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 today we are headed north to the state of Vermont, where frontline healthcare workers and the patients they serve are facing a major crisis at the University of Vermont Health Network, the state’s leading healthcare provider. In an article published in the Rake Vermont, which is an independent worker-owned news outlet based in Vermont, writer Matt Moore breaks down the situation like this. “In June, UVM Health eliminated over 140 positions across its network, a third of which were union positions, according to AFT Vermont, which represents workers there.

The cuts which the hospital estimated will save $9.5 million comes as the network faces a $300 million budget shortfall. Rules set by the Green Mountain Care Board, which regulates Vermont hospitals, will require UVM Health to cut expenses by that amount over the next three years. Later that month, UVM Health handed down a speed up order to its medical group, which includes outpatient clinics and more than a thousand physicians, which practitioners say will result in briefer appointments with patients. Owen Foster, the former chair of the Green Mountain Care Board, took aim at what he saw as the excesses of UVM Health in a board meeting last September. “It’s essentially an expensive and ineffective layer of overpriced and unnecessary corporate bureaucracy that has proven itself both physically and spiritually distant and unconnected from the mission of our flagship academic medical center and the needs of Vermonters,” Foster said.

Foster found that the surplus revenue earned by UVM Medical Center was being siphoned off by UVM Health to subsidize its hospitals in New York State that the network has been unable to manage profitably to the tune of over a hundred million dollars over the last several years. He noted that at the same time that UVM Health was shutting down kidney dialysis services in St. Alban’s, Rutland, and Newport, it was moving $10 million from UVMMC to its New York hospitals. Multiple executives, many of whom had received a combined $3 million in bonuses in 2024, were laid off in October of 2025 as part of a restructuring process. However, the most recent round of cuts and likely future cuts are aimed directly at the caregiver and support levels, leading to reductions in the quality of care for a majority of Vermonters.” To talk about all of this, I am really grateful to be joined on the show today by two guests.

Melissa Lavalle is secretary of UVMMC Support Staff United and VP of Healthcare for AFT Vermont. And Teagan Cook is lead outpatient chemotherapy scheduler at her hospital and a chief steward in UVMMC Support Staff United. Melissa Teagan, thank you both so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. And I know we got a lot to dig into here, and I want to talk to you about everything that’s happening now at the UVM system with these devastating cuts or restructurings or whatever we’re calling them and the events that led to this point. But before we do that, I’d really love to start by getting to know more about you all and the work that you do. Every week we strive to remind listeners that there are flesh and blood human beings and fellow workers behind every name tag, every job title, and every one of us has a story worth telling.

So please tell us more about yourselves and how you got into this work and the kind of jobs that you do.

Melissa Lavalle:

Thank you so much for having us. I’m Melissa and I’ve lived in Vermont my whole life. I was born here. My family lives here. I was the kid that moved furthest away because I was 45 minutes from mom and dad. I’ve worked retail. I’ve been a grocery store clerk. I was a photographer inside a Kmart for Holy Mills. And when they were going to cut my health insurance, I decided it was time to get into a job line that would give me health insurance. And that’s what brought me to working in medical. I’ve been a medical assistant and I am currently the finance and admin assistant for the psychiatry and mental health departments. There’s a lot of backend bureaucratic needs, paperwork, vacation time, continuing education stuff. And so I am the department Santa. I love my job and love serving the folks that are giving wonderful and such needed mental health care to our community.

Teagan Cook:

Thank you so much for having us. I’m Teagan. Like you said, I’m the lead outpatient chemotherapy scheduler here at UVMMC. And I got into my job after previously working in law, which is where I have a degree. Not the one you can actually do something with, but still a degree in law. And the industry of law has just so many miserable soul-sucking problems without a lot of real emotional reward, at least that I was feeling. So I ended up moving into healthcare, which is a place where you can actually make a real difference to real people. And not all of it is couched in a bunch of pseudo-Latin nonsense. A lot of it is just making real connections with your patients, understanding what their daily lives look like. A lot of what my day-to-day looks like, if you came behind my computer, it would look like I was playing Tetris a lot of the day because I’ve got the blocks of each person’s treatment that we’re trying to all stack together to make fit to get as many people as possible safely treated in the amount of time and the amount of space that we have.

It’s very rewarding. I get to make contact with a lot of different people from across the state. I’ve got patients in New York, I’ve got patients in New Hampshire, I’ve got some patients in Canada. And working here has been really incredibly rewarding. But unfortunately, as time has gone on over just the past three years that I’ve been here, sometimes the stress and the weight has started to outweigh that reward in some ways that are really specifically related to the way that our labor as workers here is treated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I want to really talk to y’all about that at the shop floor day-to-day level. But I guess I need your help here because I want to talk about the crisis that is happening right now in the UVM Health Network. And first we need to help our listeners understand what is this crisis exactly? What do folks need to understand? Is it a budget crisis? Are you facing draconian cuts? Is it a shortfall? I guess we don’t have to get too far into the weeds that we lose sight of the whole plot, but help us understand what exactly the nature of the crisis that y’all are facing there at UVM is right now.

Melissa Lavalle:

It is incredibly complex, and I can kind of scratch the surface. For years, for decades, management at the top was kind of left alone to do what they want. And what they wanted to do was give incredible salaries to the folks at the very top. We went from being Fletcher Allen to University of Vermont Medical Center, and then the Health Network was formed. So now the network encompasses five hospitals in Vermont, and I think two or maybe three in Northern New York as well. So that necessitated an extra level of administrative folks at the top, and they’re not the ones making $20 an hour by any stretch of the imagination. Vermont’s really unique that we have what’s called the Green Mountain Care Board. It came out of the work of activists in 2011 in the passing of Act 48, which ostensibly created universal healthcare in Vermont.

We never had a governor that was able or willing to find funding for that. So instead this advisory board was created and yearly Green Mountain Care Board reviews and either approves or denies budgets for hospitals in the state. About three years ago, Green Mountain Care Board really put their foot down. Vermont is the most expensive state in the country to buy or get healthcare. And they said, “This is insane. UVM Health has an obvious monopoly on the state. You folks have been making way too much profit for too long, and now it’s going to be a cut.” So the budget, instead of having any growth to it, actually had a reduced amount of profit that was allowable. So now that they’re not able to charge the most exorbitant prices for literally everything, they are saying, “We’re losing money every day. Austerity measures need to go into place.” And what that looks like is those 140 cuts and staff just being overworked in almost all locations.

Teagan Cook:

Yeah, Melissa has a much more of a bird’s-eye view of it than I do because Melissa is much deeper into the daily goings on of the union. So she’s much more well-briefed than I am. But as far as how I’ve seen this in my day-to-day work, it’s been, for example, in my clinic, which is the outpatient cancer clinic at the flagship hospital in the network, the scheduling team is about three weeks behind at any given moment, which doesn’t necessarily sound like a big deal if what you’re generally familiar with as far as healthcare scheduling is just a primary care physician’s office. If you’re three weeks behind looking at that, generally it’s not going to be a huge deal for scheduling. But here in the outpatient cancer clinic, these are patients who are coming in twice a week or every single day, five days long once a month, or they’re coming in every other week, which means that if we get three weeks behind, we are operating so far behind the patient’s actual reality that it functionally doesn’t even make sense for us to be doing our jobs because we are working with outdated information that we then have to crosscheck with the more up-to-date information that we’re seeing in the chart.

Everything takes longer because we have to do that. We get further and further behind. Patient care falls further and further behind. And we’re all very concerned about the safety of the care that we’re able to deliver because of this. And this could be solved with safer, better staffing by increasing our numbers by just two or three more people. And we’ve been refused for months and months and months. Even while going through an official grievance process to try to address the issue, we have continued to be denied.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I want to ask one more kind of clarifying question here because it seems like in all the kind of research I was able to do before we started recording this episode, there’s some competing narratives going on here, and that’s sort of muddling the picture and making it hard for folks to understand what’s going on here and why it’s so egregious. So I wanted to ask who is behind the narrative that this is a $300 million budget shortfall that requires squeezing people at the bedside level, people in the office level, and cutting back the most essential labor and piling more work onto the most essential workers?

Melissa Lavalle:

So there’s always yours, mine and theirs, but Green Mountain Care Boards saying, “You folks have made way too much money off of Vermonters for way too long. You need to lower your prices.” UVM Health is saying, “Oh my God, we used to make this much money, but now we’re only allowed to make this much money.” So normally in my mind, folks would lower the prices of things. What they’ve done instead is lower the number of available inpatient beds. So they’re seeing fewer patients, so therefore less money is getting made. And there was a law that went in that said they had to drop their prices on cancer infusion drugs because those were just astronomical through the roof. So care board says you’re making too much. Hospitals says we’re not making enough any longer. And from the union’s perspective, we’re saying this was poor management over decades and you’re now asking your lowest paid workers to bear that burden.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let’s talk about that sort of how we got here question. Because sadly, this is a story that I have heard from healthcare workers across the country in different contexts. I’ve talked to workers on the picket line at a private Catholic hospital here in Baltimore saying very similar things. I’ve interviewed workers on strike at Kaiser Permanente in the Pacific Northwest saying similar things. Workers in Chicago at a university healthcare system there, very similar story. But the devil is also in the details and not every story’s the same. But it feels like the effects that people are feeling are very similar, which is that workers are being burnt out because they’re being asked to do more with less for less while either hedge fund type corporations are buying up their hospitals and forcing them to speed up production for the sake of more profits. Or you got a system like your guys’ system where you’re being forced to claw back your operations to sustain an unreasonably poorly managed from the top down system.

Again, those are different situations, but the effect is very similar on the workers and the patients. But as you said, Melissa, that didn’t happen overnight. And so I wanted to ask how the hell did it happen? And how did you all as rank and file workers experience this over that time?

Melissa Lavalle:

A fact I heard once that really blew my mind was most hospitals used to be owned by the doctors. They were kind of co-ops that the doctors owned. And so if something terrible happened, you know whose door to knock on to complain. But letting hedge fund managers, letting private equity into healthcare. And even in Vermont, UVM Health is a nonprofit network, but letting business managers run health decisions does not work. And every other industrialized country in the world has figured it out that it’s most effective not to be paying these insurance middlemen to do nothing but mostly deny folks. Are governments capable of administering Medicare, which folks are generally happy with. With Medicaid, folks are generally happy with. And this introduction of the business element into health is where things went wrong, to be totally honest. Folks are making money off of something that should not be a money-making enterprise.

Teagan Cook:

I mean, I think what it boils down to, to your point, Melissa, is the fact that hedge fund managers, extremely well-paid executives in the healthcare industry, it’s kind of like the final frontier of late stage capitalism. This is the last way that you can profit off of not only your workforce, but the physical bodies of your workforce and the people around you. UVM Health has a monopoly on healthcare in Vermont, which means that all of their workers are here receiving care from them for the vast, vast majority, which means that not only are we struggling to get them to pay us wages that are meaningful in the economy of Vermont, which is total trash garbage right now, but there’s also the fact that we are functionally handcuffed to whatever decisions they’re making about what our healthcare is going to be like. I know, and I’m not alone in this, my fiance and I have been having to have really serious talks about when we get married, what’s going to happen to his healthcare?

Is it going to be worth it? Are we going to have to delay our wedding? I don’t know when I’m going to be getting married until we get a new contract for our union because I don’t know what my healthcare is going to look like. I don’t know what guarantees I’m going to have, and I’m not going to be able to get married if I have to pay $800 a month for me and my fiance to both have care as chronically ill people.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jesus, man. I don’t know how people can hear stories like that from everybody everywhere all over the place. And we all just accept it as like, well, I guess that’s just the way things got to be, but that’s not the way things got to be. And I do want to talk about in the end, what can be done? What can folks listening do? But by way of getting there, I wanted to bring things back down to that worker and patient eye level. Can you tell us how, since those initial cuts, what this is translating to for frontline workers providing healthcare and for patients seeking healthcare?

Melissa Lavalle:

Patients seeking healthcare are definitely experiencing waits. They know it. They know why. When my husband goes to his primary care that’s part of the network, there’s one person to check in and check out folks in an office with 25 providers. You’re waiting longer when you call in to try to talk to a nurse to get a prescription refilled from your primary care. It’s just more work, more stress. You know that the cuts happened. And it’s so weird how they always seem to happen a couple of months before bargaining. So we have been in bargaining. And when we did our pre-bargaining survey, we’re doing combined bargaining between our support staff unit and the technical professionals unit of the VFNHP nurses union. So your radiologists, your respiratory therapists, those sort of folks.

But the layoffs really also energized our members to see that this is why we’re bargaining. And when we did our pre-bargaining survey, 3,300 members across the board, the priority was safe staffing. And our folks are not in great economic shape. We know wages are a thing, but we work in healthcare because we care about our patients and because we know we are the patients as well. And that was far and away what folks cared about, that when community members are coming to us, that we are safely staffed and they’re not going to get worse because they came to UVMC for care.

Teagan Cook:

Yeah, I think that the staffing is really the critical issue. And some of those layoffs did affect union members and some of them were non-unionized staff. For example, folks in IT, folks who were in MGET, which is medical group education and training. Those are the folks who train newly oncoming doctors how to use our health record system, which is byzantine and complex. So you know how it is. The money that the people at the top are getting is never going to trickle down, but the consequences that the people at the top impose trickles down. So it takes longer for these doctors to get appropriately onboarded. It takes longer for them to get the hang of how things are supposed to be done in these systems so that things are going through workflows correctly so that people like me are making sure that you are getting scheduled out for your treatments appropriately and safely.

People in IT getting laid off. I have had a ticket out for a fax machine that my unit uses to get looked at since April, and nothing has happened about it. And that doesn’t sound like a big deal except for the fact that not all outside facilities will accept electronic faxes. And that means that we are not able to, until that gets addressed, send imaging orders to those other hospitals because they won’t accept them because they’re only e-faxable right now because we don’t have a fax machine, which can result in patients getting delayed care in something as important as getting imaging done to figure out if their chemotherapy is working or not.

It’s difficult. The layoffs and the threat of more layoffs has created such an environment of paranoia and distrust, which is the exact opposite thing that anyone needs. We’re already all struggling enough, but it’s just created an incredibly difficult work environment from the things that are tangible, like the stupid fax machine, to wondering every day when you come into work, is this the day where I find out that I don’t have a job anymore and that my patients are going to call in and just end up waiting on the line for three hours to get a simple answer.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So where do things stand now and what can be done about this? And what can anyone who is listening to this conversation right now do to help?

Melissa Lavalle:

The base of the problem is the for-profit healthcare system. That just has to be the foundation that we’re working from. In our bargaining, like I said, priority safe staffing, we’re fighting for safe staffing committees. The hospital came proposing takebacks from our first contract. So that is one of the places where we’re kind of far apart. But one of the things we’re also doing on top of joint bargaining is a common good platform. We’re asking for protections for our immigrant coworkers. If they get detained, they don’t lose their jobs position, they don’t lose their health insurance. They get time off to go to these appointments when they need to, even if it’s short notice, like we know is happening more and more often. We’re asking the hospital to join our local community group as Migrant Justice, and they have a Milk with Dignity program to only source milk from farms in Vermont that treat their workers appropriately, give them safe housing, give them safe work conditions, pay them fairly.

And we are also saying that the hospital, in all its poverty, stop using its very high paid lobbyists and publicity folks to fight us in our plate for universal healthcare. Act 48 is on the books. We intend to get it funded and enforced. And every time we’ve tried in the past, the hospital, which is a huge economic driver in the state, has had their people at the state house pushing back, pushing back. And the time has come to stop. We cannot cut our way out of this. And I would encourage everybody listening, if they don’t have a union that they can get involved in and push them to fight for universal healthcare, get involved with a grassroots organization. They are just literally everywhere. Folks see this problem, and we know what the solution is. It’s a single-payer healthcare system.

Teagan Cook:

Yeah. I mean, what Melissa said, what it comes down to is that the for-profit healthcare system is functionally a vampire that is sucking us out of money without any real significant payoff. I don’t know anyone who has gone from being on Medicaid or Medicare to being on private health insurance and gone, wow, this is so much better.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Melissa Lavalle, Secretary of UVMMC Support Staff United and VP of Healthcare for AFT Vermont, and Teagan Cook, lead outpatient chemotherapy scheduled at her hospital, and a chief steward in UVMMC Support Staff United. 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 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 Maximillian 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.

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 as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. 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 today we’re talking about an urgent crisis and a scourge that is affecting working class communities around the country. Today, we’re talking about data centers. And we’re talking about what it means for you and your community when one of these loud, polluting, energy and water guzzling behemoths comes to your town. And we’re going to be talking with people who are experiencing this firsthand right now, but we’re also going to be talking about how we talk about data centers and the communities that they’re affecting.

Because recently I was scrolling on Instagram and Facebook and I saw this viral clip from a news report that was going around with a recognizable face at the center of it. Now the clip was from an MS Now report and just take a listen to it for yourself.

Speaker 1:

A quarter mile away, Cheryl Shadden says the noise is as loud as ever.

Cheryl Shadden:

It’s like living on the edge of Niagara Falls or you’re on a runway next to a jet that’s taking off, but this jet doesn’t take off.

Speaker 1:

Morning, noon, night, she even hears it in her bedroom and it’s changed everything about how she lives her life, including her politics.

Cheryl Shadden:

Red or blue, if you vote against data centers, we vote for you.

Speaker 1:

A lifelong conservative, she’s so angry, she refuses to vote for Trump backed Attorney General Ken Paxton, who clinched the GOP nomination for Senate Tuesday. Instead, she’s all in for James Talarico, a Democrat seeking to flip a seat controlled by Republicans since 1993. You’re willing at this point to forego basically every conservative issue and let the Senate fall into the hands of Democrats if that’s what it takes to kill data centers.

Cheryl Shadden:

Yep. My entire community’s going to break rank. Everybody. All of us. We’ve had enough.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Now, as you guys heard from that clip, the original report named the woman being interviewed there, but in the viral post with that clip in it, the woman was simply named as a “Republican voter.” And that just pissed me off. And the kind of comments that people were leaving on these posts by the hundreds and thousands were just so absurd and gross and so stupidly and unhelpfully partisan. So many folks seem to think that the explosion of data centers is only happening in one type of community and that those communities somehow deserve it if they voted one way or another. But listen, how people respond to this crisis in the next election cycle will be very important, but we also need to get it through our skulls that this is bigger than what happens in the next election. And data centers are not just red state or blue state problems.

This is a working class problem and we all need to take it seriously. And when I was seeing that clip going around, all of the discourse around this has been especially gross and infuriating for me because we actually know the so – called Republican voter in that news segment. Her name is Cheryl Shadden. She’s a human being, not a quote unquote, Republican voter. She’s a registered nurse anesthetist and a resident of Granbury, Texas who lives right next to the site of a massive Bitcoin mine. And we’ve had Cheryl on this show before, and we’ve spoken with her and other members of her community about the hell that they are living through after this giant, loud, environmentally destructive Bitcoin mine moved into their neighborhood and more data centers are now invading their area. And I’m really grateful to be joined today again on the show by Cheryl and more of her neighbors from Hood County, Texas.

But we are also joined today by folks who are living here and fighting against data centers here in our home state of Maryland. So let’s meet our incredible panel of guests and I want to shut up and ask y’all if you can start by introducing yourself to the audience here.

Cheryl Shadden:

Hi, Max. I’m Cheryl Shadden. I live in Granbury, Texas. I’m a certified registered nurse anesthetist. I live in a rural area. I am also born in Maryland. I was born in Bethesda, Maryland. I lived there until I was in my 20s. And so I remember Maryland quite well and I remember Texas quite well before this happened to all of us as well.

Karen Pearson:

I am Karen Pearson. Thanks Max for having us again on the show. I appreciate you and your passion. I am a licensed professional counselor. I live in Granbury, Texas too. Actually, Cheryl is my neighbor. I live about 800 feet as the crow flies to Marathon Bitcoin. And then just a little bit further right next door to it is Wolf Hollow Gas Power Plant. I live out here on 12 acres with my parents. They have been here 30 plus years and I’ve been here 21 years. Most definitely this has come in and really just unraveled our peace out here, shaken us as far as what it means for our rural area that we invested in retiring at. Also too, just water supplies, noise pollution, vibrations, things that it also has contribute to as far as health-wise. So it’s definitely something that in this area, I say it’s more like environmental euthanasia that we are experiencing.

Definitely a concern, especially with more in our future that is moving in right on top of us here.

Craig Jackson:

I’m Craig Jackson. I live in Granbury, Texas as well. Actually seven miles from Karen and Cheryl, but I’m also 300 feet from a proposed data center that’s going to be on 2,000 acres in the city of Granbury. I’m actually listed as a plaintiff on a lawsuit against the city for Breaking Open Texas Meetings Act as well as several other violations. But as far as this whole situation, it’s been a full-time job fighting this and along with all my other neighbors that have been battling the Bitcoin mine, we’ve actually started a homestead and lost several animals due to the infrasound and noise that’s been produced off of it. And you wouldn’t think seven miles would have that effect, but we can get more into that conversation later. But all of this is basically it disrupted our way of life and why we moved out here to be away from the city and to start a homestead in the process.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

I’m Dr. Shannon Wolf and I’m also the precinct chair in the community that Karen and Cheryl live in, and that’s how I met them three years ago. And so I live in Granbury, Texas. Part of what I’ve looked at over three years is a lack of awareness by so many people at just the devastation that the Bitcoin mines can cause, often cause and then the data centers that are coming in. There are eight or nine data centers coming into a very small community or very small county rather, and there seems to be no way of stopping them. And I don’t know that Hood County is a lot different than any other county in America. I hear reports of the same kinds of issues happening in Oklahoma and in Mississippi and in places up north. And so I think it’s going to take all of us working together to stop the onslaught.

Micaiah Lloyd:

Hi everyone. Thank you Max for being here. Thank you all for inviting me. My name is Micaiah Lloyd. I’m a resident of Charles County, Maryland. A data center was proposed in my neighborhood November 17th of last year. And me and my county have been fighting tirelessly to make sure that they don’t even have the zoning rights to be in our neighborhood. So that’s where we are in the fight in Southern Maryland. I’m just a girl. I’m 24 years old. I’m trying to build my own wealth. I’m trying to build my own career. And I talk about generations a lot because I feel like my generation is in the fight for our lives right now. I feel like we’re in the fight for our future. I used to coach little kids. I played soccer my whole life and I coached four, five and sixes. And I’m also fighting for them right now.

We’re fighting for them. We’re fighting for them to be able to grow up and breathe clean air and not be surveilled and to drink clean water. I don’t know what the future will look like in about four years if data centers take over this nation.

I’ve been an activist my whole life. When Trayvon Martin was killed, it really radicalized me and I’ve been in the streets protesting since I was about 15. I’ve always been wondering what is it going to take for the working class to unite? What is it going to take for us to come together? What’s going to be that one issue? And I know that data centers are that issue, so I’m very happy to be here. I’m very happy to be networking, especially with people who could possibly be red and who could possibly be very different from me, but we’re all human beings and I think this one issue will really connect us. So I’m very excited about that.

Hillary Gonzalez:

Hi everyone. My name is Hillary Gonzalez. I am an eco poet and author. I’ve lived in Maryland for the past 10 years now, though I originally am from Southern Virginia. For the purposes of this interview, I’m going to let my accent slip. I’ve been fighting Johns Hopkins DSAI Institute, which is their Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Institute for the past three years now. I can step outside of my front door and literally look at where they’re constructing it. And from the very beginning they told us, “Oh, this is going to be so good for your neighborhood, so good for your community.” I have yet to see that. I’ve only seen environmental harm that their construction has caused. And now we’ve learned from the Baltimore Business Journal that they’re also planning a data center for East Baltimore. So my fight has switched from fighting just DSAI to now fighting for the entire city because I don’t want this in any part of the city.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, my God, thank you all so much for being on this panel together. It is really incredible to have you all here together, even if it’s just for an hour. And I want to make the most that we can out of that hour. So I wanted to go back around the table and ask, starting with our neighbors in Granbury, if y’all could give our listeners and anyone out there listening now a sort of quick and dirty reminder of what the hell has happened to your communities in these recent years with these Bitcoin mines and data centers? How is it affecting people? What does it look like over there and how are you living your lives when these behemoths are coming into your communities?

Cheryl Shadden:

I’ve lived here in my home for 35 years. It was nice and quiet. I could walk outside of my home at any time of the day or night. You could hear birds chirping, you could see your animals outside, and it was just a quiet, peaceful environment. Now sitting here in my office, I can hear the crypto mind churning through my walls. I myself personally have had permanent conduction hearing loss. I will never get that hearing back. We have motion sickness, dizziness, nausea. We don’t sleep at night. Even trying to go to sleep with a TV on or a radio on and fans on high, you can’t go to sleep, you can’t stay asleep. This noise, sound and infrasound, it travels through your walls, through your windows. It shakes your home. And this is just the noise from the crypto mine that’s turning into a data center now adding two more hyperscale data centers.

This doesn’t include the gas plant that they’re powered into. This doesn’t include the explosions from their valves when they can’t carry a load. This doesn’t include a third gas power plant coming here and building and traffic twenty four seven and literally 5,000 trucks per month.That doesn’t include the dust clouds. This doesn’t include the air pollution. Here in the state of Texas, because Texas so special, we only test air pollution and they don’t really even test it. They model it. It’s modeled in isolation. So even though the gas power plant that’s directly across from my home, even though their pollutants go right to threshold like 0.4 from being above a dangerous threshold, so that power plant is looked at individually versus the power plant that’s right next to it that rolls out acid rain and all of that. That’s looked at individually as well. And so even though both of these two power plants operate right at threshold, they’re not looked at in combination.

And now a third gas power plant is coming in here that we fought hard against, and they’re going to be an eight-turbine gas power plant. They’re going to roll out some acid rain as well. And this doesn’t even begin to account for the water use. Right now, just the two power plants across the street from me use 1.5 million gallons of water per day off of our lake and our river and spit it back out. When they spit it back out, it’s minimally treated. It’s still hot water, so it’s causing problems in our lake and in our rivers. And that flows on down from here. So the pollution here in Granbury, the water is actually cleaner up above Granbury. It becomes seriously polluted right here at Granbury where we have three gas power plants that are pulling off of the water sources here and dumping back in.

We’re going to have four. And so if you calculate the water usage, even though you’ll have the crypto mine and the data centers telling you we’re not using water, we’re not using water. You are using water by proxy if it’s taking two and a half, three million, five million, 10 million gallons of water to provide you power. So they are using water even if not directly. And if you look closely at all of these hyperscaled data centers and they’ll tell you they’re closed loop water systems, well, that’s like saying your car is a closed loop water system. You do have to flush the radiator out in your car and you have to refill it. That’s not closed loop if you do that. And if you look at all of these hyperscaled data centers coming in, they all have retention ponds behind them. That’s basically a big septic tank.

A retention pond does not mean closed loop. It means we’re going to let this nasty water sit here and draw mosquitoes and every other problem known to man. And that doesn’t mean we’re going to protect the rivers and the tributaries and your health. So air pollution, light pollution, water pollution, erosion, and it doesn’t just affect Republicans, it doesn’t just affect independence, and it doesn’t affect just Democrats. It affects us all, all of us. And

Maximillian Alvarez:

I got to tell any of y’all listening, those types of retention ponds filled with toxic stuff, they are all over this country, baby. Whether it’s coal ash tailings ponds that have toxic heavy metals in them, whether it’s lagoons full of hog waste that has so many nitrates in it that it causes massive algae blooms. You don’t want to know how much of a toxic soup we are all living in, but it’s our job to try to educate ourselves about this. And so please, folks from Granbury, keep educating us. Let’s toss it to Karen. Tell us more about how this has affected you guys and your lives.

Karen Pearson:

Thank you. Yes, I probably want to speak more towards my parents than anything. They’re both 83. And for anyone who has been out here, everyone knows that their front porch is a gathering place. I enjoy sitting out there watching the birds, the deer, just a menaseri of wildlife. My mom’s a big bird watcher. And so many of those animal populations that were thriving out here at one time are not so much anymore. A couple of other things, and Cheryl mentioned this, balance issues, the noise pollution. So again, on our porch, sitting out there and having conversation in the evenings with my parents, it’s very hard to do. My dad’s lost about 70% of his hearing and we can’t sit out there and just have a typical conversation like what we used to without him either not hearing any of it or constantly having to repeat.

I think some of the other issue is because of the noise at night, and if the wind is blowing just right, especially if there’s a south wind, it is like at megaphones over to our place. So my parents don’t sleep and they have an upstairs, their bedroom is upstairs and it’s kind of eye level with the plants.

It’s a megaphone. I mean, it’s so loud in their bedroom at night that they don’t sleep. And so then obviously during the day, that causes a lot of fatigue. I think mentally on them, it’s extremely hard to think about what their future looks like. This is not what they planned for retirement. It’s hard on me to watch what they go through because they’ve invested everything into this property. This is where they though that they would live out the last parts of their life, which has been my commitment to them is to help them with giving them the best quality at the end of their life. And so I feel pretty helpless a lot of times. I can’t help them. I can’t make the noise go away. I can’t help them sleep better. I can’t help them. And so being in the fight with my neighbors, with Shannon and government, trying to just have people to understand what this is doing to us on a personal level.

What this do? And man, it’s like you can’t get anyone to understand that. You can’t get anyone to, I don’t want to say anyone, but as far as government and stuff, it’s like there’s no empathy. On a daily basis, no one sees the mental decline of my parents. No one sees that they can’t sleep or why. And that’s just real hard. It’s hard to watch them go through that. So that’s where, I guess again, I go back to that environmental euthanasia. And I feel bad for my neighbors who really don’t speak out for themselves because they can’t for one reason or another, maybe lower socioeconomic purposes. But this is in their backyards in their back bedroom. And so I know I’ve talked to them how the impact is on their lives. They don’t sleep. There’s other health issues. I don’t want to labor all the time for that, but there’s just so much on a personal level that it ruins lives.

It really does. And it’s not what you expected. It’s not what’s being talked about. There’s no transparency about how this impacts personal lives. It’s just not there.

Craig Jackson:

Yeah, absolutely. So I think if anything, this whole battle’s not just pissed off a bunch of people, but brought a whole bunch of people together. So speaking on the Bitcoin mine, we noticed in 2024 we moved into our house at the end of 2022. So we got immediately, my wife’s dream’s been ducks and chickens. So we got ducks and chickens, set everything up. All of a sudden more eggs than we can get rid of. In 2024, marathon takes over the Bitcoin mine and we noticed production decreasing and chickens dying and ducks dying. And slowly, and then one morning we woke up and it was almost like a massacre because we had micro chickens and micro ducks. Within 24 hours, all of them had passed away. And what we discovered was that the infrasound coming off the Bitcoin mine that Cheryl and Karen and everybody else in the area is hearing is actually traveling with the wind.

But also when we have heavy cloud cover, it creates a sound barrier wall that is basically just bouncing off. And low frequency sound bounces differently than high frequency. Low frequency actually travels and I’m actually uphill. So it just really, as sound waves get tighter and tighter, if anybody can visualize it, it just literally we hit it and there’s nights I hear it and it’s like a whale that is outside just moaning and it’s in spurts. And there’s been several nights. My kids, they’re five and eight and we have a elementary school just a mile down the street from me, a high school two miles away. And so there’s kids in this entire neighborhood. I’ve talked to other parents that are like, “Man, my kid’s just not sleeping through the night or my kids are having a hard time sleeping.” Turns out that whale sound is what they’re hearing.

And so fast-forward January of this year, we discovered New Year’s Eve night that there was a data center being proposed for our city. And lo and behold, it’s 300 feet from my house. And so literally from the corner of my property to where it meets the fence line, the Dallas Cowboys could play and they might lose that game, but they could play there. And so either way, what’s been frustrating for us is my entire life now revolves around research, which I do in my job daily anyway for other people, but now I’m doing it for something that is literally threatening our way of life. And so not just we have a community well and so one small tap in the wrong direction, our wells dry and we’re going to be Meta in Georgia all over again. Turns out this is a Meta-funded data center project, Patriot, which as more information has been coming out, we have been seeing the audacity and arrogance and maybe even some ignorance from our city council or city manager, city attorney.

It’s been nothing but propaganda coming from the city side as well. So all this positive benefits about data centers and they couldn’t even get our own state representative to say something positive. They had to get the state representative from Fort Worth to say something positive. And he said, “Well, data centers are how your alarm clocks work. That’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard. My alarm clock lives internally on my phone if I use my phone.” And it just shows the audacity and how far they’re trying to propaganda all of this to the point where we as a community have been coming together and now I’m listed on the lawsuit against the city. One of those things I never thought I would have to say that as a county resident, I am suing a city that is affecting my everyday life. Now my home and neighborhood is a county island.

I don’t vote for these people. I don’t even get a say in what these people do, but they’re affecting my home. And so we’re fighting back and we’re even doing a recall. Hopefully we get enough signatures by that deadline, but we’ve done as far as signatures for no confidence in the city manager and city attorney. And every time we turn around, we’re just met with arrogance or just careless attitudes of…

People can go back, look at the city of Granbury, excuse me, city council meetings. And you’ll see on the January 6th meeting, it was literally everyone in that room was frustrated because we were told specifically only talk about the dirt when it came to annexing this property. And that was the shot heard around the entire county of like, okay, this fight just became personal for all of us.

Karen Pearson:

I was at that meeting and that’s where we also heard the city manager, I guess that’s what he is, saying that he did not care about us and something along those lines. So yeah, I heard all of that at that meeting and it was mouth-dropping.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

Yeah, I think what he actually said was I’m not scared of you, is what he said. Karen, I think you and I were sitting next to each other.

Karen Pearson:

We sat next to each other. We sure did. Yeah.

Craig Jackson:

And to add to it, we have so many emails from the city manager, from the former director of development, about meetings at a data center where all the city council members were there, all of them in the same building, same time, same place. How they all got there is a different story, but we have all of this data and all of these trails and all this communication that shows all this was premeditated. And we’re seeing now other cities are fighting this. And so one of the things, our hope and prayer is not just to undo the annexation, but just undoes all of it. But if we can establish that, hey, this is how business should not be done, hopefully we can help other towns in this fight as well.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

So as I said before, I’ve been in this fight for about three years, maybe a little more than three years. And I met Cheryl when I was running for precinct chair and she asked what I was going to do about the data centers and I had no idea what she was talking about. And so I went to look at this data center that was causing so much grief. And I had this aha moment because I thought there was a train track near my house that I just hadn’t found yet. And I could hear it really well in the wee hours of the morning or sometimes really, really late at night. My husband and I would talk about, where is this train? Because it was this rumbling that we heard. And my husband and I drove past this Bitcoin mine and we had this light bulb moment.

We don’t have a train. We have a Bitcoin mine. And Craig was talking about waking up around three, somewhere between three and four o’clock in the morning on some mornings. And I will have a migraine just all of a sudden I will have this migraine headache from this Bitcoin mine. And so we’ve been fighting this thing for about three years. Cheryl and I with just some other people have even gone down and spoken at the state capitol to a subcommittee. We have written letters. We have had town halls. I can’t even begin to list all the things that we have done to raise awareness. And I would say for the past two and a half years, Cheryl, I can’t talk for you, but it feels like I’m beating my head against the wall. It seems like people say, “Yeah, that’s tough, but that’s not me and I’ve got my life to live.” And they go on and do their thing.

Well, now that it’s all of Granberry, people are waking up. Now I don’t blame them. People have lives to live. But now we have eight to nine of these hyperscale data centers coming into one of the very smallest counties in the state of Texas. We are very small and these hyperscale data centers, one of them is about the same size as a small city. We’re talking massive data centers taking over ranches. They’re taking over areas where they There is protected wildlife. There’s one area that they’re trying to industrialize where we have bald eagles nesting there and we can’t even get EPA to pay attention to them paring down the trees and displacing these bald eagles. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. So with these hyperscale data centers that are coming in, we’ve realized that our county does not have the, or we thought our county didn’t have the right to zone or to protect ourselves from them.

And I think that there have been some people that have truly dropped the ball in elected officials who have truly dropped the ball in this and they have not protected citizens.

I see things happening in my area that I think it’s going to change this beautiful, beautiful area. And I think there’s no coming back from that. And we’re talking about endangered species that live here. There’s a species of bird that lives here that’s endangered. And I have no idea why people who are supposed to be protecting don’t protect. And that Cheryl brought up the gas power plant and when your listeners are maybe facing some of these things coming in, you cannot separate these data centers from their power source. Those two things are two parts of the very same conversation. So the data centers in our area are having to bring in their own power source. And so they’re building gas power plants, but they are using the very bare minimum of standards in protecting the environment from any type of pollutants. And so one of the other things that Cheryl was mentioning was that these, I’m sorry, gas power plants, the permitting entity in Texas only looks at each individual power plant and not take into account the cumulative impact of multiple data plants.

I’m sorry, multiple power plants. So for example, in Tarrant County, which is Fort Worth, Texas, it’s pretty large. They have one gas power plant inside Tarrant County. And right now in my very small precinct, which is five, six miles square, we have three gas power plants with another one coming in. So that’s four gas power plants now. We have two battery energy storage systems, which are the best plants or facilities. We’ve got a solar farm that is coming in and all of this has been happening within just a very short period of time. And the residents are trying to stop it and we have no way of stopping it. So that’s what we’re facing. But I’m hearing people from across the nation say the same thing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and speaking of which, Makaya, Hillary, that’s how I met both of you is because you two are both folks in communities here in Maryland fighting these things coming in. So could you tell us more about how you got involved in those fights and what’s actually happening in your communities with these data centers?

Hillary Gonzalez:

For DSAI, it’s been a roundabout fight to get me into the data center fight. I’ve always been against them, but for the longest time, Johns Hopkins was claiming DSAI isn’t a data center. And so we have been fighting them by saying, “Well, you can’t study AI without a data center being involved. So it’s the data center. Where are you going to build it? Where is it being planned for? ” And as far as the construction itself, you’ve seen massive stormwater events just constantly every single time it rains. And I think when people hear stormwater runoff, they think like, “Oh, who cares? It’s not that big of a deal.” Except that we are located directly next to Stony Run Park, which is a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. So everything that goes into Stony Run eventually goes out to the Chesapeake Bay. And stormwater is very harmful because it has pollutants in it like diesel, oil, microplastics, a lot of sediment, which can eventually kill a riparian area like Stony Run, one of the few green spaces that we have in Baltimore.

Actually, just this evening because of the storm, we have what we call on our block the storm watch where if it starts raining, if it starts storming, everybody waits and they go outside and they take photos and they take videos of the runoff that’s coming from the construction site. And then we send in our 311 reports to Baltimore City. We send them into the Maryland Department of the Environment. We send them to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. And it’s just exhausting to have to do this every single time it rains. And we’ve met with city leaders. We’ve met with city officials. We’ve had them come out to the site to see the stuff that’s still there after it rains, to see the pollutants. We have videos of it going directly into Stony Run. And one such meeting, we actually had our city council president Zeke Cohen come out to the site and we told him, “Hey, this is what we’re experiencing every single day.

And these are our very real environmental concerns. The city spent $10 million of taxpayer money repairing Stony Run so that we could have a healthy water system in Baltimore City so that we could have a healthy harbor eventually as well.” And he basically heard all the concerns and he basically said, “I don’t care. We’re going to aprove this project anyway because I think that this is going to be good for Baltimore.” So this whole project has really just opened my eyes to what the city is allowing Johns Hopkins to get away with and what they have in the past as well. Ultimately, I had to help found a nonprofit in Baltimore City so that we could sue Johns Hopkins to try to stop this project. But ultimately this isn’t just about one data center project. This is about our governor wants to ramp up data centers in Maryland, which is really scary because we unfortunately have all these rural communities who are facing terrible consequences of these data centers.

And we have them as examples for what we don’t want in Baltimore. And we have so many communities that are at risk that we know that they’re going to try to build these data centers in. And I don’t care that this is being built in my neighborhood. I do care, but what I’m saying is it’s not just that this is affecting my neighborhood. I don’t want a project like this in any neighborhood in Baltimore. It doesn’t belong in any community while you fall under regardless of what your economic station is in life. It doesn’t matter. This is truly something that can unite all of us and it’s something that we should all be fighting against.

Micaiah Lloyd:

I’m absolutely distraught hearing about what you guys are going through and I’m a crybaby. I’m also a crash out. And my messaging and my militancy in my area, I get a lot of critiques on it, but it’s because of stories that I hear like this where these people just do not care. And I just don’t know what it will take and how many cuss words I have to spew out of my mouth to get these bozos to care. And I am so spiritually connected to the earth. It’s part of my mental health practices, how you guys talk about just wanting to sit outside with your family and sit outside with your parents. I’m with my baby boy right now and all we do is just sit outside while I crochet and I sit outside, I sit under my tree. I know I saw your baby too.

I was trying to say hi.

About the dead chickens and the dead ducks, it sounds so dystopian. And if this is my future, I don’t know what to do. And all I know is to fight like hell. And what we have been told, there’s this district commissioner, he’s the district commissioner of district four in Charles County and we were at a district, I think it was a town hall meeting. And members of my coalition, I don’t know if they directly addressed him, I don’t know. But basically he said that we have funding issues. He’s made a metaphor, a stupid metaphor about a barn. This is the barn we’re trying to build and if you don’t want to build the barn but this thing, we’re going to leave you behind and stuff like that. Just nonsense, ridiculous nonsensical bull crap. And then eventually he said, what has stuck with me is you’re going to have to stay in fight.

That’s what he says as it relates to data centers. He said, you’re going to have to stay in fight. This man is running unopposed in my county and our governor Westmore endorsed him. Westmore didn’t say it himself. He was supposed to be here in Charles County. I made a call to action about it. Excuse my language. He pussied out. He canceled it for unforeseen circumstances. And then just minutes before we start this call, I see that he had a private event in our county and spoke to some of our district commissioners and Ralph Patterson, the man he endorsed, and Ralph Patterson’s mother, Edith Patterson, who was a dinosaur elected official in this area. And yeah, it’s just been a fight. It’s a lot of political manipulation. People have data center money in their campaign contributions, but they want to tell us they’re not going to put a data center in our community and people believe them and people still vote for them.

And it’s just very frustrating. I’m very frustrated. I’m very emotional listening to you guys talk about what’s happening. And I would hope if people who didn’t look like me listen to you guys speak, they would take your concerns seriously. And I really hope that they do because it’s so dystopian what I’m hearing. And I have neighbors who have chickens. I’m a mile away from farmland and that’s what I love about this area. That’s what I love about Charles County. I feel like a country girl next to a city 45 away from DC. It’s really weird and I love it and I love that I can play both sides. So yeah, it’s a fight and it’s a lot of political manipulation and I just hope that people don’t listen to it. Right now, my biggest issue is being a lou, audacious Black woman speaking on behalf of the issue and people not wanting to take me seriously and my concerns seriously.

And that will be the detriment of our community.

Karen Pearson:

The chicken thing, I had totally forgotten until Craig mentioned it. My parents also had chickens and oh my gosh, we had so many eggs, more than we could give away. And then all of a sudden they just stopped laying one day. We quit getting eggs and we had several to die too. And it’s like, can you really believe this stuff? Is that really what happens to the animals and stuff like that? And then you start hearing others say the same thing and we don’t know each other. I didn’t know Craig. I didn’t even know he had this issue till this call. And I had forgot that we had the same thing. So my parents had to get rid of their chickens. So a lot of things like that out here have also happened. Domestic animals dying. Cheryl can talk about this too. Again, it’s some of those things that you don’t really realize.

And I think Craig spoke to some of this. The levels of the noise that are just not noticeable as we talk and communicate, it’s that decibel level that you don’t hear. And there’s another doctor, I believe she’s in Lesbon, and she’s done research on the vibrations and what those types of vibrations do to your inner body and the way it calcifies cells and stuff like that. And I haven’t even gotten into my mom’s health issues that have evolved over the last three years, but all of this didn’t were fine. All of this just happened in the last three years. And so you just cannot tell me that it’s a coincidence. There’s too many of us that have the same going on.

Cheryl Shadden:

So when infrasound hits your body and it doesn’t matter if it’s an animal, it doesn’t matter what living being it hits, it starts causing tissue damage to soft tissues. And so it can be noise that’s not even audible to the human ear. When one of my dogs started ripping her fur out until she was a bloody mess, I tried everything under the sun, worked with my vet, and I finally had to let go of her life. And when you see this happening with your friends and your neighbors and even people in California or Maryland or Texas, it’s heart-wrenching. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a young woman raising hell in Maryland or you’re an old lady in Texas raising hell, it’s still not okay. It’s still not okay to be harmed like this. It’s just not.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I hate to pile the misery and horror on, but I mean I have to also mention that I hear these kinds of stories in so many other parts of the country that we keep calling sacrifice zones because it’s just areas where people are being left to live in conditions that threaten life itself. So you know who I heard working class people like yourselves talk about this kind of thing? People in East Palestine, Ohio and in the surrounding area in Ohio and Pennsylvania when they blew up the five cars of vinyl chloride in those trains. And then they told everyone after that big toxic death plume blasted them all with toxins, they said, “Okay, you’re fine. Go back home.” And it was because everyone’s chickens and cats and it started dying that they were like, “We’re not fine. The fish belly up floating down the rivers.” They said, “You’re telling us that’s fine?” They do this everywhere.

And this is why I always tell people, I feel like I’m investigating a serial murderer because I hear the same stories coming out of the mouths of working people in so many different communities who are being polluted by this crap, who are being killed by this stuff. And we’re all being set up for sacrifice whether we voted for one party or another. So it’s kind of like, what do we do about this as working people? Can this be what y’all have been mentioning on this call? Can this be one of those things that really gets us to get over our differences and forces us to work together to fight this scourge that is coming for all of us? Let’s talk about that in this final round. Because we have an incredible panel of folks who are fighting data centers and Bitcoin mines in Texas that are already there and new ones that are being proposed.

You folks here in Maryland who are seeing these data centers go up in Virginia and around the country and you’re trying to fight them in your area. So what can we learn from each other? And I guess going back to that central message in the introduction, what do we need to learn so that we don’t fight this the wrong way? So that we don’t get caught up in the, you’re on the red team, you’re on the blue team, you’re in this state, so you deserve it, you’re in that state, so you don’t deserve it. How do we get past that crap and actually fight this and win this? So let’s go back around and any sort of advice that y’all want to offer each other or anyone out there listening who may be dealing with this now or soon in the future.

Cheryl Shadden:

When I started on this battle plane, I never once went up to somebody and said, “Are you a Democrat or are you Republican? And I need you to listen to me. ” This is a humanity issue. It’s a humanity issue all the way across this nation and into Europe. And so like we had talked about before, if my next door neighbor, and I don’t care who you are, if you come to me and ask me for help, if somebody’s invading your home and you need me to come and help you, I’m coming to help you. I don’t care what your politics are. I don’t care if I have a big dog and you have a little dog. I don’t care if you drive a red car and I drive a green one. I don’t care. I’m coming to help you because that’s a humanity thing you should be doing is caring about other people.

And what the governor of Maryland is doing is the same thing that our politicians are doing all around the country with very few exceptions is you’re not listening to your constituents remotely at all. Excuse me.

Hillary Gonzalez:

You’re so right. And I come from a small rural town in Virginia and really the only reason that I’m here today is because of mutual aid. Because we had to talk to our neighbors. We had to ask our neighbors for help whether we needed clean water because our well at one point was infected by Eli. Whether the food stamps run out, so we had to have one of our neighbors bring over some place for us. And I think we’re living in a time where people are afraid to talk to their neighbors, but I know every single name of my neighbors in my neighborhood, every single person. I knock on their doors all the time. I ask them how they’re doing. I’m like the unofficial mayor of Remington at this point. They come to me with every single issue and I listen to them and it doesn’t matter what side of the board they’re on.

I’m disabled, I’m queer, definitely leftist. But if you come to me and you need help and this is a humanitarian issue, I will help you. And I think that this truly is something that can unite all of us because this isn’t just a human issue, this is a land issue, this is a water issue, this is animals, this is our environment, this is trees. It’s everything. And that’s something at the end of the day that we can all be united on.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it’s also our energy bills, right?

Hillary Gonzalez:

It’s also our energy bills. That’s right. Yeah. But also on the flip side of that, I’m sure that our governor in Maryland is going to say the same thing and Makaia can probably attest to this as well. They want to start building many nuclear reactors with these data centers, which is just absolutely insane.

Cheryl Shadden:

Little baby nuclear reactor.

Hillary Gonzalez:

Yeah, that’s insane. It’s completely untested tech. So I think another thing that we all need to start working on is when I see these data centers and the politicians who are approving them, what keeps connecting itself for me is that all of them are receiving APAC money. And I think we desperately need two individuals who are not accepting any funds from APAC.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And you know what else we got to throw on here is we need to ask ourselves as working people, what is the payoff here? What are these data centers and Bitcoin mines giving to our communities? How are they helping us? Are they providing all these jobs beyond a few construction jobs for the people who are building them? And then what happens to them afterwards? I mean, we get all these data centers and the payoff is that all of our newsfeeds are filled with fake AI slop, that AI is in all of our electronics surveilling us, taking people’s jobs, that they’re using AI to bomb people in Iran and other parts of the world. Hat the hell do we want that for? And is that worth sacrificing our lives and communities and environment too?

Hillary Gonzalez:

I think overwhelmingly, the first question that people have started asking themselves when someone proposes a data center for their town, the first thing that you’ll hear these politicians and these developers say is, “This is going to be so good for you. This is so good for the future.” A future for who? Who is that future for? And the second people start asking that question, the whole thing falls apart because it is not a future for us. There is no part of this that we have a future in. This is a future for them.

Craig Jackson:

I would invite anybody to look into the Project Stargate in Abilene, Texas. It’s about half the size of two of the proposed data centers for our Hood County Grayberry area. It’s 1100 acres. The one going next to me is 2090. The one further down the street across from Dinosaur Valley State Park, which has dinosaur tracks in limestone that will erode away due to acid rain over time is going to be about 2,100 acres or so. Anyway, that one is interesting in itself. And then next door to that is going to be one for Black Mountain Energy. And so as far as Project Stargate’s concerned, there have been so many interviews with the sheriff, with locals that have proven that infrastructure, whether it’s Texas, Maryland, wherever, we can’t handle the construction infrastructure. Not only the construction infrastructure, the infrastructure for hotels, for rental, for housing. It’s just not there.

And we’ve been seeing over the past generation that home affordability is out through the roof. Rental affordabillability is out through the roof, and that is coming for our town if we don’t fight and stop it. And so something that somebody proposed to me is just run, run for office. That is one way we can fight this is if you have an open election coming up, run. Because there are so many people that have recently been elected on this issue, whether you’re red or blue that are winning. We have an ag commissioner nominee that’s a Democrat that is killing it because of this whole issue. And I am proud to say that yes, I am excited to see somebody young regardless of what party they stand for, that is standing for the beliefs that I believe in. And so that’s one huge way. But the other thing too is anybody is questioning this, look at Abilene because it is a perfect example of prime going through the roof.

These are not just temporary construction jobs. These are jobs that are going to last three to five years. And then with those jobs, you’re going to bring in all sorts of people that are looking for work, all sorts of backgrounds. The dust is going to be a huge issue. They spend about, what is it, a hundred million gallons a day just spraying water to keep the dust down. And so traffic is a nightmare. It’s abysmal. And so we’re inviting this into every single neighborhood that has a proposed data center right now. There’s so many other issues we can tap into. I know we’re restricted on time, but ideally, if there’s something that we’ve been learning is learning your state’s laws, if you have an open meetings act, anything you can use because the Bible says your sins will find you out, numbers 23. Anyway, have found so much dirt behind the scenes that we are using the courts for our advantage for.

And whether our elected officials want to listen to us or not, at some point it’s going to court. And we already have two of the data center campuses that were proposed that are now suing our county that they’re going to lose because of how they’re trying to use a warp and distort the law. And then the other thing, follow the money. Greg Abbott, our governor, has received over $500,000 in donations from one single tech entity and a tech pack. And so it’s disgusting how much money tech is putting into whatever party will follow them and allow them to do this to us.

Hillary Gonzalez:

It’s so interesting that you bring that up because after one of the last hearings that we had with the Board of Estimates in Baltimore City, they approved a big part of the project for DSAI. And then I think it was a few weeks later after that decision, we saw campaign money from Johns Hopkins officials flowing into the pockets of the Board of Estimates people.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

One thing that I would like to add to this is I have worked a little bit with a petition to recall the entire city council and the mayor except for one council member. And I have seen Republicans and Democrats working shoulder to shoulder on this issue. And I think that’s what it needs to look like. We’ve talked a bit about politics here and there are some pretty bad people that are in office and they’re pretty good people that are in office. And I want to say that just like the people that might be listening to this, they don’t always know the details about how bad these data centers really are. And I want to give them time to learn, but they better hurry up because we don’t have time to wait for them to eventually figure this thing out. I don’t want this to be a Republican Democrat thing.

I think that too much of our country talks in terms of politics. I really wish it would be more of we’re neighbors, we live in the same community, let’s work together to make this thing happen. I heard Cheryl say that before, not today, but I’ve heard her say before, as a nurse, she doesn’t ask somebody their political affiliation before she helps them in an operating room. It doesn’t matter to her. And when I look at another human being, it doesn’t matter to me. If you need help, I’m going to try to help you. I don’t care which side of the aisle that you’re on. Now, I wish that this would be one of those things for everybody, that it just doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you’re on. It’s coming for all of us. And if we don’t all wake up and work together, we’re lost.

Micaiah Lloyd:

I am radically black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black black, black, black, black. Talk about everywhere am I going? And my parents never talked to me about race for real when I was a little girl. They just let me, because I was just so whimsical. I have stars tatted on my face. They’re the Neverland stars because I just love Peter Pan. I don’t ever want to grow up. And the world just beat me up. The world just beat me up. I played travel soccer, like I said before, so I was mostly an all white environment. So I didn’t get confidence until maybe my freshman year of high school. My racial self-esteem was low, just a whole bunch of things. So when I look at the world, it’s not that I’m trying to see racism, it’s just what I see because I’m looking for myself and I never see myself.

So me entering this organizing space, I blew it up. I blew it up. And it was after I was at a planning commission meeting and they said, “Let’s put all the data centers in the heavy industrial zones.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s where all the Black people are, isn’t it? And it was. And so I went in my coalition chat and I’m just like, “Y’all, I’m about to blow these people up.” I told them everything I was about to say. I said, “I’m doing this on my own platform. I’m just letting you guys know. ” And it hasn’t been good since. There’s been a huge divide in our county, unfortunately, between people of the more Southern part and people in the Northern part of the county. So I would say if you’re entering an organizing space, sometimes it is best for your mental health, just so many tears have been shed and it’s been a waste of time trying to get people to understand me and my point of view.

So sometimes you have to protect yourself and you have to organize with people who align with you more. But in terms of regular day-to-day conversations, no one who would talk to me would know about all of this crazy stuff I got going on in my head. I am a very personable person. All of my jobs have been more so blue collar. So I’m in the service industry a lot. I love elderly people. I don’t care what color you are. I love all people. And when I talk to people, I talk to them as if they’re the only person in the world.

So you need to go out and you need to talk to your neighbors. One of my neighbors, I’m looking at their house right now, he voted for Donald Trump. I don’t care. I didn’t even know he voted for Donald Trump until a year ago, but I’ve looked at this man face-to-face for 23 years of my life and I wouldn’t even have known. He’s always very nice to me. When I walk my dog, he lets my dog poop in his grass as long as I pick it up. It’s just like you need to go out and you need to talk to people and we have to find common ground and we have to be able to listen to people. And class solidarity is so important right now. And there are poor white people in this area who have been silenced and who have been bamboozled into voting for people consistently who do not care about them.

And I really hope that this issue wakes people up that all of these politicians lie and we need to follow the money. And if they have weird people in their campaign contributions, you should probably pay attention to that and you should stop making excuses for people.

And like Mr. Jackson said, we need to start running for office. Regular everyday people have to be in office. We have to clean sweep our government, our local governments. After God willing, I really am praying that we will ban data centers by November. I’m praying we can bully us more collectively into banning data centers. And if that happens, we’re clean sleep in the government. All of our local governments just need to be investigated because how did you allow this to happen? Why are you so susceptible to corruption? Why do you have an affinity for selling out your constituents? Why do you have an affinity for looking us in our face with attitude and lying to us and not taking our concerns seriously? Everyone has to leave. Everyone has to go. Everyone needs to be fired, as Donald Trump will say. All of them, you’re fired.

Everyone has to go. So I would say in terms of advice, get your boots on the ground, get out, talk to the people you know, get out and talk to the people you don’t know. Start showing up to planning in district commissioner meetings, go to your local government meetings, look these people in their face. These politicians, I can tell they’re scared when I walk in the room because they know I’m about to insult them. Start bullying these people. They really need to know that they work for us. And a lot of people don’t like my language, but at some point you have to stop caring and you have to really start embracing your own radical Black politic and start crashing out. And that’s my advice. I feel like if we would all crash out, they would not act like this. We need to start put…

And I don’t want violence to happen to anybody, but what they’re doing is violent to us. The stories that I’m hearing, it’s violence. It’s terrorism to me. It’s domestic terrorism. That’s what I hear.

Cheryl Shadden:

That’s what it’s like living here. It’s like living in a war zone. It absolutely is.

Micaiah Lloyd:

That’s what I’ve heard. I listened to you guys’ podcast about two times and just so I could really understand everything. And this sounds like just a horrendous… I’m sorry, I know it’s a beautiful place, but it sounds like a horrendous place to live. It sounds horrendous.

Cheryl Shadden:

It is.

Micaiah Lloyd:

I’ll be damned. If that happens to my beautiful… I’ll be damned. Oh my God.

Cheryl Shadden:

And people tell us all the time, just move. Well, my home and my property are paid for. I couldn’t sell my home or property if I wanted to. And so what do we do? You stand and fight.

Micaiah Lloyd:

That’s all you can do.

Craig Jackson:

Yeah. And to follow up with Cheryl, I have to disclose there’s a data center coming next door to me if I decide to sell my home. And we have a neighbor, their house has been sitting because it has to be disclosed. So you don’t have a choice. I mean, the worst case scenario for me is Airbnb my house to data center employees, but where am I going to go? Because I grew up in Houston and so I lived next to the highway. I know the highway noise. It’s embedded in my DNA at this point. And that’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s like you’re living next to a highway that just will not stop. And there’s nights, there’s not a car on the road. I’ve literally walked over to the highway. I say highway, Texas highway. There’s not a car on the road, but you’re hearing that droning constantly.

And the only way we are going to stop this is to not just educate politicians, but we need educated people to run for this. We need to stop just believing. So one of the things we’ve come across in our area is developers making false personas and going on Facebook groups to hype up all the positive benefits of data centers or people who are invested in data centers going on and playing the positivity side. And as neighbors, one, you know your neighbors, you know who’s true and who’s not, but the reality is we can only do so much on social media, but we need to be the louder voices in all honesty. We need to be the voices of reason. And one of the things we see all the time is, well, you’re on Facebook, you’re using a data center, you’re on TikTok, you’re using data center.

And part of that education is there’s a difference between an enterprise data center and a hyperscale data center. And what’s coming in our areas is hyperscale, which is what we don’t want. We’ve been using enterprise data centers for years. I used to work in a building that had its own data center within, and the room was constantly kept at 70 degrees, but you couldn’t hear the fans because they sound walled everything. It didn’t disrupt anything. It didn’t use any water. It was all air cooled by air conditioning. This is an entirely different beast that we’re fighting and that’s where the education outlet comes in. So if we just have smart people running, if we do more education, do what we can be the voice of reason, not just the voice of opposition at the end of the day.

Karen Pearson:

I think the level of secrecy and deception, I guess, I mean, I’m not a naive person. I deal with all sorts of people and I love people too. I like to get to know different people. And I mean, I feel like we all bleed the same color red. And our skeletal makeup, we have many things in common as far as color, race, none of that matters language. For me, one of the things that has been the most shocking is how people have just so easily lied and deceived and a lot for the sake of money. There for a long time we said out here that we were kind of the redheaded kids of Hood County because, and again, me and Cheryl, some of us have talked about this. There’s quite a few of us that are in this fight that are very highly educated.

But what they’ve done to this community is because of lower socioeconomic. I think Mikaia mentioned this about the industrial part in the city, that’s a lot of Black people there. Well, out here there’s a lot of Hispanic people in our community and they’re not going to speak up for themselves for various reasons. I don’t care if you’re here illegally or undocumented or whatever. I have some wonderful neighbors across the street that I would go help in a heartbeat. The deception to pile this onto the communities like that and to think that you can get away with it, it is, like you said, that sacrificial zone. It’s showing me that there are some of us who are worth sacrificing for a dollar. There are some of us who regardless of, “Oh, let’s look at that community. It doesn’t look like it’s very well-deserving. Let’s put it all there.” And I don’t know, I guess just the way that other human beings treat human beings is beyond me.

I don’t think that way. My heart is not like that. And so it’s just really hard to comprehend the deception and the lack of transparency and how so easily we can lie and how we can sacrifice another human being for the sake of money. I cannot wrap my head around that. And that’s part of why I want to keep fighting.

Micaiah Lloyd:

These are called the paths of least resistance, these specific neighborhoods, and it’s a microzoning and it’s redlining. So for the audience, if there’s a data center being proposed in your community, it’s probably in a community that would have the pathway of least resistance. If we’re in a state like Texas and we’re worried about ICE, probably Hispanic people aren’t going to speak up for themselves because they’re scared. So yes, let’s put it here. So we do need to pay attention to not only Black and brown people, but poor people as well because they don’t have the resources to fight for themselves.

Hillary Gonzalez:

100%.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

You are right about that. What I have found recently is that I think even middle-class people are no match for these data centers because they have really deep pockets and they can litigate for forever. And I think a normal everyday person is not going to be able to fight that because they’re going to take it to court and they will tie you up in court and they will take everything that you have and then some. Cheryl, I know that with yours, they were asking questions that they had no business asking you. So they were wanting everything and the paperwork was just nonstop. So that’s been my experience with these data centers.

Craig Jackson:

We can also say it’s expensive. We had to retain a lawyer which costs 10,000 upfront and it’s not even probably the lawyer we’re going to go with at the end of the day. There’s several other communities that have gotten lawyers that it is expensive. So if there’s any lawyers listening that want to help, we would appreciate the help. But at the end of the day, what it really is coming down to is money. And just anybody that wants to take five seconds to Google Marathon Digital Bitcoin, they sold off a lot of Bitcoin and made a lot, a lot of money at the profit of this neighborhood. And it’s frustrating because we don’t receive any of that, but our property taxes go up, our electricity goes up, our water bill, everything else goes up. We’re fighting just for daily life, but yet they’re profiting off the backs of our health.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests from Granbury, Texas, Cheryl Shadden, Karen Pearson, Craig Jackson, and Dr. Shannon Wolfe. And I want to thank our guests from Maryland, Hillary Gonzalez and Mikaya Lloyd. This was such an important discussion and this is such an important issue and I’m so grateful to all of our guests for being part of this panel and for everything that they are doing to fight back for their communities. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring about this. 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 Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other. Solidarity forever.