Chapter 1: What is the current situation with ICE and immigrant detention?
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Chapter 2: Who is Albero and why is his case significant?
Yeah. There's a lot of stuff to be done.
I'll finish telling the story of what happened to Albero too, because I want to, you know, center that. Because again, you know, this is a, this is a community issue and this is a community member who is missing now who can't do his part as a part of a whole community because he has, he's been taken. And, and like when he was taken, they had guns, they had one pointed right at his wife.
Yeah.
He was saying, you know, they were saying we're not resisting, but they they kept banging on the car window and they reached inside the car window and they like, you know, he and his wife emphasized that they were just going to work. They weren't doing anything. And I didn't care. Yeah. They see a non-white person and they grow hungry for violence.
And after detaining her, you know, they asked her to sign a document so that she could go get her kids. She refused because she didn't trust them. And she told them that she wasn't going to sign anything. And then later they found out, I think the lawyers found out that what it was is that they were giving her a voluntary deportation paper for the whole family.
And that level... They do this all the time. They do this all the time. That level of deceit and trickery is just... Yeah.
horrible because they did it they gave it to her in english and she doesn't speak english they thought they could just get her to sign it to get them out yeah This is being run by the same people who are banging doors down and just going into houses in Minneapolis. Yeah. It's all connected. They use the same tactics of violence and fear-mongering. And it's terrible.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I mean, they've been moving personnel around, so there's like a non-zero chance it was literally the same person. Yeah. Like, that person could be in Minneapolis now, we don't know.
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Chapter 3: What tactics are being used by ICE in immigrant raids?
I'm just going to say this because, you know, there used to be a thing people would do whenever there was a large social upheaval. It was called the Occupation of the Factories. Yeah. You could go read Bella Testa writing about it in like 1921. Very old thing. See, the Seattle General Strike was like the most famous example of people doing this in the U.S.
But it was like, OK, so there is some shit going on. We need to stop something from happening. So we are going to take over our workplaces and run the parts of it that need to be run so that people can get food. And then otherwise, we're not. And otherwise, we're just going to keep controlling. You don't actually just have to go to your 9 to 5.
The people in Seattle, those people didn't know what a television was. And they were able to do this. If you showed one of the people in, like, the Seattle, like, 1919 general strike, people who did this, like, if you showed them a computer, they would have a heart attack. And they did this. So I believe in all of you. You have seen things that would have obliterated these people's minds. Like...
I have like a slightly different take.
I don't know if this is like a hot take or a cold take or a lukewarm take. But my perspective is one, who said that you just have to go to your nine to five while you watch all of this happen? Who said that? You are saying, oh, I have to do that. No one is actually making you do that.
The consequences of that are that if you don't go to your nine to five or you take a sick day or something, you might get fired and you might be in a similarly vulnerable position to someone whose life is already on the line. But if we all stood in solidarity with each other, that would be less dangerous.
Like if we chose each other over capitalism, that would be so radical. But that's my take. There are not enough cops to evict us all. simply aren't. There really just aren't.
I think that people forget or conveniently compartmentalize the truth that we as a collective, when we band together, when we refuse to participate in individualism, the ways that they want us to We are so powerful. And I think that that scares people because that's a lot of responsibility.
But again, that's really only so much responsibility if you see yourself as an individual as opposed to part of a collective. If you see yourself as bearing a piece of responsibility as part of a collective, the same way that ants all move in a colony and carry like a piece of bread together, Maybe you wouldn't feel so much overwhelm because you would understand that we are in this together.
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Chapter 4: What are the key functions of the Federal Reserve?
However, comma, the Fed does a bunch of other shit. Like, for example, a whole bunch of the world's gold supply owned by a bunch of countries across the world sits in a vault under the Federal Reserve Building. The Fed has a balance sheet, right, of like the assets that it owns. And that balance sheet is right now about six and a half trillion dollars.
The payment system that the Fed maintains has $2 trillion a day moving through it, right? This payment infrastructure, the infrastructure of the Federal Reserve, is the core of the functioning of the entire American banking system. I cannot emphasize this enough. And this is also important on a macro international level, right?
Like this institution functioning sort of normally is the difference between capitalism working kind of normally, which is not good, but is working and it's not working. And Trump is trying to take control of it. And again, this is a guy who wants to invade Greenland, and he is trying to take control over one of the most powerful economic institutions that has ever existed in human history.
So these are the sort of the stakes of the fight that's happening here, because again, the Fed is supposed to be an independent entity, right?
Chapter 5: How is Trump attempting to influence the Federal Reserve?
The president is not supposed to be able to order the Fed to just do whatever it wants. And this is what's at stake with Trump trying to fire one of these reserve board presidents, with Trump trying to prosecute the current head of the Federal Reserve and use that threat to bring the Fed into line with doing what he wants to do.
Now, Trump is also, again, attempting to install his own guy when Jerome Powell's term as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board ends. And, okay, in terms of could the Trump administration actually run this, right? I'm going to read this quote from actually a very good Yahoo story about Trump. The search for Trump's new like who he wants to run the Federal Reserve.
This is starting with a quote from Trump's Treasury Secretary Scott Bessett, who's been the guy who is running the candidate search. Quote, who can bring the board along with them? Who has the gravitas, Bessette said.
Who is going to have an open, Greenspan-like mind that we could be going through a productivity boom like we did in the 90s, and not just throw the brakes because we're alarmed at a high GDP number? Okay, if you have spent your life closely following American macroeconomic policy, that is nuts. That is a terrifying statement. Utterly horrifying.
Now, Mia, why is it scary to say that he wants a Greenspan-like mindset that doesn't throw the brakes on the economy because they're alarmed by a GDP number? Why is that scary? And this is also, you know, why is it scary for the Trump administration to have direct control of the Federal Reserve? Part of the reason we haven't had a full-scale economic collapse since 2008 has been...
that there has been a bunch of very, very careful management of the economy by the Federal Reserve, right? They have done a lot of technical stuff. I'm saying they've done a lot of technical stuff well. When I say well, I mean for the functioning of capital, like you and me and everyone listening to this. Is it working for us? No, not really, but it's working for capital, right? Right.
And they've been able to prevent an economic collapse through a lot of sort of technical means in 2020. And you see this now. They did these things called overnight repo injections where they would pump like $100 billion in liquidity into the bank markets overnight in order to make sure there was liquidity because that was one of the things that caused the 2008 collapse.
So they've been doing a bunch of very careful management, some of it in these large swings that have very little public attention, some of it in just the way they've been doing policy.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of Trump's tariffs on Greenland?
What these guys want to do is the Greenspan stuff from the 90s. So, okay, Mia, what the fuck is that? So what he's talking about is the Greenspan put. Now, what happened in the 90s, to simplify the story a little bit, but I'm not even really simplifying it much, every time the market went down, Greenspan would just lower the interest rate to make the market go back up, right?
So every single time it even sort of looks like the market might be going down, he makes the cost of borrowing from the Fed cheaper so you can just take more money out of the Federal Reserve and plunge that money back into the stock market. Right. That's the theory here. The economist Robert Brenner called it asset Keynesianism.
This is something we have talked about on the show many, many, many times. And it is, to a large extent, the thing responsible for the 2008 economic collapse and also the dot-com bubble before that. And arguably also the Asian market collapses in the 90s. Okay, you know, you're dealing with a problem, which is that you don't have a manufacturing economy that can support economic growth.
So what are you going to do instead? Okay, we're going to give everyone a bunch of money so they can do speculative investing in stocks. And we're going to give everyone a bunch of money so that they can... go invest in the housing market because housing prices will only ever go up. And that's the thing that these people want to do. Right.
And in terms of why, OK, why should you be scared about this? Right. This is like saying that, OK, we need to bring back the guys who did all of the like mortgage backed securities in 2008 that went up and put them in charge of like the world's most powerful economic institution.
Right.
So the candidates that Trump is talking about putting in place, I don't know if any of them are going to make it right now, because I think the kind of person Trump is looking for is not the kind of person who like runs this kind of thing normally. In terms of like what Trump would do with the guy that he sort of installed there, we can look at who they've already installed. Right.
And the one Federal Reserve Board member that Trump has successfully gotten in place is Stefan Mirren, who, and I cannot emphasize this enough, I talk about how nuts this guy is all the time. This is the guy who wants other countries to pay taxes on on holding U.S. bonds. And this is the guy that, again, is now one of the governors of the Federal Reserve Board because Trump put him there.
I could spend another 40 minutes ranting about how bad of an idea his Mar-a-Lago Accords, which is his version of the Plaza Accords, would be. It's gibberish. It's atrocious. And these people are simply not good enough at technical economic management to be put in charge of the Federal Reserve, the most powerful economic agency in the entire world.
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Chapter 7: How is the community responding to ICE actions in Minneapolis?
who would be fine with things like Trump could do public executions in the streets and like JP Morgan eventually would be OK with it. Right. JP Morgan is like panicking over this Federal Reserve stuff. So this is actually a line at which segments of capital are willing to break with Trump because this is an existential threat to them.
Now, before I sort of close this out, you know, I've been giving what is essentially a very conventional analysis of what the Federal Reserve is, because to some extent you need a conventional analysis of what the Federal Reserve is to understand what the fuck is going on with these board things. But I want to give the final word to the anthropologist David Graeber.
This is from his book, Debt, the First 5,000 Years. Quote, One element, however, tends to go flagrantly missing in even the most vivid conspiracy theories about the banking system, let alone in official accounts. That is, the role of war and military power. There's a reason why the wizard has such a strange capacity to make money out of nothing. Behind him, there is a man with a gun.
True, in one sense, he's been there from the start. I have already pointed out that modern money is based on government debt and that governments borrow money in order to finance wars. This is just as true today as it was in the age of King Philip II.
The creation of central banks represented a permanent institutionalization of that marriage between the interests of warriors and financiers that had already begun to emerge in Renaissance Italy and that eventually became the foundation of financial capitalism. And this is something that's very, very important, right? We've been talking about how important the Fed is as an economic institution.
And obviously the importance of the Federal Reserve is tied in with the fact that the dollar is the world's reserve currency, which makes it the most important currency on earth. It means that every other country is doing a bunch of transactions denominated in American dollars. And it turns out when you can make American dollars, that is an enormous advantage for you.
But this is all based on American military power, right? The reason that the dollar is the world reserve currency is because all of the countries that had competing currencies that could have been the international standard were sort of annihilated during World War II. And at the end of World War II, it was the United States left standing with the richest and most powerful economy on earth.
Yes, but also like it was the country with nukes and the largest army that wasn't the Soviets, right? The element here that Graeber is pointing out, right, is that the debt that you and me and everyone is like carrying out our day-to-day stuff with is war debt.
Literally, the thing that we used to like buy groceries is to a large extent, it's a tiny bit more complicated than this, but like it's loads that were taken out to like go bomb Vietnam. And part of what's happening under the Trump administration is that all of the things that used to be under the table, right? The U.S.
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