’ll make a profit.” So you had a huge amount of misdirected capital. And that was, of course, a huge voice for the economy. But the standpoint of the stock market, again, I was saying we want stock investors or we think they should be knowledgeable. They aren’t. And people were spending based on their stock wealth. So you had a lot of people that were saying, “Oh, I had money in the NASDAQ and just doubled,” which it might well have. A lot of people owned stocks in the NASDAQ and over two years they would’ve doubled. So they said, “Oh, I’m going to buy a new car, get a bigger house, go on a big vacation.” Well, when those prices plummeted, that consumption stopped. So it was a very, very big hit to the economy.

And I worry very. I should add one more thing on the craziness that companies discovered that if they added dot-com to their name, their stock price would go up five or 10%. We’re seeing that today. If you add AI to your name, and someone did that, I’m trying to remember what it was. I think it was- Was it like

Stephen Janis:

Diapers.com? I think, wasn’t there like diapers.com or something or something?

Dean Baker:

Yeah. And their stock price went up five or 10%, which tells you. I mean, it’s utterly nuts. You’re the same company. It doesn’t matter whether you call yourself. Com AI or anything. You’re the same company. It shouldn’t make any sense.

Stephen Janis:

Well, now speaking of a bubble, Palantir CEO, Alex Carp, had kind of a meltdown on CNBC. Let me play a little bit of it so you can watch it. And maybe you can explain what he saw. It sounded to me like he was panicking, but it was hard to figure out what he was talking about. David, if you could play that clip and we’ll just watch it and we come back, we’ll talk about it.

Alex Carp:

Everyone who uses LLMs on the battlefield runs on top of our ontology. And our clients are just, to say they’re unhappy with the Frontier Labs is to say I’m welcome at the Berkeley faculty. It’s like there’s just a level of discomfort and loss of trust that also made it really, really –

Stephen Janis:

Okay. Unpack that. What do you mean by that?

Alex Carp:

Well, you have, okay, so when you’re using large language models, at this point, everyone technical realizes they’re like a critical resource. To make them valuable in an enterprise like battlefield context or regulated context or manufacturing, you have to have what’s called an application layer. We have this thing called ontology that now everyone’s copying, but defacto, it takes a large language model. It makes it safe and useful and precise. So safe because it doesn’t touch your unlearning data, safe because it prevents the large language model from caching your data and replicating your business. Safe because it doesn’t transfer your IP of how to fight secret data, top secret data or in a clinical context. So the general way these things were sold, and again, these people are. Sam and Dario, there’s nothing more fun than debating Dario in private. So I’m not throwing shade at them,

Taya Graham:

But

Alex Carp:

Something has gone completely wrong. And the basic view among enterprises in this country is I’m going to chill lax and waste my time with tokens. I’m going to get no value and they’re going to get my IP.

Stephen Janis:

Okay, Dean, like I said, I haven’t heard the word ontology since my religious studies class in undergraduate, but it sounds to me like there’s buyers remorse or panicking among the top people, including Mr. Carp. What’s your take on what he’s saying? Does he sound like he’s panicking?

Dean Baker:

He sounds panicking. And just to be clear, I don’t know Alex Carp, never met him. But as best I could tell, he’s an odd guy. But as best I can tell, his complaints are first and foremost that you have companies spending a lot of money on AI and you had a lot of companies that were spending literally hundreds of millions a month. And they weren’t getting anything obvious for that. So they were actually encouraging their staff, their mid-level staff. So I was mentioning, I was talking about Amazon, where they literally had a leaderboard where people were posting how much AI they were using. And I don’t know if they got a bonus or whatever it was exactly, but the more AI, the better off you were. And just like to me, Amazon’s obviously a big business in any ways very successful, at least from their vantage point of profits.

Why would you ever encourage people to use AI for the sake of using AI? And the analogy I’ve

Taya Graham:

Made is

Dean Baker:

It’s like using paper. Oh, I used five reams of paper today. And you go, okay, great. What’d you do? I mean, that’s kind of nuts, but that’s what they were literally doing. So you’ve had companies looking to cut back hugely on the AI they use because they want to see that they’re actually getting something for it. And in many cases, their conclusion was that they weren’t. The other part of the story that he’s raising, Carp is raising, is they’re worried. They don’t know what’s happening with their data. So when you’re running your programs through Anthropic, through OpenAI and whoever else, they have your data. So using the example of Amazon, that data’s worth a huge amount. We know, we complain about that. Amazon, they know everything we’ve purchased, what we’ve looked at. They have an enormous amount of data on us. That’s a lot of money to them.

They don’t want to give that away for nothing to Anthropic, to OpenAI, whoever. And they don’t know whether they are or they aren’t. So that’s what he was talking about. He’s saying you need software that regulates the usage. And as it is, a lot of companies don’t have that. Again, I’m not going to advertise for your software. I have no idea what it does, but you probably don’t want to give these AI companies all your data.

Taya Graham:

Actually, Steven and I go and cover Capitol Hill, and we saw Senator Bernie Sanders arguing that if AI creates extraordinary wealth, then the public deserves a share of that wealth. And he announced an AI sovereign wealth fund proposal. And I think he’s talking about a 50% stake for Americans. Now at first glance, this sounds like a progressive idea, but I read your article. Why do you disagree?

Dean Baker:

Yeah, I’m a big Bernie Sanders fan, known him for years. I have enormous respect for him, but I really think this goes down the wrong path. To start with, just from the word go, if you’re giving the US government a large stake in the AI companies, you’re giving Donald Trump a large stake in AI companies. I know that’s not Bernie’s intention, but look at what the Supreme Court has been saying. I’ll guarantee you, this isn’t even a debatable point given the recent Supreme Court rulings. If we get the ability through an ownership stake to put people in top positions in Anthropic and OpenAI, whoever else we might buy a stake in or take a stake in, Donald Trump is going to pick those people. It doesn’t matter how they wrote in the law. That’s what the Supreme Court has said. The unitary executive, he decides, I can’t imagine in the current environment wanting to give more power to Donald Trump.

In general, I’m not sure I want the government to have a 50% stake, but certainly not Donald Trump. So that to my mind’s a no-brainer. Secondly, from the standpoint of regulation, we know there’s all sorts of ways we need to regulate AI. It’s not an option. They want to build data centers everywhere. Do you want a data center in your backyard? Should we be able to tear down Grand Canyon to put a data? That’s their dream. That’s what they want to do. We already are having massive battles on this. I don’t trust that with the government having a direct stake that we would get the right outcomes. I don’t trust we’d get the right outcomes anyhow. But I think we really tilt the playing field and just the environmental issues, that’s just one of them. When you’re talking about ownership of data, access to privacy, there’s a whole range of issues that come up with AI that are unavoidable.

I mean, it’s not a question, oh, we should leave it to the market. There is no market. We’re setting the rules. So I worry very much about that. The third point is just what I was saying before. A huge amount of this is hype. And unfortunately, I think Bernie’s feeding the hype. Oh, they’re going to have massive wealth. I don’t see that. I think there’ll be big profitable companies here, just like going back to the ’90s. You look at the providers of internet, Cisco and Verizon and Comcast, they’re big companies. They’re profitable. They aren’t earth shaking. They aren’t the biggest companies in the world. So why are we contributing to the hype? I don’t think that’s a productive thing to do.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. Yeah, go ahead, Ed. No, go ahead.

Taya Graham:

I was going to say, when I was reading your article on your substack, Dean Baker, that your first objection wasn’t really economic, that was more political. And I was just wondering why you think having a government-owned AI investment fund would be particularly dangerous under the Trump administration? Or could you just not trust any administration with it?

Dean Baker:

I’d have problems with any administration, but let’s just focus on Donald Trump. Donald Trump has made it clear. He sees the government as his tool to enrich himself, to enrich his friends. So he will put his friends in top positions there. He will have his friends, people contribute to his campaign or give him kickbacks. They will be the ones that get contracts from these companies. He’s anti – DEI. Well, women in top positions, forget it. Blacks in top positions, forget it. He’s applied that through government as much as he could. You’re just giving them a whole new area to apply this in. And again, if AI, I don’t think it’ll be the massive thing, at least these companies will be the massive things that they’re hyping. But again, I don’t want to give Donald Trump yet more power.

Stephen Janis:

Wow. Well, listen, to your idea of Bubble Watch, which I think is kind of fascinating, well, also terrifying. So for example, in the private credit markets, people started to panic and private credit is lending a lot of money for these data centers. Last week, IBM lost 20.% of its value in one day because people were panicking about software. Where do you see this starting to unravel? I mean, we’re not economists, but we’re people that read. What should we be looking at? What should anyone be looking at actually to see where this bubble’s going to start to unravel if indeed it does?

Dean Baker:

Okay. Well, let me be as honest I can be on this. I didn’t know until this date, I can’t tell you what caused the collapse of the stock bubble or for that matter, the housing bubble. I mean, I could all point to all sorts of vulnerabilities, but when they collapsed and why? Both went on much longer than I ever thought they would. I’ll say that. So I’m saying that now what I have been looking to and will continue to look to is increasingly the companies, and these are big companies, these are Meta, Alphabet, the biggest companies in the world. They’re having to borrow. So even though they’re very profitable, they’re undertaking such massive investments that they’re having to borrow. And you’re seeing a very interesting story here that investors in bonds are starting to get worried. We actually saw this with SpaceX. It was really striking.

One of my AI bubble monitors was about this, that SpaceX bonds are being sold at a discount, meaning that bond buyers see a risk that it actually could default, that they might actually go bankrupt. So here on the one hand, you have stock investors going, “Oh, SpaceX is going to be the most profitable company in the history of the world.” You have bond investors going, “It might go bankrupt. It might not be able to pay its bills.” So I would look at the bond market and it seems to be. I recently saw some data showing that there’s much less interest in Alphabet, Meta, the hyperscalers are called, that are involved in building the data centers for AI. There’s much less interest in their bonds than for other investment grade debt. And that’s who I’d look to first, because if it ends up being the case that you can’t get the bond issues to finance it, then it’s going to fall apart.

We may be seeing the beginnings of that. I mean, it’s a little early, but we may be seeing the beginnings of that. So if they start to cut back their lending, this thing could collapse fairly quickly.

Taya Graham:

If we can, I just would like to pivot for a moment to affordability. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one out there seeing their gas, their car insurance, their groceries going through the roof. There are so many Americans that are struggling with housing costs and healthcare costs and groceries and childcare and utility bills. And I was just wondering how much of today’s affordability crisis has to do with AI, will be impacted by AI, and how much stems from our much broader economic policy?

Dean Baker:

I would say most of it is broader economic problems, but I will say one that I can pin on AI, and that’s a housing market, particularly in areas like the Bay Area. So you actually saw this when you had the SpaceX, their initial public offering, you suddenly had all these people that were doing well, obviously, were highly paid engineers in positions at SpaceX, but they’re maybe getting hundreds of thousands a year. Maybe some are getting low millions. They suddenly have 10, 20, 30 million because there’s SpaceX stock, and that’s what the evaluation would be. They suddenly turn around and go, “Oh, I want a really big house.” Well, there’s only so many really big, really nice houses in the Bay Area. So those go through the roof. And there is a trickle down here. Trickle down not in a good way. So if you’re a lawyer, you’re doing well, you make three or 400,000 a year.

Well, suddenly the home that you were looking to buy, which would’ve been a million you might have been able to afford, now it’s two or three or four million. So you look at a middle-class house and you’re suddenly prepared to pay one and a half million for that. So then the person who’s a teacher or a firefighter that maybe, maybe, maybe could have scraped together enough to buy that for five or 600,000,

No way on earth they could pay one and a half million for that. So there is a direct impact on housing, not necessarily nationwide. I don’t know how much it affects things in Ames, Iowa, but certainly in tech centers like in the Bay Area, like Seattle, other places where there are likely a lot of people involved in the AI economy.

Stephen Janis:

Dean, when the Great Recession hit, even though it was caused by bankers’ greed, a lot of it really the working class suffered. Do you think AI could have the same impact if it does start to collapse, that it will hurt working people and that the bankers will catch a cold and will catch the flu or whatever? Do you see it trickling down again to people who had nothing to do with this, what I would call a mess at this point?

Dean Baker:

Yeah, because that’s the problem with bubbles when they start driving the economy, because our economy does not turn well. So what happened in the ’90s, we were being driven by the tech bubble. Tech bubble collapses. Nothing else to come in its place. In fact, what came in its place, it took a couple years to do it, a few years to do it, the housing bubble. And then that collapsed and well, that took a long time to recover from it. We really didn’t get back to a strong labor market, lower levels unemployment till 2016, 2017. So what I worry is that the AI bubble’s definitely driving the economy, both through investment in AI stuff, AI related stuff, and then also the consumption effect that people go, “Oh wow, I now have five million in the stock market,” which some of these people do. And then they go out and spend a lot of money, housing being one thing, they get cars.

So those stocks go through the floor. Suddenly nothing’s driving the economy and we start to see the unemployment rate rise. Wages don’t keep pace with prices. It’s a bad picture.

Taya Graham:

I actually just went to a doctor’s appointment to go to radiology, just getting exams, and they said to me, “Oh, would you like to get the AI version of this and pay an extra $40?” And I said, “Well, how’s it different than my normal exam?” And they said, “Well, actually, technology is pretty much the same.” So I’m wondering how much are they overselling how beneficial this technology actually is and how much of it is just pure hype?

Dean Baker:

They’re hugely overselling it. Again, I’m not down on the ground in all these businesses, but you hear accounts of this. So you have a lot of companies where software coding, where it’s probably at the biggest impact, where they do AI and it’s often very useful, but the problem is it makes mistakes. So you still need someone who really knows the coding to check it. And I think that’s a good story really everywhere. You could use the AI, it could be very helpful, but you still have to check it. I know my own usage, which is very limited. I had it do a reference section for me. I was writing a paper and I was going, I can type up. I’m sure there’s software that could do it too, but I was going, okay, if I type it up, it’s going to take me two or three hours and I’ll make mistakes because I’m a sloppy typist.

So I’ll have AI do it and did it for me in, I don’t know, 20 seconds or something. I still had to review it because it had some references that were improper, but it was certainly much, much faster than if I had to type it myself. So I think there’s going to be a learning process. We will be able to use AI, use it beneficially, and there will be a productivity gain, but nothing like what they’re telling us.

Stephen Janis:

Dean, why do, in your estimation, we’ve heard all the incredible stories about tax incentives for data centers. If these companies are going to be so profitable and so amazing and going to create all this value, why do they need whopping tax incentives to build out these data centers? I just don’t get it. I don’t understand. And I’m not asking you to explain for them, but what do you think is the operative motive here of having all these tax breaks?

Dean Baker:

Well, there’s a crude joke with the punchline I could use because they can.

But there is a logic that from the standpoint of a state or county, they’re saying, look, we have people lined up that want our data center and we’re taking bids from all of them. So you have to beat the others. And from the standpoint of the county or state, they’re going, “Well, this will create some number of jobs.” They lie about the number. And it’ll create some amount of tax revenue. And they might go, “Well, we’re better off even giving them an incentive. Give them 50 million off on their taxes.” And you can’t say that’s necessarily wrong because in some cases it probably is right. In many cases it will be wrong. And certainly if they end up going under, it almost certainly will be wrong because having a big data center sitting there that does nothing is not going to make your county or state more attractive for people to live in or for other businesses to come and invest in.

Taya Graham:

We’ve talked about a wealth fund and even a UBI. What do policymakers need to do to protect workers and make sure that if this actually really makes generational wealth, that working people can benefit? Or maybe I should just say, if you have a magic wand and you could design your own AI policy, what would you want it to look like? Or what do you want policymakers to do?

Dean Baker:

Well, I’d go into the old bag of tricks and just start using them and ramping them up. So one of the things we used to do shorten the work week. We haven’t done that. We had the Fair Labor Cancan Act 1937. It’s almost a hundred years now. We’re getting close. So we thought 40 hours was right then. How about making it 36, 32? That would be a great thing to do. Raising minimum wage, make it easier for workers to organize. We have it so stacked against workers organizing unions now it’s become near impossible because employers could. It’s illegal to fire people, but what’s the sanction? What’s the punishment? So someone’s organizing a union. Elon Musk says you’re out the door. You could file a National Labor Relations Board complaint. Good luck. Maybe they’ll rule for you two years later, you’ll get your job back.

Kind of moot at that point. So we have a basket of things. Also, again, finishing the welfare state. Every other country in the world has universal healthcare. We should have universal Medicare. So those are some good steps. Again, I’m not opposed to UBI, but I just think back to under President Biden, he wanted to have the expanded child tax card. He put it in as a pandemic measure. He wanted to extend it and he couldn’t get that. He had Democrats opposing him. So the idea, this is children. We’re talking about a relatively small sum of money for children. He couldn’t get that through. So can we get a UBI through? Yeah, maybe, but that looks like a real uphill battle for me. I’d rather stick to the old favorites that we know work. And there’s a Well, lot of political support for them.

Taya Graham:

Okay, Steven. Well, obviously I’m in the wrong line of work because it turns out that you can lose millions or even billions of dollars and somehow make money. Is this dystopian enough for you? I mean, what are your thoughts here? I’m obviously in the wrong line of work. Well,

Stephen Janis:

Like I was kind of alluding to before, I feel like we’re kind of participating in new theology. The value here is purely theocratic, that there’s some divine power that is being burked in a lab that we’re going to have to pay penance to, whether or not it makes our lives better or not, and whether it has any influence on anything we do. So I was really glad to hear Dean kind of cut through all that BS and give us sort of a pragmatic view of what’s actually going on. And one thing, I don’t want to refer to the Tower of Babel, but that was an awfully tall tower of cards. And when AI comes bursting down on all top of us, I think it’s going to be quite cataclysmic. So yeah, apocalyptic is probably in line there.

Taya Graham:

That’s a great point. I mean, everyone is so excited. They’re hoping for artificial general intelligence where they’re going to be curing cancer and saving the world. Which would be great. And all I just do is see people losing jobs.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. I’m waiting for the cure for cancer. I

Taya Graham:

Would be so happy to see it. I would be so happy to have AI genuinely help people. Not just help students cheat on their home.

Stephen Janis:

Or not just create 100,000 songs on Spotify every day. I think it would be more useful for humanity. Just my opinion.

Taya Graham:

Steven, you know me, as always, whether it’s on our show, the Police Accountability Report or our coverage on Capitol Hill, my concern is the working people of this country. And just like with all the other tech upheavals, the elite who taught them, forget those who are going to be impacted by them. And this particular iteration could really be devastating. And that’s why we have to remain vigilant. If AI actually lives up to the hype, the concentrated power it would confer would be absolutely death to a democracy. I mean, that much wealth in so few hands is simply unsustainable. I mean, it will literally adulterate the process of governance with self-interest, and it’s going to warp accountability around the curvature of a technology that seems more and more singular in its appetite for resources. And I do mean a literal appetite for land and water. And that is why we’ll continue to report on it and have discussions with innovative thinkers like Dean Baker.

And that’s why we will continue to report to you from the nation’s capital, asking questions about how the government by and for the people will actually protect them from the ravages of AI Avaris. And that’s why independent journalists like Steven and I will continue to investigate and try to comprehend and share with you the truth because that’s all we have in the end, for better or worse. Thank you for joining us for our inequality watch report. And as always, we’re reporting for you.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez: Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners just like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and we’ve got a really important episode for y’all today. And it’s about a crisis that affects all of us, even if we don’t think that it does. And I’m really grateful to be joined by a familiar voice that listeners are going to recognize from a number of the one-on-one and panel interviews that we did with railroad workers back in 2022 when the United States was on the verge of its first national railroad strike in a generation.
To protect him and his job, we just call him Jay around here. And we won’t name the railroad company that he works for, but he’s a veteran-trained dispatcher who’s been in the industry for 22 years, basically the railroad equivalent of an air traffic controller and a 911 dispatcher rolled into one. It was rank and file workers like Jay who first alerted us to the long brewing crisis on the nation’s freight rail system, which is also impacting our passenger rail system, our whole supply chain, and the towns and cities where these trains pass through all over the country. We’d learned about the Wall Street takeover of the railroads, the deregulation, the corporate consolidation, the profits and margins obsessed mania that has led to disastrous, unsafe, and unsustainable policies and decisions that have put frontline workers, trackside communities, and the public at large at long-term risk for the sake of massive short-term profits for the rail carriers, their executives, and their shareholders cutting or automating jobs year after year, piling more work onto fewer workers, running those workers into the ground, spitting them out of the industry, and then hurriedly hiring untrained workers to replace them.
We’d learned a lot about this crisis leading up to the potential strike in 2022, which then President Joe Biden and both parties in Congress conspired to break before it even had a chance to begin. We saw the costs of this crisis with the catastrophic train derailment and chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio in 2023. So today we’re talking with Jay again to ask the simple question, has anything gotten better on the railroads? So Brother Jay, it is so great to have you back on the show again, man. I know it’s been a minute. First and foremost, how you doing, brother? How you been doing since we last heard from you?

Jay: It has been a minute. How many years now? What is this? 2022? What? Four years now. Already four years. Boy, I feel like it’s growing faster and faster every year, the older I get. But I’m doing well despite facing strong opposition and tough headwinds. I don’t let anything stop me. I mean, if you’re going to do something, you may as well set out, put your hand to it, you may as well do it right. And somebody’s got to tell the truth because if everybody believes someone else is going to do it, nobody’s ever going to tell anything. So here we are, and I’m looking forward to what we have to discuss today.

Maximillian Alvarez: Right on, man. And in terms of speaking the truths that need to be heard, I mean, you recently filed a formal complaint with the Surface Transportation Board. And by the looks of that complaint, it does not sound like the things that you and I were talking about four years ago have gotten much better. In fact, it sounds like they’ve gotten worse.

Jay: I would absolutely say they’ve gotten worse. Unfortunately, something that I figured out, and you continue to see this with the Wall Street syndrome that’s afflicting corporate America, I mean all across the country. It doesn’t matter what job it is, what profession it is, it’s cut, cut, cut, cut to prosperity. But in reality, there is no prosperity when you’re cutting. The prosperity is actually a false, it’s almost like a false flag operation. If a company’s not bringing in new revenues, new investment, new business, whatever the case may be, and yet you continue to show record profits, when as a portion of the company’s earnings, a very small portion often is what your new increases or new customers were, how do you support that? Where does your money come for stock buybacks? Where does the record revenue come quarter after quarter, year over year? And the reality of the situation is it’s not actual revenue.
It’s cutting conductors, it’s cutting engineers, it’s combining trains, it’s eliminating crew districts, it’s cutting car inspectors, hiring non-contracted workers, which are known as scabs to most union workers. Oftentimes these folks are paid less, and we already know with expenses the way they are, that a living wage in America probably at this point would be nothing short of about 25 bucks an hour. I mean, let’s just call it what it is. So if you’re making less than that, man, you’re struggling. Power bills are going up, school taxes are increasing, fuel goes through the roof. I mean, not as bad as it has been in the past, but at 450, 479 a gallon, that’s not exactly good either.

Maximillian Alvarez: No, it ain’t great, man. I’m dying over here.

Jay: Yeah. I mean, it’s costing me 70 bucks to fill a mid-size SUV where it used to cost me 45 or 50. And I mean, for a lot of people, you have to think, in the 1980s, if you looked at what an average conductor engineer earned then and compared it to today’s dollars, if our wages had kept up, I mean, my God, we’d be over a quarter million a year. And you think about that, it’s the middle class that drives the economic engine that is the prosperity of America. It’s the middle class that supports all of the other parts of the middle class. So your food service industry, your hospitality industry, any manufacturing company, let’s say you build lawn tractors. Well, if somebody’s going to need a lawn tractor, they’re first going to have to own a home. And if you buy a home and you want to have it built, well, guess what?
Somebody’s got to ship the lumber. Here’s where the railroad comes in. But before you even do that, somebody’s got to go log it. So there’s a lot of different hands that touch all of this stuff from the time it was a tree standing in the forest till it’s a two by four in your living room wall and all of the transportation in between. But if all you have is filthy rich and broke poor with no middle class, you don’t have anything because who needs a railroad when nobody’s buying anything to ship?

Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, man. It’s like they’re planning for society without humans. It’s like, who’s going to buy your products if no one can afford to live? Who’s going to create anything if you’re all putting AI into your goddamn programs and operational systems? It’s like you see that same sort of blindness that has led Wall Street and corporate executives to take our vital supply chain and destroy it, doing all the things that you’re talking about, destroying the workers in the process, destroying the infrastructure in the process, destroying towns like East Palestine in the process and just moving on because they’re raking in more money than they ever have. It’s like we’re careening towards a cliff and what’s going to happen when those profits run out? Does anyone think beyond a few years in these corporate offices? It sure doesn’t seem like it. But I wanted to sort of ask in that vein, after all the attention that you guys were able to get in 2022, especially as we got to the edge of a potential strike, and then after East Palestine being such a international disaster, it felt like for a fleeting moment, the railroads were feeling like they were going to have to make some concessions and change some of their behavior a bit.
That’s what people have asked me for years ever since. I wanted to pose that question to you. Did they change at all in that aftermath? Did it just go away after a couple months?

Jay: I mean, I think as an industry, and we’re talking the class one industry, a lot of your short lines are operated by people that are trying to do what’s right. You have small companies, in some cases they’re family-owned. Now a lot of them have been getting bought up by holding companies now, but a lot of the smaller companies weren’t the problem to begin with. It’s your giant Wall Street traded companies. And everybody knows that it’s a shell game. Everybody knows the math is a fraud. And the way it’s represented is not the way it’s actually happening. So they said, “Well, there needs to be more detectors out there. We need to have better technology. They need to be fewer miles apart.” Because I think it was an article that I read last year that Transport Canada had written about a rail car wheel bearing, that if it went bad, it could catastrophically fail in as little as 12 miles.
And you got to figure, I mean, if you’ve got a 286,000 pound rail car and you’ve got, let’s see, four axles underneath of it, so that gives you eight contact points. It means you have eight bearings. You take that 286,000 pounds, divide it out by eight, and what? I don’t know, I can’t do the math in my head. It’s like 17 tons or something pressing down on that bearing, something like that, somewhere in that neighborhood. So with that kind of pressure on there, when something stops spinning the way it’s supposed to and the lubricant goes away, you could just imagine how hot that gets and how fast. An empty car will last longer, a loaded one will not. And the more the heavier it is, the quicker the thing’s going to fail because the heat’s going to build exponentially. But putting detectors every so many miles is all well and good.
I don’t disagree with that. But then you have to look at the operating rules that we have, and the operating rules haven’t changed. So for example, on our detectors, we can’t go slower than eight miles per hour over a detector, or it’ll give us a train too slow message. It causes the transducers and stuff not to read right and they lose track of what they’re counting and don’t know what to do. And when that happens, depending on the type of train it is, then the conductor will have to get down and go walk the train for an inspection. Well, that train might be 15,000 feet long now. And yeah, I said 15,000 feet. That’s insanity. A train does not need to be that big.
I saw one that was 46,000 tons, 330 loads, and the thing had nine engines on it with split multiple DP sets. And anytime you ask somebody in leadership about this, they say, “Well, give me a data-driven solution. Data, data, data, AI, models, blah, blah, blah.” Listen, let me tell you something. If you’re going to build a model, the only way you’re going to be able to build a model is on things that have already happened in most cases. Now, you can have predictive models and futuristic models and all that, but all of those are based on past behavior. So if someone like myself comes in and says, “Look, I don’t like that. And here’s why I don’t like it. I can’t put my finger on it yet, but something just doesn’t feel right. Or I can tell you this isn’t going to go the way you think it’s going to go.
And the first thing I get is, well, give me a data-driven solution.” Well, you’re dismissing my concern and you’re saying it doesn’t matter, but yet you’re willing to look at the model someone else built, which is an opinion and take it for the gospel, but you won’t listen to me because my narrative doesn’t agree with yours. That’s a bit of a problem.
And the damage to the equipment, Max, oh my God, dude. I mean, springs are missing on the side of these cars, loaded chlorine cars without springs on the side of them. Draft gear broken in places. I’ve never seen it broken, and yet somehow it’s still out there running. Bolster angularity issues, cars lifted off of the truck. So the truck is actually riding crooked down the railroad underneath the car, burning a hole through the bottom of the equipment. I’ve had two instances where the bottom of a rail car, the welds have broken and fallen out of the bottom of the car while the train was moving. Thankfully, a dragging equipment detector caught both of those. Another one, the car literally ripped in half and caused a catastrophic derailment, put cars everywhere, delayed the morning commute for all the passenger trains. I mean, it’s crazy. You had that big explosion underneath I-10 out on the BN a year or two ago.
It was caught on a tractor trailer dash cam on the TransCon. Mind you, the Southwest Chief goes scorching through there about 90 miles an hour twice a day. God forbid if that train had been coming when the tank car wrecked and blew up.
I mean, multiple pileups on the Pittsburgh line up through Pennsylvania. CSX has had multiple pileups. They’ve had bridge failures. I mean, just like, what are we doing, dude? A railroad is a capital intensive business. You’ve got to spend money to make it run. And they’re not doing that. They’re just milking the money out to make the numbers of Wall Street look good.

Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, I think that’s very succinctly and powerfully put. It is a shell game, right? Because you can see this for yourself if you live near a railroad or drive across the country. Everyone knows our infrastructure’s going to shit. It’s just like a lot of this stuff, maybe folks don’t see it on their phones or their timelines, but if you go outside and walk around, you’ll see that everything’s kind of fallen apart while the people who are supposed to be maintaining it are making bank and the people, the workers who actually are tasked with maintaining it are getting crushed.
Yeah, I see it everywhere that I go, but I wanted to ask what that has looked like from the dispatch office. Because it’s like the country was alerted last year to the long brewing crisis in air traffic controlling as well. And the shortage of air traffic controllers that we’ve had for years that no one’s been listening to when union reps and workers are complaining about it. But I think that folks still don’t know what it looks like for a worker like yourself, all that you’re responsible for from the dispatch office. And they can understand what it’s like to be an engineer on a train that used to be a mile long that’s now three miles long. We can at least imagine that. But what does it look like to be a dispatcher who used to have the area expansion equivalent of a one-mile train going to a three-mile train?
How much terrain are you covering and how many people do you guys have to do it under these policies?

Jay: I mean, there’s nothing short of just straight up saying it’s bad. I mean, they’ve doubled the size of the territory. In fact, the job that I work is two jobs smashed together into one. And one thing that I used to do an awful lot, and this is indicative of your old heads as they call us, the ones that have been around for a while. New school, let me tell you something. The standard that we had to adhere to when I hired is not the standard now, not even close. You just do not have to be qualified like you used to have to be. Now it’s DEI this, DEI that. We have a number we have to meet, and it doesn’t really matter whether or not you actually can do the job or do the job well. They just want a body in the seat. And when they doubled the territory, I went from having time to plan, time to think about what I wanted to do, time to be deliberate about giving track time out.
So from a train dispatcher’s perspective, and most people have probably never met a train dispatcher, it’s a pretty niche craft. Just like most people will never meet a locomotive engineer. It’s pretty rare. You just don’t. I mean, you’re more likely to meet a civil engineer or a lawyer than you are a locomotive engineer. And that’s not to in any way degrade them. That just shows you how niche these jobs are. But if you consider what a train dispatcher does, I literally manage every aspect of the operation of the railroad. So I have 400 plus miles of territory. That spans multiple lines in multiple states, two telephones, numerous radio bases, sometimes anywhere from eight to as many as 18 control screens in addition to your train sheets, your bulletins, all the paperwork that you need to move trains safely. So you might have dimensional shipments on one or two trains or maybe three.
Then you have work zones for maintenance of way. So you might have three or four of those. And depending on the company you work for, those may be handled differently. You might need absolute block protection, you might need to protect switches. You might have to issue Form Ds or track authorities. I mean, all of these different things going on. Then you have people that get impatient and don’t want to wait for the three-mile long train, so they charge through the crossing and break the gate off. Well, now that’s another problem. So then I get a call from the police that I have to facilitate protecting that crossing and running trains at 15 miles an hour because the lights will stay on indefinitely. If the gate can’t go back up, the lights will just flash continuously. So we slow the train down because people come up, see the lights are flashing, not look for a train, pull out in front of it and get hit.
And I don’t need that. I’ve had enough fatalities in my career.
And I have to send a maintainer. I have to slow the trains down. And now you look at that and you say, okay, well, here comes a train that’s 15,000 feet long. I was going to put him in the siding, but there’s just one problem. He doesn’t fit by two railroad car lengths. And 30 minutes behind him is Amtrak. Now I get a broken gate. Amtrak’s still doing almost 80. He’s going to be on that guy’s rear end in a couple of minutes. I mean, literally, you’re literally going to look away and look back and boom, there he is going to be. I mean, that’s a little exaggeration, but that’s what it feels like. And that’s in addition to your rail grinders, your camping, your tying surface gangs, your rail gangs, your bridging building guys, your CNS guys that have to do their switch testing and their crossing tests.
And then you have trespassers out there messing around. We were just talking earlier, I’ve had two fatalities and a partial amputation in the last two and a half months involving trespassers. And for me, it’s a lot of paperwork. It’s a headache. It stops my trains and makes me a lot of mess to deal with. But like I said just a minute ago, I’ve had so many fatalities in my career, I’ve lost count, and I just removed myself from it. It’s just another phone call, another headache, another problem to deal with. And that might sound awful, but you have to realize trauma doctors and nurses have to do the same thing. They see horrible stuff every day. And if they let it get to them personally, they wouldn’t be effective at their jobs anymore. And nobody wants a trained dispatcher that’s not effective.

Maximillian Alvarez: Oh, and again, I was joking with you before we started recording that it’s like whether I’m talking to you or the longshore guys in the Port of Tacoma or guys on oil rigs in the Gulf, the amount of things you have to juggle in your head at once and maintain your focus and decision-making kind of capacity without getting paralyzed by the stakes of everything that you’re managing is wild to me. Because the second I start thinking about it, I start breaking out into a cold sweat because a rube like me who’s trying to envision the job that you do, I start by thinking like, okay, yeah, imagine a map where you got the trains moving at certain speeds. This one’s got to stop here so that one can go. But then the reality starts filling in of a 400 square mile area, multiple lines, trains that are now three miles long, moving a lot slower than they used to, breaking down, screwing up the flow of everything, not just on the freight system, but on the passenger rail system that’s coming up on the same line, like you said.
And then you add the layers that you’re also talking to the maintenance of way guys who are, for listeners, those are the guys on the ground checking the track, maintaining the track, fixing the track. And then you also have the bridges. Those are their own sort of interchange kind of system that you got to navigate. Do you ever have time to take a bathroom break?

Jay: You have to take one because if you don’t, you’ll never get one. Sometimes it is so bad that I literally just, I put everything down on the desk and I get up and I walk out and take a breather. I just can’t do it. I have to clear my mind for a second and just go catch my breath, go over to the bathroom, whatever it is, wash my face off, just refreshing up a little bit and maybe grab something to eat, fill my water cup, and then it’s right back in the seat and you’re charging at it again. And a lot of the policies and stuff that are being implemented don’t make sense. And you’re seeing this all across the class ones. They’re talking about technology like Trip Optimizer and Trip Optimizer now zero to zero. That’s a General Electric/Wabtec program. And what they’re doing is they’re saying, okay, well, the engineer has to use Trip Optimizer all the time on every trip.
If it’s working, he or she has to use it.
There’s a couple parts I want to touch on here. So the rip optimizer, don’t let me forget that, Max, write that down. The Trip Optimizer underpowering trains, then putting throttle restrictions in and saying, “Okay, well, the train has three engines, but over this particular piece of territory, he’s only allowed to use one.” So we run 11 daylights out of that engine. It’s wide open, notch eight full throttle. The train’s doing 16 miles per hour on 60 mile per hour track. And then here comes the UPS train behind it. And he’s all kinds of hot because he’s got, well, UPS loads on it. And hey, guess what? You ordered your package on Monday and UPS told you it was going to be there on Thursday. Well, if that’s going to happen, the train that’s carrying the trailer, your package is in needs to be on time, doesn’t it?
So he doesn’t have time to follow that big turd of a freight train doing 16 miles an hour. And they think they’re saving fuel, but dude, they’re beating a snot out of the engine. I mean, the traction motors are. Go ahead.

Maximillian Alvarez: Just a quick parentheses on that. Because again, for lay listeners, when you hear trip optimizer, it’s like so many great slogans that don’t actually mean what you think they sound like they mean. That’s

Jay: Right.

Maximillian Alvarez: Because what is being optimized here is basically they’re like, how can we pay as little as possible with the fuel we have with the trains as long as they are going as slow as 16 miles an hour when they should be going 60? Is that a fair sort of summation of what is being optimized here? Absolutely. It’s not making the package delivery more efficient.

Jay: No, what you said is literally what it’s doing. And here’s the interesting thing. So statistics. My grandfather told me this years ago, he was actually a corporate executive for Black & Decker a long time ago. He said, “Jay, there’s a lie, a damn lie, and then there’s statistics.” I said, “Well, tell me what you mean by that.” And he’s like, “Listen, you can make a statistical output be anything you want it to be by manipulating the input.” So they’ll say they’re saving fuel, but they’ll only calculate the fuel burn on the lead unit. They don’t calculate the distributed power unit that’s a hundred cars back in the train that’s been in notch eight for the last eight hours, guzzling fuel like crazy, and the train still can’t make two-thirds of track speed on if it’s lucky. And then they’ll say, “Well, we’re saving fuel. All right, we’re saving fuel.
But okay, well, how far under track speed did you go to save that fuel?” So they’re not lying about what they’re saying. It’s truthful. It’s just missing the information that actually would tell you that it’s actual bullshit.

Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and the bullshit, and again, I’m just making sure, A, that I have this right and that listeners are following along. Because all these things like the railroads themselves are interconnected. And to put it back in the kind of understanding that we were getting from you and your fellow railroad workers from 2022, it’s that the whole TripOptimizer thing, the whole precision scheduled railroading racket is basically this system implemented from the top down into the corporate structure and strategy of the railroads to maximize profits and cut costs and maximize shareholder dividends year after year. And so that’s where you get a railroad system that maybe your average person thinks like, “Well, the whole point of the railroads is to deliver good freights, rail service, get the freight there on time, yada, yada, yada.” But what we’ve come to learn is that it’s almost like the whole point of the railroads that we though we knew is secondary to the fact that the railroads are just this money-making widget that these bloodsuckers can squeeze a lot of profit out of.
And so that’s why they don’t care about delivering things on time or more efficiently. They don’t care about higher speed rail or faster trains or anything like that. That’s why they’re piling all these cars onto these trains and getting rid of more and more of the workforce. And the trains are going slower. They’re stalling, they’re braking, they’re breaking the track. But all those sorts of costs are still worth it to them because all this other crap is generating massive profits for them, even if it’s putting all of us at risk. And I guess the last point I’ll say is that the thing that everyone got into in 2022 was what this was doing to the workers, particularly the conductors and the engineers who have to be on these trains and who have to be on call basically twenty four seven now because with these trains being so inefficient, big, breaking down, all that stuff, the workers still have to be on call and they have to be there whenever the damn train gets there and they have to stay on that train wherever it breaks down.
So do I have that sort of right, Jay, that it’s like all these things are different interlocking parts of the same kind of problem, But the TripOptimizer stuff and everything else that we’ve been talking about are basically all designed to maximize profits in the short term. And they’re not about making the freight rail system any better for anyone other than the people getting those dividend payouts.

Jay: It’s calculated vandalism. I mean, that’s what it is. Think about capital expenditures and operating expenses, capital investment. So if you have capital expenditure versus operating expense, you consider that an overworked train dispatcher, for example, can’t effectively plan to let a maintenance of way gang out, can’t effectively plan to let a real grinder out, can’t effectively plan to get thermite welding done or any of the other stuff that needs to be done to maintain the infrastructure. Because at the end of the day, I mean, yeah, you might run big trains and think you’re saving money, but tonnage is tonnage and tonnage causes damage. Now what causes even more damage is excessive in-train force. That can really wear your curves out a lot quicker. That can cause track to shift. If a train goes in emergency and all of a sudden the front end sits down and the ASN runs into it, I mean fricking boom.
And all of a sudden it shifts the track out to the side by three or four inches. You say, “Well, how did that happen?” Listen, energy’s got to go somewhere. And if you can control a train safely, you can dissipate the energy with a dynamic brake as heat. You can dissipate it with friction brakes as heat or what have you. But when the train gets too big and it gets unruly and decides it’s going to do whatever it wants to do, and you combine that with Trip Optimizer, which causes engineer skill atrophy because he or she never exercises their skills any longer, and there’s no government policy to force a railroad to make them let the engineer run 50% of his or her monthly miles to keep his or her skills sharp. What you run into is a situation where the trip optimizer is programmed to work within a given set of parameters.
So you have a group of nerds sitting in a room somewhere, usually from a foreign country, and they’re plugging away at zeros and ones, and they build a model of what they think trip optimizer should do. Here’s your territory, here’s your grade. This has been all GIS and spatial mapped, and the train should run like this. And they plug it in, and most of the time it does a decent job. But then you introduce a variable you can’t control. You introduce a train as a kicker. So as soon as you touch the air to try to stop the train, boom, it goes in emergency. Or you introduce a snowstorm or ice, which will ice up the brake shoes. And then when you go for the brakes, nothing happens for the first 12 or 15 miles because you’re busy melting ice off of the brake shoe.
Well, most of the new dispatchers have no idea what that means to a train crew. They’re not qualified like we used to be. I mean, I used to watch the weather, dude, constantly. I had the weather pulled up from my entire territory. I knew where there were thunderstorms. I knew where there was thunder snow. I knew where there was sleet. I knew if there was going to be tornado warnings or watches. I knew all that. And that was always in my head and I was thinking about that stuff. And for a locomotive engineer, if you got this train going and you think, okay, I haven’t set the air in a minute because it’s snowing outside, you might need to drag the train with the brakes on every so many miles just to keep those brakes nice and up. Because God forbid you have the dispatcher that decides, oh, hey, I’m 22 and I don’t know how to put my phone down.
And here I am in a job that requires my attention, but I need to go check Facebook. So I’m not going to line the signal up for that train on this downhill mountain grade. And here comes an engineer that he’s been qualified for six months. He hasn’t touched a throttle in six months because every single trip he has optimizer. So all of a sudden he thinks, man, this thing’s doing a decent job. I think I can trust it. And then the snowstorm comes and the unexpected approach signal comes because the dispatcher’s out playing on the phone. And he goes to take over the train, sets the air, and nothing happens. Goes for the dynamic brake, the engines start to load up, and the wheels lock up and start slipping because of the ice and snow. So you start spraying sand to try to get the wheels to spin again.
Because what you need is for the wheels to rotate to be effective for dynamic braking. So more air, nothing happens. More air, nothing happens. Unbeknownst to him at the bottom of the hill, here comes an Amtrak train with 300 people on it and they’re crossing over in front of him. And this train blows through the stop signal at 45 miles an hour and slams into the Amtrak train right in the side and kills 30 people. And the company’s going to say, well, the engineer was qualified. He was supposed to have control of his train. We tested him. He had good operating rules, exams, and we wrote him up 32 times for these minor violations. Nobody wants to talk about the degradation of the skills because he never ran the damn train. And that dude, that pisses me off. Because

Maximillian Alvarez: It’s like, again, I know I’m using very caveman style metaphors here, but just bear with me. But when you say the atrophy of engineer skills, it’s like imagine a long-haul trucker sitting behind the wheel and the trip optimizer is basically a cruise control that is driving the damn thing for him, but it’s driving it 18 miles an hour on the highway with – That sounds like

Jay: Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi.

Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, but with 50 trucks hitched to it. And so then yeah, you’re just sitting there and you have to be watching, you have to be vigilant, but the damn autopilot is doing everything for you, not because it’s what you have been trained to do as an engineer, but because it is what the program has been trained to do so that it makes more money for the rich assholes who’ve never been in a cab like you are sitting in at that moment. And then the worst part is that, like you’re saying, that if you’re sitting there and then something goes wrong and you have these sort of cascading failures, the finger’s all going to be pointed at the person sitting in that seat.

Jay: Yeah, 100%. And at the end of the day, and this is kind of sad, but I think we need to be honest about this. When a person is involved, we all want blood. It seems to be human nature. If a computer does it, nobody seems to care. I mean, you might get mad, then stomp around and snort and carry on, steam, come out your dose, whatever else. But nobody really does anything. But if a person screws up, man, you just want to destroy their life for some reason. You want to go after that person and we all have that in us. And even if we want to deny it, we know it’s true, which it’s a sad thing. And this is kind of where you have to really keep this stuff in perspective. You have to remember, until you know the whole story, and I’m guilty of this myself, it’s easy to draw a conclusion.
It’s easy to judge, it’s easy to devalue something or whatever. But if you don’t know everything that happened behind it, boy, you feel like a real asshole when you finally figure it out. I wanted to make a point earlier and I forgot, I said about capital expenditures and operating expenses. And I said about this being a capital intensive business, fuel expenses, things like that. So you can hide that under an operating expense. And let me just make this point quick because this is good stuff.
And to Wall Street, that’s great. Operating expenses, diesel costs, cost of rail, whatever the case may be, or not cost of rail rather, cost of labor. And then you have capital investment. Now, this is where you’re going to buy your rail, you’re going to have these huge capital plans that they spend every year. We’re going to replace 13 bridges. We’re going to do X number of hundred miles of rail, ballast ties, blah, blah, blah, blah. So to anybody investing in a company that doesn’t really understand how it operates, and I’m an investor too, but I don’t personally want to see record profit continually because I know it’s not possible. It’s a damn bubble that you’re sitting on, and sooner later that damn thing’s going to pop and you’re pew, down you go. So you better know how to move your money quick. I’d rather see a steady earnings report with a little bit of growth and a little bit of loss here and there.
That tells me a company is healthy in my opinion. And believe me, I’m no hedge fund manager and I wouldn’t want to be. But you can tell Wall Street, oh, we’re going to buy rail, blah, blah, blah. Capital investment’s the best thing. And to somebody who doesn’t know any better, this looks like a growing company. It looks like the company’s doing great. Oh, look at all the money they’re spending on all this stuff. The company’s growing surely. Bullshit. It’s smoke and mirrors. The company’s not growing it freaking all. Dude, listen, when the war on coal started and started destroying coal miners jobs and everything else in the name of green, whatever have you, closing the power plants, all of that, the coal was the bread and butter for the railroad for decades. I mean, you made money on coal like you wouldn’t believe me. I mean, dude, it’s crazy.
Intermodal, there’s not really a lot of money in. It’s a tight market. The pricing structure is tight. You’re competing directly with trucks. And the performance, honestly, since precision scheduled railroading, I mean, look at the shift from rail back to truck. That tells you how bad the performance is. And you know who pays the price? The captive shippers, the chemical shippers, the agriculture companies have to ship trainloads of grain over to the ports to get it exported or their grain rots. That grain has to move in a couple of weeks, literally from the bread basket of America to the port to get loaded on a ship and go, or the grain’s going to be gone and the farmers are going to lose all of their revenue for the year. A loss like that would be devastating to them. And the railroad can’t provide the service. So what do they do?
They say, “Well, we’re just going to raise the rates on those people.” And then you hear about the merger that’s being proposed right now between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern. And it’s being met with some serious resistance by shippers. Why? Because of what I just said. They know what’s going to happen. Honestly, the way I see it from the class one perspective right now is a house of carts. They’ve gotten themselves to a point where there’s nothing else left to continue cutting, and the truth is going to come out. And when it does, the stock price is going to tank. The people that should have gotten rich are going to lose hundreds of millions of dollars, and they don’t want that to happen. They want to get their golden parachute and jump out of the plane and let you on the damn thing. All the engines are shut off because nobody put fuel in it.
I hate to say it, but that’s the truth.

Maximillian Alvarez: Well, as we turn the final corner here, let’s talk about that. I don’t want to beat people over the head with the doom and gloom, and we’re not saying that this is the only way it has to be. We’re having this conversation so that we can do something to avoid the disastrous horizon that we’re careening towards right now. But I think it’s important that we sort of look clear-eyed at what we are heading towards. And I wanted to ask, Jade, if you could just impress upon folks the stakes of what we’re talking about. Because some people may be interested in this for different reasons. I mean, you were mentioning the coal and the environmentalists who had their message about the destructive nature of coal. And I think a lot about that because I’ve interviewed these union coal miners. We’ve reported on deep red striking coal miners in Alabama, but I’ve also interviewed coal mining families in West Virginia where the coal is extracted that ends up at the port here in Baltimore.
And I’ve talked to the working class people here in Baltimore who are dying because of all the coal dust coming off those uncovered CSX rail cars for generations. So I don’t think it’s just the environmentalists did this or that. I think, again, the corporations fucked everybody. And working people across the board from the inside the coal mines to the port side communities here in Baltimore are left with the toxic remains or the black lung. But that’s not to say that we always got things right in the past. I think we didn’t. The whole point is to sort of learn, okay, pitting environmentalism and labor against each other was always a stupid idea. In fact, the UAW was one of the driving forces for the environmentalist movement in the first Earth Day because the Cuyahoga River kept catching on fire. And Walter Ruther was like, “What good is a union contract and a vacation if you take your family to a lake that’s poisonous?” I mean, the divide and conquer from the top, it’s been pushed on us for so long.
And now we’re in a state where it’s just like life is getting harder. Everything’s getting scarier. I think society, the things that made us feel like neighbors to each other has been eroding and we fear each other. We don’t know each other. We feel alienated, we feel forgotten, we feel beaten down. And the thing is we’re right. We are. That’s the kind of common feeling that I hear from folks across industries, across states, across ethnicities, across the political spectrum. Everyone feels that way. And yet the people who don’t feel that way are the ones becoming trillionaires, the ones raking in these record profits because they have massive shares in the railroad companies or the people raking in money from government contracts to plop AI data centers in rural red counties or blue cities here in Baltimore. It’s kind of an all-out attack. And so it can be hard to wrap your head around all of this and see the monstrous future that we’re heading towards.
So I wanted to ask you, Brother Jay, because the last time we talked, I’m sorry I’m talking so much, but it’s been so long. And whenever you and I talk, we have such a great back and forth and I wish we could talk for hours more, but this just reminded me of the fact that the last time we talked was six months before East Palestine. And you were warning me and anyone who would listen that something like that, you didn’t know it was going to be vinyl chloride. But a lot of what you described ended up basically being what happened in East Palestine. A lot of those conditions you talked about, a lot of the fallout. And so here we are six years later. And I hope folks heed your warning more now than we did then. But if we don’t address these issues, what are we in store for on the freight rail system?
And why should people care about that even if they don’t know anything about the freight railroads? Because this is impacting passenger rail, the economy, everything. People do need to care about that, but I wanted to give you the final words about why they should.

Jay: I mean, honestly, Max, well, there’s a lot to unpack there, which we don’t have time to unpack all of it. But if I had to think about what people could do now to try to address these things, I would say your best course of action, and as much as nobody wants to hear politics, would be to get politically active. And when I say that, that doesn’t mean go out and terrorize people. It doesn’t mean burn things down. It doesn’t mean any of that. It means educate yourself. Who are these people that are running for office? What do they believe? Do they share the values that you share? Just because somebody has a college degree doesn’t mean they’re qualified to be a politician.
Oftentimes, I find that the people that have the most sense are the people that grew up, they had a hard life. They know what it is to work for a dollar. They know what it is to have to pay for things, and they know what it is to want something and not be able to afford it. And in some cases, they know what it is to need something and not be able to afford it. And honestly, a lot of the policy shifts need to take place to reign in on these things are going to happen at the polls. That’s where they’re going to start. They’re going to start your city councils and you could run. I mean, just because somebody thinks they can’t do it, why can’t you do it? Now, I will tell you, the political system is heavily stacked so that particular people, either the left or the right, you have to have the right people backing you with a lot of money if you’re going to go anywhere.
And that’s because we left it go as long as we did without addressing it. And I kind of think it’s almost like a cancer. You want to catch cancer early if you’ve got a skin cancer or something. You catch it early, usually no problem. They cut it off, done. Dude, let that shit go and you may as well go buy a box because that’s where you’re going to be. And I feel like this is the same thing. It’s this corporate greed has been let go for too long. It’s been unchecked. It’s been left to fester. It’s a malignancy in our society. It’s not just the railroad, it’s the airlines, it’s every freakingwhere. And what happened to America building our own things? I mean, my God, dude, are you kidding me? Look at that steam engine. It just ran across the country. What a marvel. That thing is just the big boy, right?
Wow. We built that here in America. We built that in the 1940s going into the World War II. I mean, men literally grabbed wrenches the size of a daggone computer monitor and were cranking on nuts and bolts that you hold it the size of your hand to build these machines. We did that here. And now because of what we’re dealing with, everything’s been outsourced. The skills that we once had are gone. Nobody knows how to build a bridge anymore like the Pennsylvania Railroad did. The Keystone bridges. They literally had that keystone. They held them together. Nobody knows how to do that anymore. It’s lost. It’s gone. All of the skills that we used to have in the country to.
I mean, I don’t even. Dude, it’s hard to even. I can’t even process it. My mind’s going a thousand miles an hour right now thinking of what we’ve lost because we’ve not been good stewards of what we were given. Artificial intelligence. What is the first word in artificial intelligence? Artificial in all capital letters. Come on, hello. Wake up. Self-driving cars, all well and good. Have I used the technology? Yes. Do I trust it? Absolutely not. I watch that shit like a hawk. And if it does something I don’t like, man, I am on it. But we’ve seen people posted videos online sleeping in their Teslas and running into tractor trailers and hitting pedestrians and whatever else. I mean, it’s out there. It’s not like this hasn’t been reported before. But that ultimately ties back to skill atrophy once again. You trust the computer because it does just good enough, just often enough that you think you can.
And boy, that’s a dangerous place to be, dude. That’s a dangerous place to be. And it’s happening everywhere. Honestly, if the FAA would allow it, the airlines would fly the damn plane with one engine on and the other one shut down because they could save fuel. And I’m here quoting that. Oh, it’d save. Look how much money we’d save. Oh my gosh. But they wouldn’t consider the fact, not that they wouldn’t consider it, they wouldn’t give a fuck. If the left engine’s the one that’s running and the right engine’s shut down, the plane’s trying to turn right the whole time. So you have the rudders or whatever those things are called, ailerons, whatever, facing the opposite direction to counter the force from the engine just to keep the plane straight. Well, that would cause fatigue and then the damn thing would snap off and down you go.
And then everybody would say, “Oh, what happened?” Well, corporate greed happened. “Look at Boeing, dude. Are you kidding? How did Boeing get away with what they got away with? They killed hundreds of people. They lied about it. They found the emails that they were deceiving the government. What happened? Nothing. Not a single executive went to jail and they knew their names. What does that tell you? That’s pretty disgusting. And honestly, I know that some people don’t believe in faith, some people don’t believe in that kind of stuff. But for me, I look at it and I say, if men did what men were supposed to do and led the way they were supposed to lead, got out there, got involved in their school board meetings, got involved in their local governments, led their families, raised their kids, had supportive wives that were right behind them and right beside them the whole time, how different would things be if we had done that in the 1950s instead of looking at it today and saying, “Well, what now?” Instead of all the broken families and all the fatherless children and all of that.
That’s really gotten my attention lately. It really has.

Maximillian Alvarez: Well, I have a lot of thoughts on that. And I want us, especially men, to be able to talk to each other about this stuff because you and I have been upfront on our conversations. We’re from different sides of the political spectrum, but we don’t even identify each other that way. That’s the fourth or fifth or sixth or 10th thing that we know about each other.
And it’s like when you know each other that way, and it’s like when you only know each other through the politics first and then everything kind of flows downstream from that, it’s not impossible, but it’s so much harder to build really meaningful, genuine, organic kind of connections. And I guess all I’m saying is that there is a real problem, I think, that is affecting men in this country. But it goes so much beyond what we’re talking about here because I am also, as a man in this cis, hetero guy in this country who’s got, I’ve got my family, I’ve got my daughter, I got my wife, I got my mom, I got my sister, I got all that. All these people I love and care about in my family, it is not their job to address the crisis in this country of predatory men destroying people’s lives all the way up to Epstein level atrocities, to the shop floor sexual harassment that still happens rampantly daily in this country.
We have a real big fucking problem with men, and men have a lot of problems that they’re not talking healthily about. And I don’t care what it’s going to take, but I’m down to be part of those discussions. I don’t think we’re going to get it here because we have to wrap up, but we’ll just have to do another conversation and bring more folks into that conversation. But there’s a lot of things you said I agree with and a lot of things you said that I vehemently disagree with. But I think if we could at least agree on that final point that it’s like whatever our thoughts are about this, we actually do need better, healthier ways for men to talk about this stuff, process this stuff. And we actually have a real imperative duty to do that given what horrible men are doing to this fucking society, to the people that we live around.
This has gone on long enough. It is not just one political party or another. It could be Graham Platner, it could be Donald fucking Trump, man. We actually need to get together as working people, as men who can sit down and talk through this ourselves. I don’t want anyone else talking through it for us. I think that’s really what I want us to just come to agreement on.

Jay: Well, Max, when you talk to your grandpa, I remember you said you called him Graham. So when you talk to your grandpa, everybody in his era knew everybody. Everybody in the community knew everybody. You knew the neighbor down the street, the neighbor down the street knew the neighbor across the street. You’d sit out on your porches in the evening, they’d all talk to each other. I mean, everybody knew everybody. You had that real sense of belonging and that real sense of community. And that’s the point that I’m trying to make. Most people that are turning to private media are doing so because they’re tired of the corporate lies. They’re tired of it. They want somebody that’s genuine and honest. That’s what people really want. And I think that’s what most guys want. I think that’s what the ladies want. They just want somebody to be honest with them.
And they’ll come to the private media and they’ll listen to conversations like this. And they’re like, think about it. I wouldn’t walk up to you in public and be like, “Hey, Max, I’m a Republican.” How weird is that? Nobody does that.

Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and we even said the same thing about all the reporting we were doing in East Palestine. This was, I believe Ashley McCollum, an incredible working class hero herself who used to live right down the street from where the train derailed in East Palestine. And she’s gone through hell ever since. But she asked the blunt question. It’s like if you run up to a burning car and you see a person inside, do you ask them who they voted for? No. No, you pull them out. And if we can just start from there, I think we’ll be okay. But I think the fact that so many people don’t feel that way is why we have such a big problem that needs addressing now by us. And in that spirit, brother, I cannot thank you enough as always for coming on, talking openly, just being real with me in our audience, keeping it real all the time.
It’s always such a great conversation whenever you and I get together, brother, and it’s been really, really great seeing you again.

Jay: I appreciate the fact that we can set aside differences in disagreements. And honestly, a lot of times you strengthen relationships in your disagreements if you do so civilly.Because remember what I said earlier about not knowing the whole story. There’s a reason that you feel the way you feel and a reason I feel the way I feel. But if we could never sit down and talk to one another, we’re never going to learn what those are. And you may find out you have a whole hell of a lot more in common than you ever thought you did if you just take the time to say hello.

Maximillian Alvarez: All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, longtime friend of the show, Jay, veteran-trained dispatcher who’s been in the industry for 22 years. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our different social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves.
Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Mansa Musa:

We’re here in Washington DC, Massachusetts Avenue at Voices for a Second Chance. We’re talking about Congresses introducing certain bills to roll back progressive laws that impact District of Columbia residents. One such law is the Second Chance Act. The Second Chance Act has been very instrumental in allowing people to get out of prison after they demonstrate they have changed, but Congress want to change that. You’ll hear different testimonies today about how these things impact everyday citizens, people that want to do right. Stay tuned. Joining me today is Chelsea Canterbury. Chelsea Canterbury, welcome to Rattling the Bars. Hi,

Chelsea Canterbury:

Hi. Welcome. Thank you. All

Mansa Musa:

Right. So today we are in front of Voices for a Second Chance service organization in the District of Columbia. And full disclosure, I actually work here. Chelsea Canterbury is, and I’ll call her Chelsea from here on out. Chelsea is a case manager here at Voices for a Second Chance.

Chelsea Canterbury:

So I do connect one-on-one with clients. We’re client facing. The work we do here, we help individuals that have been involved within the justice system or are recently entering society from incarceration. We actually start connecting with clients prior to their release, and that’s part of our first responder services. So we are going into DOC. We’re connecting with individuals that have been released to the halfway houses from federal prison. So we’re actually connecting prior to release. And we offer wraparound services, making sure individuals have all their vital documentation. As you know, can’t get anything done without those documents. So that’s kind of where it all starts. We offer full case management services, employment services, housing, and any resource that we do not provide in-house, we do connect with our partners within the community.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. And I open up by making it known that Congress, they had centrality over the District of Columbia in terms of any bills or laws has passed. Congress has a finalacy on whether they’re going in effect or Congress has the authority to create laws. And recently it came out that they put 27 bills to impact some of the things that’s going on such as cash bail. How do you think changes in the law to make laws harsher in DC will impact the services that Voice for a Second Chance offer?

Chelsea Canterbury:

So yeah, definitely with certain bills being passed, it will in turn affect our community and also the resources that are available to individuals. It’s not reducing recidivism. It’s actually rising it. I don’t believe that’s the answer. I believe offering the proper resources for individuals while they’re still incarcerated prior to release and our youth.

Mansa Musa:

Our youth. And in terms of the youth, in the District of Columbia, they really got a target on the youth back. You hear a lot of negative reporting about the kids in District of Columbia, mainly in certain areas. What’s your views on, if you had the money and the authority to do something about what’s perceived as juvenile delinquency, what would you do? Well,

Chelsea Canterbury:

I definitely think it also starts in the home. So I think providing appropriate resources, I can’t say it enough, but as a community, we have to come together. We have to stand together. So even providing appropriate resources to not only the youth, but also the family. I think that will definitely help our community.

Mansa Musa:

And talk about how many people do y’all do Voices for a Circumchange service during the course of a week? What’s the caseload per week?

Chelsea Canterbury:

It definitely varies, but I mean, we can see up to 50 clients per week, but it definitely varies.

Mansa Musa:

So in terms of the 50 clients, and that’s on an average that you see 50 clients on a week, but in terms of the clients that you see, what are their major needs?

Chelsea Canterbury:

Definitely housing is a huge need. Housing employment is very scarce within our community and the district, providing more food resources.

Mansa Musa:

Right. And the general attitude about Congress interference in DC’s politics is the general consensus is they’re using the District of Columbia as a test case for how they can go throughout the nation and do these things. If you had the ability or the authority or you was able to talk to Congress about what you think should be done, what would you tell them?

Chelsea Canterbury:

I would definitely have a discussion on funding and just allocating that funding appropriately that will actually give back and assist in our community. For instance, we are, as you know, a nonprofit organization and we have seen the results of the services that we have provided to individuals. And if we had additional funding to do so, we could provide more, not only us, just throughout the district alone, more assistance to provide more food resources, shelter resources, employment resources. And in turn, that is what is going to reduce recidivism.

Mansa Musa:

I am talking to Lynwell Muse in front of Voice for a Second Chance. Mr. Muse, Congress is trying to pass a series of bills that’s going to have a devastating impact on the citizens of the District of Columbia. One such bill is to remove the second look at. Another one is what they call the Youth Act. And both of these bills they want to get rid of, both these bills lead to people upon being released under conditional term. The only way you can get access to them, you have to have certain behavior and certain attitude towards your change in life. What do you think if you had the authority or the ability to tell Congress, what do you think they should be doing? Well,

Lemuel Muse:

I don’t think that is a good idea because the Second Chance Act, people like me need that because I’m 67 years old and I’m just getting out of jail February the 20th.

Mansa Musa:

Okay, what wrong?

Lemuel Muse:

And I did 35 months and I was placed on the street the next day. So in my situation, I don’t know what they expect me to do. I’m out here, I’m homeless. All the shelters are full. They got hundreds and hundreds of Black men out on the street just homeless. You know what I mean? And I just don’t think that’s a good idea because people like me need the Second Chance Act.

Mansa Musa:

The money be best spent on doing what?

Lemuel Muse:

The money would be best spent on helping the people, the citizens that live here. I’ve been here all my life. I’ve been here all my life. And the resources that I need, they seem like they cut them and taking them away from us and just leaving us out here with nothing. You know what I mean? Go ahead. Right now I’m going to Voices for a Second Chance to receive some help. And I’ve been to Marca over on Good Hope Road.

Mansa Musa:

Mayor’s office on return to.

Lemuel Muse:

Right. And all I want is just a little bit of help just to help me because being in jail 35 months and being placed on the street the next day, it’s just difficult. It’s difficult when you don’t have help.

Mansa Musa:

So the crime is not really in people committing crime. The crime is in the misappropriation of funds.

Lemuel Muse:

I agree with you. I agree with you because I didn’t have a chance to work my way back in the community slow. I’m just back on the street.

Charlina Mcbride:

Right. My name is Charlena McBride. I was incarcerated for about a year. I’m a DC citizen.

Mansa Musa:

All right. So today we’re talking about Congress trying to roll back some of the progressive laws that the District of Columbia City Council has passed, such as they want to reduce the age of charging kids to making them adults from 16 to 14. They want to roll back mandatory minimum. Mandatory minimum is that they’re taking it out the hands of the judge to give a person a sentence that he think they should get based on whatever crime they committed. It’s a mandatory sentence they got to get. So a judge don’t have no discretion. They try to institute cash bail, making it difficult for people to get out of prison. But more importantly, they try and roll back what they call a Second Chance Act. If you had the authority to tell, or if you was in front of Congress and you wanted to tell them what you should think they should do with this money, what would you tell

Charlina Mcbride:

Them? I would tell them that I think they should create an alternative plan for the youth or for people that make mistakes in the society that get locked up because it’s a lot of stressful times out here. The economy is constantly rising. Housing is being unaffordable to people that’s not making enough money. When people get locked up, I think they should have some more facilities where they can be rehabilitated versus getting a lot of time because people can change and I don’t think they should give them more time and take away their choices or their right to be able to get out, being locked up with no bail. And I don’t think the youth should be charged as an adult because they have a mind of a youth.

Mansa Musa:

That’s right.

Charlina Mcbride:

So they should have more programs or more facilities where they can go to versus going to jail to an adult jail. Having more outreach programs, having more voices for second chance to provide for people, more counselors, more mental health sponsors and mentorship programs so that somebody can help guide the youth into the right direction. Because everybody needs somebody to guide them. And if they’re not getting guided when they step off the porch from at home, then there should be other big brother programs, big sister programs that’s reaching out to the community and the youth so they don’t have to go through taking from somebody else or involved in something that’s going to cause them to go to jail.

Mansa Musa:

I’m talking to Jerry Mack, a client at Voices for a Second Chance. Mr. Mack, tell us a little bit about yourself first.

Jerry Mack:

Well, born and raised in Washington DC. Been in the city my whole life. There’s a lot of things that’s changed in the city from pretty much my youth to now. And I think that us as pretty much the older generation can pretty much reach out to the adolescents and pretty much try to see what it is that we can do for them to pretty much get back on track and just pretty much enjoy theirself while they’re in the city instead of having Congress and everybody else try to intervene and pretty much take their youth and stuff away from them. All

Mansa Musa:

Right. And you formally incarcerated?

Jerry Mack:

Yes.

Mansa Musa:

How much time did you serve? If you don’t mind me asking.

Jerry Mack:

A year and a half.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. So you served a year and a half. Where was you at now? DC Jail?

Jerry Mack:

I started at DC Jail. They transferred me to Philly. I left Philly and went to New Jersey in Fort Dix.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. Now while you was in DC Jail, did you see a lot of young individuals in there?

Jerry Mack:

Yeah, it’s a lot. You know what I’m saying? I mean, it’s just basically, it feels like that’s what they trying to do to pretty much the youth. They’re not trying to let them enjoy theirselves, not realizing that they was once kids at

Charlina Mcbride:

That

Jerry Mack:

Point in time. So it’s just basically kids going to be kids, but they really don’t have too much for them to do nowadays. So it’s just kind of hard for them to actually really enjoy theirselves.

Mansa Musa:

So if you was able to tell Congress what your views are on what they should do in terms of helping the city become a more profitable city, a more productive city, a more humane city, what would you tell them?

Jerry Mack:

I mean, I would practically tell them that instead of just trying to lock them up and pretty much push them out or put them in prison or jail and stuff like that, sit down and talk to them. Find out what it is that they want and what they need. You know what I’m saying? Because like I said, it’s basically they just kids. They being kids. So basically you could take the money that you’re trying to put into all these other bills and cash bonds or whatever. Have the kids, you know what I’m saying, really not even into some of the foolishness or whatever. But it’s just basically they just out enjoying themselves and they just getting a bad rap.

Mansa Musa:

And as Mr. Mack said, invest in them as opposed to try to penalize

Eric Franklin:

Them. Yeah. My name is Derek Franklin. I’m the reentry navigator here at Voices for a Second Chance, and I’m a returning citizen and also a IRA recipient.

Mansa Musa:

Today we’re talking about Congress introducing a series of bills to roll back some of the progressive laws that the DC City Council passed. And one of the bills that they’ve introduced is they want to roll back the Second Chance Act, which is basically IRA. Talk about, because you’re in that space and dealing with IRA, you’re IRA recipient, as you say. And talk about that and what that means.

Eric Franklin:

So yeah, these new laws that’s been introduced by Congress, the rollback IRA and all these other laws that changed in sentences for young people, young adults to get more time at the age of 14 sentences as adults. These things doesn’t work. They’re going back to what mass incarceration, which they did back in the 90s, the 80s and the 90s that didn’t curve the crime. So it’s all about rehabilitating the people, the young people and giving them a second chance. Like me, I was sentenced to 40 years to life. And I mean, I changed my life way before I even knew IRA was in existence. You know what I’m saying? So this shows that the people will change, especially the youth as they do their time. So locking them up and throwing away the key is not the answer. It’s not the answer.

Mansa Musa:

And how old were you when you got out there?

Eric Franklin:

When I got out there, I was 22 years old. I came out, I was 47 years old. You know what I’m saying? So I spent most of my 20s, all my 30s, most of my 40s in prison. And like I say, I changed my ways and my way of thinking, I want to say probably 15 years ago before I came home. You know what I’m saying? So these things, locking the people up, these young people up and saying, okay, look, what they was calling them, predators or whatever like that. No, the sign says what? The frontal lobes don’t fully develop to the mid – 20s. So the decision making of these teenagers, they don’t fully develop. So give them a chance. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be held accountable for their crimes, but locking them up and not giving them a chance to come out, this is, I want to say, inhumane.

You know what I’m saying? This is something that you don’t do to people or do to your residence in DC. I said far as the law, especially containing to the youth. More programs for the youth. Giving them something to do as far as education. It goes back to their family, helping their families out with jobs so they won’t be just running the streets and getting to things. You know what I’m saying? This will change. This will help the youth and not to be on the streets like that. And another thing, the law should be changed, not just for a certain age. Take away the age and just give everyone who gets incarcerated another chance to come home. Instead of just locking the people up and having them in prison, which doesn’t help at all. You know what I’m saying? So we got the age where now, before the age of 25, have no age for someone who can have a time reduction.

This will help and have more programs and housing for the people when they return. You

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Taya Graham:

My name is Taya Graham and welcome to the Police Accountability Report livestream, the great American Copwatcher debate edition. Tonight, we are going to be exploring the controversy surrounding a popular Copwatcher, Long Island audit, specifically his encounter with Suffolk County Police Union officials that was the subject of our last episode. Now, a confrontation that started with Sean showing up at union headquarters to ask questions and then escalated when union officials stormed out of the building and put Sean Paul into handcuffs. Let’s just watch a few seconds of the encounter to set the scene.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Have you seen me leaving? I immediately began to leave. Lucivillo, would you like to come on? I am leaving. Would you like to come on the channel? I’m leaving. I am leaving. You seem to leave me? I am leaving. I’m leaving. I’m leaving. Lucivillo, you go on talk, you go, I’m leaving. I am leaving. Immediately begin to leave. That’s how the law works. Yes, I’m leaving. Get off the property. I am leaving. I’m getting off the property. You are trespassing. I am leaving. You will be placed. I am leaving. I am leaving. I’m going to place you under arrest. Do what you need to do. I’m identifying myself as a police officer. So do what you need to do. I am leaving. You need to leave. I am leaving. You’re such a tough guy. Do it then. Do it. Do it. I’m leaving. I’m leaving.

I’m leaving. Not resisting. I’m not resisting. Have you seen me leaving?

Taya Graham:

Okay. Now this video and our discussion with Sean set off a heated debate and it was so, let’s say lively that Steven and I decided that we needed to do a show to respond to your comments and discuss their implications. And luckily we were also able to get the man himself Long Island Audits to participate. But before we get to Sean, I want to give you a sense of the format of the show and how we’re going to handle the debate. And remember, this is very live, so please bear with any technical difficulties we might have. And I’m going to do my best to put on any comments from the live chat on the screen as we go through. So over the past week, Steven and I have been reviewing hundreds of comments on our YouTube channel and on Facebook and selecting what we hope is a representative sample of your thoughts.

Our goal is to select what best represents the framework of the discussion about Sean Paul’s work. And we’re going to show them on the screen. I’ll read them and then Sean, myself and Steven will discuss. But a big part of that is going to be what you think. And I mean the police accountability report community, in my personal opinion, is one of the most thouhtful and insightful collection of rebels. And yes, rebels I think is the right word on YouTube. Believe me, we feed off your ideas and your insights and tonight we need you to chime in. So Steven, first off, welcome to The Great Indoors.

Stephen Janis:

Thank you so much. Oh God, it’s some nice to be inside. Although yeah, it’s good to be back. It’s good to be back in the studio. Yo didn’t even have to coax me. I came in voluntarily.

Taya Graham:

Yes. Well, we gave you some coffee and left out some candy and he just followed them in.

Stephen Janis:

Free coffee. Though Max said it might come out of my paycheck, but that’s okay. It’s good coffee.

Taya Graham:

But look, before we introduce Sean, why don’t you explain a little bit why you felt like this debate needed to continue? What struck you as the critical question at the heart of it? So

Stephen Janis:

The critical question for me is the question of dissent, right? Democracy doesn’t function without free, fair dissent. And to me, journalism is the epitome of dissent because it’s saying the oligarchy truth is not the final truth. We can challenge that truth with a different reality. And when I see Sean entering the space of power and being challenged, just to ask a question, I think we have to ask critical questions about how do we preserve dissent and what this is really about. I mean, why would they just storm out at him and not allow him to ask a question? And to me, one of the defining points of this is we cover inequality in another show called the Inequality Watch. And I think as wealth becomes more and more concentrated in this country, I think the fight over the truth is going to become more important and therefore dissent is more important.

And to me, journalism is quintessential dissent. It’s organized, constructive and thoughtful dissent. And that’s what Sean was doing. I mean, he was just showing up to ask a question. That is our only army. He wasn’t ambushing them or doing anything. He just had a question. He did have a big truck. Yeah, I’ll admit that was kind of cool. We’ll talk about that. But it was just dissent. And to me, that’s what this is about. I mean, if they could take away our ability to show up at a building and ask a simple question about what they are doing with taxpayer money, then we’re done.

Taya Graham:

Then

Stephen Janis:

The oligarchs have won. So that’s why I though it’d be interesting. And I want to debate the people who somehow think that journalists are a pain in the ass. So hopefully we are. Yes. Anyway, that’s my though.

Taya Graham:

Thank you for asking. Technically, journalists are supposed to be a pain. We’re supposed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Exactly. And honestly, what you mentioned is something that is a classic part of journalism, which is to follow the money. And I believe that’s what Sean Paul was trying to do. He’s just trying to find out where taxpayer money was going. But before I bring him in, let me just first shout out some of the people that I see in the chat. I’m going to look down here. I see Noli D. Thank you so much for being here. Lacey R. Thank you so much for being here. I think Joe Cool’s here, which is amazing. Oh wow. Joe Cool. Amazing copwatcher. And there’s another copwatcher down there. I’m not sure if I should shout him out. Yes, you should. Should I shout out the name?

Yeah. Eric Brant. Wow. Eric Brant, the man is in the chat. So we definitely have some copwatchers here who I’m sure have a lot of strong and thoughtful and insightful opinions about the nature of cop watching and journalism. Oh, and let me also say hi, Katie Keyne. It’s really great to see you again. Okay. And you too, Prairie745. All right. Now, without further ado, I want to bring in the man himself, Long Island Audit, also known as Sean Paul Reyes. Sean Paul, thank you so much for joining us.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here. Thank you.

Taya Graham:

We are so happy to have you. So now first, before we completely dive in, there’s been an update with the arrest that occurred during your encounter with the leadership of the Suffolk County Police Union. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

So the update is that the criminal charge of trespassing in the third degree that I was originally arrested for has been dismissed by the district attorney’s office. That charge required that the property being closed in a manner to exclude intruders, i.e. An offense. It wasn’t the case for that property. So they dropped it down to a trespassing charge, which is a violation, not a crime, which requires unlawfully entering or remaining on a person’s property, on private property. So that’s where it stands. And I mean, we can get into more detail on the order of protection and ex parte hearings, but I’ll defer

Stephen Janis:

To you. I mean, I don’t really understand. You were exercising your First Amendment as a journalist. You have some privilege to be able to go to places and knock on doors where you’re not wanted, right?

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Right. Yeah. So generally the Supreme Court case, I don’t really remember what it is right now, but there is a Supreme Court case that even with a no trespassing sign, the public and people say, “Well, you don’t get extra rights because you’re a journalist or a YouTuber or whatever they want to call me.” And that’s the topic of today’s discussion. But generally, anyone has a license or privilege to approach someone’s door and do a knock and talk. You can knock and ask questions the same way a law enforcement officer can knock on your door, same way the solar panel, Girl Scout cookies, whatever. People knock on people’s doors and ask them questions. Once that privilege, that license or privilege has been revoked by the private property owner, then you must vacate the property.

Stephen Janis:

Which is what you were doing. But anyway, not to digress, Saya, go ahead. Sorry.

Taya Graham:

Okay. And let me just give a shout out to HBO Matt. HBO Matt, great to see you there. Another cop watcher. Wow. 1A and 2A auditor who’s in the chat as well right now. We got to shout out all those people out there doing that work. Okay. So Sean, now here’s the tough part. We’re going to start going through the comments. Now we’ve tried to pick a representative sample. And though I will say in general, more people support you than not. Some of your critics are pretty adamant that your work doesn’t benefit the community. So let’s start there. Okay. Let me hit you with comment number one. Okay. A clout chasing provocateur whose approach is ambush journalism. Real journalists make an appointment. People at work don’t just drop everything because this YouTuber shows up. Wow. Okay. So Sean, let me start with you. What do you think?

Is this a valid critique?

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

I don’t think it’s. I think anybody’s opinion is valid. Everybody can have their own opinion on what I do and how I go about it. So I’m not going to say that their opinion is invalid, but I would push back on their opinion that it’s ambush journalism. I mean, I’m asking questions. I don’t have to make an appointment. I can just walk up and ask the question. And really, to the person who made that comment, do you think if I would have called and made an appointment, they would have let me in and give me an appointment? Let’s be real here.

Stephen Janis:

I’m just laughing. Sory. I’m

Taya Graham:

Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.

Stephen Janis:

But go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Sorry.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Okay. No worries.

Taya Graham:

It just seems unlikely. Yes.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Yeah. More likely than not. They wouldn’t just, “Hey, yeah, we’ll pency in for 2:30,” right? Especially with the questions that I’m asking. I’m not asking, “How does it feel to save lives every day and put your life on the line, Mr. PBA president?” I’m asking why hundreds of millions of dollars of Suffolk County taxpayer money, hundreds of millions of dollars over the last 15 to 20 years have been put in the pockets of other people who have had their rights violated. So that’s my tax dollars. I’m a lifelong resident of Suffolk County. I’ve been investigating the police union and their power structure, and it comes from their donations to the legislators, to the county executive. There is more to the story than just showing up with my billboard truck. And again, I will say that most journalists don’t have a billboard truck. I do. And if you want to paint me out as it’s advocacy journalism, whatever word you want to put in front of journalism, it’s still objectively journalism, opinionated journalism, advocacy journalism.

It’s still journalism. Journalism is asking questions, doing investigations and disseminating that of matters of public interest to the public. Maybe it doesn’t interest you, but it interests me and it interests a lot of people out there, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people across my social media platforms. So if you don’t like the topic, you can tune into your favorite journalist that you want. I highly recommend the police accountability report here. Well, thank

You. But at the end of the day, ambush, whatever adjective you want to describe how I operate, it still doesn’t make what happened to me any less unlawful and any less a violation of my First Amendment rights.

Taya Graham:

Steven, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. Well, I mean, I don’t like the word ambush because I don’t think asking a question. Ambush has militaristic overtones, but if we had to make an appointment with every person that we wanted to ask a question that they didn’t want to answer, we wouldn’t have a job. Now, we cover Capitol Hill, right? Reporters roam all around confronting people who don’t want to answer questions. The entire process is about people showing up when you don’t expect them. That’s the whole way it works. There’s no journalism without the so-called ambush. And so I don’t like that term because that’s not what you were doing. You were asking a question which is about as passive as you can get. But yeah, so that’s just BS because almost our entire work centers on the fact that we can just walk up to someone and put a mic in their face.

If we can’t do that, we can’t do our jobs.

Taya Graham:

Steven, I really do have to agree with you on that. I mean, we show up to all sorts of places without an appointment. I have to say, on occasion when I have asked for an appointment, there was a particular time in Trenton, New Jersey where I made an appointment with their press information officer, told her I was going to be there, and she ghosted me. Just a little TikTok about the fact that I had made the effort to travel there, confirmed everything with her. She wasn’t there. And perhaps she should have been at her desk and she wasn’t. But I can tell you within eight hours, my entire TikTok account was banned and taken down. We’re just posting – Questions are not

Stephen Janis:

Ambushed.

Taya Graham:

Questions

Stephen Janis:

Are.

Taya Graham:

So it can be difficult for a traditional journalist to get an appointment. And even just reporting on the fact I didn’t get the appointment, got my TikTok account banned, which I think was a little mean, to be perfectly frank. I agree. But before I go on to the next criticism, I want to shout out Ophelia Moonrose. I thought you had a great comment there. Big G audits, good making case precedent in your state. That’s awesome. So one of the criticisms that we’ve seen of auditors like Sean is that they’re all after clicks and views, but I thought this was an interesting take on that critique. So let’s put up comment number two. Okay.

And also, I apologize if I mispronounce names, please give me some grace there. I’ll do my best. Gerek Diffelton says, “Clicks and views, spreading awareness and capturing focus for issues you want the public to see is exactly the point of journalism. Sean uses outrageous reality to catch attention and the New York Post uses lies and misinformation.” Now, Sean Paul, I think you said something quite similar, right? And Steven, can a journalism org survive without clicks? No. I mean, if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did the tree fall? I mean, if no one sees your journalism, does it even count? Yeah.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Yeah. I mean, my response to that is obviously all journalists want clicks and views. All media outlets want clicks and views. And I can give you just a recent story. CNN ran a story on First Amendment auditors just recently, and I’m actually going to do a video of this on my channel. They reached out to me and their question was, “How much money do you make? Can you provide us with your financials?” And I answered them back. Yeah. I answered them back politely and I said, “I would love to discuss with you the financial aspects of what I do in a video format, just like how we’re talking right now in a Zoom or a live stream.” And they said, “Oh, we’re going to move in a different way for our story. No problem.” And then they came out with a story and it was about how First Amendment auditors make money.

And they found two random individuals who have no idea who they are. They’re a couple. They curse a lot. They scream a lot. The video was just them cursing and screaming at members of the public and law enforcement and getting kicked out of this public building. And they went over and these two, I call them useful idiots, that’s what they were because they didn’t even shout out their channel or anything like that. So I have no idea who these people are. And most probably in our community don’t know who they are either. But they went and they showed them their YouTube studio. Yeah, I made $600 on this video. I made this and the CNN reporter’s there and they followed them around when they did these audits. And it’s crazy because the goal of the CNN story was to portray First Amendment auditors as only wanting clicks and views and being provocative and looking for negative interactions.

The ironic part of that is that’s exactly what CNN did in their story. They didn’t want me to come on their story and be a part of their story because I would talk about boring things about how I’ve been invited to train police departments, district attorney’s offices. I’ve done ride alongs with law enforcement. I’ve worked side by side with law enforcement. I investigated corrupt mayors. I’ve broken stories on mayors using federal funds for receiving federal funds that they voted on for their construction companies. So again, and I don’t curse or scream in my video, so it wouldn’t be as entertaining for people, but CNN selectively chose these two useful idiots so that way they can get what clicks and views on their video. So again – Right.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, go ahead. Maybe CNN doesn’t like the competition from you

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

From people. I don’t think so. I think they see it as a threat. I think that’s a good valid point because even Newsday is our local newspaper here on Long Island. News 12 Long Island is the broadcast arm of that. And none of them have covered, the New York Post covered this arrest because Lucavila wanted them to, the police union president. But none of the local outlets have covered this story. And I would argue that it is the quintessential public interest story. Whether you want to hit me out as a YouTuber, a gadfly, an agitator, whatever you want to call me. I’m still a public figure. And Lucavilla was the police union president and there was a confrontation where I was arrested. That seems like news that would be interesting for the residents in Suffolk County or Long Island that they report to, but they choose not to.

They pick and choose their stories. They pick and choose the themes of their stories. And I do the same thing. And my themes are focusing on police accountability, exposing what’s happening inside our police departments. I’m telling everybody watching now, and I say this on my channel, the police unions, especially here in the Northeast and specifically Suffolk County, they receive. Again, I don’t just go up there with a camera. I was just working before looking up. It’s a 501C. I’m looking up their financials. They have $15 million, the police union in Suffolk County, $15 million in assets. They bring in $5 million a year in annual revenue. They get paid through the contracts, through the contracts from the county. They get paid canine time, canine a pay. They don’t have a canine. I want to make this clear. There is not one canine that works for the PBA, the police union.

They get canine pay. They get hazard pay. They get a midnight pay. It’s a nine to five

Stephen Janis:

Job. One thing, Sean, that you’re touching on, which I think is really important, is how lucrative policing is in terms of their relationship with the government. Because I remember in Baltimore, we had take home cars. All officers had take home cars and they could drive back to Pennsylvania and the city paid for the gas. And it was like $100,000 benefit, but the mainstream media doesn’t want to take it on because they want police officers to feed them crime stories, which is more of their fodder. But what you’re doing is amazing because you’re actually challenging their lack of good reporting, which probably embarrasses them. I mean, to hell with the truck.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

And I completely agree with you when they want the murder scenes, they want the vehicle pile ups, they want to get that call. And if they’re adversarial, which you guys were talking about how a press should be adversarial. And I completely agree. I think that’s the foundation, an adversarial press towards the government. But they want those stories. And then it’s such a big story because they just got an 18% raise. Lucivillo, for example, gets paid $265,000 a year as the police union president. He keeps his full law enforcement officer capabilities, yet he doesn’t patrol, he doesn’t investigate crime. He sits in a desk defending officers who are accused of misconduct all day long and pushing his propaganda out to on. They own radio stations. They have podcasts. They’ve embraced social media in order to brainwash the people.

Stephen Janis:

Do you know where the $5 million revenue comes from? I mean, do they get it from donations or do they charge for services or something? Are they doing moonlighting or where’s it come from? Do you know?

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Yeah. So I just started looking into it before I

Stephen Janis:

Came

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

On here. I was just looking at everything, all the documents –

Stephen Janis:

I’ll look into too. Yeah.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

501 documents, but their revenue comes from union dues. And again, they’re in violation of election law. In New York State, you can’t force somebody to donate to a candidate. So what they’re doing is they’re collecting union dues. And whether the police officer is a Republican or a Democrat, sometimes that money goes to somebody who the police officer doesn’t want it to go to. And that’s in violation of election law. And a Suffolk County legislator, Rob Trota, a former detective for the Suffolk County Police Department, he blew the whistle on this. So I give him all the credit and the district attorney said, “You know what? I don’t have jurisdiction.” It’s funny how the district attorney didn’t have jurisdiction for a New York state crime, but the district attorney can receive $500,000 in campaign contributions from the PBA. The Suffolk County executive gets a million dollars.

These legislators think about this. How can anybody be okay with the system where Suffolk County Police Union can funnel money into the pockets of politicians and those same politicians get them elected? They go door to door for them. They mail out, they have mailers, the whole apparatus. And then they get elected and then they in turn vote on these 18% raise increases, hazard pay for police union. 20

Stephen Janis:

Year pensions. 20 year pensions. 20 year

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Pensions.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. I

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Like that. They make these backroom deals where there was an officer that was accused of using the surveillance apparatus for his own personal gain. And he went on to have 14 years. They said, okay, admit to this misconduct. And in 14 years, 14 years, when you get your full funded pension, you have to leave. That’s not accountability.

Stephen Janis:

Oh, and we’ve had multiple officers who have been charged, committed, charged, convicted of crimes who are allowed to keep working. I mean, the basic thing is you pointed out, I think, in both your Brian Fahey case, which we’ll get to, is these pensions are golden parachutes. Absolutely. They are multimillion dollar bonuses for these people. So a lot of what happened in Baltimore is that even though you’ve been convicted of a crime, they keep you on the payroll so that you get your pension qualification, which is like that’s when you hit the jackpot of the library. So that’s great work you’re doing there. You want to get to the next one so we don’t –

Taya Graham:

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So I have another comment here. I shouldn’t point that way. Give you some fair warning. Here is a proponent of police power urging you to obey a lawful order, which of course has some pretty broad implications. So this is Jim 0417 commenting on the Sean Paul Reyes arrest coverage. I agree there is free speech. However, don’t push your luck. Just leave. Then no problem. No arrests. I am a retired police detective. And if I’m told something by the police, I comply. It’s just that easy. Now, Steven, I think this refers back to some of your thoughts on police power. What do you think?

Stephen Janis:

Well, I mean, I think the idea that there is this police control over space that somehow, if they deem a space to be theirs is sort of an extension of some of the worst aspects of this country’s lessening democracy. So I mean, I didn’t say this in the beginning, but I think one thing that Sean Paul exposes by going into police space and pointing a camera at them is their absolute thought of control over space, which I think is a way of showing how latent authoritarianism in America kind of makes its way through policing. Because it’s really weird when you think about it. You show up with a camera, they could have ignored him. They could have just answered his question. They could have done a lot of things, but they decided to confront him with power, with power and command over that space. So I think disobeying orders from police about space is pretty much the most fundamental American kind of descent you can do.

So I’m all for Sean going and pointing cameras because what amazes me of what you see. I mean, someone points a camera at you and you start ordering around and say you’re going to arrest him. What does that mean? What is that telling you about this country? What is it telling you about authoritarianism? Sean, are you surprised sometimes when people freak out because you show up just by showing up, not even doing anything?

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Yeah. I’ve been doing this five years now and it still surprises me to this day because it’s so nonsensical. You’re 100% right. The police union president could have. He was upstairs in his penthouse suite. He didn’t have to come down with five other officers from the

Police union. He could have stayed up there, told the receptionist, “Tell him he needs to leave. He’s not welcome here.” And I would have left and there would have been no incident. There would have been no clicks and views. There would have been no story for that particular video. I just would have left. I was leaving. And these people, like this former officer that commented that, and I see it, especially in my county. I want to use my billboard truck to bring awareness to this and my voice and my platform, especially I’m going to focus on my county moving forward because it’s important to me. When I was protesting, one of the neighbors of the district attorney told me, “You’re a liberal communist.” And they were so violent in calling me a communist. And these people don’t even know the definition of communists, but they just repeat what they hear.

They have no idea what a communist is, what communism is. They have no idea what these terms mean, but they’ve heard other elected officials call people communists because of they don’t like them. And they say, “Oh, you’re a communist. You want to hold the police accountable? Then you’re a communist.” And it makes no sense. So I still get shocked to this day. Lou should have done that. Lucivilla, the police union president should have just told someone else to tell me, but he was looking for the confrontation. He came out with handcuffs in hand. He was looking for that to happen. Oh, so Sean, he

Stephen Janis:

Had his handcuffs. Had his handcuffs in hand?

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

He had his hands. Remember, he’s not a real law enforcement officer. He doesn’t do law enforcement activity, yet he gets paid for law enforcement activity, but he doesn’t do law enforcement activity. He actually does the opposite. He shields officers in this county and they introduce legislation. They just introduced a bill into the New York State Senate where you have to be 15 feet away from a law enforcement officer. That came directly from him. He’s the one pulling the strings. And it doesn’t matter, Democrat or Republican, they all take PBA money. They all want to be seen as back the blue, especially in my county. And it’s just sad to me that people like that commenter, I don’t blame him. I think his ignorance comes from his lack of critical thinking skills, his lack of a variety of media consumption. And he just wants to blame somebody, just comply.

But the most ironic part is I was complying. I mean, how can you watch that video and not see that I was complying? Maybe I wasn’t complying in the way that you wanted me to. Maybe I wasn’t complying in the way Lucid Villa wanted me to, but legally I was complying.

Stephen Janis:

What was interesting is it was almost the opposite of when police use the stop resisting to do it. You were saying, “I’m leaving. I’m leaving. I’m leaving.” And basically making it clear that you were retreating and following and obeying the law and their requests. So it was just weird and ironic that they kept confronting you even when you said you were leaving, which I think has to do with this police preoccupation with space and dissent because you are showing them up for what they’re doing to the taxpayers of Suffolk County. And they don’t want that. And it’s interesting that it’s you that’s doing it and not the people, the mainstream media with all their money and power that are doing it. But it’s one guy with a truck and a YouTube channel that is actually doing this, which I think. Well, I mean, I think it’s really telling, right?

Because I’ve covered this kind of stuff in policing and you get so much pushback when you talk about their pensions or about the fact that they can work. The guys you’re talking about get some sort of dumb desk job where they sit and they file. They don’t do anything. I mean, we had the gun tray task force where they literally went on vacation in the Bahamas and got overtime. So what police are able to do with money and what they’re able to do with the resources of a community is confounding.

Yeah, they use that money.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Go ahead.

Taya Graham:

Oh no, I was just going to say, I think you explained that basically Suffolk County is the home of the million dollar pension, right? Yeah. So I actually did some calculating on how long it would take me to save that type of pension with a little bit of money I put aside each year. I would need to work 200 years to be able to have that be my pension. Yeah, it’s a Ponzi scheme. So that’s something to look forward to. It’s a

Stephen Janis:

Ponzi scheme.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

It is a Ponzi. They’re extorting the police officers in Suffolk County through the police union are extorting the taxpayers. And they put out buzzwords like, “Oh, because we protect you. We keep you safe. We do this. We put our lives on the line.” All propaganda, that means nothing. They’re law enforcement officers. Even for body cameras, we had to pay them. We had to pay them more money every single year. I believe they got an extra $2,000 a year each just for them to put on body cameras. In what other profession does your boss tell you, you need to put this on your uniform? And then they’re like, “Well, I’m not going to do it unless you pay me.” It is a racket. It is a racket and the people need to know about it. And a lot of people know and they don’t care. They back the blue regardless of what.

And that’s why we call them bootlickers.

Stephen Janis:

You know what?

Taya Graham:

I’d like to go onto the next comment. I think it’s very appropriate because it’s apparently, Sean Paul, you’re just not nice enough to rich people. That’s what this comment’s saying. I thought it was a little odd, but I thought it was worth talking about. So this commenter, Alma Adams, 3631, wrote on a recent episode, “I was on this guy’s side until he brought up Bezos and Musk.” How are they the bad guys again? I mean, did this guy go to Comedy College? I mean, I guess they all are these days. Comedy College. Okay. I’ve seen –

Stephen Janis:

Just a public service announcement. So we are very welcoming of a Marxist here and communists at the Real News Network. And

Taya Graham:

Libertarians and libertarians. And libertarians. And any

Stephen Janis:

Ideological strike

Taya Graham:

Really. Okay. We welcome all political viewpoints to have all types of thinkers with all types of ideologies who support democracy and want to have an interesting conversation about it. So communists, come on in and have

Stephen Janis:

Conversations. Why would you critique him that way when he’s talking about police pensions? I think that’s an interesting connection, right? Symbolic, Sean?

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Yeah. I mean, again, there goes the commi thing. These people are, they’re just brainwashed. And it really disheartens me as an American and somebody who loves this country that there’s so many people out there who have been brainwashed by people like Elon Musk. I’ll call them out again, Jeff Bezos. They’re an oligarchy. They’re no different than And the oligarchs in Russia, the only difference is that you love them. The people love

Taya Graham:

Them. Exactly.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

You worship

Taya Graham:

Them. Well said.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

They’re no different. They’re celebrities here. That’s the only difference. The oligarchs in Russia are just hiding behind their fortresses and that’s going to happen too. Listen, in another life, I would have been a history teacher. I love history. One of my favorite quotes is, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” And you, we are on the track for the oligarch. Thank you. Look at the wealth separation in this country. It doesn’t make any sense. You could call me a communist or whatever you want. I’m telling you, these billionaires don’t have the everyday. You’re sitting here, that person, the sad part is that person is defending the oligarchy and yet they’re living paycheck to paycheck every week. And that’s the sad part to me.

Stephen Janis:

And I think that’s the point of police power to project the idea that you’re not worthy of an equal society with an equal sharing of wealth. I think part of the thing is that police make you feel that there’s some sort of chaos outside of this constructed oligarchy. And that if you challenge police, you’re challenging law and order. And then there will be this chaos of, like you said, like commies, like Long Island Olives knocking on your door. And I think that’s part of the point of why policing fuses with Bezos and Musk in that sense.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

They’re meant to protect the oligarchy. That’s the whole point in

Stephen Janis:

Case

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Things go south. They’re the defense against the oligarchy. That’s the part. They’re not here to protect you. They’re here to extort you through tickets and everything else. You get pulled over, you’re paying hundreds of dollars for tickets. I don’t understand. Can police officers be heroes individually? Sure they can. Sure, they can engage in heroic activity. And I will admit that, but to call law enforcement officers generally heroes is disgusting. To me, it’s like, it just doesn’t make sense.

Taya Graham:

You know what? I just have to jump in here because when I heard you talking about oligarchy, and I think in a past life, you were a history teacher. I have no doubt. But when I think about Jeff Bezos and his net worth, and when I think about Elon Musk, our newest trillionaire on the planet, that kind of money, that kind of money is more than some countries have. That kind of money, it absolutely influences our government. It influences public policy. So to say that we shouldn’t criticize these people, hold them accountable is absurd to me. These people don’t deserve some sort of unique protection because they manage to win out in the lottery of life. These people, if they have the power of a government because of their bank book, they deserve to have questions answered and we deserve transparency.

Stephen Janis:

Great.

Taya Graham:

So I’m sorry, that just gets me a little heated because we actually have a show called the Inequality Watch, which I think Steven would argue is the oligarchy accountability report. I mean, how would you answer that comment or really?

Stephen Janis:

And it’s interesting because the two fews, like Sean has pointed out, Sean Ray has pointed out policing and inequality and oligarchy all kind of come into one big problem for all of us working people in a sense. So you want to do the next one?

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Yeah. The people are working against their. I’ll just end with this. People need to stop working against their own interests and

Stephen Janis:

Fighting

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Against their own interests. I mean, you’re defending a man that has more money than he could ever spend in a million years and you can’t afford to pay your electric bill. It’s bizarre to me. It’s bizarre.

Taya Graham:

Yeah. I completely agree. I really don’t understand it. I try to understand the psychology of it, but it does allude me. But let me go to another comment here for you because I want you to see all of them. So this is someone who looks at Sean Paul’s work in kind of a broader context. And I’m wondering what you both think of it in terms of what at stake and whether we’re overlooking some of the broader implications of what auditors and First Amendment activists do. So let me read it and I’ll have Dave put up clip five. Okay. So democracy itself is at stake. Being ruled, terrorized, controlled, manipulated, dominated and lied to is not freedom. Okay. So to me, that’s very heavy, very powerful. So what do you think? Do you believe you’re fighting for democracy, Sean Paul?

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

I think I’m fighting for accountability and democracy. Anything that gives power back to the people. That’s why I wear my we the people hat everywhere I go. I want the people to have the power and I want people to act in their own interests when it comes to power because the people that are elected in our offices do not have our best interests at heart. It’s because you see the ads. Money controls politics between campaign spending. It all revolves around money. Look how much money Elon Musk put into the election. No one man should have all that power, right? Right. In the words of Kanye. But it’s crazy to me that people, even with flock cameras, the advent implementation of flock cameras, they’re here for your safety. Another favorite quote of mine is by Benjamin Franklin, “Those who give up their essential liberty to purchase temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” And it’s so sad how quickly we’ve forgotten and have handed over all of our rights.

We’re going to have a surveillance state, police state, and all of these people in power that have all of this resources and money. And no one does anything about it. Most people don’t even go out and vote. Most people don’t make their voices heard because they’re too busy working. They have their own family drama, everything else, and they don’t pay attention or they only watch CNN or they only watch Fox News. They don’t broaden their horizons to try and really critically think and analyze what’s going on in our country. And I think that needs to change. So my platform is to try and bring accountability to those in power. And I can’t. I can’t do it by myself. All I can do is put it out there for people to see. And what they choose to do with it after that, I got to expose it.

I’m going to expose the police union here.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. I mean, I think of all institutions, policing is the most anti-democratic. And like we said before, kind of the authoritarian impulses of society kind of course through it. And so your battle with them and the battle over space is pretty much to me the most so pro-democracy thing you can do as a reporter. I mean, in some ways the battle over democracy is incremental. When I worked for a TV station, when we go out to film, we had one space, which was a sidewalk because you couldn’t go on private property and you couldn’t go on the road because then they charge you with obstructing traffic. And yet even though the sidewalk was like the one place we could set up our camera and our tripod, police would still try to kick us off it. We constantly were battling. And it kind of was illuminating to me because here we have this one little space to do our jobs to expose X, Y, and Z, and we can’t even do this.

And so that’s why I think that sort of sense of taking all space over and sort of forcing people not to confront, not to ask questions, not to have a circulatory system to this democracy. I think that’s why it does make your work sort of pro-democracy because you’re fighting in some sense the most anti-democratic force. This doesn’t mean I’m anti-police or anything like that. I just think the institution itself, as you talked about before, is corrupted by the political economy that sustains it. So yeah, I think democracy is at stake in a sense, along with the broader issues that we covered on Capitol Hill, but this is an important component of it.

Taya Graham:

Steven, you were talking about how we’re covering Capitol Hill and it definitely seems like our democracy is under stress. I mean, what do you think about this idea in a broader context?

Stephen Janis:

Well, yeah, in the broader context, we just covered the federal government or the Republicans voting for a reconciliation bill that gets $70 billion. Let’s talk about real money. ICE has a hundred billion. Republicans get up and they give the ICE another 70 billion with absolutely no details or explanation of why. The point was just to fund ICE for an infinite length of time to fund ICE to do anything. So we’ve seen how ICE uses law enforcement tactics to disrupt democratic processes like in Minneapolis. And then of course killed two people that didn’t need to die. And so they give him $70 billion. And so I think here’s Sean fighting it on a local or a local level. In the national level, the same thing is going on. I mean, talk about giving unlimited money to law enforcement. I think there’s parallels there. Suffolk County has $5 million a year, 15 million here, extravagant pensions.

And then on Capitol Hill, $70 billion to an agency that doesn’t need it. They still had a hundred billion in the bank and they’re funded not year over year, but until 2029. So

Taya Graham:

The

Stephen Janis:

Unleashing of law enforcement through money, which we’ve seen in Suffolk County, we’ve written about this, is now playing out on a national level. And now you have a national federalized police force with unlimited funds.

Taya Graham:

You know what? Let me jump to our next comment because I want to make sure to get to as many of them as possible. Absolutely. And we’ve had some great comments that we’ve been putting on the screen from the live chat. I appreciate you. And don’t worry, I will ask about the tiger picture. Not now, but I will ask about the tiger pictures. There’s a person who’s obsessed with your painting, Sean. So before you go, you’re going to have to talk about it. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Stephen Janis:

I don’t know what you guys are talking about. Sorry.

Taya Graham:

It’s okay. I’ll

Stephen Janis:

Tell you. But I sure I’ll find out hopefully.

Taya Graham:

Back to police unions, one of our favorite topics. And full disclosure, I am a member of a union. I am a union steward. And I can let you know that the Communication Workers Association does not receive any taxpayer dollars. And I’m not receiving a million dollar pension. Like I said, I would need to work 200 years to earn that pension. Anyway, Sean, you explained on our show that you wanted the police union to answer questions about how they protect members who are accused of brutality and misconduct. One of the viewers weighed in on the power of police unions. Dave, if you don’t mind putting up comment six for me. Okay. Here we have Charles Harmon, 4159 says regarding the police union, “Police unions throughout the nation are the problem. Unlimited power and authority, the unions, qualified immunity, rampant racism and corruption. Nothing will be correct until we check this.” Wow.

I mean, Sean Paul, from your experience, how is bad policing a consequence of the power police unions?

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

So because they shield officers who engage in misconduct and brutality against accountability. They’ll tell you that. That’s what they do. They say buzzwords and things like, “Oh, we’re just making sure they get due process, that they need to have the same rights as everybody else and everything else.” But there is no due process when there’s no accountability at the end of that process. That’s like if people would be happy if they said, “Oh, we’re going to give due process to immigrants and then we’re going to let them stay here.” People would be upset with that. When you bring up ICE, that’s a hot button topic on when I talk about ICE on my channel.

I completely agree with what you’re talking about. And again, that’s by design, the division. We can’t say that the ICE is receiving too much money without accountability, without body cameras, without having to take off their masks, not violate people’s rights. I went to the location and flew out there to Minneapolis where Alex Pretty was murdered and I was at a eulogy there. And it really hit me that a man was murdered and executed by ICE. And people say, “Well, he kicked a car two weeks ago and broke the taillight.” And it’s like, come on, you need to understand something. That is not. Yes, Alex Pretty engaged in violent behavior two weeks before he was executed. Even if he was executed that same day, kicking a taillight is not a death sentence. We need to understand this. Wanting accountability for ICE is not pro-immigration or pro-illegal immigration.

These people, they have this in their mind where if you criticize ICE in any way, it’s now you’re pro-illegal immigration, you’re pro this. When I talked about judicial warrants, the differences between judicial warrants and administrative warrants. And I put this on my channel and people, I got so much blow back from my community about, oh, but Sean, you’re just trying to protect illegal immigrants. And no, I’m trying to protect you. I’m trying to protect me. I’m trying to protect our country. Because there’s a big difference. You cannot go into someone’s house on an administrative warrant because an administrative warrant is basically like a decree from the king. Then we’d be going back to the decree from the king where he says, oh, that’s the warrant. And then we’re going to go. A judicial warrant is necessary to have a third party look at the facts of the case.

I’m trying to protect everybody’s rights, including illegal immigrants’ rights because whether you like it or not, they do have rights and it was by design. And you don’t have to like it, but you have to accept reality for what it is. And police unions generally in this country, but specifically in the Northeast, specifically in the Northeast, they are so powerful, so well funded through tax money. And they shield officers from accountability every single day. It happens all the time. And I think police unions should be abolished across the country.

Stephen Janis:

Sean, Ray, one time I went to police union headquarters and they actually have a bar in there and they offered me a beer, which is kind of funny. But when I asked Congresswoman Mike Lawler about ICE funding about $70 billion, you know what he said to me? He said, “Do you want to abolish ICE?” That was his answer to my question. Of course. So what you’re talking about, this sort of. Well, it’s part of the culture of policing, right? You are for or against. When someone says you can either be for or against something, you know you’re in really treacherous territory. Tay and I always make this joke, do you have to be for and against the sanitation department

Taya Graham:

To

Stephen Janis:

Ask us? Well, if you ask a question about why we’re spending so much money on sanitation,

Taya Graham:

You’re against

Stephen Janis:

Sanitation.

Taya Graham:

Right. If you criticize that we don’t get Tuesday and Thursday pickup anymore, we only get Thursday pickup, then you’re anti-sanitation. You hate sanitation workers.

Stephen Janis:

And you’re somehow un-American.

Taya Graham:

There’s no other organization and agency. That we can’t just criticize.

Stephen Janis:

And part of that is the union themselves because as Sean Wright points out, they have five people that are getting paid by the taxpayers sit there and espouse the perspective of the union. And let me tell you something, union officials have great relationships with the media. They didn’t have it with me when I was covering them, but I got a lot of crap because the media was so intertwined with the union officials on police uni officials. They are so much more powerful, even more powerful than union officials for other aspects of government. There’s no comparison to the power of the police union with the power of other public services.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

I mean, just as I’m sitting there chained to a desk within hours of my arrest before I’m released, before anything else, the New York Post has an article out. Do you think that the New York Post was just looking at. No, they made a call to somebody at the New York Post and even they got a title change. The New York Post reporter that spoke to me when he went to my court, when it went to my arraignment, I said, “Why did you change the title of your second article? It was very critical of the police union because he was talking about how the video doesn’t seem to. It raises questions.” He said it in a very nice way too. He said, “It raises questions as to what the police union president stated in his original comments to the post. They changed the title of that article to Police Union President Receives Death Threats.” And I said, “Why did you do that?” He said, “Well, my first title, the police union president called my boss and he made a big stink and we had to change the title.” You want law enforcement officers to have that much power – That’s incredible.

Over the media, over your politicians, over your money, everything. That’s incredible. All because they’re heroes and you want to idolize them.

Stephen Janis:

Is he like the editor of the New York Post? I mean, just so people know, when Sean Ray, after the encounter, the New York Post ran very, I would say, inflammatory articles about your encounter with them. Not mentioning the pension or any of the questions you were asking, but simply talking about how once your video aired, people called, which happens with any publication. When I worked for a newspaper and we published a story, people didn’t like. We get tons of calls in hate mail. That’s normal. That’s not like you doing something. They made it seem like you had somehow corralled everyone to call. Yeah.That was something that you had done like, “Hey, everyone, call the police union. No.” And that’s extraordinary though that they have that kind of power.

Taya Graham:

It really is. You know what? Let me jump forward to comment eight because there are a few more comments I want to get to. I really want to check in on this one because – Give me some hard ones.Come on Tara. Because I’m going to try. People are going to town about qualified immunity in the comment section in our live chat right now. Favorite topic.

I think this is a really great time to discuss it. Yes. Okay. I mean, any discussion would be remiss without mentioning qualified immunity. And you know what? Let me just give a little explainer. I think everyone in our live chat, our PAR community knows qualified immunity, but just for anyone who might stumble across us, basically qualified immunity is a legal loophole that makes it extremely difficult to sue the police. So qualified immunity was created as sort of a threshold to give public officials immunity from violating people’s rights. And that was a consequence of a law passed during Reconstruction. I think it’s a 1983 part of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which was actually passed during Reconstruction to give people the right to sue again for the violation of their rights. But the qualified immunity loophole basically says you can’t sue someone if the right hasn’t been established, which means it has to been put through some sort of adjudication before you can sue someone like a cop.

And it has to be a case that is incredibly specific to your situation, but if it hasn’t been adjudicated upon, it’s going to be really difficult to sue. And I think Liberty Freak in the comment section and Mr. Brandt know a little something about that. Okay. With all that said, here’s the comment about it. Now this is from American Patriot 3515 on qualified immunity. We the people are getting sick and tired of that document known as the Constitution being used as toilet paper by law enforcement all across this country. We need to ban qualified immunity. That would be a good start. Okay. Sean Paul, to you. How big of a problem is qualified immunity when it comes to holding police accountable?

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

I think it’s a huge problem. Again, but I don’t want to minimize. I think the number one problem is the police unions. That is the number one problem because as things qualified immunity is horrible, but a lot of people focus on qualified immunity. That’s probably the number one thing that people who want police to be held accountable are saying, abolish qualified immunity, get rid of qualified immunity. But even if you did, the police unions are going to run rampant. It’s not going to change anything. I mean, you might be able to sue them and get some additional funds and everything, but most of the rights have been clearly established. But what judges, some judges will do, not all, but some judges will find a wiggle room. And this is what makes qualified immunity dangerous is that they’ll take, “Oh, well, this fact doesn’t add up right.” Or any layperson would be like, “Well, you can film,” for example.

I’ll give you an example of probably what a judge could do, is that you were filming the right to record the police on a public sidewalk is clearly established. But if you recorded them from the public parking lot, that’s not clearly established. So therefore right next to the sidewalk, so therefore he’s going to get qualified immunity. So eventually they’re going to run out of little loopholes to try and get people because it is qualified immunity. It’s not what prosecutors have, which is absolute immunity. Judges have absolute immunity.

So eventually they’ll run out of the little work. And I think qualified with the workarounds, I think qualified immunity is very important, but I want to stress to everybody that the police unions and the way they operate within the political system is far more dangerous when it comes to the lack of accountability and police power.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah.

Taya Graham:

Steven, I think there’s a case that talks a lot about qualified immunity. It’s the Eric Brandt and Liberty Freak case in the 10th Circuit. Maybe you want to explain

Stephen Janis:

About that? Well yeah, in 2021 or no, I think they actually, it was in 2019 that Eric Brandt and Liberty Freak were filming a police officer. They were filming just a traffic stop. And then a police officer drove up and got in front of them and then her drove his car at Eric. And this is in the 10th circuit. And I think the case was adjudicated in 2021, 2022. The initial district court said that the officer had qualified immunity because the right to film police had not been established. Now they won that case. The ACLU joined in, even the Cato Institute joined in, Electronic Frontier joined in. So they won it, but it can show you, as Sean, as you’re pointing out, that sometimes things slip through the cracks. And at that point in the 10th circuit, the district court judge had said, “Oh, there’s no established right to film police.” And this is in 2021, 2022.

Now, of course they won, but it just shows you sometimes these things can be a little more complicated. But I do agree with you that police unions are this source and locus of power when it comes to policing. It’s almost impossible to battle police unions.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Yeah. I mean, I’m taking it on now and I’m not going to stop. And I don’t see an end. I think this is going to be for the rest of my career because what I’ve seen is just horrible, especially in my own county. And I want to bring awareness to it. But the machine is just, it’s so big that it would take people really waking up and voting out these politicians who can end these contracts, who can make sure there’s accountability. But again, they have a propaganda arm. They have everything. They’re an S corp. They get paid a salary. They have expenses. They do this. It’s just such a machine.

Stephen Janis:

And a lot of times they fund. If a police officer gets into trouble, I don’t know what goes on in Suffolk County, but the police unions, like all the officers who were charged with the death of Freddie Gray, which for everyone who doesn’t know, Freddie Gray was a young man who died in police custody in 2015 and set off basically an uprising here in Baltimore. But all the police officers didn’t have to worry about hiring a lawyer because the police union pays for the lawyers for police officers who get in trouble in Maryland. I don’t know how it is in Suffolk County, but they have a lawyer on twenty four seven for them. If anything happens to them, they get free legal services from pretty well-paid law firms. Very well paid

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

First. Yeah. But that’s the secondary, that’s like the safety net. Most times in my experience, police officers get indemnified by the county or municipality. We’re going to get to

Stephen Janis:

That. And yes,

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

You are correct. They get taxpayer funded lawyers and they’re not getting the county attorneys, especially in Suffolk County or Nassau County, the neighboring county on Long Island. They hire $2,000 an hour attorneys, private attorneys. And I’m sure if I looked into that, I’m sure those attorneys probably donated those law firms. Oh

Stephen Janis:

Absolutely. We had the same thing going on in Baltimore. Absolutely.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

It’s a whole racket. It’s a whole

Stephen Janis:

Racket.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

It’s a whole big club and we’re not in it, just so people

Taya Graham:

Know. We are not in it.

Stephen Janis:

It’s a classic political economy. We had law firms were getting millions of dollars from Baltimore City to handle these lawsuits and basically –

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Instead

Stephen Janis:

Of settling,

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

They couldn’t use that money to settle the case.

Stephen Janis:

Well, exactly.

Taya Graham:

Right. But

Stephen Janis:

That’s the

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Thing. Fight it. It’s insane.

Stephen Janis:

They would spend millions. We have a municipal cap in Baltimore in Maryland. It’s 500,000 or 900,000. And they would spend more money defending than just, might as well just pay it out. They would spend five, six, seven million dollars just to defend a lawsuit. They’d eventually pay out. But instead of just paying it out, I think they wanted to run up the billable hours, which is to your point. You have the law firms getting involved, making millions and millions of dollars. The politicians getting donations. It’s a pretty nice business. Nice work if you get it. And the amazing thing about it that you point out, I think that people don’t understand, is if you mess up, the more mistakes you make, the more lucrative it is. In our city, after the Justice Department investigated our police department and found the Department of Justice found it practiced unconstitutional and racist policing for like a decade, the police department got $70 million to fix the issues.

Tons of consultants

Taya Graham:

Like you said tons of work. That was the first thing that happened. They were handed millions more dollars.

Stephen Janis:

70 million. And it just went to all sorts of extracurricular activities, which eventually ends up in the pockets of the union.

Taya Graham:

Yeah, absolutely. You know what? Let me grab comment nine because I think it’s an interesting one because it kind of is a dig at me and Steven. There’s someone who thinks we shouldn’t even be talking to you, Sean Paul. Dave, can you put up comment nine and I’ll read it. Sean Frey, excuse me, 7975 says, “You going to hitch your wagon to that mule. Lost all respect for you.” Wow. Yeah. Steven, I’m not sure exactly where that’s coming from, but I’m sure you have something to say about it. Well,

Stephen Janis:

First of all, I want to say I have tremendous respect for Sean Ray and all the work that he does. I don’t even care what they say about that. But also I think we should disabuse ourselves with this notion that interviewing someone means somehow you’re hitched to their wagon. Covering what Long Island does, Long Island Odds does, does not mean we endorse anything he does. It just means that we feel that he is newsworthy and that what he does is worth showing to our audience. That’s all it is. It’s not like we’re saying we’re endorsing everything Sean Ray does or we’re in. Sean Paul, sorry. Sean Paul Ray does. We’re not saying that at all. What we do as journalists, we interview all sorts of people. I mean, should we not interview Republican politicians who disagree with us or should we not interview people who we don’t think are perfectly suitable?

That’s not what we do. That’s not the kind of judgment we make. We judge things based on their newsworthiness. And Long Island Audits has made a lot of news for a good reason, for accountability reporting, and therefore we will cover him. And I don’t really care what people say about it, but I do have tremendous respect for your work. So

Taya Graham:

Either

Stephen Janis:

Way.

Taya Graham:

Steven, I agree with you. What we do is cover things that are newsworthy. For example, we have covered victims of crime and we have also interviewed people who have gone to prison for crimes. Does that mean I shouldn’t interview someone because they’ve gone to prison? Right. Does that mean I should only interview people that I like and never someone that I might have some fundamental differences in? Half the politicians

Stephen Janis:

In Maryland have gone to prison and we’ve interviewed all of them.

Taya Graham:

Oh my gosh. And they’re Democrats for the record.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. So we interview

Taya Graham:

People all the time. They actually did go to prison. Our previous mayor did actually, and I had a lovely interview with her. So I should not interview people because they’re problematic. If they’re newsworthy, if interviewing them is going to reveal something important, then I should interview them for the benefit of the public. It’s not about liking people. It’s not about hitching your wagon to a star. It’s about giving the public information that they can find useful. Period. Case closed. Case closed. Now, Sean, I’m not going to force you to react to this unless you want to. I will.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

I will. So first of all, to me, this is indicative of the tribalism and the death of nuance. And these people, they want to be closed-minded. They don’t want to have conversations. And this person probably, he says, if you asked him, you do support the First Amendment, do you support the free press? Do you support? And you probably say, yes, yes, yes. I love the Constitution. But the minute that someone engages with somebody that they don’t like or starts talking to them, again, just because I’m on your channel doesn’t mean that I am not. We do not endorse each other for everything that we do. If tomorrow you did something I didn’t like, I have full rights to talk about that as well. I don’t have a blind loyalty to people. I love the work that you guys do and I appreciate it. And I think what you guys do on Capitol Hill is great.

I watch you guys all the time. And you really speak truth to power. It’s great. I wish I could be up there on Capitol Hill agitating people and provoking people. I wish you could too. I

Taya Graham:

Was going to say,

Stephen Janis:

You

Taya Graham:

Can join

Stephen Janis:

Us. Can you bring your truck up to Capitol Hill one time at least once? I

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Would love to bring the truck. Yeah, I

Stephen Janis:

Would love to. All right. We’ve got to do the truck one

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Time. I would love to join you guys over there a Capitol Hill.But again –

Stephen Janis:

We’re doing that. That’s the date.That’s the date. I love it. I want that truck on Capitol Hill, man. Right on the triangle. It would be

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Great. It’s crazy. And people are like, “Oh, journalists don’t have billboard trucks. That’s true. Most journalists don’t.” I wish we did. Right. I’m sure most journalists wish they did too. It’s a good way to spread your message around. And again, I’m not saying I’m not Caitlin Collins of CNN. I’m not – Neither

Taya Graham:

Am I.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Whoever from Fox News, I guess. I’m not those people. I’m Sean Paul Reyes. My platform is my platform. I objectively engage in journalistic activities. I objectively exercise my First Amendment right. And again, if you want to call it advocacy journalism, opinionated journalism, yeah, I have opinions. And I don’t hide that. I talk about things that interest me and interest my audience. And I think that me building platforms that have over two million subscribers and at this point, probably a billion views, 500 million, 600 million on YouTube alone. These are matters of public interest that people want to see. People are very passionate about it. I get death threats. I get people are passionate on the other side too. People threaten to kill me, threaten to kill my family. There’s a lot of things that go into this. And it’s sad to see that people can’t have conversations anymore.

Even if we were totally different, I would still come on your channel. I invited Lou, when the body camera footage comes out the Sunday on my channel, the Sunday morning at 10:00 AM, I invited him to come on the channel and he accepted. So Lou, if you’re watching this, you’re still welcome to. I think that he is a despicable thug with a badge, but I would bring him on my channel. Absolutely. Great point. So that way I can debate him. Absolutely. But he would never come. He says it on the body cam. “Yeah, I’ll come on your channel. Yeah, let’s do it. “While I’m sitting in handcuffs, while I’m standing there in handcuffs with a pinched nerve in my wrist because he put the handcuffs on so tight, he says,” I’ll come on. “I said,” Come on the channel. “Because I would have anybody on the channel if I thought it brought value to the greater conversation.

Absolutely. I think him speaking to me on my channel, I think it’s going to show you exactly what I’m talking about when it comes to the police union. They talk just generalities. Oh, they don’t get into any specifics about anything. It’s just you’re an agitator, how? You’re a provocateur, how? You hate the police, how? I’ve had police officers on my channel, I’ve gotten pushback from, if you want to talk about the other side of it, I’ve brought chief of polices, detectives, I’ve had law enforcement on my channel. I’ve done ride alongs, I’ve done trainings, I’ve done command staff meetings, district attorney’s offices, and some of the more anti-police who have just a bad taste in their mouth for police and don’t think that police should exist whatsoever, they’re like, “Why would you bring on a cop?” Because I want to have conversations with people who have different views than me.

I do so I can understand what it is I need to do and how I need to tackle a problem better. I would

Taya Graham:

Bring

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

On anyone. I would.

Taya Graham:

You know what? Steven, you know what this sounds like?

Stephen Janis:

What?

Taya Graham:

This sounds like a journalist.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. Let me just make one public service announcement. I know, because I know he’s watching our editor, Maximolia Alvarez. We would like a truck. So just put that on our budget because I’m jealous of Sean. I want to show up at Capitol Hill with a truck.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

You can use my truck. We will definitely collaborate

Stephen Janis:

And I will. Oh, you were coming out with that truck. Absolutely. We would love that. We have to do a collab. I would love to do

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

It. After how it works and everything. It’s

Taya Graham:

Great. And I just want to shout out some of the people in the comments. First off, hi Car Thief News. Thank you. And also, I want to say hello to Wrights Crispy. Hello, another wonderful cop watcher out there. We still have Joe Cool out there, hippie auditor out there. I think I even saw John Felix. I don’t know if I hallucinated it, but I’m almost positive I saw the John Felix out there. And I just

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Want to –

Taya Graham:

I

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Like Joe Cool.

Taya Graham:

I know. I know. As a matter of fact, Steven, do you have a DVD next to you?

Stephen Janis:

Oh yeah.

Taya Graham:

You know what? Why don’t you show that DVD?

Stephen Janis:

Okay.

Taya Graham:

If people are interested in learning a little bit more about Copwatchers, there is something you can watch. It’s called I Am But the Mirror. The

Stephen Janis:

Story of American Copwatching.

Taya Graham:

Story of American Copwatching. Lacey Arnold D, if you wouldn’t mind dropping the link in the comments. It’s on Fossum. It’s an amazing documentary where we followed Copwatchers and in particular a very controversial one for several years. And we share their story. We share the story of how we learned about Copwatchers, their lives. Just about some of the

Stephen Janis:

Topics we talked about tonight too.

Taya Graham:

A lot of the things we. No, no, it’s okay. A lot of the things that we touched on tonight, it’s a very personal and intimate look at the lives of Copwatcher and some of the very personal costs that happen when you put everything on the line because you believe in accountability and transparency. So if you’re interested in Copwatching, definitely recommend it. Okay. I just had to throw that out there for people who might be interested in continuing this conversation in another way. Okay. I’m going to go to the comment 10, and I have to admit this as a little bit of a personal peeve for me. Okay. This is the infamous democracy versus republic debate. I know there’s some historians in the comments, so you’re welcome to weigh in on this. This is from Edward Cominar 1493. I stopped watching when you called us a democracy.

We are not a democracy. And since you believe that, I will not sub to your channel. Bye. Okay. Well, all right. I hate to say it, but this is not an airport. You did not have to announce your departure. It’s okay. I love that. But secondly, I want to put this up because very often when I use the word democracy in the show, someone brings up that it’s formerly a constitutional republic as a point as if I didn’t know this or wasn’t aware. So please let me break it down so maybe I don’t have to go through this again. One is a legal framework or structure of governance, i.e. A constitutional republic. And one is a process for conferring power within that structure. Neither are mutually exclusive. One does not preclude the existence of another. We can live within the structure of a constitutional republic while simultaneously participating in a democracy.

I mean, Steven, am I wrong here?

Stephen Janis:

No, no, no, no, no. The two exist, coexist. I mean, the process itself of voting is democratic. So I just wanted to put that up there because people say this constantly when we have this discussion. And just remember, they’re not mutually exclusive. They really work well together. So when we say one, we’re not precluding the other is the point.

Taya Graham:

Right. Just

Stephen Janis:

Wanted to make that point quick.

Taya Graham:

Yes. Think of the republic is the building in which the democracy is housed. How about that? That sounds good. Okay. So we don’t have to argue about this, you guys. I promise. I promise. Okay. I won’t ask you to. Let’s get to 11 because we’re – Running out of time. We do have some time. Yeah. We do have to watch out for time. Last

Stephen Janis:

Comment.

Taya Graham:

Okay. Last comment that we saved from earlier from Facebook and YouTube. Okay. Who is footing the bill? Okay. So I think this comment makes a really good point, so we need to highlight it. Dave, thank you so much for putting it up. This is Sean Strauss’s point. Remember, everyone, cops never pay a single cent for lawsuits. Even in a successful lawsuit where qualified immunity is denied, individual LEOs are still literally always indemnified by the municipality. It’s the taxpayers who pay for the lawyer’s fees, court costs settlements, and even judgements issued against them. We the people currently have no meaningful legal recourse to hold our LEOs accountable, neither civilly nor criminally. So either one of you can take this. Well, let’s have Sean do it. Yeah. Is it true that police are indemnified by the taxpayers?

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

In most cases, yes. There was actually a case that I brought up. I’d covered this case where this man was walking down the street in New York City and officers hopped out like a gang. Literally a gang hopped out of a patrol vehicle and started going into his pants, checking him, searching him. He was just walking down the street, minding his own business, but apparently he must have looked a certain way or walked a certain way. Who knows what they were thinking? But they hopped out and they started searching him. They ended up grabbing his genitals and doing all types of craziness to him. And he got upset and I raid about it. He ended up filing a lawsuit. I covered this story probably three years ago. And then he had texted me, told me, “Hey, they ended up settling for $100,000.” And I bring this up because out of that $100,000, well, they had to hire their own attorneys, but as Steven indicated earlier, they hired their attorneys through the PBA, through their union.

They don’t call it a PBA, but their union, they hired them attorneys. And then they had to come out of pocket out of that $95,000 of that $100,000 settlement this gentleman got was taxpayer money. And the other 5,000 had to be split between the two officers who violated his rights. So at the end of the day, cops can be held accountable civilly, but nine times out of 10, 99% of the time they are indemnified by the municipality and the taxpayers end up funding the bill. I completely agree that there’s such a lack of accountability when it comes to government officials and our public servants, whether it’s locally, on the state level, federally. Federally is even worse. Federally, you can’t even. I didn’t know this until recently when I was unlawfully detained by border patrol and they went and cut open my suitcase, searched my vehicle, deleted the video from my phone.

Thankfully it was my recently deleted, put me in a jail cell.

You cannot sue the federal government under the 1983 civil rights lawsuit. You can’t. They’re not named as a. It’s for state actors, not federal actors. So you can file what’s called a tort claim, which that’s for actual damages. I could have filed a tort claim for the damage they did to my suitcase. It’s almost impossible to hold the federal government accountable. So it goes all the way. The lack of opportunities we have and the lack of avenues, I should say, that we have to hold state actors or federal actors accountable for their misconduct is basically nothing because they have unlimited money because it’s our money. It’s our money. They have unlimited money. They can just pay out lawsuits because it’s our money. Even if the federal government, they print the money. So they literally have unlimited money. And the state governments, they can’t print money, but they have a lot of it, especially places like New York, Maryland, where there’s high taxes.

They have a lot of money to be able to spare. They factor this in and they say, “Well, it is what it is.” It goes away. The person gets their money and they move on. And there’s never any accountability. If it came out of the law enforcement officer’s pockets.

Law enforcement is designed, is supposed to be, right? This is what they tell you to hold people accountable for their criminal actions, is to enforce the law. And the criminal justice system, again, I’m not co-signing their view, but they’re saying the criminal justice system is supposed to stop people from committing crimes. Not only the individual that’s being charged with a crime, but it’s supposed to serve as a deterrent to society as a whole to say, “Hey, you can’t do this because this will happen to you the same way it happened to this guy.” But in law enforcement, when there’s no accountability for the individual officer, that breeds a lack of accountability across the whole department and across the police as a whole. And because they know that, “Hey, I can do this.” Just recently, somebody was charged with a crime for using flock cameras to stalk their girlfriend.

And the investigator, the IA investigator who investigated him was arrested as well for doing the same thing after he did it. So it’s just the lack of accountability is astounding and it breeds more misconduct and more misconduct. And unfortunately, unless we change up, unless we get the right politicians in there, public servants to legislators, executives in the executive branch to hold them accountable, it’s not going to change.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. I mean, it’s really interesting. I want to make this point before we wrap things up because one of the first times we started talking to Sean was when his encounter with Sergeant Fahey in Connecticut. Connecticut state trooper that seemed like his overtime was a little excessive for someone who worked at a desk and then retired with a pension. And I’ve been doing some digging on it. And it turns out that the couple thousand retired state troopers cost Connecticut taxpayers $110 million a year to fund their pensions. And we started looking at some of the last couple years, because the last couple years is what defines your salary. So what happens is that they start collecting a lot more overtime and therefore their final average pay goes up and therefore their final average pension becomes larger and more lucrative. And I think the point is in what you’re saying is that you are really attacking the crux of the matter in the sense that this is real dollars.

I mean, $110 million a year to fund the pensions for a couple thousand people is really an extreme use of resources in a country that purports not to be able to pay for healthcare for average working citizens. This is real money that keeps getting tossed around. When we looked at the budget for Suffolk County, it was like $1,400 a year for each household to fund police. I mean, think about that. So we are talking about hundreds of millions of billions of dollars being funneled into one organization that represents a very small number of people and hundreds of billions of dollars not going to pay for people’s healthcare or for childcare or for whatever, for education, you name it. So this is not a minor, this is a kind of a crux issue. And I think Sean, as you point out, these people are really the warriors on behalf of the oligarchy.

So yeah, I just want to make that point because that money struck me, $110 million. What could we do with that?

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

The Suffolk County Police Department has a billion dollar budget. It’s insane that the amount of money that goes into these six figure pensions for the rest of your life, for the rest of your life, but yet I might not even get my social security one day, but yet they get from. They’re going to get six figures for the rest of their life.

Stephen Janis:

For the rest of their lives. Yeah. I mean, it’s extraordinary. And Suffolk County’s like the hotbed of crime that I

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Know of. No, it’s not. You know what they do? You know what they do, Steven? Again, I like the rank and file people of Suffolk County. I do. People, I’ll probably get chewed up for that. I like the rank and file officers because I think they’re pretty cool guys, but it’s the system, the police union, the administration. But what they do is they hide behind firehouses and just sit there all night long and just hang out. That’s what they do.

Stephen Janis:

Right. Right. Meanwhile, collecting $100,000 a year. Yeah. 200,

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

300, 400, $500,000 a year, that much.

Stephen Janis:

I mean, Suffolk County’s like Stony Brook University and a couple malls. I mean, seriously, a billion dollars, what? What’s going on there?

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Keep us safe.

Taya Graham:

I wanted to say there have been some really great comments. And unfortunately, I didn’t get to ask some of the questions that were on the screen. So I just want to shout out a few people. I see Garden State Accountability, San Joaquin Valley Transparency. Otto, the watchdog is out there. Hey, Otto. It’s good to see you. How are you? One of our favorites. Leroy Truth. There’s a vigilance committee. Joe Kool is out there holding it down in the comment section. I love it. Big Nick South. Saw Rice Krispy. So I just want to make sure. I’m sorry if I didn’t get to mention everybody, but the comments are kind of flying by. I just want to thank all of you for participating. And I just want to ask, and there’s a great question on the screen of whether or not people. They want to know, do we think that this kind of cop watching, this kind of auditing, this kind of First Amendment activism, do you think it’s making a difference?

That was a question. It’s a good question. I’m so sorry. The name flew by too fast for. But I want you to know out there whoever’s in live chat, that was a great question. So Sean, I just wanted to ask you, do you think it’s making a difference?

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

I think it’s making a difference. I don’t think it’s making enough of a difference, but I do believe it’s making a difference. Even in the last five years, there’s a bunch of, you just named a bunch of people. There’s so many people that came before me. I’ve been doing this for five years. These people have been doing this for the last decade, 15 years. And I give them all the respect in the world for starting this. And I think it’s made a huge difference, but not enough of a difference. And I think law enforcement officers, they won’t just grab you and arrest you at a traffic stop anymore. No as much. I’ve noticed that when I walk into a public building now, most people, they’re like, oh, they know what you’re doing and everything else. And they treat you with respect and just the basics that should have been happening from day one.

But they don’t want to be famous online or infamous, I should say, online. So I think all of us together have really accomplished a lot. And I think my platform is really branching out into actually investigating in particular mayors, particular just like Lee Roy Truth or others out there who are focused then on one person or one organization. Because I feel like over the last five years, I’ve been stretched out and I feel like I’ve failed my county. Again, I’m proud one raised resident, Suffolk County, Long Island. And I feel like I failed my county by not taking this police union head on from the start. I’ve been all over the place from California and Hawaii, Florida and everywhere in between. And I think I need to focus my resources in one area and be able to really affect change, maybe even run for a legislator just to make them, even if it’s just to make them

Stephen Janis:

Spend money against me. Wait, wait, wait. So you’re going to run for office?

Taya Graham:

I’m

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Thinking about running for legislator in Suffolk County.

Stephen Janis:

That’s news. Okay. Can we just break news? We just break news.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

I mean, listen, my legislator, I looked it up. He won with 8,000 votes. Oh my

Stephen Janis:

God. I’ve got an audience of a million. You got

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

The senate. My district is like 75,000. So 8,000. Get out to vote people. Come on. Whoever supports the police unit support, vote the opposite. I don’t care if it’s a Democrat or a Republican. Whoever the police unit supports, vote for the opposite of that person. Whatever it is.

Taya Graham:

That’s solid platform. That’s a solid platform. We

Stephen Janis:

Are covering your campaign beginning to end. One thing I want to say –

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Great campaign. I got the billboard truck already. It’s going to be great.

Taya Graham:

You’re

Stephen Janis:

Already

Taya Graham:

Halfway there.

Stephen Janis:

Taya’s from Long Island. My family’s from Long Island. Several of our other coworkers, we have a very strong Long Island.

Taya Graham:

We’re Long Island strong here at The Real News. So

Stephen Janis:

Just so you know, we’re in solidarity with you on Long Island.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely. Absolutely. I spent summers in Stony Brook in Suffolk County. And I spent summers in Stoney. I know how quiet it is. Okay. Last question. Last question, you guys, so we can wrap up. I just wanted to ask what you envision for the future of your work and perhaps kind of YouTube auditing in general. Do you think it’s going to evolve? Do you think the police are going to push back harder or where do you think we go from here? Because I think there’s going to be an auditor summit coming up. There are people who still want to get involved, become auditors, become First Amendment activists, become cop watchers, but there are some challenges there. So what do you see as its future?

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Yeah. I’m familiar with the 1A auditor summit that’s supposed to be held next year. And I think it’s important. I kind of got into it already. I think it’s evolved to where. One of the things that frustrated me about First Amendment auditing is that there was never any follow up. And I think that’s what I would see somebody whose rights get violated and then I would never know what happened after that. I would never see them file a complaint. I would never see the results of the complaint. We all know that they’re going to investigate themselves and find out what we’re doing, but take that step because it’s important to show that’s part of the story. It’s important to show that you are filing a complaint with Internal Affairs who’s supposed to be an independent part of the police department, which they’re not. And it is important to show that they’re going to unsubstantiate it.

When your own eyes tell you exactly what happened, they will lie to you straight to your face. And I think it’s important for follow up. And I think more and more, I’m starting to investigate more into an investigative journalism kind of phase where I’m looking at the numbers, I’m looking at the papers. I’m talking to informants sources that are. I just got off the phone with a former law enforcement officer right before I almost was late because I was talking to a former law enforcement officer giving me all this information. And it’s important to evolve what you’re doing and to be passionate about it. And I think that moving forward, I think people like Leroy Truth, there are so many others out there that have really changed when it comes to actually focusing on particular issues and really digging into those issues because recording in public spaces is very important.

Recording law enforcement on a traffic stop is very important because it shows you what happens when power is challenged in any little way. These people with their ego, when you challenge their ego, I was arrested by Lucavillo because I said, “You’re such a tough guy, then do it. Let’s be real. Not because I broke the law. It’s because I went there asking questions about how his agencies are costing us hundreds of millions of dollars and I challenged his ego.” And he couldn’t control his emotions. Now imagine when you see those people, when you see these videos of these law enforcement officers who can’t control their emotions, if they’re doing it to me, if that man, Lucivillo, the police union president, is willing to do that to me, somebody with over two million subscribers across social media, hundreds of millions of views, what do you think he’s doing to John Smith down the street with no family, no money?

Stephen Janis:

Exactly.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

They run them through the system. The process is the punishment. The difference is that what law enforcement hasn’t figured out yet is that the process isn’t the punishment when it comes to people like me because the process, you’re thinking of I’m being punished. I’m not because I have a bunch of supporters that help me out with legal bills. I have a bunch of supporters that will write letters. So the process isn’t the punishment for me, but they’re so ingrained in that kind of way of thinking that this might not hold up in court. It’s probably not going to hold up in court, but he gets to sit in jail for seven hours. He has to pay a lawyer. He’s going to end up taking a deal anyway. And at the end of the day, if it all goes to shit, it’s going to get paid by his money anyway, taxpayer money.

It’s not going to affect me in any way. I’m not going to be held accountable.

Taya Graham:

Steven, let me ask you, what do you see as the future? I mean, you worked on that documentary, I am But the Mirror. You should know a little bit about Copwatching by now.

Stephen Janis:

Well, first thing I want to say is my editor-in-chief Max is in my ear and he’s telling me that this truck is on order for our billboard truck. So yes, I’ve been informed. I wanted to break that news that we will have the Tay and Steven billboard truck in operation shortly. But I think Sean injects creativity into journalism. I mean, journalists, we have a little high priestess sort of priest sort of feeling about bureaucratic. We can be a little bureaucratic and a little full of ourselves. And people like Sean come in and say, “Well, I’ve got a whole new way of approaching this, billboard truck included.” And I think that creativity is what flows from copwatchers because they went out – Yeah, that’s a great way to describe it. And they’re evolving, right? Sean says, “Yeah, I used to first film cops. Now I’m investigating overtime and going through public records and making record requests and following up.” It’s like we’re watching a whole new sort of journalism emerge.

And I think what’s great about copwatchers is they challenge the orthodoxy of what we do, which has a lot of orthodoxy in it and a lot of assumptions we make about the aesthetics of it, how it should be done. And Sean says, “No, I’m going to do it this way.” And actually it’s really effective and kind of very similar to what we do, but it kind of gives us a new way of looking at it. I mean, I have learned a tremendous amount from the copwatching auditing community as a journalist myself who came from a very conventional background. I work for a newspaper. If anyone knows what that is, I’m not sure if people are familiar with them, but they used to be delivered in your mailbox. And so I myself have said, wow, that’s a really cool way of approaching this. Or wow, I never thought of that.

Or just exposing things like now that I’m looking into the Connecticut State Pension System, thanks primarily to Sean and his encounter and what happened with Sergeant Hayes. So I think it’s a great way, a catalyst for journalism to change and evolve and adopt to an audience where audiences are, which is on YouTube and Instagram and places where Sean is quite popular. So yeah, it’s a good thing for all of us. And I’m looking forward to driving that truck

Taya Graham:

To Capital. Steven, that’s such a great point. I mean, in a way, you’re kind of making me think that it’s not as much about the future of copwatchers, but are journalists going to become more like cop watchers? Are we going to become more independent, more creative, more untethered from institutions, which can be controlling? We’re very fortunate as independent journalists that work for a nonprofit org to let you know, if we get five views on this or five million views on this, we don’t get a single nickel more. We’re a nonprofit org. We don’t run any ads on our channel. So literally we can report on what we want. So we are so lucky to be independent in that way. And I think copwatchers and the power that they show that basically a regular person who cares, who cares about transparency, excuse me, transparency, accountabilities, got a camera, willing to follow the money and do the work can actually make a difference in their community and help protect people and make change.

So I think if anything, if journalists are smart, they’re going to become a little bit more like copwatchers.That’s

Stephen Janis:

What I’ll say. Maybe should all become copwatchers. I’m an auditor. Sean, do you think I qualify to be an auditor or a copwatcher?

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

I’ve seen the work that you’ve done in Baltimore, both of you, and you guys do great work and I think you’d be perfect copwatcher. Thank you. And listen, I got to say that part of it’s waking up the public. The public is asleep. And sometimes you need a billboard truck, a flashy billboard truck to wake them up. I totally agree what you said, Steven. The institutions of journalism and everything else allegedly. I hate it when journalists say, allegedly, when I just watched the guy get punched in the face and allegedly he was punched in the face. And it’s too cutesy, too wanting. Instead of trying not to take a side because you don’t want to be part of the story and you don’t want to be in journalism. I’m going to tell this objectively. Sometimes there is no two sides to the story. Sometimes the police unions are just corrupt and you got to call them corrupt.

Stephen Janis:

Anything we say in journalism is like, it’s either raining or it’s sunny, but it’s not like there’s two sides to that, right? So yeah, good point.

Taya Graham:

You know what? I just have to say some of the folks, for example, Liberty Freak says that the police are going to push back harder. And you have a good point. I mean, I was just thinking about how there’s somewhere between 80,000 to 120,000 flop cameras across the country. The surveillance state is increasing. At the same time where there’s laws being made to say, stay further back while you’re recording, stay further back while you’re recording for us regular folks. Sure. Yeah. So it’s going to be interesting. Police like to

Stephen Janis:

Turn the cameras on up. As Sean has pointed out, they don’t like to have the cameras turned

Taya Graham:

On up. Exactly. Exactly. So Sean, we want to thank you so much for your time. And before you go, people want to know about the tiger painting. I’m sorry. I think

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

We’re going to get to that. So I’ll show it. This is not my portrait. I am in a hotel in Louisiana right now, so I have no idea what this is. And I was interested when I first saw it in my hotel room too. Okay.

Taya Graham:

So it’s not a family heirloom. Okay.

Stephen Janis:

No. So people are asking about a painting in

Taya Graham:

This

Stephen Janis:

Hotel

Taya Graham:

Room. Well, because Steven can’t see it. So there’s a tiger and this pretty woman wearing a dress with kind of like a boostier and petting a giant tiger. I’ll show you a screenshot of it later. It’s quite a shot. That’s pretty cool. Sean Paul, we have to thank you so much for your time. We took up more of it than we should have. I apologize for that. Thank you so much. We really appreciate you so much, your work, your willingness to speak about it, and your very singular insights into government accountability. And we look forward to speaking to you again soon and going to Washington DC with you.

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Love it. Can’t wait.

Taya Graham:

Thank you for

Sean Paul Reyes (Long Island Audit):

Having me and keep up the group work. Thank you

Taya Graham:

So much. Oh, thank you. You as well. Take care. Thank you. Okay. Steven, how was that for a conversation? I am so amazed about the things we learned from folks about talking about police power. And of course, one of my favorite topics, cop watchers. I got to do it. I got to say it again. Anyone who’s interested in the subject, check out the documentary, I’m But the Mirror. Steven, hold it up. Oh, okay. Sorry. Yeah. The story of American Copwatching and either Lacey R. Noli D. That’s me right there. If one of you put a link in the chat, I would very much appreciate it. And I just want to thankry a goofball. Everyone who was in the comments. And I really do apologize if I didn’t get to everyone’s comments. I tried to, with Max’s help, to put as many comments on the screen as I could.

And I just want to thank every single one of you that took the time to show up at this live. I appreciate it so much. And I’m going to make a point later on tonight to go through the comments that you guys leave underneath, give out some hearts, give some of my own personal responses. And I’m also going to go back to doing a comment of the week. So your comment might end up being highlighted on our channel if you take the time to make one. So if you can take a moment to leave a comment, maybe give us a little thumbs up, we really do appreciate it so much. So Steven, I’ve got to give you a chance before we sign off. Well, okay. And before I say thank you to all of our patreons, before I sign off, do you have any thoughts about tonight’s

Stephen Janis:

Discussion? Yeah, no. I mean, it was really interesting. And I think we’ve created a vicious cycle of comedy on comments, the comment on comments.

Taya Graham:

It’s very meta.

Stephen Janis:

It’s totally meta, so I’m pretty happy. But this is really cool to have this kind of debate and have the opportunity to hear what people think, because that really informs everything we do. If you don’t give feedback, you don’t think we read comments because sometimes you get like eight or hundred or thousand. I read a big majority of them and this time we really went through them. And what emerged was a really interesting dynamic debate that should be had every day about democracy, about journalism, about what we do, about how we should do it. That’s a great point. About how government kind of hoards resources and then uses them to attack us. And then how people on Long Island Audits are being creative and approaching it in their own way. I wish they had these debates when we go to conferences on journalism. I’d be much more interested to hear what people had to

Taya Graham:

Say

Stephen Janis:

If they were this vital.

Taya Graham:

So all

Stephen Janis:

Credits to the people on YouTube and to Long Island Audits for the way they bring out people and to talk about this. You don’t hear people debating democracy other than on CNN with a bunch of highly paid hairstylists. This is great because this is the people talking.

Taya Graham:

Yes.

Stephen Janis:

And more I hear, the better I feel about democracy.

Taya Graham:

Oh, Steven, that’s actually really beautiful. Yeah. It’s really beautiful. And I’m so glad – And the truck. And the truck. And the truck.

Stephen Janis:

And

Taya Graham:

That’s why I’m really so glad that we had this discussion and this debate to let people know we really do pay attention to your comments. And these spaces on social media, I think in particular YouTube, are places where we can really show that our democracy is so vital, that our First Amendment is still incredibly important. And that there’s real lifeblood in us that wants to have a healthy, equitable society where there’s not government overreach that is harmful. I agree. I agree. Honestly, Steven, our civic life in a lot of ways is becoming more and more precarious. And I think the right to disagree and to dissent is the most important part of it. Agreed. I mean, it’s the mechanism that keeps our democracy healthy. I would say this, this will be my little rant.

Stephen Janis:

Okay.

Taya Graham:

The right to dissent is a critical ingredient of our democracy, or if you’d like to call it constitutional republic. If you think about it, the right to vote is a form of dissent. It’s a right to express your disagreement with the people in power by voting to remove them. It’s actually the most potent form of communal dissent, actually. Our ability to collectively express dissatisfaction with political leaders and effectuate change is fundamental to who we are. But as Steven pointed out, it’s a facet of our system that can be easily manipulated or eliminated altogether. And it’s fragile and often challenging to preserve. Otherwise, I think copwatchers like Sean Paul wouldn’t continue to be arrested if the right to dissent was not in some sense provisional. So keeping dissent healthy and vibrant requires work. And that work can often lead to uncomfortable truths. So one of those truisms is that dissent, which makes us uncomfortable, is just as important to protect as that which we agree.

So what do I mean? So let me give a little bit of an analogy to explain. So imagine our collective discourse is a spectrum, a broad range of frequencies and colors intertwined, but separate. And in many ways, a spectrum of light is nature’s representation of the great Variety of colors and frequencies, all separate but equal, just like all of us in our different voices and ideas. And we need all of it because all of it is us. But acknowledging the existence of the spectrum requires acknowledging its full intensity. Let me give you an example. When noted cop watcher Eric Brandt, let’s say some people would say he provoked cops and waves, and please excuse my language, he waved a flag that said F cops. Well, a lot of people were made uncomfortable. And when Sean Paul shows up at a police union spontaneously, some people think his tactics are aggressive or even rude, but dissent does not always conform to our expectations of politeness or comportment.

It doesn’t always work when it complies with our expectations. Not every disagreement can be settled by a stoic debate or a polite exchange or even nuanced, reasonable discourse, even though sometimes I wish it could. No, I think sometimes these extremes are necessary to help keep the entire concept healthy. Sometimes more vibrant or discordant colors are necessary. Sometimes a more extreme approach is critical to making our entire project of finding ways to hold power accountable through public pushback, relevance. Sometimes dissent is just going to be ugly whether we like it or not. But my point is here that ultimately dissent must be created to survive. It must evolve to exceed the limits, as Steven pointed out, of the authoritarian impulses that exist within every government. It must be something that can accommodate citizen journalists with cell phones just as much as it protects reporters for the New York Times or Washington Post.

It has to be flexible, adaptable, and sometimes even confrontational. But the key is it’s up to us to define it. That is we, the people. It’s up to us to judge and debate what works and what doesn’t. It’s up to us to decide what we support and what we don’t. And that’s why we had this debate tonight and that’s why we ask for your comments. That’s why we do what we do. It’s an essential part of who we are. Proponents of free speech and protectors of the right of others to criticize our government and even us. Key to preserving it is discussions like this. And cop watchers are part of that recipe and so are you. So please help us fight for it together and argue like true Americans with courage and conviction and freedom to speak the truth even loudly to each other. And in the end, that’s all we have.

And I hope it’s all we’ll need. Once again –

Stephen Janis:

Very well done.

Taya Graham:

That’s my rant.

Stephen Janis:

It was a great

Taya Graham:

Rant. I had to do it.

Stephen Janis:

I agree with it entirely.

Taya Graham:

Well, Steven, I want to thank you for all the work you did to make this livestream possible today. Thank you so much. It was a very robust conversation. It

Stephen Janis:

Was. And we can disagree too. We disagree a lot of times. So just so people know.

Taya Graham:

Yeah.

Stephen Janis:

It’s not all perfect

Taya Graham:

Here. No, we actually agree pretty often. Except when we just disagreed now.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, we just disagreed that we didn’t agree. Oh my God. Irony.

Taya Graham:

Okay. And I also want to thank Long Island Auditor’s time today and all the amazing folks that showed up in the live chat. Thank all of you. And I have to give a very special thanks to moderators Noli D and Lacey R for their support. Thank you both. Hi, Noeli D and hi to Ryan. Can I just

Stephen Janis:

Say quickly how good

Taya Graham:

Long

Stephen Janis:

Island Audits is? How good he is and how interesting? You’re

Taya Graham:

Going to blow your objective journalism cover here if you do that.

Stephen Janis:

Okay.

Taya Graham:

Right. I take that back. It’s not supposed to be about interviewing people we like or don’t like. It’s about to do the world. No, I’m just saying that

Stephen Janis:

His interview

Taya Graham:

Was

Stephen Janis:

Really good. He brings up a lot of points that surprise me. And yeah, so go ahead. I’m sorry. I just wanted to say that.

Taya Graham:

No, you absolutely have the right to say that. I just don’t want people to think that you were biased. Okay.

Stephen Janis:

Good point.

Taya Graham:

But you’re right. He was a terrific interview and that is fair to say. But we have to thank our very special helpers who might be unseen. Maxime Alvarez. Oh yes. Thank you, Max. Who’s getting the truck apparently. Jocelyn, Brian and Corey for moral support. And like I said, at the very end, I’m going to thank every individual Patreon. So I’m just letting you know because I love my patrons. I do. And I’ve got to say it, I want you watching to know that if you have video evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please share it with us and we might be able to investigate for you. Please reach out to us. You can email us tipsprivately at par@therealnews.com and share your evidence of police misconduct. You can also message us at Police Accountability Point on Facebook or Instagram or at Eyesonpolice on Twitter. And of course you can always message me directly at TeasBaltimore on Twitter or Facebook or Tea Graham on Facebook or Instagram.

And please like and comment. You know I read your comments and appreciate them. I think we proved that we read your comments. And we’re probably going to have a Patreon link pinned in the comments and maybe even the live chat below for accountability reports. So if you feel inspired to donate, please do. You know we don’t run ads or take corporate dollars, so anything could spare is greatly appreciated. And as you see, I do shout out my patreons. My name is Tea Graham. I’m your host of Police Accountability Report. And for all of you, please be safe out there.

And now we’re my patrons. Real quick, I got to run through. I got to thank these good people. Are you ready, Steven? Hang on. Yes. I’m going to try to do this. Okay. Matter of rights, Tamara Anderson, XXX, Chris Robinson, David Keeley, Ronald Hensley, Gary T, David Bach, BD Gates, Calvin Mack, True Too Blive, Martin G. Nope. Talia B. Louie, Artemis LA, Lacey R. Steven J, John P. Alan J, Kyle R. Keith Bernard, M. Marcia E. Don T. Kipke, Cameron J. Joe Six, Donald, sorry, Daniel W, Frank FK, Mary M. John K. Kurt A, Steven B, John M. Conrad B, Siggy Young, Joel A, Patty Blibbets, Sescal Samian, Jimmy Touchdown, who is my very first patron. Thank you. Bill D, Rhym P. John K. Dean C. Umish H. Graham Graham, B. Joseph P. Durdevil, William T. G. Kemmy, Steven D. Just my two cents, Peter J, Sean Best, Julius Geezer, Linda Orr.

Hi, Linda Orr. Cindy K. Social Naturalist. Douglas P. Tim R. Laurie. L. D.B.M. Hugo Flores Noli D. Chris M. Shussant. Kimmy Kat P. Janet K. Omar O. Potshot and Ron Fried. Thank you. You guys are great. We appreciate you, and I hope you all have a great night. Take care. Take care. We appreciate you. Say goodbye, Steven.

Stephen Janis:

Bye.

Taya Graham:

Be safe out there, folks. Be safe.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez: I’m here in the Mexican American Council Building in Saginaw, Michigan, and I’m sitting with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who is running to represent Michigan in the United States Senate. Brother Abdul, great to see you again, man. Thanks for joining me. I really appreciate it.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: An honor.

Maximillian Alvarez: And we first met when you were running for governor here in Michigan in 2018.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: Feels like yesterday. It feels like 15 years ago.

Maximillian Alvarez: Exactly. Both a day ago and a lifetime ago. And I think the circumstances around each election can sort of trick us into feeling like they’re very similar moments. When you were running in 2018, the question was how are Democrats going to respond to Trump? But also, who’s going to inherit the Bernie Sanders mantle? AOC just won. And so you were part of that progressive cohort. And now we kind of have a similar situation. How are Democrats going to respond to Trump winning again? Zorn Mamdani just won in New York. Who’s going to inherit the progressive movement? But these are two very different moments and you’re a very different person than you were back then. I wanted to ask to start how you would characterize the differences between that campaign and this one.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: Let me break it down two ways. There’s where we are as a country, and then there’s the growth that you do as a person. I think where we are as a country, this is a moment where I think, to be honest, we had failed to learn the central lesson of Trumpism. I think a lot of folks felt like the record had skipped, that there was this mistake. And they didn’t see the fact that Donald Trump was exploiting a foundational pain in people. And I said this thing at the time, I think that was just, it was premature and most folks didn’t see it. Donald Trump himself is not the disease of our politics. He’s just the worst symptom of the disease of our politics. And the disease is the system that allows corporations and billionaires and would be oligarchs to buy and sell politicians to do their bidding.
You watch as they use their power to suppress our wages for the work that we have to do and to raise our prices for the things we have to buy. And I think this time around, people are recognizing that actually we dealt with the symptom, but we didn’t deal with the disease. And as a doctor, I’ll tell you, if you only deal with the symptom and you don’t deal with the disease, it comes back roaring worse. And that’s exactly what’s happened now. So I think folks are a lot more interested in authentic engagement with the structures of our system. Even now though, you got a lot of corporate folks out there who just want to deal with the symptoms. They’re like, oh, affordability? Okay. I’ll make one thing more affordable for you. It’d be great. And they’re like, no, there’s a structure underneath affordability. There’s a reason why everything accelerates in the wrong direction always.
And if you don’t deal with the foundational infrastructure, you’re not going to deal with the outcome. I’ve grown up a bit. I was 32, never run for office in my life. I had one and a half years of public service, two years of public service under my belt. Didn’t have any kids, lived in my in-law’s basement. I’m 41 now with two kids and a mortgage. And I’ll tell you, there’s something you learn about yourself when you have kids. And I think more than anything, it puts a patina on your soul in the sense that your kid walks into your bed, they piss your bed, and then you have to clean them and your bed while they’re pitching a tantrum in the middle of the night. Which is, to be fair, really unfair. But you’re like, “Hey, the baby, it’s okay. It’s all right. No worries.
It’s okay.” And it’s that ability, I think, to just have to metabolize more of life. That I think for me is probably the big difference.
I also, I think I learned a lot about life is short, but it’s also quite long. And one of the frustrations I think I have with some folks in our movement sometimes is that we want people to agree on the critique. And we always break apart on the critique. It’s not about the critique, it’s about the outcome. And I think the more you could focus on how you want the world to be like and get people to agree to that, even if they come at it with different perspectives, I think the better off we are. And I think that’s probably what I’ve learned over time.

Maximillian Alvarez: I’m thinking about what you were saying about having kids and the way it changes your worldview. And I wholeheartedly agree. There’s a foundational, existential humbling that comes with having kids and getting your ass beat once in your life. And you can tell the people in politics who have had neither of those

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: Things. Well, I’d had the first one.
Delivered a couple myself, but I’ve had the first one. The second one, right? To be honest, having kids, to your point, that humbling nature of it, because it never ends. There’s always something. I give all the credit to my wife, Sarah. She’s a real MVP. And I’m just in awe of all that she has to do every day because of what I’m doing right now. But there is something about recognizing you’re trying to cherish something vulnerable for what it could be. And isn’t that what we’re trying to do here? And I think it also forces you to contend with pain quite a bit. And for me, I’ve trained as a doctor and that training’s been really useful for me because both doctors and politicians have to be really good at being able to sit with other people’s pain and to speak truth to pain. It’s true truth to power, but also truth to pain.
And I think having a kid has really brought that’s crystallized that in a certain way because you kind of understand the project. You know what I mean? Taking care of you because I love you. And I also love what you could be, even if I don’t love what you’re being right now. You know what I mean? And I think those are the moments that your kids test you the most. And you get tested like that enough times. You come out in political circumstances and you’re like, at least you’ve been pissed my bed.

Maximillian Alvarez: I agree with you, but by that definition, my mom would be a great politician because I test her a lot. And let’s talk about how you’ve grown as a person, but also as a politician –

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: I’m waiting for the Mama Alvarez congressional.

Maximillian Alvarez: Oh man. Yeah. Mama Alvarez would take it, baby. But you’ve grown as a politician as well. Your career in public service and my career in journalism almost started around the same time. And again, you know this because I was the Cub reporter on your gubernatorial campaign bus being like, “What am I doing?” And

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:: Wrote one of my favorite profiles then. So I was really grateful. A good journalist can see the thing beyond or the depth, the structure of the thing. And I appreciated that then.

Maximillian Alvarez: Thank you, man. I appreciate that. And I wanted to ask, how have you changed in those 10 years, especially let’s focus on the work that you did in Wayne County to prepare you to be qualified for US Senate?

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: Yeah. There’s a couple pieces there. I had run a health department, but the Wayne County department was just a lot more complex. 550 FTEs across all the programs that you run, the contracts that you oversee, et cetera. And $172 million budget, all kinds of moving parts in a bureaucracy that can be really difficult to negotiate and manage. And you’re working with everything from federally funded programs to state funded programs to county programs. You’re managing constituencies. And more than anything else, you are responsible for a particular thing for a particular group of people. And I think negotiating all of those moving parts for me was really valuable in a space like the county. And also just deepening my relationships with the community in Wayne County. Wayne County is Michigan’s largest, most diverse county, about a fifth of the state’s population. You got all kinds of different communities.
Downriver community, predominantly working class, black or white. You’ve got Dearborn, you’ve got the city of Detroit, of course. And thinking through the ways that you have to build coalitions around the work that you can do to deliver for everybody. And then there’s the technical part of things. And as a public health director, you’re responsible for a very technical set of things. So to me, the space of public service I’ve always been most excited about is how do you bring the technical, the practical and the political together? And you think about where we are in the Senate right now, you think about what we lack. We lack the political will to actually take on Trump and also to articulate what we’re fighting for and not just what we’re against. We lack a lot of technical skills in terms of understanding some of the leading edge questions of our time, whether it’s AI or rebuilding a public health infrastructure that RFK Jr.
Is all but ruining right now. You think about what it means to take on the healthcare challenges we have. We’re fighting for subsidies, for health insurance for 25 million people when we should really be having the conversation about whether or not 350 million people should have to worry about premiums at all. But these are technical questions that are political and practical in their nature. And so I think for all of those reasons, going back to public service, being engaged on the ground will make me a better public servant. The last thing I’ll say is this. At the end of the day, these issues, the rubber hits the road in city and county government. We don’t have folks who’ve served in these rules in the Senate all too often where you actually have to look people in the eye and say, “Here’s how you get this thing done.
And here’s the service we can render to you.” And I hope I can bring that. So whether it’s the technical skill set when it comes to healthcare, we haven’t had a Democratic doctor in the Senate since 1969. Never had a public health official in the US Senate. Whether it is the practical part of it, understanding how is this legislation that we put together going to impact Ms. Sue’s life living in downriver. And then it’s the political work of bringing people together around building and moving, I think is a good preparation all around.

Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and kind of bringing that back into the climate that we’re in. I’m going to ask you basically a similar version to the same question that I asked Beto O’Rourke when I got the chance to. Because I imagine you would agree, but my sense from the coverage we’ve done is that the 2024 election was less of a referendum on how much people love Donald Trump than it was a referendum on how much people hate the Democrats. And the people’s faith in the Democratic Party is in the basement right now, especially on top of a year of doing what feels like virtually nothing to stop Trump. Caving on the longest government shutdown in our history while people are watching their SNAP benefits, their healthcare disappear before their eyes. So the question there is like, is why run as a Democrat? And how are you going to address that lack of faith and prove that this isn’t just the right message that you’re going to meet people’s needs?

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: Yeah. I know what I’m about. And Democratic Party hasn’t always met my needs. I think a lot of people out there feel like they’re Democrats by hostage situation. You look at the other guys and you’re like, “That’s crazy.” And then you look at the Democrats and you’re like, “I don’t know what’s worse.” Being cruel and crazy or being feckless in the face of being cruel and crazy. Now, the party is so far away from its voters. The majority of Democrats out there, when I talk to them out at Democratic clubs or indivisible or you name the organization that I’m out, they are so far away from the party elders who hold all the power. And I think we have an opportunity as a party to molt. Out with the old, in with what the people underneath the party really want. And I’ve said this for a very long time.
The problem with Democrats is too often they’re taking money from the very same people who created the problem. So now you’re in this weird position of trying to articulate a solution to the problem that includes the people who created the problem. That makes sense. I don’t take over money. I never have. I never will. And I understood from the day I started in politics that that wasn’t the big issue. And so when folks look at me, they say, at least I know what he believes because he’s not bought. And I think the party could do the same thing. Say what you will about Donald Trump. He’s got a coherent narrative. You out of a job. Immigrant took your job. Out of a home. Immigrant took your home. Out of healthcare. Immigrant took your healthcare. That’s his narrative. Simple, easy to understand, dead wrong. We could have a narrative too.
Out of a job, corporation offshored or automated your job. Out of healthcare, corporation squeezed you out of healthcare. Out of a home, corporation speculated that you can’t afford a home. But when you’re taking money from corporations, guess what you’re not going to say? So you come with your little list of 10 point policy plans that’s going to deliver something for maybe somebody 10 years from now. It’s bullshit. So I think the party could be better and I’m running to make it better. So I’m a Democrat with lowercase D, and I hope someday we can win the fight for what the Democratic Party can be. And I’m not willing to let go of all that infrastructure because a few folks who can’t let go of power say that it’s theirs.

Maximillian Alvarez: Do you feel hopeful about other people running as Democrats that you’ll be among a cohort of people who believe that?

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: I hope so. I hope so. I think there are some folks out there who see the issue, working to try and address it, and we’re going to have to build power. No one US Senator is going to solve all the problems. I mean, one out of 100 senators, 1% of the US Senate, always, that’s all you are. So you better figure out how to build the team. But I also think that we’ve given up on persuasion. Democrats do this thing where Donald Trump’s out there persuading people left, right, center all the time. And we’re out here trying to run a poll and figure out where people are and then speak right to the poll. So what happens is the public’s moving in one direction and we keep speaking to where that is. We can be like, “Well, immigration’s not a popular issue.” I was like, “Are you kidding me?
Shredding the damn constitution over it.” Popular issue. I don’t give a damn.This is the issue of our time and you don’t want to talk about it, but also talk about it in a way that’s complete. So you get a lot of people who talk about immigration as this esoteric abstract thing that sits on a mantle and we just admire it. I mean, democracy was broken the day corporations started to buy elections. That didn’t just happen. We’re at death’s door now, but we’ve been here. We’ve been sick. And so why don’t you talk about it in ways that are actually fully complete? Hey, every time a corporation comes in and buys off a politician, that kills your democracy a little bit. But most of these folks who want us to talk about democracy now didn’t feel it when that happened. And I think we got to talk about it completely.

Maximillian Alvarez: I want to talk about what that means for where we are sitting right now in Saginaw, Michigan. And I have a special attachment to this place. My wife grew up here. I have a lot of in-laws who live around here. My wife’s family had generations of men work in the old GM plant up the road. It is a cold, hard, but beautiful place with a lot of families, with a lot of deep roots. A lot of immigrant families going from back to Poland, Germany, Mexican and other Latino immigrants, a lot of black folks who came up during the Great Depression. People don’t give towns like Saginaw credit for how complex and beautiful they actually are. But in many ways, this is the archetypal rust belt

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: Town.

Maximillian Alvarez: I mean, there is a lot of pride. There’s a lot of joy. There’s a lot of family here. There’s also a lot of boarded up windows. There’s a lot of blight. There’s a lot of pain. There’s a lot of poverty and economic devastation. So why is it important for you to come to a place like Saginaw? And again, moving past the sort of democratic messaging, I guess my question is not how do you hope to reach people who live in places like Saginaw, but what can you and other politicians do for places like Saginaw?

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: Yeah. The simple question, how do you reach? You come. We’re here. You know what I mean? This is not my first time in Saginaw. It’s not going to be my last time in Saginaw. And then I think the way you reach folks is to be vulnerable with them. I can’t solve all the problems, but I can’t tell you why the problems exist. And I can tell you I’m going to try like hell to take it on. And then I think you need to go back to that point that I was making to be a really good listener to people’s pain and to try to forge that pain into purpose. I can’t solve it. Anybody walks in here is like, “I’m going to fix your problems.” No, you’re not. We can solve it. And if I can be a vessel that helps to create something that can organize us and can impose what it is that we’ve been asking for, for a very long time into power, then I think we can solve it.
We can’t solve it tomorrow, but we can solve it in due time. And I’ll tell you that the analogy here to medicine is clear. Somebody gets a cancer diagnosis. You want to tell them you’re going to be fine. It’s bullshit. If I tell you you’re going to be fine, it’s a lie. But what I can tell you is I’m really sorry that this happened to you. And I can tell you what we know. And I can tell you what we can do. And I can tell you I’m going to sit here and listen for as long as you need me to listen to you. And that I’m going to be your advocate for helping get the best outcome you want.
In this case, it’s not terminal. Places like Saginaw can heal, but not doing the same shit that we’ve been doing. And so in some respects, there is an honesty that you have to tell people. It’s not just always going to be okay or I’m going to solve all your problems. I’m not. I’m going to do my best to help you, to be honest with you about what the problem is, to sit down and think about what our approach moving forward can be, and to fight like hell for you against people who’ve created this problem. And if we can do that and you can trust me to do that, we can build things over time. But it starts there. And I just think there’s a humility and a vulnerability in that.

Maximillian Alvarez: And I know I got to let you go in a minute because you’re about to walk into the next room and participate in a round table with members of the Latino community out here. And I kind of wanted to end

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: On – Well as a Latino myself.

Maximillian Alvarez: Well, that’s why I kind

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: Of wanted – I’m not Latino, but I’ve been mistaken one

Maximillian Alvarez: For

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: Enough times that I’m just like, I kind of get it.

Maximillian Alvarez: I was about to say, it was like you walk into a family party. People would think that you’re, hey, he’s Mexican. I walk into one of yours and be like, “Hey, he’s Egyptian.” Exactly. But that’s kind of where I wanted to go with it. We’re both brown men living in America in 2025. You’re running for office. Your last name is Elsayed. I don’t need to tell you that this is a dangerous exercise. But I wanted to sort of ask for yourself, your family, your children, why is it important to you to run when there are so many forces in America that are trying to keep people like you out of America?

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: Yeah. I spent a lot of my childhood summers in Egypt with my grandmother who’s the smartest person I ever met. And she never got to go to school. So I’ve spent a lot of time with really smart people. The smartest of them was the person whose story would never get told. You would never know she lived. People who got to live with her knew she lived. She was immense. And I saw the chasm and opportunity that I had versus my cousins. So I know what America did for me. And I also know what America fails to do for so many other kids. And so in some respects, I’ve gotten to live a really nice life relative to all my cousins. I’m kind of playing with house money. You know what I mean? So to me is when you’re playing with house money, you put it all back in the center of the table and say, “What can I do to create the America that other kids deserve?
The one that I got.” And at the end of the day, if that’s the value of a life is to create opportunity for other people, that’s the best I can do. And it means so much to me to get to do it because I don’t know what it’s like to be someone whose American identity has a bit of an asterisk on it. And so if my doing this gets to take a little bit more of that asterisk off, gets to erase some of that asterisk, that’s meaningful. More importantly, if there are kids out there who get to manifest and get to live the kind of life that I got to live because of the work that I did, I think that’s the kind of thing that would make my grandmother proud. And that to me is meaningful. How I judge my moral work is like, would my grandmother be proud of this?
So you can get all the titles and all the accolades and all the everything. And there’s a moral simplicity to being able to speak to the right side of right and wrong for someone whose sense of morals were never clouded by what an institution thought. And so I think it’s just put it all back in.

Maximillian Alvarez: And are you scared? And what do you say to people on the campaign trail who are very understandably, justifiably scared right now?

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: Scared. That’s a complicated sort of thing. I think I am scared for where our country is headed. I’m scared I will not do what is my responsibility to do about it. But there is something about. I don’t believe in the term happiness as much as I believe that happiness is a whole bunch of consolation of different things. There is contentment. Eating ice cream, that’s contentment. There’s fulfillment. I got a good workout in. There’s joy, just the excitement of something that’s happy. And I would choose fulfillment over the others every day. And so I know I’m putting everything I can into trying to create opportunity for people who otherwise don’t have it, and that leaves me fulfilled. So in that respect, I think if all of us tried to chase, I did what I could with what I had where I was, I think we can get through this.
And the thing that to me frustrates me the most is that we know enough to be scared. There are a lot of folks out there who are so busy just trying to make life work that they can’t actually think about the broader existential questions at play. And I fear for those folks. See what I mean? Because most of the time those folks’ lives have been a function of circumstances they can’t control. And this all feels a lot worse. So I think that’s probably where my fear comes from.

Maximillian Alvarez: Well, I know we got to get going. All right. Yeah. And what’s, I guess, again, for folks who want to fight back, don’t want to go gently into the night, but are still afraid. They’re afraid of getting abducted by ICE. They’re afraid of getting surveilled online. They’re afraid of not being able to make their house payment. How do we respond to the politics of fear that Trump has risen on? What is the counter message

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: To that? Tell you what I do.
So for a long time I’ve realized that anxiety is, it’s the fear of a future pain. And so what I try to do is just actually think that through. So what would happen? What would that actually feel like? And I process that and I seek to get myself comfortable with the worst possible outcome. And then I think about my life and what I have to lose versus the people I’m trying to fight for. See what I’m saying? And I don’t know. I try to think about what is courage in this moment because that’s what we’re all trying to summon. And I think courage is the ability to be comfortable with your loss of control and to metabolize the pain you might experience.
And pain comes in a lot of different ways. But you see what’s happened over time is that the people with the most power have folded the fastest. And I never want to be that guy. And so I just think that there’s like soul work you have to do to get comfortable losing it all. You know what I mean? And to be okay with the fact that if you’re willing to incur pain so that other people don’t have to, that I think is virtue. And I think it’s important for all of us to actually think through those things and do that exercise and to live in that moment of saying, okay, if this so-and-so were to happen, what would that mean for me? And also just, I’m a person of faith and I believe that there’s another side of the equal sign. That what happens here is not the end.
And so I’m comforted by the idea that if you do what is right here, if you are willing to take pain here for others for the right reasons, that in the end, God doesn’t forsake you. So however people think about that in their belief system, I think these are the moments where you actually have to really reflect on it. Do the spiritual work of asking what begets virtue for you? What begets courage for you?
Because we’re going to need it right now. And that’s the thing is we don’t know really where it’s going to go, but we’re watching the richest and most powerful fold the first. And what that tells you is that we have a certain spiritual failure. You know what I mean? You got the most to lose. What’s the point? I mean, it’s like, what’s the point of having F you money if you can’t say F you? You mean? And in a lot of ways, I’ve been so privileged in this world. All the advantages. What’s the point of having F you privilege if you can’t say F you? You know what I mean? Yeah. At the end of the day. So at some point, you look at Donald Trump and you’re just like, F you. We’re not going to back down.

Maximillian Alvarez: That was the perfect ending spot. So I will close it there. But brother Abdul al-Sayed, thank you so much, man. I really appreciate you. Appreciate it.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today, amidst so much bleak and awful and overwhelming news bombarding us at all times from all over the world, we’re going to do something different and we’re going to talk about some good news for once. Because this week, a new worker-owned cooperative launched in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and it’s called the Pittsburgh Progress. Here’s their story, which you can find on their website. “The Pittsburgh Progress is a cooperative news organization owned and democratically run by its workers and members.

It was formed in the weeks and months after owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announced on January 7th, 2026, their intention to close the newspaper. This move by the post-Gazette came just weeks after unionized workers there had won a strike lasting more than three years. Those workers and their community supporters initially formed the organization Pittsburgh Alliance for People Empowered Reporting or Paper, with a mandate to research the creation of a daily news outlet more deserving of Pittsburgh. Paper quickly resolved that any new publication would, unlike the block-owned Post-Gazette, respect its employees and address the concerns of all working class people in the region. The publication would serve as an essential and sustainable source of communication and connection in the Pittsburgh region. Workers and their supporters decided on a publication name, the Pittsburgh Progress, in a nod to the striking Post-Gazette Workers Award-winning strike publication, The Pittsburgh Union Progress.

Work continues on the Pittsburgh Progress website, marketing strategy, and the building of a newsroom. We continue to raise funds to lift up worker-centered journalism in Western Pennsylvania, and those funds will be used to hire full-time staff and freelance journalists dedicated to looking out for and telling the stories of the working class people who form the heart and soul of our diverse communities.” So to talk about the birth of the Pittsburgh progress and what it means for working people in and beyond Pittsburgh, I am really grateful to be joined once again on the show by some familiar voices. Steve Mellon is a journalist who was on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for more than three years and is now a founding worker member of the Pittsburgh Progress. And Natalie Duleba is a former post-Gazette striker. She serves as local secretary of the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, and is now also a founding worker member of the Pittsburgh Progress.

Natalie, Steve, it is so great to see you both and thank you so much for coming back on the show for over three years while you guys were on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. We’ve gotten to know you and your coworkers over the many conversations that we’ve had on this show, on the Real News Network, when I was at Breaking Points. It’s been a long road. Did you ever think that it would lead you here?

Steve Mellon:

No, I certainly did not. Our hope, I think Natalie probably feels the same way. I won’t speak for you, man and Natalie, but we were hoping to win the strike and get a contract. That was our goal. And we thought we had accomplished that. We had an incredible community support during the strike. That was a long, hard battle. And Max, you know that. You guys cover the strike more than any other publication, more than any other organization, you know that. But we did win the strike. We won. We went back to work. Things were going pretty well. We had a big rally in front of the Post Gazette. All the community showed up to support us. We went back in. Things were going pretty well. I think we were as acrimonious as the strike was, we were working together. We were resolving conflicts. We were actually producing good journalism.

That all changed on January 7th when the company announced it was just. Max, this came just about an hour and a half after the Supreme Court had denied the Post-Gazette’s request for a stay on a healthcare issue that was related to the strike. It was think of the last gasp effort of the owners of the Post-Gazette to delay the consequences for their lawbreaking actions. Don’t forget that this strike was a result of a law-breaking action by the owners of the Post-Gazette. So they announced the closure of the paper within, I think, what, Natalie, two hours or so after that announcement came down that the Supreme Court had denied their request for a stay. They announced the closure of the Post-Gazette. And it’s like at that point, I think that among a lot of us, Max, there was a lot of anger and frustration is that we did all this stuff to win, and yet the system still fails you.

The system’s not going to let workers win. And at that point, I think a lot of us, we were angry, we were frustrated. That very quickly settled into, we have to do something about this. We cannot let this stand. And we had an extraordinary meeting that night. I think January 7th was a Wednesday, Natalie, I believe. And that night we had an extraordinary meeting of our membership and we just decided like, no, we’re not. You learn things about yourself and your community when you strike for three years, about your colleagues. I looked at Natalie and Erin and all the people we’ve been to strike on. I thought we can do whatever we want. We have a community support, we have the skills, we had the talent, we had the determination. And after a series of meetings, we though, let’s form our own publication, one that we can inoculate against corporate abuse, against the influences of money.

And the result was a worker, community-owned cooperative, a multi-stakeholder. So no, I had no idea I’d be in its position to be like a co-owner with so many other people in the community and my coworkers of a publication. So no, I did not expect to be here, but it feels good.

Natalie Duleba:

Yeah. During the strike, our goal was always to get back to work, but also to build a Post-Gazette that ourselves, but also journalists that came after us could build a life with. And the Post-Gazette still remains. The Venetulas Institute for Journalism did buy the Post-Gazette from the blocks. And Steve and I were among the journalists who were not retained, who were not hired by Venetulas. But we do still have former strikers who are at the Post-Gazette doing the good work to get a new contract with new owners. And we’re hoping that the victories that we got during the strike are carried forward in that bargaining. There’s a bargaining session that is happening today.

And I think that the Venetulas at least knows that the journalists of the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh aren’t afraid of a fight. But I think that the strike really taught us that if you want something, you got to get it yourself. And when we were looking at the possibility there was no Post-Gazette, a huge vacuum in Pittsburgh, they’re like, “Well, something should replace it.” And some of the other publications in the city were circling vultures, and some of them have expanded into areas that they weren’t in before. But even with the Post Gazette continuing, the new owners did cut the newsroom by about 40%, 80% of which were strikers. We all have an intimate understanding of the gaps in the coverage and communities that told us during the strike and after the announcement of the closure that they felt underrepresented, misrepresented. Those of us before we were not rehired, we were willing to bring that knowledge and that trust in the community to Venetulus to maybe start to repair the damage and reputation the post-Gazette suffered underneath the blocks.

But they weren’t interested in that, at least from us. So yeah, it is wild to think that we’re building our own news outlet. That’s not something that any of us though was going to happen. We wanted to get back to the post-Gazette, but now we’re in control of our own destiny in a way that we weren’t during the strike. Yes, we were out there fighting for ourselves, but also we’re at the mercy of the slow cogs of the justice system. And this is like we’re setting the pace, we’re doing the work ourselves, and it’s fully under our control, which is really amazing, but it is also a lot. It’s like, it’s our responsibility. Yay. It’s our responsibility.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I know it intimately. Yeah, it’s such a head spinner where you’re like, oh shit. Now we got to do that. Oh shit, we get to do that. It forces you to confront the sort of decision-making that affects our lives on a day-to-day level. And it is both liberating and terrifying to have more of that decision-making power yourself instead of just trusting it to be done for you by our higher ups. But so many of us, for that reason, I don’t think have even considered what it would look like in our day-to-day work lives to have that agency, to have that democratic cooperative sort of model rather than the kind of top-down authoritarian model that we’re all so comfortable and used to, which we’ve been conditioned to be used to by force for many, many generations. But I digress. I wanted to hover on that for a second and ask about your time at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

What did working and striking at a paper like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette teach you about what a project like the Pittsburgh Progress needs to be and why it needs to be?

Steve Mellon:

Well, we learned several things during the strike. Quite honestly, when I was a journalist, I tried to be out on the street a lot and talking to people. But it wasn’t until I went on strike that I was put into conversations with people in various communities that were underrepresented. And I learned a lot during the strike, especially after the strike was over. After we’d won the strike and the Post-Gazette announced its closure. And at that point, Max, we had conversations with people in the community. One of the first questions we asked, I remember, was what does it mean to lose the Post-Gazette? What does it mean to you and your community to lose the Post-Gazette newspaper? Because at that point, we didn’t know that the Venezuelas Institute was going to step in and buy it. And one of the responses really stuck with me is a young woman stood up and she said, “The closure of the Post Gazette doesn’t mean anything to me because they’ve not been relevant to my community for years.” Now, as a journalist who spent his life, a good chunk of my professional life reporting on this city, that was heartbreaking to hear that these institutions that I’d given my life to were irrelevant to the communities that had supported us during the strike and had leaned into our effort, Max.

That’s like, well, what’s wrong with this? What’s wrong with this? This is an issue. And it gets not just to journalism. It’s like we’re seeing the crumbling of communities all over this country.

There are a lot of forces that profit from creating division. And newspapers, news organizations have failed in their duty to be the cohesive force. And it’s like, okay, that’s an issue. How do we solve that? We kicked around several different ideas. And one, I don’t know anything about co-ops, Max, but in our discussions, when we brought up the fact that. Because we talk about nonprofit models, these different models. When somebody said, “What about a co-op?” People got really excited about that. And when we started talking about a co-op, that’s when we started to see a lot more people to show up. I was at a journalism conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania about two months ago, and there was a lot of talk at that conference about engaging with your audience. How do you engage with your audience? Honestly, if we haven’t figured out that at this point, then we failed anyway.

But we thought, okay, well, we’re not going to engage in our audience. We’re going to ask them to become stakeholders in this process. And I think that is a game changer. I think this model going forward is one that can be replicated. There are co-ops, successful news co-ops that exist in other places, a whole list of them. So we’re not new to this. But I do think that what we can do here in Pittsburgh is build on those models and take the lessons we learned from the strikes, take ideas from the communities, the people that we met during the strike, the people that we reported on for a pup, and use those to build a publication where we are not going to have people stand up at a town hall and say, “The Pittsburgh progress is irrelevant to my community.” We’re trying to make sure that that does not happen to us.

And our way of making sure that happens is having that young woman in the room when we’re making decisions.

Natalie Duleba:

The things that I learned at the Post Gazette, besides the things like the skills that I built there that I’m bringing in, I was a copy editor and a pay designer before the strike. I came back to be full-time on the web desk. I’m bringing those skills into this. I’m glad that I can bring that extra oomph to what I can offer. But also I think that being on strike, we saw what it was like to be on the other side of business interests overriding journalistic ethics or the coverage of the strike was just insulting, honestly, because we knew where these things were being obfuscated, but it went deeper of the Post Gazette trying to hide the fact that people weren’t talking to them because they were holding our picket line and getting around not saying the mayor is not responding to comment on this issue because he’s not responding to any comment, but not putting in, he’s not talking to us at all because he’s respecting a picket line, shades the way that people may have perceived that article.

They may think the mayor is running away from accountability on this issue or leaving off said in a press release so it looks like somebody who was holding a picket line maybe gave them a quote. And an average reader might know about the strike, but not know that that came from a press release. And then they’re like, maybe they could see the way that these perceptions change potentially. Or even a local news station that has a business relationship with the post Gazette had coverage during the summer when SAG and WGA were on strike and they had a segment where they talked about all the active strikes in the country and they didn’t mention us. The strike that at that point I think had gone on for over a year at that point. We were deep into our strike. It wasn’t like it was brand new.

And to just see, okay, so the business relationship you have with the post Gazette, I mean allegedly, it’s not like I got this confirmed by anybody, but why else would they leave it out if not because of that business relationship? There’s no other reason why I could think to not put the strike that’s happening in your own city into report about strikes that are happening across the country. And there’s no way that there’s not other communities, other issues that have been covered in that way that have felt like the nuance has been left out or that there has been gaps that have not been filled with reporting. And us being so intimately on the other side of it, I think really places us in such a great position to poke at that. What is not being said in these press releases?

What is the CEO or the founder of this big company obfuscating with legal language? Where when you poke at it, you can like, oh, well, technically what they said is correct, but there’s all this stuff that they’re leaving out that we learned by talking to the working class, the people of Pittsburgh, the regular everyday citizens that are affected by these decisions, who have first person experience being the little guy who was affected by that. And it sucks to be on that side of it, but it has allowed us to build that extra lens of looking at things that way. I mean, journalists are trained to ask questions and poke at things, but I think seeing behind the veil intimately and personally is going to allow us to easily see where that is happening. And also, I mean, we had a little exercise when you’re in one of our founders’ meetings about what don’t we want our newsroom to look like?

What behaviors do we want to avoid when we’re building our newsroom and our editorial practices? And a lot of it came down to not understanding why things are being done.

Why is this decision being made? Why is this policy in place? And why aren’t these things being communicated to the people who actually have to follow these rules? And I think that the transparency that comes in being a worker-created newsroom and a worker-led newsroom will allow. When someone’s laid off, that sucks, but a lot of times an owner just says, “We got to lay you off because we are losing money, I guess.” And you just have to take the word for it. But hopefully we don’t have to ever confront that type of thing. But if we do, that’ll be a decision that is made collectively where you understand what’s gone into it, why. And it’s not a callous just cutting of the cord there so that the owner, I guess, doesn’t get to buy a second summer home. It’s like you’ve been involved in the whole process and there’s trust that is just baked into a democratically run newsroom or any business, I suppose, but we’re talking about a newsroom here.

But we want to try to build a newsroom that people are on the same page, that is collaborative, and that people understand the mechanics that are going on and that the work and the journalism that is being done is ethical and not bowing to business interests. And I think that we’re well on our way to doing that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. Well, let’s bring this down to paper level and talk about what this looks like in the now officially launched publication. I know as we said in the intro, and as y’all say on your website, this is a work in progress. Y’all are growing, but you have officially launched. So tell folks more about what the Pittsburgh progress is, where it’s going, and what they’re going to find there, and what they can do to support y’all.

Steve Mellon:

Well, right now, we did launch on Monday. We’re considering that our soft launch. We’re working up to becoming a regular daily publication. We just started this process. It’s kind of crazy, Max, to think that this wasn’t even a topic of discussion until January 7th. And it took a couple of weeks before we had consensus about to even move forward with the idea of a new publication. And so a lot has happened very quickly. We’ve had to come up with a business. We’re journalists, Max, we’re not business people, but we’ve had to become business people. And it’s like, okay, the learning curve for this is very, very steep. We’ve had to come up with a business plan. We’ve had to come up with bylaws. It’s over and over and over again. It’s your social media strategy. We’ve had to hire people to do some of the things that we just don’t know how to do, and we don’t want to mess them up.

We have to become incorporated. How do you do that in a timely manner? And all these things. So a lot has happened very quickly. It wasn’t until quite honestly a couple of weeks ago that we were able to sit down and think about, “Oh, wait a minute. If we’re going to publish, we got to have some stories in this damn thing.” So we put together a slate of stories that we felt matched what we want to be and what we want to do that align with our mission to give people a glimpse of what we hope to be in the very near future. If you look at pittsburghprogress.com right now, you’ll see, I think, five or six stories. Our lead story right now is about organized nurses here who are fighting for our contract. That’s a big, big story in this town where these big medical companies have such a big footprint.

Nurses on the front lines of that. So that’s one of our lead stories. Natalie has a story on third places for the members of the LGBTQ community. We have a review of a new book on WPA workers. Kim Kelly wrote the foreword for that. You guys all know and love Kim Kelly. So we have our origin story is another part of that. We have a couple sports stories. We are really going to lean into high school sports because we’re interested in not covering the millionaire. God love them, our millionaire sports heroes. We are interested in covering the sports played by the sons and daughters of the working people of this region. So that’s what you’ll find when you go there now. We’re going to continue to build on that. We’re still working. We’re a small team right now. We’re building and adding, but we’re a small team and we’re having to walk and chew gum and tie our shoes and bake dinner and comb our hair all at the same time.

So it’s going to take a minute to get this thing up to where we want it to be. And we’ve learned, Max, that this group of people, when we get together, we set our mind to something, we can accomplish that thing. And this is a goal we have set for ourselves. And I know we’ll do it. I know we have a community of support. People who want to support this, learn more about it, go to pittsburghprogress.com. You’ll find a button that says join us. It’s like a maroon button, a red maroon button. Click join us. You can learn about progress. You can learn how to support this effort. If you have questions, you can reach out to me or Natalie, I’m sure you’re willing to answer questions too. We’re hoping that there are. I’ve been in journalism a long time, Max. Most people that I was in journalism with, most of the people that I knew in journalism all over the country, none of them are in the business now.

They’ve had to get out. Their newspapers have closed. They did not make enough money to support their families. For one reason or another, they’re out of the business. That’s got to stop. What’s the model for that? Well, we think this is a model that can be replicated in other cities. One of the things, we have a couple of goals here. At least that’s the way I see this. One goal is to do just what Natalie said, provide news coverage that is ethical and that focuses on the needs and concerns of the working class people in our region. But another goal is to say, “This can be done and this is possible. There are other cooperative news organizations that have done this. This is our model. We want to build on those models and say, okay, we’re going to take the baton and run with it.

We are going to run like hell with that baton, and we want somebody else to pick that up too. So we’re all running here and building news organizations that are engaged in covering the news, informing, being a source of communication, but are also building community. And I think that’s one of the things I learned about working in newspapers as a young man. This is back in the ’80s. I worked at weekly newspapers. These weekly small daily newspapers in small towns were part of the fabric of that community and held the community together by being a voice where people could look at that publication and recognize themselves and recognize their community. That’s gone. What we see in a lot of newspapers that post, because that is an example of this, we have an institution talking to other institutions. And what happens when that worker voices, regular people voices are lost?

One of our goals is to do that here in Pittsburgh is create a publication that does not do that, where people can look at that publication and recognize themselves and recognize the community that they care about and that they’re willing to invest in. So that’s where I see where we’re at right now and where we want to go.

Natalie Duleba:

Yeah. The pittsburghprogress.com is our website, but we’re also on Instagram, BluSky and Facebook. You can find us on all three of those by searching for the Pittsburgh Progress and all the same, the link to how to join us is available in all those places. And giving us a follow there is really helpful. And also you can stay up to date on the next steps in our rollout. But I think that having edited all of the stories that went up for the soft launch, that I would encourage people who want to support us to really. Obviously, I’d like you to read all of them, but if you do, you’ll see the way that they actually plug into each other, that they build on each other, the same concepts of building community. We have a high school football coach who has led an incredible team, but he’s also committed to staying at this high school to build up these young men into not only good football players, but also good young men and having that commitment there.

And there’s a football club, a soccer football that’s for a community football club. And the runner of that is similarly aligned and also has similar goals of making the players better people as well as improving their skills. The review that Erin put together of American-made stories of work, it’s a look at the working class voices of many generations ago and how they echo into today’s concerns, even if the technology has changed, but it’s still working class people trying to carve out a space for themselves and finding connections through the lens of history. Also, it’s just like you feel smarter after reading it. And my own story, these are business owners who you think that the kicker is more than money. Obviously they’re running a business, but they want to build community with their customers and fill gaps that they see in their own communities. These are all sober spaces, trying to have that safe third space for people to come to and build community and find like-minded people they can be themselves around.

And then the McGee story of nurses trying to fight for the best for their patients because they’re passionate about what they do and they’re going against big UPMC interests. And I think that seeing the way that came together and how when you let journalists pick where they can find these stories and how they do blend together, if we can continue that, I’ll be so happy and so pleased. And as Steve said, I think that as people feel more alienated from each other and from the bigger interests that control the country, that they will turn to one another and be like, “Let’s do it with each other, with our neighbors who are the people that we know and trust, and we can count on to follow through on what they’re saying they’re going to do.” I mean, our strike was sustained by donations from regular people and the other worker-led newsrooms that we’ve spoke to, they’ve been so open with us about how they did it, how we can follow their example and learn from their mistakes.

There’s been no gatekeeping amongst the worker-led newsrooms that we’ve spoken to. And it’s the same story of journalists who were let go by a new owner or had their publication shut down, and they just turned to one another and said, “What if we did it?” We have the skills, we can learn the new skills that we need to get it off the ground and get it going. And I think that the contraction and consolidation of, as Steve said, of these local newspapers that serve communities as that continues to happen and be gutted by private equity, I think that’ll be the workers who build those things back up, that we’ll see more worker-led newsrooms under various models pop up and fill the gap that business interests left in the pursuit of more profit, more money. And I’m excited to be part of the fabric of that, that there’s other rust belt cities or cities maybe who don’t have the same kind of working class history as Pittsburgh to be like, “We know how to cover our city.

We know these communities. We don’t need permission from a rich person to do this work. Let’s do it ourselves. Let’s get off the ground and they can rely on our lessons and the resources that collectively these worker-led newsrooms are putting together to offer.” And I would really love to see that. And I’m hopeful that we can find our place there, get our legs under us, and that we continue to see the support that we saw during the strike and during the past six months, which it is wild to think it’s only been six months since January 7th. I mean, a little bit more than six months, but what’s that? Is it that Margaret Mead quote of, “Never undermestimate the work that a small dedicated group of people can do.” I’m butchering that, but that’s the sentiment is that people who are passionate and committed to a thing can achieve it because that’s how everything has ever gotten done is people roam up their sleeves and putting in the sweat equity.

This way, all of our work is going to directly benefit us, not rich owners who don’t actually need the money and have never had to worry about being able to pay for the food on their table or keeping the lights on. And Steve said that in his origin story on our website, and it was echoed in the conversation that Aaron had with the editor of American Made. If you resonate with any of that, you’re going to resonate with what we’re doing. So if you want to be part of our story of our effort, check us out on pittsburghprogress.com, on Instagram, BluSky, Facebook. You can hear everything that we’re doing in the next couple months as we head toward our hard launch. We really love it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Natalie Duleba and Steve Mellon, both former strikers of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, and both now founding worker members of the newly launched Pittsburgh Progress, a cooperative news organization owned and democratically run by its workers and members. Go check them out using the links that we provided in the show notes. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our different social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.

I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Crowd Chants:

We are we. We are we. We are we. We are we. We are we.

Gwendolyn Levi:

We need to be able to say that we in our community are willing to stand up. We’re standing up for our young people. We’re standing up for our seniors. We are standing up for our communities.

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

On July 7th of this year, 2026, a comrade in my brother was brutally beaten by six youth at this same said 7-Eleven, brutally beaten for over 10 minutes. He was able to get into his vehicle and only go a few blocks before he had to stop. He was in so much pain that he had to call the police and have them to take him to the emergency room at Sinai Hospital. A few days later, the video was exposed and it was something that you couldn’t believe you were seeing. When he got out of the vehicle, those brothers was laying right there.

There’s a stack of crates that they got from this 7-Eleven. Look at it. I want you to see it. That’s why we had it here. What they call ground zero. When he got out of his vehicle, they saw him. They weren’t laying for him. They were laying for somebody to come that way. They were willing and waiting for somebody to come down Towanda or Tioga, like my son did in 2017 when he left the 7-Eleven. So after walking 20 feet with my son, he put not one, not two, not three, not four, but five bullets into his body over a cell phone. Victorias fought for his life and it was stolen from him. It wasn’t taken because he fought back. It was stolen. On July 17th of this year, my comrades, this Black Panther veteran fought back.

Speaker 4:

Children today lost respect. You know what I’m saying? And I’m not saying all our children. I’m not saying that. But these little young men that came and jumped Bob and when I seen that, I said to myself, wow, they are chumps. They are cowards and they don’t have no dignity.

Speaker 5:

I don’t want it to be a blanket thing where like all our children are bad. I once was one of the little brothers out here running them up, but I’m telling you, we are misunderstood, uneducated, misguided, and easily let us stray. We need the community to gather around these young men. We don’t believe in throwing our peoples away.

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

I am commissioning the entire city. There’s a $50,000 reward. Here’s a QR code. Do not call yourself an organization or revolutionary or anybody else until you click this and donate so we can find those babies. We have to find them. No one else can find them. We have to find them. We will find them. But we’re not finding them so that they can be locked up and we throw away the key. I heard that. We’re not finding them so we can throw away a key. We’re finding them so that we can follow them, hold them, love them. We’re taking whatever these demons have for them off the table. They can’t have our children anymore. That’s over. They’re our children. As hard as that is to say with what we saw, they’re still ours. They are still we are we. We’re going to walk with them every step of the way.

Yes, we’re going to walk them to the police station. They have to be accountable for their behavior, but we will never let them go.

Gwendolyn Levi:

We need to teach our community the difference between snitching and protecting our community. There’s a difference. There is a difference. If your grandmother walks down the street, she can’t even go to the store. That’s not snitching. That’s saying, I want that community. I want my storefront cleaned off so my grandma can go to the store. That’s protecting your community. That’s protecting your loved ones. If you see something, say something. That’s not snitching. Snitching is when you and I go rob the 7-Eleven and not go tell on you. You need to know what snitching is. This is not snitching. This is happening ourselves.

Speaker 6:

You young. You haven’t lived enough life to understand anything. So when you hear elder up here talk about snitching and all this, I see your faces twisting up because you’re not intellectually understanding that these things that are being said are true in fact. But the arrogance in who you are as a person won’t allow you to listen to the truth until you’re old enough to have a child and somebody takes it from you. And now you want justice. Now you want peace. Now you want understanding. I used to be your age. You never been my age. My job or responsibility is to guide you.

Speaker 7:

Yo, people just need to be taught y’all. We’ve been there done that. Let’s not be so quick to forget. But one of the things I can say, I’m 63 years old. That’s something I’ve never done. Jump on it. Y’all, an older man. No, we ain’t do that. We ain’t do that. We guarded them to factor them even though we did our little stuff on the side, but we ain’t do that.

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

I watched that video over and over and over and over. Even though I kept watching it, when that baby pulled that sword out like he was a samurai, all I could think about was please don’t stab him. Even though I knew he was home, I knew he was safe. The pain is so real. The visual is so vile that even when you know they’re safe, you still fear for them. When I turned that off, I said to myself, if he can fight, we can fight. If he’s not afraid to fight, even if he dies, we can fight until we’re not afraid to die. I saw it. He proved it. You can say what should have or could have happened, but what happened is he fought back. They beat him. They kicked him. They knocked him. They tormented him for 10 minutes. Do you know what 10 minutes feel like when someone is attacking you?

All the time. It feels like forever, queen.

Speaker 8:

I was inspired when I looked at the fact that you just kept getting up. You just kept getting up! And if I take anything from that, here’s what we must continue to do as a people. We got to keep getting up. They talk about black people hate each other. Black people hate black people. And I often say to them, you can’t get this

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

If we hate each other. It’s time. One of the flyers say, if not us, then who? If not now, then when? We are going into that 7-Eleven and we’re telling those people, because I called them all week. I went in and got the phone number. I called them all week with no response. We tried. No response. We tried to no avail. Now we’re going full throttle. We’re not taking any prisoners. We’re not walking backwards. We’re going in there. We’re letting them know what they need to do to protect this community.

Ujimma Masani :

We want to walk over to this store. We want you to walk with us. We’re not going to tear up the store. We’re not going stealing anything. We just over there to let them know we ain’t playing. We write to you, not as adversaries, but as neighbors who share this corner with you every day. This location has witnessed a brutal assault of a 74 year old man, elder, an overnight break in and years of prior tragedy at the same address, including a loss of a young man’s life in March 2017. We believe you want this corner to be safe as much as we do. It is in that spirit, cordial but firm that we present the following list of demands. Number one, we are giving you a 72 hour notice to post your hours of operation in lettering large enough to be read clearly from the street.

Number two, cut down the overgrown bushes that create a hidden nook where perpetrators can wait and hide to attack unsuspected customers and install brighter lighting throughout the parking lot. Number three, we urge you to donate toward the community reward fund established to help apprehend the assailants and toward the medical costs of the 74 year old elder who was attacked. Number four, invest in stronger security measures, including roll down security grates when the store is closed to deter further break-ins. And number five, acquire off-duty police presence to enforce a no latering policy and help assure the safety of your customers and this community. This is not a request made lightly and it is not one we intend to let go unanswered. We ask for a response and a plan of action within a reasonable time and we will report back to the we. Until then, we will continue to stand on this corner in agreement until this community is safe.

Respectfully, the we community.

Ade Oba Tokunbo (Stephen King):

This gathering here is important because the community around us can see it. And they need to know that this is what needs to be done. These killings and these robberies and these auto thefts, we, I believe, can decrease it by teaching our people that hoodrats are not appreciated and should not be tolerated. I’m a veteran of the Black Panther Party. My paternal grandfather was a member of the UNIA. We are more than just a group of organizations. What I feel, because you have concern for me and care for me, this is my family.

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

When I realized who it was and where it was, it brought back the night that my son Victorius walked out of this same 7-Eleven, down those steps, down to Tioga Parkway and was approached by a young man who demanded his phone. A fight pursued. The young man took out his gun and he brutally murdered my son, victorious. He shot him five times, one in the stomach, then the kneecap. Then when he fell, he shot him in the head, shot him into his eardrum, which hit his jugular vein. And as he was falling over, he shot him again and that bullet grazed his back. He left him for dead. Someone who witnessed the entire event ran over to my son, held him and told him to hold on. He called the ambulance. They took him to the hospital. And he was pronounced dead at 3:43 AM on March 26th, 2017, four days after my birthday.

That was enough for me to say I’ve had enough. The next morning, Sister Ujimma called me and asked me how the Bible was doing when she had heard about it. We talked about what had happened. I shared with her what had happened to Victoria’s and telling her that that was the same location where Victorius came out of before he was murdered. Almost the same time of night, about three Victoria’s, I think it was like 3:15, 3:20, somewhere around that same time almost. And we said we have to do something. She called Mama Gwen. And once we came into what the Sister Queen always says, we have an agreement. That was it for us. We had decided that we were going to take no more, that we were going to do the same thing that Baba did, fight back. And that’s what we started doing. So we created the we organization mindset that we were going to communicate with every organization that we could in this city to let them know, to meet us here, where the assault happened and begin the process of changing how we think and how we look at the city and how to move forward as a collective, as a we, in agreeance, in agreement.

Ujimma Masani :

In agreement.

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

And that’s what we did.

Gwendolyn Levi:

Thank you. I think one of the most significant things about this gathering that we had today is that it was not retaliatory or negative. It was not we against them or – Pointing fingers. Pointing fingers. It was to say we are here. We didn’t point fingers at our young people because we know we got some good young people in the city. Many of them that were out here with us today. But we all got some troubled young people. Sister said it best when she said it early. Some are broken. Some are just bent. Hopefully we can get to the bent ones before they get broken. That’s what this cry is about. That’s what the querying cry was for all organizations to say, “Hey, we are here for our young people. We are here for our elders. We’re here for our neighbors in the community. We are here.

All you got to do is just look around your community. If you don’t see us in your community, call one of our older. We’ll come. We got brothers who can walk the streets with us. We got brothers who could go up in the alleys with us. We got sisters who know that our young sisters who are running up in stores and just grabbing stuff. No, no, no. You don’t have to do that. We know how to go get your nails done.

We can get your hair done. Come see us. Come see us. That’s what we’re saying to our young people. We are here for them. And yes, you must be held accountable for your actions. I did. I served 16 years of a sentence. Guess how many years I was supposed to serve? How many? 400 months. I’m going to let you all add it up. And the ones who can’t add it up, that’s why we need to change our board of education. That’s a whole nother source. But I’m not going to tell you how many that the 400 months is figured out. But I did 16 years over 400 months sentence. I was transformed. And if old as I was can transform, I know we can help these young people who have a whole life ahead of themselves. And that’s what we’re trying to do. Save our youngsters mainly before they get into the system.

But even the ones that get into the system, we’re here to help you so that when you come out of that system, you will come out and do what we’re doing. Do what the Tandea family, do what some of these other young or the cry organization, do what they’re doing. Help each other. Tell your story. Your story is impactful. Your story can help somebody.

You have a store, young man. You have a store young lady. And I know some of you might be mad, not mad at me. Look in the mirror. Tell yourself who you’re mad at and address that situation before you come out here and get into some trouble that you really don’t want to get into. We are here.

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

We are here.

Gwendolyn Levi:

For those six men who assaulted my brother, we are here.

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

We are here.

Gwendolyn Levi:

Call one of us. Yes, you have to be held accountable, but in that accountability, you will have support. You will have support so that you won’t become broken. We don’t need more broken kids in our community. This is a healing city. This is a city that can be healed. And we are here to say that the healing has begun by the we. Thank you.

Ujimma Masani :

That was beautiful. Thanks. So in our effort to address this, I guess, our trust that hangs over our city with youth being not accountable in what it is that needs to happen. We’re looking for our first step, which is to be a place where you deposit information. This is an information bank. We are a repository for every organization that’s out here helping families, youth, and elders. So if you have resources, if you have services or programs, this is the one stop shop that you come to. We are not saying at this moment that we are doing anything other than that. What we want to do is when we connect with families, elders, and youth, we could point them in a direction of where they may can go. We won’t select your program for them, but we’ll tell them where they can go to get that service.

And we’re going to aggregate all the information and make it user friendly. And you’ll be able to obtain it through our social media. We’re going to be able to obtain it through our website. And most of all, we’re going to be boots on the ground. The next event that we hope to kind of commandeer everyone together is that we’re going to be at the March on Washington on August 28th. There’s a free bus available by the National Action Network provided by the local chapters, community and city of NAN through the Reverend Al Sharpton. And we are going to take our voice across this country because I believe that other communities need the same kind of help. So we want to show that what it looks like, we’re not just the wire, we’re not just the corner. We’re not just the dancing, numbing and snowballs and the bikes.

We are more than that. And people need to see us as a whole. And we have to take this as an organic approach to what we need to be getting done. And that’s what we’re here to do. I’m a graduate from the Morgan State University School of Social Work, and I’m calling on all my social workers, all my counselors, everybody who’s doing that work in this city. This is not about the dime or the doubt. This is about remembering how to bring community together. And with that, we are a we. And when we are we, we are in agreement. With that, I say

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

Ashe. I think the most important aspect

Of what we are doing is to specifically reach out to families. We want the mothers and fathers of this city to know that their children are loved, that there is help available, there are resources available. Like mama said earlier, we’re not blaming anybody. There are no finger pointing. This is not anyone’s fault. If it is, it’s all of our faults. There’s no one person we can blame for this situation. I heard someone say we need to lock them up and throw away the key. I think, I hope, and I believe that we’ve had enough of that. There’s a system set up that eats, that sets up retirement funds, that sets up vacation time for our children being incarcerated. Being in a system where they’re abused, where they’re raped, where they’re tormented, where their lives literally stop. That has to stop. That has to stop. We can no longer accept our children being put into these systems and saying, lock them up and throw away the key.

Ujimma Masani :

I want to say one important thing. People say that things start in the home. Some people don’t have a home. We have so many people who are homeless, families that are living out here in these woods. People who have no resources whatsoever, no family in foster care. We have the largest number of foster care people in the system, youth in the system, but we’re only 13% of this whole national population. So if you keep saying that it begins at the home, did you check out whose home life you’re talking about? Because everybody don’t have a home. We

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

Don’t even know if these young men had a

Ujimma Masani :

Home. Right. We don’t know where they come from. And we don’t know that if their home is safe and protected and wholesome. How do we know if they’re not being abused or abandoned or – Neglected. Neglected or molested? We don’t know what that is. It’s in the body. It’s in the body. And so what we’re going to teach them is something called clean talk. We’re going to teach them about facts, feelings, judgments and outcomes. We’re going to change the dynamic of how we communicate with these people, with our babies. And that is where we’re going with this clarion call Baltimore.

Queen Mother Victory Swift-Gye Nyame:

Changing our journey to change their journey.

Crowd Chants:

We are we. We are we. We are we. We are we. We are we. We are we. We are we. We are we.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Mansa Musa: Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. We’re here in the historical part of the District of Columbia, U Street, 14th and U, 13th and U, 11th and U, 12th and U, all historic. Lincoln Theater and Benz Chillibo. We’re here today to talk to two representatives from DC Justice Lab about current legislation that Congress is attempting to pass to minimize the DC City Council’s ability to pass laws to govern this District of Columbia. Stay tuned for this interview. The District of Columbia has become the testing ground for Congress in terms of reforming so-called reform of laws that the city council has passed. So let’s talk about cash bill, what’s going on with it and what this bill is trying to do. Because when we look at what’s going on in over DC jail and how overcrowded it is, what’s our position on HI5214?

Bethany Young: Yeah. Well, DC has had a pretrial system in place for the last 30 years or so that has worked well. People are kind of released or not based on kind of a demonstrated threat to public safety. It’s not necessarily about how much money they have or starting with the presumption that someone should be incarcerated. And that system has worked well. Most people come back without committing any other crime. Most people show up for their court date. So it’s not a system that’s broken. So this is kind of a solution in search of a problem, this congressional bill that you’re talking about.

Mansa Musa: Who profiting from? Because the intent is not to change, get safer streets because we already recognize that the streets are safe. So who profiting?

Darby Hickey: We haven’t had cash bail in over 30 years in DC. And you know what that means we haven’t had in this city? Our bail bondsmen or these companies that are very predatory to poor people that require these payments and that make money regardless of what the person does after they’ve been released. And they make billions of dollars a year and we haven’t had that exploitative system in DC during this time. And as we’ve all been discussing, we’ve been safer for it. So that’s who is going to profit off of this. So we know that this is not about safety. This is about harming poor people, exploiting them for money. And it’s also ideological because I think I’m glad you started with this one as an example of this rollback and of using DC as kind of a Petri dish of what they can force on places around the country.
Because you see them pushing also on the national level to roll back bail reforms. And it’s ideological. I call it dumb on crime approach rather than following the actual evidence that shows that reforming bail systems, getting rid of cash bail actually makes our community safer because we know even a short time in jail, that destabilizes your life and that leads to worse safety outcomes in the long run.

Mansa Musa: Let’s talk about another aspect of this is mandatory minimums. And DC has always been real equitable in terms of taking into account the social conditions, really with sentencing the way they’re supposed to make a determination before they sentence. It’s always been like that. Talk about this attack.

Darby Hickey: I do agree with you that many of our judges do a good job of taking into account the circumstances around an event when determining a sentence. We actually already have some of the worst mandatory minimum sentences on the books in the country. And under this new proposal in Congress, the minimum that someone will be sentenced that would be longer than what the maximum is in some other states for the same conduct. So it’s really singling out DC. And again, it’s furthering this ideological agenda of just lock people up. We know all the companies are going to make money off of that. And to disempower and harm our communities, including unfortunately disproportionately black communities in DC and across the country are disproportionately impacted by mandatory minimum sentences. Is

Bethany Young: That in DC, nine out of 10 people sentenced under mandatory minimums were black. And so kind of same kind of look at every statistic as it relates to the criminal legal system in DC, and you’re going to see mostly black people. I think it’s eight out of 10 arrests. Most of the people in the jail. Most of the kids that are detained are black, certainly most disproportionately impacting black people and poor people.

Darby Hickey: And then we got to look at, going back to your point earlier, that the interconnection between these different policies, you were speaking on the efforts to roll back voting rights. And how we know that some of the origins of some of these sentences and some of the restrictions on voting after being convicted came out of reconstruction, came out of the backlash to reconstruction and trying to disempower and disenfranchise black communities. And so we have to see this and connect this as part of that lineage as well.

Mansa Musa: And I think that when we look at the District of Columbia, how can you rule your house where somebody got the authority and ability to tell you what you can and cannot spend? Your own money, your own revenue that you generate. So in this regard, you’ve got Congress is interfering with the legislative process. The people that’s duly elected to determine what their constituents say they want, don’t have a voice. They can pretend like they do. They can vote on something. They can pass it. But if Congress don’t like it, the appropriation committee will just simply don’t fund it. And that’ll kill that, which brings me to, and this right here is one thing that I want y’all to dial down on heavily. This is about the youth because they got this push. They pushing this effort to criminalize the youth as young as 14. Talk about their attempt to push to make the laws change or create a law around dealing with our youth.

Bethany Young: A child, because we’re talking about children, could be charged as an adult. There are also some other laws that are for other young people, young adults would affect their ability to kind of have a second look at their sentences after they’ve served some time or that would impact their ability to have their records sealed after a certain amount of time and would affect the discretion that judges have in certain cases to sentence a young person in alignment with where they are developmentally. And what we know and what we’ve known for decades about laws like this is that they’re counterproductive. They’re as counterproductive as they are oxymoronic. If you think about treating a child as an adult, just because you say you’re an adult does not make a child an adult. And it actually ignores what science says about the developing brain. We know very well at this point that our brain, excuse me, as humans are developing well into our 20s, especially the part of the brain that deals with impulse control.
So there are certain things we take for granted with kids that they’re going to be impulsive, that they’re going to engage in risky behaviors. And we account for that. We know with the driving age, with drinking, with buying tobacco, with voting, with enlisting. We acknowledge in all of these different contexts that children are different and that we have to kind of help make decisions for them because their brains do not allow them to do this well. But in the context of crime and incarceration,
For some reason, we treat kids differently in that context and it doesn’t work. We know that for kids, contact with any part of the system. So even if they see someone getting pulled over by a police, they see their friends being encountered by police, that from that to being in a courtroom, to being arrested, to being incarcerated, that actually sets them back developmentally.

Mansa Musa: The fact that they’re saying in this cadence that youth are taking over the city and they’re using this as a pretext for getting tough on oil, as Bethany said.

Darby Hickey: What we’re seeing with these incidents with young people is, guess what? Young people are still recovering from the trauma of the COVID epidemic and of the shutdowns that happened and of the challenges with socialization they’ve had. We’re now learning so much more about the negative impacts of social media on them. And I’m a parent of a teen. Look, kids just want to get together. They want to not have to deal with adults. They want to be able to be with each other a little bit. And that’s what the vast majority of kids are doing in these situations. They’re just looking for a place to get together. And a lot of those places have disappeared. Yeah, we have our rec centers. Yeah, we have libraries. That’s really important. But think about the movie theaters, the malls. Union Station is largely blocked off to them at this
Point. So where else are they supposed to go is a question you keep hearing from them. I think it just goes back to a point that Bethany was making of like, these are children. Let’s give them the support that they need. Let’s invest in them. Let’s lift them up instead of continuing to tell them you are not welcome here. You can’t go there. This city and all the changing that has happened is not for you in these areas, which is putting a real distinct point on it, in my opinion, on top of the displacement and the gentrification that’s already happened in a city that has pushed so many people out of traditional neighborhoods like Southwest. You can even go back centuries, or decades rather, that was a very robust multi-ethnic community before it was destroyed by urban redevelopment back in the ’60s, I believe it was.
And then now has had this new wave happening as well. And you see it all over the city, unfortunately.

Mansa Musa: The attitude is we got to create a false narrative that in order for this place to be safe, we got to identify who’s making it unsafe, and that’s the youth. Which brings me to the point, the United States Attorney General for the District of Columbia recently said, “I know evil when I see it, no matter what their age.” How do y’all respond to that? They wearing hoodies. That’s evil. But he know evil respond to that.

Bethany Young: There is a really loud emotion that people respond to. And if you can make me afraid enough, I can support a lot of different things if you’re saying it’s in the name of safety. But what we know is that it’s not actually tied to safety, that the rest are down across the country, some of the trends that we’ve seen that we saw during COVID and immediately post, we’re turning the corner on those that the things that communities are doing to give young people other options to invest in them if given time are working.

Mansa Musa: When you create an environment where you have summer jobs, like me and my sister, we was first generation when they first started summer jobs and we did the projects in the District of Columbia. And when they created summer jobs, the whole city became vibrant because we had money. Young people had money and young people had Princeburg.

Darby Hickey: We know that giving people the right to determine their own future is what makes them great and what makes our democracy great.

Mansa Musa: So what’s y’all strategy now around what’s going on? Because when we went down to Congress, I was there. I forgot the congressman’s name out of Florida. They introduced the bill. His town don’t have problems. They reading articles that didn’t have nothing to do with the district. They reading the article from Arizona or New Mexico and just reading the facts of the article and making it seem like this is DC. Talk about where y’all at in terms of y’all advocacy and y’all strategy around changing this narrative or more importantly, mobilizing people to be effective in terms of advocating.

Bethany Young: So we’re continuing the work that we do locally on that in terms of shrinking policing, shrinking incarceration. We recently, along with about 30 other partners in the district, put together a 2026 public safety policy agenda that runs the gamut from community-based investments around non-police alternatives to safety like violence interrupters, credible messengers, investing and protecting in youth. So before a kid even gets into the system, what are the things that we can be doing to surround them to make sure that they’re thriving, that they have access to opportunities, that they’re building confidence and self-efficacy and skills all the way up until ways that our local officials can stand up and make a stronger statement

Mansa Musa: To the

Bethany Young: Federal government about the respect for DC laws. And we talked about this a little bit earlier. There’s only but so much they can do, but they can make their voices and their position known in a way that I don’t know that we’ve seen our elected officials locally do satisfactorily.

Mansa Musa: I like what you just said. Y’all got a document that y’all putting out. So this opened the doors up for insertion in terms of application, how to get people to stop. Okay. If we talking about incredible messages, fund that.

Darby Hickey: Although we do have these threats from the federal government right now, we also know, as we were just discussing with the curfew, that unfortunately our local elected officials are also making some bad choices around policies. And of course we want to defend their right to make that choice. We want to also convince them to make the right

Mansa Musa: Choice.

Darby Hickey: But that’s what this document lays out is this policy agenda is a number of recommendations that are not new, that we’ve been making, that people in the community have been making, that experts have studied and the evidence backs up. And so in addition to that, other things that we’re also doing are educating the council and staff, educating the mayor, educating the public about these proposals in Congress to roll back our laws or to impose bad nuance on us. The more of a united front and the more voice we have, the better chance we have of beating back these fundamentally undemocratic attacks that are trying to set us back years and years.

Mansa Musa: And we shouldn’t be handcuffed because someone is to your point, ideologically think that we should be back and change. So I want to commend y’all on y’all work.

Bethany Young: We can pick up a phone. We have resources that we can share around how to advocate in the legislative process, but keep learning about what’s happening. Make sure that you understand what it is because it can feel distant to some people. It can feel like that’s not happening to me. But rest assured that it’s going to get closer and closer. And before you know it, it’ll be. It’s kind of at all of our doorsteps at this moment. So continue to stay aware and engaged and ask people to do what they can to push back.

Mansa Musa: Okay.

Darby Hickey: Yeah, I think we see unfortunately this playbook being tried out here, but we know where it’s going next. We know it’s already been being used in other places. People saw the violence that happened in Minneapolis and Los Angeles and Chicago. That’s the same stuff that we’ve been dealing with. And actually we’ve still got the National Guard in

Mansa Musa: DC

Darby Hickey: And all the rest of the places they pulled back. So we are really struggling and we need help from everyone that’s willing to help. All our residents need to speak out. We all got to be in this together. And we need help from friends and family all over the country who actually have a vote in Congress and should be reaching out and doing what they can. We can’t be satisfied, like you said, with our colonial status right now. Home rule is a bare minimum. So we need statehood and we need people to support statehood for DC.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Speaker 1:

Michigan is shaping up to be one of the most closely watched Senate races of this entire cycle.

Speaker 2:

Democrats will choose between Congresswoman Haley Stevens and former director of the Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services, Wayne County, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

We pay more for the stuff we got to buy, get paid less for the work that we do and watch as our tax dollars get misappropriated abroad to drop bombs on other people’s kids instead of to invest in our own kids and their schools and their healthcare.

Speaker 4:

We’re done. Business as usual politics is over.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

Most people don’t walk around thinking, where do I stand on the left right spectrum? Most people walk around thinking, how am I going to afford my groceries? How am I going to pay for my rent? Can I ever afford a home? What am I going to do if I get sick? The majority of Democrats out there, when I talk to them, they are so far away from the party elders who hold all the power. And I think we have an opportunity as a party to molt out with the old, in with what the people underneath the party really want.

Speaker 5:

Obviously politics are a very tumultuous time right now and the Democratic Party’s kind of in disarray. So I’m coming out to support Abdul.

Maximillian Alvarez:

He really knew and understood the people, that he was for the people.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

So we’re running a campaign to do three very simple things. Number one, we’ve got to get money out of politics. We’ve got to take on the system that tells us that corporations are people and that their money is speech. So we’ve got to get money out of politics. Number two, we’ve got to put money back in people’s pockets. So what does that mean? It means empowering people to join or form a union in every sector of our lives. It means standing with small businesses like this one that really do create the backbone of our economy. And it means finally taxing billionaires some wealth.

Speaker 7:

And that is precisely why we need people like Abdul in the US Senate.

Speaker 8:

I worked third shift and I made sure to get my butt out here in support before I have to go into work because the message has always been amazing. Watch out. There’s a car right there. But yeah, the way he just speaks to the working class I feel like is really what we need. And also when I shook his hand, he dabbed me up like a homie.He felt like somebody I knew already and that’s somebody I want fighting for us in the Senate. So I’m really glad I came tonight.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

The question for us is bigger than this seat. It is about what we want out of our democracy in the first place. So if everything is working just fine for you, I’m not your guy. Do not vote for me. But if you believe that you deserve healthcare, if you believe that your tax dollars ought to be spent on you, if you believe that corporations should not have a bigger say in our politics than you do, then maybe I am.

Maximillian Alvarez:

We first met when you were running for governor here in Michigan in 2018. The question was how are Democrats going to respond to Trump? But also who’s going to inherit the Bernie Sanders mantle? AOC just won. And so you were part of that progressive cohort. And now we kind of have a similar situation. How are Democrats going to respond to Trump winning again? Zorn Mamdani just won in New York. Who’s going to inherit the progressive movement? But these are two very different moments and you’re a very different person than you were back then. I wanted to ask to start how you would characterize the differences between that campaign and this one.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

Let me break it down two ways. There’s where we are as a country and then there’s the growth that you do as a person. I think where we are as a country, this is a moment where I think to be honest, we had failed to learn the central lesson of Trumpism. I think a lot of folks felt like the record had skipped, that there was this mistake and they didn’t see the fact that Donald Trump was exploiting a foundational pain in people. And I said this thing at the time, I think that was just, it was premature. Most folks didn’t see it. Donald Trump himself is not the disease of our politics. He’s just the worst symptom of the disease of our politics. And the disease is the system that allows corporations and billionaires and would be oligarchs to buy and sell politicians to do their bidding.

You watch as they use their power to suppress our wages for the work that we have to do and to raise our prices for the things we have to buy. And I think this time around people are recognizing that actually we dealt with the symptom, but we didn’t deal with the disease. And as a doctor, I’ll tell you, if you only deal with the symptom and you don’t deal with the disease, it comes back roaring worse. And that’s exactly what’s happened now. So I think folks are a lot more interested in authentic engagement with the structures of our system. Even now though, you got a lot of corporate folks out there who just want to deal with the symptoms. They’re like, “Oh, affordability? Okay, I’ll make one thing more affordable for you. It’d be great.” And they’re like, “No, there’s a structure underneath affordability. There’s a reason why everything accelerates in the wrong direction always.

And if you don’t deal with the foundational infrastructure, you’re not going to deal with the outcome.” One of the frustrations I think I have with some folks in our movement sometimes is that we want people to agree on the critique and we always break apart on the critique. It’s not about the critique, it’s about the outcome.

And I think the more you could focus on how you want the world to be like and get people to agree to that, even if they come at it with different perspectives, I think the better off we are. And I think that’s probably what I’ve learned over time.

Speaker 4:

There’s a big battle brewing. A battle brewing against not only the corrupt fascist forces of the Republican Party, but also against do – nothing Democrats that would rather sit there and collect paycheck after paycheck and fundraise from corporate donors that put your interests second to the interests of those very same corporations.

Maximillian Alvarez:

The 2024 election was less of a referendum on how much people love Donald Trump than it was a referendum on how much people hate the Democrats.

Speaker 2:

Agree.

Maximillian Alvarez:

People’s faith in the Democratic Party is in the basement right now, especially on top of a year of doing what feels like virtually nothing to stop Trump, caving on the longest government shutdown in our history while people are watching their SNAP benefits, their healthcare disappear before their eyes. So the question there is like, is why run as a Democrat? And how are you going to address that lack of faith and prove that this isn’t just the right message that you’re going to meet people’s needs?

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

Yeah. I know what I’m about. And Democratic Party hasn’t always met my needs. I think a lot of people out there feel like they’re Democrats by hostage situation. You look at the other guys and you’re like, “That’s crazy.” And then you look at the Democrats and you’re like, “I don’t know what’s worse.” Being cruel and crazy or being feckless in the face of being cruel and crazy. Now the party is so far away from its voters. The majority of Democrats out there, when I talk to them out at Democratic clubs or indivisible or you name the organization that I’m out, they are so far away from the party elders who hold all the power. And I think we have an opportunity as a party to molt. Out with the old, in with what the people underneath the party really want. And I’ve said this for a very long time.

The problem with Democrats is too often they’re taking money from the very same people who created the problem. So now you’re in this weird position of trying to articulate a solution to the problem that includes the people who created the problem. That makes sense. I don’t take over money. I never have. I never will. And I understood from the day I started in politics that that wasn’t the big issue. And so when folks look at me, they say like, “At least I know what he believes because he’s not bought. And I think the party could do the same thing. Say what you will about Donald Trump. He’s got a coherent narrative. You out of a job. Immigrant took your job. Out of a home. Immigrant took your home. Out of healthcare. Immigrant took your healthcare. That’s his narrative. Simple, easy to understand, dead wrong. We could have a narrative too.

Out of a job, corporation offshore automated your job. Out of healthcare, corporation squeezed you out of healthcare. Out of a home, corporation speculated that you can’t afford a home. But when you’re taking money from corporations, guess what you’re not going to

Speaker 2:

Say?

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

So you come with your little list of 10 point policy plans that’s going to deliver something for maybe somebody 10 years from now. It’s bullshit. So I think the party could be better and I’m ready to make it better. So I’m a Democrat with lowercase D, and I hope someday we can win the fight for what the Democratic Party can be. And I’m not willing to let go of all that infrastructure because a few folks who can’t let go of power say that it’s theirs.

Speaker 7:

So what the hell is going on? Why are we living in a society where workers are producing more and more and virtually all of that income and wealth is going to the top 1%?

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

It’s the system that allows the richest, most powerful people, corporations, billionaires to buy and sell politicians in ways that leave them rigging the system against us. Corporations get bigger, more powerful. Our lives get harder.

Speaker 2:

I feel like I don’t ever see hardly any campaigning politicians come to Saginaw and it’s so underrepresented given how much we’ve been through. I mean, we’re very similar to Flint in a lot of ways and how we had a booming industry and then laws were passed that just discriminated against every single person one way or another that pushed us out of different areas for companies and contractors to come in and exploit us. And I think he touched on that in a way I haven’t seen a lot of politicians really focus on, at least for again, Saginaw.

Speaker 1:

I absolutely think Abdul is right on track of having the billionaires stop having power in politics and allowing us to have a voice and making sure that everybody is treated fairly. I do a lot of the organizing of the Latino community here in Saginaw, Michigan. So I’m trying to get them a voice because for too long there are too many Republicans and Democrats that have been voting to cause harm to the Latino population.

Speaker 5:

I think an unapologetic progressive populism that’s centered on delivering for working class people is how we win in the future. And that’s exactly what Abdul’s message is.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

I mean, democracy was broken the day corporations started to buy elections. That didn’t just happen. We’re at death’s door now, but we’ve been here. We’ve been sick. And so why don’t you talk about it in ways that are actually fully complete? Hey, every time a corporation comes in and buys off a politician, that kills your democracy a little bit. But most of these folks who want us to talk about democracy now didn’t feel it when that happened. And I think we got to talk about it completely. I

Maximillian Alvarez:

Want to talk about what that means for where we are sitting right now in Saginaw, Michigan. And I have a special attachment to this place. My wife grew up here. I have a lot of in – laws who live around here. My wife’s family had generations of men work in the old GM plant up the road. It is a cold, hard, but beautiful place with a lot of families with a lot of deep roots. A lot of igrant families going from back to Poland, Germany, Mexican and other Latino immigrants, a lot of black folks who came up during the Great Depression. People don’t give towns like Saginaw credit for how complex and beautiful they actually are. But in many ways, this is the archetypal rust belt

Speaker 2:

Town.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean there is a lot of pride. There’s a lot of joy. There’s a lot of family here. There’s also a lot of boarded up windows. There’s a lot of blight. There’s a lot of pain. There’s a lot of poverty and economic devastation. So why is it important for you to come to a place like Saginaw? And again, moving past the sort of democratic messaging, I guess my question is not how do you hope to reach people who live in places like Saginaw, but what can you and other politicians do for places like Saginaw?

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:

Yeah. The simple question, how do you reach? You come. We’re here. You know what I mean? This is not my first time in Saginaw. It’s not going to be my last time in Saginaw. For me, I’ve trained as a doctor and that training’s been really useful for me because both doctors and politicians have to be really good at being able to sit with other people’s pain and to speak truth to pain. It’s truth to power, but also truth to pain. And then I think the way you reach folks is to be vulnerable with them. I can’t solve all the problems, but I can’t tell you why the problems exist. And I can tell you I’m going to try like hell to take it on. And then I think you need to go back to that point that I was making to be a really good listener to people’s pain and to try to forge that pain into purpose.

I can’t solve it. Anybody walks in here is like, “I’m going to fix your problems.” No, you’re not. We can solve it. And if I can be a vessel that helps to create something that can organize us and can impose what it is that we’ve been asking for, for a very long time into power, then I think we can solve it. We can’t solve it tomorrow, but we can solve it in due time. And I’ll tell you that the analogy here to medicine is clear. Somebody gets a cancer diagnosis. You want to tell them you’re going to be fine. It’s bullshit. And if I tell you you’re going to be fine, it’s a lie. But what I can tell you is I’m really sorry that this happened to you. And I can tell you what we know and I can tell you what we can do.

And I can tell you I’m going to sit here and listen for as long as you need me to listen to you and that I’m going to be your advocate for helping get the best outcome you want. In this case, it’s not terminal. Places like Saginaw can heal, but not doing the same shit that we’ve been doing. And so in some respects there is an honesty that you have to tell people. It’s not just always going to be okay or I’m going to solve all your problems. I’m not. I’m going to do my best to help you, to be honest with you about what the problem is, to sit down and think about what our approach moving forward can be and to fight like hell for you against people who’ve created this problem. And if we can do that and you can trust me to do that, we can build things over time, but it starts there.