Mia Wong
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Everyone is arguing about whether it was even a Nazi salute. You watch the video. It's a Nazi salute. The second one is a Nazi salute. None of the headlines will say that Elon Musk did a Nazi salute. The articles won't say it either. You can't tell whether they've been cowed to submission by the threat of a defamation lawsuit or if they're already running cover for the new regime.
Behind the Bastards
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You scroll through your timeline. They made my gender illegal. They tried to repeal the 14th Amendment through executive order to end birthright citizenship. You can't follow it. It's too much. The world has become a spectacle. And that spectacle is trying to kill you. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm your host, Neil Wong. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail...
Behind the Bastards
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all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. So wrote the French social theorist Guy Debord in his seminal 1967 work, The Society of the Spectacle. Debord is typically written off as just another theorist of early mass media. and today, his work is generally confined to the art world.
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Which is, to be fair, largely a demonstration of the fact that nobody who talks about him has ever gotten past the opening paragraphs of the book, and made it to the part where he demands the formation of armed workers' councils. But this is the age of the spectacle, in ways more nightmarish than Debord could ever have predicted. His elaborate metaphor is rendered thuddingly literal.
Behind the Bastards
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Quote, everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation. And indeed, living has been replaced by the image of living. This phenomena is called Instagram. The spectacle, Society of the Spectacle opens, is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images.
Behind the Bastards
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Today, we literally call the collection of images we use to relate to each other social media. Quote, "...lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness.
Behind the Bastards
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A reality TV star, the old human symbol of the spectacle, in which everything that was directly lived has been transformed into a representation." is now a president the second time, driven by streamers and influencers and podcasters who stand as the new human symbols of the spectacle. They have invaded real society and now rule it directly.
Behind the Bastards
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In the 1960s, the debate was whether you could ignore the spectacle because it wasn't real. Debord's elegant solution was that contemplating the spectacle makes it real. None of that matters anymore. You can't ignore the spectacle because it's here. It has physically invaded the world. Donald Trump is the president. The richest man on earth is Nazi saluting Elon Musk.
Behind the Bastards
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The autonomous force Debord described as a spectacle no longer operates at the abstract level. It is the president of the United States. Everything is rendered thuddingly, transcendently literal. In DeBoer's usage, the spectacle is the management of society by mediating people's social relations through images. This sounds complicated, but on an intuitive level, you already understand this.
Behind the Bastards
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You and I relate to each other through the one-way mirror of a podcast app. You relate to others by reacting to their TikTok videos. You watch the bombs fall on Palestine on Twitter. You relate to each other and the world through images, and that relation is a system of control.
Behind the Bastards
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As Debord describes it, that mediation takes you out of the real world, a world that you can actually change with your actions, and thrusts you into the world of the spectacle, a world where reality is, quote, an object of mere contemplation. Today, we call this the discourse. The work that inspired the 1968 revolutions called it the spectacle. Why does it feel like this?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
The rot, the decay, the unreality of the moment that consumes you until one day Donald Trump is president and the next he's president again. The board has a simple answer. It's because the entire political, economic, and technological system is designed to make you isolated, afraid, and alone. Quote, "...technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn.
Behind the Bastards
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From the automobile to television, all of the goods selected by the spectacular system are also weapons for a constant reinforcement of the condition of isolated, lonely crowds." Later, he writes, what binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center, which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
This is why the world feels like an endless doom scroll. Instagram, TikTok, live streaming, this podcast, they're all based on isolation. Look at what happened to social media during the isolation of the pandemic, how it came to consume even more of our lives with the promise of connection that simply rendered us more and more and more isolated.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
The spectacle, given technological form in the social media app, turns us into a mass in which we are all, somehow, terrifyingly alone. We're not people who form a crowd that could do anything from celebrate a holiday to burn a third precinct. We're spectators. We're listeners. We're viewers. We're chat. Not living, but commenting on the image of living.
Behind the Bastards
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The spectacle, the app, the image, mediates our social relations with each other and ensures that together in a lonely crowd, we rot in isolation and do only the two things the capitalist system needs us to do, work and consume. Atomized individuals are the ideal subject of capitalism, the basis on which everything is built.
Behind the Bastards
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You entered into a free contract to live under a state, says the social theorist. You, the individual, gave up your labor to your boss voluntarily in another free contract between individuals, says the economist. Do not organize with anyone else to get paid more for that labor, or God help you try to create a system where you aren't forced to sell your labor every day.
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That's cheating, says the politician. Your job is to sell your labor, buy these products, and comment on a world in which someone else is acting. The isolation of the spectacle ensures that we're incapable of collective action. Not only because we're incapable of forming a collective, we're not even engaging in the world in which action can take place.
Behind the Bastards
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The extent of the advance of the spectacle today is such that the unfolding of the economic system is designed to turn every part of you into a commodity. Not just your labor, but your identity, your beliefs. Everything that you are is sold to everyone else's spectacle. And in turn, everything that defines you becomes the spectacle itself.
Behind the Bastards
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In a world where there is no action, just the image of someone else's action somewhere else, a commercialized political identity is much easier to adopt than actually doing politics. You don't have to do politics. You can just put on a red hat and watch the man on TV make the liberals angry. You don't need relations with your family. You have Facebook groups.
Behind the Bastards
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Your relations to the world are relations to images. David Graeber wrote that the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.
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But the second, slightly less ultimate hidden truth is that almost everything we think of as objects, money, capital, commodities, are really just relations between people abstracted out onto something physical. We interact with each other by using objects as forms of command. What do you think money is? Instead of having real, equal social relations.
Behind the Bastards
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And that makes it all the more dire that the social relations that compose this world are no longer even relations with each other at all, but relations with images. The spectacle is a strategy of control. As Debord writes, "...where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.
Behind the Bastards
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The spectacle is a tendency to make one see the world by various means of specialized mediations." it can no longer be grasped directly. As the spectacle advances, even rebellion is reduced to meaningless attacks on the symbols of power, never touching power itself.
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Jesus Christ. And that's assuming there's no new ones.
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But when the insurgents manage to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya, or in Wisconsin... It's only to discover empty places, that is, empty of power and furnished without any taste. So wrote the Invisible Committee in the distant Halcyon days of 2014. It could have been written yesterday.
Behind the Bastards
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Nine years later, the insurgents, now on the right, produced their masterpiece. Brazil's even more ineffectual cousin of January 6th. known forever as January 8th.
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On that day in 2023, for reasons that are almost totally incomprehensible to anyone whose mind has not been utterly melted by prolonged and terrible exposure to the spectacle, supporters of defeated President Jair Bolsonaro stormed Brazil's capital. Bolsonaro, of course, had already fled to Florida.
Behind the Bastards
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The presidential palace, Congress, and the Supreme Court were literally empty when the protesters took them. There was nothing to be won, nothing to be gained. The protesters' vain hopes that simply seizing the symbols of power would trigger a military coup to remove Lula and restore the Bolsonaro regime evaporated like a morning dew, leaving nothing in their wake.
Behind the Bastards
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January 6th, at least, attacked the site of the ritual of power while the ritual was technically in progress. The attack was, of course, designed to stop the certification of the election.
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Congress was at least in session, even if that attack, too, was the culmination of a series of ineffectual reruns of the Brook Brothers riots in which right-wing political operatives did manage to steal an election by stopping the vote count in Florida in 2000. On January 8th, no one was even there. So how do we get out? Lashing out at the symbols of power is pointless.
Behind the Bastards
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But you can't ignore them either. Elon's Nazi salute really does represent something. The opening of any solution is to go to the source. Trump and Elon are symptoms, not the disease. The spectacle is born of capitalism. It's a management strategy designed to suppress any attempt to end or even rearrange the terms of the class system. Trump and Elon were likewise produced by two settler colonies.
Behind the Bastards
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They are, in their own ways, the manifestation of the evil of colonialism and racism. Debord's solution to these problems, of course, well, the solutions that people bother to read. There is a staggeringly racist section of this work about how time passes in China that I simply cannot recommend. But Debord's solution was workers' councils.
Behind the Bastards
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And he got his wish the next year during the factory occupations of 1968. It nearly worked. But the last workers' council fell a quarter of a century ago in Argentina. And there's no sign that the workers' council, the definitive fighting form of the working class for over a century, is coming back. In some ways, this is liberating.
Behind the Bastards
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170 years ago, Marx wrote this in the 18th premier of Louis Bonaparte, his own response to a nation's nationalist attempt to restore its former glory by invoking the name of a previous leader. The social revolution of the 19th century cannot take its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstitions about the past.
Behind the Bastards
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In the days and weeks and months, and God help us all years to come, we're going to have to assemble a new fighting form. And no one knows what it looks like yet. We could, perhaps, look at the airport protests from the first months of the original Trump administration.
Behind the Bastards
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where masses of people, including a very young Mia who had not quite realized what gender she was, occupied airports all across the country to stop the implementation of Trump's Muslim ban by physically forcing the government to release the people who had detained in the airports.
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The power of those protests was that they directly located the site where power was operating, the airport, and took them. The weakness of those protests was that people went home.
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And they went home because they had been told time and time and time again by the ACLU and by other legal organizations that the fight was over, that they could leave, and that the Muslim bans would be defeated by the courts. Most of you lived through it. Some of you remember. The Muslim ban was never defeated by the courts. It could possibly have been defeated in those moments. It wasn't.
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The contest was taken away from the real side of power and into a domain largely ruled by the ruling class. But we can learn from both January 8th and the airport protests. Marching to a building doesn't guarantee you're actually targeting power. You must understand how the system is operating before you attempt to gum up its works. A thousand miniature January 8th's is no solution at all.
Behind the Bastards
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You must do the hard work of sifting through the tangle of rumors and lies and attempting to work out the actual structure of repression. It starts with community self-defense. It starts with actually engaging with each other instead of the mediated images generated by an algorithm. You want to break out of the spectacle? Talk to the people around you.
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Talk to the trans people and the immigrants in your life and find out what they actually need. Figure out the concrete steps you can take to organize the people around you and the steps you can take to lift them out of their despair. We're not going to develop a new fighting form glued to our phones alone in a digital crowd.
Behind the Bastards
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We're going to figure it out by talking to each other, by acting in the real world, not by being rendered passive observers of the spectacle. We're going to do it by finding the real places where power operates and taking them. And above all, we're going to do it together.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, wasn't he the guy that Trump brought in specifically to destroy the post office as part of the campaign to steal the election?
Behind the Bastards
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That's actually a pretty common... I mean, this is one of Amazon's strategies, right? Through their warehouses. They intentionally want to cycle through people because the more new people you have continuously cycling through, the less organized and the less sort of like... Less knowledge they have, less you have to pay them, etc., etc., etc.
Behind the Bastards
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And so if you can just cause high turnover rates on purpose, that's a thing that a lot of these sort of business ghoul, like nightmare factory people... love in their workforces and makes everyone else's life just a living hell. But, you know, they're still getting paid.
Behind the Bastards
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Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness can stop the Persian courier service. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about postal services where we ask the question, can the American capitalist class finally stop the American post office? I'm your host, Mia Wong, and with me to talk about What is going on with the post office? What's going on with the post office unions?
Behind the Bastards
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Well, and that's also just sort of like an organizational problem, right? Like if your organization is set up in such a way that a small number of people being incapacitated means total paralysis and no one has any idea what's going on, that's just a bad way to run something, right?
Behind the Bastards
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And especially it's a terrible way to run a union because the union's power is supposed to be from its organization and from the collective power of a large organization of people who can make decisions for themselves.
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And if that's not happening and you get to the point where these decisions are being made by a very small number of people who can just sort of vanish, like that's – for whatever – literally whatever reason that is, right? It could just be you get sick. It could just be like whatever happens. That's just a terrible way to organize things.
Behind the Bastards
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I guess it's also like I want to take a little tiny tangent to be like, if you're doing any organizing project, your goal is to organize yourself out of a job. Ideally, if you were in an organization, it should be able to function without you. Having an indispensable person is a fiasco. Don't do that.
Behind the Bastards
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And yeah, how things are going downhill for the noble people who carry your mail is Tommy Espinoza, who's a union steward for the National Association of Letter Carriers. Tommy, welcome to the show.
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This is true of both your tiny local mutual aid group as much as it's true of your giant national union. So this has been Mia talking about the indispensable person don't have.
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Yeah, I'm really happy to, and I'm really happy to get to talk to you about this. So, I think the place we should start is with a bunch of very, very weird stuff in how labor law works. So, okay, for most people in the United States, you have a federally protected right to strike if you have a union. That is not true for federal employees.
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Yeah, well, I think there's two things about that. One, I mean, I don't... And this is something I've gotten to with a lot of the sort of interviews that I've done on this show, is that I think... a lot of very, very basic jobs have labor conditions that are unimaginably appalling that people just don't know about.
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And I think people are very sympathetic to once they actually understand what's happening in the kind of just horror show stuff that's happening in these workplaces. And the second thing I think that's sort of important in terms of
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getting people to you know like try trying to actually do like mass mobilizations even just to get people to understand what's going on is that i think a lot of people who are facing these kind of conditions think that they're alone and think that it's just something that happens to them or they've been in them for so long they think that it's sort of normal and having a bunch of people go no like a this happens and b it shouldn't happen
Behind the Bastards
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is extraordinarily powerful because you know like that that feeling of isolation is is the thing that all of that you know your that your bosses depend on to make sure that you know you you just keep going along with these conditions even though they are just objectively horrific and i think any strategy that's not based on that is just not going to go anywhere
Behind the Bastards
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That is especially not true for members of the post office. And that is a real issue because the government has decided that like, yeah, no, all these people who do a vital service are not allowed to go on strike. And it absolutely sucks. Yeah. And so I think this this gets into sort of.
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Yeah, and I think that's a great place to end, unless you have anything else that you want to make sure we get to?
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Yeah, so how can people support you and postal workers just in general if there's a specific place you want them to go?
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Well, yeah, we will put that in the show notes. I hope you all win. And I don't think I've ever said this genuinely in my life, but thank you for your service.
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Yeah, it absolutely is. And I mean, I think that's sort of the beauty. I mean, it's both the beauty and the horror of this world is that on the one hand, all of us are being crushed by the same sets of forces. But on the other hand, it means that whatever fight that you're taking is also a part of the larger fight for get all of us free.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. Yeah, this has been Nick Adapa here. Go make trouble for people who suck.
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Where I want to start, which is with the sort of history of the National Association of Letters Carriers, a union that is not allowed to strike and how sort of weird that is. So, yeah, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about sort of the origins of the union and what effect that has had on how organizing works or doesn't work.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, that's a debilitating set of conditions because you've effectively taken away sort of the two major tools that unions of basically across all political stripes use, right? You've taken away the ability to strike. You've taken away the ability to use your dues money to influence elections.
Behind the Bastards
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So this immediately means you've taken away the tool that sort of militant unions use, which is strikes, and you've taken away the tools that more conservative unions use, which is attempting to buy politicians. And then also your leadership is like, we can't strike us. I mean, we can't protest because someone might think it's a strike or the public might come at us.
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And it's like that, that doesn't seem, I don't know. It really seems like it's like, it's not only have you tied both hands behind your back, you've like tied them behind your back to your legs. You're now rolling around on the ground. Right.
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Isn't that right? Yeah, I know. Spoken like someone who has never watched a federal government in action.
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Yeah, I mean, it's something that it's a part of being in a union that doesn't get talked about very much, which is that the contract doesn't mean anything unless the union enforces it. Because the moment the contract happens, the bosses will attempt to not abide by it. And this is what a lot of union militancy back in the sort of heyday of militancy was.
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I mean, if you look at how the UAW worked in the 60s, they'd have a guy with a whistle standing on the line. And if someone did a contract violation, he would blow the whistle and everyone would just sit down. And you'd immediately have a strike, right?
Behind the Bastards
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And like that level of militancy, you don't need to be at that level to enforce a contract, but you have to actually be willing to do stuff and to fight management over it. And if you're not willing to do that, your contract is effectively meaningless. And that's a real issue with a lot of unions.
Behind the Bastards
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Which, the thing I think is really interesting, just to circle back to the 1970s strike, is that... So the strike was illegal, right? Nixon brings in the Army and the National Guard to break it, and the strike still wins?
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And not only does it... You know, I mean, you could argue whether it achieved total victory, but not a single person who walked off the line got arrested, even though all of them technically committed a crime. And that's something that, like, you know, I think... Okay.
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The enforcement of laws depends on a set of relative balance of forces and whether people care about enforcing the law, which is how, for example, if you pirate seven movies and you get three copyright strikes, you go to prison, but the Sam Altman or whatever AI company can...
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literally steal everything on the entire internet and get money for it and no one will ever prosecute him right and so so you know whether or not something is illegal is to a large extent or the difference between something being illegal and you going to prison for it
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largely has to do with the balance of forces involved and that's something that you should keep in mind when and this is this is this is the thing that that cuts the other way a lot too right like a lot like employers just do illegal actions literally all the time and it doesn't matter because the state doesn't care
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Yeah. Unfortunately, we need to go to ads for a little bit because unfortunately, my my my boss's boss's boss's livelihood depends on these ads. Mine technically does, too. But like, Lord knows, I don't see that money. So ads. We are back.
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And yeah, I guess that leads into the next place you want to go to, which is talking about what are the specific grievances today that y'all are dealing with and the union is not dealing with?
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The richest man in the world does a Nazi salute while giving a speech at the inauguration of the new president. He does a second one. In another age, it is the most significant event in world history. It's maybe the third most fascist event of the day. NBC re-uploads the address and cuts away from the sig hail it broadcasted live. You refresh your timeline.
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Because it's really not that hard, right? If you just go do the thing, it will happen. And suddenly it ceases to be this like, oh, this domain of expert knowledge or this like, oh, this is a really difficult thing. If you just, I don't know, you go give food to someone and suddenly you've done that and it's happened.
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So there are things that are important to like basic organizing stuff, knowing how to book rooms from like churches, from libraries, from whatever meeting spaces, and also knowing how to book rooms in places that like accommodate disabilities. Yeah. is a huge thing because a lot of people book meetings in places that are wheelchair accessible and it's a fucking fiasco.
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And you can avoid that very easily, but you have to put a little tiny bit of work into it.
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Yeah, you know, there's a range of people's schedules, getting people to show up for stuff. Things you can do to prepare if what you're doing is basically all the things we've been describing, right? Getting together a bunch of people to do a thing that is technically forming an organization. Yeah.
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Now, how formal or informal you want it to be or just, you know, maybe it's just your organizing project or whatever. There's things you usually want. You want some kind of email so people can contact you. In tandem with the email, something that's very helpful that I think younger people tend not to think about is getting Google Voice. Yes.
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When Google Voice lets you set up a voicemail account so people can call you and leave phone messages. I mean, everyone should just do this because this is the way that a lot of older people communicate, right? They won't send you an email, but they will leave you a voice message. And it's very, very useful for this.
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And childcare is something that's important. I did. I mean, a lot is probably too strong of a word, but like I did childcare when I was organizing and it wound up being really helpful because there's a lot of people with kids. And so, you know, there's a couple of ways that this could work. One is that, you know, you have you have everyone bring their kids. You have like a little space.
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You bring them like coloring stuff. You bring them toys. You bring them games and you just sort of watch everyone for a while.
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And as an organizing thing, again, if you're good with kids, that's very useful, staggeringly useful organizing skill. Yeah. Another way this stuff happens is, you know, everyone pulls together 10 bucks and you hire a babysitter. Yeah. For a bunch of kids. And that's a very useful organizing thing.
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Yeah. There are some other very basic things that I think are very important if you've never done this before. I'm going to talk a little bit about how you run a meeting. Yeah. And you would think that this doesn't matter until you watch a group of 100 people who don't know how to do this attempt to get anything done. And it just is a fiasco. And this is even true of sort of smaller groups. Yeah.
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So I'm going to give you how to run a meeting 101. Okay. Okay, a very common way to organize meetings that people use all over the world and it's very effective is you have two things. You have an agenda and you have a stack. And those are like the technical terms for them. The agenda, I mean, it's an agenda, right? You know what an agenda is. You put the things that you need to do on it.
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And another thing that's very helpful with these is, you know, you're going to be operating under time constraints because people don't have 45 hours to be in meetings. And my God, you don't want to be in a meeting for that long. Yeah.
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You know, knowing how long roughly you want to talk about these things is very, very useful and making sure that you're sort of moving the conversation through the stuff on the agenda because you have more stuff that you need to talk about. Yeah. All of this, again, like this all sounds very obvious. And again, you know how to do it. But until you've been in a room where people...
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have not realized they need to do this. You don't understand how important this stuff is. Yeah, the pain of it not happening. God, I have watched rooms full of like, these are like professional scientists, right? This is an entire room of 150 people with physics PhDs who don't know how to run a meeting. And it's a shit show.
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And all of this stuff could have been avoided with some very, very simple things. Yes. The other thing, and this is genuinely a piece of social technology, right, is the stack. It is very simple, right? You have one person who is the stack keeper and when someone wants to talk, you have one person talking at a time.
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And when someone wants to talk, they raise their hand or they make some kind of signal to the stack keeper and that person writes their name down. And so you now have a list of who gets to talk in what order. And so you go down the list and people get to say things. And again, you know how to do this. This is not like a complicated thing.
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But again, I have watched people who collectively have like more PhDs than like I earn money in a week. Like... who know I cannot be able to figure this out. And you do. I believe in you. I believe in you, dear listener, that you can do this. There's a very common... Sometimes this is one person. Sometimes this is two people.
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A very common way to do it is to have a stack taker and then have someone who's the facilitator. And the facilitator's job is to call on the people and to try to move the conversation forwards and make sure everyone's involved. And also, another important part of this, and this is, again, something you'll know from your stupid work meetings, is you have to get people like me to shut up.
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Your meetings can't just be one person giving a speech. You have to cut them the fuck off and you have to get to the next person.
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Yeah, yeah. And finally, on this note, there's a lot of... If you want to go into more technical stuff, part of the things the facilitators use and part of...
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You know, the formal name for this is like the progressive stack, but it's just a thing that's very useful in organizing is you want to make sure everyone in a room is engaged and talking and that it's not just three people who talk all the time. Yeah.
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And, you know, and so the idea of the progressive stack, right, is you're trying to find the most marginalized people in the group, people who are least likely to speak, and you're trying to get them in first. Yeah. And sometimes this is literally just like, Hey, someone hasn't been talking in a meeting this whole time.
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And you can like ask them what they think about something or ask if they have anything to say. And a lot of times they will, but they just don't feel confident enough to say it. And this is, this is a very, very important skill for a facilitator or just even, you could just do this in a meeting too, right? Like,
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You can be the person who goes like, hey, do you have this person have anything to contribute? And that is an enormous thing. Sometimes it can be, you know, sometimes it can be a little bit awkward, but it's a very important thing because you're just losing out on people who have really, really valuable ideas and contributions and plans.
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And if you just let the same three people give speeches, you can't get to the stuff that's actually useful.
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Yeah. So I'm going to put all of this together briefly, and I'm going to run through basically how we started the first organizing project I ever did, which was at a tenants' union in Chicago. Okay. So, and this is based on my memory. It's been a long time since I did this, but my basic memory of what we did was... Okay, so one of my friends is an experienced organizer.
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I was like a tiny baby, right? This was my first offline organizing project ever, right? I had no idea what I was doing. I still thought I was a guy, which, like, that's how much of a fiasco, like, little tiny baby Mia who doesn't know anything this was, you know.
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And so my friend talked to some people that he knew, and he knew that I, you know, I was interested in getting involved in tenants organizing, and we, like, went to a cafe.
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And we sat down and we ate and we just talked about what we wanted to do, what our plans were, what things we needed to do to get this organization set up. We talked about ideological stuff. And that's actually is something that's important, too, is part of organizing is getting people to think intentionally about their actions. and think politically about their actions. Yeah.
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And that's something that's very useful. You also have to make sure that you're not forming a book club. Book clubs are fine, but you need to make sure your organizing group, if you're trying to do a thing, hasn't just become a book club. Yeah. But that was something that was very useful to us, and we started making a plan.
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And our plan was, okay, we made a bunch of flyers, and then we went out, and I did this, and I walked around through a bunch of streets, and we put them on light posts or whatever, and then we put them... Like, we hung them up in the buildings of tenants. Because you can just, like, walk up the stairs, right? And you just put them on the walls. And, you know, we had this flyer.
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This flyer had information. This flyer said, okay, we're starting a tenants union. If you have issues with your landlord or you want to talk about tenant stuff, like, come here at this time. We had an email. You can send us stuff. We had a phone number that you could call. You know, and so, okay. And so, parallel to this, we, like... I forget if it was a church or if it was some building...
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some center or something. We, we booked a room. We were kind of lucky in that we had like local press people. Nice. Who we sort of knew.
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And this is another useful, like if knowing a journalist can be a very useful skill, because one way to get a project off the ground, if you're trying to get to a bunch of people is by finding a journalist who is willing to cover it because, you know, we're, we're finding, we're founding like the first tenants union in this place. Right. Yeah.
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And you know, so we had media coverage and we got kind of screwed with, when this event eventually came together because there was like three feet of snow that night. Yeah. But people still came. Like, people still came in the blizzard. Like, a lot of people showed up for this. What are things we do? We also, like, you know, we just started talking to people, right?
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We started talking to tenants about their problems. We just, you know, we talked to our friends. We talked to the people they knew. We ended up talking to someone. You know, and this is the thing that just happens. As this spreads by word of mouth, right, people start contacting you. We ran into a really long-time tenants organizer, right?
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in the city who had a bunch of incredible stories about how our corrupt politicians got their jobs by betraying the old tenants organizers. Right. And I guess everything is, you know, another thing that happens in projects is you'll, you'll sometimes you'll just, you'll just pick up someone who's, you know, has been doing this since like the sixties. Yeah.
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And it rules because they have a wealth of experience and they, they want to go, they want to do stuff. We plotted out what we were going to do at our meeting. You know, we were going to do some political education. We were going to have a bunch of time for people to talk about stuff. And we were going to, you know, get people to understand what we were doing, how they can start organizing.
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And then we did it. And I, unfortunately, don't remember much of what we talked about because I was off in another room taking care of a bunch of people's kids, which was very nice. But I don't remember what we talked about. But like, you know, but like all of those things, right? All of those steps from the start of organizing
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You get five of your friends to go eat dinner, and you talk about what you want to do through someone makes a flyer in, like, Microsoft or whatever. You make it in, like, PowerPoint. MSP. Publisher. What's the one I'm blanking? I haven't used it in so long. The one you make greeting cards in. WordArt. WordArt.
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There's like an actual program and I forgot what it is. Used to use it to make Christmas cards. But like, you know, okay, so we made a flyer and we walked around and put the flyers up and we made an email. You know, we got a space together. We figured out what we wanted to do. And then we did it. Yeah. And, you know, and there's a bunch of organizing from there, right?
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But, like, we had started a thing. And you can do every single one of those steps. And if you can't personally do one of those steps, you can think of a person who you know, who you can bring in to help you do these things. Because organizing, you already fucking know how to do it. Yeah. You just have to go out there and do it. Yeah. You can have faith. Yeah. And this has been It Could Happen Here.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where I, your host, Mia Wong, talks about inflation. We have covered inflation on this show extensively, and now it is once again time to return to it as we head into a world where concerns about inflation and the economy are the most cited justifications for people voting for one Donald Trump.
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But unlike our other, oh God, so many episodes about inflation, this one is going to be a bit different. It's going to start out somewhat similar in that I am going to lay out a brief explanation of the sort of material causes of the inflation cycle and talk a bit about inflation theories, which is what we've been largely doing on this show for a while.
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And then I'm going to explain why none of that shit mattered, why none of what was actually causing inflation mattered a single bit, because ultimately our experience of inflation, and more importantly of price in general, is based on a sense of justice, or as the academics call it, a moral economy, and not on, you know, anything that's sort of going on.
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So let's begin with what is going on with inflation. Now, as we've discussed before on this show, most economists do not understand why inflation happens. People will take theories. Those theories are usually quite bad. There is no mainstream consensus on what is going on. As both me and my friends at the magazine Strange Matters have pointed out,
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Former Federal Reserve Governor Daniel Tarullo said, quote, the substantive point is that we do not at present have a theory of inflation dynamics that works sufficiently well to be of use for the business of real-time monetary policymaking. So again, this is a guy who used to be a Federal Reserve Governor who has admitted that they have no idea what the fuck is going on with inflation.
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Looking at the extent to which people don't know what's going on to inflation and how the various theories simply don't work is a large part of Steve Mann's notes towards the theory of inflation, which is a strange manners article that a lot of this will be pulled from. And we've had Steve on the show talk about this before.
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So there are a lot of theories about inflation and none of them work very well. Inflation on a fundamental level is just prices going up. People have this tendency to think about inflation in terms of the value of money going down. But on a pure level, all inflation says is that prices go up.
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Now, the most common theory of inflation is, you know, inflation is based on there being too much money in the economy.
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And the thing about those theories is that they don't work outside of like a very few specific examples of hyperinflation that loom large over our understanding of what inflation is, even though they have absolutely quantitatively and theoretically, they have absolutely nothing to do with the inflation that we've seen over the past four years.
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So instead of talking about that shit anymore, Mann and the Strange Matters crew developed what they call the supply chain theory of inflation. So I'm going to read the quote from Notes Towards the Theory of Inflation. As economist J.W. Mason recently remarked on his website, inflation is just an increase in prices. So for every theory of price setting, there's a corresponding theory of inflation.
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If inflation theory is downstream of price setting, this is still a quote from that article, but not the J.W. Mason quote, If inflation is downstream of price theory, then no account of inflation can begin with the macro economy at all, since prices are set at the micro level.
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Rather, you need to look at particular industrial sectors, their supply chains, and ultimately the pricing decisions of their firms. Only then are the true causes of inflation, both the internal failures of the industrial system and external shocks to it which can cause price rises, revealed. Mann's price theory is fairly simple, right?
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It flows from the basic observation that prices are set by guys in offices, not by something, you know, abstract as like market forces and supply and demand. In economic terms, what this argument amounts to is the argument that corporations are price makers and not price takers, right? There's a bunch of guys, they sit in offices and they develop a strategy about what prices are going to be.
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And that's, you know, how they're set. And what matters to the people who develop prices are things like goodwill, which is to say not pissing off their customers by raising prices, and things like their balance sheets, which reflect, you know, their incomes and costs. Price in this model is just cost plus markup.
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And we know this is how prices are actually set because, as Mann points out, people have gone through and done surveys of pricing managers and asked them how they set prices, and the answer is cost plus markup. So what would cause these guys in offices to increase their prices?
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Well, these are companies that are all part of a global supply chain, a very, very broad global supply chain and a very complicated global supply chain.
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This means that if the cost of the stuff they buy from other suppliers on the chain in order to produce what they're selling, if those prices go up because there is, to use a purely hypothetical example, a giant global pandemic, those cost increases eventually had to be passed down to the people paying the products so that the corporation can maintain its balance sheets and maintain its sort of price plus markup as something that covers their costs, right?
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This is what set off the giant inflation spike in the US and the Biden administration. You know, the cost side of cost plus markup exploded. But it doesn't really matter why the prices increased for our purposes. And our purposes are looking at sort of why Trump won the election. What was important, you know, about inflation wasn't even the price increases.
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It was the narratives around inflation and how we understand the economy at a moral level. And for that, we're going to turn to one of the most popular accounts of inflation, so-called greedflation. Now, as we've said, price is cost plus markup. And you can raise prices because of cost. But you can also do this because you want to increase your markup.
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And this is something that happened during the inflation surge. Companies realized that consumers were willing to accept higher prices without the usual goodwill hit because they thought the prices were going up because inflation was happening.
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And because they were willing to accept the higher prices and not try to shop somewhere else, corporations went, fuck it, let's just keep jacking the prices up. And this really, really pissed people off. It still does. And this is something that was true across the entire political spectrum, right? People were very, very angry about this sort of re-inflation thing.
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And that rage is more important than the technical details of why inflation happened. Because the way we understand inflation is not through conventional economics. We understand it through the moral economy.
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And when we come back from a different kind of economy, which is to say this ad break, we are going to examine what the moral economy is, how it differs from our sort of regular economy, where it came from, and why it's relevant to our situation now. And we are so back. All right, let's talk about the moral economy. The moral economy is a concept developed by the British historian E.P.
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Thompson in the early 1970s. Thompson was attempting to explain the previous century and a half of bread riots by what he termed the English crowd by applying anthropological principles to their actions. I'm just going to read from Thompson's The Moral Economy of the English Crowd here.
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It is of course true that riots were triggered off by soaring prices, by malpractice among dealers, or by hunger. But these grievances operated within a popular consensus as to what were legitimate and what were illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, baking, etc.
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This, in its turn, was grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic function of several parties within the community, which, when taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor. An outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation, was the usual occasion for direct action."
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Now, the moral economy of the English crowd in the 18th century is about a very specific period in British history, which is to say the 1700s, and about how people thought bread should be sold.
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Peasants and the new urban workers had very specific ideas about bread, about how bread should be produced, about who should be allowed to sell it, about where and when they should be allowed to sell it, about how it should be sold, how it should not be sold.
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And because of this and, you know, because of their experience in sort of previous systems that before the sort of imposition of the free market system or quote unquote free market system, they have a very specific series of hatreds. They hate middlemen. They hate grain hoarders. They hate all of the aspects of the new quote unquote free market that impose additional costs and burdens on them.
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And they also believed that elites have a kind of moral duty to the masses based on the norms and traditions of their society. And when they welch on that deal in a way that makes people's lives worse, people get extremely pissed off. These peasants and, you know, urban workers particularly hated price increases. And they hated price increases so much that this frequently turned into riots.
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But the actual contents of these riots are very interesting. Instead of simply seizing all of the grain, they do something else entirely. Here's Thompson again, quote, the central action in this pattern is not the sack of granaries and grain or flour, but the action of, quote, setting the price.
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from a few lines later, they might then order the farmer to send, quote, convenient quantities to market to be sold, quote, and at a, quote, reasonable price. The justices were further empowered to, quote, set down a certain price upon a bushel of every kind of grain. So if you follow this here, right, what's happening in these British bread riots is that the revolt isn't just
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about there, you know, being a price to grain, it's that people have a very, very specific moral understanding of what the price of grain should be. And they take direct actions that are designed to set the price of grain to the level they thought it should rest at. And this kind of action is extremely common sort of across Europe in this entire time period, right?
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It's also a hallmark of the French Revolution. You can see in this, right, in this sort of rage over price in the sense of justice, the outlines of our current moral economy.
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You have, you know, staggering outrage as price increases seen as unjust, which is re-inflation, or just inflation in general, because people are just mad about the concept of the price going up, paired with rage at the elites, which manifests in sort of hatred of Joe Biden and the Democrats for being the people who presided over these price increases.
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We also have our own rage about price gouging. In immediate market terms, and this is something that the most annoying libertarians and the defenders of the market love to point out, there's nothing actually wrong by market economics about, say, Martin Shkreli jacking the price of medicine up until you can't afford it anymore.
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Or, you know, other things that we find extremely terrible, like people jacking the price of water when people need water, like bottled water during hurricanes. We are all outraged. So why do we feel morally strong about it? And that is the moral economy, baby!
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This is something that, you know, these reactions, right, the emotional reactions we have to this, the sense of injustice that we feel, are almost entirely outside of the realm of what you would call traditional economics, right? And that's because we're functioning on something that is, in some senses, older than that kind of economics.
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But there's something else going on here at a fundamental level. And what's important about price and the reaction to inflation is that it's an outrage based on a sense of justice, right? This rage is not a measure of direct exploitation necessarily. I think it was the political scientist James C. Scott who wrote his own book called The Moral Economy of the Peasant.
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And Scott argues that, you know, and E.B. Thompson also argues this, that it's the moral angle that causes people to revolt, not the direct level of exploitation. You can, in fact, you know, inflict hideous exploitation on people as long as they think that it's just. But when you violate these moral principles, that's when people really lose it.
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But it also means, right, the fact that the sort of sense of outrage is not necessarily directly tied to to the exploitation level, it means that rich people can be bad about inflation, even though they're completely fine, because these people also still have this sort of sense of justice about what prices should be.
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Now, it's also worth noting here that it is possible to have high inflation rates and have everyone be fine. In fact, we have discussed scenarios like that on this show. In my episodes about the rise of Lula, the current president of Brazil, we discussed how military dictatorship in Brazil produced an economy that was, you know, you had 20% year-on-year inflation, right?
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But also you had 40% yearly wage increases. And so everyone was like kind of fine with it because because the amount of money you were making was going up every year, so nobody really cared about even things like the military dictatorship itself. There was not an enormous amount of opposition to it.
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But then Brazil's trade unions figured out the government had been lying about inflation numbers, and this started off a series of protests that would send Lula into his political career, and eventually this is one of the sort of dominoes that leads to knocking down the military dictatorship. And that's because the level of exploitation people were living under hadn't changed
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But the deal that they had made, right, the sort of deal with with the military government of like, we won't do anything. Our wages will continue to go up and inflation will continue to be work at a certain level such that we're still getting paid.
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That deal was violated and that sense of injustice was powerful enough to really kickstart an extremely powerful Brazilian labor movements and kickstart the fall of a dictatorship.
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Now, one of Thompson's arguments was that the success of Adam Smith and his cohort, and Smith is moving around and making his arguments about what the free market is in the period where we're dealing with all of these sort of grain crises. His argument is that the success of Smith was moving economics out of the domain of morality where it was born.
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Economics was originally an aspect of moral philosophy, right? It was part of that discipline. But, you know, Smith and his people move it out. And this is why liberal economists find the anger about inflation so incomprehensible. They see it in purely statistical terms and go like, look, the economy is great. Why is everyone mad?
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And, you know, I could get into here a bunch of arguments about whether or not this is actually true. I mean, I'm going to return to my sort of classic argument about like, well, yeah, OK, even if you believe all of the economic indicators are great for cis people like I'm trans for me, the economy is it has an unemployment rate of like 1936 U.S. Great Depression.
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So, you know, there are a lot of people for whom the economic outlook is not good. People for whom, you know, even the wage increases that they got in this period still leave them in sort of hideous and crippling poverty. And none of that shit matters because the statistics that these people are trying to use to try to get everyone to calm down are not operating in the inside of the moral economy.
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They're operating outside of it because they're from a tradition that is specifically about not working inside the moral economy. And the people they're interacting with are in the moral economy. But why is it like this, right? Why do we have a moral economy that functions this way?
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In the case of the peasants and, you know, the working people of the 1700s across Europe, and, you know, this goes on through the 1800s too, right? We can trace the moral economy to a very, very specific set of conditions and traditions and expectations rooted in how people traditionally bought bread. But what are the conditions of the modern American moral economy?
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To understand that, we need to turn to the concept of price itself. But first, do you know what guarantees low price? Actually, I probably should not say the word guarantee. That is probably staggeringly illegal. You know what probably has low prices? It's the products and services that support this podcast. We are back. So let us now turn to price.
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The political economists Shimshong Bickler and Jonathan Neitzan argue that price is the unit of what orders capitalist society. You know, price is like the fundamental unit of political economy. It's the thing that orders and structures the entire society. If you want to know more about this, read their book Capitalist Power. It's quite good.
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I am mentioning them because I'm about to misuse their argument completely in tandem with a quote from Marx that I am also about to misuse. And I am going to do this to make a different point. So I agree with Bickler and Nietzsche that price is the unit that orders capitalist society. But what I'm interested in is price as what's called a social hieroglyphic.
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Now, social hieroglyphic is a term that's a one-off term that Marx used once to talk about how price mystifies the nature of value, whatever. I don't care about that. I care about it because price. there's something very interesting about price itself. And there's something interesting about the notion of a hieroglyph.
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Now, Marx is using hieroglyph in the term of like, it's something you have to be decoded, right? Because he's writing in the 1800s. This is, you know, everyone's obsessed with hieroglyphs. I am using hieroglyphs because hieroglyphs are also a method of encoding complex information into a single character, right? Price as a social hieroglyph
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is important because price is the mechanism through which we understand and often through which we fail to understand the world. Our entire lives in the eyes of the people who rule this world, our entire lives are captured in a single number. Everything you do at work is ultimately just a price on a corporate spreadsheet.
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The entirety of the labor process of producing a good, every hour worked, every drop of sweat, every tear, every broken body and shattered city and trade union is lined up in front of a firing squad, appears in the end as a simple number. Price. To express it another way, here's Daniel Cahn and the Painted Bird from their song, The Butcher's Share.
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Let's take a walk around the old bazaar where every little thing has traveled far. Every pair of pants and grain of rice contains this horror story and its price. A story of the power people wield. A story about factories and fields. A story of what you'll never have to be aware just as long as the butcher gets his share. Price, this single number, is how we understand the world.
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And it causes us to treat price, and thus inflation, as a matter of morality and not economic rationality. Because price is the way that our society causes us to interact with people. It's the way we interact with objects. It is the thing that structures the way we all behave and understand the world. But price has another function. It is the gatekeeper of capitalist society.
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Because price and a man with a gun is what's standing between you and the ability to live your life. Outrage at the moral economics of price increases are similar but not identical to the impulses behind looting. Everything that you've ever need and have been unable to get is, when you walk into a grocery store, just sitting there right in front of you.
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But between you and it is a number and a man with a gun. And the man with a gun fucking hates you. So the moment you're free, you just take it. Price, and the entire economic system behind it, is organized very specifically so you don't do this. E.P. Thompson argued that the moral economy was pre-political.
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The movements that it produced could be extremely well organized, but they fundamentally were not the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. In 2020, we, for a brief moment, saw the outlines of that movement. The uprising was brutally crushed. In its place, we saw the emergence of pre-political concerns about price, right? We saw, once again, a massive panic about inflation.
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And this is not to say that inflation didn't hurt people. It did. It was, in large extent, a fiasco. But look at the politics for a moment that this has produced, right? What the media understands is economic anxiety.
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And what I think we can now better understand as the moral economy that is a result of the fact that our entire economic system is structured by price and that we encode all of the information in our life into prices that we sell ourselves for and that we in turn are sold things for. those prices going up, the product of it was Trump, right?
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And there's, I think, a reason why these sort of pre-economic explanations are preferred to the answers and, you know, to the actions that people saw in 2020. Four years later, Portland, one of the centers of the uprising, now has almost every grocery store at the exit of it is armed guards with guns. And these guards are there to maintain the price system.
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They're there because for a very brief moment, people started thinking something dangerous. They started thinking, what if this didn't have a price?
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It could happen here, the podcast that's happening right now. This is maybe the foremost of the Putting Things Back Together episodes. I'm your host, Mia Wong. With me is James Stout. A guy who likes to put things together. Yeah.
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And, you know, on the subject of putting things together, over the last, I don't even know, three, four weeks, the question I have been asked the most by everyone is, how do I start organizing?
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And, you know, the problem with how do I start organizing is that it's not a question that has clean or simple answers. Now, the most common answer you get is just join an org. And the problem is that most of the people who you are hearing this from are already in an org and want you to join their org.
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Yep, and that's a lot of orgs. Yeah, that takes most of them, right? Now, we'll come back to orgs in a bit, but what I'll say about orgs is that, okay, if you know an organization in your area that you like and you think does good work and most importantly spends their time actually doing work instead of either infighting or talking about doing work, join them. It'll be good.
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But the important thing about organizations, and this is something we'll come back to later, the important thing about organizations is they have a lot of people. Yeah. And the thing that makes organizing work is people. It's not organizations. It's not even necessarily ideological labels. It's there being a bunch of people who you can use and who want to do things. Yeah.
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But something I realized, the more I had these conversations, right? You know, I'm having it with friends. I'm having them with strangers. I'm having them with other organizers. And the more I had these conversations, the more I realized something sort of startling. You, the person listening to this, almost certainly already knows how to organize, but you don't know that that's called organizing?
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Yeah, that's a very good point. I have encountered some of the most stunning... I mean, organizing that, like... I can't discuss the specifics of, but some of the best organizing I've ever encountered, I have ran into in the last three weeks from people who don't think that they're organizers and started talking to me about their stuff. And I was like, what? Like...
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People are winning victories that the hardcore committed organizers haven't been able to do in like 30 years. Yeah. And it's just by random people who don't think they know how to do anything.
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Yeah, and that's part of what I want to try to, the myth I want to try to puncture with this, because I think, particularly in the US, but this is true in a lot of places, there's this way in which the organizer, sort of TM, capital T, capital O, the organizer gets held up as this sort of, I guess, particularly masculinist thing, which is it's this guy with specialized knowledge.
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And that's just not true. This brings us to something that I think is actually really important, which is what even is organizing, right? And the answer is that most organizing is you get a group of people together, you get them to show up to something, and then you do something, right? And the thing about this, right, That's something all of you know how to do.
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If you can organize a dinner party, right? If you can get eight people to show up to a place to eat dinner, you can do this. It is largely the same skill sets. And all of the skill sets that make people good organizers are skill sets that you have to develop to, you know, work a job, right?
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You know, like one of the things that comes up a lot in this, which is less discussed and also kind of annoying, but, you know, you have to manage it, is that organizing is about people. Mm-hmm. And sometimes you have to, you know, you have to do things like you have to manage people's egos. But like, I don't know, almost all of you work jobs or have worked jobs, right?
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You have had to like deal with your boss being on one, right? You have the skills to do this. You know how to do the interpersonal relationship stuff. It's just that you don't think about that as organizing, even though that's just what it is. Yeah, that's the core of it, is getting people to do stuff.
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Yeah. And the way you do this is by building relationships with people. Right. And this isn't necessarily friendships, although that works. And like one of the easiest ways to start organizing is by getting all of your friends together because you're already friends. You have preexisting relationships and being like, OK, motherfuckers, we got to go do something.
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And actually, I love that the first thing that you brought up was an admittedly sort of medium-ish scale lift version of this. But one of the very easiest things that you can do is you can just get food of some kind. You can either buy it or you can make it yourself. And you and a group of like eight people, not even eight people, you can do it with lower.
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I know people who've done this just solo, is that you can just go give food to people.
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Yeah, and there's a second compounding thing here, too, which is that... You know, feeding people, it's a way to build relationships with people. And also, it's a really good way for people to get to know you in general and know that you are someone who will help them with things. Yeah. And from there, and this is a very common exception.
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I mean, this is I literally had this conversation with with one of my friends who's like an old school Food Not Bombs organizer. Food Not Bombs is a very, very it's a cool organization. You can just like found a Food Not Bombs chapter online. They have like a couple of principles or you can just do your own thing. And I'm pretty sure it's still like the largest anarchist project in the world.
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Yeah. Because all it takes is you and like three other people and you just go feed people. But the thing is, from doing that, right, if there's other things that you're concerned about, people will bring you their problems and you can help them doing it. And this is a very good way to get into other kinds of organizing because suddenly you're
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Once you start building these relationships, everything sort of cycles and cycles and you know, you get involved in more and more things. Yeah. And that's kind of a that's kind of a late stage thing that we're sort of jumping to a bit. But I want to go back to the beginnings of how so how do you get a group of people together to do a thing?
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And the answer is you kind of already know how to because you presumably at some point in your life have like organized a group of friends to go do something, right? Like you've gotten a group of people together to go accomplish a task.
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One way I've been thinking about it recently in my project is thinking about it as like putting together a heist crew. Yeah. Okay, I could vouch for this, right? The feeling of walking up to eight people and telling them individually, I'm putting together a team and I want you. It feels, you could just do it. There is nothing stopping you.
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Nothing in the world can stop you from just walking up to your friend and going, I'm putting together a team. And it feels exactly as good as you think it would for a heist movie. It rules. It's so fun. Amazing. Yeah, but this gets into also what kinds of people you want to do, right? Because obviously, you know, there's two vectors of this.
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There's, on the one hand, you have the aspect of, okay, who do you know, right? And a lot of organizing is just about... Here is a problem, and I know someone who has some sort of skill or resource that can help deal with it, and you put people in touch with each other, and that's organizing. So much organizing is literally just, hey, I have a broken part of my car.
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I know someone who's a car mechanic, right? And you put them in touch, and you have successfully organized people, and you have built relationships, and you have made... all of the sort of social web that creates organizing, you've made it stronger. Yeah.
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It also just feels good because, you know, and that's an auxiliary benefit to all of this is that it's a great way to sort of break the isolation we're all under.
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Yeah, and do you know what else will help you enter a situation with more hope?
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I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but we are not in control of the length of the ads. They just do it. We're sorry. Here's a really long period of ads. I'm so sorry. We are back. So I want to return to my heist career. I don't know, if you're a D&D person, the other way you can think about this is you're putting together like a Dungeons & Dragons party or like an RPG party.
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And the way you need to think about this is, okay, so you've picked a thing that you want to do, right? You've seen something in the world that is bad and you figure it, you go, okay, I can do this thing to solve it. And maybe that's, you know, it's literally something as simple as feeding people. Maybe that's... You know, I want to start I want to start doing tenants organizing.
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I want to start because my rent is too high. Right. People are getting evicted. I want to start doing like immigration defense. Yeah. And from there, you make a list. And that list is, you know, what you're interested in doing. And you try to match what things need to be done with people, you know, who have those skills.
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And this is where you really get into the heist things, right? Because everyone has their sort of like heist role. Now, obviously, part of this that you want is you want to create sort of balanced teams, right? You want people who have overlapping strengths so you don't just have only one person who can do a thing.
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And part of the way that successful organization works over time, and I mean, just how successful organizing works, is that eventually you are trying to organize yourself out of a job, which is to say you want your organization to function such that if you're not able to do it, or just you're gone, or you cycle on to a next thing, or any number of things that can happen, you want the organization to still be able to keep working without you.
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And you're trying to get people to be able to replace you as the person who's organizing the thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. And at this point, we can start talking about the kinds of skills that people need for organizing.
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And a lot of people and this is unbelievably common when I talk to people and like, especially women and especially like a lot of binary people and trans people particularly have this is that people don't believe that they have any skills. And then you talk to them for five seconds, and they're like, well, I'm good at carrying heavy objects, right? I'm good with kids, which is a huge one.
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We'll get to in a second, right? Or like, I don't know, I have a car. That's a huge skill. There are so many different skills that are so useful for so many things. I'm just going to go over lots of things that are actually really useful to get people a sense of, like, the kinds of things that there are massive roles for.
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So one of the most important ones, and this is something you deliberately look for, you know, this is one of the things you do at the beginning of any union organizing campaign. Someone who's good at talking to other people and making friends, that is a staggeringly useful person. Because, again, most organizing is just talking to people and building relationships.
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And, you know, one of the things you do when you're doing your sort of – they call it power mapping. But when you're figuring out –
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How you're going to organize a workplace is you find the person who everyone likes and talks to and respects and you talk to that person because that person can, you know, can sort of like organize people down the chain because they have they have the relationships already. And also they're good. They'll be good at, you know, talking to new people and spreading the organization that way. Mm hmm.
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And so like, you know, if you're just someone who's social or, and this is also very useful, if you have a friend who is very social, because I know a lot of us are not very social, but you probably have a friend that you're thinking of right now who is very good at conversations and is charming and is good at making friendships.
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That person, unbelievably useful, incredibly useful and compelling skill. There are also things like research, people who are good at, and I think people are much better at research than they think. To take like a tenants organizing example, right? One of the common things you have to do is find out stuff about a landlord, right?
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And there's the higher difficulty version of that, which isn't that hard also. I want to mention this, but like going to a courthouse and finding records about who owns property companies. Not that hard. It's not that hard. It's like you could just do it, right? It's not as hard as you think it is from someone saying it. But there's also even just easier things than that, right?
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That all of you probably already know how to do, which is just looking at someone's social media profiles and finding out information about them. Yeah. And this is very useful, yeah, for like union campaigns, you know, bosses.
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And you can use it for good. Do you want to explain what OSINT is and how that process works?
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Yeah, and this is something that's very useful for, I mean, there's so many use cases for this, right? There's, you know, there's the very obvious ones where you're dealing with a local Nazi and you're trying to organize around, like, running them out, keeping people safe from them, and you can find information about them. But, I mean, it's useful for, I mean, cops who are beating people.
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It's useful for, like, politicians, particularly. It can be very useful for, it's useful for landlords. This happens all the time. It can be very, very useful for banks.
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bosses in union campaigns unions have like teams of researchers usually to like do this kind of stuff but the thing is also and this is something i don't think people understand those guys they're like the people they're hiring to be researchers are just you but they got a job being a researcher for a union They have the same skills as you.
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They know how to Google stuff, and they know how to look through people's dating profiles and look through their Facebooks and their Instagrams. A big one, a big one that rich people especially do not think about is Cash App and Venmo. Oh, Venmo is gold. Particularly Cash App. Because, yeah, yeah, because people just leave public transactions out there.
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Like, that's how they got, what's his name, the congressional... McGate. Can I legally call him the congressional pedophile? I guess I'd call him the accused pedophile. Yeah, yeah.
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And one of the ways they found that was that and also like paying for that, right? Yes. Which is rape, by the way. I want to be very clear about that. Like having sex with someone who is underage is rape. It is always rape. And the way people found that was that they just looked through like his Cash App history and they found all of these money transfers to people.
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This is all very, very simple stuff that's very, very useful organizing wise that you already know how to do. Yeah. Pinterest is another absolute bang.
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They'd be pinning. You know, if you're hearing some of these things and you think that you can figure out how to do this, that's also a huge skill. Finding people who are willing to learn things and willing to learn new skills is... is a huge benefit to organizers because this gives you a flexible person, right?
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It gives you someone you can flex into any of a bunch of roles that you need and also can pick up skills to learn things. Having a car and being able to drive, and I know a lot of you don't do this, but if you do do this, this is you immediately, even if you literally cannot contribute anything else to a project, being able to just drive a bunch of water to a place. Oh, yeah. Huge.
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Yeah, and like transport-based skills are also very useful. I mean, if you hike a lot, that's a very, very useful skill. There's a lot of sort of mutual aid projects. There's a lot of, you know, I mean, even things like setting up summer camps is a thing that like leftist groups do, right? And being able to hike, very good for that. It's good for things like wilderness rescue.
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There's a lot of, you know, James, like the work you do that has to do with like going and helping migrants like... being able to hike is staggeringly useful skill. Yeah.
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And it can literally take 10 minutes. And this is something that, you know, can scale up depending on how much skill you have, right? There's even just very basic auto maintenance stuff is very useful for stuff like this. But, you know, like if you're a carpenter, right? If you're an electrician, You do some kind of trade work, right? You do plumbing, right?
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That is a thing that is massively useful to a lot of people. There's a lot of other kind of just skills that you have from your job that can be very useful. I mean, having someone to manage a spreadsheet. Oh, yeah. Yeah, is staggeringly useful. And another one that I think people don't understand that they really have, but like being able to set up a meeting, right?
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And like having a thing that lets you be like, okay, here's when everyone is free. Like you probably have to do this for your job or just for, you know, trying to get your friends to go even just like be on a call together or like go have food or like just do anything free.
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That is what literally genuinely one of the most important skills you can possibly have as an organizer is the ability to just sort of like go talk to people and be like, hey, can you show up to this thing here? Yeah. And that is that is so much of just what organizing is. Can you be here at this time and then trying to figure out a time?
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So we're going to close out this sort of skill section with some, I think, just sort of like domestic skills that I don't think people realize are super useful. If you have a button maker, you are instantly the single most useful person in any organization. I love that.
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Or you can obtain a button maker. They're very easy to use, but if you have one or you know the person who has the button maker and suddenly you can just crank out buttons for every single event, they rule. Everyone loves them. It helps enormously. It's awesome.
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And that's a huge part of what organizing is, right? And that goes into one of the things that is also an appreciable skill that's very useful is, I mean, just like being nice to people, being kind to people and having people around who are good at keeping groups together.
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Yeah, that's its own distinct kind of person is someone who can, you know, keep all of the people who are involved in a thing, enjoying being around each other. That's that's that's a kind of person who's very valuable.
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And it's something that you can look for, you know, and if that's not you, like you can, that's something you can, you know, find in your friends, you can find in the sort of the people around you. Yeah, definitely. There's also something I think you can tell when an organization is collapsing because this is like the first thing where the quality drops.
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Drawing and graphic design are very, very useful because a big part of what you do organizing is like you make a flyer and you put a flyer on a bunch of telephone poles to tell people that there's a thing happening. Yeah. And...
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Yeah, you know, and this is also something, you know, later on you might be making a social media presence, but just having good artists and having good graphic design people is enormously useful for this kind of stuff. And along this line, there's things like making music. And there's a bunch of different ways this can go.
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This can be an immediate thing where, you know, like you have people on a picket line, right? And everyone's singing songs. And this is great. We love this. Also, and this is another thing that you can be thinking about in terms of what skills you have and what things you can create. Benefit shows. Oh, yeah.
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This has been a huge part of a lot of how some of the union stuff up here has been getting funded is by just having like punk benefit shows. And if that's the thing that you can do, or you know people in bands, you know people who make music, you know people who just make stuff who are willing to contribute it to the cause, that's great.
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No, and this is something I've been starting to say more and more. If you need a theory-brained way to say this to someone who is a curmudgeon-y Marxist who hates fun, morale is a terrain of struggle. There's a reason why morale is one of the most important factors of military campaigns. You can't get people to do things if they're too depressed to do it. And being able to raise people's morale...
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It's it's this massive if you want to get want to go into technical language is a massive force multiplier right it makes everyone you have enormously more effective the better they feel about themselves the better they feel about situation they're in and things like music things like art I mean things like pulling pranks.
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if you were a good practical jokester this is a staggeringly useful skill both like in terms of you know you need to be careful about whether you're playing your pranks on like other people in the org but like you know if you know how to just like pull pranks this is a really really useful thing in like union campaigns in tenants organizing there are a lot of people who you can prank and it's very funny and it lowers their morale and it raises your morale
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And resisting fear is another huge aspect of this, right? A lot of the ways that people, like a lot of the ways that you demobilize people, this is why regimes like this spend a lot of effort trying to make people afraid, is that it makes it harder for you to act. And the things that make you less afraid, even if they sort of seem silly, are very, very important.
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And on sort of this note, one of the things that, as you've assembled your group of people, right? One of the things that's important to be able to sort of have a grasp on is that you can't just do organizing by having it only be the capital, the serious thing, the capital T organizing thing all the time. Your organization will not hold together.
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There has to be actual like bonds formed between you and the people you're organizing with and the people you're trying to help.
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And this is something that I think you can understand in your own life pretty easily where, okay, if a random person on the street walks up to you and tells you to go do something, are you going to do it? And it's like, no, why? No, probably not. Like, I don't know, maybe it's something like really sort of Hey, there's children in a burning building. We're going to run in and grab them.
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But like the odds are, no, you're going to ignore them. But if your friend goes and tells you to do the same thing and, you know, you've been friends with them for a long time and you really care about them, the odds of you doing it are much, much higher. And that's that's all organizing is.
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It's finding ways to you have a thing to do and you go talk to people and you ask if they want to help you do it.
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And the stronger your relationships are, the more likely that is to happen. And that's why it's very important to do things like, you know, just like having potlucks, like bringing snacks to meetings. Oh, yeah. And like, you know, even if you're doing a potluck, it's good to, you know, you do like one capital O, capital T organizing thing, right? You get like a little bit of work done.
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But mostly everyone's just sort of relaxing and eating chili or whatever.
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If you're a baker, you know, you can bake for people. It's a wonderful thing to share. Oh, my God.
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Yeah. And just knowing how to cook. I realized I forgot to mention this one. Knowing how to cook is a staggeringly useful skill. It's useful in literally every, literally any kind of organizing you can possibly be in. It is a thing. It is a skill that is useful in like, it's useful in war zones. It's useful. Like literally no matter what organization you are in, if you can cook for people.
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And you don't even, and you don't have to be like a good cook. It's just like, you can show up with food that you have made. You, you have instantly made this whole thing more successful.
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We are back. So I want to wrap things up by doing a couple of doing a few things. One, I want to talk about some kind of basic organizing things that you're going to have to do that are not very difficult, but are extremely important. And second, I want to talk a bit about how we did the first organizing project that I ever was involved in, which was tenants organizing.
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It's awesome. The other fun one is pure joy at something funny happening, like the Shinzo Abe assassination. Easiest writing I've ever done in my life.
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Yeah. Um, other times it's just like, there's a deadline and everyone is counting on me and I have to get it out. And I've gotten to the right level of sleep deprivation where I can just do it. That's right. That's right. Yeah. But I, I, I also think, you know, there's obviously like health insurance, which is sort of a joke given our health insurance, but yeah.
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And then the last thing, and this is the sort of the serious one is that like this, you know, I mean, I do some organizing stuff too, but like this is, This is the thing that I have to do that can materially affect the world, which is a very, very weird thing to say about a podcast, but I've seen it happen, right? I've seen all of you go and do things that wouldn't have happened.
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And I've, you know, it's a weird situation, right? Because my motivation for doing this stuff is the chance that you will make the world better. But I've seen it happen. And I have to continue to believe that the thing that I've been doing for all these years, this project of building a very large hammer, And deploying it against our enemies can work and will work.
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And that is, you know, that's how I get out of bed every morning is we're building the hammer and we're swinging it. Yeah. That's a great way to put it. Very large hammer would be a banging name for a podcast.
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There's weirdly a few this year. Cool. I normally isn't. I like the Boeing ones. That was fun.
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The one that was most emotionally impactful for me was getting to interview Dr. Julia Serrano, who, if you haven't listened to that episode, go listen to it.
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Yeah. Whipping Girl is the book that literally created a bunch of the... The concept of misgendering is from that book, right? The language that we use to talk about transness today is directly her. And so few people have ever read the book. So few people even know who she is. And getting a chance to talk to her was incredible.
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And I'm also really happy about the organizing one that I did because I've gotten so many messages from people who were just like...
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oh wait my knitting is useful to organizing and i'm like yes yes it is you're knitting you're so incredible staggeringly useful yeah so i'm proud of that one yeah let's take a quick break then garrison robert james you can answer that question and we're back james how about you
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Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty good idea. Like, there's definitely sort of... I'm immediately going into this naysaying a little bit. There's definitely problems with it. It's going to be extremely hard to execute because we just don't have a modern history of doing that in the US, and even some of the successful ones in the last decade that people have pulled off haven't been that effective.
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But, on the other hand, as something that we, you know, a concrete thing that we have to organize towards that has a bunch of, like, pretty large unions behind it already... I did an episode about that a few weeks ago. I don't know, a couple months ago. I don't remember when I did this episode. I'm sorry. I can't remember anything I've ever done.
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But I think it's a good opportunity to connect a whole bunch of different kinds of organizing together, both in terms of sort of labor and in terms of the support work you need for that. So, yeah, cautiously optimistic.
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Yeah, I have a couple. So I'm trans fiction-pilled right now. We're giving you fiction from trans authors. Would you say you're transfixed? Wow. I walked right into that one. Nice.
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Yeah, the first one I wanted to talk about is The Gunrunner and Her Hound by Maria Ying, which is the pen name of a couple of authors. Okay, so this is an absolutely unhinged lesbian book about a lesbian crime lord and her new bodyguard, who is also a lesbian, and it rules. There's a whole sort of post-apocalypse US thing going on, but they're still in civilized Hong Kong. It's awesome.
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It's great. You need more unhinged lesbians in your life. Go read this. The other one is one of the boys. This is forthcoming. It's going to release May 13, 2025 by Victoria Zeller. And it's about a trans girl who's like the kicker on her football team. And she has to leave the team because she transitions. But then the team needs her back because they don't have a kicker. And it's fun.
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It's a good time. So you should get that when it comes out.
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There's still time. It's still 2024 as we're writing this.
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Something's happening in January. I have two. Well, one of them, I mean, it's kind of a hack one, but I don't think the Junta of Myanmar makes it out of 2025. Yeah, I think not in the version it is today. Yeah, that's the hack one. The other one is another Assad one. I think someone actually does assassinate Assad.
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Well, he gets too full of himself and he goes to Abu Dhabi and some Muslim Brotherhood guy just whacks him.
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Here's your long shot, man. My long shot is that sometime on Spotify rap day, JK Rowling sees a trans woman just like existing and gets so mad she has an aneurysm and dies. No.
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Yeah. Okay, my big one for the year is this is the year the economy finally collapses. This is the year you find out that no company has made any fucking money in a decade. It's all been being pumped up by a deranged combination of interest rate bullshit, a bunch of fucking money from overnight repo purchases, keeping the banks propped up.
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I don't know if it's going to be the trade war that fucking blows it up, although I think that will instantly detonate.
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everything I don't know maybe it's maybe it's a Chinese housing bubble maybe the tech bubble finally collapses maybe all three of them hit at the same time this is the year it fucking goes I've never actually put my name down it on down on this on the show on any other fucking year this is the year the zombie economy will fall over dead the necromancy cannot hold
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There you go. All right. What impact do you mean? AI is going to result in astronomical job losses. True or false? There will be an evolution of job laws. Next.
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Yeah, I think the other thing that's going to happen pretty quickly is I think he's going to start moving on tariffs very, very fast.
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Yeah, for me, okay, so the easiest way something gets done is just pure rage. I get really angry at something, and I can just do it. Like, it just comes out.
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We're in this kind of crisis period of, I don't know, what you call the national trans movement to the extent that it exists, where the advocacy orgs and legal strategies they've been pursuing are not working. We're losing in the courts all the time. Their electoral strategy of... kind of burying themselves in the Biden administration has failed.
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And I think this is a moment where we need a new plan. And this is as good of a plan as I've ever seen. And I think one of the things that we're going to see, we're going to need to see, and we're literally just going to have to do over the next few years. I mean, ideally, over the next couple of months, because we don't have much time until these people take power.
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is more sort of, you know, not just intra-union coordination of organizing trans workers, but is organizing trans workers across different unions and trying to figure out how we leverage our power more broadly to protect ourselves and to fight for our rights and fight to be free.
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We have an opportunity here because, you know, to do a version of Zizek's mistranslation of Antonio Gramsci is like, you know, the old trans movement is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is a time of monsters. But I think this means that, you know, you, like literally the people listening to the show, the people on this now, we are going to be the people who define humanity.
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what the trans movement is going to be going forward, right? And we have to because we have no other choice. But this also means that, yeah, we are going to be the ones who get to set the tone of what we're doing, get to strategically decide on how we're going to do this. And I think we have advantages, too, in the sense that
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There are ways in which our economic marginalization is sort of helpful in that, you know, if you look at the sort of independent unions that have been forming recently, right? Even more so than in conventional unions, unbelievable numbers of those people are trans, right? Because... you know, okay, you're dealing with a population where it's very easy to get salt.
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It's very easy to send people into unionized stores because no one has jobs anyways. And so the, you know, the risk of you losing it is like lower because you're already taking a low wage job, et cetera, et cetera. And I think there's things about these movements and the way that we're embedding ourselves in also sort of new movements, like the Starbucks unionization thing is not that old, right?
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I think we're well-positioned on the sort of front of a bunch of different changes that are happening in both union organizing and in how the American working class works to build something together that can actually go back on the offensive for the first time in like a decade.
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Every single union that has ever been formed was made by people exactly like you. You, the listener, listening to this right now, right? You are exactly the person who has organized every union that anyone has ever done, right? It's not something that's like the domain of pure professional organizers. You can do this too.
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Jesus Christ. Yeah, I mean, if you are in a union and you hear your leadership say the words historic contract, you are screwed. That agreement is going to suck. I remember on this show, literally live and recording right before there's supposed to be the Teamsters UPS strike, right?
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Like I'm literally on the episode with two of the union people and we get the text of the contract in the middle of recording and And we get the thing with it is this is a historic contract. And we're like reading in the middle of the episode. It's like, wait, this fucking sucks shit. It's like, that's how you know you are doomed.
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When you get the historic, when they start pulling out the historic contract thing.
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Yeah, but by the time we're finished recording this, there might be another anti-trans executive order. We'll get to that at the end. But the big ones for right now is that Trump is trying to do a... And this is something we talked about in our last episode about what it's going to look like for trans people, but a federal funding...
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ban for trans health care which means for for youth trans health care which means any provider that like gets federal funding and this is this includes things like taking medicare and medicaid right those like hospitals can't do any kind of gender affirming care for youth Part of what's sort of terrifying, I mean, there's a lot of terrible stuff about this, but they've defined a kid as age 19.
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Or under the age of 19. Yeah, under the age of 19.
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Totally, totally. Yeah, and on that note, one of the things they're trying to do is target states that have trans-sanctuary laws by trying to get parents who take their kids to safe states charged on kidnapping charges.
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And it's worth noting, supposedly later today, there's going to be one about using the attorney general's office to work with attorney generals in states who prosecute teachers to use gender affirming pronouns as like sexual abusers.
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And I want to point out like these executive orders specifically, like the second raft of them that I've been talking about, like these are all unbelievably illegal, right? Yeah. Like. These are probably not going to get implemented immediately because there's immediately going to go to the courts like the Supreme Court will probably give them some of it.
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But like you can't just like declare something a crime and have the attorney general prosecute people for it. Like that specific thing is genuinely so ridiculous that it might not survive the Supreme Court. It's nonsense. But things that aren't nonsense. And this is something he genuinely can do. That's very dangerous is he's trying to get. And this is from Aaron Reed.
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He's a trans journalist, does pretty good work on this stuff. The federal government has been instructed to not follow WPATH guidelines. So WPATH is this sort of organization that sets the guidelines for like trans health care. And this we don't know what this is going to do.
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There is a chance that this could endanger private like health care covering it because they follow the government using WPATH guidelines. So that's extremely, extremely bad. But again, and this is going to be a running theme in the next section of this, a lot of this is stuff that he should need Congress for, and he's just trying to do it because he thinks that he can and he doesn't give a shit.
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So speaking of fuck it, let's get into this whole, this whole freezing the entire federal government thing. We're going to do a more detailed episode about this next week, but maybe the most unhinged thing that he's done so far is in the birthright stuff. he did an executive order that's telling everyone they can't fund DEI. Yeah. Early this week, the U.S.
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Office of Personnel Management sent out this memo to everyone telling them that, like, all grant programs are frozen until they submit a, like, they submit a description of, like, what the grant program is and why it's not DEI. And so, like, Things that were, like, fucked by this, right? I have a few of these programs that they were, the grants they were shutting down here.
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The Nicholas and Zachary Burt Memorial Carbon Monoxide Poisoning Program. Whoa! The National School Lunch Program, Special Milk Program for Children, the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, the DOD's Basic and Applied Scientific Research Grants. DEI, DEI. It's even got a D right in there. That's right.
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One of these, and this is a very serious one, at least for these people holding on to power, was the National Guard's military operation and maintenance. Famously woke. That's like $8 billion of money to the National Guard. Hey, critical support. He got one thing right.
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The way that you can tell that none of these people and the thing is a sign of is that none of these people have any idea what's going on inside of the state. They don't understand what it is. They don't understand what it does.
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And I can prove this for a fact because one of the programs that they froze was a program that gives money to police to do patrols outside of a nuclear weapons assembly plant. They defunded the nuke police.
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So, this is the thing. Like, I think people have this conception that, like, you know, they're operating according to a plan. These are all sort of strategic, like, strokes and master strokes. And, like, no. They're just lashing out, right? They're driven by pure anger, and they're trying to do this purge of the government of anything woke or whatever.
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Like, anything that's, like, vaguely involves non-white people or just, like, anyone who's not a cis white dude, they're trying to get rid of. Yeah. And this memo is... Was immediately challenged in court because it's also this is also hideously illegal. The president doesn't control the purse strings. That's like, you know, in the Constitution, it says that Congress controls this.
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So where we're at now is that the memo has been withdrawn. But there's a bunch of really conflicting information where, like, Trump spokespeople are saying that they're still going to go through with the executive orders.
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But the problem that they have is that there are literally so many of these grants. And the reason they did it this way in the first place was because they found a list of grants, they copied all of them, and they were like, okay, departments, you have to go figure this out and we're freezing your stuff until you do that. Even Medicaid was frozen for a few hours yesterday. Yeah, right.
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Jesus Christ. So you gave up things for a 1.3% raise. That's the kind of thing that you get if like... I don't know, say, like, you got, like, some unbelievable concession package somewhere else. Maybe, conceivably, you would take that. Or maybe it's a thing where, like, you're, like, a nurse and your problem isn't pay. Your problem is you're working, like, two million hours a week.
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But, like, that's a you-got-concession-somewhere-else kind of thing, not a we-gave-up stuff for, like, the worst raise you've ever seen.
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Great. Incredible stuff. Yeah, it's it's it's wild. Someone should dig into who's running that company and, like, who they're working with to get those contracts because probably a fun story there.
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Oh, great. Okay, yeah. I'm bequeathing this as a gift. I know there's a bunch of journalists who listen to this. Go do that story. I guarantee you'll find some unbelievably unhinged stuff.
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Yeah. And like it's Minnesota, right? Like I'm from Chicago. So like it is it is slightly warmer in Chicago and you get wind chills and negative 40 here. And like Minnesota is much worse. So like that is that that is not like optional stuff. That is the difference between you having hypothermia and you not having hypothermia.
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Yeah, speaking of ways to not die in Minnesota summers, here are some products and services that will probably not help you with that, but maybe they will. We are back.
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Great. Great. Your managers are also cops. They can attack you. Incredible. Incredible stuff from the post office.
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And in every single one of these contracts, they're inventing new, different, and unique ways to do wage theft and just steal people's money, which... And it's worth noting, again, like if a post carrier like broke into an office and stole the amount of money that is being stolen from them, they would go to prison forever. Right.
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But because it's your boss doing this, like the worst thing that happens to them is they have to go through a grievance procedure, even though they are just literally robbing you.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and putting them back together again. I'm your host, Mia Wong. So, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, we talked about the collapse of the U.S. Postal Service and the absolute horror show that's been inflicted on postal workers. When we last left our intrepid heroes, things were not great. They have continued to be not great.
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Yes, this is this is this is a vote to send your bargaining reps back to the table with the demand that we can't take a deal that sucks this much. That's what a vote no thing is.
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Yeah, like, 1.3% is the kind of raise that, like, in a normal functioning union is, like, that's, like, a company's opening agreement that both you and the company knows you're not going to take. Yeah. Like, that's...
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And with us to talk about this entire shit show... is Bad Mouth, who's a letter carrier in Fort Worth, and Tommy Espinoza, who is a former letter carrier and former union steward for the Post Office Union. That one. Yeah, look, it's like I got up at 7 a.m. this morning. It's happened that long since I got up. You're getting tired, Mia.
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The products and services that support this podcast if you don't buy them and therefore cannot be are broken. Is there anything else you want to talk about with arbitration or should we move on to the impending doom of the postal service?
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Yeah, so let's move on to the future of the post office, which I want to take a second to mention that, like, Okay, look, I am not someone who has any respect for the people who built the U.S. government. However, if you want the U.S. government to exist, the Postal Service is something that was deemed so important that establishing the Postal Service is in the main body of the Constitution.
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Now, freedom of speech and the right to free association, that is not in the main body of the Constitution. That is a fucking amendment. Right. The people who built the American system thought that the Postal Service was a more important thing to make sure to have in the main body of the Constitution that set up the modern version of the government. Right.
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They thought that shit was more important than like your right to have freedom of assembly, like your right to not literally be grabbed off the street and tortured, which is like the Fourth Amendment. Right. So like, you know, in the scale of priorities of like how important is the Postal Service? Like that's how important people who set it up.
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thought it was, and those people were not very smart and, like, a bunch of racist slave owners, so I would argue it's actually more important than they thought it was because they're, you know, I mean, like, obviously their priorities are completely out of whack, but, like...
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Oh, no, he did. He did own a slave as a young man. Damn it. And I think freed him.
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We're finding this out live. So, yeah, he did for his early life and then became an abolitionist later. Which is still bad. Yeah, yeah. That's, you know, glad you came around eventually, I guess. I don't know. Look, we're finding this out live on the show. Oh, my God. That was a lot of time of him owning slaves. That absolutely sucks shit.
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But both of you two, welcome to the show, and I'm excited to talk to you both.
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Well, and, like, also, I want to point out, the President of the United States is issuing a cryptocurrency. Like, that shit is so fake now. Like, so fake.
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Yeah, thanks for having us. Yeah, so, all right, let's start in a place where many things start, which is to say the 1970s, the fulcrum upon which history pivoted. So one of the things, and we talked about this in our last episode, is that post office workers are not legally allowed to go on strike. This is sort of nonsense, but it also doesn't mean that it's never happened, right?
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Yeah. So it's like they can just be like they can just be like hiding like your bills or like Social Security check. Yeah. Yeah.
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Oh, by the way, I was just about to talk about a wildcat strike. Disclaimers. No one here represents a union. They're speaking in their individual capacity, et cetera, et cetera. None of this is legal advice. Do I have any more caveats that we usually say for these things? That's roughly all of them.
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Yeah, sorry. This is one of these areas where delivering the mail is a social thing, but the thing is, sociality is the enemy of capital, and that's the people who are running the post office, that they don't give a shit about you know, like the actual social bonds and ties that, you know, that are the thing that society is supposed to be composed of.
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Like they care about their metrics and them being able to make more money and them, you know, being able to advance higher in their career ladder. Yes. It reminds me a lot of the campaign against the school system where you deliberately underfund things and then you blame the teachers for why the service is bad.
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And it's like, well, it is not the teacher's fault that there's like 48 kids in a classroom, right? Like, yeah. And there's also a very, very similar privatization campaign run by a bunch of extremely powerful forces. Let's go back and talk a bit about who the people are who are doing this and what their sort of plans are.
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Yeah, but did you want to talk about sort of the last time that things kind of looked like this and what happened?
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that's so unhinged that's like i need to stop here for a second because that's like if your union is doing that to you you need to understand like dear listener that is not how any of this shit is supposed to work like even even a normal corrupt union will have a bargaining team that is composed of like it will have a bargaining team that isn't outside contractors there'll be people from inside the union who are like the stooges of like whatever sort of management clique is in power like having them all be outside contractors is one of the most ludicrous things i've
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ever heard a union negotiation cutting out the entire, that's so wild.
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Yeah, can you talk about what open bargaining is?
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We'll have links to all that in the description.
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Yeah, it really does. Yeah. Is there anything else that you want to make sure people know before we head off?
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Yeah. And so as we sort of mentioned before, one of the things about the post office, it's similar. If people remember the rail, like the rail strike that didn't happen, where there's all of these hoops you have to jump, you'd be able to go on strike. And that's because, again, like rail workers, postal workers don't operate under the normal sort of National Labor Relations Board like framework.
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Right now, admittedly, there was a very good chance that in like seven months we don't even have that. No one has that anymore. But, you know, as we are right now, yeah, things are going good. But as things are going right now, let's get into the current tentative agreement. And I guess we should actually, we should roll this back a little tiny bit.
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For people who haven't listened to these episodes before, can you explain what a tentative agreement is?
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And that's had a profound impact on most of the unions that survived that period. And a lot of them didn't, right? Which is, you know, part of why you get people who behave like this. But on the downside is it means that you get handed a lot of deals that absolutely suck. But do you know what else absolutely sucks? It's the robotics and services that support this podcast. They probably don't.
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I don't know. We are back. So let's talk about what the tentative agreements that y'all are being asked to sign is right now.
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This is one of the things that the UAW is fighting for, is eliminating tiering systems altogether. Because if you're actually trying to get a functional union and make people's jobs better, that's the thing that you do. And having a third tier is not good. Extremely bad.
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Yeah, morale is a terrain of struggle. And this is a way that you can fight there that does other things too at the same time, which is critically important.
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Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you because things have been very bad. And one of the specific ways that they've been very bad is that there's become this framing, and this has been around for a while, but it's getting sort of increasingly adopted in mainstream circles, that trans rights are opposed to workers' rights. And that's just nonsense.
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So I wanted to sort of start there with a bit of a discussion about the ways in which the trans struggle is a workers' struggle.
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Yeah, the actual stats, by the way, these are running from the U.S. Trans Survey, which is the largest survey of trans people in the U.S. 34% poverty rate. The national number for cis people is 11%. The unemployment rate is 18%. The U.S. unemployment rate for cis people is 4%. 18% is 1936 rate depression levels of unemployment. 30% of trans people have experienced homelessness in their lives.
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The national rate is about 7%. And those numbers are actually very misleading because it's actually much worse than that because these demographics skew young significantly because of both the shortness of our life expectancy and how often we get killed and also... There's more people who are realizing that they're trans now than there ever has before.
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So those homelessness numbers, we are racking up a rate of homelessness that is four times higher than the regular rate. And we're doing it in significantly less years than it takes the cis population to rack up these levels of homelessness. So things are extremely bad for trans people. Trans femmes make like 60 cents on the dollar of like the average American worker.
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That's something I also want to highlight because I don't think people understand this at all if they're cis is that the level of employment discrimination is staggering. It is however hard if you are a cis person you think it is to find a job. It is like 30 times harder if you are trans.
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It's unbelievably difficult and the promise of just like any job that will hire a trans person is a huge deal because you know, otherwise odds are you walk in the door and they take one look at you and like, you know, you're fucked.