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In the early hours of Saturday morning, January 3rd, Venezuelans were awoken by the sounds of bombs falling. US helicopters whirled overhead. Explosions struck across the capital Caracas and in surrounding states.
Hours of chaos, fear, and uncertainty.
President Donald Trump would post over social media that the US had “captured” Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores amid a “large-scale” strike against the country.
This is the first US invasion of another country in Latin America since the 1989 invasion of Panama, when the US kidnapped and detained Panamanian President Manuel Noriega under charges of drug trafficking. The Trump administration used the same excuse to detain Maduro, despite lack of evidence linking Maduro to drug trafficking.
With this strike, the United States has taken an unprecedented step: This is the first time the United States has used its own military to invade a South American country.
Today, we go to Caracas to look in-depth at the January 3rd US invasion of Venezuela. Host Michael Fox speaks with Caracas-based reporter Ricardo Vaz.
* * *
_Under the Shadow_ is an investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time, telling the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present.
Season 2 responds in real time to the Trump Administration’s onslaught in Latin America.
> Hosted by Latin America-based journalist Michael Fox.
>
> This podcast is produced in partnership between The Real News Network and NACLA.
>
> Theme music by Monte Perdido and Michael Fox. Monte Perdido’s new album Ofrenda is now out. You can listen to the full album on Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you listen to music. Other music from Blue Dot Sessions.
**Resources:**
**Under the Shadow**
* You can check out the first season of Under the Shadow by clicking here
* The Beginning: Monroe And Migration | Under The Shadow, Episode 1
* Panama. Us Invasion. | Under The Shadow, Episode 13
* The Legacy Of Monroe | Under The Shadow, bonus Episode 4
* **Michael Fox’s recent reporting on the boat strikes and the ramp-up for war in Venezuela:**
* With the Strike on a “Drug-Carrying Boat,” Trump Returns to a Dangerous US Policy for Latin America
* Caribbean Leaders Call for Unified Latin American Resistance to US Attacks
* Trump’s Monroe Doctrine 2.0 Outlines Imperial Intentions for Latin America
**Other Resources**
You can check out Ricardo Vaz’s reporting at www.venezuelanalysis.com.
You can follow them on X at https://x.com/venanalysis
For more English-language reporting on Venezuela, you can follow the Orinoco Tribune, Kawsachun News, and Sovereign Media.
**Support Under the Shadow:**
Please consider supporting this podcast and Michael Fox’s reporting on his Patreon account: patreon.com/mfox. There you can also see exclusive pictures, video, and interviews.
You can check out Michael’s recent episode of Stories of Resistance about the protests against US intervention in Venezuela.
Written and produced by Michael Fox.
Transcript
**MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:** In the early hours of Saturday morning Jan. 3, Venezuelans were awoken by the sounds of bombs falling.
Videos shared widely over WhatsApp and social media are shocking. US helicopters whirl overhead, missile strikes, explosions across the capital, Caracas, and in surrounding states.
Hours of chaos, fear, and uncertainty.
President Donald Trump would post over social media that the US had “captured” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, amid a “large-scale” strike against the country.
That news was confirmed by Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who would soon be sworn in to serve as interim president.
This is the first unilateral US invasion of another country in Latin America since the 1989 invasion of Panama, when the United States kidnapped and detained Panamanian President Manuel Noriega under charges of drug trafficking.
The Trump administration used the same excuse to detain Maduro despite a lack of evidence linking Maduro to drug trafficking.
Trump’s attack on Venezuela marks a return to a terrifying not-so-distant past when the United States felt emboldened and entitled to carry out unilateral military action against sovereign nations to achieve its goals.
But with this strike, the United States has taken an unprecedented step: this is the first time the United States has used its own military to invade a South American country.
Now people across Venezuela and the region are trying to figure out what it all means, and what happens next…
That… in a minute
[THEME MUSIC]
This is _Under the Shadow_ — An investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the role of the United States abroad in the past and the very, very present.
This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.
I’m your host, Michael Fox — Longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist. The producer and host of the podcasts _Brazil on Fire_ and _Stories of Resistance_. I’ve spent the better part of the last twenty years in Latin America.
I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad. And most often, sadly, it is not for the better: invasions, coups, sanctions. Support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years. It still does….
This is Season 2 of _Under the Shadow_ : Trump’s Attack.
If you listened to Season 1 about the US role in Central America, you know that in each episode I take you to a location where something historic happened, diving into the past to try and decipher what it means today. I’ll still do that here. But Season 2 is also going to be a little different. Because my goal is to respond in real time to the Trump Administration’s onslaught in Latin America.
Today that is, unfortunately, more important than ever.
Just in recent months, we’ve seen the boat strikes, threats of a US invasion of Venezuela, the seizure of multiple tankers carrying Venezuelan crude, US intervention in the Honduran election, tariff war, and on early Saturday morning, a US invasion of Venezuela. The United States deployed 150 aircraft. More than 40 people were killed. Buildings destroyed. The president and his wife, kidnapped.
In the last episode — The first of this season — I looked at the Trump administration’s new National Security Doctrine and how Trump is now justifying intervention in the region with his new “Trump Corollary” of the Monroe Doctrine.
Today, I take you to Caracas to look in-depth at the Jan. 3 US invasion of Venezuela. You’ll note that today is a little different than usual. In order to respond quickly to the US attack, I’ll be speaking this whole episode with Caracas-based reporter Ricardo Vaz.
**RICARDO VAZ [CLIP]:** I’m an editor at Venezuelanalysis, a political analyst and journalist here working on the ground in Venezuela.
**MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:** I spoke with Ricardo on the afternoon of Sunday, Jan. 4, the day after the invasion. He spoke from his home in Caracas, where his electricity has just returned. Power was presumably cut by US forces across Caracas during the invasion. Here is our conversation in its entirety.
[MUSIC]
**MICHAEL FOX:** Ricardo, let me just start by saying thank you so much for being with me today. I really, really appreciate it.
**RICARDO VAZ:** Hey, Mike, thanks for the invitation. It’s actually, I’m a bit calmer and better right now. I mean, yesterday it was just, it still feels a bit like a surreal dream, and I had no electricity, and trying to deal with the whirlwind of news and speculation. Now it seems things are settling down a little bit and maybe we can start to take stock at least of some things that have happened.
**MICHAEL FOX:** Exactly. Well, let’s just start off with right now, what is the feeling on the ground in Venezuela?
**RICARDO VAZ:** There are still a lot of questions to be answered. First of all, how many people died in the US bombing campaign? We still don’t know that. Obviously information starts to circulate and there are pictures, gruesome pictures, of people killed and maimed in these attacks. Some preliminary reports of at least 40 killed, although other people suggest that the figure might end up being a lot higher.
But it seems that there is an effort from the government here, Delcy Rodríguez taking over to kind of restore normalcy. So, she had the Supreme Court endorse her in a way, or saying that she is the one, according to the constitution, that should take over as interim president. The armed forces have issued a statement backing her. So, there is a sense of trying to get things back to normal as quickly as possible while we try to process everything.
**MICHAEL FOX:** Wow. It’s just crazy, Ricardo. It’s just crazy.
Walk me back to yesterday. I’m sure for you, it must seem like a week ago, but it was literally just a day ago. Can you describe the invasion? Were you awake for it? What happened?
**RICARDO VAZ:** Yeah, so my New Year’s resolution was to go to bed a bit earlier, but I’m still working on that. So it was 2:00 AM. I had actually just shut off work for the day. And I was just, you know, doing some last minute errands in the house. And then suddenly… Power went out and I mean, of course, hindsight is 20/20, but I had a feeling something was going on. And then there was a huge boom, like something I’d never felt before. I’d never been in a war zone or anything like it. So it was clear. This was no remnant of New Year’s fireworks. So, there was a loud boom and then a sequence of others.
So, I mean, I have a balcony, I immediately went out, I couldn’t actually see it, it was not in my line of sight. But then, you go on social media and there are immediately lots and lots of reports, Caracas is being bombed, airplanes are flying. And we continue to hear these explosions.
And then we see photos of Fuerte Tiuna, that’s the largest military installation here in Caracas, with fires and large columns of smoke. Also that the Francisco Miranda Air Base in La Carlota had also been bombed. And then other bombings that turned out not to be confirmed. One of them was Miraflores Palace, also the Cuartel de la Montaña, where Chávez’s mausoleum is being held. And we were trying to to make sense of it.
And then the scariest part was videos of helicopters, helicopters flying in Caracas and bombing targets on the ground around Fuerte Tiuna. So, what are these helicopters? Analysts saying, this is the 160 SOAR [Special Operations Aviation Regiment] special operation tactical team. What are they here for? And then, so this was from 2:00 AM to around 3:30 when we stopped hearing bombings.
And then what happened to the helicopters? Are they still here? Have they left? Are there troops on the ground? Who knows? And then 5:00 AM there was this announcement from Trump that they had captured Maduro and First [Lady] Cilia Flores. So, there were five minutes where people were wondering if this was fake until it was confirmed by other sources. And that was basically the end of the bombing campaign and the operation.
We saw first Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino come out. I think he made this statement before he had any idea that Maduro had been captured, saying that we are preparing resistance, we reject this cruel and illegal attack, and then Diosdado Cabello also called on people to go out on the streets. So that was, let’s say, the night portion of, or the early portion of the events.
**MICHAEL FOX:** Crazy. How big was people’s responses? Did many people hit the streets? Did you go see some of the protests that were happening yesterday during the daytime?
**RICARDO VAZ:** Yeah, so I walked around for a bit. People went out from the early hours, but there wasn’t a lot of them. I mean, a crowd in the hundreds, maybe low thousands around Miraflores Palace. But also, keep in mind, there was no public transportation, so it wasn’t that easy to get around. But people made a point of showing up, and that’s always the gathering point where to protect the Bolivar Revolution. It’s around Miraflores Palace.
But there was a few hours of really not knowing what was going on because people started to gather in the morning. And then the question is, where is Delcy Rodríguez? Is she going to say something? There were rumors that turned out to be false that she was in Russia.
And then we had this, I mean, all Trump press conferences are an experience, but this press conference where Trump’s saying he’s going to run the country and the people behind him, presumably Rubio, is going to run the country, and we’re going to take all the oil, and we’re going to get back what they owe us.
**PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:** We’re there now. We’re ready to go again if we have to. We’re going to run the country right. It’s going to run very judiciously, very fairly. It’s going to make a lot of money. We’re going to give money to the people. We’re going to reimburse people that were taken advantage of. We’re going to take care of everybody.
**RICARDO VAZ:** I mean, just a sequence of bluster. But with the “triumph” of having secured Maduro’s arrest in this special operations raid.
And then the most critical part of what he said regarding what happens next, it was very surprising that he was so forceful in dismissing far-right leader Maria Corina Machado, saying, oh, we like her, but she basically has no prospects of holding power right now. I think he said she doesn’t have the respect of the country, something like this.
[CLIP BEGINS]
**PRESS:** Is the US aware of the location of opposition leader Machado, and have you been in contact with her?
**PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:** No, we haven’t really. I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.
[CLIP ENDS]
**RICARDO VAZ:** And then he talked about Delcy Rodríguez, saying that she’s the one in charge right now. She was sworn in. She actually wasn’t sworn in. And [Marco] Rubio talked to her and she said she’s going to do everything we demand. I’m paraphrasing, but it was something to this effect.
And then still we had to wait at least a couple more hours before Delcy herself gave a press conference. And her tone was very defiant, saying that Maduro is the president and we demand Maduro’s release and return, and that a lot of emergency mechanisms that had been set in place before were activated. This state of external commotion and this National Defense Council is also active.
And basically she emphasized that the situation is calm. I think that’s one of the priorities for the government is not having any kind of internal chaos that can spiral out of control. So, basically getting things to work.
And a good sign also, from my narrow perspective, was the restoration of electricity in parts of central Caracas, because that’s always an issue and always a worry, whether the state retains functions, retains the capability to do these important things. And it seems that at least there’s some sense of normalcy returned.
**MICHAEL FOX:** Ricardo, can you just tell me again who Delcy Rodríguez is again? She’s now the acting interim president.
**RICARDO VAZ:** Yeah, so this is, let’s say, the final step in a very strong and quick ascendancy for Delcy Rodríguez. So, she’s also younger, but she wasn’t very prominent during the Chávez presidency. But under Maduro, she has taken an ever more important and ever present role.
So first, she was foreign minister. And she was foreign minister when Venezuela had these recurring battles in the OAS [Organization of American States], as you’ll remember. And then she actually was president of the Constituent Assembly in 2017. And then she became vice president. And a few years later, she also took over as finance minister and then as oil minister.
So, she is clearly the strongest person when it comes to Venezuela’s economic policy and the oil industry, which, for better or worse, is still the heartbeat of the Venezuelan economy. So, she is clearly a key person in that regard.
And as vice president, she and the Supreme Court gave this interpretation. She’s the one that takes over as interim president in the, they call it temporary absence of the sitting president, who is Maduro.
So for Delcy, she was already calling the shots in many regards in terms of international relations. She was the one that went very regularly to India, to China, to talk with counterparts and try and negotiate investment deals.
And also inside, it’s no secret that, under these crushing sanctions, the Venezuelan government has offered plenty of concessions to the private sector and also undoing some of the regulations. And Delcy is the person who has had this rapport with the private sector guilds, with Fedecamaras. So, she’s the one that has the relations right now, both domestically and abroad, to take over the reins of the country. So in that sense, it wasn’t any surprise.
And now, of course, it’s different to be sitting on the big chair as opposed to advising and having someone else have the final word. But I mean, let’s see now what Delcey does in terms of policy. Also, how does she handle this US… Not pressure, it’s outright blackmail, while also denouncing the kidnapping and this illegal trial against Maduro? So, she has a lot on her plate. Let’s see how she handles it.
**MICHAEL FOX:** This is one of the things that I thought was really interesting also, because you saw Trump’s press conference and it’s like, basically, we’ve taken over Venezuela. These are the guys who are going to run it. Like you said, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, the defense minister.
But then on the flip side, when it comes to Venezuela, then you see Delcy Rodríguez, and she’s very strongly defiant. What does that tension mean for the US-Venezuela relationship going forward, what does that mean for Venezuela’s path ahead?
**RICARDO VAZ:** I mean, it’s clearly a very tricky path ahead, but we now have a bit more clarity. Marco Rubio gave some statements just a while ago. And again, surprising that Marco Rubio would dismiss the opposition’s prospects. He basically said, “We like them, but they’re basically all abroad. So, there’s nothing they can do right now.”
And he said, he kind of explained what this run the country is going to mean. So he said, “We are in touch with the new authorities and we hope they will make the right decisions. And if not, we have,” I think he said, “levers of leverage.” So, these economic sanctions, this naval blockade that he said was going to remain in place.
So basically, they want to coerce the new administration, and they have this threat of just coming back and bombing again if it doesn’t go according to what they want. And basically what they want — And I’m not guessing anymore, it’s just Trump in his own words — They want the oil. So, they want some very favorable oil arrangements for US corporations.
**MICHAEL FOX:** Do we have any idea of a timeline of what things could look like in the coming weeks, in the coming months? Did Delcy give any sense of if US oil corporations might actually get the beneficial treatment and things like that?
**RICARDO VAZ:** She didn’t give anything specific, but she did say something that seemed a bit out of place. She said that Venezuela was prepared to have relations with the US so long as they are based on respect, which is something a bit unusual to say after the US has just bombed your country and kidnapped your president. But I mean, that has been a common line in the Venezuelan discourse, so maybe it’s not that out of place.
If there are going to be deals, I would expect them to be maybe not in the next week, but maybe very, very soon. And it will take some effort to… There will be, I’m sure there are negotiations going on right now, but then they will have to realize how they’re going to, on both sides, how they’re going to present it because it is undoubtedly a concession. So, even though you can try to say that, oh, you know, the US companies are coming in and they’re bringing investment, it’s still something that was forced upon you, forced upon Venezuela on the back of missiles.
So, that’s the tricky balance that the Venezuelan government and Delcy Rodríguez in particular now being in charge has to navigate.
**MICHAEL FOX:** Ricardo, just real quick, because I feel like this is one of the things that is not well-understood. Trump keeps repeating that this is our oil and it was stolen from us. Can you just give some context to that? Like, what’s the actual reality and why is that just ridiculous?
**RICARDO VAZ:** Trump says something and then there are propagandists who come and try and explain what Trump should have said. So Trump says, it’s our oil and they stole it from us. And then I think it was one of the administration officials who said, oh, you know, the Venezuelan oil industry was built by US investment and ingenuity. And US corporations were involved almost from the start, but I mean, they had such a favorable arrangement of just taking the oil and not paying anything that, on the look of it, actually, Venezuela could charge for illegal profits retroactively.
So what Trump is referring to is probably the 1976 nationalization, which was a partial nationalization that was then partially reversed in the 1990s with what’s called the Oil Opening, the Abertura Petrolera, that allowed, again, great benefits for foreign corporations.
And then the Chávez government, first with the Hydrocarbons Law of 2001 and then with the decrease in 2007, reasserted, let’s say, the state’s hegemony over the oil industry by demanding that Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA, hold at least a majority stake in oil joint ventures, and perhaps 60% stake in in some of them.
And there were corporations that accepted the new rules. Chevron was one of them, and then they are still around. But others, and the most important ones, are ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, rejected.
But they didn’t just have their assets confiscated. Confiscated is a word that doesn’t make any sense in this context. So, there were offers of compensation. Some companies accepted it. These two in particular and others, many others, did not. And they took Venezuela to international arbitration, these state investor courts that somehow always rule in favor of the investors.
And so, Exxon Mobil was already paid. They wanted $20 billion in compensation, Venezuela appealed, and it was brought down to $1 billion, which was seen as a major victory. And that was paid. Venezuela doesn’t owe anything to ExxonMobil.
And ConocoPhillips, there were some settlements already achieved. There were others that were not able to be fulfilled because of sanctions. But ConocoPhillips is one of the companies that’s going to profit from the corporate plunder of Citgo.
So in a sense, these corporations already have either been compensated or in the process of being compensated for these nationalizations. So, Trump’s discourse doesn’t make any sense. It’s not really about looking back and getting back what was “owed” because there is nothing owed. And also, the oil is a sovereign resource. It’s about going forward and securing a strategic resource that’s very close and in the most favorable and affordable conditions to bolster US hegemony and prepare for future, perhaps inevitable, confrontation with China.
**MICHAEL FOX:** You know, there was something that someone said in my last episode of _Under the Shadow_ that was along the lines of the fact that this is no longer America first for US interests or for the people of the United States. This is America first for corporations. This is neoliberalism on steroids. This is not just a return to the Monroe Doctrine of the past, but rather a Monroe Doctrine that is explicitly defending US corporate interests.
And it’s fascinating how Trump speaks that language. When he’s there on the tarmac speaking about oil, he doesn’t say, “Well, this was US oil companies’ oil, and then these things happened.” He says, “This is our oil,” as if the US oil companies [are] the United States.
**PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:** You remember they took all of our energy rights. They took all of our oil from not that long ago. And we want it back. But they took it. They illegally took it.
**MICHAEL FOX:** I just think that’s a, it’s like this really terrifying but also really interesting nugget of truth in this moment as Trump is pushing, not just in Venezuela, but in so many other places.
Ricardo, what are people feeling now? What are Venezuelans that you’re talking to or on the streets [saying]? Are there concerns of a new Trump bombing? Are people just shocked? What’s the feeling on the ground in that sense?
**RICARDO VAZ:** There’s still a lot of shock and still trying to process everything that went on, as you can imagine. And there is, of course, now a looming fear that this might happen at any moment because it happened without any warning and in the middle of the night when people were really not expecting it. So, that’s clearly in the back of people’s minds.
But I think there is a sense of outrage even from from Venezuelan opposition figures of what is a very blatant violation on one hand of international law, but in what concerns Venezuela of national sovereignty, of going into another country and bombing without any kind of mandate and kidnapping the country’s sitting president.
Even people who wanted Maduro out of power, unless they are really US agents, they cannot tolerate something like this because who’s to say that it doesn’t happen again tomorrow? And the same goes for other Latin American countries, who’s to say that at some point Trump will not flip a switch and do this to them? So I think it’s also important, and there are signs in that direction, that there be a unified response in condemning this. And also not just condemning, because these statements only take you so far, but actually demanding some action in return.
So, that’s certainly a feeling right now on the ground, and it was a common thread in the people who took the mic yesterday in these spontaneous demonstrations saying, what are international agencies going to do? Are they just going to stand by? Is this going to be the new normal? The line has been crossed a while ago. At what point do we see a reaction?
And actually, there’s a UN Security Council meeting, I think today, and there were two of them before that only produced statements and condemnation of US escalation. I would guess very generously that a red line has already been crossed. So, is there at least going to be a resolution that forces the US to to use its veto?
**MICHAEL FOX:** Right, exactly. How shocking was this US invasion? Could you have imagined it even with all of the talk and the rhetoric about the potential of the United States invading going back 20 years and all of the buildup in the Caribbean, was it still a shock when it was actually rolling out and was actually happening?
**RICARDO VAZ:** Yeah, I mean, of course, we all made our predictions based on what we had seen and where things were going. I actually thought that this was no longer really on the table after the US imposed this, what they called an oil quarantine and the naval blockade. I saw that as perhaps an admission that this kind of thing was not possible. And so, they were going back to the kind of slow death asphyxiation to extract whatever concessions they want also in the near term, but with a different approach. So, it was definitely unexpected.
We had spent a lot of time watching these radars and seeing the US warplanes waltzing around close to Venezuelan shores. So, maybe that created a false sense of security that it was just one show of force after another. But there were no signs that this was actually about to happen. We knew that the US aircraft carrier, the Gerald R. Ford, was relatively close.
Also we have to talk about the reaction or the response from the Venezuelan armed forces because there was supposed to be some kind of deterrence, some kind of force that would make the US think twice before not just bombing but doing this land incursion. And in the end, perhaps there was so much preparation and Venezuelan armed forces were caught off guard, but there was really not much resistance put when these helicopters came in and then executed the operation to kidnap President Maduro.
I’m guessing we’ll know more details in the coming days and weeks. But I think I was caught by surprise as an outside analyst, but by the looks of it, the Venezuelan armed forces were also not ready to confront it.
**MICHAEL FOX:** Yeah. Ricardo, what do we know right now about the tankers and the oil sanctions? I know Trump has said he’s going to continue with those sanctions and continue blocking the tankers in the blockade, but is there hope that that might be rolled back in the coming weeks?
**RICARDO VAZ:** So, I’m guessing that if US corporations are going to come in, there’s going to have to be some kind of relaxation. So, at least the lifting of this physical naval blockade.
Right now, I think everyone is still in a wait and see pattern. There are oil operations going on, of course, but we haven’t seen neither another attempt to seize a tanker nor anything blatant like a blacklisted tanker going in and out. I’m guessing in the coming days we’re going to see if there’s a new pattern emerging here on this front.
My guess is that… I mean, Trump already has his political victory. He already did this very daring raid and did something that, it’s the most blatant violation of international law you can think of. He kidnapped another country’s sitting president. So, in one sense he can already gloat about it and do his victory lap. And perhaps he can loosen a bit the naval blockade as he prepares to force the entry of US corporations.
**MICHAEL FOX:** Have we heard anything from Maria Corina Machado, and any response? I know she was a big supporter of actual US intervention. And then of course, like you mentioned, Trump kind of really gave her the sidestep during his speech on Saturday.
**RICARDO VAZ:** In all honesty, I haven’t had time to really keep up with her. She was very enthusiastic in the early morning, saying the hour of freedom has arrived. And she wasn’t shy about saying, we are prepared to take power at any moment and we have a plan for the first 100 hours, 100 days, and whatever.
And I mean, right now, her political prospects are a bit shaky because Trump said quite openly she doesn’t have conditions to rule the country. And the approval that she needs is not from the Venezuelan people because it can be imposed at the end of a gun; she needs Trump’s approval. And if Trump says she’s not being considered, then basically what does she do now?
She’s abroad. I’m guessing she’s going to regroup and then try and piggyback on the US success and claim that it’s boosting her prospects in the future. But she has, perhaps out of everyone, she has a lot of political spin to do to try and become relevant once again. But it’s clear that right now the opposition is not a factor.
During the bombing and late morning, there were stories, Venezuelans are going out to celebrate, but I mean, that wasn’t really happening. Their mobilization capacity is very diminished right now, and the administration knows this. That’s why they say the opposition doesn’t have any conditions to take power because if it was up to them, they would put a surrogate in power without thinking twice. But for their prospects and they want stability and they want the oil, this is the scenario that they find gives them the best possibilities.
**MICHAEL FOX:** Wow. Ricardo, is there anything else to add in particular having to do with what this means for US imperialism, US intervention, Monroe Doctrine, in the region, the significance of this invasion?
**RICARDO VAZ:** Yeah, this is definitely a new chapter in the US projection of force in the region. This kind of direct intervention we haven’t seen since Panama, really. So there is, of course, a worry, and I hope that Latin American countries take it seriously, they have to stop it from becoming the norm once again. And even Panama was already kind of the last breath of plan CONDOR and everything we had seen in the decades prior.
So, it is really, I mean, it is no longer a moment when you can just call for dialogue and just look at your own narrow interests and try to stay in the Trump administration’s good graces, because we see how quickly that can flip. Trump will just turn his focus somewhere else and issue threats. And now he has shown that it’s not just a bluff. It comes in, and it comes in with deadly force. So that on one hand.
And on the other, the other front that’s going to be open for a few weeks, is Maduro’s trial. Right now he’s in the US, he’s in custody. I think everyone knows by now these “narcoterrorism” charges have no ground in reality. And perhaps that’s why Trump just ditched it at a moment’s notice and started talking about the oil.
But still, it’s a US court and it has sealed evidence and it has these carefully groomed witnesses. So, it’s also a precedent of going in and kidnapping another country’s sitting president and forcing them to face US justice when there is no jurisdiction. The US justice system does not have universal jurisdiction.
So that’s going to be another precedent in terms of violations of international law that either it’s going to be imposed and no one is really going to want to do anything about it, or there’s going to be some pushback and some consequences.
**MICHAEL FOX:** Can you just talk really quickly about these drug trafficking charges on Maduro? Like we’ve heard from so many different people and so many analysts, they are ridiculous, but it’s still there. He’s still in a Southern court. They actually came and invaded Venezuela for this. So, what’s this based on? Do we have any sense?
**RICARDO VAZ:** I think the one thing to realize is how the US wants to frame this, because keep in mind that 70% of the US public, according to polls, was against any kind of intervention. And there were these two war power resolutions, one in the House and the other in the Senate, that were narrowly rejected. And the word behind the scenes was that Rubio and Hegseth had given assurances to Republican congressmen that something like this was not going to happen.
So, their effort is to say that this was not an act of war — It’s absurd, but it’s the discourse — This was not an act of war, but an act of law enforcement. We went in to apply US law and bring to justice someone who had been accused of doing whatever. So that, in one part, is the construction of a legal, very narrow and a very dubious, to say the least, legal argument.
But as for the charges themselves, they accused Maduro of conspiring to flood the US with drugs. And this is absurd on many counts. But on one hand, just the overall reality is that drugs that enter the US don’t really come from Venezuela. It’s just a very small fraction of cocaine that flows through Colombia to Venezuela and then through the Caribbean. But even [then] most of it goes to Europe. It doesn’t actually reach the US. That on one hand.
On the other, the whole War on Drugs reloaded was about fentanyl. And there’s nothing, Venezuela has absolutely nothing to do with fentanyl. So again, that’s really shifting the goalposts.
And third, there has never been any credible evidence of Venezuelan leaders having any kind of direct ties to any narcotics activities. I mean, of course, with sanctions and the diminishing of state capacities, there is a kind of an increase in illegal activities. And there are, of course, parts of the armed forces that might turn a blind eye or be bribed or even collaborate with drug trafficking. But that happens in the way the drug enterprise expands. There’s no evidence at all, and in fact it would have been against the Venezuelan government’s interests to actually participate actively in any kind of activity like this.
But again, they can just have some witness that says Maduro was directly involved. There are people who have been arrested and will want to get their own sentences reduced by producing these kinds of false allegations to say that Maduro was actively sending drugs into the US. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense, but I think that’s the way they’re going to try to construct the case.
**MICHAEL FOX:** Ricardo, thank you so much. Anything else to add that you think is important?
**RICARDO VAZ:** No, I think the most important thing is first keep up and try and not be convinced by the dishonesty that’s going around in the media establishment, and also mobilizing. Right now, this is Sunday afternoon, there’s mobilization outside the place where Maduro is being detained. So, there is an unprecedented new chapter of imperialism, so there should be a matching anti-imperialist response.
**MICHAEL FOX:** Ricardo, where can people find more of your work?
**RICARDO VAZ:** Just go to venezuelanalysis.com. We’re trying our best to keep up with everything and keep people updated. So, Twitter is where we will be posting most regularly, and then eventually on the website. Maybe later today we’re going to publish something on everything we know so far and where things stand. And of course, news and analysis in the coming days, as always.
**MICHAEL FOX:** Fantastic. And then last question also, what are your suggestions for other individuals, journalists, outlets that people should be following at this moment if they want actual news on the ground?
**RICARDO VAZ:** English speaking is always hard to find. We have great friends here at the Orinoco Tribune. They’re also on the ground. And also, both Venezuelanalysis and Orinoco Tribune are part of what’s called the Sovereign Media Coalition. This is a group of, a new initiative, a group of alternative independent outlets coming together to challenge the media establishment’s narrative. So, we’re going to be producing a lot of content on Venezuela through that as well.
**MICHAEL FOX:** Ricardo, thank you so much for all of your work. Thank you for being on the ground. And thank you so much for joining me here today.
**RICARDO VAZ:** Thanks, Mike. It’s always a pleasure. And I hope we get in touch again soon, hopefully in better circumstances.
**MICHAEL FOX:** Absolutely.
[THEME MUSIC]
**MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:** That is all for this episode of _Under the Shadow_.
Next time…
We continue to look at the fallout from this US invasion of Venezuela. We’ll speak with others on the ground, dive into the devastating history that has led up to today, and look deeper into what Trump is now calling his own “Donroe Doctrine” for the region — Donald Trump’s Monroe 2.0.
That’s next time on _Under the Shadow_.
I’m your host Michael Fox. Thanks for listening.
A couple of things before I go…
First… If you’re interested in Ricardo Vaz’s work, I’ll add a link in the show notes to Venezuelanalysis and some of the other outlets that he mentioned. I highly recommend you check them out. Venezuelanalysis is one of the top sources for independent on-the-ground news in Venezuela. Their reporting is seriously more important now than ever.
Second… If you are new to this podcast series, I highly recommend you check out the first season of _Under the Shadow_. It looks at US intervention in Central America, in particular throughout the 1980s. It’s still super relevant today. I’ll add links in the show notes or you can find that by searching for _Under the Shadow_ wherever you get your podcasts.
Finally, if you like what you hear, please head over to my Patreon page… patreon.com/mfox. There you can support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. This really helps me to continue to do this important work and to get the word out.
_Under the Shadow_ is a co-production of The Real News and NACLA.
Thanks for listening. See you next time…
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# The Americas will never be the same
by Michael Fox, The Real News Network
January 5, 2026
<h1>The Americas will never be the same</h1> <p class="byline">by Michael Fox, The Real News Network <br />January 5, 2026</p> <br /> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> https://open.spotify.com/episode/2lF5Bosz1YOIQcNhjG4nCM?si=7e62e163734f4239 </div> </figure> <p class="has-drop-cap">In the early hours of Saturday morning, January 3rd, Venezuelans were awoken by the sounds of bombs falling. US helicopters whirled overhead. Explosions struck across the capital Caracas and in surrounding states.</p> <p>Hours of chaos, fear, and uncertainty.</p> <p>President Donald Trump would post over social media that the US had “captured” Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores amid a “large-scale” strike against the country.</p> <p>This is the first US invasion of another country in Latin America since the 1989 invasion of Panama, when the US kidnapped and detained Panamanian President Manuel Noriega under charges of drug trafficking. The Trump administration used the same excuse to detain Maduro, despite lack of evidence linking Maduro to drug trafficking. </p> <p>With this strike, the United States has taken an unprecedented step: This is the first time the United States has used its own military to invade a South American country.</p> <p>Today, we go to Caracas to look in-depth at the January 3rd US invasion of Venezuela. Host Michael Fox speaks with Caracas-based reporter Ricardo Vaz.</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity" /> <p><a href="https://therealnews.com/under-the-shadow"><em>Under the Shadow</em></a> is an investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time, telling the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present. </p> <p>Season 2 responds in real time to the Trump Administration’s onslaught in Latin America.</p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> <p>Hosted by Latin America-based journalist <a href="https://www.patreon.com/mfox" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Michael Fox</a>.</p> <p>This podcast is produced in partnership between <a href="https://therealnews.com/under-the-shadow" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Real News Network</a> and <a href="https://nacla.org/under-shadow" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">NACLA</a>.</p> <p>Theme music by <a href="https://open.spotify.com/artist/0nexDyQCZI89JH8zsYu5wa" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Monte Perdido</a> and Michael Fox. Monte Perdido's new album Ofrenda is now out. You can listen to the full album on <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/1THq4wHHqkY8yydUMJRmWj" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://www.deezer.com/pt/album/587476202" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Deezer</a>, <a href="https://music.apple.com/za/album/ofrenda/1746696244" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Apple Music</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_n1lCcdFJEQczm-VSiraOuUpGcbzLxnRXs" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">YouTube</a> or wherever you listen to music. Other music from Blue Dot Sessions.</p> </blockquote> <p><strong>Resources: </strong></p> <p><strong>Under the Shadow</strong></p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li><a href="https://therealnews.com/under-the-shadow" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">You can check out the first season of Under the Shadow by clicking here</a></li> <li><a href="https://therealnews.com/the-beginning-monroe-and-migration-under-the-shadow-episode-1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Beginning: Monroe And Migration | Under The Shadow, Episode 1</a></li> <li><a href="https://therealnews.com/panama-us-invasion-under-the-shadow-episode-13" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Panama. Us Invasion. | Under The Shadow, Episode 13</a></li> <li><a href="https://therealnews.com/he-legacy-of-monroe-under-the-shadow-bonus-episode-4" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Legacy Of Monroe | Under The Shadow, bonus Episode 4 </a></li> <li><strong>Michael Fox’s recent reporting on the boat strikes and the ramp-up for war in Venezuela: </strong> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li><a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/world/venezuela-trump-air-strike-monroe-doctrine/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">With the Strike on a “Drug-Carrying Boat,” Trump Returns to a Dangerous US Policy for Latin America</a></li> <li><a href="https://truthout.org/articles/caribbean-leaders-call-for-unified-latin-american-resistance-to-us-attacks/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Caribbean Leaders Call for Unified Latin American Resistance to US Attacks</a></li> <li><a href="https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-monroe-doctrine-2-0-outlines-imperial-intentions-for-latin-america/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Trump’s Monroe Doctrine 2.0 Outlines Imperial Intentions for Latin America</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> <p><strong>Other Resources</strong></p> <p>You can check out Ricardo Vaz’s reporting at <a href="http://www.venezuelanalysis.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">www.venezuelanalysis.com</a>.</p> <p>You can follow them on X at <a href="https://x.com/venanalysis" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://x.com/venanalysis</a></p> <p>For more English-language reporting on Venezuela, you can follow the <a href="https://orinocotribune.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Orinoco Tribune</a>, <a href="https://kawsachun.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Kawsachun News</a>, and <a href="https://sovereignmedia.online/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Sovereign Media</a>.</p> <p><strong>Support Under the Shadow:</strong></p> <p>Please consider supporting this podcast and Michael Fox’s reporting on his Patreon account: <a href="http://patreon.com/mfox" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">patreon.com/mfox</a>. There you can also see exclusive pictures, video, and interviews.</p> <p>You can check out Michael’s <a href="https://therealnews.com/thousands-march-against-trump-war-venezuela" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">recent episode of Stories of Resistance</a> about the protests against US intervention in Venezuela.</p> <p>Written and produced by Michael Fox.</p> <details class="wp-block-details"> <summary>Transcript</summary> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]: </strong> In the early hours of Saturday morning Jan. 3, Venezuelans were awoken by the sounds of bombs falling.</p> <p>Videos shared widely over WhatsApp and social media are shocking. US helicopters whirl overhead, missile strikes, explosions across the capital, Caracas, and in surrounding states.</p> <p>Hours of chaos, fear, and uncertainty.</p> <p>President Donald Trump would post over social media that the US had “captured” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, amid a “large-scale” strike against the country.</p> <p>That news was confirmed by Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who would soon be sworn in to serve as interim president.</p> <p>This is the first unilateral US invasion of another country in Latin America since the 1989 invasion of Panama, when the United States kidnapped and detained Panamanian President Manuel Noriega under charges of drug trafficking. </p> <p>The Trump administration used the same excuse to detain Maduro despite a lack of evidence linking Maduro to drug trafficking. </p> <p>Trump’s attack on Venezuela marks a return to a terrifying not-so-distant past when the United States felt emboldened and entitled to carry out unilateral military action against sovereign nations to achieve its goals.</p> <p>But with this strike, the United States has taken an unprecedented step: this is the first time the United States has used its own military to invade a South American country.</p> <p>Now people across Venezuela and the region are trying to figure out what it all means, and what happens next… </p> <p>That… in a minute </p> <p>[THEME MUSIC]</p> <p>This is <em>Under the Shadow</em> — An investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the role of the United States abroad in the past and the very, very present.</p> <p>This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.</p> <p>I’m your host, Michael Fox — Longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist. The producer and host of the podcasts <em>Brazil on Fire</em> and <em>Stories of Resistance</em>. I’ve spent the better part of the last twenty years in Latin America.</p> <p>I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad. And most often, sadly, it is not for the better: invasions, coups, sanctions. Support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years. It still does…. </p> <p>This is Season 2 of <em>Under the Shadow</em>: Trump's Attack.</p> <p>If you listened to Season 1 about the US role in Central America, you know that in each episode I take you to a location where something historic happened, diving into the past to try and decipher what it means today. I’ll still do that here. But Season 2 is also going to be a little different. Because my goal is to respond in real time to the Trump Administration’s onslaught in Latin America.</p> <p>Today that is, unfortunately, more important than ever.</p> <p>Just in recent months, we’ve seen the boat strikes, threats of a US invasion of Venezuela, the seizure of multiple tankers carrying Venezuelan crude, US intervention in the Honduran election, tariff war, and on early Saturday morning, a US invasion of Venezuela. The United States deployed 150 aircraft. More than 40 people were killed. Buildings destroyed. The president and his wife, kidnapped.</p> <p>In the last episode — The first of this season — I looked at the Trump administration’s new National Security Doctrine and how Trump is now justifying intervention in the region with his new “Trump Corollary” of the Monroe Doctrine.</p> <p>Today, I take you to Caracas to look in-depth at the Jan. 3 US invasion of Venezuela. You’ll note that today is a little different than usual. In order to respond quickly to the US attack, I’ll be speaking this whole episode with Caracas-based reporter Ricardo Vaz.</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ [CLIP]: </strong>I'm an editor at Venezuelanalysis, a political analyst and journalist here working on the ground in Venezuela.</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]: </strong>I spoke with Ricardo on the afternoon of Sunday, Jan. 4, the day after the invasion. He spoke from his home in Caracas, where his electricity has just returned. Power was presumably cut by US forces across Caracas during the invasion. Here is our conversation in its entirety.</p> <p>[MUSIC]</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>Ricardo, let me just start by saying thank you so much for being with me today. I really, really appreciate it.</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>Hey, Mike, thanks for the invitation. It's actually, I'm a bit calmer and better right now. I mean, yesterday it was just, it still feels a bit like a surreal dream, and I had no electricity, and trying to deal with the whirlwind of news and speculation. Now it seems things are settling down a little bit and maybe we can start to take stock at least of some things that have happened.</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>Exactly. Well, let's just start off with right now, what is the feeling on the ground in Venezuela?</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>There are still a lot of questions to be answered. First of all, how many people died in the US bombing campaign? We still don't know that. Obviously information starts to circulate and there are pictures, gruesome pictures, of people killed and maimed in these attacks. Some preliminary reports of at least 40 killed, although other people suggest that the figure might end up being a lot higher.</p> <p>But it seems that there is an effort from the government here, Delcy Rodríguez taking over to kind of restore normalcy. So, she had the Supreme Court endorse her in a way, or saying that she is the one, according to the constitution, that should take over as interim president. The armed forces have issued a statement backing her. So, there is a sense of trying to get things back to normal as quickly as possible while we try to process everything.</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>Wow. It's just crazy, Ricardo. It's just crazy. </p> <p>Walk me back to yesterday. I'm sure for you, it must seem like a week ago, but it was literally just a day ago. Can you describe the invasion? Were you awake for it? What happened?</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>Yeah, so my New Year's resolution was to go to bed a bit earlier, but I'm still working on that. So it was 2:00 AM. I had actually just shut off work for the day. And I was just, you know, doing some last minute errands in the house. And then suddenly… Power went out and I mean, of course, hindsight is 20/20, but I had a feeling something was going on. And then there was a huge boom, like something I'd never felt before. I'd never been in a war zone or anything like it. So it was clear. This was no remnant of New Year's fireworks. So, there was a loud boom and then a sequence of others. </p> <p>So, I mean, I have a balcony, I immediately went out, I couldn't actually see it, it was not in my line of sight. But then, you go on social media and there are immediately lots and lots of reports, Caracas is being bombed, airplanes are flying. And we continue to hear these explosions. </p> <p>And then we see photos of Fuerte Tiuna, that's the largest military installation here in Caracas, with fires and large columns of smoke. Also that the Francisco Miranda Air Base in La Carlota had also been bombed. And then other bombings that turned out not to be confirmed. One of them was Miraflores Palace, also the Cuartel de la Montaña, where Chávez's mausoleum is being held. And we were trying to to make sense of it.</p> <p>And then the scariest part was videos of helicopters, helicopters flying in Caracas and bombing targets on the ground around Fuerte Tiuna. So, what are these helicopters? Analysts saying, this is the 160 SOAR [Special Operations Aviation Regiment] special operation tactical team. What are they here for? And then, so this was from 2:00 AM to around 3:30 when we stopped hearing bombings. </p> <p>And then what happened to the helicopters? Are they still here? Have they left? Are there troops on the ground? Who knows? And then 5:00 AM there was this announcement from Trump that they had captured Maduro and First [Lady] Cilia Flores. So, there were five minutes where people were wondering if this was fake until it was confirmed by other sources. And that was basically the end of the bombing campaign and the operation. </p> <p>We saw first Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino come out. I think he made this statement before he had any idea that Maduro had been captured, saying that we are preparing resistance, we reject this cruel and illegal attack, and then Diosdado Cabello also called on people to go out on the streets. So that was, let's say, the night portion of, or the early portion of the events.</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>Crazy. How big was people's responses? Did many people hit the streets? Did you go see some of the protests that were happening yesterday during the daytime?</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>Yeah, so I walked around for a bit. People went out from the early hours, but there wasn't a lot of them. I mean, a crowd in the hundreds, maybe low thousands around Miraflores Palace. But also, keep in mind, there was no public transportation, so it wasn't that easy to get around. But people made a point of showing up, and that's always the gathering point where to protect the Bolivar Revolution. It's around Miraflores Palace.</p> <p>But there was a few hours of really not knowing what was going on because people started to gather in the morning. And then the question is, where is Delcy Rodríguez? Is she going to say something? There were rumors that turned out to be false that she was in Russia. </p> <p>And then we had this, I mean, all Trump press conferences are an experience, but this press conference where Trump's saying he's going to run the country and the people behind him, presumably Rubio, is going to run the country, and we're going to take all the oil, and we're going to get back what they owe us. </p> <p><strong>PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]: </strong>We're there now. We're ready to go again if we have to. We're going to run the country right. It's going to run very judiciously, very fairly. It's going to make a lot of money. We're going to give money to the people. We're going to reimburse people that were taken advantage of. We're going to take care of everybody.</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>I mean, just a sequence of bluster. But with the "triumph" of having secured Maduro's arrest in this special operations raid. </p> <p>And then the most critical part of what he said regarding what happens next, it was very surprising that he was so forceful in dismissing far-right leader Maria Corina Machado, saying, oh, we like her, but she basically has no prospects of holding power right now. I think he said she doesn't have the respect of the country, something like this.</p> <p>[CLIP BEGINS]</p> <p><strong>PRESS: </strong>Is the US aware of the location of opposition leader Machado, and have you been in contact with her? </p> <p><strong>PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: </strong>No, we haven't really. I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn't have the support within or the respect within the country. She's a very nice woman, but she doesn't have the respect.</p> <p>[CLIP ENDS]</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>And then he talked about Delcy Rodríguez, saying that she's the one in charge right now. She was sworn in. She actually wasn't sworn in. And [Marco] Rubio talked to her and she said she's going to do everything we demand. I'm paraphrasing, but it was something to this effect.</p> <p>And then still we had to wait at least a couple more hours before Delcy herself gave a press conference. And her tone was very defiant, saying that Maduro is the president and we demand Maduro's release and return, and that a lot of emergency mechanisms that had been set in place before were activated. This state of external commotion and this National Defense Council is also active. </p> <p>And basically she emphasized that the situation is calm. I think that's one of the priorities for the government is not having any kind of internal chaos that can spiral out of control. So, basically getting things to work. </p> <p>And a good sign also, from my narrow perspective, was the restoration of electricity in parts of central Caracas, because that's always an issue and always a worry, whether the state retains functions, retains the capability to do these important things. And it seems that at least there's some sense of normalcy returned.</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>Ricardo, can you just tell me again who Delcy Rodríguez is again? She’s now the acting interim president.</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>Yeah, so this is, let's say, the final step in a very strong and quick ascendancy for Delcy Rodríguez. So, she's also younger, but she wasn't very prominent during the Chávez presidency. But under Maduro, she has taken an ever more important and ever present role. </p> <p>So first, she was foreign minister. And she was foreign minister when Venezuela had these recurring battles in the OAS [Organization of American States], as you'll remember. And then she actually was president of the Constituent Assembly in 2017. And then she became vice president. And a few years later, she also took over as finance minister and then as oil minister.</p> <p>So, she is clearly the strongest person when it comes to Venezuela's economic policy and the oil industry, which, for better or worse, is still the heartbeat of the Venezuelan economy. So, she is clearly a key person in that regard. </p> <p>And as vice president, she and the Supreme Court gave this interpretation. She's the one that takes over as interim president in the, they call it temporary absence of the sitting president, who is Maduro.</p> <p>So for Delcy, she was already calling the shots in many regards in terms of international relations. She was the one that went very regularly to India, to China, to talk with counterparts and try and negotiate investment deals. </p> <p>And also inside, it's no secret that, under these crushing sanctions, the Venezuelan government has offered plenty of concessions to the private sector and also undoing some of the regulations. And Delcy is the person who has had this rapport with the private sector guilds, with Fedecamaras. So, she's the one that has the relations right now, both domestically and abroad, to take over the reins of the country. So in that sense, it wasn't any surprise. </p> <p>And now, of course, it's different to be sitting on the big chair as opposed to advising and having someone else have the final word. But I mean, let's see now what Delcey does in terms of policy. Also, how does she handle this US... Not pressure, it's outright blackmail, while also denouncing the kidnapping and this illegal trial against Maduro? So, she has a lot on her plate. Let’s see how she handles it.</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>This is one of the things that I thought was really interesting also, because you saw Trump's press conference and it's like, basically, we've taken over Venezuela. These are the guys who are going to run it. Like you said, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, the defense minister.</p> <p>But then on the flip side, when it comes to Venezuela, then you see Delcy Rodríguez, and she's very strongly defiant. What does that tension mean for the US-Venezuela relationship going forward, what does that mean for Venezuela's path ahead?</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>I mean, it's clearly a very tricky path ahead, but we now have a bit more clarity. Marco Rubio gave some statements just a while ago. And again, surprising that Marco Rubio would dismiss the opposition's prospects. He basically said, “We like them, but they're basically all abroad. So, there's nothing they can do right now.” </p> <p>And he said, he kind of explained what this run the country is going to mean. So he said, “We are in touch with the new authorities and we hope they will make the right decisions. And if not, we have,” I think he said, “levers of leverage.” So, these economic sanctions, this naval blockade that he said was going to remain in place. </p> <p>So basically, they want to coerce the new administration, and they have this threat of just coming back and bombing again if it doesn't go according to what they want. And basically what they want — And I'm not guessing anymore, it's just Trump in his own words — They want the oil. So, they want some very favorable oil arrangements for US corporations.</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>Do we have any idea of a timeline of what things could look like in the coming weeks, in the coming months? Did Delcy give any sense of if US oil corporations might actually get the beneficial treatment and things like that?</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>She didn't give anything specific, but she did say something that seemed a bit out of place. She said that Venezuela was prepared to have relations with the US so long as they are based on respect, which is something a bit unusual to say after the US has just bombed your country and kidnapped your president. But I mean, that has been a common line in the Venezuelan discourse, so maybe it's not that out of place. </p> <p>If there are going to be deals, I would expect them to be maybe not in the next week, but maybe very, very soon. And it will take some effort to… There will be, I'm sure there are negotiations going on right now, but then they will have to realize how they're going to, on both sides, how they're going to present it because it is undoubtedly a concession. So, even though you can try to say that, oh, you know, the US companies are coming in and they're bringing investment, it's still something that was forced upon you, forced upon Venezuela on the back of missiles. </p> <p>So, that's the tricky balance that the Venezuelan government and Delcy Rodríguez in particular now being in charge has to navigate.</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>Ricardo, just real quick, because I feel like this is one of the things that is not well-understood. Trump keeps repeating that this is our oil and it was stolen from us. Can you just give some context to that? Like, what's the actual reality and why is that just ridiculous?</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>Trump says something and then there are propagandists who come and try and explain what Trump should have said. So Trump says, it's our oil and they stole it from us. And then I think it was one of the administration officials who said, oh, you know, the Venezuelan oil industry was built by US investment and ingenuity. And US corporations were involved almost from the start, but I mean, they had such a favorable arrangement of just taking the oil and not paying anything that, on the look of it, actually, Venezuela could charge for illegal profits retroactively. </p> <p>So what Trump is referring to is probably the 1976 nationalization, which was a partial nationalization that was then partially reversed in the 1990s with what's called the Oil Opening, the Abertura Petrolera, that allowed, again, great benefits for foreign corporations. </p> <p>And then the Chávez government, first with the Hydrocarbons Law of 2001 and then with the decrease in 2007, reasserted, let's say, the state's hegemony over the oil industry by demanding that Venezuela's state oil company, PDVSA, hold at least a majority stake in oil joint ventures, and perhaps 60% stake in in some of them. </p> <p>And there were corporations that accepted the new rules. Chevron was one of them, and then they are still around. But others, and the most important ones, are ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, rejected. </p> <p>But they didn't just have their assets confiscated. Confiscated is a word that doesn't make any sense in this context. So, there were offers of compensation. Some companies accepted it. These two in particular and others, many others, did not. And they took Venezuela to international arbitration, these state investor courts that somehow always rule in favor of the investors. </p> <p>And so, Exxon Mobil was already paid. They wanted $20 billion in compensation, Venezuela appealed, and it was brought down to $1 billion, which was seen as a major victory. And that was paid. Venezuela doesn't owe anything to ExxonMobil.</p> <p>And ConocoPhillips, there were some settlements already achieved. There were others that were not able to be fulfilled because of sanctions. But ConocoPhillips is one of the companies that's going to profit from the corporate plunder of Citgo. </p> <p>So in a sense, these corporations already have either been compensated or in the process of being compensated for these nationalizations. So, Trump's discourse doesn't make any sense. It's not really about looking back and getting back what was “owed” because there is nothing owed. And also, the oil is a sovereign resource. It's about going forward and securing a strategic resource that's very close and in the most favorable and affordable conditions to bolster US hegemony and prepare for future, perhaps inevitable, confrontation with China.</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>You know, there was something that someone said in my last episode of <em>Under the Shadow</em> that was along the lines of the fact that this is no longer America first for US interests or for the people of the United States. This is America first for corporations. This is neoliberalism on steroids. This is not just a return to the Monroe Doctrine of the past, but rather a Monroe Doctrine that is explicitly defending US corporate interests. </p> <p>And it's fascinating how Trump speaks that language. When he's there on the tarmac speaking about oil, he doesn't say, “Well, this was US oil companies' oil, and then these things happened.” He says, “This is our oil,” as if the US oil companies [are] the United States.</p> <p><strong>PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]: </strong>You remember they took all of our energy rights. They took all of our oil from not that long ago. And we want it back. But they took it. They illegally took it.</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>I just think that's a, it's like this really terrifying but also really interesting nugget of truth in this moment as Trump is pushing, not just in Venezuela, but in so many other places. </p> <p>Ricardo, what are people feeling now? What are Venezuelans that you're talking to or on the streets [saying]? Are there concerns of a new Trump bombing? Are people just shocked? What's the feeling on the ground in that sense?</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>There's still a lot of shock and still trying to process everything that went on, as you can imagine. And there is, of course, now a looming fear that this might happen at any moment because it happened without any warning and in the middle of the night when people were really not expecting it. So, that's clearly in the back of people's minds. </p> <p>But I think there is a sense of outrage even from from Venezuelan opposition figures of what is a very blatant violation on one hand of international law, but in what concerns Venezuela of national sovereignty, of going into another country and bombing without any kind of mandate and kidnapping the country's sitting president. </p> <p>Even people who wanted Maduro out of power, unless they are really US agents, they cannot tolerate something like this because who's to say that it doesn't happen again tomorrow? And the same goes for other Latin American countries, who's to say that at some point Trump will not flip a switch and do this to them? So I think it's also important, and there are signs in that direction, that there be a unified response in condemning this. And also not just condemning, because these statements only take you so far, but actually demanding some action in return.</p> <p>So, that's certainly a feeling right now on the ground, and it was a common thread in the people who took the mic yesterday in these spontaneous demonstrations saying, what are international agencies going to do? Are they just going to stand by? Is this going to be the new normal? The line has been crossed a while ago. At what point do we see a reaction? </p> <p>And actually, there's a UN Security Council meeting, I think today, and there were two of them before that only produced statements and condemnation of US escalation. I would guess very generously that a red line has already been crossed. So, is there at least going to be a resolution that forces the US to to use its veto?</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>Right, exactly. How shocking was this US invasion? Could you have imagined it even with all of the talk and the rhetoric about the potential of the United States invading going back 20 years and all of the buildup in the Caribbean, was it still a shock when it was actually rolling out and was actually happening?</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>Yeah, I mean, of course, we all made our predictions based on what we had seen and where things were going. I actually thought that this was no longer really on the table after the US imposed this, what they called an oil quarantine and the naval blockade. I saw that as perhaps an admission that this kind of thing was not possible. And so, they were going back to the kind of slow death asphyxiation to extract whatever concessions they want also in the near term, but with a different approach. So, it was definitely unexpected.</p> <p>We had spent a lot of time watching these radars and seeing the US warplanes waltzing around close to Venezuelan shores. So, maybe that created a false sense of security that it was just one show of force after another. But there were no signs that this was actually about to happen. We knew that the US aircraft carrier, the Gerald R. Ford, was relatively close. </p> <p>Also we have to talk about the reaction or the response from the Venezuelan armed forces because there was supposed to be some kind of deterrence, some kind of force that would make the US think twice before not just bombing but doing this land incursion. And in the end, perhaps there was so much preparation and Venezuelan armed forces were caught off guard, but there was really not much resistance put when these helicopters came in and then executed the operation to kidnap President Maduro.</p> <p>I'm guessing we'll know more details in the coming days and weeks. But I think I was caught by surprise as an outside analyst, but by the looks of it, the Venezuelan armed forces were also not ready to confront it.</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>Yeah. Ricardo, what do we know right now about the tankers and the oil sanctions? I know Trump has said he's going to continue with those sanctions and continue blocking the tankers in the blockade, but is there hope that that might be rolled back in the coming weeks?</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>So, I'm guessing that if US corporations are going to come in, there's going to have to be some kind of relaxation. So, at least the lifting of this physical naval blockade. </p> <p>Right now, I think everyone is still in a wait and see pattern. There are oil operations going on, of course, but we haven't seen neither another attempt to seize a tanker nor anything blatant like a blacklisted tanker going in and out. I'm guessing in the coming days we're going to see if there's a new pattern emerging here on this front. </p> <p>My guess is that… I mean, Trump already has his political victory. He already did this very daring raid and did something that, it's the most blatant violation of international law you can think of. He kidnapped another country's sitting president. So, in one sense he can already gloat about it and do his victory lap. And perhaps he can loosen a bit the naval blockade as he prepares to force the entry of US corporations.</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>Have we heard anything from Maria Corina Machado, and any response? I know she was a big supporter of actual US intervention. And then of course, like you mentioned, Trump kind of really gave her the sidestep during his speech on Saturday.</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>In all honesty, I haven't had time to really keep up with her. She was very enthusiastic in the early morning, saying the hour of freedom has arrived. And she wasn't shy about saying, we are prepared to take power at any moment and we have a plan for the first 100 hours, 100 days, and whatever. </p> <p>And I mean, right now, her political prospects are a bit shaky because Trump said quite openly she doesn't have conditions to rule the country. And the approval that she needs is not from the Venezuelan people because it can be imposed at the end of a gun; she needs Trump's approval. And if Trump says she's not being considered, then basically what does she do now? </p> <p>She's abroad. I'm guessing she's going to regroup and then try and piggyback on the US success and claim that it's boosting her prospects in the future. But she has, perhaps out of everyone, she has a lot of political spin to do to try and become relevant once again. But it's clear that right now the opposition is not a factor. </p> <p>During the bombing and late morning, there were stories, Venezuelans are going out to celebrate, but I mean, that wasn't really happening. Their mobilization capacity is very diminished right now, and the administration knows this. That's why they say the opposition doesn't have any conditions to take power because if it was up to them, they would put a surrogate in power without thinking twice. But for their prospects and they want stability and they want the oil, this is the scenario that they find gives them the best possibilities.</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>Wow. Ricardo, is there anything else to add in particular having to do with what this means for US imperialism, US intervention, Monroe Doctrine, in the region, the significance of this invasion?</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>Yeah, this is definitely a new chapter in the US projection of force in the region. This kind of direct intervention we haven't seen since Panama, really. So there is, of course, a worry, and I hope that Latin American countries take it seriously, they have to stop it from becoming the norm once again. And even Panama was already kind of the last breath of plan CONDOR and everything we had seen in the decades prior. </p> <p>So, it is really, I mean, it is no longer a moment when you can just call for dialogue and just look at your own narrow interests and try to stay in the Trump administration's good graces, because we see how quickly that can flip. Trump will just turn his focus somewhere else and issue threats. And now he has shown that it's not just a bluff. It comes in, and it comes in with deadly force. So that on one hand. </p> <p>And on the other, the other front that's going to be open for a few weeks, is Maduro's trial. Right now he's in the US, he's in custody. I think everyone knows by now these “narcoterrorism” charges have no ground in reality. And perhaps that's why Trump just ditched it at a moment's notice and started talking about the oil. </p> <p>But still, it's a US court and it has sealed evidence and it has these carefully groomed witnesses. So, it's also a precedent of going in and kidnapping another country's sitting president and forcing them to face US justice when there is no jurisdiction. The US justice system does not have universal jurisdiction.</p> <p>So that's going to be another precedent in terms of violations of international law that either it's going to be imposed and no one is really going to want to do anything about it, or there's going to be some pushback and some consequences.</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>Can you just talk really quickly about these drug trafficking charges on Maduro? Like we've heard from so many different people and so many analysts, they are ridiculous, but it's still there. He's still in a Southern court. They actually came and invaded Venezuela for this. So, what's this based on? Do we have any sense?</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>I think the one thing to realize is how the US wants to frame this, because keep in mind that 70% of the US public, according to polls, was against any kind of intervention. And there were these two war power resolutions, one in the House and the other in the Senate, that were narrowly rejected. And the word behind the scenes was that Rubio and Hegseth had given assurances to Republican congressmen that something like this was not going to happen.</p> <p>So, their effort is to say that this was not an act of war — It's absurd, but it's the discourse — This was not an act of war, but an act of law enforcement. We went in to apply US law and bring to justice someone who had been accused of doing whatever. So that, in one part, is the construction of a legal, very narrow and a very dubious, to say the least, legal argument. </p> <p>But as for the charges themselves, they accused Maduro of conspiring to flood the US with drugs. And this is absurd on many counts. But on one hand, just the overall reality is that drugs that enter the US don't really come from Venezuela. It's just a very small fraction of cocaine that flows through Colombia to Venezuela and then through the Caribbean. But even [then] most of it goes to Europe. It doesn't actually reach the US. That on one hand. </p> <p>On the other, the whole War on Drugs reloaded was about fentanyl. And there's nothing, Venezuela has absolutely nothing to do with fentanyl. So again, that's really shifting the goalposts. </p> <p>And third, there has never been any credible evidence of Venezuelan leaders having any kind of direct ties to any narcotics activities. I mean, of course, with sanctions and the diminishing of state capacities, there is a kind of an increase in illegal activities. And there are, of course, parts of the armed forces that might turn a blind eye or be bribed or even collaborate with drug trafficking. But that happens in the way the drug enterprise expands. There's no evidence at all, and in fact it would have been against the Venezuelan government's interests to actually participate actively in any kind of activity like this. </p> <p>But again, they can just have some witness that says Maduro was directly involved. There are people who have been arrested and will want to get their own sentences reduced by producing these kinds of false allegations to say that Maduro was actively sending drugs into the US. I mean, it doesn't make any sense, but I think that's the way they're going to try to construct the case.</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>Ricardo, thank you so much. Anything else to add that you think is important?</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>No, I think the most important thing is first keep up and try and not be convinced by the dishonesty that's going around in the media establishment, and also mobilizing. Right now, this is Sunday afternoon, there's mobilization outside the place where Maduro is being detained. So, there is an unprecedented new chapter of imperialism, so there should be a matching anti-imperialist response.</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>Ricardo, where can people find more of your work?</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>Just go to venezuelanalysis.com. We're trying our best to keep up with everything and keep people updated. So, Twitter is where we will be posting most regularly, and then eventually on the website. Maybe later today we're going to publish something on everything we know so far and where things stand. And of course, news and analysis in the coming days, as always.</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>Fantastic. And then last question also, what are your suggestions for other individuals, journalists, outlets that people should be following at this moment if they want actual news on the ground?</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>English speaking is always hard to find. We have great friends here at the Orinoco Tribune. They're also on the ground. And also, both Venezuelanalysis and Orinoco Tribune are part of what's called the Sovereign Media Coalition. This is a group of, a new initiative, a group of alternative independent outlets coming together to challenge the media establishment's narrative. So, we're going to be producing a lot of content on Venezuela through that as well.</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>Ricardo, thank you so much for all of your work. Thank you for being on the ground. And thank you so much for joining me here today.</p> <p><strong>RICARDO VAZ: </strong>Thanks, Mike. It's always a pleasure. And I hope we get in touch again soon, hopefully in better circumstances.</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX: </strong>Absolutely.</p> <p>[THEME MUSIC]</p> <p><strong>MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]: </strong>That is all for this episode of <em>Under the Shadow</em>. </p> <p>Next time… </p> <p>We continue to look at the fallout from this US invasion of Venezuela. We’ll speak with others on the ground, dive into the devastating history that has led up to today, and look deeper into what Trump is now calling his own “Donroe Doctrine” for the region — Donald Trump's Monroe 2.0.</p> <p>That’s next time on <em>Under the Shadow</em>. </p> <p>I’m your host Michael Fox. Thanks for listening.</p> <p>A couple of things before I go… </p> <p>First… If you're interested in Ricardo Vaz’s work, I’ll add a link in the show notes to Venezuelanalysis and some of the other outlets that he mentioned. I highly recommend you check them out. Venezuelanalysis is one of the top sources for independent on-the-ground news in Venezuela. Their reporting is seriously more important now than ever.</p> <p>Second… If you are new to this podcast series, I highly recommend you check out the first season of <em>Under the Shadow</em>. It looks at US intervention in Central America, in particular throughout the 1980s. It’s still super relevant today. I’ll add links in the show notes or you can find that by searching for <em>Under the Shadow</em> wherever you get your podcasts. </p> <p>Finally, if you like what you hear, please head over to my Patreon page… patreon.com/mfox. There you can support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. This really helps me to continue to do this important work and to get the word out.</p> <p><em>Under the Shadow</em> is a co-production of The Real News and NACLA.</p> <p>Thanks for listening. See you next time… </p> </details> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/us-trump-invasion-of-venezuela">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com">The Real News Network</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"></p> <img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://therealnews.com/?republication-pixel=true&post=340021&ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/us-trump-invasion-of-venezuela", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script>
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The Americas will never be the same
“Suddenly the power went out and I had a feeling something was going on. Then there was a huge boom, like you know something I'd never felt before,” says journalist Ricardo Vaz. This is Season 2, Epis...
The Americas will never be the same #therealnews
therealnews.com/us-trump-inv...
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In the 1980s, the United States wreaked havoc in Central America. Backing authoritarian dictatorships. Fueling massacres and violence. Funding, training, and organizing the Contras, a paramilitary organization created to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The US government was spending billions on its interventionist policies across Central America in the name of fighting so-called communism.
But people pushed back across Central America. And they also responded in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of people marched in the streets against US intervention in the region. It was the Central American solidarity movement.
**BIG NEWS!** This podcast has won Gold in this year’s Signal Awards for best history podcast! It’s a huge honor. Thank you so much to everyone who voted and supported.
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The Real News’s legendary host Marc Steiner has also been in the running for best episode host. And he also won a Gold Signal Award. We are so excited. You can listen and subscribe to the Marc Steiner Show here on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
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Written and produced by Michael Fox.
**Resources:**
* Under the Shadow podcast
* Nicaragua, 1980s. Revolution | Under the Shadow, Episode 10, Part 1
* _Some clips of this episode of Stories of Resistance were taken from Episode 10, Part 2_ : Nicaragua, 1980s. Contra War | Under the Shadow, Episode 10, Part 2
Transcript
It’s the 1980s.
The United States is wreaking havoc in Central America. Backing authoritarian dictatorships. Fueling massacres and violence. And in the case of Nicaragua it’s funding, training, and organizing the Contras, a paramilitary organization created to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government.
The Sandinistas were a revolutionary group that had overthrown the US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, ending the Somoza family’s grip on the country that had lasted for more than 40 years. They promised revolutionary change. Health and education.
But the United States would not have it. The US government was spending billions in its interventionist policies across Central America, in the name of fighting so-called communism. $9.5 billion, just in 1985 alone, according to one estimate at the time.
US military support and money spent on bloody authoritarian dictatorships and groups like the Contras. Support and funds to fuel terror raids, civilian deaths, disappearances, massacres, and human rights abuses.
Historian Alex Aviña:
“This is one of the darkest, if not the darkest, period of Latin American history when it comes to genocide, political violence and just mass death. And Ronald Reagan was behind a lot of it.”
But people pushed back across Central America. And they also responded in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of people marched on the streets against US intervention in the region. It would become the Central American solidarity movement.
As many as 80,000 people in the United States signed a Pledge of Resistance, promising to commit civil disobedience if the US invaded Nicaragua. And people were already putting their bodies on the line against the US support for the Contras. There were hunger strikes. Others blocked weapons shipments. Many went to jail. Vietnam veteran Brian Wilson lost both legs while participating in a non-violent protest on the railroad tracks outside of a US weapons depot in California. The train ran him over.
“We found out later that the train crew that day had been ordered not to stop the train, which was an unprecedented… basically an illegal order.”
That’s him, speaking to Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! in 2011 after the release of his memoir, “Blood on the Tracks.”
“This is what happens to people all over the world, who obstruct the Yankee mad train that’s trying to repress people who wanna have self-determination. It was just another part of US policy coming home to me viscerally.
“The day I woke up, 9,000 people showed up at the tracks and ripped up 300 feet of the tracks and stacked up the railroad ties in a very interesting sculpture. And from that day on, for 28 consecutive months, there was a permanent occupation on the tracks of sometimes 200 people with tents, blocking every train and every truck. 2,100 people were arrested. Three people had their arms broken by the police.”
The solidarity movement grew to be huge in the United States.
“It’s easy to forget because you haven’t lived it, but I think it was very, very present. And it was like something that, like in local council meetings there were debates about the Sandinista Revolution and United States foreign policy.”
Historian Eline van Ommen:
“This was something that student unions talked about. There were posters everywhere… more left-leaning city councils, established relationships with Nicaraguan towns. It was kind of an alternative foreign policy route.”
Some people even traveled to Nicaragua to put their lives on the line.
Historian Alex Aviña:
“Often, other Americans would go down there and serve as human shields to protect. They thought that if you have foreigners on the border areas that the Contras wouldn’t attack the population, the Nicaraguense population there, because foreigners were around.”
The Contras still wreaked havoc. Killed and shot Americans acting in solidarity on the ground. But people continued to fight. Including lawmakers, who pushed back, passing amendments limiting US assistance to the Contras. Reagan turned to the covert and illegal Iran-Contra deal to fund the Contras. That scandal would break in 1986, tanking Reagan’s approval.
Still, people marched. Voices in the United States standing up to US intervention. Standing in solidarity with Central America. Standing and demanding that people and countries abroad be allowed to decide their own destiny without the intervening hand of the United States… fueling violence abroad, carrying out attacks and threatening invasion in foreign countries just across the Caribbean.
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Hi, folks. Thanks for listening. I’m your host, Michael Fox.
I really wanted to share this story today, as the Trump administration carries out ongoing deadly strikes on boats across the Caribbean and Pacific. And increasingly threatens military action in Venezuela.
These are dark times. We can not forget the long history of people standing up across the United States in solidarity with countries abroad. When they are under attack by US foreign policy and intervention.
Marches are planned for this Saturday across the United States against Washington’s military threats against Venezuela.
This resistance and solidarity is more important than ever today.
My podcast Under the Shadow takes a deep look at the role of the United States in Central America, and in particular, in the 1980s. Episode 10 of that series looks at the US in Nicaragua and also the resistance and solidarity that I talked about today in this episode.
I’ll add links in the show notes.
Folks, if you have not heard, I have more incredible news. You might remember that Stories of Resistance recently won a Gold Signal award for best history podcast. Well it has also won a Gold Anthem Award in the category of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. We are honored.
This is episode 79 of Stories of Resistance. If you don’t already subscribe to the show you can follow the links in the show notes. Stories of Resistance is produced by The Real News. Each week, I bring you stories of resistance and hope like this. Inspiration for dark times. And please, if you like what we do, rate us, leave a comment or a review, and help us spread the word.
As always, thanks for listening. See you next time.
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# Remembering the resistance to US intervention in Latin America
by Michael Fox, The Real News Network
December 5, 2025
<h1>Remembering the resistance to US intervention in Latin America</h1> <p class="byline">by Michael Fox, The Real News Network <br />December 5, 2025</p> <br /> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> https://open.spotify.com/episode/3jDFotEpawJi0MJ7N1GsIr?si=7f34ecc6477d45cf </div> </figure> <p class="has-drop-cap">In the 1980s, the United States wreaked havoc in Central America. Backing authoritarian dictatorships. Fueling massacres and violence. Funding, training, and organizing the Contras, a paramilitary organization created to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The US government was spending billions on its interventionist policies across Central America in the name of fighting so-called communism.</p> <p>But people pushed back across Central America. And they also responded in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of people marched in the streets against US intervention in the region. It was the Central American solidarity movement.</p> <p><strong>BIG NEWS! </strong>This podcast has won Gold in this year’s Signal Awards for best history podcast! It’s a huge honor. Thank you so much to everyone who voted and supported. </p> <p>And please consider signing up for the Stories of Resistance podcast feed on <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/1GtnrSF03VgQCzyRIRUIAE" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/stories-of-resistance/id1803542348" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/stories-of-resistance--6566893" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Spreaker</a>, or wherever you listen. And please take a moment to rate and review the podcast. A little help goes a long way.</p> <p>The Real News’s legendary host Marc Steiner has also been in the running for best episode host. And he also won a Gold Signal Award. We are so excited. You can listen and subscribe to the Marc Steiner Show here on <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/3rN9PFDr2mOZSI4cGuI2p9?si=2e2ad6febf2f455c" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Spotify</a> or <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-marc-steiner-show/id1539971852" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Apple Podcasts</a>.</p> <p>Please consider supporting this podcast and Michael Fox’s reporting on his <a href="http://patreon.com/mfox" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Patreon account</a>: <a href="http://patreon.com/mfox" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">patreon.com/mfox</a>. There you can also see exclusive pictures, video, and interviews. </p> <p>Written and produced by <a href="https://www.patreon.com/mfox" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Michael Fox</a>.</p> <p><strong>Resources:</strong></p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li><a href="https://therealnews.com/under-the-shadow" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Under the Shadow podcast</a> </li> <li><a href="https://therealnews.com/nicaragua-1980s-revolution-under-the-shadow-episode-10-part-1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Nicaragua, 1980s. Revolution | Under the Shadow, Episode 10, Part 1</a> </li> <li><em>Some clips of this episode of Stories of Resistance were taken from Episode 10, Part 2</em>: <a href="https://therealnews.com/nicaragua-reagan-iran-contra-sandinista-revolutio" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Nicaragua, 1980s. Contra War | Under the Shadow, Episode 10, Part 2</a></li> </ul> <details class="wp-block-details"> <summary>Transcript</summary> <p>It’s the 1980s.</p> <p>The United States is wreaking havoc in Central America. Backing authoritarian dictatorships. Fueling massacres and violence. And in the case of Nicaragua it’s funding, training, and organizing the Contras, a paramilitary organization created to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government.</p> <p>The Sandinistas were a revolutionary group that had overthrown the US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, ending the Somoza family’s grip on the country that had lasted for more than 40 years. They promised revolutionary change. Health and education. </p> <p>But the United States would not have it. The US government was spending billions in its interventionist policies across Central America, in the name of fighting so-called communism. $9.5 billion, just in 1985 alone, according to one estimate at the time.</p> <p>US military support and money spent on bloody authoritarian dictatorships and groups like the Contras. Support and funds to fuel terror raids, civilian deaths, disappearances, massacres, and human rights abuses. </p> <p>Historian Alex Aviña:</p> <p>“This is one of the darkest, if not the darkest, period of Latin American history when it comes to genocide, political violence and just mass death. And Ronald Reagan was behind a lot of it.”</p> <p>But people pushed back across Central America. And they also responded in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of people marched on the streets against US intervention in the region. It would become the Central American solidarity movement.</p> <p>As many as 80,000 people in the United States signed a Pledge of Resistance, promising to commit civil disobedience if the US invaded Nicaragua. And people were already putting their bodies on the line against the US support for the Contras. There were hunger strikes. Others blocked weapons shipments. Many went to jail. Vietnam veteran Brian Wilson lost both legs while participating in a non-violent protest on the railroad tracks outside of a US weapons depot in California. The train ran him over.</p> <p>“We found out later that the train crew that day had been ordered not to stop the train, which was an unprecedented… basically an illegal order.”</p> <p>That's him, speaking to Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! in 2011 after the release of his memoir, “Blood on the Tracks.”</p> <p>“This is what happens to people all over the world, who obstruct the Yankee mad train that's trying to repress people who wanna have self-determination. It was just another part of US policy coming home to me viscerally. </p> <p>“The day I woke up, 9,000 people showed up at the tracks and ripped up 300 feet of the tracks and stacked up the railroad ties in a very interesting sculpture. And from that day on, for 28 consecutive months, there was a permanent occupation on the tracks of sometimes 200 people with tents, blocking every train and every truck. 2,100 people were arrested. Three people had their arms broken by the police.” </p> <p>The solidarity movement grew to be huge in the United States.</p> <p>“It's easy to forget because you haven't lived it, but I think it was very, very present. And it was like something that, like in local council meetings there were debates about the Sandinista Revolution and United States foreign policy.”</p> <p>Historian Eline van Ommen:</p> <p>“This was something that student unions talked about. There were posters everywhere… more left-leaning city councils, established relationships with Nicaraguan towns. It was kind of an alternative foreign policy route.”</p> <p>Some people even traveled to Nicaragua to put their lives on the line.</p> <p>Historian Alex Aviña:</p> <p>“Often, other Americans would go down there and serve as human shields to protect. They thought that if you have foreigners on the border areas that the Contras wouldn't attack the population, the Nicaraguense population there, because foreigners were around.”</p> <p>The Contras still wreaked havoc. Killed and shot Americans acting in solidarity on the ground. But people continued to fight. Including lawmakers, who pushed back, passing amendments limiting US assistance to the Contras. Reagan turned to the covert and illegal Iran-Contra deal to fund the Contras. That scandal would break in 1986, tanking Reagan’s approval. </p> <p>Still, people marched. Voices in the United States standing up to US intervention. Standing in solidarity with Central America. Standing and demanding that people and countries abroad be allowed to decide their own destiny without the intervening hand of the United States… fueling violence abroad, carrying out attacks and threatening invasion in foreign countries just across the Caribbean. </p> <p>###</p> <p>Hi, folks. Thanks for listening. I’m your host, Michael Fox. </p> <p>I really wanted to share this story today, as the Trump administration carries out ongoing deadly strikes on boats across the Caribbean and Pacific. And increasingly threatens military action in Venezuela.</p> <p>These are dark times. We can not forget the long history of people standing up across the United States in solidarity with countries abroad. When they are under attack by US foreign policy and intervention.</p> <p>Marches are planned for this Saturday across the United States against Washington’s military threats against Venezuela.</p> <p>This resistance and solidarity is more important than ever today. </p> <p>My podcast Under the Shadow takes a deep look at the role of the United States in Central America, and in particular, in the 1980s. Episode 10 of that series looks at the US in Nicaragua and also the resistance and solidarity that I talked about today in this episode.</p> <p>I’ll add links in the show notes. </p> <p>Folks, if you have not heard, I have more incredible news. You might remember that Stories of Resistance recently won a Gold Signal award for best history podcast. Well it has also won a Gold Anthem Award in the category of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. We are honored.</p> <p>This is episode 79 of Stories of Resistance. If you don’t already subscribe to the show you can follow the links in the show notes. Stories of Resistance is produced by The Real News. Each week, I bring you stories of resistance and hope like this. Inspiration for dark times. And please, if you like what we do, rate us, leave a comment or a review, and help us spread the word.</p> <p>As always, thanks for listening. See you next time.</p> </details></p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/remembering-the-resistance-to-us-intervention-in-latin-america">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com">The Real News Network</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"><img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://therealnews.com/?republication-pixel=true&post=339009&ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/remembering-the-resistance-to-us-intervention-in-latin-america", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script></p> Copy to Clipboard
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Remembering the resistance to US intervention in Latin America
Marches, hunger strikes, blocked weapons shipments, solidarity actions, pledges of resistance. The 1980s solidarity movement stood up against US intervention in Central America. This is episode 79 of ...
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Investigative reporters Taya Graham and Stephen Janis go to Capitol Hill to speak with Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, who co-sponsored the Epstein Transparency Act. Many of the women who survived Epstein’s abuse and human trafficking ring share their experiences and their determination to receive justice. Now that the bill has passed both Houses, the Department of Justice is obligated to share with the public thousands of previously secret documents, emails, and photos. Although many critics are concerned that redactions will make these documents ineffectual in exposing the predators and predator protectors, there is still hope that these women will finally be able to reveal the corruption that has survived multiple presidential administrations. We discuss four reasons why the Epstein files may be the beginning of the end for the unchecked power of these elites, or “Epstein class.” With Congress compelling the DOJ to reveal Epstein’s secret files, the protective wall around America’s most powerful men is finally beginning to crumble. This moment could be the first genuine challenge to the impunity enjoyed by the country’s wealthiest predators.
> Produced by Stephen Janis and Taya Graham
> Written by Stephen Janis
> Post-Production by Stephen Janis
Transcript
_The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible._
Taya Graham:
Have the wealthy elites who have turned this country into an inequality playground finally met their match with the Epstein scandal. Well, we’re going to break down why the fallout from Epstein is turning the tables on the oligarchy and how the stain of being a predator or a predator protector might not be easy to get rid of just because you’re rich. It’s a show we’re calling the Epstein Reckoning, and we’re going to give you four reasons why President Trump and the wealthy elite or the Epstein class are finally playing defense and finally might not be able to evade accountability. Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and welcome to the Inequality Watch the show that examines the destructive impact of this country’s historic wealth inequality while holding the billionaires who created it accountable. And I’m joined by my reporting partner, Stephen Janis. Say, hi, Stephen.
Stephen Janis:
Hi, Taya. How are you doing?
Taya Graham:
I’m doing great, thank you. Good,
Stephen Janis:
Good, good.
Taya Graham:
Now, today’s topic is ostensibly about the latest developments in the case of a serial predator, Jeffrey Epstein. This week on Capitol Hill, the House and the Senate voted overwhelmingly to compel the release of all the investigative records from the FBI pertaining to Epstein’s crimes. And his cronies victims showed up just before the votes and pleaded with Congress to act.
Speaker 3:
This is a human issue. This is about children. There is no place in society for exploitation, sexual crimes, or exploitation of women in society. There’s no room for it, guys.
Taya Graham:
And indeed, they did approving the bill unanimously in the Senate. Only one Republican in the house voted against it. I’m keeping an eye on you. Rep Higgins. All of these dominoes fell when President Donald Trump caved, finally throwing his support behind the measure. Just two days before the vote, Trump has signed it, and now the Department of Justice has 30 days to release the files. I mean, Stephen, this was just pure whiplash.
Stephen Janis:
That’s an understatement. We thought we were going to have a big, big battle over this bill on the house and in the Senate, and then in 24 hours it’s all done and Trump has signed it. It was total whiplash.
Taya Graham:
I know we are standing out there in 32 degree weather. It’s eight o’clock in the morning. We’re trying to get position with our cameras and then to find out, oh, it’s just going to go right through. It was kind of a shock.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, Trump basically capitulated before the fight even started.
Taya Graham:
But that’s really just the surface of the story. There’s more to it, much more because what we witnessed was in some sense historic. For the first time in recent history, a scandal had President Donald Trump and his billionaire allies back on their heels. And that’s what we’re going to unpack today. Because despite President Trump’s best efforts to stop, distract or otherwise strong arm this crisis out of existence, it has persisted to say the least. And that’s because there’s something else driving the scandal than just Epstein’s heinous crimes, which are of course bad enough. I mean, put simply, Epstein is a symbol of the unequal and unfair economy that surrounds us. Historic wealth concentration. Now, all but granted, Epstein and others unqualified immunity from punishment. Now remember, economic inequality in the US is at historic levels. Wealth is so concentrated that the rich in this country have gobbled up as much extra cash and assets as the elites did during the last gilded age. Nearly a hundred years ago. Money and power has never been in fewer hands. I mean, what other era could our president unironically throw a Great Gatsby party that was a novel that recounted the rapaciousness of the rich during the first gilded age, while people are literally getting kicked off food assistance. I mean, on the one hand, we had a woman on display in massive martini glasses at Mar-a-Lago while there were families lined up outside food banks so their children wouldn’t starve. But I mean, it goes deeper than that, right, Stephen?
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. I think it goes to the core of the, let’s say, the culture of unfairness that emerges from a political economy of concentrated wealth. In other words, the entire economy is extractive and it’s become extractive to serve the wealthiest among us. And so that has also birthed the culture where people are resentful, but they don’t know where to put their resentment
Taya Graham:
To show how the Epstein scandal is bigger than just one man’s crimes. We’re going to break down how it is defined by our country’s vast and widening wealth imbalance. We will show how that fact has made it nearly impossible for the elites to shake it. And to make this point, we’re going to explain how the scandal has put elites in the uncomfortable position of being subjected to the same scrutiny they’ve been subjecting us to for decades. So here are the four ways the Jeffrey Epstein scandal is turning the tables on the oligarchy and why they can’t along with President Trump, make it go away. Number one, the guilt by association playbook has been flipped, so to speak. Now for years, the American criminal Justice system has constrained the working class by using a very simple technique of making almost everyone a criminal. It’s a concept known as guilt by association, which technically is unconstitutional, but that hasn’t stopped law enforcement from using it as a tool of oppression.
For example, think about the war on drugs. Residents of working class neighborhoods were subject to illegal searches, stops, arrests, you name it. Police often justified it by saying the neighborhood was high crime or drug infested, and they did not care about the individual’s guilt or innocence. I mean, I couldn’t leave my house without ID because in my hometown, Baltimore, I could be arrested for being in a neighborhood where I didn’t live. I could not leave my house without my ID to prove that I lived in the neighborhood where I lived or I risked being arrested. But Stephen, how is the Epstein scandal turning the tables on this kind of immunity?
Stephen Janis:
Well, it’s really interesting because as you point out, working class people have been subjected to this kind of technique by police, we call it in the police accountability court blanket criminality. Yes. So the idea is like you are not guilty of anything, but you are guilty of being associated by people in a neighborhood or some other of nefarious depiction of a working class neighborhood. And now you see, when these emails came out, now, the big point where we saw this work when the emails came out, there were people in there like Lawrence Summers, who didn’t necessarily commit a crime but have been ostracized because of their connection to Epstein. Just the connection, just the fact that you email him, the fact that you sat at dinner with him, the fact that you have a picture with him is enough to turbo your career is enough to make you an outsider. And this never happened to the oligarchs. They’re not used to this. They’re not used to saying, like you were saying with your id, you’re walking down the street, do you live in this neighborhood? And you’re like, no, I don’t. And so you’re somehow guilty of a crime because you’re in a neighborhood where there are a lot of drugs. Didn’t matter what you were doing at that moment. Absolutely. Now the elites are feeling this, right? I sent an email to Epstein, oh my God, right?
Taya Graham:
Yes.
Stephen Janis:
You are literally associated with his crimes. Everything bad that he has done, you suddenly become tarnished by it. It is totally a new idea, and I think they’re really, really, really unhappy with it.
Taya Graham:
Absolutely. And now, the second reason Epstein scandal is turning the table on the oligarchy and why they can’t get rid of it, namely Epstein has revealed you can become filthy rich by apparently doing nothing. Now for the record, nothing is more ideological than wealth Americans who work their entire lives just to go bankrupt when they get sick. They’re often told it’s their fault. That’s because we celebrate wealth no matter how it’s obtained as a sign of both moral and intellectual superiority. And this is not new. Just read economist Thomas Piketty’s, groundbreaking work capital and ideology. In it, he counts how the wealthy have always made an ideological argument that their wealth, no matter how it was acquired, was deserved even if it wasn’t necessarily earned. But the Epstein scandal has revealed a twist in the narrative of the entitled wealthy, namely, Epstein got rich without having a job. He didn’t create anything, and yet his net worth when he died was nearly 560 million. I mean, Stephen, how does this turn the tables on the ideological idea of wealth being earned?
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, I mean, it’s one of the great mysteries is Epstein, how Epstein got wealthy, but he’s part of what I think we call the mediocre majority when it comes to the wealthy in this country. A lot of people get wealthy just by being around wealthy people
Taya Graham:
And
Stephen Janis:
Get wealthy by extension. Not because they created something. I mean, Epstein never created a company, a product. That’s right. Anything that we can tie to him. He never wrote a great book or produced an interesting movie or a documentary, even worked as a journalist. He never did any of that. And yet, he’s one of the wealthiest men in this country. And you have to ask yourself why. And what does it say about wealth in this country? Does it say it’s earned? No. In other words, it can accrue to you. And I think one of the things that the rich like to trot out is like, you’re lazy. You’re not working hard enough. You just worked harder.
Taya Graham:
You
Stephen Janis:
Would have more. You wouldn’t die because you can’t have healthcare if you just worked harder. And yet Epstein proved you don’t have to work at all.
Taya Graham:
Not
Stephen Janis:
At all.
Taya Graham:
Well, wait a second. Why did Epstein have a private jet? Why do he have access to some of the wealthiest, most important people in the world, whether they’re Harvard professors or celebrities? Why did he have
Stephen Janis:
Access to that? I’ll tell you exactly why. Because the greatest conspiracy in American politics is wealth concentration. They are all in on it. And if they think you’re part of it, they’ll just throw a little to you, what? $150 million from the guy that ran BlackRock? I don’t know the exact numbers, but it clearly shows that this is an extractive economy where there’s plenty of wealth to go around amongst small group of people. It’s just they don’t want to share it. And so Epstein is the proof that you don’t have to work hard to be rich, you just have to be around rich people.
Taya Graham:
Oh my gosh, that’s such a great point. It’s not what you do. It’s who you know. Yep. Oh my
Stephen Janis:
Gosh, absolutely.
Taya Graham:
And now the third reason the oligarchy can’t shake Epstein. It’s being decided in the people’s court rather than the justice system they own. Now, how Epstein’s Prosecution Unfolded taught us that the rich own the criminal justice system and can thus immunize himself from it. I mean, there are too many things to recount in how Epstein’s first prosecution let him off with little or no punishment, even though he had dozens of witnesses against him, he pleaded guilty to just two state counts of soliciting prostitution from a minor, which please, lemme just add. You cannot do because a minor 14-year-old girl in this case cannot consent to sex. So even the conviction is problematic. He then served time only at night for 18 months and was allowed to work from his private office during the day during which he more than likely committed more crimes. But Stephen, this scandal is actually not being vetted by our criminal justice system. What’s happening here?
Stephen Janis:
Well, what’s happened is that the demands of the people have actually overwhelmed the ability to manipulate this case through a corrupt criminal justice system. As we saw, as we watched this whole thing unfold, remember we were, when the victims first came out and testified, not testified, but talked to the public about their experience with Jeffrey Epstein, that was in September, there was going to be this big battle, right? They weren’t going to have enough signatures for the discharge petition. Speaker Mike Johnson was going to delay the swearing end of Ali to Alva because no way she could sign the discharge petition. She ended up being the 218th. But at that point, when we were covering the victims and covering their stories, it was going to be this massive big thing that
Taya Graham:
It was going to be a fight.
Stephen Janis:
It was going to be a fight through that process, that judicial process. And what happened? Well, all of a sudden it all melted away
Taya Graham:
Because
Stephen Janis:
The People’s Court said, no way you’re going to do this. I don’t know if you agree with me, but I think, oh, Stephen,
Taya Graham:
I completely agree.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, go ahead.
Taya Graham:
I completely agree. I mean, I think the public support, the outpouring of support for these victims,
Stephen Janis:
For the victims
Taya Graham:
Absolutely has made all the difference in the world.
Stephen Janis:
And because it’s sort of 48 hour meltdown, we’ll call it with Donald Trump, is set at such contrast to the 16, 17, 20 years that the victim testified, where nothing happened, where Epstein was never charged, where people where they
Taya Graham:
Were ignored, they were the fbi. I didn’t return people’s phone calls. It was just always put on the back burner. No justice was served for. So
Stephen Janis:
Clearly the justice system doesn’t work. And of course, I think we’ll see in 30 days whether or not the Justice Department follows the law at all. We know, we know the greatest privilege, as I just said before in this country is being able to evade the law, is being above the law. They always say, oh, no one’s above the law. That is not true because the Epstein victims prove that is provably false. But this time it doesn’t matter because the court of public opinion is louder and stronger than the justice system, as you said they own.
Taya Graham:
Now, I just want to note one sort of addendum to this discussion. Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for her, pardon, Epstein’s Crimes, has been transferred to a minimum security prison and received preferential treatment according to her fellow inmates. This includes meals served in her cell and the whole campus being put on lockdown so she could have a secret meeting for which the participants have still not been disclosed. I think it demonstrates that at this point, the criminal justice system has been so warped, it cannot be counted on to hold anyone involved in Epstein’s crimes accountable. And now, the fourth reason, the elites can’t shake the Epstein scandal, the power of the victims. Now, sometimes a massive crime needs a specific victim to resonate and to be fully understood. And as we’ve noted, America’s rampant wealth inequality along with Epstein on trial in the court of public opinion is only due, in my estimation, to the courage of the victims who spoke out and stood up for justice.
I mean, remember when President Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support? Well, these forceful, determined, courageous, and undaunted victims of Epstein’s crimes prove that thesis wrong because as Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene noted at the most recent Epstein Conference, this scandal is tearing MAGA apart, which is thanks to the victims who were brave enough to speak out, and they’re the first to take President Trump down a notch. Not prosecutors, not politicians, not pundits. They did it. And so put simply this incredible, brilliant and beautiful array of women that I personally witnessed testifying for the Epstein Transparency Act beat President Trump Fair and Square, and are determined that the rest of his cronies are next in line for accountability. I have personally stood outside the Capitol and witnessed the victim share some for the very first time, horrific abuse at the hand of Epstein and others. And let me be clear, the only reason we’re talking about this now is because of them. Trump finally met his match, and it was roughly a dozen women who have thus far refused to back down. Let’s just take a moment to listen to some of them.
Speaker 3:
This isn’t an incredible thing that I’m watching as a Republican, and this is nonpolitical. But for you to go against your own party and to be ostracized, there’s no place for political violence. There’s no place for intimidation. And I can say firsthand stepping out against Epstein and his crimes against children, we have all experienced that ourselves. So for you to knowingly put yourselves at risk and put your career at risk is unbelievable to watch. And we are so grateful. It’s an honor to stand
Speaker 4:
Here again for something. America’s finally united on the immediate release of the entire Epstein files in a divided nation. This is one demand we all share. And I realize that we are a representation of women across America. We come from different backgrounds. We have different religions. We are different races, different creeds, different ethnicities. We have different political affiliations. Some of us don’t want to be political at all. And yet we stand here together for this cause the world should see the
Speaker 3:
Files to know who Jeffrey Epstein was and how the system catered to him and failed us.
Taya Graham:
So Steven, their testimony is incredibly powerful. And I have to say, just on a personal note, being able to be in front of these women, talk to them
Speaker 3:
Directly,
Taya Graham:
Hear their voices, see their eyes fill up with tears, hear their throats close up, because they’re getting emotional, so they’re having trouble speaking. I mean, being just like two feet away from some of these women, it’s impossible not to believe them. It’s impossible not to see their trauma. And I’m just so glad that they’re now finally being heard. I mean something. One of the Epstein survivors, Annie Farmer, said she was 16 when she was first approached by Epstein, and her sister Maria Farmer, her older sister, was also sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein. And she said in 1996, her sister called, when Bill Clinton was president, she went to the FBI. When George W. Bush was president, no one got back to her in 2009, just again and again, presidential administration after presidential administration ignored them. And now for them to finally be close to justice. I mean, Stephen, how do you react when you see
Stephen Janis:
This? Well, I think after the first set of press conferences in September, I think we wrote quite specifically that the women were going to be the ones to take down Trump. It was not going to be any other politician or political party or prosecutor or even some sort of political idea. It was going to be very, the victims who I think anyone who sat and watched them, I’m so glad I was there as a reporter to actually witness this. But yeah, their power of their stories and the courage that it took to speak out,
Taya Graham:
Absolutely.
Stephen Janis:
Which I think people can’t underestimate that. I can only imagine the online pushback they have to deal with.
Taya Graham:
Oh my gosh. And
Stephen Janis:
We know as reporters, we,
Taya Graham:
Oh, we’ve seen it.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, we’ve seen
Taya Graham:
It. We’ve seen it. We’ve actually seen it with other reporters as well.
Stephen Janis:
They are victims put simply of inequality, not just of sexual predators. And I think the anger and the anxiety and people understanding the system is rigged, but they don’t know how to really express it or what to focus on. These victims gave people something to focus on, which was their horrible stories of being abused by an unequal justice.
Taya Graham:
And I think this was the most important test that our democracy has seen publicly for a while, which is that essentially the public is saying, Republican, democrat, independent, green, whatever the public is saying, if our democracy can’t keep children safe from sexual predators, then what do we even have? And what is it even worth?
Stephen Janis:
And
Taya Graham:
That’s the big test that’s going on here. It’s a test of our democracy, not just transparency, not just justice, not just wealth inequality, but does a democracy protect people?
Taya Graham:
We’re finally getting to see that yes, the people are being heard. Because if we can’t agree that children shouldn’t be predated on by sexual predators, what can we possibly agree on in this country?
Stephen Janis:
Which is why 30 days from now, we will be there watching
Taya Graham:
Absolutely.
Stephen Janis:
When they supposedly deliver these files, because that is going to be critical. To your point, will democracy prevail? Will these files actually be released or will they find some substitute to deny us or deny the victims? Excuse me. So we will be watching for that very reason. Absolutely. Because you’re right, 30 days is like a deadline on democracy.
Taya Graham:
Absolutely. And we will be back on Capitol Hill covering this every step of the way, because as Rep Massie, Rep Khanna noted, this bill actually has legal consequences built in. If the Department of Justice, if there’s anyone in there that’s actually blocking transparency, that’s working against how this bill is outlined, there are trouble and there are criminal liabilities for blocking this transparency. So there you have it. The four reasons why President Donald Trump can’t shake the Epstein scandal and why the oligarchs are shaking in their boots. My name is Taya Graham. This is my reporting partner, Stephen Janis, we are your Inequality Watchdogs. Thanks for joining us. As always, we’re reporting for you.
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# Thanks to Epstein, America’s elite are losing control of the narrative
by Taya Graham and Stephen Janis, The Real News Network
November 26, 2025
<h1>Thanks to Epstein, America’s elite are losing control of the narrative</h1> <p class="byline">by Taya Graham and Stephen Janis, The Real News Network <br />November 26, 2025</p> <br /> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH2jr25K4lA </div> </figure> <p class="has-drop-cap">Investigative reporters Taya Graham and Stephen Janis go to Capitol Hill to speak with Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, who co-sponsored the Epstein Transparency Act. Many of the women who survived Epstein's abuse and human trafficking ring share their experiences and their determination to receive justice. Now that the bill has passed both Houses, the Department of Justice is obligated to share with the public thousands of previously secret documents, emails, and photos. Although many critics are concerned that redactions will make these documents ineffectual in exposing the predators and predator protectors, there is still hope that these women will finally be able to reveal the corruption that has survived multiple presidential administrations. We discuss four reasons why the Epstein files may be the beginning of the end for the unchecked power of these elites, or "Epstein class." With Congress compelling the DOJ to reveal Epstein’s secret files, the protective wall around America’s most powerful men is finally beginning to crumble. This moment could be the first genuine challenge to the impunity enjoyed by the country’s wealthiest predators.</p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> <p>Produced by Stephen Janis and Taya Graham<br />Written by Stephen Janis<br />Post-Production by Stephen Janis </p> </blockquote> <details class="wp-block-details"> <summary>Transcript</summary> <p><em>The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.</em></p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>Have the wealthy elites who have turned this country into an inequality playground finally met their match with the Epstein scandal. Well, we're going to break down why the fallout from Epstein is turning the tables on the oligarchy and how the stain of being a predator or a predator protector might not be easy to get rid of just because you're rich. It's a show we're calling the Epstein Reckoning, and we're going to give you four reasons why President Trump and the wealthy elite or the Epstein class are finally playing defense and finally might not be able to evade accountability. Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and welcome to the Inequality Watch the show that examines the destructive impact of this country's historic wealth inequality while holding the billionaires who created it accountable. And I'm joined by my reporting partner, Stephen Janis. Say, hi, Stephen.</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>Hi, Taya. How are you doing?</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>I'm doing great, thank you. Good,</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>Good, good.</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>Now, today's topic is ostensibly about the latest developments in the case of a serial predator, Jeffrey Epstein. This week on Capitol Hill, the House and the Senate voted overwhelmingly to compel the release of all the investigative records from the FBI pertaining to Epstein's crimes. And his cronies victims showed up just before the votes and pleaded with Congress to act.</p> <p>Speaker 3:</p> <p>This is a human issue. This is about children. There is no place in society for exploitation, sexual crimes, or exploitation of women in society. There's no room for it, guys.</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>And indeed, they did approving the bill unanimously in the Senate. Only one Republican in the house voted against it. I'm keeping an eye on you. Rep Higgins. All of these dominoes fell when President Donald Trump caved, finally throwing his support behind the measure. Just two days before the vote, Trump has signed it, and now the Department of Justice has 30 days to release the files. I mean, Stephen, this was just pure whiplash.</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>That's an understatement. We thought we were going to have a big, big battle over this bill on the house and in the Senate, and then in 24 hours it's all done and Trump has signed it. It was total whiplash.</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>I know we are standing out there in 32 degree weather. It's eight o'clock in the morning. We're trying to get position with our cameras and then to find out, oh, it's just going to go right through. It was kind of a shock.</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>Yeah, Trump basically capitulated before the fight even started.</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>But that's really just the surface of the story. There's more to it, much more because what we witnessed was in some sense historic. For the first time in recent history, a scandal had President Donald Trump and his billionaire allies back on their heels. And that's what we're going to unpack today. Because despite President Trump's best efforts to stop, distract or otherwise strong arm this crisis out of existence, it has persisted to say the least. And that's because there's something else driving the scandal than just Epstein's heinous crimes, which are of course bad enough. I mean, put simply, Epstein is a symbol of the unequal and unfair economy that surrounds us. Historic wealth concentration. Now, all but granted, Epstein and others unqualified immunity from punishment. Now remember, economic inequality in the US is at historic levels. Wealth is so concentrated that the rich in this country have gobbled up as much extra cash and assets as the elites did during the last gilded age. Nearly a hundred years ago. Money and power has never been in fewer hands. I mean, what other era could our president unironically throw a Great Gatsby party that was a novel that recounted the rapaciousness of the rich during the first gilded age, while people are literally getting kicked off food assistance. I mean, on the one hand, we had a woman on display in massive martini glasses at Mar-a-Lago while there were families lined up outside food banks so their children wouldn't starve. But I mean, it goes deeper than that, right, Stephen?</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>Yeah. I think it goes to the core of the, let's say, the culture of unfairness that emerges from a political economy of concentrated wealth. In other words, the entire economy is extractive and it's become extractive to serve the wealthiest among us. And so that has also birthed the culture where people are resentful, but they don't know where to put their resentment</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>To show how the Epstein scandal is bigger than just one man's crimes. We're going to break down how it is defined by our country's vast and widening wealth imbalance. We will show how that fact has made it nearly impossible for the elites to shake it. And to make this point, we're going to explain how the scandal has put elites in the uncomfortable position of being subjected to the same scrutiny they've been subjecting us to for decades. So here are the four ways the Jeffrey Epstein scandal is turning the tables on the oligarchy and why they can't along with President Trump, make it go away. Number one, the guilt by association playbook has been flipped, so to speak. Now for years, the American criminal Justice system has constrained the working class by using a very simple technique of making almost everyone a criminal. It's a concept known as guilt by association, which technically is unconstitutional, but that hasn't stopped law enforcement from using it as a tool of oppression.</p> <p>For example, think about the war on drugs. Residents of working class neighborhoods were subject to illegal searches, stops, arrests, you name it. Police often justified it by saying the neighborhood was high crime or drug infested, and they did not care about the individual's guilt or innocence. I mean, I couldn't leave my house without ID because in my hometown, Baltimore, I could be arrested for being in a neighborhood where I didn't live. I could not leave my house without my ID to prove that I lived in the neighborhood where I lived or I risked being arrested. But Stephen, how is the Epstein scandal turning the tables on this kind of immunity?</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>Well, it's really interesting because as you point out, working class people have been subjected to this kind of technique by police, we call it in the police accountability court blanket criminality. Yes. So the idea is like you are not guilty of anything, but you are guilty of being associated by people in a neighborhood or some other of nefarious depiction of a working class neighborhood. And now you see, when these emails came out, now, the big point where we saw this work when the emails came out, there were people in there like Lawrence Summers, who didn't necessarily commit a crime but have been ostracized because of their connection to Epstein. Just the connection, just the fact that you email him, the fact that you sat at dinner with him, the fact that you have a picture with him is enough to turbo your career is enough to make you an outsider. And this never happened to the oligarchs. They're not used to this. They're not used to saying, like you were saying with your id, you're walking down the street, do you live in this neighborhood? And you're like, no, I don't. And so you're somehow guilty of a crime because you're in a neighborhood where there are a lot of drugs. Didn't matter what you were doing at that moment. Absolutely. Now the elites are feeling this, right? I sent an email to Epstein, oh my God, right?</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>Yes.</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>You are literally associated with his crimes. Everything bad that he has done, you suddenly become tarnished by it. It is totally a new idea, and I think they're really, really, really unhappy with it.</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>Absolutely. And now, the second reason Epstein scandal is turning the table on the oligarchy and why they can't get rid of it, namely Epstein has revealed you can become filthy rich by apparently doing nothing. Now for the record, nothing is more ideological than wealth Americans who work their entire lives just to go bankrupt when they get sick. They're often told it's their fault. That's because we celebrate wealth no matter how it's obtained as a sign of both moral and intellectual superiority. And this is not new. Just read economist Thomas Piketty's, groundbreaking work capital and ideology. In it, he counts how the wealthy have always made an ideological argument that their wealth, no matter how it was acquired, was deserved even if it wasn't necessarily earned. But the Epstein scandal has revealed a twist in the narrative of the entitled wealthy, namely, Epstein got rich without having a job. He didn't create anything, and yet his net worth when he died was nearly 560 million. I mean, Stephen, how does this turn the tables on the ideological idea of wealth being earned?</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>Yeah, I mean, it's one of the great mysteries is Epstein, how Epstein got wealthy, but he's part of what I think we call the mediocre majority when it comes to the wealthy in this country. A lot of people get wealthy just by being around wealthy people</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>And</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>Get wealthy by extension. Not because they created something. I mean, Epstein never created a company, a product. That's right. Anything that we can tie to him. He never wrote a great book or produced an interesting movie or a documentary, even worked as a journalist. He never did any of that. And yet, he's one of the wealthiest men in this country. And you have to ask yourself why. And what does it say about wealth in this country? Does it say it's earned? No. In other words, it can accrue to you. And I think one of the things that the rich like to trot out is like, you're lazy. You're not working hard enough. You just worked harder.</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>You</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>Would have more. You wouldn't die because you can't have healthcare if you just worked harder. And yet Epstein proved you don't have to work at all.</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>Not</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>At all.</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>Well, wait a second. Why did Epstein have a private jet? Why do he have access to some of the wealthiest, most important people in the world, whether they're Harvard professors or celebrities? Why did he have</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>Access to that? I'll tell you exactly why. Because the greatest conspiracy in American politics is wealth concentration. They are all in on it. And if they think you're part of it, they'll just throw a little to you, what? $150 million from the guy that ran BlackRock? I don't know the exact numbers, but it clearly shows that this is an extractive economy where there's plenty of wealth to go around amongst small group of people. It's just they don't want to share it. And so Epstein is the proof that you don't have to work hard to be rich, you just have to be around rich people.</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>Oh my gosh, that's such a great point. It's not what you do. It's who you know. Yep. Oh my</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>Gosh, absolutely.</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>And now the third reason the oligarchy can't shake Epstein. It's being decided in the people's court rather than the justice system they own. Now, how Epstein's Prosecution Unfolded taught us that the rich own the criminal justice system and can thus immunize himself from it. I mean, there are too many things to recount in how Epstein's first prosecution let him off with little or no punishment, even though he had dozens of witnesses against him, he pleaded guilty to just two state counts of soliciting prostitution from a minor, which please, lemme just add. You cannot do because a minor 14-year-old girl in this case cannot consent to sex. So even the conviction is problematic. He then served time only at night for 18 months and was allowed to work from his private office during the day during which he more than likely committed more crimes. But Stephen, this scandal is actually not being vetted by our criminal justice system. What's happening here?</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>Well, what's happened is that the demands of the people have actually overwhelmed the ability to manipulate this case through a corrupt criminal justice system. As we saw, as we watched this whole thing unfold, remember we were, when the victims first came out and testified, not testified, but talked to the public about their experience with Jeffrey Epstein, that was in September, there was going to be this big battle, right? They weren't going to have enough signatures for the discharge petition. Speaker Mike Johnson was going to delay the swearing end of Ali to Alva because no way she could sign the discharge petition. She ended up being the 218th. But at that point, when we were covering the victims and covering their stories, it was going to be this massive big thing that</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>It was going to be a fight.</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>It was going to be a fight through that process, that judicial process. And what happened? Well, all of a sudden it all melted away</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>Because</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>The People's Court said, no way you're going to do this. I don't know if you agree with me, but I think, oh, Stephen,</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>I completely agree.</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>Yeah, go ahead.</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>I completely agree. I mean, I think the public support, the outpouring of support for these victims,</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>For the victims</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>Absolutely has made all the difference in the world.</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>And because it's sort of 48 hour meltdown, we'll call it with Donald Trump, is set at such contrast to the 16, 17, 20 years that the victim testified, where nothing happened, where Epstein was never charged, where people where they</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>Were ignored, they were the fbi. I didn't return people's phone calls. It was just always put on the back burner. No justice was served for. So</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>Clearly the justice system doesn't work. And of course, I think we'll see in 30 days whether or not the Justice Department follows the law at all. We know, we know the greatest privilege, as I just said before in this country is being able to evade the law, is being above the law. They always say, oh, no one's above the law. That is not true because the Epstein victims prove that is provably false. But this time it doesn't matter because the court of public opinion is louder and stronger than the justice system, as you said they own.</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>Now, I just want to note one sort of addendum to this discussion. Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for her, pardon, Epstein's Crimes, has been transferred to a minimum security prison and received preferential treatment according to her fellow inmates. This includes meals served in her cell and the whole campus being put on lockdown so she could have a secret meeting for which the participants have still not been disclosed. I think it demonstrates that at this point, the criminal justice system has been so warped, it cannot be counted on to hold anyone involved in Epstein's crimes accountable. And now, the fourth reason, the elites can't shake the Epstein scandal, the power of the victims. Now, sometimes a massive crime needs a specific victim to resonate and to be fully understood. And as we've noted, America's rampant wealth inequality along with Epstein on trial in the court of public opinion is only due, in my estimation, to the courage of the victims who spoke out and stood up for justice.</p> <p>I mean, remember when President Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support? Well, these forceful, determined, courageous, and undaunted victims of Epstein's crimes prove that thesis wrong because as Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene noted at the most recent Epstein Conference, this scandal is tearing MAGA apart, which is thanks to the victims who were brave enough to speak out, and they're the first to take President Trump down a notch. Not prosecutors, not politicians, not pundits. They did it. And so put simply this incredible, brilliant and beautiful array of women that I personally witnessed testifying for the Epstein Transparency Act beat President Trump Fair and Square, and are determined that the rest of his cronies are next in line for accountability. I have personally stood outside the Capitol and witnessed the victim share some for the very first time, horrific abuse at the hand of Epstein and others. And let me be clear, the only reason we're talking about this now is because of them. Trump finally met his match, and it was roughly a dozen women who have thus far refused to back down. Let's just take a moment to listen to some of them.</p> <p>Speaker 3:</p> <p>This isn't an incredible thing that I'm watching as a Republican, and this is nonpolitical. But for you to go against your own party and to be ostracized, there's no place for political violence. There's no place for intimidation. And I can say firsthand stepping out against Epstein and his crimes against children, we have all experienced that ourselves. So for you to knowingly put yourselves at risk and put your career at risk is unbelievable to watch. And we are so grateful. It's an honor to stand</p> <p>Speaker 4:</p> <p>Here again for something. America's finally united on the immediate release of the entire Epstein files in a divided nation. This is one demand we all share. And I realize that we are a representation of women across America. We come from different backgrounds. We have different religions. We are different races, different creeds, different ethnicities. We have different political affiliations. Some of us don't want to be political at all. And yet we stand here together for this cause the world should see the</p> <p>Speaker 3:</p> <p>Files to know who Jeffrey Epstein was and how the system catered to him and failed us.</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>So Steven, their testimony is incredibly powerful. And I have to say, just on a personal note, being able to be in front of these women, talk to them</p> <p>Speaker 3:</p> <p>Directly,</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>Hear their voices, see their eyes fill up with tears, hear their throats close up, because they're getting emotional, so they're having trouble speaking. I mean, being just like two feet away from some of these women, it's impossible not to believe them. It's impossible not to see their trauma. And I'm just so glad that they're now finally being heard. I mean something. One of the Epstein survivors, Annie Farmer, said she was 16 when she was first approached by Epstein, and her sister Maria Farmer, her older sister, was also sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein. And she said in 1996, her sister called, when Bill Clinton was president, she went to the FBI. When George W. Bush was president, no one got back to her in 2009, just again and again, presidential administration after presidential administration ignored them. And now for them to finally be close to justice. I mean, Stephen, how do you react when you see</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>This? Well, I think after the first set of press conferences in September, I think we wrote quite specifically that the women were going to be the ones to take down Trump. It was not going to be any other politician or political party or prosecutor or even some sort of political idea. It was going to be very, the victims who I think anyone who sat and watched them, I'm so glad I was there as a reporter to actually witness this. But yeah, their power of their stories and the courage that it took to speak out,</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>Absolutely.</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>Which I think people can't underestimate that. I can only imagine the online pushback they have to deal with.</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>Oh my gosh. And</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>We know as reporters, we,</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>Oh, we've seen it.</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>Yeah, we've seen</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>It. We've seen it. We've actually seen it with other reporters as well.</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>They are victims put simply of inequality, not just of sexual predators. And I think the anger and the anxiety and people understanding the system is rigged, but they don't know how to really express it or what to focus on. These victims gave people something to focus on, which was their horrible stories of being abused by an unequal justice.</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>And I think this was the most important test that our democracy has seen publicly for a while, which is that essentially the public is saying, Republican, democrat, independent, green, whatever the public is saying, if our democracy can't keep children safe from sexual predators, then what do we even have? And what is it even worth?</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>And</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>That's the big test that's going on here. It's a test of our democracy, not just transparency, not just justice, not just wealth inequality, but does a democracy protect people?</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>We're finally getting to see that yes, the people are being heard. Because if we can't agree that children shouldn't be predated on by sexual predators, what can we possibly agree on in this country?</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>Which is why 30 days from now, we will be there watching</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>Absolutely.</p> <p>Stephen Janis:</p> <p>When they supposedly deliver these files, because that is going to be critical. To your point, will democracy prevail? Will these files actually be released or will they find some substitute to deny us or deny the victims? Excuse me. So we will be watching for that very reason. Absolutely. Because you're right, 30 days is like a deadline on democracy.</p> <p>Taya Graham:</p> <p>Absolutely. And we will be back on Capitol Hill covering this every step of the way, because as Rep Massie, Rep Khanna noted, this bill actually has legal consequences built in. If the Department of Justice, if there's anyone in there that's actually blocking transparency, that's working against how this bill is outlined, there are trouble and there are criminal liabilities for blocking this transparency. So there you have it. The four reasons why President Donald Trump can't shake the Epstein scandal and why the oligarchs are shaking in their boots. My name is Taya Graham. This is my reporting partner, Stephen Janis, we are your Inequality Watchdogs. Thanks for joining us. As always, we're reporting for you.</p> </details> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/epstein-files-americas-elite-losing-control-of-narrative">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com">The Real News Network</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"><img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://therealnews.com/?republication-pixel=true&post=338796&ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/epstein-files-americas-elite-losing-control-of-narrative", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script></p> Copy to Clipboard
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_This story originally appeared in Common Dreams onOct. 19, 2025._ _It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license._
The United States carried out another deadly attack on a boat it claimed was being used by a left-wing Colombian revolutionary group to transport drugs in the Caribbean Sea, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Sunday, hours after President Donald Trump alleged without evidence that Columbia’s president “is an illegal drug dealer.”
Hegseth said the strike, which took place on Friday, targeted “a vessel affiliated with Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), a designated terrorist organization.”
The ELN is Colombia’s last-standing far-left guerrilla group. Founded in 1964, the group fought to liberate Colombia from longtime right-wing rule, end foreign influence—especially from the United States—and achieve social justice and equality for the poor. ELN has been accused of using proceeds from drug trafficking to fund its insurgency.
“The vessel was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, was traveling along a known narco-trafficking route, and was transporting substantial amounts of narcotics,” Hegseth said without offering evidence. “There were three male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel during the strike—which was conducted in international waters. All three terrorists were killed and no US forces were harmed in this strike.”
“These cartels are the al-Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere, using violence, murder and terrorism to impose their will, threaten our national security, and poison our people,” the defense secretary added. “The United States military will treat these organizations like the terrorists they are—they will be hunted, and killed, just like al-Qaeda.”
> On October 17th, at the direction of President Trump, the Department of War conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), a Designated Terrorist Organization, that was operating in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility.
>
> The… pic.twitter.com/1v7oR879LC
>
> — Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) October 19, 2025
Hegseth’s announcement followed a post by Trump on his Truth Social network calling leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro “an illegal drug leader strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs.”
Trump offered no evidence to back his baseless claim. The US itself has a long history of involvement in the international drug trade, from American capitalists profiting immensely from opium trafficking in the 19th century to the Central Intelligence Agency working with narcotrafficking anti-communist groups in Southeast Asia and Central America during the Cold War, helping to fuel first the heroin and later crack cocaine epidemics in the United States.
The US president further alleged that drugs have “become the biggest business in Colombia, by far, and Petro does nothing to stop it, despite large scale payments and subsidies from the USA that are nothing more than a long-term rip off of America.”
Trump added:
> AS OF TODAY, THESE PAYMENTS, OR ANY OTHER FORM OF PAYMENT, OR SUBSIDIES, WILL NO LONGER BE MADE TO COLOMBIA. The purpose of this drug production is the sale of massive amounts of product into the United States, causing death, destruction, and havoc. Petro, a low-rated and very unpopular leader, with a fresh mouth toward America, better close up these killing fields immediately, or the United States will close them up for him, and it won’t be done nicely.
According to _The Associated Press_ , Colombia received an estimated $230 million in US aid for the budget year that ended on September 30.
Trump has ordered attacks on at least seven alleged drug-running boats without providing concrete evidence to support his claims. At least 29 people have been killed in the attacks.
In a series of posts on the social media site X, Petro said that “US government officials have committed a murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters,” repeating claims that some victims of the US strikes, including Thursday’s, were fishermen.
> La lancha del pescador de Santa Marta no era del ELN, era de una familia humilde, amante del mar y de ahí extraía sus alimentos.
>
> Qué le dice usted a esa familia, explíqueme porque usted ayudó a asesinar un humilde pescador de Santa Marta, la tierra donde murió Bolívar, y de la… https://t.co/Dd9D1aEqGK
>
> — Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) October 19, 2025
“I respect the history, culture, and people of the USA,” Petro wrote in a subsequent post. “They are not my enemies, nor do I feel them as such. The problem is with Trump, not with the USA.”
Refuting Trump’s accusation that he has “done nothing to stop” drug trafficking, Petro noted that “we have reduced the coca leaf crop growth rate to almost 0%. In past governments, there were years with nearly 100% annual growth. Today, half of the total coca leaf crop area has crops that have been abandoned for three years.”
The Trump administration said Thursday that survivors of one recent strike, a Colombian and an Ecuadorean, would be repatriated to their respective countries, possibly as a way to skirt concerns over the legality of the attacks.
On Thursday, Hegseth said that US Southern Command chief Adm. Alvin Holsey—who is overseeing the boat attacks—will step down at the end of the year. Holsey’s resignation reportedly stems from concerns over the strikes.
“If Commander Alvin has resigned for refusing to be complicit in the murder of Caribbean civilians by US missiles deliberately launched against them from comfortable offices, I consider him a hero and a true officer of the armies of the Americas,” Petro said in response to the news. “I said in New York, on one of its streets, that I asked the officers of the US military forces not to aim their weapons at humanity.”
The Trump administration revoked Petro’s US visa following his speech.
“I believe that Commander Alvin has proven himself to be a man of worth by refusing to aim his weapons at humanity. Perhaps Commander Alvin does not know it, but he is a true officer of the armies of Washington and Bolívar,” Petro added, referring to George Washington and the great South American liberator Simón Bolívar.
On his first day back in the White House in January, Trump signed an executive order designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Last month, the president reportedly signed a secret order directing the Pentagon to use military force to combat drug cartels abroad, sparking fears of renewed US aggression in a region that has endured well over 100 US attacks, invasions, occupations, and other interventions since the issuance of the dubious Monroe Doctrine in 1823.
Trump has also deployed a small armada of naval warships off the coast of Venezuela, which has endured more than a century of Washington’s imperialist meddling, raising fears of yet another US war of choice and regime change.
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# Trump baselessly calls Colombia’s Petro ‘drug dealer’ as US bombs another boat
by Brett Wilkins, The Real News Network
October 20, 2025
<h1>Trump baselessly calls Colombia’s Petro ‘drug dealer’ as US bombs another boat</h1> <p class="byline">by Brett Wilkins, The Real News Network <br />October 20, 2025</p> <div class="wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:32% auto"> <figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img src="https://therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png" alt="Common Dreams Logo" class="wp-image-268291 size-full" /></figure> <div class="wp-block-media-text__content"> <p><em>This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-calls-petro-drug-dealer" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Oct. 19, 2025</a>.</em> <em>It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.</em></p> </p></div> </div> <p class="has-drop-cap">The <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/united-states" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">United States</a> carried out another deadly attack on a boat it claimed was being used by a left-wing Colombian revolutionary group to transport drugs in the Caribbean Sea, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Sunday, hours after President <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/donald-trump" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Donald Trump</a> alleged without evidence that Columbia’s president “is an illegal drug dealer.”</p> <p>Hegseth said the strike, which took place on Friday, targeted “a vessel affiliated with Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), a designated terrorist organization.”</p> <p>The <a href="https://colombiareports.com/eln/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ELN</a> is Colombia’s last-standing far-left guerrilla group. Founded in 1964, the group fought to liberate <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/colombia" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Colombia</a> from longtime <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/right-wing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">right-wing</a> rule, end foreign influence—especially from the United States—and achieve <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/social-justice" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">social justice</a> and equality for the poor. ELN has been accused of using proceeds from drug trafficking to fund its insurgency.</p> <p>“The vessel was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, was traveling along a known narco-trafficking route, and was transporting substantial amounts of narcotics,” Hegseth said without offering evidence. “There were three male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel during the strike—which was conducted in international waters. All three terrorists were killed and no US forces were harmed in this strike.”</p> <p>“These cartels are the al-Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere, using violence, murder and terrorism to impose their will, threaten our national security, and poison our people,” the defense secretary added. “The United States military will treat these organizations like the terrorists they are—they will be hunted, and killed, just like al-Qaeda.”</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> https://twitter.com/SecWar/status/1979930208472912048 </div> </figure> <p>Hegseth’s announcement followed a <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115401182824973489" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">post</a> by Trump on his Truth Social network calling leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro “an illegal drug leader strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs.”</p> <p>Trump offered no evidence to back his baseless claim. The US itself has a long history of involvement in the international drug <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/trade" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">trade</a>, from American capitalists <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/society/american-old-money-opium-trade-fortunes/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">profiting immensely</a> from opium trafficking in the 19th century to the Central Intelligence Agency working with narcotrafficking anti-communist groups in <a href="https://renincorp.org/bookshelf/politics-of-heroin-in-south.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Southeast Asia</a> and <a href="https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Central America</a> during the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/cold-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cold War</a>, helping to fuel first the heroin and later crack cocaine epidemics in the United States.</p> <p>The US president further alleged that drugs have “become the biggest business in Colombia, by far, and Petro does nothing to stop it, despite large scale payments and subsidies from the USA that are nothing more than a long-term rip off of America.”</p> <p>Trump added:</p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> <p>AS OF TODAY, THESE PAYMENTS, OR ANY OTHER FORM OF PAYMENT, OR SUBSIDIES, WILL NO LONGER BE MADE TO COLOMBIA. The purpose of this drug production is the sale of massive amounts of product into the United States, causing death, destruction, and havoc. Petro, a low-rated and very unpopular leader, with a fresh mouth toward America, better close up these killing fields immediately, or the United States will close them up for him, and it won’t be done nicely.</p> </blockquote> <p><a href="https://apnews.com/article/trump-petro-colombia-drugs-us-aid-c3955b2ce351737119920741178e0567" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">According to</a> <em>The Associated Press</em>, Colombia received an estimated $230 million in US aid for the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/budget" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">budget</a> year that ended on September 30.</p> <p>Trump has ordered attacks on at least seven alleged drug-running boats without providing concrete evidence to support his claims. At least 29 people have been killed in the attacks.</p> <p>In a series of posts on the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/social-media" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">social media</a> site X, Petro <a href="https://x.com/petrogustavo/status/1979700160608206983" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> that “US government officials have committed a murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters,” repeating <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/us-attack-on-boats-off-venezuela" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">claims</a> that some victims of the US strikes, including Thursday’s, were fishermen.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> https://twitter.com/petrogustavo/status/1979952036860113284 </div> </figure> <p>“I respect the history, culture, and people of the USA,” Petro <a href="https://x.com/petrogustavo/status/1979934703340617914" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">wrote</a> in a subsequent post. “They are not my enemies, nor do I feel them as such. The problem is with Trump, not with the USA.”</p> <p>Refuting Trump’s accusation that he has “done nothing to stop” drug trafficking, Petro <a href="https://x.com/petrogustavo/status/1979418442194121016" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">noted</a> that “we have reduced the coca leaf crop growth rate to almost 0%. In past governments, there were years with nearly 100% annual growth. Today, half of the total coca leaf crop area has crops that have been abandoned for three years.”</p> <p>The <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/trump-administration" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Trump administration</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/10/18/detainees-drug-boat-us-venezuela-colombia-ecuador/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> Thursday that survivors of one recent strike, a Colombian and an Ecuadorean, would be repatriated to their respective countries, possibly as a way to skirt concerns over the legality of the attacks.</p> <p>On Thursday, Hegseth said that US Southern Command chief Adm. Alvin Holsey—who is overseeing the boat attacks—will step down at the end of the year. Holsey’s resignation <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/us/politics/southern-command-head-stepping-down.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reportedly</a> stems from concerns over the strikes.</p> <p>“If Commander Alvin has resigned for refusing to be complicit in the murder of Caribbean civilians by US missiles deliberately launched against them from comfortable offices, I consider him a hero and a true officer of the armies of the Americas,” Petro <a href="https://x.com/petrogustavo/status/1979215831151091833" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> in response to the news. “I said in <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/new-york" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">New York</a>, on one of its streets, that I <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJU_BUilpbA" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">asked</a> the officers of the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/us-military" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">US military</a> forces not to aim their weapons at humanity.”</p> <p>The Trump administration <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/gustavo-petro-un-trump" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">revoked</a> Petro’s US visa following his speech.</p> <p>“I believe that Commander Alvin has proven himself to be a man of worth by refusing to aim his weapons at humanity. Perhaps Commander Alvin does not know it, but he is a true officer of the armies of <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/washington" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Washington</a> and Bolívar,” Petro added, referring to George Washington and the great South American liberator Simón Bolívar.</p> <p>On his first day back in the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/white-house" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">White House</a> in January, Trump signed an <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/designating-cartels-and-other-organizations-as-foreign-terrorist-organizations-and-specially-designated-global-terrorists/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">executive order</a> designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Last month, the president <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-drug-cartel-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reportedly signed a secret order</a> directing the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/pentagon" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Pentagon</a> to use military force to combat drug cartels abroad, sparking fears of renewed US aggression in a region that has <a href="https://www.veteransforpeace.org/files/7815/5130/4069/US_Acts_of_Aggression_in_Latin_America_Timeline.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">endured</a> well over 100 US attacks, invasions, occupations, and other interventions since the issuance of the dubious Monroe Doctrine in 1823.</p> <p>Trump has also deployed a small armada of naval warships off the coast of <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/venezuela" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Venezuela</a>, which has <a href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14263/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">endured</a> more than a century of Washington’s imperialist meddling, <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-bomb-venezuela-2674047728" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">raising fears</a> of yet another US war of choice and regime change.</p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/trump-baselessly-calls-colombias-petro-drug-dealer-as-us-bombs-another-boat">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com">The Real News Network</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"><img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://therealnews.com/?republication-pixel=true&post=337911&ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/trump-baselessly-calls-colombias-petro-drug-dealer-as-us-bombs-another-boat", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script></p> Copy to Clipboard
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Trump calls Petro what? #therealnews
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5 months ago
Trump baselessly calls Colombia’s Petro ‘drug dealer’ as US bombs another boat
The leftist Colombian president retorted that “US government officials have committed a murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters.”
Trump calls Petro what? #therealnews
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The federal government shutdown is now in its fourth week. Over 700,000 federal employees have been furloughed, with nearly as many continuing to work without pay, yet there are still no signs that an end to the shutdown is near. “Unlike past presidents, Mr. Trump appears to feel little urgency to strike a deal to reopen the government,” Luke Broadwater writes at _The New York Times_. “Instead, he has used the shutdown, which began Oct. 1, as an opportunity to further remake the federal bureaucracy and jettison programs he does not like, seizing on unorthodox budgetary maneuvers that some have called illegal.” In this episode, we speak with three furloughed federal employees about the harm government shutdowns cause working people, and we discuss why this shutdown is different.
**Guests:**
* Adam is a furloughed federal employee who works in recreation for the US Forest Service, managing hiking, biking, and equestrian trails in central Idaho. He serves as chapter president of National Federation of Federal Employees Local 1753, and he is an organizer with the Federal Unionists Network.
* Ellen is a furloughed federal employee who works in SNAP oversight and administration at the USDA Food and Nutrition Service. She serves as chapter president of National Treasury Employees Union Local 255, representing FNS employees at the Northeast regional office, and she is an organizer with the Federal Unionists Network in Boston.
* April is a furloughed federal employee who works in the office of Head Start at the Administration for Children and Families HQ in Washington, DC. She serves as chapter president of the National Treasury Employees Union Local 250.
**Additional links/info:**
* Federal Unionists Network website, BlueSky, and Instagram
* Federal Unionists Network: “Join Us To Defend Public Services!”
* Luke Broadwater, _The New York Times_ , “The Shutdown Is Stretching On. Trump Doesn’t Seem to Mind.”
* _Democracy Now!_ , “Shadow president: Project 2025 architect Russell Vought is using shutdown to gut federal agencies”
**Credits:**
* Featured music: Jules Taylor, “ _Working People_ ” Theme Song
* Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
_The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible._
Maximillian Alvarez:
I got work. 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 within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we are recording this episode on Monday, October 20th, and the federal government has been shut down for nearly three weeks at this point. Although frankly, the term shutdown can be misleading because there’s still a lot happening in the federal government right now. As the New York Times reports, president Trump has repurposed money to fund military salaries during the government shutdown. He has pledged to find ways to make sure many in law enforcement get paid.
He has used the fiscal impasse to halt funding to democratic jurisdictions and is trying to lay off thousands of federal workers. Government shutdowns are usually resolved only after the pain they inflict on everyday Americans forces elected officials in Washington to come to an agreement. But as the shutdown nears a fourth week, Mr. Trump’s actions have instead reduced the pressure for an immediate resolution and pushed his political opponents to further dig in. We’re not going to bend. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leaders said on Friday, the 17th day of the shutdown we’re not going to break. He added all of these efforts to try to intimidate Democratic members of the House and the Senate are not going to work. He said. Now unlike past presidents, Mr. Trump appears to feel little urgency to strike a deal to reopen the government. Instead, he has used the shutdown, which began October 1st as an opportunity to further remake the Federal Bureaucracy and Jettison programs.
He does not like seizing on unorthodox budgetary maneuvers that some have called illegal administration. Officials appear undaunted by the criticism even after a federal judge temporarily blocked their efforts to conduct mass firings on Friday. Some agencies indicated in court filings that they might proceed with layoffs that officials suggested were not covered by the order. Russell T vote, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the architect of the effort to remake the government has pledged to quote, stay on offense throughout the shutdown. Now all of this is going on while at least 700,000 federal employees have been furloughed with nearly as many continuing to work without pay. And today we are speaking three of those furloughed federal workers. First, we are joined by Adam, who works in recreation for the US Forest Service, managing, hiking, biking, and equestrian trails in central Idaho. He’s also local president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, local 1753 and an organizer with the Federal Unionist Network.
We are also joined by Ellen, who works in SNAP oversight and administration at the USDA Food and Nutrition Service. Ellen is the chapter president of the National Treasury Employees Union, local 2 55 representing FNS employees at the Northeast Regional Office, and she’s an organizer with the Federal Unionist Network in Boston. And lastly, but not least, we are joined by April, who is National Treasury Employees Union, chapter two 50 president and who also works in the office of Head Start at the Administration for Children and Families Headquarters in Washington DC And they are all three here speaking on their own behalf. They’re not speaking on behalf of the government, of the agencies they work at or their unions. Adam, Ellen, April, thank you all so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it, especially with everything going on in the damn country right now. Everything going on in your lives right now. And I want to start there. I want to start with where we are here and now in the third week of this shutdown. And I wanted to ask if we could go around the table and first have you introduce yourselves and tell listeners a little more about the work that you do for the federal government and then if you can tell us what these past three weeks have been like for you.
Adam:
Thanks, Max. Yeah, like you said, my name is Adam. I work at Recreation for the US Forest Service and I run a trail program. We’ve maintained about 600 miles of hiking and biking trails, like you said, and it has already been a strange summer. We usually have about 10 permanent folks plus seasonal employees that can help us maintain trails, maintain trail heads, bathrooms, campsites, all that good stuff. Since the beginning of the year, we’re now down to just three of us because we lost so many folks before even the furlough started happening. But we lost folks due to the deferred resignation program. People were stepping out and stepping away from the agency just because of the toxic workplace that existed in February and ongoing. And once the shutdown started on day one, by the end of that day I was told that I would be furloughed or no longer using the words essential and non-essential.
But the feeling is pretty clear when they tell you that it just don’t bother coming into work the next day. So there’s plenty of things that will be happening. There’s definitely no trails getting maintained by the agency right now on any of the places that I work. And that’s about it as far as my agency work since the shutdown started. But definitely committing more deeply with my sudden free time to work within our union, within our local, trying to make sure that people who are still working are getting connected with resources and that they’re still getting informed on their rights. And as well as the people who have been furloughed who are not getting paid, just making sure that they know that they can turn to their fellow members for support, where to look for other resources that they might need. And then keeping everyone together because it does feel a little bit like that’s part of this process and who is working and who’s not working is to build up some divisiveness between all of us at the working level. So far, folks in the Forest Service have been pretty lucky. Those that are still working are still getting paid for at least through this pay period. At least there was some leftover funding and so far folks are getting paid, which is a benefit for us, at least at the agency.
Ellen:
Max. Thanks for having us on here today. So my name’s Ellen. I work at the Food and Nutrition Service, and we do a lot of things that FNS, we administer the 16 nutritional assistance programs that the federal government provides. So everything from SNAP to WIC to the school lunch program. I specifically worked in SNAP and made sure that the states had all their questions answered on how to actually give out SNAP benefits, how to determine if people were eligible. There’s a whole maze of regulations and rules that people have to follow. And so our job was to kind of parse that for the states, make it a little easier for them, and now it’s hard to not be doing that, to not be answering their questions, especially when the program changed so much in July, and there’ll be real penalties for them starting next year if they don’t get things right, they’ll have to start paying for a portion of SNAP benefits.
Their administrative costs are going to go up this time next year. And we are fielding a lot of questions on how do we pay for this? What are the kind of essential rules and regulations that we have to follow up until October one and then now we’re gone. I also worked in some of the auxiliary programs to SNAP that required some extra approval for funding. So there was a SNAP Nutrition education program that I worked on where actually on the last year of that program, because Congress decided to end its permanent funding status back in July, so there’s only funds left through September 30th, 2026. And so we were fielding a lot of questions on how do we run the last year of this program? How do we close it out, lay people off? And so now I’m not, my coworking bank weren’t there to answer those questions for folks.
So it’s been weird for people in the last three weeks of seeing everything unfolding in the hearing about how people are, not even just federal workers, but everyday working. People are concerned about how they’re going to put food on their tables as everything gets more expensive. And knowing that the programs that we administer might have questions going unanswered of how the states can fill the gaps, states and food banks, schools can fill the gaps that are left by the federal government. And we work in human service program, so we’re always thinking about the recipients at the end of the day. And we’re concerned not just about how we can get paychecks and how we can get put on the table, but how we can keep helping the people that are there. So I know a lot of my members are volunteering at food banks right now off of the time that we have left in our day and trying to help out and plug into their local communities where we can. I’ve trying to get the word out about what federal workers are doing and trying to organize with the Federal Unionist Network to keep getting the message out there and also trying to cohere my members still so that we don’t feel any sense of isolation from each other as we’re continuing to read the news, worrying about rifs and worrying about mass firings, trying to keep everyone together in these past three weeks. And hopefully we’ll stay together even longer than that.
April:
Yeah, it’s always so heavy to listen to because as part of Head Start, I, in addition to being chapter president, I work in policy. And so some of the things I was working on before, of course, are all the things that this administration hates. In fact, they were the first things to go. So I worked on the Office of Head Starts Equity plan, I helped with building all of the public comments for new head of regulations, and I manage the process of reports to Congress, all of the ones that are statutorily required. And I would just say that within HHS, it’s such a, I mean a lot of the same things are just happening across the government, but things are, we just have to constantly wait to see what the impact is and just constantly check in with each other. And our programs are so interlinked.
We’re watching what happens with snap because we know that our kids and families are also connected to that program. The same with tanf, the same with I represent employees who work in LA eap. So again, heating, but then there was a push to take and strip bargaining unit rights away from a good portion of my members in the Office of Refugee Resettlement. And so even though it seems like, okay, well they go to work just as regular, now they’re getting hit with debt letters for locality changes that are not their fault because they were told to come back and then got exceptions and then told that they would come back and some 50 if they lived 50 miles outside of whatever created things. And so they’re getting thousands of letters in debt and the agency you call and they’re like, we don’t know what these debt letters are either.
And I’d also say being specifically here in DC a lot of, and I’ll say that a lot of my members are black folks and very many of them are black women who have also just been very much more impacted when it comes to the shutdown because we’ve already been leaving in record numbers like the biggest exodus from the government in the history of the government in a country where those were some of the first stable jobs that black folks had and that unions had were essential to making happen. And so seeing this push out and exodus of folks who are generations of people who have worked in the government and have created a staple in communities. And then I, look, I live in DC and we have one of the highest populations of both poverty black folks and our welcoming in a lot of our migrant families and community members.
And so seeing that once our program specialists who have gotten hit the hardest, those are the people who do all the grants. They talk to the grantees knowing, but they also live over here. And so being in a new income bracket means having new needs, especially for kids. And so there’s just this interconnectedness with our lives as employees, just the not knowing also just like this is an abusive relationship with the government. I just want to say, and that, so this, it just seems like the snowball everywhere. And so there’s never a time when people are just talking about programs or just talking about their lives. They’re just so intertwined. So yeah, there’s that sense. But I also will say that people are really angry and my commentary on the labor movement in the United States is like they don’t have an organized way necessarily to do that. But I also see groups like fun coming and being like, all right, we got these wheels. We have some knowledge from generations. So I will say that’s also a change with some of the employees wanting to be becoming politicized or wanting to get active.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to pick up on that point because you put that really powerfully April, and it’s something that I’ve heard echoed in my conversations with other federal workers when you said that this is an abusive relationship and from the outside it sure as hell looks like that. And even as a citizen, it sure as hell feels that way to a lot of us right now. But as federal workers, as we already mentioned long before this shutdown began on October 1st, this has been a year unlike any other for you all and your coworkers. And I wanted to ask if we could just flesh that out a bit more, if we could get a worker’s eye view from your different sides of the federal workforce. Could you tell listeners a bit more about what it’s actually been like to work in the federal government over the past year leading up to the inauguration and from there to now?
Adam:
Yeah, I would say that earlier in 2025 when Russell V said, and not a direct quote here, but that they want to make federal workers’ lives miserable, that they want us to not be in the workplace, they want us to not work here anymore,
Maximillian Alvarez:
We want to put them in trauma where his exact words.
Adam:
Exactly. Exactly. And to have that be the overarching aura around you. Even when you work in a great workplace with people that really care about what they do and they care about each other and they want to hold each other up and provide these public services to Americans, that was the dark cloud that’s been hanging over us this whole year. And from the very beginning with those bullshit five points, which was just a waste of time, super patronizing and condescending to the probationary firings, the illegal terminations of thousands of probationary employees, our unions were able to fight to bring those people back, but they came back into the same environment with the media talking points and coming from politicians, blaming scapegoating federal workers. And it’s impossible for it not to feel like a toxic workplace. So many people took this deferred resignation program even if they weren’t already going to get fired or RIFed, because so many of the folks that I know that took it didn’t want to.
They felt coerced into doing it. They were coming to work every day being belittled by the administration, by the heads of many agencies. And then that’s why this shutdown doesn’t, to me feels like the next step. It just feels like the natural progression of the things that they’ve been trying to do this whole year of make our lives miserable, divide us and then use that as an excuse to cut public services that American people need. And it’s, this isn’t like some left versus right bullshit. This is like the billionaires and their political pawns versus the American people through the lens of federal workers and the services that we provide for everybody. And I think that that’s part of why the fund has been so important in this moment, and this is changing the narrative is that the importance of federal unions is in that our working conditions day-to-day, whatever agency we work in, those working conditions are the conditions of the public services that we provide for the American people. When we are supported in doing our jobs and we are allowed to do our jobs and we’re funded, we are the experts in our fields, this is our job. I jokingly say I smash rocks for a living, but I’m a pretty damn good trail builder. And when those jobs and all of our other jobs are on the cutting block, that directly impacts the American people.
Ellen:
When they say that they’re wanting to cut the Democrat programs and they only want to pay people that are deserving of it, I think it really shows it’s the billionaire versus the working people divide because what are the Democrat programs is programs like the food and nutrition programs is programs like April’s programs is programs that will keep the land public so that people can actually go and recreate on them instead of being just closed off or drilling or logging or whatever. And this whole year, it’s felt like them trying to make us miserable to make us leave so that they can cut our programs and say, look, that program’s not working anyway, so why don’t we just end snap or look, that funding’s not working anyway, and the refugees aren’t being resettled. I don’t know April, that’s the probably way of talking about it, but they’re trying to make us so miserable.
And in my workplace, at the very beginning, we were all hopeful. We were like, oh, we can stick it out as long as we stick together as an agency and as an office that we’ll make it out of these next four years together. We can pull up with anything. A lot of people had made it through the first Trump presidency and they’re like, it’s okay. Let us old heads guide y new workers through this. I was like, let’s go. And then they fired the probationary employees. I was like, oh, shoot. The people that I’ve worked with for the past year, maybe two years, for some people, their ary peers were a little bit longer. And then it’s like, well, do we still want to go on? Because our bosses still want us to do the same amount of work with you or people, and who knows if they’re going to come back and they’re trying to downsize the federal government.
Wilson wants to not only traumatize the federal workforce, but he wants to shrink it so that we can’t do the work that we are charged with doing. And since March, my office has faced threats of closures, and we’re seeing offices close across the nation too. So in Boston, the HHS office closed and the part of the Department of Education office closed. And so we keep thinking the house is going to drop, we’re going to close next. And it’s so hard doing the work, obviously in that kind of environment where I, I’ve been doing England, I want to support these New England states, but maybe I’ll have to move away so that I can keep doing my work or maybe they’ll just fire me so that I can’t do the work. Period. And morale, morale kind of sucked, but about half of my office has stuck around.
Half of us did not take the deferred reservation program, and it’s been like, if we can make it through, we’ve made it through these nine months so far, and we can make it through anything as long as we stick together. So solidarity has never been stronger. The feeling of support amongst each other has never been better, and there’s just a lot of dark humor around, but it’s whatever makes us feel better. At the end of the day, whatever gets a little laugh out of everybody, and I know a lot of people are turning to their coworkers. We have to spend so much more time together. We have to do our Zoom calls from the office now and drive two hours each day to be on teams calls, but it’s giving us time to talk in the hallways to commiserate about anything that’s going on and just try to lift each other up. And I feel like that’s what federal workers do. I feel like the’s, what fund does too, get to meet a bunch of other federal workers. And when people go out to rallies, I know that there’s lots of signs that the public are supportive of federal workers. And so it’s been great to see the public support too for us.
April:
Yeah, I think as someone who has been a part of whatever, how many shutdowns since 2013, I think it’s just so different. And so leading up to the election, it really was like, what do we do? And as federal workers, we’re very clear that it almost doesn’t matter. I mean, it matters how the elections go, but we know that things change fundamentally. Things change every few years based on whatever it could be on whatever’s hot, we’ll say that. And so there’s that part, but to what extent and how is that going to change what I do every day? Because for me, it wiped out all of the work. That was literally my entire performance plan in one day. It was like, oh, nah. And so I was like, oh, I’m the chopping block for, oh, we’re doing, we want to get rid of policy employees.
There’s one we want to get rid of people who are doing any kind of DEI work. And I was leading the whole, so I just was like, all right, so what does that mean? And we knew that going forward because there were things like Schedule F, and so I think it’s important to say the buildup was definitely there. I think there was a preparation emotionally, and I would say in the work we did that was just very cognizant of, okay, what things do we need to make sure are evergreen to ensure that we as employees are supported in the best ways?
How do we make that happen? What kind of new connections do we need to make between programs? So there was that, and then there was the hit, it literally was like all the shoes dropped day one, and it just was like, oh yeah, all the contingency plans and then no contingency plans because what is that? This whole thing, that whole thing called law and order that you would usually go to do anything, not even just fight back was completely broken. Who do you go to? Everybody’s like, did you get an answer on the HR line? Nope, nobody did. And then the next day it’s like there’s a whole new email that you write email, and then sometimes we’re not using this email anymore because nobody is here to take, and then when people get fired or they get ripped or put on administrative leave, nobody knows who they are until their email doesn’t work.
And there’s no way to know the work that they were doing, that there’s no access to any of those things. They just couldn’t go to work that day. And then to try to figure out for everything you do, okay, so can I still submit this? Because statutorily it has to be done. And then are we on the hook for not doing that part too? Probably. And then I think there came the fact where we knew even the ways in which they went, the ways that they went about attacking us weren’t even just using things that were already that they could use against us. It was brand new things and it was almost like throw everything up the wall and see what sticks. Obviously all of the administrative leave, the riff notices, AI is doing them so constantly just everybody’s service dates are wrong, everybody’s veteran status is wrong, but there’s nobody in the office to fix it being.
And I have a smile on my face because sometimes I forgot about the five points. There’s literally so much that happens day to day that you just don’t know. And then I think last month what I realized is I really had members who were saying, you know what? Because some of our employees got refire, right? They got fired twice, got brought back refire. They were just like, I don’t want to fight. Take my name off the MSVP lawsuit. I just don’t want to go through this anymore. And I don’t fault you. I’m going to need you to keep fighting, but I don’t fault you. It’s exhausting. It’s exhausting for them. I mean, I’m furloughed not getting paid, but some of the folks who went through two firings and stuff like that mean, so just over the last year has been every day. I mean, we go to log on and I’m like, deep breath. You don’t know if that’s the day you got to a notice. Your computer doesn’t work. So everybody who got riff notices last week, their computers just stopped working. So yeah, I mean it’s just never knowing anything.
Ellen:
If I could add on, there’s a level of paranoia that’s like a attached to everybody who’s still here because of that. Because there’s been, if the internet goes out of the office sometimes or the security thing that you scan your badge onto, if that just takes a little too long, but everyone’s just like, am I fired? And it’s like, that did not happen before. But now it just getting a lot worse and the technologies breaking down a lot more. There’s a lot of wifi issues, there’s a lot of system issues, and so everything is slowing down. So not only are they taking away people, but the systems that they’re supposed to be good at maintaining as the rich folk are not working anymore too. They built their fortunes off of making it systems and yet ours are, ours are breaking and making us think that we’re fired every week.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to pick up on that though, right? Because you guys mentioned in the beginning of this panel that it’s not just you and your coworkers whose lives are being impacted by all this. It is the millions and millions of Americans who depend on you and your labor and the services that your coworkers and your agencies provide, whether that’s people going to VA hospitals, people going to national parks, people looking for food assistance, housing assistance. This is one of the greatest tricks, these government efficiency, cost cutting folks. I mean, we’ve seen them, they’re new faces, but the same kind of story year after year. But they’re always pitching this as like, oh, government is bloated bureaucracy that’s wasting taxpayer money. We’re doing this to make the government more efficient for you, the American taxpayer. And so I wanted to kind of make that a two-part question for you all because you all said it feels like ages ago, but it wasn’t even like nine months ago that Elon fricking Musk was the head of Doge cutting departments left and and loading up everyone’s personal information into these unchecked AI systems that feels like forever ago.
And now here we are months later hearing that this is making our work life hell. So I wanted to ask a, are all these cuts, all this crap that you all have been enduring and that we’ve been watching, has it made the government more efficient? And B, how is this, what do you think people out there need to understand about how this is impacting the whole of American society? Like poor and working Americans across the board, not just folks working for the federal government?
Adam:
Yeah, I think that the ultimate irony of the push for efficiency is that the people doing the work on the ground, if had someone asked us, we definitely could have found ways to make these systems not only more efficient, but better for all working people, more productive. But that’s obviously not what they were trying to do. They’re trying to enrich the billionaires, the Doge cost how many billions of dollars? And then most of that was just to pay people to do nothing until the end of the fiscal year. No, I absolutely didn’t think things are more efficient now. Things feel more inefficient than ever. With all the firings and the resignations that have happened, people are struggling even more to do their jobs that they already were doing without the appropriate amount of funding or staff. And those jobs are now even harder. And I think that this is what’s so critically important that all working people need to understand is that we really feels like we’re on the front line of one of the front lines of this fight right now.
And federal employees administer nearly every single service that sustains daily life in America, whether that’s, like you said, healthcare for veterans, housing, clean air, clean water, food assistance, recreation, public lands, all sorts of other consumer protections. And the total impact on the budget to all of that is less than 5% of the total expenditure of the US. And for us to be able to provide all that we do for that little sliver of a budget and then to be told that that little sliver of the budget is where we need to make our cuts to efficiency just by removing public services for working class people, that is what’s been so frustrating to see that be such a big part of what they’re selling as a solution. And it’s really just another way to funnel wealth up. And it has honestly, it’s made me more than ever want to stay working as a federal employee.
I have this sudden and intense desire to hold the line and make sure that these public services are provided for everyone. And so fight to keep those. And I think that’s what a lot of us are trying to do in our unions and through fun and through these other community organizations is we swore an oath when we took these positions to defend the constitution and to provide these services to American people. And that is really what’s lit a fire I think under so many of us is that we are seeing these cuts happening and seeing reading between the lines on what’s going to happen to your everyday American when they don’t have social security or food assistance or Medicare. And I think that yeah, that’s definitely what’s engaged me and energized me even through the abusive relationship of being a Fed this past year.
Ellen:
Just mic drop on that. Yeah, it’s like how do you get more efficient if you are in a abusive relationship if you’re seeing your coworkers walk out the door, but I think everybody who’s staying behind is like, we have to be here. We have to hold the line because if we leave our positions then the programs that we administer, they might not have been gone immediately, but they’re going to break down further and further until they’re just not functional programs anymore. At some point, if you are trying to administer a program and all of your questions go unanswered about it and how you’re supposed to do things correctly, you’re going to make mistakes on accident until the whole thing just kind of breaks. You put the wrong screws in the wrong places, the machine is going to collapse. And we’re seeing a lot of that.
Things are so much slower now than they were eight months ago because so many people have left. I said earlier that half of my agency stayed, but really half of them left. And so we have to pick up half of the work with the same amount of people who are a little bit more traumatized, a little bit more like, what the hell’s going on? And we’re a little angrier now, so we want to hold the lie, but we don’t know exactly what we’re doing. And so things take a little bit longer. First we have to figure out what the heck somebody’s asking us to do, then we have to figure out how to do it, and then we have to figure out how to tell them to do it.
And sometimes we have to wait for somebody to tell us if we can tell them how to do it, if that makes any sense at all. We don’t have the clearance to answer certain questions with authority to make certain decisions that we used to have. By the way, they’ve taken a lot of autonomy away from federal workers because there’s an element of control, just like an abusive relationship where the abuser wants to do, wants you to do everything as they tell you to do it. And you can’t color outside the lines at all. But the federal government has worked for a long time, I think with federal workers who have had to do more with less. And we’re having to do that now. And we’ve usually been able to do that because we can be creative or we have a little bit of autonomy and we get to use our expertise to make some decisions and apply our discretion as professionals.
And that’s now kind of being taken away from us because discretion is not efficient maybe or makes some people look a little less powerful at the very least. And I think that’s why there’s some people have a little bit of a fire when things take a little bit longer to get resolved. We have to wait three months instead of three weeks to answer a question. It is the people at the other side of that question who wait a little bit longer. Most of the times when we’re solving things for our state partners for schools, when we’re answering their questions, it’s because they have a SNAP recipient, Rick recipient who has a situation that needs to be resolved. They have somebody who’s raising that question for us and there’s a novel situation. Maybe it’s a complex family situation, maybe it’s a woman who has to take in her relative’s kids and now they have a new family composition and they don’t know what to do and they’re trying to figure out how do I give the state is trying to figure out how do I give benefits to these kids and to this family so that they can get fed.
And when we take longer to answer those questions when we’re less efficient, and that’s a family who’s going hungry for a couple more days and I hate that.
April:
Yeah, I would say the thing that’s interesting to me about efficiency is I don’t actually think that anybody has a definition for that. The people who want it to be efficient, because then you think about ultra people, who are we paying for people who are poor and this and that? But put it this way. So if you believe so much in welfare to work, but you also want start childcare and pre-K to be defunded or dismantled, parents can’t go to work if the kids can’t go to childcare. And then if you can’t go to work because they have no childcare, then they can’t pay rent. So these billionaire developers, not only will they have issues with people being able to afford rent, which people can’t already, but new people are not going to have the income to move in either. So I think it’s not until people are impacted personally, until they feel it personally that they will take this seriously.
I don’t think they understand what the government does. And I’m talking about the public now. I don’t know that people know what the government does. I don’t think they understand what we do and don’t do or have, like you said, discretion or power to do even when we’re at our biggest or whatever and everybody’s at work. And so I just feel like efficiency for whom and where, because I mean now the farmers are like, so this is not exactly what we meant and that’s going to trickle down because food prices, food that we have for USDA, all of these things will start to happen and people will realize, oh, so we only got what we needed because we tried to make sure that everybody got what they needed. And so I don’t think that it’s, until people are like, why don’t you just open the government? So November 1st is coming, you may not have food. There’s all these things that might crash. And I don’t think it’s going to be until they’re just like, or the medical stuff, everybody’s Obamacare or whatever they want to call it. But when it goes up 200%, yeah, I think they’ll be like, oh, well maybe. I mean they might change the narrative and be like, that’s not Obamacare. That’s some other thing. But it’s not until they experience it themselves.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and just to sort of, I guess round us out on that note, I am sure folks listening to this, they have the same question that all of us have, which is like, when is this damn thing going to end? When is the government going to reopen? And in what condition is the government going to be if and when it does reopen? Right? I mean, I think we’ve covered a lot of that ground here and you guys have all been so helpful by giving our listeners as much information and perspective as you can, but I know I can’t keep you for much longer. And so I just wanted to sort of talk about where things go from here, both short term with this government shutdown and long-term with, like you guys said, the effort to hold the line before the country is totally unrecognizable to all of us.
And I guess I’m thinking about the fact that I was in DC this past weekend on the ground covering one of the thousands of no kings protests that happen across the country. I’m there talking to folks, seeing federal workers, seeing folks with signs supporting federal workers, and who do I bump into on the street? But our labor queen, president of the Association of Flight attendants, Sarah Nelson there with her family protesting, we did an interview on the ground and I got a chance to ask Sarah, she became a household name during the last government shutdown in 2019, the longest in America’s history up to this point. It was like 35 days, I believe. And I remember just like now, it felt like this shutdown could go on forever. There’s total gridlock between Democrats, republicans on the hill, and then a new player entered the chat, and that was labor and that was unions.
That was people like Sarah Nelson saying the words general strike if we don’t open the damn government. And all of a sudden people on Capitol Hill started moving very quickly to get the government open. And so I’m not saying that you guys are calling for a general strike, this is just my own personal reflection, but that was a really important moment in our history where I think a lot of working people learned that we don’t have to just sit around and wait to see what Democrats and Republicans on the hill do to decide our collective fate. There’s more that working people can do to change the situation here and to change the outcome. And so in that spirit, I just wanted to sort of go around the table one more time and ask if you had any kind of final thoughts or reflections for folks about what they can expect with the ongoing government shutdown, but also where the fight needs to be going forward with the Federal Unionist network or elsewhere. So anything you guys want to share, and then I promise I’ll let you go.
Adam:
One thing that was really empowering for me in the springtime with the illegal firings of probationary employees was the way that we saw communities step up and support federal workers in their area. Even in small towns where I work in McCall, Idaho, there was a bunch of local businesses that were ready to support fired employees. There was, people were putting together potlucks at local churches and stuff like that to make sure these folks were getting the support financially and in the food that they needed. And that I think is what’s going to have to become very important once again, as we near the end of the fourth week of the shutdown and people have gotten paychecks with $0 now, I think the impacts on the individual federal employees that are furloughed or working and not getting paid are pretty quickly going to become super important.
So connecting at the local level is always going to be the most important thing, whether that’s connecting with local unions, if you are in a union, get more active, reach out to your fellow workers across the private sector and the federal sector. I think where our power does and will eventually come from in a powerful way is where we as federal unions are also spending time connecting with all the other unions through central labor councils or state federations of AFL ccio and stuff like that, and being able to support each other there. And I think that going forward, state public services.com is where the big push and the federal unionist network is going. So that is open to federal employees, former federal employees, veterans and community allies, anyone who wants to save these public services, pick your favorite public service. And there’s action happening to keep it around and improve it.
And I think looking forward, that’s where the groundwork that we’re fighting that we’re building right now is yes, to resist a fascist authoritarian regime change by capital, but also we’re building a potential incredible future where the people on the ground doing the work, who know the people in their communities, know the services that they need, know how to provide them. We should be part of the conversation and the policy development. And I think that there’s, what keeps me going is that vision and then envisioning a world where the people who need the services and provide the services have a say. And it’s not just top down political puppetry.
Ellen:
I was just going to say a better world is possible if we build it. So everything that Adam said, get involved to your local community organizations. If you’re in a union, become more active. There’s definitely something that your union’s executive board needs your help with or your steward words or anybody who’s already involved in the union. There’s always a need for more hands on deck if you’re not unionized that get with your coworkers and talk about it. There’s a ton of organizations out there to help people form a union in their workplace. And sometimes there’s even people forming unions in their apartment building. So if you need to form a tenant union, you can go that way too. So any sort of union is a way to connect with other people and withhold labor, money, whatever, from capital so that the billionaires can’t continue to make our lives worse because what they’re doing to the federal sector is making everybody’s lives worse and they’re making life worse in other ways too that we haven’t even talked about today. We probably won’t and probably shouldn’t. So just get heck with your community, not just your friends with the people who you’re not friends with yet. Get it. Join your union. Go to save public services.com, especially if you’re a federal worker so you can get connected with the fun. Just again, join your union. I feel like that can’t be said. And
April:
Yeah, so many things. I think while we talked about general strike, right, and obviously we can’t strike, and I’m not saying we should strike, but I will say that I spent time with unions in South Korea in a country where they can do and do general strikes and the kind of general strikes that remove presidents. And again, not saying we should do that here, but the part of that that is powerful that we can learn from is just how much organizing matters and finding those points of unity. So I mean these were government, they were literally, they were our South Korean counterparts. They were the administration, fraternal affairs, they were HHS basically. And so really looking at how in each place there was a commitment to just because it’s not our chapter or even our local or even our union that we have decided that this thing they’re doing is that important, that we will show up the same way that they show up and that they learn to organize their workplace so that they can organize.
I mean, they’re very clear that we’re all workers. So there’s this worker solidarity that is then part of the community the way of moving. It’s just like, okay, we want a thing. We all need a thing. This is what we’re going to do. And so yeah, I just want to say organize, organize. Don’t think that you have to use big organizing words and all the things and training. If you have ever said, this is a thing we want and I think we should get it, you can organize some people and can do that again and again. And so the last thing is these big rallies, love them, have done them. But the thing that we still need to strengthen is absorption. We need to have a way to say, alright, people are engaged, they are ready to do something, have a way to plug people into work that’s being done or support what people want to do that they don’t see, right?
That it’s great to get together, but that should be a moment of where we’re feeling like, oh, there’s more people who feel the way we do that want to do some things and let’s get together. And so let’s create those opportunities, like solid opportunities that we can say, Hey, come and work with fun. We’re doing these things. Or come and work with this labor council or mutual aid. I’m part of east of the River Mutual Aid here in DC and we are still delivering free groceries and household goods since the first week of the shutdown. And many of us are also union members, and so we share information. And so what we know is if Snap in DC goes aways 123,000 people who will be impacted. So what do we do to say yes, whether we’re working or not, people got to eat. So how do we take care of these basic survival needs as a community? So yeah, I mean that’s my thing is organize, organize, organize, absorb people and realize mutual aid is we need each other to survive. So yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our guests, Adam, Ellen, and April, all three federal workers who have been furloughed while the government is shut down. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.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.
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## Working People
Working People is a podcast about working-class lives in the 21st century. In every episode, you'll hear interviews with workers from all walks of life. Working People aims to share and celebrate the diverse stories of working-class people, to remind ourselves that our stories matter, and to build a sense of shared struggle and solidarity between workers around the world.
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# This government shutdown is not like the others: Furloughed federal workers explain
by Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network
October 22, 2025
<h1>This government shutdown is not like the others: Furloughed federal workers explain</h1> <p class="byline">by Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network <br />October 22, 2025</p> <br /> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> https://open.spotify.com/episode/2bMKN8PkHQpYJrShHRw0Qt?si=72153e2ef5204f8c </div> </figure> <p class="has-drop-cap">The federal government shutdown is now in its fourth week. Over 700,000 federal employees have been furloughed, with nearly as many continuing to work without pay, yet there are still no signs that an end to the shutdown is near. “Unlike past presidents, Mr. Trump appears to feel little urgency to strike a deal to reopen the government,” Luke Broadwater writes at <em>The New York Times</em>. “Instead, he has used the shutdown, which began Oct. 1, as an opportunity to further remake the federal bureaucracy and jettison programs he does not like, seizing on unorthodox budgetary maneuvers that some have called illegal.” In this episode, we speak with three furloughed federal employees about the harm government shutdowns cause working people, and we discuss why this shutdown is different.</p> <p><strong>Guests:</strong></p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Adam is a furloughed federal employee who works in recreation for the US Forest Service, managing hiking, biking, and equestrian trails in central Idaho. He serves as chapter president of National Federation of Federal Employees Local 1753, and he is an organizer with the Federal Unionists Network.</li> <li>Ellen is a furloughed federal employee who works in SNAP oversight and administration at the USDA Food and Nutrition Service. She serves as chapter president of National Treasury Employees Union Local 255, representing FNS employees at the Northeast regional office, and she is an organizer with the Federal Unionists Network in Boston.</li> <li>April is a furloughed federal employee who works in the office of Head Start at the Administration for Children and Families HQ in Washington, DC. She serves as chapter president of the National Treasury Employees Union Local 250.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Additional links/info:</strong></p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Federal Unionists Network <a href="https://www.federalunionists.net/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">website</a>, <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/fedworkersunited.bsky.social" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">BlueSky</a>, and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/fedworkersunited/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Instagram</a></li> <li>Federal Unionists Network: “<a href="https://actionnetwork.org/forms/pledge-to-defend" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Join Us To Defend Public Services!</a>”</li> <li>Luke Broadwater, <em>The New York Times</em>, “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/us/politics/trump-democrats-shutdown-deal.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Shutdown Is Stretching On. Trump Doesn’t Seem to Mind.</a>”</li> <li><em>Democracy Now!</em>, “<a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2025/10/21/russell_vought_propublica_shadow_president" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Shadow president: Project 2025 architect Russell Vought is using shutdown to gut federal agencies</a>”</li> </ul> <p><strong>Credits:</strong></p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Featured music: Jules Taylor, “<em>Working People</em>” Theme Song</li> <li>Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich</li> </ul> <details class="wp-block-details"> <summary>Transcript</summary> <p><em>The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.</em></p> <p>Maximillian Alvarez:</p> <p>I got work. 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 within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we are recording this episode on Monday, October 20th, and the federal government has been shut down for nearly three weeks at this point. Although frankly, the term shutdown can be misleading because there's still a lot happening in the federal government right now. As the New York Times reports, president Trump has repurposed money to fund military salaries during the government shutdown. He has pledged to find ways to make sure many in law enforcement get paid.</p> <p>He has used the fiscal impasse to halt funding to democratic jurisdictions and is trying to lay off thousands of federal workers. Government shutdowns are usually resolved only after the pain they inflict on everyday Americans forces elected officials in Washington to come to an agreement. But as the shutdown nears a fourth week, Mr. Trump's actions have instead reduced the pressure for an immediate resolution and pushed his political opponents to further dig in. We're not going to bend. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leaders said on Friday, the 17th day of the shutdown we're not going to break. He added all of these efforts to try to intimidate Democratic members of the House and the Senate are not going to work. He said. Now unlike past presidents, Mr. Trump appears to feel little urgency to strike a deal to reopen the government. Instead, he has used the shutdown, which began October 1st as an opportunity to further remake the Federal Bureaucracy and Jettison programs.</p> <p>He does not like seizing on unorthodox budgetary maneuvers that some have called illegal administration. Officials appear undaunted by the criticism even after a federal judge temporarily blocked their efforts to conduct mass firings on Friday. Some agencies indicated in court filings that they might proceed with layoffs that officials suggested were not covered by the order. Russell T vote, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the architect of the effort to remake the government has pledged to quote, stay on offense throughout the shutdown. Now all of this is going on while at least 700,000 federal employees have been furloughed with nearly as many continuing to work without pay. And today we are speaking three of those furloughed federal workers. First, we are joined by Adam, who works in recreation for the US Forest Service, managing, hiking, biking, and equestrian trails in central Idaho. He's also local president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, local 1753 and an organizer with the Federal Unionist Network.</p> <p>We are also joined by Ellen, who works in SNAP oversight and administration at the USDA Food and Nutrition Service. Ellen is the chapter president of the National Treasury Employees Union, local 2 55 representing FNS employees at the Northeast Regional Office, and she's an organizer with the Federal Unionist Network in Boston. And lastly, but not least, we are joined by April, who is National Treasury Employees Union, chapter two 50 president and who also works in the office of Head Start at the Administration for Children and Families Headquarters in Washington DC And they are all three here speaking on their own behalf. They're not speaking on behalf of the government, of the agencies they work at or their unions. Adam, Ellen, April, thank you all so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it, especially with everything going on in the damn country right now. Everything going on in your lives right now. And I want to start there. I want to start with where we are here and now in the third week of this shutdown. And I wanted to ask if we could go around the table and first have you introduce yourselves and tell listeners a little more about the work that you do for the federal government and then if you can tell us what these past three weeks have been like for you.</p> <p>Adam:</p> <p>Thanks, Max. Yeah, like you said, my name is Adam. I work at Recreation for the US Forest Service and I run a trail program. We've maintained about 600 miles of hiking and biking trails, like you said, and it has already been a strange summer. We usually have about 10 permanent folks plus seasonal employees that can help us maintain trails, maintain trail heads, bathrooms, campsites, all that good stuff. Since the beginning of the year, we're now down to just three of us because we lost so many folks before even the furlough started happening. But we lost folks due to the deferred resignation program. People were stepping out and stepping away from the agency just because of the toxic workplace that existed in February and ongoing. And once the shutdown started on day one, by the end of that day I was told that I would be furloughed or no longer using the words essential and non-essential.</p> <p>But the feeling is pretty clear when they tell you that it just don't bother coming into work the next day. So there's plenty of things that will be happening. There's definitely no trails getting maintained by the agency right now on any of the places that I work. And that's about it as far as my agency work since the shutdown started. But definitely committing more deeply with my sudden free time to work within our union, within our local, trying to make sure that people who are still working are getting connected with resources and that they're still getting informed on their rights. And as well as the people who have been furloughed who are not getting paid, just making sure that they know that they can turn to their fellow members for support, where to look for other resources that they might need. And then keeping everyone together because it does feel a little bit like that's part of this process and who is working and who's not working is to build up some divisiveness between all of us at the working level. So far, folks in the Forest Service have been pretty lucky. Those that are still working are still getting paid for at least through this pay period. At least there was some leftover funding and so far folks are getting paid, which is a benefit for us, at least at the agency.</p> <p>Ellen:</p> <p>Max. Thanks for having us on here today. So my name's Ellen. I work at the Food and Nutrition Service, and we do a lot of things that FNS, we administer the 16 nutritional assistance programs that the federal government provides. So everything from SNAP to WIC to the school lunch program. I specifically worked in SNAP and made sure that the states had all their questions answered on how to actually give out SNAP benefits, how to determine if people were eligible. There's a whole maze of regulations and rules that people have to follow. And so our job was to kind of parse that for the states, make it a little easier for them, and now it's hard to not be doing that, to not be answering their questions, especially when the program changed so much in July, and there'll be real penalties for them starting next year if they don't get things right, they'll have to start paying for a portion of SNAP benefits.</p> <p>Their administrative costs are going to go up this time next year. And we are fielding a lot of questions on how do we pay for this? What are the kind of essential rules and regulations that we have to follow up until October one and then now we're gone. I also worked in some of the auxiliary programs to SNAP that required some extra approval for funding. So there was a SNAP Nutrition education program that I worked on where actually on the last year of that program, because Congress decided to end its permanent funding status back in July, so there's only funds left through September 30th, 2026. And so we were fielding a lot of questions on how do we run the last year of this program? How do we close it out, lay people off? And so now I'm not, my coworking bank weren't there to answer those questions for folks.</p> <p>So it's been weird for people in the last three weeks of seeing everything unfolding in the hearing about how people are, not even just federal workers, but everyday working. People are concerned about how they're going to put food on their tables as everything gets more expensive. And knowing that the programs that we administer might have questions going unanswered of how the states can fill the gaps, states and food banks, schools can fill the gaps that are left by the federal government. And we work in human service program, so we're always thinking about the recipients at the end of the day. And we're concerned not just about how we can get paychecks and how we can get put on the table, but how we can keep helping the people that are there. So I know a lot of my members are volunteering at food banks right now off of the time that we have left in our day and trying to help out and plug into their local communities where we can. I've trying to get the word out about what federal workers are doing and trying to organize with the Federal Unionist Network to keep getting the message out there and also trying to cohere my members still so that we don't feel any sense of isolation from each other as we're continuing to read the news, worrying about rifs and worrying about mass firings, trying to keep everyone together in these past three weeks. And hopefully we'll stay together even longer than that.</p> <p>April:</p> <p>Yeah, it's always so heavy to listen to because as part of Head Start, I, in addition to being chapter president, I work in policy. And so some of the things I was working on before, of course, are all the things that this administration hates. In fact, they were the first things to go. So I worked on the Office of Head Starts Equity plan, I helped with building all of the public comments for new head of regulations, and I manage the process of reports to Congress, all of the ones that are statutorily required. And I would just say that within HHS, it's such a, I mean a lot of the same things are just happening across the government, but things are, we just have to constantly wait to see what the impact is and just constantly check in with each other. And our programs are so interlinked.</p> <p>We're watching what happens with snap because we know that our kids and families are also connected to that program. The same with tanf, the same with I represent employees who work in LA eap. So again, heating, but then there was a push to take and strip bargaining unit rights away from a good portion of my members in the Office of Refugee Resettlement. And so even though it seems like, okay, well they go to work just as regular, now they're getting hit with debt letters for locality changes that are not their fault because they were told to come back and then got exceptions and then told that they would come back and some 50 if they lived 50 miles outside of whatever created things. And so they're getting thousands of letters in debt and the agency you call and they're like, we don't know what these debt letters are either.</p> <p>And I'd also say being specifically here in DC a lot of, and I'll say that a lot of my members are black folks and very many of them are black women who have also just been very much more impacted when it comes to the shutdown because we've already been leaving in record numbers like the biggest exodus from the government in the history of the government in a country where those were some of the first stable jobs that black folks had and that unions had were essential to making happen. And so seeing this push out and exodus of folks who are generations of people who have worked in the government and have created a staple in communities. And then I, look, I live in DC and we have one of the highest populations of both poverty black folks and our welcoming in a lot of our migrant families and community members.</p> <p>And so seeing that once our program specialists who have gotten hit the hardest, those are the people who do all the grants. They talk to the grantees knowing, but they also live over here. And so being in a new income bracket means having new needs, especially for kids. And so there's just this interconnectedness with our lives as employees, just the not knowing also just like this is an abusive relationship with the government. I just want to say, and that, so this, it just seems like the snowball everywhere. And so there's never a time when people are just talking about programs or just talking about their lives. They're just so intertwined. So yeah, there's that sense. But I also will say that people are really angry and my commentary on the labor movement in the United States is like they don't have an organized way necessarily to do that. But I also see groups like fun coming and being like, all right, we got these wheels. We have some knowledge from generations. So I will say that's also a change with some of the employees wanting to be becoming politicized or wanting to get active.</p> <p>Maximillian Alvarez:</p> <p>I want to pick up on that point because you put that really powerfully April, and it's something that I've heard echoed in my conversations with other federal workers when you said that this is an abusive relationship and from the outside it sure as hell looks like that. And even as a citizen, it sure as hell feels that way to a lot of us right now. But as federal workers, as we already mentioned long before this shutdown began on October 1st, this has been a year unlike any other for you all and your coworkers. And I wanted to ask if we could just flesh that out a bit more, if we could get a worker's eye view from your different sides of the federal workforce. Could you tell listeners a bit more about what it's actually been like to work in the federal government over the past year leading up to the inauguration and from there to now?</p> <p>Adam:</p> <p>Yeah, I would say that earlier in 2025 when Russell V said, and not a direct quote here, but that they want to make federal workers' lives miserable, that they want us to not be in the workplace, they want us to not work here anymore,</p> <p>Maximillian Alvarez:</p> <p>We want to put them in trauma where his exact words.</p> <p>Adam:</p> <p>Exactly. Exactly. And to have that be the overarching aura around you. Even when you work in a great workplace with people that really care about what they do and they care about each other and they want to hold each other up and provide these public services to Americans, that was the dark cloud that's been hanging over us this whole year. And from the very beginning with those bullshit five points, which was just a waste of time, super patronizing and condescending to the probationary firings, the illegal terminations of thousands of probationary employees, our unions were able to fight to bring those people back, but they came back into the same environment with the media talking points and coming from politicians, blaming scapegoating federal workers. And it's impossible for it not to feel like a toxic workplace. So many people took this deferred resignation program even if they weren't already going to get fired or RIFed, because so many of the folks that I know that took it didn't want to.</p> <p>They felt coerced into doing it. They were coming to work every day being belittled by the administration, by the heads of many agencies. And then that's why this shutdown doesn't, to me feels like the next step. It just feels like the natural progression of the things that they've been trying to do this whole year of make our lives miserable, divide us and then use that as an excuse to cut public services that American people need. And it's, this isn't like some left versus right bullshit. This is like the billionaires and their political pawns versus the American people through the lens of federal workers and the services that we provide for everybody. And I think that that's part of why the fund has been so important in this moment, and this is changing the narrative is that the importance of federal unions is in that our working conditions day-to-day, whatever agency we work in, those working conditions are the conditions of the public services that we provide for the American people. When we are supported in doing our jobs and we are allowed to do our jobs and we're funded, we are the experts in our fields, this is our job. I jokingly say I smash rocks for a living, but I'm a pretty damn good trail builder. And when those jobs and all of our other jobs are on the cutting block, that directly impacts the American people.</p> <p>Ellen:</p> <p>When they say that they're wanting to cut the Democrat programs and they only want to pay people that are deserving of it, I think it really shows it's the billionaire versus the working people divide because what are the Democrat programs is programs like the food and nutrition programs is programs like April's programs is programs that will keep the land public so that people can actually go and recreate on them instead of being just closed off or drilling or logging or whatever. And this whole year, it's felt like them trying to make us miserable to make us leave so that they can cut our programs and say, look, that program's not working anyway, so why don't we just end snap or look, that funding's not working anyway, and the refugees aren't being resettled. I don't know April, that's the probably way of talking about it, but they're trying to make us so miserable.</p> <p>And in my workplace, at the very beginning, we were all hopeful. We were like, oh, we can stick it out as long as we stick together as an agency and as an office that we'll make it out of these next four years together. We can pull up with anything. A lot of people had made it through the first Trump presidency and they're like, it's okay. Let us old heads guide y new workers through this. I was like, let's go. And then they fired the probationary employees. I was like, oh, shoot. The people that I've worked with for the past year, maybe two years, for some people, their ary peers were a little bit longer. And then it's like, well, do we still want to go on? Because our bosses still want us to do the same amount of work with you or people, and who knows if they're going to come back and they're trying to downsize the federal government.</p> <p>Wilson wants to not only traumatize the federal workforce, but he wants to shrink it so that we can't do the work that we are charged with doing. And since March, my office has faced threats of closures, and we're seeing offices close across the nation too. So in Boston, the HHS office closed and the part of the Department of Education office closed. And so we keep thinking the house is going to drop, we're going to close next. And it's so hard doing the work, obviously in that kind of environment where I, I've been doing England, I want to support these New England states, but maybe I'll have to move away so that I can keep doing my work or maybe they'll just fire me so that I can't do the work. Period. And morale, morale kind of sucked, but about half of my office has stuck around.</p> <p>Half of us did not take the deferred reservation program, and it's been like, if we can make it through, we've made it through these nine months so far, and we can make it through anything as long as we stick together. So solidarity has never been stronger. The feeling of support amongst each other has never been better, and there's just a lot of dark humor around, but it's whatever makes us feel better. At the end of the day, whatever gets a little laugh out of everybody, and I know a lot of people are turning to their coworkers. We have to spend so much more time together. We have to do our Zoom calls from the office now and drive two hours each day to be on teams calls, but it's giving us time to talk in the hallways to commiserate about anything that's going on and just try to lift each other up. And I feel like that's what federal workers do. I feel like the's, what fund does too, get to meet a bunch of other federal workers. And when people go out to rallies, I know that there's lots of signs that the public are supportive of federal workers. And so it's been great to see the public support too for us.</p> <p>April:</p> <p>Yeah, I think as someone who has been a part of whatever, how many shutdowns since 2013, I think it's just so different. And so leading up to the election, it really was like, what do we do? And as federal workers, we're very clear that it almost doesn't matter. I mean, it matters how the elections go, but we know that things change fundamentally. Things change every few years based on whatever it could be on whatever's hot, we'll say that. And so there's that part, but to what extent and how is that going to change what I do every day? Because for me, it wiped out all of the work. That was literally my entire performance plan in one day. It was like, oh, nah. And so I was like, oh, I'm the chopping block for, oh, we're doing, we want to get rid of policy employees.</p> <p>There's one we want to get rid of people who are doing any kind of DEI work. And I was leading the whole, so I just was like, all right, so what does that mean? And we knew that going forward because there were things like Schedule F, and so I think it's important to say the buildup was definitely there. I think there was a preparation emotionally, and I would say in the work we did that was just very cognizant of, okay, what things do we need to make sure are evergreen to ensure that we as employees are supported in the best ways?</p> <p>How do we make that happen? What kind of new connections do we need to make between programs? So there was that, and then there was the hit, it literally was like all the shoes dropped day one, and it just was like, oh yeah, all the contingency plans and then no contingency plans because what is that? This whole thing, that whole thing called law and order that you would usually go to do anything, not even just fight back was completely broken. Who do you go to? Everybody's like, did you get an answer on the HR line? Nope, nobody did. And then the next day it's like there's a whole new email that you write email, and then sometimes we're not using this email anymore because nobody is here to take, and then when people get fired or they get ripped or put on administrative leave, nobody knows who they are until their email doesn't work.</p> <p>And there's no way to know the work that they were doing, that there's no access to any of those things. They just couldn't go to work that day. And then to try to figure out for everything you do, okay, so can I still submit this? Because statutorily it has to be done. And then are we on the hook for not doing that part too? Probably. And then I think there came the fact where we knew even the ways in which they went, the ways that they went about attacking us weren't even just using things that were already that they could use against us. It was brand new things and it was almost like throw everything up the wall and see what sticks. Obviously all of the administrative leave, the riff notices, AI is doing them so constantly just everybody's service dates are wrong, everybody's veteran status is wrong, but there's nobody in the office to fix it being.</p> <p>And I have a smile on my face because sometimes I forgot about the five points. There's literally so much that happens day to day that you just don't know. And then I think last month what I realized is I really had members who were saying, you know what? Because some of our employees got refire, right? They got fired twice, got brought back refire. They were just like, I don't want to fight. Take my name off the MSVP lawsuit. I just don't want to go through this anymore. And I don't fault you. I'm going to need you to keep fighting, but I don't fault you. It's exhausting. It's exhausting for them. I mean, I'm furloughed not getting paid, but some of the folks who went through two firings and stuff like that mean, so just over the last year has been every day. I mean, we go to log on and I'm like, deep breath. You don't know if that's the day you got to a notice. Your computer doesn't work. So everybody who got riff notices last week, their computers just stopped working. So yeah, I mean it's just never knowing anything.</p> <p>Ellen:</p> <p>If I could add on, there's a level of paranoia that's like a attached to everybody who's still here because of that. Because there's been, if the internet goes out of the office sometimes or the security thing that you scan your badge onto, if that just takes a little too long, but everyone's just like, am I fired? And it's like, that did not happen before. But now it just getting a lot worse and the technologies breaking down a lot more. There's a lot of wifi issues, there's a lot of system issues, and so everything is slowing down. So not only are they taking away people, but the systems that they're supposed to be good at maintaining as the rich folk are not working anymore too. They built their fortunes off of making it systems and yet ours are, ours are breaking and making us think that we're fired every week.</p> <p>Maximillian Alvarez:</p> <p>I want to pick up on that though, right? Because you guys mentioned in the beginning of this panel that it's not just you and your coworkers whose lives are being impacted by all this. It is the millions and millions of Americans who depend on you and your labor and the services that your coworkers and your agencies provide, whether that's people going to VA hospitals, people going to national parks, people looking for food assistance, housing assistance. This is one of the greatest tricks, these government efficiency, cost cutting folks. I mean, we've seen them, they're new faces, but the same kind of story year after year. But they're always pitching this as like, oh, government is bloated bureaucracy that's wasting taxpayer money. We're doing this to make the government more efficient for you, the American taxpayer. And so I wanted to kind of make that a two-part question for you all because you all said it feels like ages ago, but it wasn't even like nine months ago that Elon fricking Musk was the head of Doge cutting departments left and and loading up everyone's personal information into these unchecked AI systems that feels like forever ago.</p> <p>And now here we are months later hearing that this is making our work life hell. So I wanted to ask a, are all these cuts, all this crap that you all have been enduring and that we've been watching, has it made the government more efficient? And B, how is this, what do you think people out there need to understand about how this is impacting the whole of American society? Like poor and working Americans across the board, not just folks working for the federal government?</p> <p>Adam:</p> <p>Yeah, I think that the ultimate irony of the push for efficiency is that the people doing the work on the ground, if had someone asked us, we definitely could have found ways to make these systems not only more efficient, but better for all working people, more productive. But that's obviously not what they were trying to do. They're trying to enrich the billionaires, the Doge cost how many billions of dollars? And then most of that was just to pay people to do nothing until the end of the fiscal year. No, I absolutely didn't think things are more efficient now. Things feel more inefficient than ever. With all the firings and the resignations that have happened, people are struggling even more to do their jobs that they already were doing without the appropriate amount of funding or staff. And those jobs are now even harder. And I think that this is what's so critically important that all working people need to understand is that we really feels like we're on the front line of one of the front lines of this fight right now.</p> <p>And federal employees administer nearly every single service that sustains daily life in America, whether that's, like you said, healthcare for veterans, housing, clean air, clean water, food assistance, recreation, public lands, all sorts of other consumer protections. And the total impact on the budget to all of that is less than 5% of the total expenditure of the US. And for us to be able to provide all that we do for that little sliver of a budget and then to be told that that little sliver of the budget is where we need to make our cuts to efficiency just by removing public services for working class people, that is what's been so frustrating to see that be such a big part of what they're selling as a solution. And it's really just another way to funnel wealth up. And it has honestly, it's made me more than ever want to stay working as a federal employee.</p> <p>I have this sudden and intense desire to hold the line and make sure that these public services are provided for everyone. And so fight to keep those. And I think that's what a lot of us are trying to do in our unions and through fun and through these other community organizations is we swore an oath when we took these positions to defend the constitution and to provide these services to American people. And that is really what's lit a fire I think under so many of us is that we are seeing these cuts happening and seeing reading between the lines on what's going to happen to your everyday American when they don't have social security or food assistance or Medicare. And I think that yeah, that's definitely what's engaged me and energized me even through the abusive relationship of being a Fed this past year.</p> <p>Ellen:</p> <p>Just mic drop on that. Yeah, it's like how do you get more efficient if you are in a abusive relationship if you're seeing your coworkers walk out the door, but I think everybody who's staying behind is like, we have to be here. We have to hold the line because if we leave our positions then the programs that we administer, they might not have been gone immediately, but they're going to break down further and further until they're just not functional programs anymore. At some point, if you are trying to administer a program and all of your questions go unanswered about it and how you're supposed to do things correctly, you're going to make mistakes on accident until the whole thing just kind of breaks. You put the wrong screws in the wrong places, the machine is going to collapse. And we're seeing a lot of that.</p> <p>Things are so much slower now than they were eight months ago because so many people have left. I said earlier that half of my agency stayed, but really half of them left. And so we have to pick up half of the work with the same amount of people who are a little bit more traumatized, a little bit more like, what the hell's going on? And we're a little angrier now, so we want to hold the lie, but we don't know exactly what we're doing. And so things take a little bit longer. First we have to figure out what the heck somebody's asking us to do, then we have to figure out how to do it, and then we have to figure out how to tell them to do it.</p> <p>And sometimes we have to wait for somebody to tell us if we can tell them how to do it, if that makes any sense at all. We don't have the clearance to answer certain questions with authority to make certain decisions that we used to have. By the way, they've taken a lot of autonomy away from federal workers because there's an element of control, just like an abusive relationship where the abuser wants to do, wants you to do everything as they tell you to do it. And you can't color outside the lines at all. But the federal government has worked for a long time, I think with federal workers who have had to do more with less. And we're having to do that now. And we've usually been able to do that because we can be creative or we have a little bit of autonomy and we get to use our expertise to make some decisions and apply our discretion as professionals.</p> <p>And that's now kind of being taken away from us because discretion is not efficient maybe or makes some people look a little less powerful at the very least. And I think that's why there's some people have a little bit of a fire when things take a little bit longer to get resolved. We have to wait three months instead of three weeks to answer a question. It is the people at the other side of that question who wait a little bit longer. Most of the times when we're solving things for our state partners for schools, when we're answering their questions, it's because they have a SNAP recipient, Rick recipient who has a situation that needs to be resolved. They have somebody who's raising that question for us and there's a novel situation. Maybe it's a complex family situation, maybe it's a woman who has to take in her relative's kids and now they have a new family composition and they don't know what to do and they're trying to figure out how do I give the state is trying to figure out how do I give benefits to these kids and to this family so that they can get fed.</p> <p>And when we take longer to answer those questions when we're less efficient, and that's a family who's going hungry for a couple more days and I hate that.</p> <p>April:</p> <p>Yeah, I would say the thing that's interesting to me about efficiency is I don't actually think that anybody has a definition for that. The people who want it to be efficient, because then you think about ultra people, who are we paying for people who are poor and this and that? But put it this way. So if you believe so much in welfare to work, but you also want start childcare and pre-K to be defunded or dismantled, parents can't go to work if the kids can't go to childcare. And then if you can't go to work because they have no childcare, then they can't pay rent. So these billionaire developers, not only will they have issues with people being able to afford rent, which people can't already, but new people are not going to have the income to move in either. So I think it's not until people are impacted personally, until they feel it personally that they will take this seriously.</p> <p>I don't think they understand what the government does. And I'm talking about the public now. I don't know that people know what the government does. I don't think they understand what we do and don't do or have, like you said, discretion or power to do even when we're at our biggest or whatever and everybody's at work. And so I just feel like efficiency for whom and where, because I mean now the farmers are like, so this is not exactly what we meant and that's going to trickle down because food prices, food that we have for USDA, all of these things will start to happen and people will realize, oh, so we only got what we needed because we tried to make sure that everybody got what they needed. And so I don't think that it's, until people are like, why don't you just open the government? So November 1st is coming, you may not have food. There's all these things that might crash. And I don't think it's going to be until they're just like, or the medical stuff, everybody's Obamacare or whatever they want to call it. But when it goes up 200%, yeah, I think they'll be like, oh, well maybe. I mean they might change the narrative and be like, that's not Obamacare. That's some other thing. But it's not until they experience it themselves.</p> <p>Maximillian Alvarez:</p> <p>Well, and just to sort of, I guess round us out on that note, I am sure folks listening to this, they have the same question that all of us have, which is like, when is this damn thing going to end? When is the government going to reopen? And in what condition is the government going to be if and when it does reopen? Right? I mean, I think we've covered a lot of that ground here and you guys have all been so helpful by giving our listeners as much information and perspective as you can, but I know I can't keep you for much longer. And so I just wanted to sort of talk about where things go from here, both short term with this government shutdown and long-term with, like you guys said, the effort to hold the line before the country is totally unrecognizable to all of us.</p> <p>And I guess I'm thinking about the fact that I was in DC this past weekend on the ground covering one of the thousands of no kings protests that happen across the country. I'm there talking to folks, seeing federal workers, seeing folks with signs supporting federal workers, and who do I bump into on the street? But our labor queen, president of the Association of Flight attendants, Sarah Nelson there with her family protesting, we did an interview on the ground and I got a chance to ask Sarah, she became a household name during the last government shutdown in 2019, the longest in America's history up to this point. It was like 35 days, I believe. And I remember just like now, it felt like this shutdown could go on forever. There's total gridlock between Democrats, republicans on the hill, and then a new player entered the chat, and that was labor and that was unions.</p> <p>That was people like Sarah Nelson saying the words general strike if we don't open the damn government. And all of a sudden people on Capitol Hill started moving very quickly to get the government open. And so I'm not saying that you guys are calling for a general strike, this is just my own personal reflection, but that was a really important moment in our history where I think a lot of working people learned that we don't have to just sit around and wait to see what Democrats and Republicans on the hill do to decide our collective fate. There's more that working people can do to change the situation here and to change the outcome. And so in that spirit, I just wanted to sort of go around the table one more time and ask if you had any kind of final thoughts or reflections for folks about what they can expect with the ongoing government shutdown, but also where the fight needs to be going forward with the Federal Unionist network or elsewhere. So anything you guys want to share, and then I promise I'll let you go.</p> <p>Adam:</p> <p>One thing that was really empowering for me in the springtime with the illegal firings of probationary employees was the way that we saw communities step up and support federal workers in their area. Even in small towns where I work in McCall, Idaho, there was a bunch of local businesses that were ready to support fired employees. There was, people were putting together potlucks at local churches and stuff like that to make sure these folks were getting the support financially and in the food that they needed. And that I think is what's going to have to become very important once again, as we near the end of the fourth week of the shutdown and people have gotten paychecks with $0 now, I think the impacts on the individual federal employees that are furloughed or working and not getting paid are pretty quickly going to become super important.</p> <p>So connecting at the local level is always going to be the most important thing, whether that's connecting with local unions, if you are in a union, get more active, reach out to your fellow workers across the private sector and the federal sector. I think where our power does and will eventually come from in a powerful way is where we as federal unions are also spending time connecting with all the other unions through central labor councils or state federations of AFL ccio and stuff like that, and being able to support each other there. And I think that going forward, state public services.com is where the big push and the federal unionist network is going. So that is open to federal employees, former federal employees, veterans and community allies, anyone who wants to save these public services, pick your favorite public service. And there's action happening to keep it around and improve it.</p> <p>And I think looking forward, that's where the groundwork that we're fighting that we're building right now is yes, to resist a fascist authoritarian regime change by capital, but also we're building a potential incredible future where the people on the ground doing the work, who know the people in their communities, know the services that they need, know how to provide them. We should be part of the conversation and the policy development. And I think that there's, what keeps me going is that vision and then envisioning a world where the people who need the services and provide the services have a say. And it's not just top down political puppetry.</p> <p>Ellen:</p> <p>I was just going to say a better world is possible if we build it. So everything that Adam said, get involved to your local community organizations. If you're in a union, become more active. There's definitely something that your union's executive board needs your help with or your steward words or anybody who's already involved in the union. There's always a need for more hands on deck if you're not unionized that get with your coworkers and talk about it. There's a ton of organizations out there to help people form a union in their workplace. And sometimes there's even people forming unions in their apartment building. So if you need to form a tenant union, you can go that way too. So any sort of union is a way to connect with other people and withhold labor, money, whatever, from capital so that the billionaires can't continue to make our lives worse because what they're doing to the federal sector is making everybody's lives worse and they're making life worse in other ways too that we haven't even talked about today. We probably won't and probably shouldn't. So just get heck with your community, not just your friends with the people who you're not friends with yet. Get it. Join your union. Go to save public services.com, especially if you're a federal worker so you can get connected with the fun. Just again, join your union. I feel like that can't be said. And</p> <p>April:</p> <p>Yeah, so many things. I think while we talked about general strike, right, and obviously we can't strike, and I'm not saying we should strike, but I will say that I spent time with unions in South Korea in a country where they can do and do general strikes and the kind of general strikes that remove presidents. And again, not saying we should do that here, but the part of that that is powerful that we can learn from is just how much organizing matters and finding those points of unity. So I mean these were government, they were literally, they were our South Korean counterparts. They were the administration, fraternal affairs, they were HHS basically. And so really looking at how in each place there was a commitment to just because it's not our chapter or even our local or even our union that we have decided that this thing they're doing is that important, that we will show up the same way that they show up and that they learn to organize their workplace so that they can organize.</p> <p>I mean, they're very clear that we're all workers. So there's this worker solidarity that is then part of the community the way of moving. It's just like, okay, we want a thing. We all need a thing. This is what we're going to do. And so yeah, I just want to say organize, organize. Don't think that you have to use big organizing words and all the things and training. If you have ever said, this is a thing we want and I think we should get it, you can organize some people and can do that again and again. And so the last thing is these big rallies, love them, have done them. But the thing that we still need to strengthen is absorption. We need to have a way to say, alright, people are engaged, they are ready to do something, have a way to plug people into work that's being done or support what people want to do that they don't see, right?</p> <p>That it's great to get together, but that should be a moment of where we're feeling like, oh, there's more people who feel the way we do that want to do some things and let's get together. And so let's create those opportunities, like solid opportunities that we can say, Hey, come and work with fun. We're doing these things. Or come and work with this labor council or mutual aid. I'm part of east of the River Mutual Aid here in DC and we are still delivering free groceries and household goods since the first week of the shutdown. And many of us are also union members, and so we share information. And so what we know is if Snap in DC goes aways 123,000 people who will be impacted. So what do we do to say yes, whether we're working or not, people got to eat. So how do we take care of these basic survival needs as a community? So yeah, I mean that's my thing is organize, organize, organize, absorb people and realize mutual aid is we need each other to survive. So yeah.</p> <p>Maximillian Alvarez:</p> <p>All right, gang, that's going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our guests, Adam, Ellen, and April, all three federal workers who have been furloughed while the government is shut down. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We'll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can't wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we're doing at the Real Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.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.</p> </details> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/this-government-shutdown-is-not-like-the-others-furloughed-federal-workers-explain">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com">The Real News Network</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"><img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://therealnews.com/?republication-pixel=true&post=338010&ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/this-government-shutdown-is-not-like-the-others-furloughed-federal-workers-explain", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script></p> Copy to Clipboard
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