Socialist response to Elon Musk's $1.77 trillion SpaceX IPO

This is part of a larger pattern of behavior of all of Musk's company that follows the kind of mantra of big tech which is the, you know, move fast and break things. It comes obviously at the expense of worker safety, of environmental regulations, of corruption, and democracy at large as we've seen throughout the country. Welcome, welcome, welcome everybody to the My name is David Griscom and I'm coming to y'all from Austin, Texas on this auspicious day. We're gonna get right into it. We're going to be talking with Etienne Rosas in just a couple minutes about what's going on in South Texas with SpaceX. But this is a pretty significant day, potentially the minting of the world's first trillionaire. So I wanted to break it down a little bit for y'all. Today, Musk SpaceX is launching the largest IPO in history at a valuation of 1.77 trillion. Much of that money is going to be on your back. SpaceX is a company that has achieved some real engineering feats, but the vast majority of revenue comes from the government contracts and from Starlink. Tied into SpaceX is now Twitter and Musk's chatbot Grok, which Elon Musk merged into SpaceX to hide the failures of his takeover of Twitter, including the massive buyout that was required to allow him to purchase that social media site in the first place. While he certainly paid back some of those folks in favors, like his role in promoting the far right domestically and internationally, those investors are certainly looking for a payback and the SpaceX IPO is a perfect opportunity for this. Now, Elon Musk doesn't like to play by the rules. He moved his businesses from California to Texas for this exact reason. Hiding from labor law, he has effectively bought out the Texas state government. In fact, my governor, Greg Abbott, has bragged about the fact that he happily leaves dinners with his own wife to take calls from Elon Musk. And since Musk has moved to Texas, our government has played a major role in clearing out the regulatory systems meant to protect the public for the benefit of this billionaire South African. When a worker died at the Tesla Gigafactory here, the state government was slow to act and federal investigation under the Trump administration only got a wrist slap for Elon Musk. Not satisfied enough with the complacent state and federal government, Elon Musk has even founded a company town here in Texas called Starbase. The vast majority of homes here are owned by the company and the government is made up of Musk allies and friends. And while these engineers are sitting pretty, the vast majority of the real work is done by contract labor by South Texans living in the state's poorest and most exploited region. A little bit more on that in just a second. On the IPO, there's a good chance that it may be on your back if you have retirement savings in an index fund. Normally, new IPOs are not included in index funds. The reason? To protect those funds which are seen as safe investments from fraudsters and hype. In Musk's case, both of those concerns are well-founded. But Musk has strong-armed Wall Street into changing the rules just for him, meaning that everyday people will see their retirements go into floating up the assets of the world's richest man. This $177 trillion valuation is completely out of step with reality, with SpaceX revenue. But when you write the rules, own the politicians, and have been a glorified government contractor your whole life like Musk, what's a few more billion taken from everyday people? While many in Musk's orbit will be popping champagne, celebrating their new billionaire status off the backs of everyday folks, you know who won't be celebrating? Jose Luis Batista, a 25-year-old from Donna, Texas. At 4 a.m. May 15th, an unsecured 7,700-pound metal beam fell, killing Batista. Musk's SpaceX has been long cited as an unsafe workplace, and those conditions there are set by the billionaire Elon Musk. We may be seeing the world's first trillionaire in Musk. He'll do it the same way that those who came before him did. Henry Ford, Rockefeller, etc. By taking from the public, putting the lives and bodies of those who actually do the work at risk, socializing the costs of his largesse while privatizing the profits. The question before us is the same as it has always been. Which side are you on? Well, friends, Etienne Rosas is a really great figure, somebody who I'm very honored to call friend and very happy to have on the program. So we're going to talk a little bit about South Texas and the conditions that Musk has created in this part of the state. It's a story that is often forgotten. That's a shame. So I'm very happy to have Etienne Rosas on the program, and we'll be right back after this quick break. And friends, we are back with The Jackman Show here. I'm really excited to be joined by Etienne Rosas, who is a public policy researcher, former candidate for office in the Rio Grande Valley, as well as a community organizer, activist, DSA member. Etienne, thank you so much for coming on The Jackman Show today. It's my pleasure. Thanks so much, David, for the invitation. Always a pleasure being here. No, of course, man. I'm so happy to be having you on the program. I'm frustrated that so much of the coverage that I've had to do about the Rio Grande Valley, both on this program and on Left Reckoning, has been about Elon Musk. And I mean, there's a lot to get into. Obviously, there's this huge IPO, which is really, I think, making a lot of things abundantly clear. There is the environmental and the political corruption that we're seeing. But I want to start with an event that I've seen you cover and ask a lot of important questions about. What is the death of Jose Luis Batista Jr. at a SpaceX facility? Could you talk about what happened here and why this has been something that you've been trying to investigate and ask questions about? Yeah, I mean, this is part of a larger pattern of behavior of all of Musk's company that follows the kind of mantra of big tech, which is to move fast and break things. It comes, obviously, at the expense of worker safety, of environmental regulations, of corruption, and democracy at large, as we've seen throughout the country. But Jose Luis Batista Jr.'s death is just kind of the starting point, I guess, of this situation that has been going on behind the scenes. And it comes at a time that is very critical for Musk, because it's right before the launch of the IPO. And it was right before a big Starship launch, which is at, I mean, that's a critical choke point for the entire SpaceX operation and the rest of Musk's companies and financial viability. So Jose Luis Batista Jr.'s, first off, he was a contractor working for a company out of, I forgot the town, a small town in Texas. But usually SpaceX contracts out a lot of this hard labor, a lot of welders, a lot of engineers aren't actually SpaceX employees, they're contracted out. And a lot of the reason why Musk came down to the valley was because very lax regulation, corporate capture of the local government, which has always been fairly pliable, and they acquiesce to most of the corporation's demands. And Jose Luis Batista Jr. was the latest victim in it. But we've seen also reports from Reuters, from other outlets that have shown that SpaceX is an outlier when it comes to worker accidents. They also, from what I've been told, a lot of the workers are made to sign NDAs going in there. Usually after the fact, when an event happens, they're told, you do not speak of this, don't go to the press. They're intimidated. And a lot of them, from what I have gathered, also are even fired when there's even these requests to make the environment safe. So what we know from reports from the past is that the kind of safety measures that they take are very much left at the hands of workers who are there, who are basically accepting terms of, if you're working here in this massive space rocket that obviously a lot of things can go wrong, it's at your own risk. And because you are in an area where people need jobs and are struggling to pay their rent or get health care, a lot of them take these very risky jobs and just assume, you know, this is just part of the game. So we're kind of, this is kind of the mentality of what we used to have during, you know, at the turn of the century, you know, over a century ago where we saw people in factories being mutilated or, you know, having to face all of these risks just to put food on the table. Before then, we knew that there was a much, much higher incident rate. And this is probably because of FOIA requests, because SpaceX itself would not put that information out willingly. OSHA had already seen that there was an elevated rate of incidents, not just in SpaceX, but also in Tesla and other Musk companies on top of the environmental regulations that are always broken and for which there are really no consequences, because in reality, Texas, as a very pro-corporate, very anti-union state, doesn't really care that much about workers themselves. It cares about the growth of corporate capital. And it's sort of a place that is reflective of, you know, what's going on in the entire coast where industry just continues taking over. Just really quick, Etienne, I just want to make this clear to the listeners. So in Texas, in recent years, we've seen the state government wage war on the kind of like local workers protections. And I don't need to tell anybody this, Texas is hot as hell. And one of those local protections that they got rid of was water break protections for workers. At the same time, in Texas, we have laws about what you need to provide for dogs if they are left outside in Texas. I just want to be abundantly clear to listeners here, in Texas, we treat dogs better than we treat workers. And there's a huge reason why someone like Elon Musk comes here and works. And Etienne, I mean, I want to ask you about this next bit here, because I've seen you respond to this on Instagram and in other places. I've covered, for example, here at the Tesla Gigafactory, when we had another kind of similar death in the sense of what's going on here. Oh, you know, it just seems like these people are overworked. And, you know, Tesla wasn't trying to release any information to the government, to people, to journalists. And then you get this refrain from folks who say, well, even if they did do something gross, gross misconduct, it wasn't Musk. It wasn't Tesla. It wasn't SpaceX. It was the contractor. Can you respond to that kind of line of argument that we get from people? Well, first off, just because he's not legally liable doesn't really mean that he did nothing wrong. It just means that the legal system sucks. And it's not doing much to protect normal people, workers who are more vulnerable. And it's doing a whole hell of a lot to protect billionaires and their interests like Musk. Second, there are regulations in place, especially for a big, I mean, the biggest contractor for or the biggest client for SpaceX is the US government. Any kind of government contractor also has very clear regulations in place for what kind of labor, how labor happens there, and what safety regulations and other kinds of regulations should be in place. In the case of SpaceX, a lot of exceptions just keep getting made. And every time something happens, there's a slap on the wrist and almost very little investigation even happening to begin with. Part of the reason why Musk decided to incorporate and the people around decided to incorporate their own town, which is Starbase, and it's a town of about, I don't know, upward maybe 200 people, something like that, and voted overwhelmingly to become just this company town right outside of Brownsville is because that allows them to shield themselves from other kinds of regulations and to set their own rules in, you know, what is basically a big company town. When Starbase was reached out to about these, about what had happened, they wouldn't even really respond for SpaceX. They would just say, oh yeah, we're very sorry about this incident, but that's just not our jurisdiction, even though they're a company town and all the mayor and all the rest of the people there that are in government. They're like security, like, I mean, a lot of their leadership are like people with like insecurity or HR, if I recall correctly. Yeah, kind of really creepy situation there. Yeah, it's just kind of like a chain of command that is there to do his bidding to launder the reputation and then to deflect. And when they were asked, they were said, I mean, you have to take that up with SpaceX because we don't know, even though they are SpaceX. But the reality here is that it's very, like, people would say stuff like, well, if somebody goes and like fixes my, like, I hire somebody to fix my roof and they fall off, like, am I liable for that? And it's a very, very different thing when you're talking about somebody fixing your roof and somebody working on a massive space rocket with very, you know, very critical safety measures that have to be in place for people to not create this just larger human tragedy. Also, like, let's just be really clear about, like, what this process is going to be like to, you know, this idea of separation. I understand, like, why they set up these kind of legal protections, but as in the same way that, like, most people know that, like, a lot of these kind of like independent contractor relationships at work are bullshit. It's just so that bosses don't have to pay for insurance and all these other kind of things for workers. Elon Musk sets the dynamic at those facilities. He sets the schedule, and when they're like, hey, we need to get this done by this certain time, that is coming from the top. I'm, you know, Musk, you know, it's amazing when something goes wrong, they're like, well, I'm not involved. And yet, you know, you know, that the entire time, Musk is very much watching what's going on here, making sure that they're meeting their deadlines, or else he wouldn't have a contract with them. These were, José Luis Bautista Jr. died around 4am. They were working at breakneck speed in order to get this launch ready to go, and because the launch was going to happen supposedly like three days later, you had workers there working around the clock in very sensitive, using, you know, in very sensitive areas that requires a lot of safety measures and requires people who are well rested, and to have the appropriate measures in place to ensure their security. What happened there could very well just be the result of, I mean, even if it is somebody making a poor decision, it's, it is tied to the fact that they are being overworked, they're being exploited. And by the way, this is not just coming from me. When I put these videos out, I had dozens, dozens of former SpaceX employees or family members of SpaceX employees who were telling me that this, this case was not exceptional, that people who had been there had been saying for the longest time, it's just a matter of time before somebody here gets into a serious accident. And in fact, if you look at the record and you go back, there are other incidents that are pretty, pretty grave. I mean, that we don't even really know what the follow-up was. It's just somebody may have actually even died in a couple of incidents that were described to me, but the, but SpaceX washed its hands clean, and if they died outside, if they went to the hospital and didn't make it, that was no longer their problem, and it wasn't registered as a death that happened in SpaceX, even though they died doing something related to the company. So they get to bypass all these rules, not just because SpaceX has designed it that way and has created this insular bubble, but it because it has captured all types of regulatory agencies, all types of levels of, all levels of government from the local to the state to the federal, obviously, but on top of it, the, the media has also just become beholden to those interests, and it took about five days before this was even reported, and there are many other stories that were told to me, and I was just, you know, researching just briefly, and I could only find, like, really small snippets of those stories of workers getting into accidents and other kind of shady situations where people lost their lives related to SpaceX's operations, but that were never publicized, and that were just kind of, it was maybe, like, one mention in the media, and it never kind of got beyond that. Look, I think that this kind of gets to another dynamic about, you know, the Rio Grande Valley in general, Texas more broadly, but the Rio Grande Valley in general, it's like, you know, the death of, of, of journalism and media, and I don't say this to denigrate all the wonderful people in the state of Texas who try to do this work, you know, but the fact that these kind of things are flying under the radar, I think there's no doubt about it, you know, that there's a large aspect to this that comes from the fact that, like, yeah, the, the folks who should be watching, the folks who should be reporting aren't, oftentimes because of cuts, because all the newsrooms have been hollowed out, but it creates a sense of, at least, like, kind of public impunity for somebody like Musk, if it's kind of up to somebody like you, I appreciate the work that you're doing here, but, you know, this isn't, you know, your job necessarily. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, I mean, it has been a very kind of emotionally taxing thing to have all of these, you know, different stories and requests from people saying, like, this happened to me, or this happened to my husband, or this happened to my cousin, is there any way, like, we can, you know, maybe put this out there or something, and all I could do is sort of channel the information in different ways and saying, I, I mean, I'm not, this is not my job, I'm just kind of putting it out there, showing how it intersects with the failures of our government, and showing how our local government is not out there looking for us, but it, it, it does highlight just how broken of a system we live in, both in the, in the, in the media, in the media sphere, in the, you know, just social justice sphere, like, all the, the institutions that are supposed to be taking care of us are really just there to hamper any kind of justice being made for workers, and it's there to isolate billionaire and billionaire interests and launder their reputations. You know, let's talk a little bit about, about your, your new neighbor, or your relatively new neighbor in, in general, right? Obviously, you know, people are probably seeing a lot of the environmental destruction that has come from, from SpaceX, but let's talk a little bit about kind of, like, capital and economics and politics in, in the area, you know, and maybe, if you don't mind, I'm sorry to ask you this, could you kind of describe this part of Texas? It's a really, I think, a special part of the state, but it's also a part of the state that I think a lot of people don't really have the pleasure to, to go to, like, a lot of people, you know, it really is kind of isolated geographically from, from the rest of the state. Yeah, I mean, South Texas, but particularly Rio Grande Valley, it is very closely tied culturally to Mexico, obviously. Brownsville has a sister city just next door, there's no actual even separation between them, it's Matamoros, and in fact, Brownsville has a very unique Brownsville Brownsville holiday that is called Charro Days, and Charro Days is a parade that, when it started, was designed to establish this unbreakable brotherhood between Matamoros and Brownsville, and it was a parade that went through the border, and actually, it started in Brownsville, would go to Matamoros, come back, you know. Obviously, that cannot be done since the militarization of the border, and, like, it's, it's virtual, it's closing, particularly after 9-11, so that interrupted the entire dynamic, but, but the whole area, its economic viability has increasingly depended, I mean, has always really depended on its relationship with Mexico, both for trade and for culture, and all these other ties that it has, but I think the other area that has been blown up, and I think it's very purposeful, is border security, so a lot of people, border patrol agents are given very, very good deals, and, I mean, with very little, you know, preparation, they are able to get salaries that they would never be able to get otherwise, or it'd be difficult to get otherwise in the area, and it's, you know, more than double what we pay teachers, or a lot of healthcare professionals, which are jobs that we actually need, so it's this sort of double whammy, where you create an industry that is built on dividing a community, and on, on creating a sort of police state, where, you know, the community is policing itself, and it's also hindering the relationship between the Mexican side and families that go back and forth, and the economic and cultural ties from being, you know, actually respected, and even, you know, fomented, so the area itself, Brownsville was a very small town, it's gotten a whole lot bigger, and more crowded, too, but the ecosystem of Brownsville is, it's just very beautiful, there's a lot of birding activity going on, it has a lot of wildlife refuges, the beach, Boca Chica Beach, is a sanctuary, also a sanctuary, a wildlife sanctuary, and it has all these species that are unique to that environment, the beaches of Boca Chica, and around that, are areas that we all grew up in, that we held very close and dear to our hearts, and now they're just being taken over, because, as Musk said, the reason why Starship was being done there, when he was asked, like, well, there's a big risk in what you're doing, most likely it's going to happen in a Brownsville location, because you're going to land with nobody around, and so if it blows up, it's cool. Jesus Christ, yeah, and this is just, sorry not to interrupt you on your own time, but like, this is like one of the oldest settled parts of the state of Texas, you know what I mean? It's just, it's insulting on so many levels, that statement. Yeah, and I mean, he knew, obviously, that this was going to, it was probably suggested to him, too, that this area has always been underrepresented, there's a lot of immigrants, many of them who are very vulnerable, because there are many undocumented, or people who have families, where there's undocumented people within them, so people live with a certain kind of feeling, that they simply just want to get by, a lot of the times, unnoticed, and especially now, that fear has gripped most of the community, so they're willing to accept very risky jobs under very tenuous circumstances, and that is just a recipe for exploitation. Much of the narrative that I think, like, Trump tried to sic on this area, is just kind of the epitome of what we've been living through over the past few decades, which is, if you want to be an insider, if you want to be a part of the United States, it comes at the expense of that community cohesion, especially with an immigrant community, and in a place like Brownsville, which is over 90% brown, that is going to come at a very high cost, as opposed to some place like, for example, in Kentucky, right, where they support it, and these are the realities that I think nobody really truly understands of the border, that the border is a way of life, it's not a war zone, and every politician seizes on this otherness to elevate their own profile, and to talk about a thing that they don't really know much about, and where people actually live. Yeah, and you know, I'll just say this for my part, you know, when I was there kind of recently, I remember going and looking at the Rio Grande, and seeing, I'm forgetting the name of the park I was at, but there was like a plaque that was celebrating a ferry, you know, this is one of the oldest continuously operating ferries, whatever, and it obviously was a plaque, you know, that was old, because there's nothing there, I mean, it's fenced off, it's really disgusting, despicable, and I don't mean to say this to insult the park, but it's one of those things, it's like, you know, the view's horrible, because there's just this disgusting wall there, and you just can see, you know, how much this has kind of built up in our lifetime, and how despicable it is to the kind of the history, and the cultural cohesion of the region. It's upsetting, you know, on that fact alone, but then I think you add into the kind of like the political and the economic disinvestment from the area, I mean, it really is you know, a spot, I mean, obviously the whole border region is filled with that, you know, special legal zones on the Mexican side, and you know, for exploiting workers, you know, this is, this is, you know, you know this well enough, but I wanted to kind of talk a little bit about the political scene here with Musk, and you know, in Brownsville, because you know, we know these stories, how they often go, you know, some kind of big sparkly operation moves to town, and you know, the mayor is very happy about it, because they can say, I brought this many jobs, you know, can you talk about kind of like politically, and socially, how you know, this operation has been seen in Brownsville, and in the Rio Grande Valley in general? Yeah, so Musk arrived in, or SpaceX arrived about, roughly about 10 years ago, officially I think it was 2014, and then it started just ramping up from there, it's kept on expanding its footprint, the original notion of what it was going to be is nothing like what it is now, so originally, yeah, it was brought in with this same kind of talk about like the expansion of, you know, more, much more jobs, and it's going to infuse all this capital into this area, it's going to put us on the map, that's kind of what politicians would like to say, but I mean, anybody who studies kind of the way capitalism handles itself, and how like the terms of development happen, I mean, people view industry as the key to development, really because, not because they are, but because they're a gatekeeper, they're a gatekeeper of development, and it's not untrue that it can come with investment in capital, but it's where that capital goes, and how it affects local residents, and the economy of a place like Brownsville, that is a much more important consideration, so the benefits for a very select few, yes, have been very high, particularly the insiders, the economic, you know, I guess the ones who consider more of the economic growth at all costs, the kind of, the name of the game, but when it comes to locals, Brownsville home prices have doubled since 2015, it's one of the highest, like, rises in spikes in price for homes in the entire nation, inequality, I think, ranks about third or fourth in the nation, same goes for McAllen, so all this quick infusion of capital is concentrated in the interest of a select few, and when you have somebody like Musk, who is a giant economically, well, what that comes with, and we've seen it happen over and over, it comes with pliable politicians that are very easily put in place by him, because the rest, you know, you can just mount campaigns and assault them in other ways, or intimidate them in other ways, and they just kind of are not even in the game, but the other part is that your development is just beholden to whatever he decides it's going to be, and if that comes at the expense of the environment, it comes at the expense of labor laws, it comes at the expense of gentrification and moving the people who have been there for generations, then so be it, and that's exactly what we're seeing, there's an influx, I mean, and you talked about this in your book, right, about how like there's an influx of people who have a very distinct conservative type culture and a very defensive capital mindset that have come into Brownsville and that have also started buying up a whole lot of it, including the government, and those people are not really very interested in Brownsville as a town where you live and where you grow and where you would like become part of the culture, they're interested in replacing it, so it's kind of ironic that a guy like Elon Musk, who talks a lot about the replace, the replacement theory and all this kind of stuff, who talks about immigrants, is an immigrant who is here to replace an entire community that has been here for generations, and does not really, you know, he doesn't even pretend that he cares about what Brownsville is, or what the whole area is, and what its culture is, he really just kind of plopped himself on top of it, so again, I'm not saying that there is no money that starts flowing in there, but it's kind of the same dynamic as you would say with like, well, I mean, Chapo Guzman was also beneficial economically to the people in his region, and that's why a lot of them defended it, but everybody knows what the risk is when you hinge your entire development strategy and your economic future on somebody like Chapo Guzman, and I would apply the same thing here, these are autocratic structures that are interested in getting ahead as quickly and as easily as possible, and if it comes at the expense of workers and democracy, they will not care, and the environment, they will not care about it, because that is really what has allowed him to rise as high as he has. I would also just note for people too that, you know, again, Musk has his operation at his kind of fake company town called Starbase, but when you see those horrific pictures of explosions on his facilities, you will see, you know, Brownsville fire trucks going in and helping them out, I mean, in fact, the one that happened a few months ago, there were multiple house fires that were not put out in Brownsville because firefighters had been deployed, again, to another municipality that, you know, is kind of trying to carve itself out from the tax system of Brownsville, so it's just one of those classic things where, like, they're separating themselves, but when they need something, they like to come, you know, they need the kind of the public good, you know, the kind of largeness of the community that they're kind of pickpocketing here. I just, please. Sorry, the other part that I was going to mention is that people also thought, like, okay, well, SpaceX, but the thing that happens with industry is that it's also a network, particularly sort of like the PayPal mafia kind of thing that we know about, of how, like, the tech sector starts to kind of take over a section, and they sort of design the area around their needs, and their capital's expansion, so what has also happened is not just that SpaceX has, you know, taken its operation and based its own growth model on whatever it needs, but it has also welcomed and opened the floodgates to LNG, and there's a lot of big LNG developments happening very quickly without a lot of, without any kind of public input a lot of the times. There's the America First Oil Refinery, which, that one, they just sprung up on us. By the way, all of these have been welcomed and invited by Democrats in the Valley, who operate very much under the guise of, oh, well, you know, we have to do it because it's development, and in order to beat Republicans, we must become Republicans, so that's kind of like the ethos that is pervaded here, so you have data centers also now starting to take hold of this area, and all of these, this creeping effect of industry that doesn't seem to stop, and people seem to welcome it for now because they don't ever really discuss the costs and the long-term, what the long-term effects of their development strategy has been, but all that you have to see is Corpus Christi just up there, and how they are fighting for their town, and for their town to exist because they're sucking, they're literally sucking it dry, and there is no reason to believe that this is not just a replication of that if the model of development is exactly the same, and also, it is, it stands to be said that we are in a fragile ecosystem, we're under a drought, and all of these systems that are in place that are highly polluting that are also being carried out with very minimal regulation and respect for the environment are just like sitting ducks for any kind of climate catastrophe coming our way, which will. Yeah, I mean, well, we're kind of putting out a fairly bleak picture, but I think that, you know, the warning is an important one, because, you know, what we're seeing is like the combination of like, you know, of capital of anti-democratic movements represented by Musk, but I would just, you know, before we leave, my friend, you know, I always do try to like highlight and remind people that things are bad, but there is like a fight happening, and people are standing up. I will say for my part, you know, when I was in Brownsville kind of recently to talk about my book, I left so inspired, I mean, it was a packed room, I got to meet people from all over the community, and it was just, there was an energy there that was particularly special, so I would not want our listeners to go away and just, you know, without any kind of sense of hope, so can you talk about some of the ways that people have been pushing back, or just, you know, what is it that kind of gives you that hope and energy to keep on doing the work that you're doing, both politically and kind of, you know, covering what you've been covering? Well, for example, I'll just go from my own experience that I started, I mean, I'm a public policy researcher, I've specialized in the study of organized crime groups and ideological extremist groups, and what I see mirrored are those dynamics in now having captured our government, so it's not very different from my field of study, and I jumped into it basically to, I jumped into the political fray, not because I wanted to, but because I felt I needed to, because of this critical time, this critical juncture that we are in. I needed to do that myself, become the candidate that I never saw in, you know, on the ballot, and I decided to run against an incumbent who had been there for, you know, 10 years in Congress, he's a corporate insider, and he has, he had about $22 million in his war chest, so he spent about a million dollars on the primary, I was the only, I was his only opposition, we spent about $50,000, and we got, somebody, nobody knew about, we got about close to 40% of the vote to his 60, and this was just a first run, and it was just completely grassroots, it was all just people going out there, knocking on doors, doing the same thing that they're doing all over the country in a lot of these progressive movements, and we got that much, I mean, it wasn't just Democrats, it was a lot of people also who were formerly MAGA, who were disappointed, and were seeing what was happening. The broad opposition to data centers that is also bipartisan is a development in that direction as well, so I think like many of, much of the things that they're doing to race through this development to corrupt as many officials as possible and keep them all in line is actually not a reflection of their strength, but of their vulnerability, because they know that the chickens are coming home to roost. This structure cannot hold much longer, I mean, we're depleting the middle class, and people are, I mean, capitalism always needs a permanent underclass, but it also needs a middle class who kind of believes like they're on their way up. When that starts to shake, which it is shaking, then everything starts to subside very quickly, and the pyramid starts to break, so I think a lot of people that joined the campaign, even if we lost in the numbers, they are still very much active. I mean, DSA RGB is one of the fastest growing chapters in the country. We now have, I think it's 170 members, and it was close to closing in 2024, and I always said during the campaign, I don't want people, like, I don't want to mobilize people to get elected. I want to get elected to mobilize people, because that is just one of the sides of our struggles, but the more important side, particularly as democratic socialists, is the continuous mobilization, and we see it in New York. The kind of things that Mamdani has been able to do isn't just because he's a very skilled political actor, which he is, it's also because the people that made his coalition and made his movement grow in the way that it did are still very active and are still, you know, jumping into the fray, and that same story is happening here, and it's only going to continue growing as we see the sort of the faults becoming clearer and industry continuing to fail on its promises, and I think it's actually reaching this very critical point, this IPO, which is just a complete, I don't even know what to call it, like, it's a fabrication of, like, this fantasy world that Elon Musk wants us all to live in at some point will come crashing down, and when it does, we will be there to pick up those pieces, but to rebuild something or build something in its place that is sustainable, that is democratic. Well, friends, that is Etienne Rosas. I'm so thrilled to have you on the program, my friend. Thank you for your time. It's always a pleasure, David. Thanks so much, and thanks to everyone who tuned in. All right, friends, always so great being able to bring on guests like Etienne right here on the Jacobin Show. You're not going to get this many other places, so if you haven't, please do consider becoming subscribers to the magazine and also supporting us on YouTube by leaving a like, comment, subscribing, and even considering being a paid supporter of this Jacobin YouTube channel. We got a lot of really exciting stuff coming up. This next edition of Jacobin is fascinating. It's a deep dive into the legacy of America, looking back on this country on its 250th anniversary. We'll be doing a special episode on that next week, but if you want to get your hands on the magazine, we still have this really great deal just for our Jacobin Show subscribers. You can find the link in the show notes. Please consider subscribing. If you haven't already, you can pick up the book The Myth of Red Texas. It's been really great hearing from everybody across the country and across the state of Texas. Hope you all have a good rest of your weekend. Leave us a comment. Let us know who you'd like to see on the program, what you'd like to see us cover, and looking forward to seeing you again, friends. Take care.