New Ellijay TV

The LA uprisings and protests against the ICE raids and kidnappings have made waves around the country since early June, 2025. And while most of the coverage and discussion has focused on what the Federal government is doing, I wanna come at this from a different angle. If the city government in Los Angeles is so against the raids, why are their employees, the LAPD and LA Sheriff's Department going so far out of their way to do... well, exactly what Trump would have wanted them to do, if they were following his orders directly. Who's really running the cops and what does this tell us about Democrats and their relationship to power?

Wal-Mart vs Trump feels like some kind of kaiju battle, where we're all street-level, watching, just hoping not to get stomped on or have a building collapse on our head. But I'm keeping that Dr. Serizawa energy about this one: let them fight.

On this special mini episode of New Ellijay TV Talks to You, we're revisiting the topic of trade and tariffs, focusing this time on the specific tariffs we're facing, and the brewing battle between Trump and major retailers around the country who are less than happy about the predicament they find themselves in regarding the tariffs.

Here's the link to that first episode in case you missed it: https://vod.newellijay.tv/w/n67o7YmiGXjCFCXxgmHAFb

New Ellijay Television is proud to present The Open Stage from The Circus Freaks. Filmed at weekly shows between 2011 and 2015 and hosted by Russ Sharek, the show features a wide variety of acts ranging from stand up comedy and spoken word to band performances and singers. Presented here on NETV is a curated selection of some of the best acts The Open Stage has to offer, selected and edited for us by Robin Black.

This is just a short Hastening update to vent my frustrations around Trump's Middle East visit and the fact that these skidmark regimes exist in the first place. Monarchy has no place in this millennium and its frankly pathetic that these people are our leaders' friends.

The Hastening is a show about US imperialism. And in particular, its a way to explain some ideas about how imperialism has evolved into something I call crypto-imperialism. Crypto-imperialism is basically the outcome of living in denial about imperialism for decades -- instead of consciously and intentionally working to keep an empire running, we tell ourselves there is no empire at all, while a handful of spies, diplomats, and other un-elected and generally unaccountable people try to keep things running.

This is actually a reboot of this series, which I made a few episodes of in the latter half of 2023. You can watch all those episodes here: https://vod.newellijay.tv/w/p/fJ5N6WqaZwUJ79UbUH7raK?playlistPosition=2

So many things have gone into influencing me on this subject, but in particular I want to shout out the book Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories, which is a compilation of the writings and speeches of Amilcar Cabral, a revolutionary from Guinea-Bissau. I've been really moved and invigorated by that book in a lot of ways, but a lot of my thoughts in this episode are pretty heavily derived from Cabral. In particular, the analysis of why having no local economically powerful class makes newly-freed colonies vulnerable to neo-liberalism. He was a pioneer in this subject and his analysis is so precise that it doesn't even read like what it was at the time -- a prediction. He describes the problems as if he has perfect hindsight. I would encourage anyone interested to read that book.

Next time, we’ll take things to the next level and see how crypto-imperialism looks up close, by analyzing the current war in the eastern part of the DR Congo. A Rwandan-backed rebel group called M23 has been on a rampage, sacking major cities and sending millions of people fleeing into exile. Tensions over this are spreading across the continent and threaten to unleash a pan-African war, with leaders as far away as South Africa issuing threats against the Rwandan President Paul Kagame. So next time on the Hastening, we’ll look at how the US and other imperial powers like France are the drivers of this conflict, even though they pretend to know little and less about it. We’ll see y’all next time.

Welcome back to New Ellijay News Special Reports, A State of Denial. On part one of this series we took a hard look at the fundamentals of how health insurance works, and we honed in on the issues that arise when we try to use insurance as a healthcare cost management system. Insurance companies don’t have a lot of tools to keep costs down, meaning the claim denials are pretty unfair and inflation and price gauging are rampant. But we mostly looked at how things look in the abstract, so on part two of A State of Denial, we’re gonna put things in some historical context, starting by looking at the state of things as they were on the eve of Obamacare, how we seemed to be nearing a Brian Thompson moment even then, and how the failures of the Affordable Care Act have turned the temperature back up on the insurance industry.

Welcome back to Coconut Trees! On episode one, we covered Liberalism, the Great Depression, and the New Deal. But rather than jump straight to the collapse of FDR's New Deal Coalition, we're gonna backtrack a bit and talk about political parties as clubs, populism, and how those parties manage their relationships with working class voters.

New Ellijay TV Talks to You About TRADE

One of the biggest issues in the 2024 Presidential election was tarrifs, trade, and the future of the american economy. Trade policy is one of the most commonly recurring debates we’ve been having as a country since at least 1789. Yet somehow, talking about it almost constantly hasn’t really helped a lot of people get the picture, as trade remains one of the most misunderstood aspects of economics. It was certainly one of the main issues in the 2024 election, with President Trump making it the focal point of his economic rhetoric, blasting large US trade deficits and touting tariffs and other policies to bring manufacturing back to the US. And while the specific items and technology might have changed over the years, this debate about what we produce locally versus what we have to buy from abroad has been raging for several hundred years.

So on this episode of NETV Talks to You, we're gonna explore the subject of trade and look at why it remains such an enigma, what we should expect over the coming few years, and what the real source of the US' economic headaches are.

New Ellijay News Special Report - State of Denial: The Failure of the US Health "Insurance" Industry (Part 1)

This is a New Ellijay News Special Report. The killing of United Health CEO Brian Thompson has sent ripples around the American political landscape, as the US healthcare industry gets a glimpse of the depth and severity of public discontent towards their policies governing our health. On this multi-part installment of New Ellijay News Special Report, we're going to turn the US health "insurance" system upside down and analyze whether or not their scam can even be considered insurance, take a closer look at their policies regarding denials of claims, and look at how they have used their enormous profits to stack the deck in government and media against any attempts at reform.

The outpouring of support for the accused killer Luigi Mangione shows how bone deep the animosity is among many Americans towards the big insurance companies, deep enough that the response feels more like a successful counter-attack in a war than the "execution of an innocent man" as the mainstream media is trying to portray it.

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