Chapter 1: What is the significance of the media's capitalist structure?
This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Dr. Laurie Santos from the Happiness Lab here. It's the season of giving. And this year, my podcast, the Happiness Lab, is partnering with GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that provides people in extreme poverty with the cash they need as part of the Pods Fight Poverty campaign.
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I didn't really have an interest in being on air. I kind of was up there to just try and infiltrate the building. From the underground clubs that shaped global music to the pastors and creatives who built the cultural empire, the Atlanta Ears podcast uncovers the stories behind one of the most influential cities in the world. The thing I love about Atlanta is that it's a city of hustlers, man.
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The show was ahead of its time to represent a Black family in ways the television hadn't shown before. Exactly.
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And I'm Kelly Williams, or Laura Winslow.
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Chapter 2: How did the New York Times handle the Tom Cotton op-ed controversy?
Which is Trump administration has the ability to use its quote-unquote antitrust power in order to stop one of these two companies from doing this buyout. And Trump administration is using the fact that the media is being bought out by his allies in order to try to get people to buy CNN and simply eliminate negative news coverage of him.
And I don't really think I need to explain why it's extremely bad that the President of the United States could simply order a news outlet to be bought out and then suddenly it's bought out. I think it's kind of self-explanatory why that's unbelievably bad. But that is the situation that we may rapidly find ourselves in because we don't live in anything that even sort of looks like a democracy.
We live in the dictatorship of capital. And the thing about the press under a dictatorship, even one that's as decentralized as the dictatorship of capital, is that one particularly fascist faction of capital can simply roll in by the media and take control of it. And that's the project that we're seeing now. But these people are not undefeatable. We beat them before, we can beat them again.
And in some ways, their project is kind of self-defeating in that they have spent a significant amount of time hollowing out people's trust in these institutions. And there is an extent to which, as bad as all of this is, they may simply be taking control of a husk that they had already caused or brought from the inside.
And meanwhile, all of this control of the media that they've been taking has not stopped everyone from fucking hating them. And that's the note that I want to leave everyone here on. It doesn't matter how much of the media these people buy. Everyone still hates them. We can fight them and we can win.
Hi, Dr. Laurie Santos from the Happiness Lab here. It's the season of giving, which is why my podcast is partnering with GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that provides people in extreme poverty with the cash they need. This year, we're taking part in the Pods Fight Poverty campaign. And it's not just the Happiness Lab. Some of my favorite podcasters are also taking part.
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Chapter 3: What events led to the rise of the New Jewel Movement in Grenada?
Yeah, you're just in traffic. But shouldn't they already just be there? Oh, yeah, well, because this is something that's actually been a delay tactic for them, is... They insist that we need to split the cost equally of a bargaining space. What? What? And again, we're independent, so they know that we can't on a regular basis commit to that.
So if you want to donate to our unions, that way we can pay to sit down in front of these people. That's completely... Yeah. Having to have the union pay... I've never heard of that before. That's completely deranged. That's... What? And we've even waived our right to meet in a neutral space. Uh-huh.
So we've asked if they would be willing to meet in the office of their legal representation or if they'd be willing to meet in the office of our legal representation. And they've said no to both because supposedly, despite being the second largest union avoidance firm in the world, they've said that their office doesn't have adequate space to hold us.
But then rental space in the city is so fucking expensive that there's no feasible way to rent a space for eight hours for two days, you know, once a month. Yeah. Which has meant that we've ended up in some strange places. So, college conference rooms, City Hall, we work... I know. This is the most deeply unserious company I have ever encountered.
There's all kinds of things like that that they've employed in the past year to attempt us making significant progress with negotiating. And it wasn't until November this year that they finally gave us a counter on economics after we told them we would file a bad faith bargaining charge if they didn't. Hell yeah. Do you want to guess what their counter?
So for reference, our union's requesting $30 an hour for baristas because that's a living wage according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator. Do you want to guess what Blue Bottle said they would give us? 18? No. Well, actually, strangely, yes. They said right now we make 18 an hour, but they said they'll keep it the same and they want to retain the rate to change it whenever they want.
they're making a floor they're committing to a floor I then tried to ask if they've ever in their history decreased wages and they're like no I don't see why we would ever do that and I'm like oh so then this floor is bullshit actually Their baseline for negotiations as our starting position is nothing? Yeah. And this is a year after negotiating with them so far. Yeah.
It's like, okay, like, I mean, at that point, it's like, yeah, I don't know, like, fuck it. Our starting position is we should have your house. Like, this is, like, this is, like, equally, like, come on. Like, you having their house is a more reasonable demand than our basic negotiating position is nothing? Like, what are we doing here? Oh, man.
No idea.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Larry Ellison's influence on media consolidation?
And to hear it all in a bullet form, like in literally just a bullet list, like every single aspect of my life and everything that I've ever loved or thought was important to me in a list of what they think they can control.
It's just crazy. And then we have to go back and say, okay, well, do you see how off base you are?
Yeah.
And then they make us sound like the crazy ones for wanting to live a good life and be able to like, you know, make ends meet. Yeah.
pay less than 60 percent of our income towards rent yeah yeah take a vacation maybe yeah one other thing that i think is a great point about how it's actually capital responding to the organization of baristas people workers whatever is they haven't done it recently but last summer they sent a very long-winded and angry email about all the bargaining updates and press that the union was getting um they're so mad at me that i'm good at my job
And then this past summer, after we did two walkouts in fairly quick succession in response to two different things, they attempted to accuse us of intermittent striking just because they were so scared. They didn't know what else to do to try and be like, you didn't own me. I'm not mad. Please don't put in the news that I'm mad.
Their lawyer even said in a bargaining session later on that he had a less than 75% chance of ever winning that argument at the board. Oh my god. But they were just so mad that we walked out twice in May that they tried to claim that it was unprotected, but that they were being benevolent by not disciplining anyone for it. Oh my god.
And they haven't really given much of a response to our multi-day strike yet, aside from their lawyer emailing us earlier this week to ask us for our entire legal justification for why the terminations of Abby, Nora, and Ashley were illegal, and what legal justification do we have to say that they're negotiating a contract in bad faith? Mm-hmm. Which is, like, the NLRA? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Grenada face regarding freedom of the press?
And so even with these alternative organizations, you had that kind of hierarchy. But I think that is to be expected from any movement besides anarchism.
Yeah.
So I can't say I'm surprised. They closed the independent newspaper Torchlight after an article highlighting a Rastafarian protest against lack of representation in government. So there were efforts to ensure that Grenada moved towards secularism. But freedom of the press was not something that was particularly high in terms of priorities.
And there were still prejudices against religious groups and movements like the Rastafarians that had yet to be addressed. You know, these things aren't dealt with overnight, but I think when all you have is a hammer, everything can sort of look like a nail.
Yeah.
They didn't do anything too drastic in the economic sphere. For the most part, they left people's private businesses alone. They implemented some state enterprises and they implemented some cooperative enterprises.
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Chapter 6: How did the People's Revolutionary Government become militaristic?
So a fairly standard mixed economy, a mixed economy that can to varying extents be found throughout the Caribbean, whether they had a revolution or not. But they did establish cooperative and friendly relations with Cuba, which was a real thorn on the side of the United States.
yeah he didn't like them and now this is i would say from 1979 to 1980 so their first two years in power people were nervous sighted you know they were hopeful of the genuine decolonization and positive change taking place but the excitement part of the new excitement started to die down by 1981. The People's Revolutionary Government, PRG, became increasingly militaristic as time went on.
They organized militias and armed people. They were essentially preparing for a Gary counter-coup, but also potential CIA involvement. The police were replaced with military personnel. And I think this is the trap that a lot of these projects end up falling into. This concern about the enemy within and the enemy without leads these revolutionaries to cannibalize themselves.
The revolutionary potential and excitement gets curtailed because there's so much fear dominating that
some enemy is going to attack uh some violence is going to take place that they need to prepare for and so you over you militarize you militarize and you stare the course of the project away from its original intentions to a point where it's not even recognizable to the people who initiated it yeah you know i'm not saying that they weren't right to be wary of u.s intervention
History has demonstrated as much, but it was something that the people of the country were becoming increasingly concerned about because it's a small country and it's uncommon. You know, it's strange. It's unusual. It's unnerving to see militias marching down your street.
Now, the neutral movement was starting to become more focused on establishing a vanguard core, the more they oriented themselves toward Marxism-Leninism. So, like I mentioned before, they were making this shift away from the sort of popular mass democracy that people like C. Lord James was talking about, the more they read and they studied the works of Marxism-Leninism.
And there were people within the party who became more and more convinced that Again, remember the end positions of power this point in time. So you're in positions of power and you're reading theoretical justifications for why you need to be in power. You know, you'll stand by those theoretical justifications because it
lines up with your interests, your self-interests to, you know, further your position of power and the continuation of your role as an authority, as a leader. And so this vanguard core that they were pursuing, it ended up creating a hierarchy of in-group and out-group.
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Chapter 7: What events led to the downfall of Maurice Bishop?
And then two major events took place in 1981. There was a bombing under the stage of a rally that killed some youths. And there was a car ambushing as well. Both of these incidents were blamed on counter-revolutionaries in the country. That famous buzzword, that famous catchphrase, that famous justification for any and every response.
Yeah.
So it further pushed the country and really the whole society forward. into this culture of suspicion and repression and also resentment for the New Jewel Movement.
The New Jewel Movement wasn't responsible for the bombings, but you can imagine people were probably saying when they were at the parlor, by the grocery, you know, out by the bar, down the street, they're saying, you know, at least they didn't have any bombings under Gary. You know, at least they didn't have these car ambushes under Gary. Gary wasn't nice, but we didn't have terrorist attacks.
And the sort of transparency and engagement people were accustomed to was starting to evaporate. The New Jewel movement was starting to be seen by some as a secret society. And if your society is already small, right, just about 100,000 people.
Yeah.
Having a secret society within that small society where everybody knows everybody. That's not good. Especially when the revolution is so new, so nascent. You need people's trust. And especially as well, because people were not ideologically for Marxism-Leninism. Most of them, that is. They weren't ideologically for Marxism-Leninism. They weren't ideologically neutral movement advocates.
They just wanted Eric Gehry out, and they wanted improvements to their living conditions.
Yeah. Yeah.
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Chapter 8: What lessons can be learned from Grenada's revolution?
That sort of secrecy, it doesn't push things in a positive trajectory. Yeah. It's easy for the population to perceive that you've replaced one elite with another elite, right? Especially in post-colonial movements when we do this. Exactly. It's a transparent one for one, you know? Yeah. I mean, not to say that people didn't see the differences. No, yes, correct. They weren't aware of the nuances.
They could tell the difference between an Eric Gehry and a Maurice Bichot. Mm-hmm. They can tell the difference between, you know, one form of politics and another. It's not that they were just ready to turn court immediately. I mean, some of them still had the fresh wounds of the trauma being inflicted by Eric Carey.
But it's because of that trauma that they were also sensitive to the potential of new traumas. Call it paranoia, call it unist and right-thinking suspicion. But they were wary of what was taking place. And you know what didn't help?
It didn't help that, okay, so you know how some people, they read like one or two theory books and they start walking around like their head is three times bigger than it is. They start walking around this kind of inflated sense of self-importance.
Yes, I'm very familiar with that kind of person.
Yeah, unfortunately, that's exactly what started taking place among some members of the party. They're reading all these books, all these thick books from Russia and Germany and Marx and Lenin and all these people. And they're starting to carry themselves in a particular way.
Yeah.
With a level of arrogance and know-it-allness. And this is Wilson in a society where, remember, we are fresh out of colonialism. None of our independent nations are even 100 years old yet. Much of the population still remember that colonial period and much of the population, like I mentioned before, needed changes to the education system because they didn't have educational opportunities.
So you had this vast educational inequality, right? And then you have this New Jewel movement and some of its members are talking to you like you're stupid.
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