Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
Time 0:10:23
Suburban Wasteland
- Esteban Kelly describes growing up in suburban Long Island and feeling trapped by the car-centric environment.
- He points out the lack of sidewalks and the inability to walk to a store, highlighting the dependence on cars and the resulting isolation.
- This personal experience connects to the broader theme of capitalism’s impact on communities and individuals, where even seemingly comfortable suburban life can be restrictive and alienating. Transcript: Speaker 2 Here I am growing up in the suburban wasteland of Long Island being like, this whole place is ruined. I can’t, I don’t even have a sidewalk. I can’t walk to a store to get orange juice if we’re out of it. I literally was just trapped on my street until I was 17 years old and able to drive and liberate myself and was supposed to feel good about that or something. Speaker 1 I remember this feeling. Coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s was an immersion in Reaganomics and then Clintonomics. If you lived in an urban area, you saw unemployment and wage stagnation, divestment from neighborhoods and communities, mass criminalization and incarceration. If you lived in the suburbs or in a college town like I did, you saw the aggressive spread of development. And in all of these places, you saw the globalization of trade. All this was supposed to be great and hopeful. But it was confusing. As governments made these new so-called free trade agreements, like NAFTA that Esteban learned about at a punk show, it had real world effects. American factories moved to Mexico and China where they could pay people less. The middle class was shrinking. The whole economy was being reorganized, often at the expense of the most vulnerable people. Speaker 2 There’s so much that could be sold off. There’s so many, you know, companies that can be shut down, reopen overseas, offshore, automated. And what better way to break the backs of worker power and labor solidarity than to simply move to a different jurisdiction where there are where the workers are not organized where You don’t to have
Time 0:12:34
Esteban Kelly’s Family Impacted by Capitalism
- Esteban Kelly’s family history illustrates the impact of racial capitalism.
- British colonization and enslavement brought his family to the Caribbean.
- Globalization then drove them further north to the U.S.
- The IMF’s debt restructuring policies and austerity measures ravaged Jamaica, impacting his family there. Transcript: Speaker 2 My own story and the ways that my family in the Caribbean has been the product of capitalism under the British Empire and then that struggle for independence and then the ravages of the IMF and what it has done through debt restructuring and policies on places like Jamaica. Speaker 1 Here he’s talking about the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, which started at the end of World War II, but really extended its global control over so-called developing countries In the 80s and 90s. Basically, the IMF operated like a pro-globalization, pro-capitalist bank.
Time 0:14:17
Esteban’s First Protest
- Esteban Kelly developed anti-capitalist views after seeing the impact of the IMF on countries like Jamaica.
- As a college student at UC Berkeley in the late 90s, he participated in his first major protest against the WTO in Seattle.
- He initially understood the protest’s importance but didn’t grasp its global scale until he arrived.
- The protest united punk, anarchist, and labor organizers against globalization’s negative effects, such as exploiting labor and harming the environment.
- The event signified a rising awareness of globalization’s flaws. Transcript: Speaker 1 So that’s what Esteban came to, along with a small but growing number of disaffected Millennials long before the financial crisis of 2008. By the time he went to college at UC Berkeley it was the late 90s, basically the pinnacle of the neoliberal movement for globalization. The World Trade Organization, which is kind of a cousin of the IMF, was founded in 1995 to better facilitate these agreements between countries. Agreements that would allow for the free movement of capital and allow companies to offshore more and more of their functions to the cheapest places. When people learned the WTO was planning a meeting in Seattle, right after Esteban started at college, a lot of folks planned to go and protest. He was 19, and this was his first big demonstration. Speaker 2 I knew it was a thing that we were against. I had a sense about why. We didn’t know how big it was going to be. We knew how big the protest was going to be. The protest was going to be in terms of how global it was. That’s something I learned when I arrived there. Speaker 1 This protest in 1999 represented not just the punk and anarchist strain of anti-capitalism, but also a growing movement by labor organizers to push back against the local impacts Of globalization. These agreements made trade more free for owners of companies, but often allowed them to more easily squash union efforts, exploit people’s labor, and destroy the environment. More and more people saw economic globalization as fundamentally flawed. Esteban and a bunch of college kids drove up to Seattle.
Time 0:19:37
Occupy Wall Street - The 99%
- In 2011, activists initiated the Occupy Wall Street movement, protesting against economic inequality.
- The movement highlighted the disparity between the wealthiest 1% and the remaining 99% of the population.
- This followed the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent government bailouts, which further fueled public frustration.
- The Occupy movement gained national attention and called for systemic changes in financial systems.
- The movement criticized the lack of accountability for the financial crisis and the unequal distribution of wealth. Transcript: Speaker 1 Take over one of its major public parks in an act of protest. The clarion call was, we are the 99%. The 99% of people who share a much smaller percentage of the wealth in the richest country in the world. The 1%. They were accused of being quarters. Speaker 2 And by the way, there was a pent up audience because it was three years after a huge financial crisis where there was very little accountability. There was not significant recovery despite how much hand-wringing had happened. Speaker 1 The thing is, after the 2008 crash, incoming President Barack Obama, who took office just a few months later, led a significant bailout of banks and investment firms. There was some financial reform championed by people like Senators Warren and Bernie Sanders, but not a lot. And there was some aid to regular people in the US, but also not a lot. A lot of people who were middle class found themselves in surprisingly precarious situations because they’d lost jobs or lost all the wealth in their homes. Remaining wealth was concentrated among fewer and fewer people. In 2009, the wealthiest 1% of households had 225 times more wealth than the median household in the U.S. And wealth was growing for the 1 %ers and shrinking or stagnating for almost everyone else.
Time 0:21:55
Slow Economic Recovery and its impact
- The Obama administration faced a severe economic downturn after the 2008 housing market crash.
- Despite short-term bailouts, millions lost their homes and jobs, leading to a long and painful recovery from 2008 to 2016.
- The drop in unemployment was slow, resulting in a very weak labor market for an extended period.
- The deflation of the housing bubble triggered a chain of negative events, including decreased consumer spending, which further deepened the recession.
- The recession had tangible consequences for ordinary people seeking employment, as illustrated by the speaker’s difficulty finding even food service jobs in Chicago in 2010. Transcript: Speaker 6 The Obama administration inherited an economy in freefall. Speaker 1 The short-term bailouts kind of slowed the freefall, but literally millions lost their homes and jobs. Speaker 6 Then from 2008 to 2016, we just had this really agonizingly slow recovery. Unemployment dropped a little bit every year. And it was just this incredibly extended period of time with a very impaired labor market. It was just really hard for people. Speaker 1 He explains it started with the bust up of the housing market in 2008, but that was just a beginning. Speaker 6 And so as soon as you start to have that deflation of the housing price bubble, you just get this cascade of horrible effects. I mean, one is people realize I’m nowhere near as wealthy as I thought I was, so they stop spending money. And when you stop spending money, everyone at once, that’s what a recession happens.
Time 0:29:44
Jibali’s observation about Bernie and Trump voters
- Malaika Jibali, after graduating during the Great Recession, became involved in anti-capitalism.
- She was enthusiastic about Bernie Sanders’ campaign in 2016, similar to other people in her generation.
- Reporting in Milwaukee during that time, Jibali noticed a peculiar trend where some Bernie supporters switched to Trump after the primaries.
- Studies indicate about 12% of Bernie primary voters made this shift, illustrating the frustration with Democrats that led some to prefer Trump’s populist approach, even if performative. Transcript: Speaker 1 And like a lot of people of her generation, she was stoked on Bernie Sanders. Speaker 3 And you know what people are saying? They’re saying enough is enough! Speaker 1 Bernie tapped into that young populist energy that Trevor Hill and Malaika Jibaly were both trying to push the Democrats on. And in that, he had a leg up on Hillary Clinton, who ultimately was nominated to run against Donald Trump. Jibaly at the time was reporting in Milwaukee in the Rust Belt. And so she also saw the weird phenomenon of folks who were into Bernie and then, when he lost the primary, went to Trump, which one study showed was a full 12% of Bernie primary voters.