Welcome to what the F is going on in Latin America and the Caribbean, CodePink's weekly YouTube program of hot news out of the region. In partnership with Friends of Latin America, Massachusetts Peace Action, and Task Force on the Americas, we broadcast every Wednesday at 4.30 p.m. Pacific, 7.30 p.m. Eastern on CodePink YouTube Live. Today we have the great honor of being in conversation with Senor Ernesto Teefer. He is the president of Nicaragua's Electrical Energy Company, and Nicaragua is the leader in the hemisphere of the Americas on renewable energy, has been for almost a decade now. And so we're very excited to talk about the continuation of this program and further development of renewable energy in Nicaragua. And also talking, we can talk this afternoon about Nicaragua's partnership with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative to help develop infrastructure in their country as well. So it's with great pleasure that I welcome Ernesto Teefer to our program today. Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure for us to be here and to tell you all about what we, our country and our government have been able to do in the last 15 years regarding the investment in renewable and natural energy sources, which has greatly contributed to the fight against climate change as one of the many variables involved. I think that never in the history of Nicaragua have we seen something similar to what we have achieved in the last 15 years, in the last three government terms of Commander Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. It is worth highlighting that in 2007, when Commander Daniel Ortega, when the Sandinista front came back to political power in Nicaragua, the situation that we found ourselves in was drastic. 12 hours of electricity rationing every day. The country was divided into sections and each section in the country received electricity every two hours. And that's what we did to be able to provide every department in the country with electricity. And let me tell you, the country that we had back then was not the country that we have now. It was just the Pacific Coast and the center of Nicaragua. The Caribbean Coast was not integrated with the Pacific Coast and the central part of Nicaragua. That's the history of Nicaragua. Apart from that, it was sad that only 52% of our population had electricity. And something else that saddened us was that 80% or between 77% and 80% of the energy that was produced in Nicaragua was produced on the basis of fossil fuels. There was only 23% of renewable resources. And at that time, the renewable resources were hydroelectrical power and geothermal power as energy producing sources. According to the philosophy then, geothermal power was used as the basis and the hydroelectrical power was used to fulfill demand fluctuations that happen every day in every electrical grid around the world. But the main concern was how to solve the situation. And it was right there and then that Commander Daniel Ortega talked to Commander Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. And it so happened that some plants that were destined to Cuba as a gesture of solidarity, brotherhood and awareness, Cuba gave these plants to Nicaragua. And that's when we started to install the first megawatts to deal with the energy rationing that the country was undergoing back then. And that's how throughout the following two years, the country got going because more than 250 megawatts were installed as power capacity. And that fulfilled at that time the demand that the country may have. So one problem was solved, but we were facing another issue. And Commander Ortega called all of us who were involved in this area and said, I want to provide every single Nicaraguan person with electricity. And I wanted to have energy, one type of energy from natural resources because our country is full of nature. And due to its geology, it has tremendous resources, enough geothermal resources to supply Central American part of Mexico with energy. And we have hydroelectrical power sources and rivers with tremendous potential. And also wind power, solar power, and those are renewable energy sources which do not pollute. They do not pollute the environment. They do not contribute to the greenhouse gases emissions that will have a negative impact on climate and that contributed to global warming. So that's how we started. And to not bore you with the whole story step by step, I can tell you that in the last 15 years of Nicaragua's history, we have brought into the system more than 780 megawatts of energy. And that was wind energy, geothermal energy, hydroelectrical power, and solar power. So in the year 2007, we had 709 megawatts as our power capacity installed in the country. Nowadays, in the year 2022, we have 1619 megawatts of installed power capacity. So we have increased that power capacity in the last few years by 783 megawatts, more or less. But we were forced to use conventional thermal power in part due to the lack of energy that we faced at the beginning. But as of then, we have not brought into the country any other thermal power station. So nowadays, when compared to what we have in 2007, which was 25%, 27% regarding natural resources, nowadays we have turned the energy matrix around because in Nicaragua, we currently have only 33% of our energy, which is based on fossil fuels, and 67% and 70%, which is based on renewable energy. And that has been a great achievement for our country. And we also have a 99% of our population that are getting electricity, including the Caribbean coast, which for the first time in the history of the country is integrated fully with modern roads that go from the Caribbean to the Pacific with electricity that covers both the northern part that goes towards Bilbi, Guajpan, Limo, Rio Coco, that whole area, and the south of the country where we find blue fields and also African palm projects. That and everything that exists in our country is an unprecedented achievement. Electrical coverage, energy production with alternative energy sources, and the integration of the country under a single, very, very impressive. I want to share with you, Senor Tifa and the audience as well, that I have been to your country six times, seven times now. January was there for President Ortega's inauguration. A great honor to have been there with you and your people on that day. But I did tour your country, I think it was August of 2014. And the theme of that trip was green energy and renewables. And that was August of 2014. And I think at that time, the renewables in Nicaragua were 52% still a very large percentage, particularly compared to other countries in the hemisphere. And to have seen the growth continue, because for me, it was such an exciting theme to go steady in 2014. And to see the success of it and to see it grow even larger is just such a wonderful example of what is possible for all of us. I do want to ask you specifically about hydroelectric power. Because for so many in our audience, this is a big question throughout Central America is the privatization of rivers, natural resources to achieve the dams needed to create hydroelectric power. And of course, we all know yesterday was the sixth anniversary of Bertha Casares. I say yesterday, Wednesday, March 2nd, was the sixth anniversary of Bertha Casares's assassination. And she in fact was an indigenous person trying to stop the damning of the river in her community. And so maybe can we talk about some of the controversies associated with hydroelectric power, and whether those exist in Nicaragua or not, and then the benefits of wind and solar.  We have a river in Nicaragua, the Rio Grande de Matagalpa that goes through the central part of the country and flows into the Caribbean. This is the basin that has the greatest potential hydroelectric potential in Nicaragua. This was started more than 40 years ago and this has been updated. We have an update on this project since two years ago. And back then, when this project started to be conceived, there is one called Copalar. There is a project that had two stages, the Copalar Alto and the Copalar Bajo. There was a town nearby called Paiwas, Bocana de Paiwas. And at that time, there were 50 years ago, more or less, there were maybe 500 inhabitants. And the project was feasible. And when we told the president, Commander Otega, that we want to carry out the project, the Copalar project, he asked, where is that? Well, near Paiwas. Nowadays, Paiwas has more than 15,000 inhabitants. But the commander said, no, we are not going to carry out that project. We are not going to move 15,000 people away from their homes to carry out that project. So hydroelectrical projects that we want to carry out are projects that prioritize the social issues. And once the project is fully approved and accepted by the community after analyzing the pros and the cons, then we proceed to carry out the project. This kind of project, even though we wanted to carry out some of them with our private funds in a private way, what's happened, Terry, is that Nicaragua needs the funds to carry out such a big project. And those funds have conditions. Financial institutions, the IDB, the World Bank say, well, the private company needs to develop. And we think that that's okay. Yes, the private company has to play a part. But to think that we can have a universal recipe, for instance, saying that, oh, in Chile, energy privatization has worked wonders. And in Argentina, in Brazil as well, that doesn't mean that in Nicaragua, it will succeed as well, because we have seen the negative consequences of privatization of a part of a sector of the energy industry sector in Nicaragua. It's in the case of Penosa, that took away a lot of money from us. So that's the reality. I cannot stay quiet. But we have to develop the energy sector. Great. How do we do that? So our strategy is first to resort to the state because we are interested in the cost of the kilowatt per hour that the population is going to incur in. And we want the population to get energy at a low price. And that's something our government insists on. But if they tell us, okay, the private company needs to intervene. We, as a last resort, can say we can do something together to make it public and private. And that's what we are trying to develop and carry out nowadays. Because if the World Bank or the IDV told Nicaragua or Commander Otega, Rosario Murillo, here you have the funds for Nicaragua to carry out those projects. Nicaragua has its own projects. And they are state owned. And we have no profits. And everything is a service. We are providing the population with the rights that they are entitled to. That would be ideal. But if we cannot do it that way, we need to find a way to do it. And we thought about having public, private initiatives. And that is something that we've been trying to implement and carry out. But in reality, our country, which solely wants to live calmly and peacefully, hasn't been able to develop what we would have liked to develop because there are problems. It's not worth mentioning them now here. But we haven't been able to carry out our projects because we are not left alone. We cannot live in peace. We just want to develop our country. That's our main concern. Hydroelectrical power has its pros and has its cons. We need it to control daily demand, daily energy demand in the country. You know that at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., the demand is minimum. Then at 7 a.m., 6, 7 a.m., it starts to go up. So those variations are covered by the hydroelectrical power because we can turn on and turn off the water supply. And that allows us to fulfill that demand. That's why I mentioned the philosophy that we were trying to live by in our country and in other countries in Latin America. That we don't have another kind of energy that can fulfill those demand variations throughout the day yet. But once again, the social issue comes first. If we are able to solve that, can I ask you a question? You made the comment that, and I think a lot of our audience will understand this, clearly understands it. I think the term we use is natural resource sovereignty. Perhaps you do as well. But you said one of the things in one of the hurdles in developing energy for Nicaragua is that your country cannot live in peace. And most of us understand interventionism in many, many different forms. And are you talking about, when you say that, are you talking about the desire for transnational corporations to control your energy growth as they do in Colombia, as they do in Honduras and many other countries throughout the hemisphere? So I'm going to give you an example. Four years ago, we had been talking with the World Bank for two years to carry out a geothermal project here in a nearby volcano close to Leon, which is a San Cristobal volcano. And we had intense meetings with the World Bank during two years. And we were thinking about having a private public partnership because we were developing this project with a private company. We were barely starting. Everything was practically ready. And then in 2018 in Nicaragua, there was a coup d'etat attempt to commander Ortega and Rosario Morillo's government. That's what happened. There is no other way to call that. And as a result of that destabilization, well, we've been waiting for four years for that that has been had been already in discussion for three years to get back on track. But now there's nothing. So what about that? How do we carry the project out if we have no funds, if they don't want to provide us with the funds? The World Bank has gone missing. It's been MIA for four years. So what's going to happen with the other bank? Financial institutions are instruments. We know that they are instruments for a country to develop or not, depending on several factors that are not worth considering right now. But Nicaragua is definitely being affected by those policies. That's why the commander has already said that we only want to be left alone. We want to live in peace. We want to develop our country with our own alternative sources. And we don't want to be pressed from different angles and sites. We're in the 21st century. People should think differently. But it's been such a problem. It's been very difficult. I think that to separate, we cannot separate political events from the realities in our country. Because in the end, the IMF, the World Bank, those are all instruments, devices that put pressure to the point that the country cannot pay. And so they say, now you will do as I say. That is a mechanism that has taken place throughout history. And that continues. It doesn't change. Because we would like to have our alternative sources to benefit Central America, all our brothers in Central America, and also to benefit ourselves because the economy in our country is like, I give something to you and you give something to me. That is a reality. And despite all the problems on the hurdles that we faced, we have achieved wonderful things. And let me tell you something. During the ATIS, in the midst of a very bloody and unfair war that was started by the government in the U.S., we carried out or we started two geothermal projects in the Monotombo Volcano. And someone asked me back then, because I was in leading those two projects. And they asked me, how difficult was it? An Italian man asked me that while I was talking to him once. And I told him, look, I think that the effort that it meant for the U.S. to get to the Moon was the same effort that it took for us to carry out those two projects during that war. Of course, nowadays, we're not talking about similar words. The problems are different. The pressures are different. But they don't want the country to develop as it could. We demand respect. We demand to be left alone. We demand freedom. And in terms of dignity, our heroes and martyrs have taught us that. And that's what we are mostly characterized by. And that's okay. But we have to develop the country. And that's Commander Ortegas and Rosario Murillo's main concern. And we're working on that. And I would add, for the audience to say, if you're doing it quite successfully, despite all the hurdles that have been thrown against you from the United States and other factors in the international community, including international financial institutions, which now Nicaragua is significantly blocked from with the enforcement with the enactment of the Renus Air Act Wednesday, when was that, the last Wednesday of October. So right before the presidential elections in November, President Biden signed that into law. And for our audience, we did a whole episode on that. And it's extraordinarily harsh. It's an extraordinarily harsh sanctions regime against Nicaragua. And so, and also, Senor FIFA, I should tell you, you may already know this, we did a wonderful episode of our program with Senor Ivana Costa about Nicaragua's plan to alleviate poverty and develop human potential, which did include some discussion of the development of the energy grid. And for our audience, that's on our YouTube channel as well. It's extraordinary, the accomplishments. And he himself has been sanctioned. And I would assume to prevent him from securing international finance for all your infrastructure projects. So this leads me to ask you, since we did formally hear this the night of President Ortega's inauguration, January 10, he did formally tell the audience and the world that Nicaragua has signed a memorandum of understanding with China to participate in China's Belt and Road Initiative. And how does that now affect the development of the electrical grid, renewable energy? And I think one of the other concepts of the memorandum of understanding was food production. And I'm assuming all of this does also not only deal, not only looking for remedies to develop energy production in Nicaragua, but also to find alternatives to alleviate or respond to climate change, as you had mentioned earlier in our conversation. But can we talk a little bit about this new option for Nicaragua? And I would also argue not just for Nicaragua any longer, but for the rest of the world. Yes, I think that Latin America is grabbing the hand of a country that is offering help without any conditions politically speaking. They are offering help and it's been the Chinese government for us. Nicaragua has signed or our government and the Chinese government have signed a memorandum of understanding by which China offers to help us develop by means of renewable energy source projects. And of course, our government knows our needs and will surely know how to make the most of the help that China is offering and will surely focus on what we need most so that China can help us with that. This is all very recent. Remember that in November, we recognized again the Chinese government and those were the first steps to award signing the necessary agreements to build roads, ports, energy infrastructure, and even to develop the offshore oil and the Nicaraguan Pacific Coast with told them to help us and we're waiting to see how we can benefit from the help that China is offering because also a lot of our products, you know, our traditional market is the United States. It has always been the United States because there is a relatively short distance and a market like China involves other aspects but it is a new opportunity that has appeared for us a new market and of course we're going to make the most of any help that they can offer us. If they gift us something or if they lend us something that's great but they are coming here and they are asking what does Nicaragua need and Nicaragua and our government say this is what Nicaragua needs. They don't come here to say what they want to do and that is a great difference between companies from other parts of the world. Yeah, the paradigm is completely different. Yeah, an Occidental and Oriental way of seeing the world completely. I wanted to, yeah, that's true. You mentioned recognition of the People's Republic of China just for our audience. November, when were the presidential elections? 7 November 2021 and that week right after Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo were re-elected, Nicaragua announced that it would be leaving the OAS and then the following week I think within seven to ten days Nicaragua, I guess we need to say, re-recognize the People's Republic of China because during the first end of the Nista government there was full recognition of the People's Republic of China and then during the neoliberal years, 16 years of neoliberalism, Taiwan and now and then for the first administration, second administration, it was still Taiwan and now where the government's recognizing the People's Republic of China. So this is, for our audience, this is a re-recognition. It's not like this, oh my gosh, all of a sudden Nicaragua has turned to China. It's been there. That relationship was established in the 80s and then taken away for 16 years and now re-introduced, which is, I think that's an important difference to understand. It's not like, oh my gosh, all of a sudden Nicaragua is turning to China. They're re-recognizing that relationship. Also you mentioned offshore oil, Pacific offshore oil. Can we talk about that for a moment because that's like, I didn't even, I mean, I know off the coast of California where I'm from. There is oil, Santa Barbara specifically. I guess I hadn't thought about that off the coast of Nicaragua. Well, I hope that's for the good of our country to talk about these things because sometimes having many natural resources is dangerous. We're going to talk a little bit about that though. In the last five years, Statoil, which is a company from Norway, Statoil, which is a complex boarding nation, we performed jointly the seismic studies, all the geoscientific studies that are necessary geology, geochemistry, geophysics, everything that you can imagine with the most state-of-the-art technology. We've studied thousands of linear kilometers in the continental platform of Nicaragua in the Pacific Ocean. And we discovered a very promising resource. We established the quantities of gas, oil. We were practically at a stage of looking for the platform to drill the seabed. 20 kilometers away from the Masachapa coast here in Nicaragua. And the company that was performing the studies at Nicaragua suddenly said that it had to back away from the project because the new board in Norway had decided that it was better to invest in a place near Norway and not in a place so far away as Nicaragua. So Nicaragua is currently looking for partners. You know that the largest companies in the world, among them there are five, which are from North America, then there are two in Europe, one or two in China, one in Russia. So there are more or less like nine, but it's not that simple to bring an old platform here because they can't go through the Panama Canal if they come from Europe. They have to go through the Strait of Magellan and the South of Argentina and Chile. So the logistics for bringing this equipment is very expensive. It's a billion-dollar investment and we need a partner that is interested in taking all the studies that we have already done that are worth more than 60 million dollars. We need them to look at them to get interested in it and say, okay, let's do it. So we are waiting for someone to show up and I am sure that the government of Nicaragua, our president and our vice president, will approve a fair and just partnership because our government is a nationalist government and protects national interests. That is the greatest sin that a government in our region can have to demand respect, to demand peace. So we know how things are, but that's our main goal. We need for a company to come and we agree that they need to get a return on their investment, but they're not going to take everything away for free as it happened with oil in Venezuela or in Ecuador or all the resources in Latin America.  That's not going to happen here. That's very difficult. You know this, boy, now there's several themes I want to follow now with your comments. This is fascinating talking to you. I so appreciate your time. These comments really looking for a partnership and not, so we're still looking at, well, regarding the oil deposits on the Pacific Coast, off the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua, we're looking at extraction industry versus renewables and I'd like to go back to the renewables in a moment, but with extraction, with the extraction industry, I think sometimes our audience, myself included, we get confused or anxious in saying, you know, stop the neocolonial extraction industry, but it's almost impossible for a country that's had an extraction industry-based economy to just get off of that overnight. That doesn't happen without spinning the economy, you know, into a downward spiral, but with Nicaragua having a partnership between these companies is key and it is a way of preserving your national sovereignty, but also, you know, the Venezuelans are really clear about using the term natural resource sovereignty in addition to national sovereignty and I think that that's such a clear way to state, you know, a people in their country maintaining control of what is within their country's borders. All natural resources, not just the not just the oil sitting off the Pacific Coast, but land and water and air and precious metal, all of it, the natural resource sovereignty is such an important thing. I do, you know, we saw so many elections throughout the hemisphere of the Americas last year, specifically in the month of November, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Chile, Argentina, Honduras, and I guess I would argue, unfortunately, with the exception of Argentina, all the other elections resulted in people voting to preserve their national sovereignty, non-interventionism, but also I would argue wanting to prevent balkanization of their countries and the grab for natural resources. They voted for natural resource sovereignty as well as national sovereignty and I think, you know, Nicaragua is very, very clear on that. It's a partnership. It's not, you know, a colonial relationship. It's an equal partnership to do business in Nicaragua and that's just so, it's so important. It's so, you can see it in the people and the Nicaraguan people, the, you know, the, the pride and ownership of the country, of themselves as a people and being in control of their economy and their government and their destiny and it's a, it's a very different, I guess for lack of a better term, you know, it's a different energy you feel among the Nicaraguan people than you do in many other countries. I would say you feel it in Haiti too, you know, the first country to liberate itself in the Americas. So it's a big, you know, what you're sharing with us is a really important program and concept for your nation to have and the leadership provides it, you know, in conjunction with all of you. It's really exciting. Can we, can we talk about, I don't want to focus on the oil too much, but it is important for the world to know that you have it off the Pacific coast because that comes into the whole geopolitical construct of things that you have, you have oil. Let's talk about the development of wind energy and solar energy, the continued growth of it because I know it was a pretty large percentage of the energy segment years ago, but it's continuing to develop. Can we talk a little more about both of those, those renewables? Yes, of course. Our national interconnected system, which includes all the conventional thermal power plants that we still have hydroelectrical power plants, geothermal power plants, wind power plants, and biomass from Cherokee and Bagas all come together. And there are mathematical models that we use that the energy and mining ministry uses to determine the plants that are made based on the supply demand forecast for the next years, let's say the next 15 years. So this model tells us which projects need to be carried out as the demand increases to keep a balance in the energy generation system. We have that and we are ready to develop and carry out our renewable resource projects in Nicaragua that are natural, but there are natural resources which are not renewable. That's worth clarifying for instance, gas. Gas is a natural resource, but it's not renewable and it pollutes more than any other projects that we were talking about. So this forecast tells us which projects we should carry out and then the agency that regulates Nicaragua's energy policy starts to recommend the projects that we should carry out and we as the state-owned energy generation company we seek to get financing which benefits the country and that's where we sometimes face hurdles because it's not simple nowadays for us to find that financing and what does it mean that in the future if they don't let us develop our own projects then we're going to rely again on fossil fuels and all the effort that we have done throughout these years has been worthless. So we have to really value what our government has done because we have contributed to the fight against climate change and global warming by not releasing gases that are going to worsen global warming and Nicaragua has signed the Paris Agreement. Nicaragua even has a law that has been recently enacted and it's called the approval of a national policy on climate change. It is a law in Nicaragua. We have a legal framework that establishes how we should face the changes in global climate, considering that Nicaragua only represents the 0.02 percent of the total greenhouse gases emissions and despite all of that we are fully committed to fighting against climate change because we know that we have to reduce those effects that are going to increase global warming and continue our development in a way that does not pollute the environment and we are not one of the countries that pollutes the most. We are not even close, not even to the first five, China, the U.S., Russia, Germany, India, oh my god. We are not even on the list as a country that contributes to climate change and despite that we have a law to allow the import of electric cars so we want to tell the world that our government cares about all these issues affecting humanity as a whole and that Nicaragua will be part of a group of countries that is fully aware of climate change and that wants to slow down its development because I think that we are diving head first into a climatic chaos if we continue doing what we are doing. Do you know that emissions of carbon dioxide have reached 37 million tons last year? Sorry, in 2018-2019 more than 37 million tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere and the large capitals controlling the world should be worried about this because if not they will have no one to control because the United States which is second to China in terms of which country pollutes the most its gas production goes up, its oil production goes up and it did reduce its energy production based on coal that does help, of course, but the rest is still going up so what should we do? Atomic energy, okay it does not pollute in the sense that it doesn't release carbon dioxide or green house gases which contribute to climate change but what should we do? Should we resort to atomic energy? It takes 300 years for the radioactivity in one uranium bar to disintegrate so we're going to pollute the world with atomic energy, what do we do? We have to do something because if not we will reach a point in which everything will stop hydrogen I don't know any other method to separate hydrogen from oxygen that is not electrolysis so we need to find a way to get hydrogen because that's one of the future energy sources solar power which is not photovoltaic energy, that could work but to tell highly industrialized countries that they shouldn't produce electricity with gas it's like telling them to stop their development because they cannot do it and if they cannot do it with gas they will do it with coal so in the long run we are committing suicide humanity is heading towards it's death because what is the price that we are paying for more and more development we have to do something and that's the example that our government and we have tried to give if the government is not concerned about these things then things don't get done and that's what Nicaragua has done our government, our leaders, how our leaders defend the national interests that's why commander Ortega and Rosario Murillo are highly respected by the Nicaraguan people I have to mention this because I cannot isolate the energy generation context from the government, from the political situation because it's because of them that we were able to do that people may say that it's all political propaganda so in my case I am a santanista and a very proud one and I will say that until the day I die I don't have anything to hide but our country has a huge amount of natural resources and wonderful things have been achieved in our country in the last few years in every sense of the word and next time that you come I hope you can visit me and I will take you to the newest bridge that we've built over the river Coco joining Ginotega with Nueva Segovia this bridge is 320 meters long and 12 meters wide and for the first time in history people are not going to die when crossing the river on a boat which is one of the mightiest rivers in our country here roads are amazing there are no other places in Latin America with this roads of course we're not going to compare it to the highways in the US but our roads are incredible electricity social projects and programs for people do you know that more than 85 percent of the Nicaraguan population is vaccinated against covid our doctors and nurses go from home to home knocking on doors asking how many people have been vaccinated I'm vaccinating those who have not been vaccinated and then when we say that we have only 250 deaths others say that we are altering data that that's not true because they want to hear that 20 000 people have died because that's what our traders and nation-sellers want by doing negative propaganda about our country but here people are not fooled the people in the Caribbean coast it's the first time that they have electricity they can recharge their phones they can turn on the lights during the night watch tv listen to the radio exactly and by the way in terms of cell phones there's um well you know you mentioned and I'm sure the audience caught this as well but I think it deserves you know some reiteration that Nicaragua is one of the least contributors on the planet to carbon emissions and one of the greatest reliant on renewable energy leading the way in the Americas on renewables it's very impressive and but the irony of being one of the least contributors to carbon emissions and being the leader in renewables I mean that's that's a that's a huge accomplishment and and says and says a lot about things happening in the global south that we don't talk enough about the other thing in developing your your electric grid I mean I have watched this over the years as a particularly since 2007 and it's very clear the goal of the government was to get energy into homes and local communities but and with that and now over to the Caribbean coast as well as an enormous achievement but you need this energy grid a significant energy grid in place now now that the individual the individuals have been taking care of to go forward to develop your economy to attract business for domestic businesses to continue to grow you need to expand the electrical grid as well I mean it's it's a multi-tiered project but the getting the the electricity into individual homes and communities throughout the country just an enormous accomplishment something that the neoliberal privatized government prior to 2007 was not able to do failed miserably actually so we know that didn't work and that's a lesson for the entire world but it's it's a it's a fabulous it's a fabulous story that that you have to tell as your government your people the achievements it's really and you know for those of you uh for in the audience it's really I cannot emphasize enough the importance of going to Nicaragua and seeing even if you just want to go sit on a beach for a week and relax you will see how beautiful the country is how diverse it is how wonderful the people are and and the infrastructure achievements that they have have made it's really it's it's quite a story and it's a it's a real you know tribute to you your people that really is I mean uh it's it's quite something and it's very very I can't emphasize enough the importance of going to visit so what so senior people what's what's next you can Nicaragua continues to lead the hemisphere and renewable energy development and it's against the majority of your of your energy grid now what what's next to maintain the same development strategy the same strategy of electricity generation in the next 15 years I would love to be able to say that we will get rid of the 25 or 30 percent and of electricity based on fossil fuels that remains maybe in the next 15 or 20 years I won't be able to see that but I know that our country is moving towards that I am sure of that because that's what we've taught the next generations we've taught them about dignity respect sovereignty and love for Nicaragua and that is something the new generations will take with them and that is what will guide our future leaders forever because we cannot erase all the great heroes that we've had throughout the history of our country and that is a banner that we will always carry as we move through history and I am very proud of being a Nicaraguan of being a son of Sandino of working with the Sandinista front alongside Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo and of having done so in the last 45 48 years of my life well I'm very proud and very honored that you had time to join us today what a privilege to meet you and have this conversation and I'm so happy to share with our audience the development of energy throughout Nicaragua it's such a model for all of us and an example of what's possible between a government and her people and her land and resources so thank you so much for your time a real honor and a privilege to have this conversation with you today well I will definitely I will definitely take advantage of that invitation thank you so much I want to remind our audience that you've been watching what the F is going on in Latin America and the Caribbean CodePink's weekly YouTube program of hot news out of the region we broadcast every Wednesday 4 30 p.m. Pacific 7 30 p.m. Eastern on CodePink YouTube live also be sure to catch CodePink radio CodePink radio broadcasts every Thursday morning 11 a.m. Eastern 8 a.m. Pacific on Pacific radio stations WBAI out in New York City and WPFW out of Washington DC thank you everyone for joining us has been a terrific conversation I hope it was educational to all of you it certainly was for me and very much enjoyed today's conversation thank you so much we'll see you next week


Hello and welcome to the 35th annual Norris and Marjorie Benditson Epic International Symposium on preventing genocide and mass atrocities. My name is Jacob Kirsch and I'm a junior studying international relations and economics. I will be moderating tonight's panel, never again and again and again, causes of genocides and mass atrocities. First off, I want to thank all of our panelists for joining us. In order to prevent future genocides and mass atrocities, it is critically important to understand why they happen. So it seems appropriate to begin the symposium with a big picture discussion of the underlying root causes of these atrocities. Specifically, I would like to consider these causes through the frameworks of identity based conflict and socioeconomic strife. Many mass atrocities come at the intersection of issues of identity, as well as socioeconomic issues. In this panel, we will look at the convergence of these issues and how they can independently or jointly cause mass atrocities. Before I introduce our panelists, I want to first explain how the panel will be run. Each panelist will deliver opening remarks for five minutes. After the opening remarks, the panelists will have a 10 minute discussion, following which the panelists will split into breakout rooms moderated by my peers, Sebastian, Hightone and Connor. The links to these breakout rooms will be posted in the chat. Now that we've gotten all of that out of the way, allow me to introduce our first panelist. Joining us from Scotland, Donald Bloxham is the Richard Parris Chair of European History at the University of Edinburgh. He's known for his numerous publications focusing on the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, and the post-World War II war crimes trials. His current projects include working on a manuscript on the role of moral evaluation in the historians' confrontation with the past, as well as co-editing a diary of a Nuremberg prosecutor. Dr. Bloxham, you have the floor. Thank you very much indeed, Jacob. And thank you to everyone who's been involved in organizing my participation and inviting me. And thank you to everyone who's bothered to tune in to listen to this. It's great to be virtually there. So I know that Professor Cox will be talking a little bit in a little bit more detail about issues of identity and specifically about racism. Perhaps I'll pick up a little bit more on the socio-economic aspects when we're talking about causation. I like the title of this panel, causation of genocide and mass atrocities. In some sense, my feeling is that genocide studies has got into a bit of a rut, perhaps into a bit of a dead end. Well, depending upon how tightly or how preoccupied it is with the definition of genocide, thankfully we seem to be moving away from that a little bit, but there is still a concern with whether things fall into the category of the G word or not. And I'm not increasingly uncertain that that's a desperately useful way to approach things, especially since in so many instances we see genocide emerging alongside or out of other sorts of atrocities that we might categorize slightly differently. But in other instances, we might also choose to categorize something that's a simultaneous genocide and does something else. What could equally, I think, put what we could reasonably call genocide in Nigeria during the Biafra conflict and genocide in East Pakistan in 1971. We could quite reasonably call both of those instances genocide, but we could also call them secession conflicts. And calling them one is not to preclude calling them the other, but there's an awful lot of scholarship on secession conflicts, and there's an awful lot of scholarship on genocide, and there's only a partial intersection between those two things. And it seems to me that a lot of I think genocide scholars studies could really fruitfully engage with and it's starting to do so with a whole body of scholarship that deals with things that don't necessarily instantly fall into the rubric of the G word. I'm thinking of a great deal of political science literature on civil wars. There is a significant propensity in civil war to tend towards total targeting of the other side in the civil war in the civil war which lends itself to indiscriminate violence against population groups. This may or may not pass whatever bar is deemed necessary to have the label genocide attached but it's clearly in some sense related to genocide. It certainly falls under the rubric of mass atrocities. That said, there are also very different sorts of mass atrocities. If one thinks of, for instance, the Stalinist case, it's a totalitarian regime like the Nazi regime, and yet unlike the Nazi regime. The Stalinist regime contrives to kill millions of people. But it does that in a rather different way to the way that the Hitler regime does. There's much less, relatively speaking, much less direct mass murder in the Stalin regime, much more exposure to conditions where death is likely if not inevitable in the Gulag system and beyond. The sorts of mass executions we see in Katin during the Soviet occupation of Poland in the run-up to the Second World War is relatively unusual in the Soviet system. Mass executions are there and they're large-scale but compared to the death that comes from massive socio-economic reorganization, things like the famine, or the massive use of the penal Gulag archipelago. They're much greater cause of death, or death from structurally imposed conditions. We can very reasonably, and I think I would call those mass atrocities, but they clearly merit a very different sort of explanation to the sort of explanation that might come as a result of civil war. So even when we broaden out genocide to include mass atrocities, there are still, I suppose, definitional issues because there are so many different sorts of mass atrocity. And we're on a fool's errand if we look for one grand overarching explanation, I think, for this whole kind of complex of nasty things. One has to look, in the Soviet case, at the specificities of communist regimes looking for massive swift industrialization, socio-economic advance, with a contempt for the peasantry and a certain contempt for human life full stop. That's a very different sort of set of considerations, I think, to the overtly racist considerations of exterminatory war in the east that comes from the Nazi perspective. Different, again, are many of the civil wars that we see, even though I still think there's a great deal that genocide studies could learn from the study of civil wars. Especially in the post-colonial context, to think of socio-economic causes, the legacy in a whole series of countries from Chad, Sudan, Nigeria, legacies of unequal development across in different areas of those states, East Pakistan, Pakistan too, bequeathed legacies of differential colonial investment, giving one region a socio-economic advantage over another, and often those regional differences are sort of overlapped with ethnic differences too. But that said, it's very, very rare really for civil wars to occur purely on the basis of ethnic difference. As Jacob quite rightly intimates, there has to be a sort of intersection of causality there. Well, you might think in social science parlance we would talk about horizontal inequalities, different ethnic groups within the same society either having or being seen to perceive to have some kind of intrinsic material advantage over others. When that intrinsic advantage is also kind of layered in terms of regions of historical underinvestment versus historical overinvestment, we see the grievance causes for civil wars. We might also see the possibility of causation for secession as well. So especially well endowed region thinks it would be better off going on its own or thinks it's been historically repressed and would be better off going on its own. Then we see, you know, cause for state breaking or state reinforcing violence or the sort of violence that comes about, you know, civil war coming about from a combination of identity and resource based conflicts. So I think all of those things need to, I suppose a lot of these things move us away a bit from the classic genocide paradigm which does rather have the Nazi genocide and the Holocaust as it as its paradigm for very good reasons because of the extremity of that event. But if we're looking at the world as it is now and has been since since the Second World War. You know, I think the most likely sorts of atrocities the most common sorts of atrocities are going to be those that fall at this nexus of development related issues as they cross over with civil war, secession or conflict, and so on and so forth.  Is that right, Jacob. That is correct. Alright, thank you, Professor Bob. Our next panelist is the director of the Center for the study of mass violence at Rutgers University, Manus Mdlarski. His books on genocide and political violence have earned widespread praise, including recent works such as the killing trap genocide in the 20th century and origins of political extremism mass violence in the 20th century and beyond. In recent publication, genocide and religion in times of war focuses on the critical roles of religious differences in wars as enablers of genocide. Professor Mdlarski. Thank you Jacob appreciate the generous introduction. I'm a political scientist and my field is international relations that's my specialization. And so I suppose it's natural for me to come at the issue of genocide from an international perspective. And so I'm going to talk about some of the issues that generate genocidal events that happen, particularly in more time and such a civil wars as Donald block some correctly pointed out, it is interstate wars as well. And the interstate wars in particular that were so deadly for let's say the Holocaust, World War One and ongoing World War Two when the genocide began. So what in particular distinguishes the genocidal perpetrator in this instance. And what I found is that experience of loss territorial in particular can also be personal. And there's a lot of work that that still needs to be done on this, but the genesis of the Holocaust happened afterwards World War One after Germany lost meant much of its territory in Europe as well as its colonies. And these territories were were central. And the Western Poland, for example, posing and was not of course now under Polish rule. And so the impact of these losses became central to Nazi ideation. And these were the personal losses of the of both the inflation after World War One where carts of of George Marx were brought to pay the salary of workers, because the each individual mark was worth so little to buy a loaf of bread you might need that cart of of George Marx. So that combination of personal loss and territorial loss was a condition that that really enabled the Nazi state power. And then we look at the Soviet case. And in particular the Russian Federation, where Putin comes to power. And one of the first things he does is to actually commit a genocide against the Chechens, roughly 20% of the Chechen population was destroyed in the two wars between 1994 and 2000. So that territorial loss was immense there to where where the Soviet Union collapsed as Putin said it was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. This this transformation of this huge Soviet Union to something smaller, namely the Russian Federation. And that Rwanda and and, and we see in Rwanda, also a case of territorial loss that took place when the RPF Rwandes patriotic front invaded and took over substantial territories in Rwanda. It was after that territorial loss that the Rwandan genocide occurred in Cambodia. It was a similar relationship with Vietnam Vietnam was gradually encroaching on Cambodian territory, and ultimately interestingly, even though it was called an auto genocide because so many civilians were killed in in that genocide, who were ethnic Khmer, the first to be killed were the Vietnamese and they were totally eliminated, the small Vietnamese patient population in Cambodia, after those losses, both the people to the engaging in war of the Vietnamese invading solely and the territorial loss. So these losses really confer a kind of almost sanctity on the effort to make up for them to revenge them to the war against the Jews, for example, for their treasonous activity presumed trees, trees enough trees enough. I just saw one minute warning, presumed trees in this activity in in in World War One, the infamous stab in the back was of course never occurred. And, and so I suppose in that minute, I'll simply I am pointing out this one I think one salient element. There are many others as as Donald has pointed to as I'm sure John will, but when they come together is really bad. And but even in and of themselves individually, they have important. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Midlarski. Our final panelist, John Cox is the director of the Center for Holocaust Genocide and Human Rights Studies at University of North Carolina Charlotte. He recently published to kill a people genocide in the 20th century, a book focusing on the intersection between modern genocide and racism. He's currently working on a project titled Rebellion and Resistance in the Nazi Empire, fighting Hitler fighting for a new world, in addition to co-editing, co-editing numerous books on genocide. Professor Cox. Yeah, thank you very much. And I'd like to spend more time thanking everyone but the clock is running. Okay, so I'm going to speak very quickly. All right. And but this is a marvelous effort that you all have undertaken. And I know it's been difficult when with postponements and everything and it's great pleasure to be here. And it's also great to hear my two colleagues speak first because that helps me to tie in some things without duplicating things. But so what I'm going to focus on in my very brief few minutes is one factor that I think is really an essential ingredient in genocide in modern times in the last couple of hundred years. It's not the only factor it intersects. I'm also really glad that Donald Manus explained that there's no, there's never one single cause that things intersect. And I also really appreciate Donald's thoughts about not drawing hard borders around between genocide, mass atrocities, crimes against humanity and so on, because all these things are, you know, blend into one another. It depends on how one defines something. And it's not, it doesn't help a victim of an atrocity to know whether or not they're a victim of a genocide or a crime against humanity or war crime or an atrocity and so on. And the dynamics are the same or that is the dynamics flow into one another and so on. And so, for example, in my classes, I talk a lot about American Genocidal American Warfare in Vietnam. And I don't even feel necessarily compelled to put the big G word on top of the entire war effort, although I actually have no problem doing that. But to me, it's more effort to, it's more worthwhile to talk about the facts and to talk about what happened and how it fits in. Well, etc. Okay, so right now, though, I just want to take my last three and a half minutes to speak about the factor of racism and invention of Europeans and eventually other white people over the last 500 years that became especially a key ingredient in the genocide of violence. Yeah, well, in particular for the last century and a half or so. And so, and I'll just say very quickly that a couple, there are many ways in which it does that.  So racism inevitably was tied in with ideas about nationality and who's indigenous and who's not and so on. And so, for example, the genocide of violence in Rwanda in 1994 was based on ideas of racism brought there by Europeans 100 years that taught among other things that one group to touch the were not were not not only a separate race, but we're also not indigenous to the region. And this is also factoring a couple of things that Dr. Larski pointed to about territorial loss that was often tied in also with ideas of of the the inferior race that you imagine being tied to outside threats. So for example, the very, very, very small population of Vietnamese people in Cambodia being regarded as being tied to a massive external threat, the rather small Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire being seen as being tied to an external threat, because they were not part of the race that was being constructed and fortified. Just say a couple other words I'll say is that it probably doesn't sound too shocking to anyone here to students in general to say that racism is a factor in genocide. But then we often then think immediately of Nazi genocide and other things, but to non specialist to non specialist is surprising to hear that racism imported by the Europeans was a key factor in the Cambodian genocide in the second half of the 70s in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, where Belgians and others had brought full blown really wild ideas about races and the origins of the Tutsi people and so on. But then also in what one could call episodes of well of things that that sometimes have an appearance of some character of the Civil War and so on, including in the Spanish Civil War, and then also in Bosnia and elsewhere and as Yugoslavia was being destroyed in the early 1990s, very powerful and strong ideas of racism. In the case of Yugoslavia ideas and served nationalist mythology that had been had held sway for many centuries, helped to fuel the genocide of violence there and the case of Spain believe it or not. There were people who cooked up some ideas about how communism was a genetic genetic matter there was one person in particular who developed a theory of the of a red gene and so on. And so in fact and actually why not because race itself is completely a fiction something completely invented by human beings. And so therefore is quite malleable. Okay, I know I'm running out of time but I'll just say lastly that I thought about focusing on this especially in the last four and a half months because as well as anyone who's lived in the United States for most of their life. One must be one must take down assume the obligation of learning and being vigilant about racism and combating racism. And yet as much as I've done that throughout my adult life. When I saw the video four and a half months ago of the public lynching of a man named George Floyd. It was especially shocking. And even though I couldn't even watch the video, but the clips I saw but also just something that struck me was that I was saying the face of genocide that cook capacity and potential of genocide of violence. You know genocide starts somewhere. It doesn't start with a massive army and you know the Nazi army and you know invading Russia in 1941. It starts or it's perpetuated or potential is perpetuated in all kinds of ways. And if you could just even just seen a little bit of the facial expressions of the murderer in that video. The murder of George Floyd then you could see a combination of the arrogance, the feelings of racial superiority, the feelings of how dare you even live here in my country and so on. Martin Luther King once said something like that the logic of racism is genocide. Because if you believe that the very essence and the very being of other people is inferior than obviously it's not going to be a huge step toward genocidal violence in time it doesn't take too much of a spark. That is a spark by which I mean social crisis or whatever to go in that direction. Okay, thank you. Thank you Professor Cox and again thank you to all of our panelists for helping us set the stage for this discussion. I first like to ask the panelists if you have any questions for each other. I have one for for john if I may. Sometimes the personal element also enters into it and I'm going to talk now about the George George Floyd thing where the cop who had his knee on his neck, and what eight minutes or so. Apparently there were some sort of personal elements that they both worked in the same bar as as bouncers or whatever. And they had they had a falling out. And I'm wondering to what extent, when racism is combined with that personal element. It gets so magnified that a an open murder can occur. Yeah, thank you that's a really good question because that's something to and yeah maybe Donald might have something to say on this too about because there's definitely been some literature and genocide studies in recent years about the phenomena of neighbors murdering neighbors and so on and and at a more kind of superficial level though I still often believe that when you know someone it's harder to kill them, although maybe that's in a more general way like if one knows if you have many Muslim friends, then it's much more difficult to accept Islamophobic propaganda and rubbish from your head of state, you know, and so many countries. Okay, but anyway, I'm not sure that's, I don't have a real quick answer off the top of my head I'll just say that that was of course one of the most vexing problems in Rwanda, for example, which was a case where people had been turned into races by the Belgians. Of course that's also a lot different I guess than the American experience because they didn't really affect us a little bit more like the Yugoslav experience, where for some generations people didn't really think them that themselves as being distinctly different peoples or races, but yet there was a kind of a reservoir that could be drawn upon later. So I think that the Belgians were building and they were going to do it better than the Germans who had governed Rwanda earlier, where the Germans had some of this identity identity stuff that they forced it on the to see and who to, but the Belgians went beyond them, and made it an almost impenetrable barrier between them, despite the fact that intermarriage was had been ongoing between the two groups for quite a while. Thank you. Um, so I guess I would now like to pose a question to all of the panelists. How does the political stability of a state and its institutions contribute to the risk of mass atrocity occurring. I'll I'll try a essay essay and response. It's very important. Stability is a major issue and in fact, at one point the US government had a state failure task force that was established and it and it's ranked countries in terms of their state failure. Now it's called the political instability task force. So these are countries to watch. Rwanda was certainly one one case in point. And I realize that Russia the Russian Federation's Russian Federation was quite as unstable as it was at the time that Putin took over, but it was. If you look at the indices that I've been looking at recently of the economy and and of people's views of the government so that yeah political instability is very important and doesn't have to leave the genocide but certainly can be an outcome. Absolutely. I mean, I mean much will depend upon the state of the institutions that you have in in situ to deal with instability. I mean, there are all sorts of different forms of instability, some of which are the essence of democratic politics on they and in the sense of competing views about which way you might go and you know often very vibrant and even angry argument about that something about the depth of institutions and civil society that's capable capable of negotiating those differences. I think there's also points to be made about the difference, different distinctions between strong states and weak states, and stable and unstable states those two very different sorts of sorts of dichotomies I mean, we can think of a number of one of the peculiarities of Rwanda, perhaps in the African context is that it was still a very relatively speaking a strong state and partly due to its small size being considered to be something of a developmental model. It was a strong but unstable state as it were a strong state at a moment of kind of constitutional crisis if you like or you know, a period of democratization after economic restructuring and who to elites that felt its hold on power being and being taken away so then played up to the broader who to population the prospect of sort of historical loss of power to the historical enemy. You know that's an interesting example of a relatively strong state in an unstable situation, whereas you could contrast that with with with Darfur in Sudan and say this is a relatively weak state much territorially larger, much weaker institutions much less control over its peripheries. You could say that the Nazi Germany is a strong state, a very strong state house I mean it'd be interesting to say how unstable stable Nazi Germany was. I mean, clearly a state that relies upon the necessity to go to war as it clearly did in its ideology and in its economic model. It was based on an expansionism racist economic military kind of and at the same time, would we call that an unstable state, I don't know. I, it's, you know, it's a state with with the incredibly strong state with obvious grip of a small of a power elite over its main institutions. Particularly not pluralistic in any sense. But I do wonder. This is a very long answer I suppose it's getting round to, if I if I could be so crass as to make this into my own question is to ask all of us looking forward. What we seem to, it seems to me that things like climate change resource scarcity environmental degradation will play out most strongly and most most dangerously in states with relatively weak infrastructures and it will enhance instability. And so it may probably not be worth me talking about Nazism in this sense at all because it's very interesting case but may not have that much relevance to the future going forward. I'd like to follow up on on the Nazi Germany case, and which also has some similarities to Russia at the time that Putin took over, and that is the retreat of democracy that you had the Weimar Republic which was on paper, the most liberal constitution in all of Europe, perhaps the world, although in practice not probably like France or Belgium in practice. And it could not it could not stand that so that the retreat of democracy was was was crucial here in allowing Hindenburg essentially enabling Hitler to say power, even though most people don't realize it. And Hindenburg played a very active role actually, and it will come into power. And Hindenburg was the president of the German Republic, Weimar Republic. And, but I want to, and Russia the same thing Russian Federation, where the Yeltsin will have a major liberal liberalization program that was failing massively given the decline in GDP GDP per capita. And the fact that even minimum standards of living were not being maintained at the Soviet level. With all the lines, people have a minimum, minimum survival, whereas that they were not being able to survive on the amounts of money they were making in the Russian Federation under the Yeltsin liberalization program. So, and this and this led to, along with the territorial problem of Chechnya, led to the Yeltsin appointing Putin, and the essentially genocide of the Chechens to the point of 20% of the population. I want to mention as a political scientist and I happen to be at a zoom meeting this morning with a graduate student of mine. I was talking about state capacity and that is a variable that's been around in political science for a while, and it's gotten new purchase I think, precisely for the kinds of things that we've been talking about here. The issue of instability. Okay, thank you guys so much. So, I'd like to, again just thank our panelists for this really fascinating discussion. To all of you joining us in the audience, I would like to extend my thanks for being here tonight it means a lot both to our panelists and to me that you're dedicating your time and energy to studying such an important topic with us. And with that, we will now split into the breakout rooms with the panelists so the links to each of those rooms should be in the chat. Thank you. Let's head over there.


What's going on y'all? Chris from jassescasebreaks.com a little bit of a first taste for For the shop is 2022 Leaf stitches and slabs baseball a three box case break number one It's gonna be a random hit so in this case It's gonna be a box with a jersey and a card a box with a jersey and a card and a box with a jersey and a card The way it'll work normally is we'll do just like a hit spot You know jerseys will we'll break the box will break the case and then we'll randomize the hits at the end of Someone but just like they're throwing earlier Carl went and bought all six spots and then the randomizer as well So thank you again Carl. So we'll break it first Then we'll do the practice at the end because I need it. So let's just get to it. Here is our case Stitches and slabs three boxes per case It's my first time even seeing this the secret of Jaspie's training What a crazy movie to Speaking of crazy movies It's a great. It's a great all-time movie with a great all-time Denzel performing. That's but really It is crazy crazy crazy. All right, so let's do a little bit of a sneak freak. That's our our box. It looks like Stitches and slabs on the front each box contains Yes, he did But the funny thing is I don't think even hawk was even nominated for it So each box contains one signed custom baseball jersey plus one buyback card here Let's see how this goes So we'll do the card first in the jersey. So here's our buyback card enclosed Let's just Then sells everything in that movie. Here's our first buyback card Nice speaking of card nose and prospects coming up 2018 Bowman draft no one Gorman chrome refractor bowman first Third base second base prospect for the st. Louis Cardinals Did he I don't know no one Gorman if you did and that's That's a big one and we'll see our jersey. So just like the bowman's throwing the no one Gorman will be hit number one Then jerseys will be card jersey card jersey card jersey. Let's do our first Jersey. Oh That's a nice one here. You know prospects. How about number 44 for the Seattle Mariners? How about J rod? Julio Rodriguez Mariners major league jersey That's a nice one right there It is a custom jersey So Is there any room I can put this So I'm just gonna put the jerseys on the cart to the side Just so we have a little bit more room. That's a nice first box though. If that's the Here's box two So, yeah, if you're if you're a bed man, I would assume no one Gorman somewhere on some opening day Some odds to win the rookie of the year might be a good one to take. I Don't think there is an outright rookie of the year favorite in the NL unless I'm blanking on someone But he's a pretty good one to get maybe say a Suzuki We get the car first in the journey Here's buyback card number two Good luck Carl Wow 1989 tops traded Jim meant PSA 10 Ken Griffey, Jr. Oh Wow 89 This is the card for me That's a nice one. Wow, and then your second jersey Looks like number 57 for the Guardians now don't call him Justin It's 2020 say on the winner silent war winner Shane Bieber BS BSA Beckett service authentication, so Justin don't call him Shane Beaver Cleveland Guardians Navy Bluejack box number three the last box of this case number a Filler for this for four spots on the website right now and then two outright spots Jackson's case breaks calm This one feels a little heavier Maybe a beckett grade this time. You have two PSAs it is a beckett grade thicker from the beckett and 1990 Frank Thomas number one draft pick rookie card with his Authenticated auto as well. So Frank Thomas rookie car PSA not PSA But just not no grade on the card itself, but just the authentic auto our third jersey Here we go Ronald Acuna, Jr. Oh Navy blue Atlanta Braves Jersey. That's another nice with three nice jerseys I would say three nice cards There it is right on the one here is the auto on the jersey Kind of find a right spot. That's pretty decent. That's a nice one there too right on the one I'll look at the beaver On the five nice spot Another nice signature The first four nice Three nice jerseys three nice cards Take a quick little pause get our our our brakes filled out just for practice like we were doing earlier And then we'll do the randomizer. Thanks again. You'll be right back All right, so we are back. So here are our hits in order Once again, the no one Gorman bowman first chrome refractor the Julio Rodriguez signed Mariner Jersey 1989 Ken Griffey, Jr. Topps traded card the Shane Bieber signed Jersey the 1990 Frank Thomas tops rookie card Authenticated autograph from Beckett another Ronald Acuna, Jr. Signed Jersey all these authenticated that they their Authentication certificates in the bag were on the card as well PSA graded Beckett graded But let's do our hits in order with our players in our coral. Thanks again Roll-roll both dice for both lists. So four and four doubles again is eight. So roll eight times just for practice once again Here is one two three four five six seven and eight Very nice Here and then our hits once again four and four eight times one two three four five six seven and eight So Jersey Jersey Frank Thomas Jersey card card nice All right, that's gonna be the break. So that was just the first break we have We have another case on the website right now with a filler from select 2021 baseball to go with it This is Chris and Jesse case break calm. Thanks again. Bye