And to moderate todays conversation before i introduce our guest thank you for the organizer and sponsor. The publisher of a new series of the abolitionist papers and i am proud doctor gilmores forthcoming book change everything, racial capitalism and a case for abolition. Haymarket has three more important events lined up this week on sunday. And on thursday one week from today and conversation with the money perry. Was so many people joining the call we need your patience with technical issues you may want to try reduce your image quality video will be recorded and we are reserving time for q a please post your questions on the live video feed wherever you are watching it. The pandemic is a portal to imagine the world. Some responses to covid19 that doubles down on criminalization on national and subnational borders now serves us with a message of total surveillance of good medicine. As we try to imagine a different world and fight for our future there is no one i would rather hear from. The cofounder of Many Organizations including california moratorium project and Environmental Justice network and part of the Graduate Center and doctor gilmore is the author of purpose in opposition and brilliant study that locates prisons at the foundation of the new prison space where we met the idea that government can or should guarantee social wellbeing to be featured in dozens of journals and books and the new book change everything the case for abolition is forthcoming in february 2021. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. With covid19 many are pointing out so can you start off the Bigger Picture between prison and inequality . I would be happy to. My dear friend catherine who i think is listening from somewhere in toronto, recently cited the fantastic poet and lawyer and said if we were truly all in this together, we would not all be in this together and this is the message i think we can use as a starting point tonight to talk about covid19 mass incarceration and the struggle for abolition. Mass incarceration and the related detention that connects to what is a feature of places that have the deepest inequalit inequality. We have one slide to show you tonight, that shows a list of the founding nations this was created by the franklin policy initiative with Data Collection and visualization and spreading organization and one of the great ones of the world, shows us that even in the context the United States is off the chart. Quite literally. And what holds to gather is the possibility of mass incarceration is a combination of organized abandonment and organized violence which is to say present attention and importation. We can take the slides down if people are satisfied with this image. We could, but tonight we would also look at images from brazil, russia, india and south africa and we would see a similar pattern emerging where no one, no country is remotely close to the United States. But as russia and other countries follow increasing neoliberal policies to say that abandonment and austerity we see the number of people rise and rise. But as i said the United States is off the charts. That said, it is not for catastrophe or a culture of complaint the catastrophe and complaint if that is how we do our the kinds of practices for the many people who are listening what my friend and historian calls pity and that is not looking for contempt or pit pity. What we are doing rather is trying in every possible way , to find a way to politics , rather than the distinguished by or by style but looking for politics that are grounded in the struggle of life and death. So a young french writer he wrote a fantastic book that is called who killed my father and in this book he makes this distinction. So what does that mean for abolition . Abolition his presence and is already happening in so many ways around the world and many of the people listening and watching tonight are already doing the work and as stumped as we are because they are under some subversion of house arrest. So revolutions happen because people are so conservative. Conservative. They wait and try every little thing until one day people come out in the street and clear up in a matter of years the disorder of centuries so to say that covid19 is a portal to which people who do all kinds of Little Things of various kinds around the world to come out and clear up the disorder of centuries. My friend and conrad listed what i made the other night was the selfdefense model and she thought in the discussion from abolition radio the other day that we could think of what we did as survival pending abolition so that means the work behind and the work ahead is very long. I will give you an example. In l. A. County, decades ago, the aclu brought conditions of consignment case against the county for their horrendous conditions in the jails. Over the years the aclu was in charge of taking care and keeping an eye on what the county did to remedy the horrific conditions. About 18 years ago the aclu invited a few abolitionists to talk to them about something they had never imagined which was the way to remedy the problem with the l. A. County jails was not have a jail at all but build a better one. Slowly but surely this way of understanding is central to the struggle in Los Angeles County over those jails. Sixteen years later, abolitionists who joined forces with those of reform, managed to persuade l. A. County board of supervisors, one of the biggest governments by number of people in the United States , not to build a new jail but rather put the billions of dollars that wouldve gone into that, into housing and healthcare and other lifeaffirming projects. So abolition is present and how we connect with growth from and to multiply those that have the capacity to risk the movement i learned many years ago us who are talking heads on skype is to live on live the moment and to show how anti Domestic Violence people is essential to the formation of abolition that Mutual Aid Organization that now flourishes everywhere because of covid19 nurses, all of these organizations become in one way or another and some movement of abolition its about abolishing the condition under which prison became the solution to problems rather than the buildings we call prison. There are neighborhood organizations and prisoner organizations and Environmental Justice and legal aid, rights advocates , Public Health advocates, you name it, large and small are coming together in various configurations around the world to relieve the stress of this abandonment and the realization by changing the world in which we live so thats the big picture that connects inequality with abolition and mass incarceration. So here we are decades deep in organized violence and abandonment and now the covid19 pandemic what are the possibilities now and what does it mean for the future . The pandemic is focusing on everybodys mind nothing like fear to focus the mind there are many aspects and therefore the responses that people put together in many ways are quite astonishing. And one very pointed case at the university of law school put together for all of the state jurisdiction and federal bureau of prisons to show who has the authority so people who are organizing on the ground can focus using the power map to make the decision to release people. What we know about mass incarceration it is class war and it is tied to the vulnerabilities that the types of organizations i listed a few minutes ago and the organizing that they do they try to relieve these vulnerabilities as our prisoner rights advocates and people who are incarcerated advocating on their own behalf. We could spend some time perhaps thinking about the fact that in the United States the. That mass incarceration has become a catchall solution for social and economic behavior and other problems and the number of prison beds has gone up as hospital beds have gone down. The movement in the opposite direction is quite startling to me. And as many people have figured out, those who are against door for the configuration of hospital and healthcare in the United States today, we still see the fact that many areas of the us are underserved, if served at all and those that have the capacity to take care of people are overwhelmed because of cuts to health care and the workers who are working in hospitals and transportation and all of the venues of the system to try to keep people whose lives are in danger from becoming sick and dying, are struggling with an adequate resources when they could be there. What could we think about in terms of organizing now . Certainly a lot of the work that people have done and vulnerabilities should and could be lifted up now. Weather talking about brazil or the workers who have been organizing for years, are supposed to have access to produce food and wellbeing and have shelter, but also built an enormous Educational Program for themselves and others that has very Strong International connections for this hemisphere and around the world. And the Highlander Center in tennessee since the 19 twenties has been an essential place for organization and pro workingclass and to have a program right after we log off tonight and thinking about housing a fantastic story of a young abolitionist based in new orleans. After katrina destroyed a good dale one deal of everyday life and then the United States came through and destroyed what had been destroyed by the flood floods, shana and her comrades said we will create a Housing Trust so that a few one if you households could have a safe and secure and Pleasant Place to live. And raise the money and then when they were finished with they had to say about it was we did do this and this tells me the state that we needed we actually need that state that belongs to us rather than think we can do this for ourselves for each other. Other possibilities with respect to covid19 connect with the various kinds of things that people are doing immediately to set people out of prison and jail or those that have gotten out that are vulnerable because they need shelter or food or other kinds of sustenance. So those that have sprung up around the United States they are new with covid19 but they are more urgently of course raising money and we know in cook county in chicago and the comrades that she had been working with over the years was getting people out of cook county jail. This is a good thing to do but yet we also know in the last four weeks, 22 Million People in the United States lost their jobs. That means the need could not be greater for people to have the wherewithal to buy food and so forth and there is less discretionary cash available to help out and therefore in discovering the work from new orleans, we have to make demands on the social wage which is our right and requirement of ourselves. From around the world there are examples from Rio De Janeiro and the Detroit Justice Center and working on behalf of undocumented people all over the United States those disability organizers it had been so beautifully pull together and people for chicago many people have been working to extend protection and opportunity to see in this emergency is not to say they are deserving and they are not but to say 22 Million People in the United States lost their job that means many of us to be precariously employed or steadily employed or unemployed would risk joining forces together rather than imagine we can prevail to break ourselves up into smaller and smaller groups. I want to turn to some certain calls to caution against using conventional dividing lines nonviolent versus violent and short and sympathetic and can you explain why its problematic using these categories . First and foremost, we should plan and then we should say what happens next in the event the victory . So that the people who have been released are those that could ever be released do i say everybody inside . Of course not. But i do say most people who go to prison, leave prison most people are not doing life sentences. There should not be any life sentences and most parts of the world there are not. Most people do leave prison so to imagine there is a magical line of less guilty or more guilty or less or more innocent or less or more deserving or violent and nonviolent, why not take seriously the fact most people need prison, do a little analysis to see that we could closing prisons already and jails already if we just cut by two, three, four weeks, much less years the kinds of sentences people are serving and then go on to the work on abandonment. This is not an impossible challenge. It did take a long time in los angeles it didnt take as long for what we learned and of that model behavior and revolutionaries and leaders of my consciousness and cautions us and that is absolutely right. We should gather all of the victories and stop and think about them and what will this make possible . Why do these victories matter . Who do we abandon or use our own capacity whether or not to include them in victory . So new york city plans to build to spend 11 million for a new jail. This is the close rikers project the mayor yesterday or today announced the city budget as ravaged as it is by the effects of covid19 will shrink by 2 billion. 11billion for prisons and 2 billion left for everything the city needs. The mayor can learn from l. A. County, do not build the new jail, close rikers, use the resources, the money from Human Resources that would have gone into those institutions that people would be organizing to close rikers which was open because people organize to close the institution that preceded i it, the mayor and the city council use the money for the wellbeing that indeed has been ravaged by unemployment from covid19. How can that be . Design of the relationship with the transportation, health , the justice system, securit system, security, gender, ag system, security, gender, age,. That this definition of what people start to think systematically so that its possible to see how they come into being. And naturally available to organizing and struggle. That is what that definition is for. Let me give you some examples. The design of the Public Health system this is true with the overdeveloped world with the resource extraction went to several rounds of Governmental Organization the 2h century that put into place largescale government to extract value from labor. So that was a project of the 20h century. So that design put out a framework of care and disregard that has amplified for you over time certain people are to have underlying conditions that make them vulnerable to covid19. The issue is not if its pathological about a person or group of people but how has the design of a Public Health system have the wherewithal to bring people in and push them out over time. So tomorrow at 2 30 p. M. Eastern time in the us, a long time organizer and aid activist for critical resistance will be in conversation with the visionary sociologist who was thinking of data and the visualization for the purpose to strengthen people and movements. That conversation will happen tomorrow. And i want to Say Something else. That to be aware of the statistics and to tell us over and over again we have to be aware of bad statistics and at the same time be aware of the presumption that vulnerability is somehow persuasive 50 percent that somehow that will persuade people to action. And in my experience especially years ago doing some outreach work with young people in high school trying to bring into the early days and then to talk to a group of mostly brown and black young people in one of the teachers said young one out of three young black women are one men will go to prison. What young person sitting in the auditorium in 1998 would be encouraged to listen and act if the older people said you are doomed . You are doomed. So to go back to the purpose of my definition of racism is to enable people to think of activity the vulnerability would lead to joining forces to overcome that folder ability and do something else. Example is water. Everywhere around the planet people are struggling over water. So the Navajo Nation is a hot spot because of the scarcity of water because people cannot wash their hands. So those who were organized at standing rock, pipeline people but those anti pipeline has everything to do with protecting water. So then with michigan and detroit and the Justice Center especially after the fires of last year with adequate nutrition is enormous. Cape town south africa is on the verge of running out of water for some time now. So all of these concerns about water go through my definition of racism give a sense to join forces to fight racism against water, prison, housing, peoples attitudes. I dont care what anybody thinks of me as long as they stay out of my way. Now we will bring in audience questions. Radical imagu are in the position to make a donation no matter how small and today bookstop and to consider giving to the groups of critical resistance. We will give you a couple of questions and you can select a. Caring asks does abolition fight the war and i thought you could elaborate also the militaryindustrial complex and how you are thinking about the Prison Industrial Complex. That is one for the taking. Theres also a few good questions that are asking for the breaking down of the incarceration and if there is a meaningful contrast. A i will take that question. Ten years, maybe. The war, absolutely. Its interesting that weve gotten this far in the discussion. So, some of us inspired by an article in the nation in 1994 i think, maybe five, started to think that the mass incarceration. How come there are so many people in britain and how come there are so many new laws and how come there are so many new prisons everywhere so those are the questions that animated as. Is there a Prison Industrial Complex, and in playing off the concept of the militaryindustrial complex, inviting people to think about things i think that he might not even have thought about at the outset which is to say if we think of the militaryindustrial complex, we think not only about the people who go to war, but we have to think about the intellectual society, the Public Policy that determines when a big u. S. For example will use diplomacy and when it will send troops. It means that the militaryindustrial complex moves all of the people who designed the machinery and then the pentagon that contracts for those to be made. But the militaryindustrial complex includes all of the bases around the United States and around the world. More than 800 around the world. We are the only military around the world, but there is no military that has such a wide representation on the service of the planet within the u. S. Military. The militaryindustrial complex also includes all of the people that are residents of the town and the boosters that want to have more of the jobs for civilians that come with the bases and the people who work in the factories that make the ordinance and the bombs and so on and so forth. All of that. And if all of that is the militaryindustrial complex, the people that make the law and who designed the policies, the people who designed the weapons, the people that actually, uniform and civilian personnel who enlivened the whole thing, by extension, the Prison Industrial Complex has the same complexity, and that is not to muddy the water but to clarify that ther there are all these different places to fight. That we can fight in Rural America where people in many cases welcomed them thinking it was going to bring jobs and save the hospitals but neither thing happened. One of the people but imagine that the only kind of nature they can have his first Generational College students through the criminal justice of one kind or another and hope to become a Police Officer or a prison guard or a worker in that environment rather than a teacher or artist or something else. But the samthe same amount of en could produce a. That use of land and resource a relationship between and among the people are involved in the Prison Industrial Complex. So, that is a long way to say absolutely abolition does require that we change one thing which is everything, which is what the title of the book is about. So, there are some Young Lawyers i just turned 70 but legal scholars and practicing lawyers including young women postdoc at cornell whos been doing all kinds of people were in the various zones on the socalled war on terror around the world for a long time. For example, pakistan border and in the horn of africa and elsewhere. One particular said as they come to understand them through the combination of insight against violence put together with critical resistance gives us the basis for thinking about how to take abolition into the most difficult struggle outside which are the struggles from the ground and the air and the complexity of those struggles that it is not as though we could say it is as bad as everyone on the ground. But rather there are all of these relationships that have gotten a so messed up over time that we have to sort them out and that is the way to sort them out. So yes, abolition does extend to the war. There are a lot of excellent questions. That style asked how can they practice to support the palestinian occupation . You probably already know the answer to the question and if they were sitting in front of me i would ask you to answer it. There is so much mutual aid that extends across the barriers of occupation and war and struggle that goes in both directions so it isnt as though people in the United States are exclusively in the position to offer help that people that are in the occupied territories are exclusively in the position to require help. I dont think that that is the way to think and i know for a fact that isnt how things have gone, so for example, during the active days at the time of black life matter it becomes more and more a feature of how people understood the need to protest without cessation over the fact Police Killings of people in the country. People of all countries and ferguson learned from people in solidarity in palestine having dealt with teargas. That is one example. There are other examples as well. I think perhaps part of the question is how can we reach through the walls that seem to be so solid . With gore the modes of communication, solidarity, struggle that we can put into practice. To come back to the u. S. , and i am not turning my back in any way is to talk about how some of the very small things people do if it is them persistently start to add up to something bigger. So to go up to. Com that of the survival pending abolition, the fact only that people have worked very, very hard to create belongs and other money many res to help people get out of being locked up, but also the people sending care packages and sending them over and over again for the people who are not expecting to be released anytime soon can have some of what they need and what comes with this package is the fact that this is not a small thing. Its a big thing. The solidarity, and i dont mean a kind of sentimental, although sometimes sentimental, but a i care about you because you are needy because if i said at the beginning of the conversation neither content nor pity is going to get us anywhere rather the constant interaction from the care packages were people in the occupied territories were being in solidarity with those on the one hand in the various paramilitary and the other. It seems to be an insurmountable problem say the problem of how to end mass incarceration and this tension and as well the problem of solidarity means that we have a possibility to it and promises to. On questions of the indigenous struggle. In the abolitionist practice it finds the indigenous struggle against the socalled border wall. That is a great question. This does the work. It is in abolitionist or abolitionist struggle. Ththe activists and intellectuas from around the planet weve talked about. Its for the people to undo the colonial presence that have structured their lives for a generation. These things must come together to make freedom. One question comes from whether we can make the situation of suspending civil liberties. And the related legislation and related questions. Its an incarceration of surveillance technologies. This goes back to i was talking about earlier. It wouldnt be locked up in a building somewhere. All of this led to or enabled the expansion with my friend called electronic incarceration. So, years ago when i was trying to put together a talk about this and i looked up ankle shackles but if you look up bracelets, it always turned up martha stewart, famous, blonde, villain, fell in and so on. So the idea that this is a much preferable way to be incarcerated. It showed it ti showed it to bee that it is. They are subjected and incredibly shrunken and living in their own homes or whoever has taken the name. The scope of activity is extremely limited, and its not only the life that is responsible such as parents and their children and children for their aging parents or workers for their jobs. But also it is a cost to the person wearing the shackles. The book published by the press that came out i think about just last week called prison by an other name, i think is the title. But you can learn about that. And so the spread of this kind of surveillance control the re rest. Organize, organize. Everything else is just annoying is if we are not organizing. Whatever it is its in the absence of organization, nothing will be done. So the question is what kind of organizations already exist that do this sort of work that would lead. Do those organizations have currently the capacity to do more than what they are doing and if they dont, can people help and expand the capacity and if they have the capacity as is the case with many publicsector unions that have had in some cases leadership that has encouraged for example Luxury Housing Development as against working class housing development, then is it possible from within to change the direction. We saw this happen with the biggest event in california when the California State Employees Association turned against the prison expansion even though they had members that would lose jobs because they realized there are a lot of unions in the world about making life better for people in communities and people working in College Sector work into people that do home healthcare, for people who do Everything Else and they realized that they would be very happy and content to losing their jobs i jobs and president s and the people who were in fact by those resources could be free to do something else. So, these are the kind of things we have to do. We have a lot of knowledge. Many people who do a lot of good work that we can use fo public Environmental Justice scholar calls data judo which is when you might as thing about the vulnerability of say men in their 40s in brooklyn who are likely to suffer the ravages of covid19 because of this, that or another underlying condition. Announcing the fact of the vulnerability doesnt do anything. But if we get to a point where those forces that can make certain kind of decisions including the decision organized or arranged in the right way, then busting out with the data is exactly its turns into what it could be. So a lot of the Research Many people do, and this isnt just people in school but many people in school is what th that the pn use later. But its work that is available, free, and should be used by organizations to build organizing. There are many organizers on the called so i want to make sure you get to some of their questions. One question which is many organizers are fighting against government officials using the reentry infrastructure as an excuse to keep people incarcerated. What would you say to them . I dont know if i will get bleeped if i use a swear wor usd so lets just say bleep and stuff. [laughter] who comes to mind in answering this question or a couple of my 19th century people come and bizarre Sojourner Truth and herriot tubman. So what was the Sojourner Truth say . What would Sojourner Truth do backs new york state, where she was enslaved and new york state, said a program of gradual emancipation so they had achieved a certain age or have been an apprentice to the person we had known if the person who thought they owned it before it could be free. So, isabella, who we know is Sojourner Truth one days that i call on all this and she left, she just left. So, when government Officials Say the reason we cant let more people out if w they are not rey for them, we are ready, as ready as we are ever going to be. What does that mean . It means we have to struggle over the question of shelter. We have to struggle over the question of food. The fact that 22 more people were without unemployment than weeks ago means all 22 million plus 2. 5 million plus everybody else should be struggling together. This gradualism that is all the rage. With many kinds of think tanks and Large Research institutions is the same absurdity we must resist and refuse politically as the one that said the way we think its wrong in new york is to build and the way we fix the problem of people getting sick and dying in prisons and in the uk is to have them be privately run to publicly run. Nobodys going to live any longer in a publicly run prison. People have to not be in prison. Or the way to resolve the problem of mass detention again is to get rid of the private contract. Nobody gets to go home. We have to fight for what is right. Those words i just shared with you are quite general. Is it possible to return to the table again and again and make the same demand . This is what is necessary, and none of that will happen very quickly. But while certain people given the advantage of being able to editorialize in Mainstream Media say there must be a way we can balance out the bail, no. That is not the answer and its quite scary to insist on what the answer should be. We have all learned something i would like for us to unlearn. I think that over the years and decades. People try to figure out a way to speak to the legitimacy and the way to speak to it is to speak to as many walls. Ive done this, too. Im not saying other people have done something wrong and i havent. Havent. They say its designed for men so its bad for women. Prison is for adults and for children or if the people that are helping or for people who have ordinary kinds of abilities therefore it is difficult for disabled people. Or it is based on the gender nonconforming. It isnt good for anybody so a healthy heterosexual man with generally no difficulties getting around and so forth, i think that the search for how to speak came from the struggle many people have found over what on earth do we need any more by rights. You wrote a book called the first bill of rights. Human rights, either one. Why does it matter for us to talk about. I think whats happened is that a lot of us are trying to figure out who is speaking. Or the mass incarceration itself is possible to identify the people who shouldnt be there. That was a mistake. It wasnt doing the work we wanted to do, so today rather than go along with a way of talking about prison and detention that seems to suggest we can identify the relatively innocent into them do something on their behalf that we would never do for everybody else we have to step back and say this system is corrupt and it compels people to die and therefore what are we going to do. And we have to see i say it oved over and over again. In the range of work in the illegitimacy of the prison it strikes me up so much of what has been happening the last 20 years saying prison failed by its own standard which is it doesnt actually reduce crime, it is expensive. They are off the mark. I agree. There are many, many excellent questions. I know it is strange to keep talking with no feedback but i want to let you know you are getting all kinds of exclamations from criminal justice major at college and then saying how do we fight the antistate and state Higher Education and there are a lot of questions about the distinction between the antistate and pro state to state. Two final questions held we break the economic and emotional logic of prison . I think i wrote a book about and i dont know if it gave you the level of how to do would have liked and into the quickest to be done is kind of a secretly wish that i were the kind of. The point of the focus to lift up the struggles of people could look into the struggle and see i could see Something Like this somewhere else maybe i can do this. And if i ever, ever finished the new edition of that book, i will make it all much more heavy handed. So, how to fight is the question i think. And how to type has everything to do with figuring out how the people that are already organized, is it possible that they are already doing to get connected to this radical vision in the future for all of us, how would that connection happen, like what has been thrown together and how do we trace the not. So, for example, i cannot say to people that organized the Chicago Teacher strike, the los angeles unified strike the strike in West Virginia and the others, i cannot say any of those people in the pre meeting him at the meeting, the way they persuaded each other, they decided to strike at risk of themselves. It is refusing obscurity and demanding a future that has some sense of the voluptuous beauty that they should hold. I was in chicago during the strike last fall. They are saying why not, right on. There are these moments with consciousness opens. I mean in our coming together all of our consciousness is open and that means that its possible for us to think about these things we might not have thought about before because this is an important thing that matters is consciousness, not experience. The sum total would lead to somewhere that we do not seem to be doing. Rather, it is the consciousness of what the experience beans and what the possibilities are. They are finding all of the struggles coming together which is true of so many people. The multiple struggles each of us wish is what they are trying to figure out how to bring together and move forward with it. One of the founders of critical resistance into somebody i think about every day would say to us always when we would be dreaming of a new campaign or a new organization say we have to be bolder. And she was the organizer. In the attention to detail and killing 12 people might call her back. In the midst of that kind of organizing would say we have to be bold and that is what we have to do. So the economic and emotional sort of downward drag our things that we can push off through organizing. We have business depending but so much mor more and all other aspects of everyday life and a lot of the essential workers, the people who have been going to work every day and havent been exempted for just as they have been told to stay home for the people that are still getting paychecks and working long hours and are greatly formidable to covid19 so what is it about the essential workers . They are many of them not all of them educated people in the time of life and demographically speaking of prisons hold modestly educated people in the path life and then many essential workers are also people with skills that are needed in the hospital and elsewhere when they opened the school the teachers will suddenly be essential workers as well. This is the phone of the next great Labor Movement in the u. S. And the uk and beyond. Its what its meant at the time to go back to the poets beautiful words if we are truly all in this together, would we not all be in this together. I want to recommend to everybody back and look at the New York Times that there is a great artist asked to share in the newspaper a drawing from the window or a drawing of being sheltered in place during covid19, and she attached a demand for rent strike. She put her capacity for visual expression to the drawing with her insistence on what it is that we need now and i think we are all here because that is what we want to do. So this is for our friends in australia, i think that you are on the line and our friends in south africa and brazil. In the uk and london. Weve got the need. We know what is wrong with the world. So the question is how we do the work to turn the world grain, which should be and read, which it must be coming in in orde, ao those things to make it International Project should be. Can i ask you to elaborate on green and is it okay if i share the aoc medication that we went through before the conversation . In thinking about the question of the commonly used language that draws the line to the deserving and undeserving, i thought about selecting a quote from alexandria cortez is a sort of gloss to think of those ter terms. Part of the reason we backed away from it is we didnt want people to think that there were these dividing lines between an abolitionist and someone whos working and organizing it has these bold ideas who may from time to time use this language in getting the things that we may have some critique with. So i was hoping that you could talk about the Green New Deal and what makes it an abolitionist idea. Sure. Ive already become a revisionisrevisionist a little e Green New Deal. I like green because it says Climate Change is a catastrophe and says im taken by the revisionists of the Green New Deal that are putting forward the red new deal so the other one im talking about is in which to each accordin each accs ability and from each according to the ability. The idea, the urgency of rebuilding an economy that isnt based in fossil fuel extraction and strengthening inequality between people and places is absolutely urgent, and i do think that aoc sees the urgency and like many people who get to be where she is says what she means over and over again so i am not about to disrespect in any way what aoc has accomplished today. The problem with one of the quotations that we went back and forth about, aoc like many people present at the necessity of incarcerating people which is a step towards abolition to answer the question that i never answered, and throwing them on the street, it is not evolution it is just incarceration. But the necessity to incarcerate people seems to encourage to say here are the eligible or that person who was the first to die was there on this minor thing, stop thinking that way. As i said, most people leave britain, anyway, so why dont we think about that as opening the door on the portal that takes us away from the organized abandonment in our own habit when we think that we are uplifting it by saying we can fix this thing but not for everybody. They say we should fix this thing let lets make it as expee as possible. To get away from not only the notion some people are more deserving than others, the possibility of living a life to get away from that at the same time i know my brothers and sisters and cousins and loved ones who are all over the other side of the equator would appreciate this, get away from apologizing places because people are poor or because in the mainstream or social, its about a certain vulnerability that a group of people might have 21 or another. Structurally it could be addressed so that the vulnerability of premature death is finally put aside. So, there are social movement organizing in south africa that has been going on for decades and decades among the people for whom antiapartheid is only the beginning, not the achievement of the world that people wanted to live. So, i learned from all kinds of people that have been organizing in south africa about what possibilities there are in tanzania trying to figure out how to maintain a certain level of determination in the face of a geopolitical relation between the peoples republic of china and that relationship in terms of the wellbeing of everyday people on the ground. These are some of the questions that come to mind. We do need to wrap it up. I will give you the final word and i will sign off by saying thank you to haymarket books for all of the fantastic work that you are doing and also thank you to everyone that joined in on the call. Thank you for your questions and finally, thank you t and you get the final word. Thank you for tuning in all over the world. I think i want to leave us with a sentence that ive been repeating for years that involved a repetition and that his life is precious. So straightforward. The making of life pressures arises to all different struggles. I want to bleed off with something i learned recently that this is my last thing. That is the art of care. A person that i know that was recently released from being locked up tells me they and other people in the area are seeming that it was bringing them a sense of being in the world but they didnt have before and that reminded me of the freedom riders that god locked up at another place that needs to close. We shall overcome but only by rebuilding the movement. On our Author Interview program after words, the cofounder of the squar square os thoughts on innovation. Here is a portion of that interview. Guest a i make stuff that nobody needs. I make art. The stuff nobody needs. In dc i used to teach at the park. For the local viewers if youve been to the park 20 years ago i was the guy that taught you how to make a paperweight. But the point is i was in my studio trying to sell a piece of glass that i lost the sale because i couldnt take in the American Express card, and i was angry. I lost this great assortment windfall, and i was talking to the lady over the phone about one of these devices and i had this attitude towards devices like this which this is the magic device. It turns into anything they want if i ever wanted to turn it into television and becomea televisia television. A radio, it will turn into that bookthebook, literally, tomorroi guess it will turn into that book if you want. It didnt turn into a credit card machine though. So i was angry but also motivated to fix it so i called up on the device and i said lets make our iphones turn into credit cards so that is what became square. The book is innovation stack, what is this and how did you learn about it from square backs delete the test code it isnt something we knew about but it is probably the most powerful, that ive seen in business. It is simply a way of interweaving inventions together sometimes very simple. But if you put enough of this together they start to take on their own life and they create new industries. So if you look throughout history at the Great Industries that have started, almost always busy and innovations back at the beginning but i didnt notice. I had no idea that any of this was happening. It is a matter of fact, i wrote this book and ive been sort of having people review it for yourself and one of the greatest compliments i got was from a very successful entrepreneur, said hes interviewing me and this guys living room and he has a painting on the wall that is worth more than my house. So im a little intimidated and hes asking me about the book and he finally says i wish i had known this when i was 20yearsold, and i was like me too. But it turns out that there is this thing that happened. This process when you start to solve a perfect problem, something that hasnt been solved before because most of what we do is copying and most of the tools and training and comfort is with solutions that exist. When you get out of the world of copying, you can build some thing that is truly different, the process is different and it creates this innovations back. If you build it they innovation stack your companies will dominate the world, it will run whatever business you are in