Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's got to be nothing new here for you. But
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 2: Pod Cast it's a podcast that you're listening to. It's
Speaker 2: it could happen here. It's that the show where things
Speaker 2: fall apart and so that you put them back together again.
Speaker 2: And actually, okay, you know, I really should have checked
Speaker 2: the calendar before I did it, before I tried to
Speaker 2: do this introduction where I've referenced the thing that I'm
Speaker 2: saying came out last week but might actually have come
Speaker 2: out like no, no, no, okay, okay, I got it right.
Speaker 2: I got it right. I should never have doubted myself.
Speaker 2: Last week, we did an episode about inflation, and we
Speaker 2: told maybe half that story and the part of it
Speaker 2: that we didn't tell, you know, we got through the
Speaker 2: most of the part about like you know what what
Speaker 2: this sort of theory of inflation that the people a
Speaker 2: strange matter to fello up. We got through what it was.
Speaker 2: What we didn't really talk about was what happened next,
Speaker 2: which is a very very interesting set of sort of
Speaker 2: maneuvers that happened where this theory started spreading through a
Speaker 2: bunch of very disparate academic circles and you know, sort
Speaker 2: of like economic circles and different political circles that usually
Speaker 2: don't have anything to do with each other. But we're all,
Speaker 2: i don't know, taking taking things in very interesting directions,
Speaker 2: and to talk about how how how this sort of
Speaker 2: supply Shaine theory of inflation like spread through the world
Speaker 2: and all of this very very interesting, somewhat bizarre stuff
Speaker 2: that happened. Next, we once again have Steve Mann and
Speaker 2: John Michael Cologone, who are co editors as Strange Matters. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Steve jmc welcome back to the show.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm glad, glad, glad we could have YouTube back,
Speaker 2: and glad we get to talk about the really really interesting,
Speaker 2: somewhat strange things that happened next, which was, Yeah, a
Speaker 2: lot of people started picking up your theories and starting
Speaker 2: to work with them. Yeah, I was worrying if you
Speaker 2: could talk a bit about I guess like how that
Speaker 2: kind of first started and how people first started sort
Speaker 2: of coming to you for stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like last year. So last year when the first
Speaker 4: of these pieces came out Notes toward e theory of inflation,
Speaker 4: we got like a really good response in general from it,
Speaker 4: and it was kind of provoking discussions between groups of
Speaker 4: economists and like readers of econ stuff on Twitter and
Speaker 4: stuff like that, who otherwise wouldn't have really been talking
Speaker 4: to each other, but suddenly having a different theory of inflation,
Speaker 4: one that was like a lot different than what sort
Speaker 4: of like the people who thought it would be super
Speaker 4: transitory or the people who thought it was like purely
Speaker 4: a monetary phenomenon or something like that. Like having that
Speaker 4: option sparked good conversations, and it eventually led to some
Speaker 4: writers approaching us who are sort of inspired by those conversations,
Speaker 4: and particularly a few of them really wanted to follow
Speaker 4: up on like specific key like either points from the
Speaker 4: paper or follow some of the implications as far as
Speaker 4: they think they could take them. So one such paper.
Speaker 4: Oh and by the way, just as a refresher the
Speaker 4: original theory that is laid out in Part one of
Speaker 4: this series that we're doing is essentially saying that inflation
Speaker 4: has a tendency to propagate a long supply chains first
Speaker 4: and then through supply chain networks secondarily. And so it's
Speaker 4: it's saying it's essentially that that's that's how it propagates.
Speaker 4: It starts in supply chains. Things like bottlenecks along production
Speaker 4: processes have give the price setters, who are people at companies,
Speaker 4: socially acceptable reasons to eventually if they need to raise prices.
Speaker 4: And but they but that generally pricing managers refrain from
Speaker 4: raising prices unless that us like every other lever they've pulled,
Speaker 4: essentially has not worked. So like people took that theory
Speaker 4: and wanted to follow up on it, and so one
Speaker 4: author who did that was Alex Vaccolo who approached us
Speaker 4: and he essentially wanted to do an updated version of
Speaker 4: the pricing manager survey that we found really helpful in
Speaker 4: writing those initial pieces. So in my piece No sort
Speaker 4: of Theory of Inflation, I relied upon like a wealth
Speaker 4: of pricing manager surveys that showed that where they asked
Speaker 4: these pricing managers under what circumstances would you raise prices,
Speaker 4: and they sort of went through each scenario of that
Speaker 4: over the decades, starting in the thirties and going into
Speaker 4: the nineties and two thousands. In order to not have
Speaker 4: a replication crisis, like, we need more and more studies, right,
Speaker 4: Like this is a that's phenomenon across social sciences and elsewhere.
Speaker 4: So you want to have good replication studies. One way
Speaker 4: to do that is to have an updated pricing manager
Speaker 4: survey that talks to like sort of modern corporations in
Speaker 4: the twenty twenties. So are they still concerned about some
Speaker 4: of the same things? Are they not? Are there innovations
Speaker 4: and pricing that we should know about? And so Alex Paccolo,
Speaker 4: who's a financial journalist by trade, he went and interviewed
Speaker 4: some managers at Walmart and other big companies and some
Speaker 4: smaller ones and found that, like, broadly speaking, a lot
Speaker 4: of the same issues are at play. So companies have
Speaker 4: cost plus markeut pricing as kind of their bedrock, and
Speaker 4: from there they develop some innovations such as like so
Speaker 4: called dynamic pricing, where they have the like if you're
Speaker 4: a larger company who knows that they are viewed as
Speaker 4: a price leader, you have some leeway in responding to
Speaker 4: sales forecasts and changing your pricing, like Walmart does what
Speaker 4: they have like everyday low prices, that type of thing.
Speaker 4: And if you're a grocery store and one of your
Speaker 4: competitors is Walmart, Serve on the flip side, you might
Speaker 4: start developing indexes of prices set by Walmart or like
Speaker 4: one of the other big like behemoth chains, knowing how
Speaker 4: important they are to the overall supply chain network and
Speaker 4: knowing how important they are for the demand for groceries.
Speaker 4: Like like if wherever Walmart goes, many people have no
Speaker 4: choice but to follow them in terms of their pricing schedules.
Speaker 4: And so that's another thing that is going on, Like
Speaker 4: people are developing just entire price indices of like Walmart
Speaker 4: or Costco or Sam's Club or who have you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was something that's I think interesting in terms
Speaker 2: of like the the difference between the way that like
Speaker 2: economists think about sort of price, the difference between and
Speaker 2: how it's actually getting set, which is like a lot
Speaker 2: of it, a lot of it. Very much seems to
Speaker 2: be like if you are if you are like the
Speaker 2: largest company in a market, like if you are like Walmart, right,
Speaker 2: you have this incredible ability to sort of like like
Speaker 2: you have this ability to like like force people force
Speaker 2: your like downstream or like a guess upstream suppliers to
Speaker 2: like sell it to you at low at lower prices
Speaker 2: because you have this enormous sort of like you know,
Speaker 2: amount of buying power that like, you know, if you're
Speaker 2: like if you're like a smaller thing, you don't necessarily
Speaker 2: like you know, like like the same company will charge
Speaker 2: like another grocery store more for like the same thing
Speaker 2: because Walmart, Walmart has an ability to sell it at
Speaker 2: a lower price than if I'm remembering this right, I'm
Speaker 2: getting I'm gonna im getting strange looks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well it's it's it's important not to mix up
Speaker 3: two separate things. One is Walmart's relationships to suppliers and
Speaker 3: the other one is relationship to its competitors. Right, So
Speaker 3: the supplier bit, you were totally right on the right track.
Speaker 3: It's like, you know, like people who supply Walmart with
Speaker 3: with products because Walmart is such a big customer. If
Speaker 3: you get the Walmart contract and you're a small producer
Speaker 3: or a medium sized producer, like you're set right because
Speaker 3: like you know, then then you can basically just like
Speaker 3: you know, they can even be your only customer in
Speaker 3: many cases. But that comes at a cost, which is
Speaker 3: that you sell at the price that will dictates, otherwise
Speaker 3: they'll just tell you to fuck off basically. And you know,
Speaker 3: it's not only price, it's also the quality. You have
Speaker 3: to hit the standards. And oftentimes what these firms that
Speaker 3: are like the big important firms, so called nuclear firms
Speaker 3: in a supply chain do is that they set those
Speaker 3: standards like very rigidly, and you have to be certified
Speaker 3: with them. So McDonald's does this for example, you know,
Speaker 3: like all those poultry farmers or whatever who supply the
Speaker 3: chickens for the chicken mc nuggets, they have to go
Speaker 3: through this extremely rigid process in order to be able
Speaker 3: to qualify to be a McDonald's certified supplier or whatever,
Speaker 3: because that's how they keep the product standardized even though
Speaker 3: they're not in house. And then the other thing that
Speaker 3: you were alluding to, which is a vocalo's piece, is
Speaker 3: the relationship to competitors. So obviously Walmart's able to keep
Speaker 3: things cheap all the time, and they're famous every day
Speaker 3: low prices because basically those they have economies of scale.
Speaker 3: You know, there's this notion, I think common sense for
Speaker 3: a lot of people, especially those who don't have a
Speaker 3: lot of business experience, is that the more that you
Speaker 3: make of something, the more expensive it's going to But
Speaker 3: actually it's almost the exact opposite. Any firm that has survived,
Speaker 3: like over a period of time being able to make
Speaker 3: more and more of something has generally found ways of
Speaker 3: making more and more of the same thing using fewer
Speaker 3: inputs and less labor, like you know, and that's something
Speaker 3: that happens through automation, but it's also something that happens
Speaker 3: through administrative innovation and through and sometimes through less than
Speaker 3: than nice things, right through through through you know, Amazon
Speaker 3: warehouses where people aren't allowed to take bathroom breaks, or
Speaker 3: through sort of like you know, coercive measures that they
Speaker 3: can do because they've found a nice little spot in
Speaker 3: the economy that lots of people are depending on them,
Speaker 3: and they can dictate terms. But whatever it is, you know,
Speaker 3: as firms get bigger, it actually gets cheaper to make
Speaker 3: more of their kind of thing. So people in a
Speaker 3: bodega can't match Walmart's prices for everything from like hamburgers
Speaker 3: to detergent right, because for them it's more expensive to
Speaker 3: produce or to acquire. So what they do instead knowing
Speaker 3: this and they're able to survive, is that they do
Speaker 3: Walmart price and then they do a markup over Walmart's price.
Speaker 3: So in the same way that like by themselves, they
Speaker 3: would do a markup over their costs, Walmart's costs are
Speaker 3: lower and they do a markup, so they do a
Speaker 3: percentage over Walmart's markup, and as long as it basically
Speaker 3: is something that's doable in terms of cost, they do that,
Speaker 3: which means that they're basically advertising themselves to customers as
Speaker 3: the slightly more expensive but more local you know, more
Speaker 3: you know, more reliable or easier to get to you
Speaker 3: can just walk to the corner store or whatever, you know,
Speaker 3: whatever conveniences. They're kind of like justifying themselves with to
Speaker 3: the customer base. And in the cities this can be
Speaker 3: enough to keep you know, small to medium sized you
Speaker 3: know sort of retailers in business, although in the suburbs
Speaker 3: the competition is basically just all other ali gobalistic firms
Speaker 3: on Walmart's scale, like you know, Wegman's or in Florida
Speaker 3: it will be something like Public's you know, and that
Speaker 3: kind of thing so generally Vacola was discovering was I
Speaker 3: want to just emphasize Steve's point about replication. Like, you know,
Speaker 3: if a lot of the supply chain theory depends upon
Speaker 3: a story about prices that most economists just don't believe in.
Speaker 3: Economists believe that supply and demand are automatically adjusting based
Speaker 3: on changing prices, and that those adjustments determine in turn,
Speaker 3: how we spend and how we produce. You know, that's
Speaker 3: that's supposedly how everything works. They believe in this thing
Speaker 3: called the price mechanism. The supply chain theory depends upon
Speaker 3: a story where the vast majority of prices in the
Speaker 3: economy are a markup over costs or you know, beyond
Speaker 3: that some kind of strategic decision being made in pursuit
Speaker 3: of a certain strategy. But like, you know, if some
Speaker 3: studies had verified that, but then other studies refuted it,
Speaker 3: then you would have a situation like psychology, where you know,
Speaker 3: the psychologists are always saying all human beings really have
Speaker 3: a neck fetish. But then you know, because some study
Speaker 3: of like some college students you know, said this, and
Speaker 3: then six months later it'll be like, actually that failed
Speaker 3: to replicate this. It turns out that human beings don't
Speaker 3: have a neck fetish, you know. And I'm being rude
Speaker 3: to psychology, but this is a real crisis that happened
Speaker 3: there called a replication crisis. Now. Fred Lee that the
Speaker 3: economists who kind of like started us along this track
Speaker 3: in his famous book post KINSI and Price Theory, found
Speaker 3: seventy one pricing studies, and they form an appendix called
Speaker 3: Appendix B in his book, which ought to be legendary,
Speaker 3: but it's not, because all this stuff is very obscure.
Speaker 3: The seventy one studies from very different book length studies
Speaker 3: from very different people with very different like political and
Speaker 3: economic commitments. Some of them are business school literature, some
Speaker 3: of them are empirical studies commissioned by states or by
Speaker 3: corporations on how corporate management works. Some of them are
Speaker 3: by like Marxist economists, some of them are by neoclassical
Speaker 3: economists like and they all converge, no matter what the
Speaker 3: biases of the people of the people involved, upon this
Speaker 3: same kind of similar cost plus administered prices model. Vocolo
Speaker 3: writing now in the present day, not in the period
Speaker 3: that Lee was talking about, which is roughly from the
Speaker 3: thirties to roughly the nineties, Like you know, he's talking
Speaker 3: about the twenty twenties. He just went out and started
Speaker 3: talking to pricing managers and capitalists and all this other stuff,
Speaker 3: and lo and behold he found the exact same thing.
Speaker 3: So the the evidence base, the empirical evidence base for
Speaker 3: the underlying basis of the supply chain theory is very
Speaker 3: very sound. The ball is in other people's court, in
Speaker 3: mainstream economists court, who want to defend the supply and
Speaker 3: demand bullshit and the price mechanism bullshit to prove us wrong,
Speaker 3: because frankly, the weight of the evidence is so strong
Speaker 3: that they're the ones who who have to prove their case,
Speaker 3: not the other way around. You know that the what's
Speaker 3: it called when you when you've got the you know,
Speaker 3: the I think that the presumpture the burden of proof,
Speaker 3: thank you, The burden of proof is on their side.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so something also I think is really interesting from
Speaker 2: that color pieces that like, you know, there is a
Speaker 2: bit in there about firms that try to do this
Speaker 2: sort of like like in real time reacting to supply
Speaker 2: and demand stuff, and it's like uber and if you
Speaker 2: look at Uber's like, okay, so uber has a couple
Speaker 2: of things. One they don't have, like the thing that
Speaker 2: they're like they don't really have a supply chain really
Speaker 2: a B. They don't make any money. They never make money,
Speaker 2: they will never make money. And the other the third
Speaker 2: thing that's really interesting about is that like that kind
Speaker 2: of pricing, Like you know, if if you have some
Speaker 2: people who go in ideologically and or like we're gonna
Speaker 2: build an algorithm to like try to have pricing respond
Speaker 2: to demand or whatever it like, it fucking sucks and
Speaker 2: everyone hates it because it means that like, you know, suddenly,
Speaker 2: like when you actually need a thing, it's unbelievably expensive
Speaker 2: and it pisses people off. Like most most people who
Speaker 2: have to deal with actual like the normal things that
Speaker 2: a business do don't do. And the only people who
Speaker 2: do it are like the insane tech people who are
Speaker 2: like like, I don't know, I almost want to call
Speaker 2: it like intensely ideological and also assholes and also don't
Speaker 2: make any money, which is just I don't know, it's
Speaker 2: it's I think it's kind of a coincidence, but it
Speaker 2: is just very funny to me that the people who
Speaker 2: actually try to use the neoclassical like pricing theory. It
Speaker 2: sucks and everyone hates them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and uh, the Colo kind of summarizes like the
Speaker 4: several different uh pricing procedures that he witnessed, and to
Speaker 4: just say, like on both on both determining your company's
Speaker 4: costs and determining what market markup you should have, so
Speaker 4: the cost plus markup you need to you need to
Speaker 4: figure out both of those pieces. It's anything but automatic. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's a very manual process. And even I would I
Speaker 4: would go so far as to say, like Walmart has
Speaker 4: teams of tech people, yes, but they're liaising heavily with
Speaker 4: the finance department and sales and marketing to determine what
Speaker 4: is an appropriate margin based on historical like in industry
Speaker 4: and sub industry trends and like what is our historical
Speaker 4: cost structure for each product down to the product level.
Speaker 4: And they have so many different products that they might
Speaker 4: actually say, well, because we're selling everything to everyone, maybe
Speaker 4: some things can just be what are called lost leaders
Speaker 4: and have a negative margin because they get people in
Speaker 4: the store, and then those people are there and they
Speaker 4: see other things which have higher markups, and then they
Speaker 4: buy those and then overall they've made more of a
Speaker 4: profit because they use something's a negative margin on them.
Speaker 4: And it's like it's a really complex process. And even
Speaker 4: if an algorithm is being developed by say uber to
Speaker 4: like dynamically priced things up and down based upon events
Speaker 4: like a baseball game or something they are going on
Speaker 4: in a city so they can get more revenue, that
Speaker 4: was still a people. It was a group of people
Speaker 4: in a room in a very extremely manual process. Coding
Speaker 4: is extremely manual still, and like lasing with like sales, marketing,
Speaker 4: finance people all at once.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And the other thing is that it's like supply and
Speaker 3: demand is a phrase that gets thrown around anytime that
Speaker 3: there's any kind of interaction between like the amount of
Speaker 3: people who want something and the amount of people and
Speaker 3: the amount of stuff that there is, right, which is
Speaker 3: a lot of different situations. But the specific supply demand
Speaker 3: price theory that's at the core of neoclassical economics is
Speaker 3: this price mechanism story whereby you know, companies basically all
Speaker 3: make one thing. The price of that thing is not
Speaker 3: something that is really under their control. It automatically fluctuates
Speaker 3: based on demand, which I guess you can roughly measure
Speaker 3: as sales and like the and in turn, like what
Speaker 3: the price of that thing is determines how much they
Speaker 3: produce and how much of it people buy, because people's
Speaker 3: buying decisions are in some fixed functional way, and people's
Speaker 3: production decisions, in some fixed functional way are tied to
Speaker 3: that price.
Speaker 5: Like if you.
Speaker 3: Want to create an algorithm that includes as a consideration
Speaker 3: doing a discount when you haven't yet sold all the
Speaker 3: seats in an airplane in the hopes that you'll get
Speaker 3: some last minute sales, which, by the way, statistically is
Speaker 3: shown to not actually help that much those kinds of
Speaker 3: last minute sales and discounts. I mean, I suppose in
Speaker 3: a flight where there's a time limited thing, it might
Speaker 3: work better. But for a typical product, it doesn't move
Speaker 3: the dial very much in terms of sales, which is
Speaker 3: why Walmart pursues an every day low price. Is strategy
Speaker 3: just keeping prices down in general, so you don't do
Speaker 3: sales and discounts which don't move the dial much. But
Speaker 3: like you know, that's a strategic pricing decision that you've
Speaker 3: chosen to make because you think that it might move
Speaker 3: the die in some way. You experiment it with it
Speaker 3: and see if it works or whatever. That's not the
Speaker 3: automatic lawlike functional relationship that is supposed to exist according
Speaker 3: to neoclassical theory between supply demand and prices. People will
Speaker 3: say that the algorithm is about supplying demand, but that's
Speaker 3: not really how it works. That's it's it's not the
Speaker 3: same thing as the theory, right. It's just a pricing
Speaker 3: system that takes into account among many other variables and
Speaker 3: usually not as the primary thing, whether or not. For example,
Speaker 3: there is available available slack in the in the you know,
Speaker 3: in what you're producing to be able to get some
Speaker 3: last minute sales if you do a discount or something
Speaker 3: like that, like or like Steve was saying, like, you know,
Speaker 3: there's a there's a game today, so you can do
Speaker 3: surge pricing because people are gonna you know that a
Speaker 3: bunch of people are going to want to get in
Speaker 3: the game. So you're basically just price gouging based on
Speaker 3: this opportunistically based on this event that's happening or whatever,
Speaker 3: like like, yeah, you can do that, and you can
Speaker 3: say that it's pricing that tries to take into account
Speaker 3: supply and demand, but it's not the supply demand price
Speaker 3: mechanism of neoclassical theory and also as McColo like you know,
Speaker 3: finds out it, attempts to do this are very very
Speaker 3: mixed in their success at best.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Basically, people who are trying to do it are like, yeah,
Speaker 3: maybe it could work, and then they try it and
Speaker 3: nine times out of ten it doesn't work very well,
Speaker 3: so they go back to some variation on a cost
Speaker 3: plus model, you know, or a price leadership model or
Speaker 3: something like that. You know, the kinds of methods that
Speaker 3: Lee discusses.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean the customer good will that you kind
Speaker 4: of put at risk with these more dynamic pricing models
Speaker 4: is like often a little too risky, Like even for
Speaker 4: big companies like Uber, Like there's been a backlash against
Speaker 4: Uber for doing that.
Speaker 3: Absolutely the only reason they can maybe get away with
Speaker 3: it has been because they have access to infinitive finance.
Speaker 2: But yeah, how long is that gonna last? Yeah? Like,
Speaker 2: and that's another thing that's interesting, Like, you know, this
Speaker 2: is this is does some except like a different economic question,
Speaker 2: but like you do at some point have to ask
Speaker 2: the question, like to to what extent can you learn
Speaker 2: things about the economy based on companies that don't have
Speaker 2: a revenue model, or the revenue model is they will
Speaker 2: continue to be headed piles of money by like the
Speaker 2: same seven billionaires they've conned, and that's like a I
Speaker 2: think there's an interesting interplay of how dependent you are
Speaker 2: on actually making like actually having revenue be the source
Speaker 2: of like the continuing existence of your company, and how
Speaker 2: ideological you can be about running.
Speaker 4: Do you have a game?
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, it's actually very funny that you say this because
Speaker 3: one of the people that Vocolo talks to is this
Speaker 3: guy Cohen. I can't find his first name right now,
Speaker 3: and I don't want to scroll up, but somebody who's
Speaker 3: last name is Cohen is quote unquote more skeptical of
Speaker 3: the of the dynamical pricing, and he says, I think
Speaker 3: it's a sexy idea and probably it has a lot
Speaker 3: of intellectually valuable pathways, except when it crashes into the
Speaker 3: sensibility of the customer. He said, it could create a
Speaker 3: universe of very inconsistent prices across categories in time, which
Speaker 3: I don't think human beings are going to align to.
Speaker 3: These dynamic models need common sense judgment attached to them,
Speaker 3: which is not always necessarily available. Now, this is a
Speaker 3: very diplomatic statement by somebody who's formerly of Sears Canada.
Speaker 3: Now I find this very funny because there's a kind
Speaker 3: of subtext here. Vocola doesn't get into it, but Sears
Speaker 3: Canada obviously kind of related to Sears. In the nineties,
Speaker 3: Sears had a CEO who was like this ultra libertarian,
Speaker 3: you know. He basically believed that the problem with the
Speaker 3: free market is that it's not free enough, right at
Speaker 3: the height of neoliberalism. So he's really pissed off about
Speaker 3: the fact that inside the corporation there's no free market.
Speaker 3: It's all a planned economy, you know, which is is true.
Speaker 3: There's no there's no market exchanges in there, Like, it's
Speaker 3: all allocations, Like, Okay, we have this goal, so we're
Speaker 3: gonna allocate these workers to this place and blah blah
Speaker 3: blah blah. You know, and and we're and and uh
Speaker 3: and you know, anything that the company owns, they just
Speaker 3: use it to pursue their goals. He wanted everything inside
Speaker 3: the company to have a price, so that everything could
Speaker 3: just be you know. But and this is kind of
Speaker 3: like mad scientist experiment done on this like very old
Speaker 3: American corporation. But somehow. I guess it was the nineties.
Speaker 3: You know, people were coked up on this kind of thing.
Speaker 3: They tried it, and it was a catastrophic failure that
Speaker 3: actually generally seen as contributing to the end of Sears
Speaker 3: as a as a major player in retail. And it's like, like,
Speaker 3: so it shows So I think that the fact that
Speaker 3: this person very diplomatically from Sears is like maybe this
Speaker 3: doesn't work, you know, and that might be born of
Speaker 3: more experienced than than than than not.
Speaker 2: You know, yeah, okay, we have to go to an
Speaker 2: adrak before we that. I want to tell one more
Speaker 2: insane nineties Like, people in the nineties really really had
Speaker 2: market brain in a way that's like difficult to understand now.
Speaker 2: And you can even see this kind of through Obama,
Speaker 2: Like they really have market brain. And like I think
Speaker 2: the most market brain thing anyone ever did was the
Speaker 2: the the I think it was the Army joint. She's
Speaker 2: of staff brought in like a group of economists who
Speaker 2: were you know, like you were doing the whole like okay,
Speaker 2: we like, how can we make how can we use
Speaker 2: the market to make the army run more efficient? And
Speaker 2: the first polls that they put down on the table
Speaker 2: is we're going to have each part each like like
Speaker 2: each like section, like what's the type time declartim We're
Speaker 2: gonna have each branch of the military bid for control
Speaker 2: of who of who gets controlled the nuclear weapons. And
Speaker 2: there's a bunch of just like five star generals sitting
Speaker 2: at this table going like what the fuck are you
Speaker 2: guys talking about? This kid about And that was the
Speaker 2: end of like but that was like like peak absolute
Speaker 2: peak nineties brain of like these these people thought you
Speaker 2: could solve terrorism by like having futures markets on like
Speaker 2: where when terrorist attacks would happen, Like it was these
Speaker 2: people were wild. None of this stuff worked, unlike the
Speaker 2: products and services that you're gonna you're gonna now hear
Speaker 2: ads for and we're back from these fine products and services.
Speaker 2: If you're if if if the thing you were doing
Speaker 2: right now is you have your finger on the button.
Speaker 2: We are about to message Sophie about the fact that
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Speaker 2: leave Sophie alone. Oh my god, I think we we've
Speaker 2: gotten we've gotten a little we've we've gotten sort of
Speaker 2: into the weeds of I guess like the kind of
Speaker 2: research stuff it's been produced, but I wanted to move on,
Speaker 2: I think to some of the some of the other
Speaker 2: like kinds of like I don't know, kinds of discourse
Speaker 2: and kinds of sort of work that's been produced out
Speaker 2: of this.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So the Cola's piece, I think was was very,
Speaker 3: very accomplished, and it adds to this proud tradition of
Speaker 3: pricing surveys, like you've been saying. But the the piece
Speaker 3: that I would say ended up having the biggest impact
Speaker 3: in this sense that it really kind of started getting
Speaker 3: followed up on by a lot of people and it
Speaker 3: cut a lot of attention was Tim Demetzio's piece. So
Speaker 3: a little about Tim. He's an economist based in Australia
Speaker 3: and I should remember the name of his university, but
Speaker 3: it was the University of something and it starts with
Speaker 3: W and it's a very long name there you go,
Speaker 3: University of Well. Yeah, and he's a political economist. He
Speaker 3: does a lot of stuff pertaining to kind of like
Speaker 3: international relations type stuff, but he also comes at economics
Speaker 3: from a particular perspective. So we mentioned last time that
Speaker 3: there's these the orthodoxy and economics. Is this one school
Speaker 3: called the Neoclassicals. Who believe in the supply and demand
Speaker 3: stuff and along with a whole bunch of other dogmas.
Speaker 3: Then there's a bunch of dissident heterodox schools. And there's
Speaker 3: a whole bunch of these, and one of them is
Speaker 3: called the capital as Power school, which is named after
Speaker 3: a book called Capitalist Power by these two professors called
Speaker 3: Bickler and Nitsen, and it has a lot of things
Speaker 3: to say about a lot of subjects. But so Capital's
Speaker 3: Power is a book that says a lot of things
Speaker 3: and a lot of different subjects, but at its core
Speaker 3: is the idea that what makes the capitalist system tick
Speaker 3: is the process of capitalization, and that that process of
Speaker 3: capitalization is controlled by certain people, and their control over
Speaker 3: that process is the basis of the entire economic system.
Speaker 3: That's very heavy stuff. It tends not to have to
Speaker 3: do with what we're going to be talking about, but
Speaker 3: it informs the perspective that Demutzio comes from. Now, Demuzio
Speaker 3: saw Steve's brilliant essay on the suplashing theory of inflation,
Speaker 3: was very inspired by it because there are certain affinities
Speaker 3: between the framework that we're coming from in this kind
Speaker 3: of research and the capitalist power framework. They don't agree
Speaker 3: one hundred percent on everything, but there's a lot of
Speaker 3: common ground there. So he basically hopped aboard to say, well,
Speaker 3: why don't we talk about interest rates? Because remember the
Speaker 3: main upshot of Steve's of Fred Lee's administrative crisis theory,
Speaker 3: and then and then by extension, Steve's theory about inflation
Speaker 3: is that inflation is not about money. It's about prices.
Speaker 3: And in order to understand inflation, you have to understand
Speaker 3: why people set the prices that they do, and why
Speaker 3: prices across the economy will go up at any given moment,
Speaker 3: because it's people who set prices, not the market, not
Speaker 3: the money supply, and not any of these other sort
Speaker 3: of automatic, general macroeconomic things. It's a microeconomic decision made
Speaker 3: by particular people within particular institutions, with the ability to
Speaker 3: pull the lever on particular prices. Right, So the interest
Speaker 3: rate is a price, you know, it's a very important
Speaker 3: price too, because.
Speaker 2: We should look, we should we should back off for
Speaker 2: a second and explain what when when you say the
Speaker 2: interest rate, you should explain what that is, because well, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's under explained.
Speaker 3: That's totally exactly where I was going because there's actually
Speaker 3: many interest rates out there in the economy. When we
Speaker 3: talk about the interest rate, what we tend to be
Speaker 3: talking about is the interest rate that is set at
Speaker 3: the central bank of the country that control of the
Speaker 3: currency under discussion, right. That is basically an interest rate
Speaker 3: that sets the price for credit for loans in the
Speaker 3: rest of the economy. And it's basically you can see
Speaker 3: it as a supply chain, even though it's not a
Speaker 3: physical one, and it's basically the main cost for banks
Speaker 3: that want to borrow, you know, and they then have
Speaker 3: to set a markup over that cost as the price
Speaker 3: for anyone who wants to borrow from them, which includes
Speaker 3: other banks but also includes end consumers and firms. So
Speaker 3: that's basically I mean, I'm oversimplifying and seeing probably a
Speaker 3: more nuanced version of this, but that's that's the basics.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Banks, just like any company, need to determine both
Speaker 4: their cost structure to the extent that they are able
Speaker 4: to themselves, and their markup. And the markup is they
Speaker 4: like banks, have costs just like anyone. One of their
Speaker 4: principal costs is their rate of interest that they pay
Speaker 4: on deposits of their customers in order to get them
Speaker 4: to get new customers in Like, that's one of their
Speaker 4: main services that they provide is checking checking accounts and
Speaker 4: savings accounts, and like, so, how much interest are you
Speaker 4: is a bank willing to set on its savings account
Speaker 4: is like an important decision that's like part of its
Speaker 4: cost structure. But where people if the Federal Reserve were
Speaker 4: to raise its federal it's a the federal funds rate,
Speaker 4: it's a principal policy rate up to what they have
Speaker 4: now five and a half percent or so, when it
Speaker 4: was less than one percent only a year ago, in
Speaker 4: order to compete with all of the other products which
Speaker 4: are based upon this so called risk free rate of
Speaker 4: return that the central bank offers that that governments used
Speaker 4: to like set the rate of things like treasury treasury
Speaker 4: bills and stuff like. Eventually, if you're a bank, you
Speaker 4: have to start charging higher and higher interest rates. Sorry,
Speaker 4: you have to start offering higher and higher interest rates
Speaker 4: on your savings accounts. And likewise you need to, like
Speaker 4: you need to start charging higher interest rates on the
Speaker 4: products that are your actual money makers, like mortgages and
Speaker 4: home equity, lines of credit and that sort of thing.
Speaker 4: And so like the cost so the cost structure of
Speaker 4: a bank will shift as the Federal Reserve is changing
Speaker 4: its policy rate, and so too will its margin over
Speaker 4: time as it competes with other banks, for like a
Speaker 4: narrowing pool of qualified mortgage applicants, and also for people
Speaker 4: who are willing to shop around for where to keep
Speaker 4: their deposits in a way that they previously they weren't
Speaker 4: because there was no sort of differential in interest rates
Speaker 4: at all. It was just being held steady.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, So the key thing to understand, and by
Speaker 3: the way, up to now, Steve and I have been
Speaker 3: describing what we regard as the real world. Like everything
Speaker 3: that we've just described, we can see it in action,
Speaker 3: like in the world right Like if the Fed raises
Speaker 3: this interest rate effectively, what that means is that this
Speaker 3: whole supply chain of people lending to other people, who
Speaker 3: lend to other people, who lent to other people, the
Speaker 3: cost of lending has essentially increased, which will eventually lead
Speaker 3: to a rise in the cost and the cost of
Speaker 3: lending to people downstream until for end consumers, which basically
Speaker 3: like firms and households trying to get a loan from
Speaker 3: the bank, those loans are going to be more expensive,
Speaker 3: and conversely, if the Fed's interest rate goes down, those
Speaker 3: prices will tend to go down as well, if you like.
Speaker 4: Crucially, none of it is just automatic.
Speaker 3: That's Y's absolutely true.
Speaker 4: There's even just just because it's a bank doesn't mean
Speaker 4: it's any different than the story that Facola was laying
Speaker 4: out for retailers.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm, that's exactly right. The Fed's rate is a
Speaker 3: very important rate because it's basically the first, the first
Speaker 3: one in this chain, and it's a cost for pretty
Speaker 3: much everybody who's doing business and dollars. But that doesn't
Speaker 3: mean that it in some simple way just controls everything else.
Speaker 3: You can hope that it controls if you're if you're
Speaker 3: the central banker. But of course all these firms are
Speaker 3: making their own decisions based on their own reasons, so
Speaker 3: you know, they can make all sorts of decisions based
Speaker 3: on their priorities and based on like like all sorts
Speaker 3: of things. Now, by the way, if you want the
Speaker 3: more detailed version of this story that actually talks about
Speaker 3: the different agents at each step of this process in
Speaker 3: much more detail, you should check out Perry Merling's work
Speaker 3: on this, and there's even online online lectures that kind
Speaker 3: of get into the nitty gritty which I have absorbed
Speaker 3: and then since completely forgotten the details of, so I
Speaker 3: would need to watch them again to actually be able.
Speaker 6: To name the names.
Speaker 3: But the point is that so far, so real right now,
Speaker 3: here's where things get a little bs. Remember that the
Speaker 3: mainstream theories of inflation are all basically descended in their DNA,
Speaker 3: even though they've been moving further and further away from
Speaker 3: it from the old school quantity theory of money, the
Speaker 3: idea that the amount of money in the economy basically
Speaker 3: determines the price level. More money that there is circulating,
Speaker 3: the less that money is worth because there's too much
Speaker 3: of it, so the price of it goes down, and
Speaker 3: the price of money basically determines like how much your
Speaker 3: money is able to buy. Now, people have been moving
Speaker 3: away from that towards theories that get more realistic but
Speaker 3: still retain the basic structure where the money supply is
Speaker 3: the main thing that matters, and they'll say, for example,
Speaker 3: that it's the amount of money circulating in people's pockets
Speaker 3: relative to the amount of goods being produced, such that
Speaker 3: if too much money is chasing too few goods, like
Speaker 3: there isn't enough supply to meet the demand, and that
Speaker 3: causes something, although people disagree on what, that causes prices
Speaker 3: to be bid upwards, and that's called the demand poll theory.
Speaker 3: It's the dominant theory that most economists, classical mainstream economists
Speaker 3: that you talk to today will will will pedal to you.
Speaker 3: The ones who are not orthodox monitorists, they still believe
Speaker 3: in this, which means that they still think that you
Speaker 3: have to when there's an inflationary event, you have to
Speaker 3: attack the money supply. Now from them, from their point
Speaker 3: of view, it doesn't have to do with the absolute
Speaker 3: amount of money circulating. It has to do with the
Speaker 3: amount of money in people's pockets relative to the amount
Speaker 3: of stuff that can be bought. So, if there's too
Speaker 3: much money in people's pockets, how do people use their money?
Speaker 3: They spend it on goods and services that are produced
Speaker 3: by firms. So if you reduce that amount of money,
Speaker 3: that basically the only way that you can do it
Speaker 3: is by putting people out of work, right, you know,
Speaker 3: because then they don't get the wages which they would
Speaker 3: have spent on stuff that you know, the factor is
Speaker 3: in Walmart and everything else. The agriculture and whatever, all
Speaker 3: the stuff that gets made, the goods and services. Now
Speaker 3: they think that if you raise the interest rate, it
Speaker 3: makes the cost of finance more expensive. Some firms are
Speaker 3: depending on finance, so if that cost increases for them,
Speaker 3: they're going to go under. And when they go under,
Speaker 3: people get unemployed. When people get unemployed, they have less
Speaker 3: money in their pockets, which means that they're spending less,
Speaker 3: which means that some other firms go out of business,
Speaker 3: and then those people go unemployed. Now, the of this
Speaker 3: is like the crash of two thousand and eight or
Speaker 3: nineteen twenty nine, where suddenly a whole bunch of people
Speaker 3: are unemployed and a whole bunch of companies are empty.
Speaker 3: They don't want to go all the way with that,
Speaker 3: but they want to kind of get part of the
Speaker 3: way to that. They want to put the squeeze on
Speaker 3: the economy and get some companies put out of business
Speaker 3: and some people unemployed on the dole so that people
Speaker 3: don't have money in their pockets, so that the supposed
Speaker 3: pressure of too many people spending money on goods that
Speaker 3: are not being produced enough to meet that demand, the
Speaker 3: demand pressure goes down, so therefore it equilibrates and inflation prices.
Speaker 3: Inflation ceases because prices go down too, because the idea
Speaker 3: is that there's a law like relationship between demand and prices,
Speaker 3: souch that if demand goes down, the price will go down.
Speaker 3: The actual explanation for this is will vary depending on
Speaker 3: the thing. They basically accept it as a religious orthodoxy
Speaker 3: and then different economists justified in different ways. But that
Speaker 3: that's why they're trying to raise interest rates so that
Speaker 3: basically people get thrown out of work and that'll cause
Speaker 3: prices magically to go down. Now, as we discussed, the
Speaker 3: actual cause of the inflation was an exogenous shock based
Speaker 3: on like the chip shortage, the labor shortage, and key
Speaker 3: things like agriculture, the container shortage and the war in
Speaker 3: Ukraine causing increases in grain prices that have caused cost increases.
Speaker 3: That firms tried to hold off price increases as long
Speaker 3: as they could, but then they couldn't, and then they
Speaker 3: traveled down the supply chain and a whole bunch of
Speaker 3: prices across the economy went up. So we know that
Speaker 3: because we have looked at the news stories that you
Speaker 3: know and talk to people at these different companies. We
Speaker 3: I don't mean strange matters. I mean, like you know,
Speaker 3: journalists or whatever, and like, you know, that's what they say.
Speaker 3: And yet nevertheless, they're trying to make the interest rates
Speaker 3: go up to throw people out of work and partially
Speaker 3: induce a recession in the hopes that that will drive
Speaker 3: is down.
Speaker 4: But they can't even get that right, that's right.
Speaker 3: They haven't actually haven't.
Speaker 4: Been able to get unemployment up either, So it's it
Speaker 4: doesn't work in either direction exactly.
Speaker 3: Well, and what's really funny is that Demucio basically says, Okay,
Speaker 3: why do people believe this? They believe it for a
Speaker 3: lot of reasons, but they think that it worked in
Speaker 3: the seventies. That's the myth. Right. You asked Larry Summers,
Speaker 3: why do you think this ship will work? And Larry
Speaker 3: Summers will say, well, you might not like it. And
Speaker 3: I think he actually said things like this, like a
Speaker 3: couple of weeks ago. You might not like it, but
Speaker 3: this is how we got out of the crisis of
Speaker 3: the seventies. If we hadn't done the vulgar shock, which
Speaker 3: is basically the same thing they raised interest rates through
Speaker 3: up the yazoo, you know, like like we and hadn't
Speaker 3: induced that unemployment or whatever, prices would never have come down.
Speaker 3: But you see, Demucio did something that you're not supposed
Speaker 3: to do, which is that he actually checked out on
Speaker 3: the relationship between between interest rates and prices. And what
Speaker 3: he found was that basically, there's either that I believe
Speaker 3: that I explained his essay is that there's a strong
Speaker 3: version of his argument and there's a weak version. The
Speaker 3: week version is definitely true. The strong version is speculative.
Speaker 3: So he charted it and he found that there is
Speaker 3: absolutely no inverse relationship between interest rates and prices. They
Speaker 3: raise interest rates, they raise interest rates, the prices keep
Speaker 3: going up. Then they're not coming down, right, and the
Speaker 3: prices don't start to go down until oil because remember
Speaker 3: the oil shock caused by the war in the Middle
Speaker 3: East between Israel and Weal and and Egypt and a
Speaker 3: whole bunch of other places caused opek to raise their
Speaker 3: prices in order.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna. I'm gonna
Speaker 2: point in a thing, which is that the actual story
Speaker 2: behind that is slightly more complicated, which is that, like, okay,
Speaker 2: so to be completely one hundred percent accurst about this,
Speaker 2: OPIK had a meeting where they decided to raise prices,
Speaker 2: and then the war started and then like like two
Speaker 2: weeks afterwards, and then they kind of ta their explanation
Speaker 2: on to the back of the price increase state already
Speaker 2: decided on. Oh okay, but yeah, so this this, this
Speaker 2: is the thing that like, I don't know there there
Speaker 2: there was a there was an oil historian who went
Speaker 2: back and like spent a bunch of time looking through
Speaker 2: the records of OPEC and shit and trying to figure
Speaker 2: out what the actual sequence of events was. But it
Speaker 2: it is true that like one of the things behind
Speaker 2: keeping OPEK together so that it could increase the price
Speaker 2: of oil was like the like what was their sort
Speaker 2: of solidarity and they faced the opposition of the war.
Speaker 2: But also it's slightly more complicated than that, And I
Speaker 2: want to I want to I want to put that
Speaker 2: on the record, just because the oil knowers will get
Speaker 2: mad at us. We Yeah, yeah, so that that that's
Speaker 2: the version of it that like like ninety nine percent
Speaker 2: of accounts will give you. It's just slightly not quite
Speaker 2: exactly what was happening.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I gotta wrote that book.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it was God, I remember what book
Speaker 2: I think it was in. I think was in Carbon Democracy,
Speaker 2: maybe like eighty percent. Sure, Sorry, I read like four
Speaker 2: books about oil and coal in like incredibly rapid succession,
Speaker 2: like several years ago, and sometimes I have trouble remembering
Speaker 2: exactly which one which thing is from. But yeah, although
Speaker 2: I want to say sorry, I guess I want to
Speaker 2: say one other kind of interesting thing about that that
Speaker 2: makes specifically trying to use the interest rates arguments about
Speaker 2: like I think it is it is pretty clear that
Speaker 2: raising the interest rates directly would like did not immediately
Speaker 2: did wasn't the thing that brought down prices. I think
Speaker 2: there's like an interesting there's like a weird thing going
Speaker 2: on there too, because the like almost like when when
Speaker 2: economists tend to look at this, what they tend to
Speaker 2: look at what the interest rate rises, was what was
Speaker 2: happening to the US economy and the other The other
Speaker 2: thing that the vocal shock did was it raised the
Speaker 2: interest rates on it raised it raised the interest rates
Speaker 2: in all of these audjustable rate loans that like all
Speaker 2: of these countries like all over the world had and
Speaker 2: those economies got fucking obliterated. And that actually I think,
Speaker 2: I think actually that there is an argument that like
Speaker 2: my my argument would be, I think it kind of
Speaker 2: probably prevented prices maybe from going up more, But it
Speaker 2: did that because it prevented any more opex from forming
Speaker 2: and just like absolutely annihilated any kind of political movement
Speaker 2: to like have pricing be set by like raw material
Speaker 2: producers rather than by like countries that do production. And
Speaker 2: this is a kind of like separate thing, but like
Speaker 2: this is I think, I think the moral of my
Speaker 2: story with this before we get back to sort of
Speaker 2: like the I don't know the the other arguments about
Speaker 2: this is that like that moment was such a fucking
Speaker 2: shit show. There were so many things going on, It's
Speaker 2: so complicated. It is absolutely nuts to try to base
Speaker 2: literally your entire theory about how you stop inflation by
Speaker 2: raising interest rates on one event in like probably the
Speaker 2: most complicated economic crisis, and it like we've ever had.
Speaker 2: And yeah, because like it it did, like the Vulcar
Speaker 2: shock did a lot of things that weren't what Volcar
Speaker 2: were not nottarily not what Vocal were trying to do,
Speaker 2: But it did a lot of things that aren't what
Speaker 2: economists talk about when they talk about what the Volcan
Speaker 2: shock did, like it had all of these incredibly like
Speaker 2: powerful political ramifications that they just don't put in the
Speaker 2: equations because it doesn't feel like how how do how
Speaker 2: do you mathematically model like the collapse of the like
Speaker 2: like the collapse of the non online movement and like
Speaker 2: the third world movement, Like you can't, right, and so
Speaker 2: they just sort of like wave their hands and pretend
Speaker 2: that it was just like directly it caused more unemployment,
Speaker 2: the unemployment prout inflation rate doown.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's interesting to think of the global effects of
Speaker 4: the Vulcar's shock. It's like you have countries who are
Speaker 4: dependent upon USD finance suddenly are facing much stronger dollar.
Speaker 4: So if they didn't already have dollars, that's a huge problem.
Speaker 2: Yeah and again yeah and again also just like like
Speaker 2: just literally the interest rates on their loans like increased
Speaker 2: by like twenty percent, and that's like, you know, like
Speaker 2: you're it doesn't really matter what your economy is, you can't,
Speaker 2: I don't know, it's it's unbelievably difficult to survive them
Speaker 2: like that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, on the four x dimension and just on regular
Speaker 4: lending terms in dollar lending anyway, it's going to get
Speaker 4: way tougher. Yeah, even domestically, like to de Mitiu, superimposes
Speaker 4: the oil price onto the inflation and like the the
Speaker 4: inflationary crises of the seventies and early eighties, it was
Speaker 4: a double it was a double victim, if you remember.
Speaker 4: And so like the first time the FED chairman who
Speaker 4: proceeded Paul Voker was blamed for not raising interest rates
Speaker 4: during an inflationary crisis because of the emerging theory, said
Speaker 4: that maybe that would be a good idea, and so
Speaker 4: like the monitorists had like their one moment after that
Speaker 4: to say, like they where they became more than simply
Speaker 4: an academic movement and became like briefly hegemonic with the
Speaker 4: vulgar interest rate arise that happened to like set in
Speaker 4: nineteen seventy five or so, when the oil price was
Speaker 4: about fifteen dollars per barrel. That's when inflation and the
Speaker 4: oil price start to move closely in conjunction with each other,
Speaker 4: going into nineteen eighty, which is also when the interest
Speaker 4: rates are being raised more like give or take nine
Speaker 4: to eighteen months or so, and the economic historians, the
Speaker 4: neoclassical economic historians, will forget about the supply chain, pressures
Speaker 4: like the oil price, which has nothing to do with
Speaker 4: the FED, and like that happened in this inflationary when
Speaker 4: oil prices were up to like one ten. During our
Speaker 4: current inflationary crisis, this exact debate debate was taking place again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which like where it's like, I.
Speaker 4: Mean there's like all of the prices that the FED
Speaker 4: has no control over. It's like, well, if you ignore
Speaker 4: those ones, then actually, our theory is like kind of
Speaker 4: getting close to being right.
Speaker 3: And the worst part, the worst part is that the
Speaker 3: interest rate correlates positively with prices. This is so like
Speaker 3: so like so like the interest rate when it's high,
Speaker 3: theory expects that prices will be low. But actually and
Speaker 3: and and and like even if you adjust for like
Speaker 3: a delay where maybe like the prices get low afterwards,
Speaker 3: like no, that's not what happens. It's like the interest
Speaker 3: rate goes up and prices go up, to prices go
Speaker 3: down and the interest rate goes.
Speaker 4: You know, like like like it's like yeah and like
Speaker 4: and Demucio is like it hurt when he eventually he
Speaker 4: super imposes oil price, Fed funds, thoral funds, rate, and
Speaker 4: inflation all in one chart. It's just like this epic
Speaker 4: wave of all three going up at once, yeah, like
Speaker 4: almost in lockstep. And then oil goes back down, and
Speaker 4: then interest rates go back down, and then prices go
Speaker 4: back down.
Speaker 3: Yeah I can't. I think prices first before interest rate.
Speaker 4: Let me see, oh yeah, yeah, like inflation cress like yeah,
Speaker 4: somewhat concurrently with the federal funds, and then the UH
Speaker 4: oil price eventually falls like like shortly thereafter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then and this this just gives you a disaster,
Speaker 2: right because you like, okay, so the you will get
Speaker 2: neoclassical economists who are like, oh my god, oh no,
Speaker 2: all these idiots are saying that increasing the increasing the
Speaker 2: interest rate actually increases prices. It's not what happening. It's
Speaker 2: like you get into this mess. You have to figure
Speaker 2: out the new classical explanation, right, is that like, okay, well,
Speaker 2: the reason it looks like the fund rate increasing increase
Speaker 2: prices is because you do that in response to the
Speaker 2: inflation happening. Right, But like you can also just very
Speaker 2: easily look at this as like a panic index basically
Speaker 2: like where you know, it's like okay, well, prices go up,
Speaker 2: and then the Fed panics, and so they they raise
Speaker 2: their it doesn't and you know it like it's it's
Speaker 2: this is one of those things where like the neoclassical
Speaker 2: economists have invented a mechanism that like allows them to
Speaker 2: explain their own actions in a way that's plausible enough
Speaker 2: that they can call anyone that they've they've gotten a
Speaker 2: veegibility that could say anyone who says they're wrong is
Speaker 2: just like nuts, right, right, And also it's it's it's
Speaker 2: entirely possible that not only are they not right, they're
Speaker 2: literally perfectly exactly wrong.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and that yeah, they tried out the like the
Speaker 7: the econometric jargon long and variable lags, when people say,
Speaker 7: when our interest rate's gonna cause unemployments arise, when are
Speaker 7: interest it's going to cut down on inflation by themselves
Speaker 7: and not some other supply chain phenomenon, And they say, like, well,
Speaker 7: the monetary transmission mechanism has long and variable lags, which
Speaker 7: means that like ninety eighteen months from now, it will
Speaker 7: settle down and then we'll know it's from interest rates.
Speaker 3: Trust us, right, And even their purported explanations are demonstrably false.
Speaker 3: So theoretically, the mechanism by which this happens is that
Speaker 3: the monetary that the money supply will go down.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, M.
Speaker 3: Two is our best estimate for the monetary for the
Speaker 3: money supply, and it's not even a perfect one. You know,
Speaker 3: interest rates go up, interest rates go down. M two
Speaker 3: keeps going up. And this is over the course of
Speaker 3: like from the seventies to the nineties, you know, Like, yes,
Speaker 3: another graph of the monsios.
Speaker 4: That's another important point that like the money, it doesn't
Speaker 4: even get the money supply down.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So, like it's quite questionable whether this interest rate
Speaker 3: adjustment thing even works at all on its own terms,
Speaker 3: because all the and says that there's at least and
Speaker 3: this is what I mean by the weak version of
Speaker 3: Dic's argument that all the evidence shows that there's at
Speaker 3: least no relationship between interest rates and the price level.
Speaker 3: That there is like no relationship whatsoever. It basically just
Speaker 3: is useless for controlling prices one way or the other.
Speaker 3: The uh Now, the strong version of argument is he
Speaker 3: takes the he takes the the the fact that interest
Speaker 3: rates track prices very seriously, and he's like, well, what
Speaker 3: if making finance more expensive actually raises business costs? And
Speaker 3: businesses choose to respond to it by raising their prices.
Speaker 3: You know, what if you what if you actually, by
Speaker 3: raising the interest rate, are contributing to inflation. Now, this
Speaker 3: is this is kind of how we framed the whole
Speaker 3: article in our title editors make titles, not not not
Speaker 3: not writers do interest rate hikes worsen inflation? And I
Speaker 3: remember showing this to some of my friends who were
Speaker 3: financed bros. And they were like, what what are you
Speaker 3: talking about? This is crazy idea, But like it makes
Speaker 3: a lot of sense because if you look at things
Speaker 3: as a supply chain, at the very least, rising financially
Speaker 3: rising cost of loans would be a higher cost for
Speaker 3: at least some businesses. Theoretically they could respond to that
Speaker 3: by raising their prices. Now, in actual fact, it probably
Speaker 3: at least my solo opinion is this is a small effect.
Speaker 3: If it exists at all, it's much more plausible that
Speaker 3: there is simply no relationship.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the general price yeah, and that and that
Speaker 2: and that, Like the fact that they're correlated is just
Speaker 2: it's just a panic index on the on the on
Speaker 2: the on behalf of the fed that they just get
Speaker 2: scared and do this thing and it doesn't it has
Speaker 2: no effect. But like you know they've got to press
Speaker 2: the panic button.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think I'm for a variety of reasons. I
Speaker 4: think I'm a weak form demusiist on this point. I think, like, like,
Speaker 4: especially these days, there's so many other like a relatively
Speaker 4: small percentage of commercial and bussiness credit is variable right
Speaker 4: to begin with. These days, more of it is fixed rate,
Speaker 4: and like especially for more well certainly for mortgages, like
Speaker 4: it's it's like eighty percent plus approaching eighty five percent
Speaker 4: even fixed rate, which will not be affected. And then
Speaker 4: businesses have other so many other means of liquidity other
Speaker 4: than loans these days, particularly the like medium large scale businesses,
Speaker 4: like the you know, you can go to the capital markets,
Speaker 4: private equity or the stock market and get the funding
Speaker 4: you need. That I'm in ways that don't don't depend
Speaker 4: upon what the federal funds rate is doing or only
Speaker 4: weekly depend upon it. So it's just like there's so
Speaker 4: many other liquidity sources, especially like in the last thirty
Speaker 4: years or so, like well since since the Vulcar shock.
Speaker 4: Basically they've like all of these like private equity and
Speaker 4: other capital markets methods for liquid you have opened up
Speaker 4: and a good deal of the debt. A good deal
Speaker 4: more of the debt as a percentage of total debt
Speaker 4: is fixed rate, so like on that basis, and like
Speaker 4: all right, well maybe it doesn't maybe it doesn't increase prices,
Speaker 4: but there is at the very least, it's like non correlated.
Speaker 3: This caught a lot of people's attention, like ONCET, once
Speaker 3: you put this paper out there, this is one of
Speaker 3: our most successful essays because it got picked up by
Speaker 3: a bunch of folks, I mean, Investipedia cited it as
Speaker 3: a source. Economy called this a blog and not a magazine,
Speaker 3: you know, like like it ended up being taken up
Speaker 3: by another capital as Power influenced economists Blair Fix, who
Speaker 3: found yet more empirical evidence that there is no relationship
Speaker 3: whatsoever between interest rates and like the general price level,
Speaker 3: you know, and to the extent that there is, it's
Speaker 3: only because you induce a recession, you know that that
Speaker 3: that puts people out of work, in which case you've
Speaker 3: basically you know, you've in order to deal with a
Speaker 3: paper cut, you've cut off your hand, right and even
Speaker 3: then like they can't they can't reliably get unemployment up,
Speaker 3: you know, by raising rates. So like what like what
Speaker 3: use is that even if you accept that mechanism. So
Speaker 3: they found more evidence and then got even more attention.
Speaker 3: Cory Doctoro, the science fiction writer and futurist and kind
Speaker 3: of left wing all around public intellectual, he found both
Speaker 3: Demusia's study and Blair Fix's study and was like really
Speaker 3: excited about it. And after that it really took off.
Speaker 3: It started getting debated all over the place. There's a
Speaker 3: heterodotsy economics international organization called Rethink Economics, which is all
Speaker 3: about like you know, inciting pluralism and the discipline. And
Speaker 3: in their Australian blog, because they're all over the world,
Speaker 3: an economist called Matthew Harris, you know, took up took
Speaker 3: up the controversy and basically sided with with Demusio, like
Speaker 3: and JW. Mason writing in Baron's also basically sided with
Speaker 3: us in an essay called the Fed Can't Fine Tune
Speaker 3: the Economy. JW. Mason's very important heterodox economists who's often
Speaker 3: on the cutting edge of a lot of these kind
Speaker 3: of theoretical developments. Interestingly, the first fellow though, Matthew Harris
Speaker 3: at Rethink Economics, he actually found a study which I
Speaker 3: was not aware of, which is why I love these
Speaker 3: When we started all these conversations all over the place,
Speaker 3: people dug up stuff that we didn't even know about.
Speaker 3: There was a study done by the National Bureau of
Speaker 3: Economic Research by two professors from the University of Chicago,
Speaker 3: but notably they were not University of Chicago economists. They
Speaker 3: were in the University of Chicago Business School. And as
Speaker 3: many people have pointed out, you know, capitalists started business
Speaker 3: schools because economists are basically just propaganda, but like, you
Speaker 3: actually also need people who know how the world actually
Speaker 3: works in order to run your companies. So that's why
Speaker 3: economics and business schools are two separate schools.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is like a real like I remember this
Speaker 2: on campus. This is like, this is a real thing.
Speaker 2: Where like, if you're so the business school, if I'm
Speaker 2: remembering correctly, the business school is like is most I
Speaker 2: think it's I think it might only be a grad
Speaker 2: school for han So let me let me look this up.
Speaker 2: Yeah that was my memory of it. Yeah, so, so
Speaker 2: this is a real thing because because the University of
Speaker 2: Chicago doesn't have an undergrad business program, you get people
Speaker 2: who want to do business who go into ECON and
Speaker 2: the ECON people fucking hate them because they see them
Speaker 2: as like like they see them as sort of like
Speaker 2: like these like inferior like fly by night people who
Speaker 2: don't care about like the sort of deep like the
Speaker 2: deep math and like the deep sort of like you know,
Speaker 2: like intellectual like political pursuit of economics. They just want
Speaker 2: to like go be a business person. And this has
Speaker 2: really interesting effects because it means that like you know,
Speaker 2: like the business school, cause it's not like the business
Speaker 2: school is like a bastion of leftist or whatever, but
Speaker 2: they don't agree on stuff a lot because they're like
Speaker 2: like the the University of Chicago Economics program, it produces
Speaker 2: basically two things. It produces like a bunch of people
Speaker 2: who go on to be investment bankers where you don't
Speaker 2: actually need to know how a firm works at all,
Speaker 2: and then it goes on to produce a bunch of
Speaker 2: people who become economists and so like it's it's actual
Speaker 2: sort of ideological purpose is is specifically it's it's a
Speaker 2: school that trains other economists, right, it's a school that
Speaker 2: teaches like the ruling class what to think, whereas the
Speaker 2: business school is like the school that teach This is
Speaker 2: like This is a very very very explicit. It's it's
Speaker 2: something that like when you're there, you can like watch
Speaker 2: like in practice, the fact that these aren't the same thing,
Speaker 2: and the fact that like you know, they're they're they're
Speaker 2: they're going to produce different conclusions because you know, the
Speaker 2: the like because like because their actual like purpose is different.
Speaker 2: One is ideological, the other one is like making money.
Speaker 3: Yes, and and and this is a great case study
Speaker 3: of it because these folks at the business school, their
Speaker 3: names are Nil's, Nils Gormson, and Killian Huber, they actually
Speaker 3: went and asked companies what they do when credit gets
Speaker 3: more expensive. Now, according to the theory, and this is the
Speaker 3: most sophisticated theory, the theory that people at the FED
Speaker 3: will tell you, which is, you know, you might need
Speaker 3: to put a few drinks into them first, but you know,
Speaker 3: it's like we have to induce a partial recession in
Speaker 3: order to make it so that people have less spending
Speaker 3: money in their pockets and prices get bidd down.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 3: Theoretically, the mechanism by which this works at the individual
Speaker 3: firm is that the firm season that the cost of
Speaker 3: capital goes up and they invest less, you know, or
Speaker 3: just outright go out of business. Right, But in fact
Speaker 3: future investment is only weekly correlated to the cost of
Speaker 3: capital because of the limited transition into discount rates, you know,
Speaker 3: in other words, like basically there's no real effect.
Speaker 7: So yeah, you go around and do business service, sorry,
Speaker 7: go ahead companies.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they do a good amount, if not perhaps most,
Speaker 4: of their capital investment from cash on hand before going
Speaker 4: before seeking out finance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that and that like, and that means that
Speaker 2: it doesn't have an effect.
Speaker 4: And then even if you need financing their non debt finance,
Speaker 4: there's like equity finance, either private or public, that you
Speaker 4: have as an option site alongside the debt options exactly.
Speaker 3: So we go from like a situation where we published
Speaker 3: this article in twenty twenty two, right, and it's got
Speaker 3: a title that for a mainstream economist, even a very
Speaker 3: sophisticated one, is unthinkable, like do interest rates hikes, you know,
Speaker 3: cause inflation to get worse or even just don't matter
Speaker 3: for inflation. But then suddenly, like you have a bunch
Speaker 3: once it gets taken up by a larger discussion, you
Speaker 3: have a bunch of quite rep people saying the exact
Speaker 3: same thing, citing us directly, and even in one case,
Speaker 3: six months after our article comes out. Lo and behold
Speaker 3: that a certain little known economist rights in the Guardian.
Speaker 3: In fact, raising interest rates could do more harm than
Speaker 3: good by making it more expensive for firms to invest
Speaker 3: in solutions to the current supply constraints. The US federal reserves.
Speaker 3: Monetary tightening has already curtailed housing construction, even though more
Speaker 3: supply is precisely what is needed to bring down one
Speaker 3: of the biggest sources of inflation housing costs. Moreover, many
Speaker 3: price setters in the housing market may now pass the
Speaker 3: costs of doing business onto renters. You know. So in
Speaker 3: other words, like maybe higher interest rates can actually induce
Speaker 3: price increases as the higher interest rates and do businesses
Speaker 3: to write down the future value of lost customers relative
Speaker 3: to the benefit of higher prices to be sure, a
Speaker 3: deep recession you know, parenthesis like the kind of they're
Speaker 3: trying to induce. That's my parenthesis. Back to the quote,
Speaker 3: a deeper session would tame inflation. But why would we
Speaker 3: invite that? You know, Oh, Jerome Powell and his colleague
Speaker 3: seem to relish cheering against the economy. Meanwhile, they're friends
Speaker 3: in commercial banking are making out like bandits. Now that
Speaker 3: the Fed is paying four point four percent interests on
Speaker 3: more than three trillion dollars a bankers or balances. Blah blah,
Speaker 3: blah blah. Now this little known economist writing for The
Speaker 3: Guardian is Joseph Stieglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in economics.
Speaker 3: Now does he cite our article who's talking points he's
Speaker 3: basically going through point by point. No, does he cite
Speaker 3: any of the better known places that cited us that
Speaker 3: are heaterodox. No, he basically presents it as if it's
Speaker 3: his own idea. Now, maybe he did have this idea
Speaker 3: six months after we started.
Speaker 2: Axtendid in like Stinglets has not had a single idea
Speaker 2: in like fifteen years. Like that man, Oh, that man
Speaker 2: is a transparent medium through which the stuff that he
Speaker 2: reads appears on a page. I'm going to be made.
Speaker 2: I'm I'm sick of doing this bullshit.
Speaker 3: And you know the worst part is, like, you know,
Speaker 3: this is something that happens a lot. There's an orthodoxy
Speaker 3: that says certain things that are nonsense. The heterodoxy goes
Speaker 3: through the hard work of like figuring out the reasons
Speaker 3: why it's not true and presenting an alternative model. It's
Speaker 3: denied at first, but then increasingly it's just plagiarized, you know,
Speaker 3: perhaps accidentally, probably not, you know, like like and that
Speaker 3: it's presented as if actually, this is what the theory
Speaker 3: has always been all along, you know, and like, how
Speaker 3: can anyone think differently? And it's this, it's this unfortunate
Speaker 3: thing because since the neoclassicals control the discipline, they control
Speaker 3: advancement through the ranks of the economists, so they're always
Speaker 3: wrong and never right, but they're never punished for it,
Speaker 3: and they control all the leavers of who gets to
Speaker 3: be an economist. So it's this sort of like continual, sad,
Speaker 3: unfortunate thing. But on the bright side, we were right.
Speaker 3: We were right early A bunch of people picked it up,
Speaker 3: and our talking points ended up making it too very
Speaker 3: very distant and well regarded places to the point where
Speaker 3: now it's it's a viable alternative that exists out there
Speaker 3: in the world in terms of like, you know, why
Speaker 3: keep raising rates it's not doing any good, It could
Speaker 3: even do bad. And that's the talking point that I
Speaker 3: don't think would have existed if hadn't been for Democio's
Speaker 3: research which depended entirely upon the supply chain theory of
Speaker 3: inflation framework that Steve developed out of Fred Lee's work,
Speaker 3: which is basically a research program that now the magazine
Speaker 3: has put out there in the world that and it
Speaker 3: is continuing to build up on that. That actually makes
Speaker 3: it make more sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I want to just sort of like take
Speaker 2: a second to highlight like how impressive it is had
Speaker 2: this happened, because like again like like a year and
Speaker 2: a half even like like like even like even like
Speaker 2: a year ago, right for the entire time I have
Speaker 2: been alive if you tried to say that raising interest
Speaker 2: rates raises inflation, like people would have thrown bananas at you,
Speaker 2: like like volleys of tomato. Was like they they would
Speaker 2: have like you would have you would have gotten sixteen
Speaker 2: contracts to be a professional clown like this. This was
Speaker 2: the thing that like you could not you couldn't even
Speaker 2: like suggest this, and you know, like within a pretty
Speaker 2: rapid span, suddenly like Stinglets is being like, ah, I
Speaker 2: want this very real. Maybe this is a plausible thing,
Speaker 2: and it's like, oh my, like I don't know, I
Speaker 2: think it's I think it's it's really it's really impressive
Speaker 2: watching how fast I don't know, like how fast the
Speaker 2: combinations of like reality and having an explanation of reality
Speaker 2: that actually like lines up with it has been able
Speaker 2: to change, like as been able to actually just sort
Speaker 2: of like change what the discourse at like the highest
Speaker 2: levels of power and sort of like what what has
Speaker 2: actually been happening in the economy like has shifted And
Speaker 2: that's wild, Like I would not have guessed that that
Speaker 2: that was the thing that was even remotely possible, and
Speaker 2: and yet we are now here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the Overton window has shifted so far that like
Speaker 4: the idea that interest rates just don't seem to have
Speaker 4: any discernible effect upon the price level is kind of
Speaker 4: like becoming the base case.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so like the entire yeah, the entire spectrum has
Speaker 4: shifted like a strong form and have like I'm starting
Speaker 4: to use that phrase now, by the way, And okay,
Speaker 4: people won't be throwing a ton of they'll still throw
Speaker 4: something at you, but like it's it's like manageable now.
Speaker 3: I mean you can always point to that argument from
Speaker 3: authority but says it might be so yeah, so you
Speaker 3: know it's like.
Speaker 2: Es he won the prize, really prize to.
Speaker 3: Should say about.
Speaker 2: Want this is a whole.
Speaker 3: The so called Nobel Prize in economics is not actually
Speaker 3: the Nobel Prize in economics. It's that there's Nobel prices
Speaker 3: in science and you know, literature and all this stuff
Speaker 3: that's administered by the Alfred Nobel Organization and the fund
Speaker 3: that he left and whatever. This started in the sixties,
Speaker 3: like I think some seventy years after the Nobel started
Speaker 3: or something like that, and it was started by the
Speaker 3: Swedish Central Bank to imitate the Nobel Prize. So technically
Speaker 3: it's the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, you see. And
Speaker 3: it's and it's just it's basically like peeling off the
Speaker 3: skin of the face of the Nobel Prize and then
Speaker 3: wearing it, you know, and saying, where we have a
Speaker 3: Nobel price too. Totally basically it's not. And you know,
Speaker 3: it puts the lotion on its skin or else it
Speaker 3: gets the hose again. You know, they did this specifically.
Speaker 3: There's a historian of of economics. Oh my god, what
Speaker 3: the hell is his name? The it's it's the it's
Speaker 3: the more heat than like guy. He's oh my goodness.
Speaker 2: I cite him in the Friendly thing and I can't Mosi.
Speaker 3: Morowski, that's the guy. Yeah, Okay, So he actually like
Speaker 3: went and like studied the origins of it, and it
Speaker 3: turns out that they specifically did it as a scheme
Speaker 3: to only give the Nobel Prize to people who are
Speaker 3: basically like neoclassical economists, and they mostly have so sometimes
Speaker 3: they've diversed, but mostly they've done it to very reactionary economists.
Speaker 3: In order to promote neoclassical economists in Europe, because it
Speaker 3: was stronger in America than it was in Europe, and
Speaker 3: in order to promote the idea of central bank independence,
Speaker 3: which is a fancy term for uh, you know, the
Speaker 3: a central bank should not need to operate under a political,
Speaker 3: uh a democratically controlled you know, legislature that says, actually,
Speaker 3: we don't want more unemployment because that would be bad,
Speaker 3: so don't do that. Like, instead, they should have independence,
Speaker 3: the independence that allows them to technocratically decide that it's
Speaker 3: time for people to get out of work, you know,
Speaker 3: and and and that kind of thing. So you know,
Speaker 3: that's that's the story of the Sokel Nobel Prize. It's
Speaker 3: really the fake Nobel, Yeah, which is I just.
Speaker 2: Call it the fake Nobel yeah, which is also really
Speaker 2: funny if you talk to other people, like specifically, one
Speaker 2: of the things that happened to me when I was
Speaker 2: in the university was like I knew a bunch of
Speaker 2: people who were like really really good at math. Like
Speaker 2: one of my friends was like like like actual genuine
Speaker 2: prodigy was doing like like was doing like like graduate
Speaker 2: level like math in high school. And if you talk
Speaker 2: to these people, and you talk to like math professors
Speaker 2: about the Nobel Prizes, they like they will like yell
Speaker 2: about it for like twenty minutes because the math is
Speaker 2: so bullshit. It's like, yeah, this guy like like the
Speaker 2: math involved in these Nobel Prizes are like they figured
Speaker 2: out too blos two weekos four and they gave them
Speaker 2: like this fucking fake Nobel prize. You look at like
Speaker 2: the fields metal and it's like, I don't know, like
Speaker 2: it's it's it's it's it's it's really nonsense. All the
Speaker 2: math people are really mad about the fact that the
Speaker 2: econ people think that they know math because they don't.
Speaker 2: And the consequence of this is you get these like that,
Speaker 2: you get people handing out Nobel prices for saying shit
Speaker 2: like the economy can't miss like the market can't miss price,
Speaker 2: like in like assets that are like the price of houses,
Speaker 2: and then the entire housing market immediately imployed because it
Speaker 2: was all miss priced. It's it's it's a disaster. It
Speaker 2: has been. I don't know. We should everyone at all
Speaker 2: times should be doing anti fake Nobeil price propaganda against
Speaker 2: the economics Nobel price, because it's it's it's fake and
Speaker 2: bad and we should all say it more.
Speaker 4: Uh, you know, there's on the heterodox side of things,
Speaker 4: there's some really promising uses of mathematical economics to create
Speaker 4: like input output matrices. Yeah, and to model, like do
Speaker 4: an io model of the economy that the math is
Speaker 4: very much subservient to empirical data that is coming in
Speaker 4: that trains them model, and it like like to so
Speaker 4: much of economics is well, data fits, data fits the model.
Speaker 4: Data fits the model, like over and over again when
Speaker 4: it should be the other way around.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, does the model fit the data, because if
Speaker 3: it doesn't, then you got to throw it out like
Speaker 3: this whole like raising interest rates is going to control prices? Bullshit?
Speaker 3: When has that even happened? Theoretically happened in the seventies,
Speaker 3: but then you look at it and yeah, it doesn't
Speaker 3: tell you that story. So you know, do they throw
Speaker 3: it out?
Speaker 4: No, like brief brief callback to Fred Lee's table table
Speaker 4: B was it?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: Yeah, is the Blinder study in there? I forget?
Speaker 2: Yes, Yes, that's like an instance.
Speaker 4: That's an instance where Alan Blinder is and neoclassical economists
Speaker 4: who like, he messed up and did real science and
Speaker 4: what he found was was the administer price theory.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he made the terrible mistake of thinking that his
Speaker 3: bullshit theory would be vindicated and then it turns out
Speaker 3: that it was not.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's just like the history of intellectual thought for
Speaker 4: economics is like replete with examples where they kind of
Speaker 4: like they screw up and they actually do real science
Speaker 4: for a change, and like find things like cost plus
Speaker 4: markups happening.
Speaker 3: And he tries so hard to explain it away. You know,
Speaker 3: he's like, well, supply and demand exists.
Speaker 8: It's just that these prices are sticky because the cost
Speaker 8: of changing the price on the menu is actually too expensive,
Speaker 8: so they choose not to and that's why prices are sticky.
Speaker 3: They can't they can't change the stickers. You know, it's
Speaker 3: completely insane.
Speaker 4: The cost of admit there's a cost to administering prices themselves,
Speaker 4: and that's why they don't change prices. Like the price
Speaker 4: mechanism for neoclassical economics would suggest.
Speaker 3: To look for the stickers, and he couldn't find it.
Speaker 3: You couldn't find the costs. So he's like, well, I
Speaker 3: guess it's not sticky because of menu costs. It's like,
Speaker 3: I wonder what it could be. What a mystery?
Speaker 2: Okay, so we we should we should start wrapping up
Speaker 2: because this has been This has been a very long
Speaker 2: episode already, but I wanted to ask before we go,
Speaker 2: what what what? What are you all doing next? And
Speaker 2: what other incredibly funny economics discourses can we expect to
Speaker 2: have giant like creators punched into in the next couple
Speaker 2: of years.
Speaker 4: So one thing we've started to work on, and we've
Speaker 4: discussed a little bit on this podcast, I believe. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 4: Beck was the importance of for X foreign exchange for
Speaker 4: all sorts of microeconomic things like inflation being one of them,
Speaker 4: Like if you're a small country that that does not
Speaker 4: have hegemonic monetary authority like the US does to get
Speaker 4: people to use its currency and you have to go
Speaker 4: out and import things and some other currency. How does
Speaker 4: that affect your ability to socially provision yourself as a
Speaker 4: nation state and like do development work. And we're developing
Speaker 4: a theory of for X. Essentially that is it's a
Speaker 4: it's an extension of the chartlist framework that informs MMT,
Speaker 4: but with some important criticisms about how like the central
Speaker 4: MMT insights sort of is like you can create if
Speaker 4: you're the sovereign issuer of your own fiat currency, you
Speaker 4: can always provision enough of it to you can always
Speaker 4: spend as much of it into existence as you need
Speaker 4: to to do productive things. And yes, that's true. You
Speaker 4: can create infinity of your own money, but your own
Speaker 4: not other people's money. Yeah, so other currencies like if you're.
Speaker 2: Like, uh, really Sri Lanka for example.
Speaker 4: If you're Sri Lanka or Mexico or whoever, most of
Speaker 4: most of the world, basically you need to maintain and
Speaker 4: augment your balance of like the trading the major trading
Speaker 4: currencies US dollars, yen, the euro, to name three, and
Speaker 4: have balances of those. You need to maintain your balance
Speaker 4: of payments and your balances of specific currencies in order
Speaker 4: to meet the biophysical obligations that your whatever your development
Speaker 4: strategy necessitates, because in most instances, not all, but most,
Speaker 4: you're going to need to, like no one's going if
Speaker 4: you're Sri Lanka, no one's going to want to to
Speaker 4: transact in your currency. For major purchases of like staple goods.
Speaker 4: You're going to need to use like dollars or euros
Speaker 4: or end or are you on perhaps you know who
Speaker 4: knows exactly one of the major trading currencies.
Speaker 3: And this also raises the question of how it currency
Speaker 3: becomes a major trading currency, and that almost invariably takes
Speaker 3: you in two directions. One is which countries are powerful
Speaker 3: and able to industrialize and make capital goods that nobody
Speaker 3: else has that everybody wants a piece of. And two,
Speaker 3: which are the powerful imperialist great powers. And it turns
Speaker 3: out that those are the nexus that's created between imperialism, development,
Speaker 3: and the balance of payments. Those three things can't even
Speaker 3: be discussed independently of each other, and the politics of
Speaker 3: what is going to be used as the what Steve
Speaker 3: and I are tentatively calling the international means of payment,
Speaker 3: in other words, what you can use in international transactions
Speaker 3: across a whole region or across the entire planet. That
Speaker 3: is a hugely political question that all the major great
Speaker 3: powers in their interimperial conflict are constantly fighting over. So
Speaker 3: right now it appears that China is attempting to make
Speaker 3: a bid for a global yuon. First, they tried to
Speaker 3: do it through the digital un Now they're seemingly trying
Speaker 3: to do it through bricks by getting the other bricks
Speaker 3: countries to agree to a kind of EUON gold standard,
Speaker 3: mirroring the Breton Woods agreement that was basically the dollar
Speaker 3: piggybacking off of gold to reach global pre eminence. Will
Speaker 3: it work, will it not? Nobody really knows. It's a
Speaker 3: total mess. But in theory, that could be one way
Speaker 3: that you could suddenly have, like the yuon, at least
Speaker 3: in a certain currency zone, be used as the main
Speaker 3: way of doing imports, and if the US suddenly needs
Speaker 3: an import from that zone, which hypothetically, if it existed,
Speaker 3: right they couldn't use dollars anymore, or or maybe dollars
Speaker 3: would be at a high disadvantage, you know, in the
Speaker 3: exchange rate between dollars and that currency at that point,
Speaker 3: or maybe they would just be banned entirely from using dollars.
Speaker 3: They have to get it in that currency, which means
Speaker 3: is suddenly the US, which has basically been able to
Speaker 3: print for X, to print the international means of payment
Speaker 3: for some fifty years now, would suddenly have to actually
Speaker 3: hold reserves of this thing. Now, if we have to
Speaker 3: hold reserves of it, that means that we have to
Speaker 3: sell something to the people who issue that currency. That
Speaker 3: means that we suddenly have to worry about which firms
Speaker 3: are the most profitable exporters. And I bet you anything
Speaker 3: that none of our listeners know what the most important
Speaker 3: company in America would become if that situation happened. Is
Speaker 3: it Uber? Is it Amazon? Is it all these like
Speaker 3: Fortune five hundred companies and whatever?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 3: No, I mean it's one of the Fortune five hundred,
Speaker 3: But it's not like towards the top of that list.
Speaker 3: It's Boeing. Boeing is by far our single greatest exporter firm.
Speaker 3: It would be in a situation like this, the national champion,
Speaker 3: so to speak, to use language that's usually reserved for
Speaker 3: less developed countries than the US. And this is exactly
Speaker 3: the kind of like thinking that is important, because you know, obviously.
Speaker 3: The other thing that would happen if dollar hegemony ended
Speaker 3: is that it would be a huge economic crash in
Speaker 3: the US, Like suddenly the import the costs of importing
Speaker 3: anything that we're in that zone would skyrocket, and it
Speaker 3: would mess up, you know, our ballance of payments, and
Speaker 3: it would cause inflation, depending on how quickly it happens
Speaker 3: and how how little, how much or how little time
Speaker 3: firms have to adjust their supply chains and stuff like that.
Speaker 3: So it's, uh, this is exactly what you need in
Speaker 3: order to understand everything from the decline and fall of
Speaker 3: the Roman Empire to current geopolitics today. And and and
Speaker 3: I'm hoping that that Steve and I, through developing the theory,
Speaker 3: will create a general framework that can be used to
Speaker 3: tie discussions that people usually have in purely political terms
Speaker 3: about interimperial conflict into economic questions, so that there's no
Speaker 3: longer a kind of division of labor between between economics
Speaker 3: which denies the existence of imperialism. And then the people
Speaker 3: who study imperialism as historians or political scientists.
Speaker 2: Or whatever, stay stay tuned for more theories dropping at
Speaker 2: some point in the future.
Speaker 3: Oh and we should do our marketing pitch. If you
Speaker 3: like the stuff that you hear, you should seriously consider
Speaker 3: checking out the magazine which is at Strange Matters dot
Speaker 3: co op. And also please consider if you have the
Speaker 3: ability to subscribe or donate subscription storty five dollars. And
Speaker 3: it really, uh, it really helps because all the money
Speaker 3: that we get that doesn't just go to our capitalist
Speaker 3: overlords for basically like you know, paying for the services
Speaker 3: that we use to keep the website going and the
Speaker 3: magazine going. All of it goes to our writers, and
Speaker 3: we try to pay them a both market rate for
Speaker 3: little magazines of our size. So if you want to
Speaker 3: see more of this stuff and more arts, philosophy, anthropology, history,
Speaker 3: all the other kind of stuff poetry that we publish,
Speaker 3: definitely please consider.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well we'll we'll put we'll put a link to
Speaker 2: the magazine and the description. Yeah, Steve GenZ, thank you
Speaker 2: so much for thank you so much for being on
Speaker 2: the show and for yelling at the kind of opriced
Speaker 2: with me.
Speaker 4: It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 3: It's been great MANA thank you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you can find us at it could happen here,
Speaker 2: but that happened here pod on Twitter and Instagram. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we have a website where we post our sources. It's
Speaker 2: schools on media dot Com. There's other stuff there. You
Speaker 2: should go there and yeah, go into the world and
Speaker 2: make life worse for mainstream economists. It could happen here.
Speaker 2: It's the podcast that's called it could Happen here. I
Speaker 2: think things fall apart and put them back together again, etcetera,
Speaker 2: et cetera. We're slightly rushing this intro because Garrison have
Speaker 2: to leave in like ten minutes, not ten minutes, but yeah,
Speaker 2: we're with the way. Yeah. So we've spent a lot
Speaker 2: of time covering the sort of various aspects of the
Speaker 2: transgend aside we haven't The aspect of the angle we
Speaker 2: haven't covered that much is The New York Times. And
Speaker 2: partially that's my fault because if I every time I
Speaker 2: try to write something about New York Times, it has
Speaker 2: devolved into about seven hours and me reading every single
Speaker 2: time The New York Times wrote an article that was
Speaker 2: pro Hitler. So you know, it's difficult to be what
Speaker 2: you would describe as reasonably objective when you're talking about
Speaker 2: these people and not just start yelling about the Iraq War. However,
Speaker 2: coma other people have done a very very good job
Speaker 2: about this, and things have developed in the sort of
Speaker 2: world of the New York Times printing just incredibly bizarre
Speaker 2: transphobic articles. And to talk about one of these things
Speaker 2: and some developments on one of their stories, we are
Speaker 2: talking to Evan erk Hard of Assigned Media, who has
Speaker 2: published a very very good story about some real nonsense
Speaker 2: that the New York Times and their journalists have gotten
Speaker 2: up to. So Fa, welcome to the show.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thanks for having me. Always glad to talk about nonsense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's been it's it's been a real time. Also,
Speaker 2: here is Garrison. Yeah. So I guess, okay, I think
Speaker 2: the place to start with this is getting people caught
Speaker 2: up with the incredibly bizarre story of Jamie Reid. So
Speaker 2: I guess I wanted to start there, of can you
Speaker 2: talk a little bit about who Jamie Reid is and
Speaker 2: how the New York Times and a bunch of other
Speaker 2: very less reputable somehow newspapers got involved with this.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So, I mean there are certainly reputable newspapers that
Speaker 5: have looked into the allegations of former Gender Clinics staff
Speaker 5: member in Saint Louis, Jamie Reid, and those organizations including
Speaker 5: local papers, have found that her allegations didn't hold up.
Speaker 4: This was.
Speaker 5: Months ago, kind of the beginning of the year, I believe.
Speaker 5: She kind of came forward with great fanfare and an
Speaker 5: alliance defending freedom lawyer and said that the gender clinic
Speaker 5: she once worked at was harming children. They weren't engaging
Speaker 5: in informed consent. They were pressuring parents to go along
Speaker 5: with these harmful treatments, horrifying stuff that if true, would
Speaker 5: be just a major, major scandal if true. And the
Speaker 5: allegations fell apart pretty quickly. Numerous parents and patients came back, came,
Speaker 5: you know, forward saying this is nothing like what we've experienced.
Speaker 5: Some of that was pretty directly refuting things that she said,
Speaker 5: such as, you know, kids never got any therapy. They
Speaker 5: just saw a therapist for an hour and an undercanologist
Speaker 5: for an hour and were immediately approved for hormones. And
Speaker 5: so people came forward saying, I did six months of therapy,
Speaker 5: I did nine months.
Speaker 2: I wish you could do that. Like no, like right.
Speaker 3: I mean.
Speaker 5: It was very wild and very discredited. And then, for
Speaker 5: some reason, apparently back in May, as Ing Graashi of
Speaker 5: the New York Times started looking into this story, and
Speaker 5: she didn't find anything different. I mean, if you look
Speaker 5: at her reporting, if anything, she found even more evidence
Speaker 5: that Jamie Reid is not accurate and not on the
Speaker 5: up and up. But the story that she came out
Speaker 5: with is really really weird.
Speaker 2: And and I think the thing, the thing that that
Speaker 2: is the most at least before the most recent round
Speaker 2: of incredibly bizarre stuff, the thing that's the most infuriating
Speaker 2: to me about the sort of Jamie Reid's story is
Speaker 2: that the thing that had come out by the time
Speaker 2: The New York Times is writing about it was that
Speaker 2: it looked a lot like if you look at the
Speaker 2: stuff that Jamie Reid had been doing and people talking
Speaker 2: about their experiences with her, it looked like she was
Speaker 2: trying to sabotage kids getting healthcare because she personally didn't
Speaker 2: believe in it.
Speaker 5: I talked to a parent, a parent who was also
Speaker 5: talked to by The New York Times, who had really
Speaker 5: just wanted like an educational visit for her like eight
Speaker 5: year old, and Jamie Reid said, we can't do anything
Speaker 5: for you. Sorry. You know, we can only bring you
Speaker 5: in if your child is an adolescent ready to go
Speaker 5: on hormone therapy. And so after the allegations came out,
Speaker 5: this parent got in touch with the clinic Jamie Reid
Speaker 5: had left, and they were like, what are you talking about.
Speaker 5: We do educational appointments all the time. Come in. They
Speaker 5: spent you know, almost two hours talking to the family
Speaker 5: about the different you know, medical possibilities in the far
Speaker 5: future and just you know, trying to help educate the
Speaker 5: kid about their body and their options years and years
Speaker 5: before they never did anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is really infuriating because like the actual story
Speaker 2: here is that you know, even even clinics that are
Speaker 2: like trying to do the right thing wind up with
Speaker 2: just incredibly deranged CIS people who basically can at every
Speaker 2: point in the process act as a gatekeeper and decide
Speaker 2: that like you don't get to get treatments, and that's
Speaker 2: awful and is one of them. I mean, you know,
Speaker 2: even even in place, even even in parts of the US,
Speaker 2: at clinics that are good, that is the thing that
Speaker 2: can just happen to you is you get the sort
Speaker 2: of gatekeeper stuff. But instead of doing that, instead of
Speaker 2: again covering the story they had been handed about someone
Speaker 2: trying to keep kids from getting health care, they did
Speaker 2: this they you know this, This turned into this like
Speaker 2: like full court press against Wait, Gary, you you're right.
Speaker 9: I closed my door because the air conditioner is way
Speaker 9: too loud. Only now the cats start screaming at the door.
Speaker 9: But now I open the door. They and they don't
Speaker 9: want to come in. They're just like all the threshold,
Speaker 9: just like staring at me, like make a choice, come
Speaker 9: in or come out.
Speaker 3: And I think we're leaving this in.
Speaker 2: This's great content. They're out, They're gone. They had their chance.
Speaker 2: They blew it. Yeah, what happens instead is is this
Speaker 2: sort of like full court press with a bunch of
Speaker 2: you know, starting in sort of conservative media and then
Speaker 2: moving into sort of liberal media, like using this story
Speaker 2: as an example of like why why we have to
Speaker 2: like stop like we have to shut down clinics and
Speaker 2: stuff while.
Speaker 9: Children's hospitals are getting bomb threats, Yeah, constantly, mostly due
Speaker 9: to kind of prodding by ghouls the Daily Wire who
Speaker 9: are hunting for clicks. And yeah, there's also a big
Speaker 9: part of this is like this tactic of attacking like
Speaker 9: healthcare centers and clinics proved to be a pretty good
Speaker 9: recipe to go viral. That's what the Daily Wire discovered.
Speaker 9: And that's something that New York Times certainly took notice
Speaker 9: of as well, is that, hey, this is this is
Speaker 9: a way to drive a lot of attention towards our website.
Speaker 9: That is just another another angle about this, this sort
Speaker 9: of thing which also like it leads to real world consequences,
Speaker 9: not just in terms of healthcare getting restricted, but also
Speaker 9: like threats of violence against doctors. The right has historically
Speaker 9: been completely willing to carry out acts of violence against
Speaker 9: healthcare workers and let alone you know, trying threatening to
Speaker 9: bomb a children's hospital.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and the exact allegations were were really devastating for
Speaker 5: these families. I mean, I love to Heidi, who's you know,
Speaker 5: her daughter's personal medical history was misrepresented, shared with the world,
Speaker 5: shared in a million articles, and used to to fuel
Speaker 5: gender firm and care bands, you know. I mean that
Speaker 5: is like really damaging for a like seventeen eighteen year
Speaker 5: old who's just trying to like live her life in
Speaker 5: kind of a conservative town.
Speaker 2: Which also and this is another aspect of this, is
Speaker 2: like she is sharing the private medical history of patients
Speaker 2: at a clinic, which you are not allowed to do.
Speaker 2: That is a which is very funny for people who
Speaker 2: rant about these all of these people all the time.
Speaker 2: We finally got one, we finally got an actual hippo violation,
Speaker 2: and h yeah.
Speaker 5: I think the hippa thing has been I mean, you know,
Speaker 5: as Zingeration could have gotten that story, I feel, I mean,
Speaker 5: I think it's been really undercovered. My understanding is that
Speaker 5: healthcare workers are not supposed to have to share information
Speaker 5: that's identifiable to the patient. And we have a patient
Speaker 5: saying I could tell this was my story. And so
Speaker 5: again I'm not a lawyer, but I think that people
Speaker 5: have underestimated the extent to which real families could look
Speaker 5: at these allegations and say, this is me, twisted, distorted,
Speaker 5: used to hurt my family and other families like mine,
Speaker 5: and there's kind of no outrage about that. It's kind
Speaker 5: of this neglected backwater of this story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I mean, I mean, the thing it reminds
Speaker 2: me the most of is the is the original like
Speaker 2: vaccines cause autism story where you have someone who is
Speaker 2: incredibly politically motivated, who is incredibly unreliable, who's demonishrably unreliable,
Speaker 2: who is not someone who's you know, who's someone who
Speaker 2: in the field. Everyone's like, what is going on here.
Speaker 2: This is complete nonsense who like misrepresents and just straight
Speaker 2: up lies about about like about about their patients. And
Speaker 2: then also it turns out like has abused their patients
Speaker 2: or in this case is not has abuse of patients
Speaker 2: in this case case like has successfully like stopped parents
Speaker 2: from being able to talk to the clinic about what
Speaker 2: the options for their kids are. But the media sort
Speaker 2: of doesn't care about that all. All they all they
Speaker 2: see is sort of this story and they they just
Speaker 2: sort of latch onto it, and then they spread all
Speaker 2: of this stuff and it's like, you know, it reminds
Speaker 2: it reminds me a lot of that where like, wait,
Speaker 2: we're still dealing with the consequences of just the completely
Speaker 2: fake bullshit about like vaccism, vaccines supposedly causing autism, which
Speaker 2: and again like that that's stuffing that never that never
Speaker 2: would have gotten mainstreamed if the media hadn't picked it
Speaker 2: up and ran with it. And yet you know, every
Speaker 2: single time one of these absolute like politically motivated frauds,
Speaker 2: it gets up on the stands, like there there's the
Speaker 2: New York Times doing doing their article about it, and
Speaker 2: and like.
Speaker 9: This used to be like Glenn Beck's territory, who would
Speaker 9: like bring out like a chalkboard and make like a
Speaker 9: make like a crazy wall with yarn and string. And
Speaker 9: now it's it actually has been relegated to the New
Speaker 9: York Times, the sort of the sort of coverage that
Speaker 9: they're doing over these types of like moral panics around healthcare.
Speaker 9: I think if you look at like Fox News twenty
Speaker 9: years ago, this was the type of stuff that they
Speaker 9: did for a long time before it was actually a
Speaker 9: little bit too insane and they had to like fire
Speaker 9: Glenn Beck.
Speaker 3: And it's this.
Speaker 9: It's the same sort of stuff now that's propagated by
Speaker 9: people like The Daily Wire and then picked up on
Speaker 9: by even more kind of mainstream publications.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think what's so insidious about this story
Speaker 5: in particular and some of the other New York Times
Speaker 5: stories is that they represent this as being their deep
Speaker 5: investigative journalism. They represent this as being the finest that
Speaker 5: the Times produces. And here is you know, the mother
Speaker 5: of a trans girl who went to the reporter and said,
Speaker 5: I can prove to you I have medical records, I
Speaker 5: have emails to prove to you that what is in
Speaker 5: this allegation is about my family. And isn't true. The
Speaker 5: reporter takes that and kind of sticks it in at
Speaker 5: the end, you know, like that it's not lying, but
Speaker 5: it is so totally distorting the truth that it feels
Speaker 5: like lying. It feels worse than lying almost.
Speaker 9: Yeah, especially because there's like like thousands of people who
Speaker 9: will just read the headline. They're not going to scroll
Speaker 9: to the bottom of the thing and read a little disclaimer,
Speaker 9: being like haha, JK.
Speaker 2: If there's a line on everything, that's not good enough. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And I think this gets into the part they So
Speaker 2: you very recently talked to uh, the mother of one
Speaker 2: of the girls who was you know who who to
Speaker 2: read has been lying about and.
Speaker 5: To three of the parents who who a zine had
Speaker 5: talked to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you discovered some very disturbing and incredibly bizarre
Speaker 2: stuff that a zine was doing to get parents to
Speaker 2: stay in the story after reads and like this was
Speaker 2: in her follow up story, after a bunch of people
Speaker 2: came out and were like, hey, this is like not correct,
Speaker 2: this person has in fact been lying about this. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So could you could you go into what you found
Speaker 2: about this?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 5: It was truly truly bizarre. I mean I going in
Speaker 5: there were some parents that contacted me because they'd spoken
Speaker 5: to a Zene Grashi and they were really upset about
Speaker 5: the story. And you know, I went into it thinking
Speaker 5: I'm going to do them a favor. I'm going to
Speaker 5: let them feel heard. They feel disappointed about the story.
Speaker 5: This kind of happens in journalism. I was not expecting
Speaker 5: what I got. So this parent had been very suspicious
Speaker 5: of a zine because of a zine's previous writing about
Speaker 5: trans issues, and so I think she and her family
Speaker 5: kind of were very cautious and very savvy, and they said,
Speaker 5: we don't want to be part of a story that's
Speaker 5: going to be negative on this clinic that we feel
Speaker 5: saved our daughter's life. So you know, I'm willing to
Speaker 5: talk to you, I'm willing to give you this information
Speaker 5: about this person who lied about our daughter's history, but
Speaker 5: if you're going to turn that into a hit piece
Speaker 5: on the clinic, we don't want to be part of it.
Speaker 5: And a Zene, you know, reassured her, calmed her fears,
Speaker 5: and so you know, they were going forward but cautiously.
Speaker 5: And then this mother sees a zine at a courthouse
Speaker 5: where Jamie Reid was testifying about the allegations in Missouri
Speaker 5: and just sees the warm relationship between a Zine and
Speaker 5: Jamie Reid, and she thinks something isn't right here. I
Speaker 5: helped her catch this person in a lie, but they're all,
Speaker 5: you know, buddy, buddy, that seems weird. So she, you know,
Speaker 5: she first went up to Jamie Reid and confronted her.
Speaker 5: She said, I'm liver toxicity mom, and you know, she
Speaker 5: again noticed that Jamie Reid is kind of saying how
Speaker 5: can I help you? What do you want and like
Speaker 5: looking to a zine like save me from this crazy person.
Speaker 5: And so that's when the mother said, we're out. We're
Speaker 5: not We're not going to be part of the story.
Speaker 5: And a Zene did not take that for a Yeah,
Speaker 5: it's nuts. She followed them to their car as they're
Speaker 5: trying to leave, She stood in the car door so
Speaker 5: they couldn't drive away, saying, you know, please keep talking,
Speaker 5: to keep talking. You know, I don't know exactly what
Speaker 5: she's saying, but like I need you in the story.
Speaker 5: And you know, the mom says like no, Azine, we're out.
Speaker 5: Could please step away from the car and they drove away,
Speaker 5: and then Azine called them and called them, and they
Speaker 5: picked up and A zine managed to convince them to
Speaker 5: let her come over to their hotel room. This is
Speaker 5: the night before the New York Times article published. And
Speaker 5: so now Heidi and her husband and Zene are in
Speaker 5: this hotel room and A zine is going paragraph by
Speaker 5: paragraph telling her everything that's in the story, trying to
Speaker 5: convince her that it's not a hit piece on the clinic,
Speaker 5: and the family isn't buying it at all. The family
Speaker 5: is like, no, you're describing a hit piece on the
Speaker 5: clinic where Yeah, But they're left with this horrible, horrible
Speaker 5: conundrum because if they actually pull out of the article,
Speaker 5: which as far as I can tell, they really did
Speaker 5: have this agreement. Again, azine wouldn't talk to me, so
Speaker 5: like it's a little unclear what the agreement was or
Speaker 5: exactly what's going on here. But in the end they decided,
Speaker 5: you know, there's no evidence that this woman lied if
Speaker 5: we pull out of the story. So they felt that
Speaker 5: they had kind of no choice. Even though they felt
Speaker 5: completely betrayed, completely devastated that their story was going to
Speaker 5: be used in this way, they felt they had no
Speaker 5: choice but to stay in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And then like the and the way that like
Speaker 2: it ends the article like is is basically like the
Speaker 2: article is like completely supportive of Jamie Reid, even though
Speaker 2: again demolishably in the article she is lying.
Speaker 5: Such a weird article. You find someone's lying, but you're
Speaker 5: still spending all of your words saying, well, so she's
Speaker 5: sort she lied this one time, but she's basically credible.
Speaker 5: Just bizarre.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then you know, and the New York Times
Speaker 2: is response to this is like the piece you're referring
Speaker 2: to was rigorously a reporter and edited and thoughtful and
Speaker 2: sensitive to the moment. The time stands behind his publication.
Speaker 2: I'm reservedull It's like, well, yeah, of course, of course
Speaker 2: it meets the New York Times like incredibly demanding standards
Speaker 2: for journalism. These are the people who published like these
Speaker 2: are the people who published the yellow Cake Uranium story,
Speaker 2: like these people like these people have published things that
Speaker 2: like a a like these are these people have published
Speaker 2: off about the Iraq War that like British tabloids wouldn't publish.
Speaker 2: So like, yeah, it's it's not it's not I don't
Speaker 2: I don't think it's that surprising to me that, like
Speaker 2: the New York Times was like this passion editorial standards.
Speaker 2: But that's because again the New York Times backed Hitler
Speaker 2: and like deliberately good forth the entire country. You're starting
Speaker 2: a war by straight up lying about a bunch of
Speaker 2: stuff they knew was fake.
Speaker 5: Let me take a moment and say, there are a
Speaker 5: lot of reporters who work for the New York Times
Speaker 5: who do really great work, very very occasionally it's even
Speaker 5: about trans issues. But like it is certainly not a
Speaker 5: monolith of ridiculous nonsense. It's just all of the good
Speaker 5: work kind of camouflages the ridiculous nonsense. And them get
Speaker 5: it through when they when they go on a tear,
Speaker 5: when they go on a crusade against you know, against someone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I mean it's it's they. I don't know,
Speaker 2: New York Times. They they pick, they pick their moments
Speaker 2: to get incredibly ideological about this, and then they hide
Speaker 2: behind the more normal reporting they do in order to
Speaker 2: sort of like disguise the fact that again there's sort
Speaker 2: of this person knows that their sources lie is demonstrably
Speaker 2: lying to them. I just I don't know, it's it's
Speaker 2: the thing that was interesting to me about the story too,
Speaker 2: is that a zen as someone who up until this
Speaker 2: point like seems to it like like from from everything
Speaker 2: I had been aware of, A zine from.
Speaker 5: Asinine did really good me too, reporting, I believe. Yeah,
Speaker 5: the science astronomy.
Speaker 2: Community in astronomy, which I like. The thing I don't
Speaker 2: talk about enormously was that I did astronomy for a
Speaker 2: little bit. I didn't do very much astronomy, but there
Speaker 2: was a there was a small amount of time where
Speaker 2: I wanted to do astronomy, and so like I knew
Speaker 2: a bunch of the people like in that scene, as
Speaker 2: he had a very very good rep there, as like
Speaker 2: the person you could go to to talk about like
Speaker 2: like to do a B two story, which makes it
Speaker 2: even more weird that, you know, I guess this is
Speaker 2: just I don't know, I'm hesitant to just brush this
Speaker 2: off as sort of like trans brain, where like some
Speaker 2: like a sister reporter starts covering trans stuff and just
Speaker 2: completely loses their mind. But you know, it's it's a
Speaker 2: really startling and disturbing like shift from this person who
Speaker 2: had a very very good rep on yes, like as
Speaker 2: someone you could go to to like her standing in
Speaker 2: someone's car door trying to stop a family from driving
Speaker 2: away because they want because they don't want to be
Speaker 2: involved in a story where she's lying about them.
Speaker 9: Who who could have thought that a radical feminist could
Speaker 9: be trans exclusionary. It's just crazy people.
Speaker 5: People are complicated. It I think has to do with
Speaker 5: who she feels sympathy for, and women in science are
Speaker 5: maybe people that she feel sympathy for and who she
Speaker 5: or I have no idea what reason doesn't And like
Speaker 5: innocent parents of trans youth are apparently people she doesn't
Speaker 5: really have that empathy for, have.
Speaker 2: That ability to or the kids themselves apparently.
Speaker 5: I mean, as a transperson, I never expect a reporter.
Speaker 2: To have empathy for me.
Speaker 5: But these white parents, these middle class white parents, please,
Speaker 5: you must take them seriously.
Speaker 2: The other thing I think I wanted to talk about
Speaker 2: was the impact that this reporting has had on the
Speaker 2: broader So we we allude to this a little bit,
Speaker 2: but yeah, I wanted to talk a little bit about
Speaker 2: the way that right wing sort of right wing lawyers
Speaker 2: like right wing politicians have been using specifically this coverage
Speaker 2: and also sort of like the fear mongering around gender
Speaker 2: clinics as something they're using to support, like health to
Speaker 2: support healthcare bands, on trans youth.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Jamie Read's allegations directly resulted in a ban on
Speaker 5: gender affirming care in Missouri. You know, there were families
Speaker 5: that were going to the legislature week after week and
Speaker 5: we're keeping it at bay, and then these allegations came
Speaker 5: out and it fell apart and the care ban was passed.
Speaker 5: And you know, it would be bad enough if they
Speaker 5: found a bad clinic, but you know, there's nothing miraculous
Speaker 5: about doctors who treat trans people that makes them incapable
Speaker 5: of being an ethical you know, like it would have
Speaker 5: been devastating if it was the truth, but for it
Speaker 5: to have been, you know, all based on lies, is
Speaker 5: it's just a really tough blow.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, like, you know, like I have friends there,
Speaker 2: and it's it's like it's bleak right now, and I
Speaker 2: think I've been really you know, I mean, I don't
Speaker 2: know why I would I expected these people to sort
Speaker 2: of like even remotely feel a single emotion about the
Speaker 2: fact that directly the stuff, the actions that they did
Speaker 2: led directly to a bunch of kids losing their health care.
Speaker 2: But you know, there's been no there's been no reckoning
Speaker 2: with this. Right as best I can tell neither the
Speaker 2: New York Times nor any of the journalists, involve, any
Speaker 2: of the editors, any publishers, none the people seem to
Speaker 2: care at all about the fact that they're about their
Speaker 2: work directly is leading to the suffering and possibly death
Speaker 2: of children. And I don't know, like I I this
Speaker 2: is one of those things where like either either something
Speaker 2: about this changes and you know, we get to a
Speaker 2: point where it's unacceptable to sort of do this kind
Speaker 2: of stuff, or we just you know, we wait for
Speaker 2: the next rounds of journalists to like find some absolute
Speaker 2: crank who they like dug out of some like Derain
Speaker 2: super Room MC mansions somewhere to like push push another
Speaker 2: one of these stories. Because right now, like this is
Speaker 2: this is disappears to just be an established path that
Speaker 2: you can use to sort of like you know, but
Speaker 2: from from both ends, right, the thing you can use
Speaker 2: the journalist's advantage career. It is the thing you can
Speaker 2: use as like a crank to be suddenly on the
Speaker 2: talk shows start going to get a bunch of money.
Speaker 2: It's just lying about all of this stuff, yep.
Speaker 5: And I mean, you know, you try to inject some accountability,
Speaker 5: but you can't make people listen. Yeah, this is what
Speaker 5: I do every day, and I'm going to keep doing it.
Speaker 5: But I'm under no illusions that since people are necessarily
Speaker 5: going to start listening, it's just you got to put
Speaker 5: it out there.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, I guess two more things I wanted to ask
Speaker 2: about before we sort of wrap up. One is, Okay, so,
Speaker 2: on the off chance that there are SIS journalists listening
Speaker 2: to this, what kinds of things would you recommend to
Speaker 2: them to, like to to make sure you a don't
Speaker 2: fall down this rabbit hole, and b to make sure
Speaker 2: that if you are attempting to write a story that
Speaker 2: is good, that you get things right.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So, the trans Journalist Association recently published an updated
Speaker 5: style guide, which I would absolutely suggest people check out
Speaker 5: because it's much more in depth than anything that I
Speaker 5: can say. But I think that the biggest pitfall people
Speaker 5: have is thinking that they understand more than they do so,
Speaker 5: and I think that the kind of connected pitfall is
Speaker 5: is just a wow, there's smoke, there's fire, like, well,
Speaker 5: there must be more to the skeptical side than there
Speaker 5: really is. So while I, you know, always try to
Speaker 5: butter journalists up by saying you can make up your
Speaker 5: own mind and you know, look at the evidence. Like,
Speaker 5: really engage with trans people who are not just telling
Speaker 5: their stories, but who are science porters themselves, like myself.
Speaker 5: Really engage with experts who are not trans, but who
Speaker 5: understand this medical information and are representatives of a mainstream
Speaker 5: medical consensus, and really try to, you know, understand that
Speaker 5: the experts are experts for a reason, and the mainstream
Speaker 5: consensus is a mainstream consensus for a reason. And don't
Speaker 5: be so quick to just assume that a bunch of
Speaker 5: activists and cranks know something that everyone else is trying
Speaker 5: to keep from you, because that is a conspiratorial mindset
Speaker 5: that is below you as a mainstream cisgender journalist, and
Speaker 5: that you wouldn't be falling into with you know, masks
Speaker 5: or anti vacs or whatever. And it's just because trans
Speaker 5: people are marginalized that I think people are kind of
Speaker 5: falling for this crap and getting rolled.
Speaker 9: You are not a conspiratorial thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, and this is this is something, This is
Speaker 2: some thing I'm going to talk about at length more
Speaker 2: in one day. The like sixty five thousand word thing
Speaker 2: that I've been writing about, the lab leak stuff is
Speaker 2: going to come out and you know, one of the
Speaker 2: god I have spent so many hours talking to epidemiologists.
Speaker 2: You have no idea, but one of the things that
Speaker 2: you know comes up there, and it comes up also
Speaker 2: just in general science, conspiratism is if someone like people
Speaker 2: who actually do normal science do not start yelling about
Speaker 2: how they're being censored by the scientific establishment and like
Speaker 2: there's a giant conspiracy to stop them from talking about
Speaker 2: their work, even people who legitimately are being like actually
Speaker 2: screwed over by scientific establishment, right, people who have been abused,
Speaker 2: people you know, like people of color, people from marginalized backgrounds,
Speaker 2: who like like, I know these people, right, I grew
Speaker 2: up with a bunch of these people. They don't talk
Speaker 2: like this about that. The only people who talk like
Speaker 2: this are absolute cranks. And it would be really great
Speaker 2: if journalists realized that actual scientists don't talk about science
Speaker 2: in a way where they're like, ah, the medical establishment
Speaker 2: is sensor me. I would I would love for that
Speaker 2: to happen.
Speaker 6: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I'm skeptical that it will happen because it's I mean,
Speaker 2: it's a great story.
Speaker 5: Everyone knows that there are times when the medical or
Speaker 5: when the medical or scientific establishment is wrong, You, as
Speaker 5: a lay journalist, are probably not going to be able
Speaker 5: to tell I am sorry which times those are so
Speaker 5: slow your role. Don't envision pulitzers and get grounded on
Speaker 5: you know what the basics are, instead of thinking that
Speaker 5: you kind of know better than the people who spend
Speaker 5: their lives researching. This is my entreaty to journalists who
Speaker 5: maybe don't realize how transphobia might be playing a role
Speaker 5: in there wanting to believe certain things.
Speaker 2: Yep, and I guess the last thing I wanted to
Speaker 2: ask you about. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about
Speaker 2: the trans Data Library because I'm very excited about this.
Speaker 2: This sounds rad.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So you know, a few months ago I started
Speaker 5: working and you know, with some other people in the
Speaker 5: trans community, most of whom are you know, staying anonymous
Speaker 5: on a resource to try and help people who you know,
Speaker 5: we've really envisioned people who are in good faith, but
Speaker 5: trans issues are not their main thing, you know what
Speaker 5: I mean? So like not somewhat not as Ingoatie, but
Speaker 5: maybe a Zingerashi of five years ago, you know what
Speaker 5: I mean, the person who's a journalist who wants to
Speaker 5: get the story right, but there's so much misinformation out there.
Speaker 5: There's so many groups with so many different names. They're
Speaker 5: very skilled sometimes as presenting themselves as you know, legitimate.
Speaker 5: So this is the trans Data Library upcoming hopefully by
Speaker 5: the end of the month, is going to be a
Speaker 5: kind of you know, Wikipedia for the user, not Wikipedia
Speaker 5: and not like edible by the community, because that's very
Speaker 5: bad idea for trans stuff. I mean, a resource on
Speaker 5: what are these groups, who are these activists, what have
Speaker 5: they done in the past. It is intended as a
Speaker 5: journalistic resource, not an activist resource, which just means, you know,
Speaker 5: if someone is there isn't anyone like this. But if
Speaker 5: someone is a Nobel Prize winning scientist, we're not going
Speaker 5: to pretend they didn't, you know what I mean. If
Speaker 5: someone has legitimate potentials, you will find that out. If
Speaker 5: someone has said things that are discrediting, you'll find that out.
Speaker 5: But it isn't just a list of the most discrediting
Speaker 5: things someone has said, and we are going to, you know,
Speaker 5: directly try to get this out to journalists, local journalists,
Speaker 5: particularly people again who have decent coverage, not people who
Speaker 5: are you know, already on a tear and to democratic
Speaker 5: politicians who similarly are you know, sympathetic but might need
Speaker 5: an extra source of information, and yeah, it is, it
Speaker 5: is coming. I want people to be aware of it
Speaker 5: so that they can start spreading it and sharing it
Speaker 5: when it does, so that we can hopefully try to,
Speaker 5: you know, just get some basic information into the hands
Speaker 5: of people who I think desperately need it. They may
Speaker 5: not know that they desperately need it, but desperately need
Speaker 5: basic information on some of these groups and some of
Speaker 5: these bad actors.
Speaker 2: I think that's definitely a good thing because there is
Speaker 2: a lot of information out there on the connections between
Speaker 2: you know, the sort of right wing grifters who come
Speaker 2: out of the woodworks talking about this stuff, and you know,
Speaker 2: they're they're they're they're they're sort of demonstrable links to
Speaker 2: far right extremist groups, to the Proud Boys, to you know,
Speaker 2: sort of right wing think tanks. But that's stuff that like,
Speaker 2: the the subset of trans people who spend their time
Speaker 2: doing this are all very well aware of, but the
Speaker 2: reporters who are sort of venturing into the space for
Speaker 2: the first time don't know about it all. And yeah,
Speaker 2: having having a thing we can put into their laps
Speaker 2: being like, hey, this is these are all the people
Speaker 2: who are like getting paid by the lines depending freedom
Speaker 2: yeah stuff, Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's what I'm hoping to make. So the u
Speaker 5: RL is probably going to be trans Data Library dot org.
Speaker 5: It is a little broken right now. Go to a
Speaker 5: signedmedia dot org. You follow me, follow my Twitter, follow
Speaker 5: my project, and watch that space for the trans Data
Speaker 5: Library because I'm hoping it can do some good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm I'm I'm excited for it. And yeah, do
Speaker 2: you have anything else do you want to say before
Speaker 2: we close up?
Speaker 5: I think that's it for me. Thank you so much
Speaker 5: for having me on. This was really fun and uh.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, thanks for coming and thanks thanks for reporting
Speaker 2: on the story, because lord knows, the rest of the
Speaker 2: media wasn't going to do it.
Speaker 5: That's why I started doing it.
Speaker 2: All right, this has been It can happen here. You
Speaker 2: can find us on Twitter, Instagram. It happened here, pods
Speaker 2: and yeah, go into the world and be better about
Speaker 2: this than The New York Times, which is not an
Speaker 2: enormously high bar, but it's a bar they consistently failed across.
Speaker 2: So you too could be superor have superior journalistic ethics.
Speaker 2: The New York Times.
Speaker 5: Ah, this is what I tell myself every day.
Speaker 1: Welcome everyone back to it could happen here a podcast
Speaker 1: about things falling apart, and sometimes stuff that's slightly less
Speaker 1: depressing than that, but not today. Today we're talking about
Speaker 1: the falling apart sort of thing, and are our you know,
Speaker 1: continuing coverage of what we like to call the crumbles.
Speaker 1: Here today leads us to a little state called New Mexico,
Speaker 1: and specifically a little city in New Mexico called Albuquerque.
Speaker 1: If you have been kind of casually skimming the news
Speaker 1: about the American Southwest, you might be aware that the
Speaker 1: governor of New Mexico has recently announced a ban on
Speaker 1: citizens carrying openly or concealed with a license, firearms within
Speaker 1: the county that contains Albuquerque. The justification for this is
Speaker 1: a recent surge in gun violence in the state, most
Speaker 1: of which is centered on Albuquerque. And this is there's
Speaker 1: a been a pretty over the last specifically the last year,
Speaker 1: a pretty dramatic increase in the number of shootings from
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one to twenty twenty two. The number of
Speaker 1: shootings in Albuquerque or murders, I should say, most of
Speaker 1: which are shootings, also about eighty four percent the number
Speaker 1: of murders in Albuquerque almost doubled. I think it's and
Speaker 1: I think still you know, it's gone down a little
Speaker 1: bit this year, but there's still about fifty percent higher
Speaker 1: than the normal rate. Now, as you might guess from
Speaker 1: the fact that you've probably watched Breaking Bad fifteen years
Speaker 1: ago or whatever, the drug trade, drug trafficking, drug deals
Speaker 1: gone bad have something to do with this.
Speaker 2: But I think this year.
Speaker 1: About seventeen something like that, seventeen twenty percent of the
Speaker 1: homicides in Albuquerque are drug related, but a much higher
Speaker 1: number above seventy percent. The police have given the kind
Speaker 1: of primary cause as individual disrespect. Now what does that mean, Well,
Speaker 1: it means kind of what you think of it. People
Speaker 1: getting into shit with each other and somebody pulls a gun.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 1: A lot of these have been traffic related, and in fact,
Speaker 1: the shooting that kind of most directly inspired the governor's
Speaker 1: controversial legal measure was a road rage incident. About what
Speaker 1: was this, Yeah, on September ninth, I think it was.
Speaker 1: An eleven year old boy was shot and killed in
Speaker 1: a road rage incident as his family was leaving a
Speaker 1: minor league baseball game. It looks like his aunt cut
Speaker 1: off another driver. The driver followed them and fired seventeen
Speaker 1: shots into the car. The eleven year old boy was
Speaker 1: killed and his aunt is still in the hospital in
Speaker 1: the unstable condition at least last I checked after this shooting.
Speaker 1: And this is, by the way, you know, prior to this,
Speaker 1: there was another case where a little kid, I think
Speaker 1: a four year old was killed in another road rage
Speaker 1: shooting incident. We don't know who shot the kid in
Speaker 1: this instance. We don't know if it was a for example,
Speaker 1: a citizen legally carrying a firearm or somebody. Although in
Speaker 1: the state of New Mexico you are allowed to carry
Speaker 1: a loaded firearm in your vehicle. You're not allowed to
Speaker 1: walk around with it concealed without a license, but you're
Speaker 1: allowed to conceal it in your vehicle. The shooting that
Speaker 1: preceded this one, the road rage shooting, wasn't illegal shooting.
Speaker 1: It was because the guy was a drug dealer. He
Speaker 1: had illegal drugs on him, all that stuff. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's messy. So really, in response to the governor's proclamation,
Speaker 1: there have been quite a bit of people have gotten angry,
Speaker 1: in part because the Supreme Court ruled fairly recently that
Speaker 1: you have a right to carry a concealed firearm. There
Speaker 1: are some barrier states can set up in terms of licensing,
Speaker 1: but you can't stop people from carrying, like you have
Speaker 1: to have a legal avenue for people to carry concealed firearms.
Speaker 1: That's something that the Supreme Court has said you have
Speaker 1: a right to do, and governors do not have the
Speaker 1: right to overrule that sort of thing on public health grounds.
Speaker 1: So this has become an increasingly contentious issue. We're going
Speaker 1: to talk about some of the things that have followed
Speaker 1: from this, but I want to bring on our source
Speaker 1: for the day, Lucas Herndon. Lucas is a New Mexico
Speaker 1: based activist, someone we've had on the show before as
Speaker 1: well as a gun owner.
Speaker 2: Lucas, Welcome to the program, Thanks Robert. Good to be back,
Speaker 2: sort of as always. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is
Speaker 2: a messy one. Yeah.
Speaker 11: So that was a good a good summary of of
Speaker 11: of what got us here this the the executive order
Speaker 11: was dropped Friday afternoon, and I immediately went to my
Speaker 11: work chat and said, hold on, y'all, this is going
Speaker 11: to be a wild weekend. And as you can imagine,
Speaker 11: it was. There has been incredible responses from sort of
Speaker 11: everybody on just sort of yeah, despite political ideologies.
Speaker 2: The responses have been swift and ranging in their.
Speaker 6: Loudness.
Speaker 11: Let's say, uh, and it's created uh yeah, national buzz.
Speaker 11: A number of right wing talking heads from the state
Speaker 11: have now you know, been brought into national talking spaces.
Speaker 11: We have seen the news bounce around the far right blogosphere.
Speaker 6: And you know, it's made it to.
Speaker 2: Alex Jones and that kind of ilk.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 11: But then of course, you know, and so obviously there's
Speaker 11: there's that far end of the spectrum, and you know,
Speaker 11: then there's the response here in the state, which is
Speaker 11: you know, ranging from supportive, too indifferent, to angry.
Speaker 1: To all you know, all the different things you can
Speaker 1: think of. Yeah, one of the things people may be
Speaker 1: kind of confused about this. One of the things that's
Speaker 1: problematic about this is specifically the fact that it is
Speaker 1: restricting citizens who have concealed carry permits from continuing to
Speaker 1: carry in the county. States have a right to at
Speaker 1: least currently the Supreme Court has not you know, ruled
Speaker 1: counter to that. Currently have a right to restrict people
Speaker 1: from open carrying, and you have a right to restrict
Speaker 1: people from doing stuff like have unlicensed carrying a handgun
Speaker 1: in your car. Right in the state of Oregon, for example,
Speaker 1: you cannot carry a loaded weapon in your vehicle without
Speaker 1: a concealed carry permit. As far as I'm aware, there's
Speaker 1: not been any sort of constitutional challenge to that. There
Speaker 1: may be in the future, but the Supreme Court, you know,
Speaker 1: has ruled very differently on the issue of concealed firearms,
Speaker 1: and so that's a problem because, you know, regardless of
Speaker 1: what you think about how the law on concealed carry
Speaker 1: of firearms should be, the idea of a governor overturning
Speaker 1: a right like that, access to a right like that
Speaker 1: based on what they call the public health emergency is
Speaker 1: deeply concerning, you know, which is why you've had, you know,
Speaker 1: a surprising people come out against this, including David Hogg,
Speaker 1: who's one of the Parkland kids, and a gun control
Speaker 1: advocate who said, you know, the govenor simply doesn't have
Speaker 1: the right to do this, which is kind of more
Speaker 1: or less where I land.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and you know, and just to be clear, right,
Speaker 11: I'm not an attorney, but yeah, I am a gun
Speaker 11: owner and have exercised that right since I was legally
Speaker 11: allowed to do so. At eighteen, which was very long
Speaker 11: ago at this point. So, yeah, I've been I have
Speaker 11: been a New Mexico gun owner paying attention to things
Speaker 11: and how those laws affect me for quite a while.
Speaker 6: Well.
Speaker 11: One of the yeah, one of the interesting things about
Speaker 11: the executive order, and you sort of touched on it,
Speaker 11: is that the in in the in the order, it
Speaker 11: specifically limits having a firearm in your vehicle to traveling
Speaker 11: to any excluded place that she listed in the executive order. Right,
Speaker 11: So so there's there's a there's a ban on you know,
Speaker 11: carrying unless you're going to like X, Y or Z
Speaker 11: specific places, and that then is furthered that you can
Speaker 11: only have a firearm in your vehicle if you're traveling
Speaker 11: to one of the said places. So yeah, that's that
Speaker 11: is in direct contradiction to existing law because New Mexico,
Speaker 11: in ostensibly your home or your car is an extension
Speaker 11: of your home. You don't there is there There basically
Speaker 11: is no law about having a car firearm in your car,
Speaker 11: which has led to some weird things because so for instance,
Speaker 11: you can get a dui on a bicycle and so
Speaker 11: that law has actually been used that you can carry
Speaker 11: a concealed firearm like in a backpack on a bicycle,
Speaker 11: but the second you step off the bicycle, now you're
Speaker 11: in violation of the law unless you have a permit. So,
Speaker 11: you know, those specific pieces of gun law and her
Speaker 11: executive order, even in the state are at odds, let alone,
Speaker 11: whatever the maybe you know, the federal implications are yeah,
Speaker 11: and I.
Speaker 2: Think you know.
Speaker 1: One of the things that is kind of concerning about
Speaker 1: this to me is and that should be concerning about
Speaker 1: these people, is that I don't see how I can
Speaker 1: see an argument for saying we want to restrict the
Speaker 1: unlicensed carry of firearms in vehicles, right, because not a
Speaker 1: significant number of these shootings seem to have involved that.
Speaker 1: Although it is a little bit unclear. We don't know
Speaker 1: who carried out the most recent road raid shooting, so
Speaker 1: we don't know if that person was legally allowed to
Speaker 1: pass as a firearm. Right, we know that in at
Speaker 1: least one of the recent shootings that killed a kid,
Speaker 1: the person was, you know, had a dealing amount and
Speaker 1: what appeared to be a dealing like setup of you know,
Speaker 1: it was parceled out into baggies marijuana on him, which
Speaker 1: is illegal. I'm not making a moral statement about that
Speaker 1: I don't think it should be illegal to but it is,
Speaker 1: it is illegal, right Like, he was not carrying within
Speaker 1: the bounds of federal law. But restricting people from carrying
Speaker 1: licensed concealed handguns does not seem I mean, number one,
Speaker 1: I haven't seen evidence that like that's a major driver
Speaker 1: of gun violence. But number two, if a decent number
Speaker 1: of these shootings are people acting outside of the bounds
Speaker 1: of the law, which they appear to be, I don't
Speaker 1: see how restricting people from lawfully carrying a weapon is
Speaker 1: something that can that's going to make the problem better,
Speaker 1: right Like, it seems like you're kind of striking at
Speaker 1: this in an ineffective way that's going to galvanize resils
Speaker 1: distance to any kind of gun control, as opposed to
Speaker 1: going out with kind of a more limited and surgical
Speaker 1: approach to try and actually tackle the causes of the problem.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the reasons why
Speaker 11: being on your show to talk about this is worth
Speaker 11: thinking about. The last time I was on was, you know,
Speaker 11: earlier in the year when there we discovered that there
Speaker 11: was a GOP operative who had committed acts of violence
Speaker 11: in the form of shooting at Democrats elected Democrats up
Speaker 11: in the Bernoleo County area as an act of political
Speaker 11: violence and worth thinking about is that, you know, he
Speaker 11: was charged with firing a firing a firearm from a
Speaker 11: moving vehicle, which is a crime, like.
Speaker 1: It's a specific crime, which and also like very valid crime.
Speaker 2: You should not be you should never shoot from a
Speaker 2: moving vehicle.
Speaker 11: Like that's correct, that's press so the right, so we
Speaker 11: you know again yeah again not a lawyer, however, it
Speaker 11: seemed duplicative to have a law on the books that
Speaker 11: already there.
Speaker 2: It is a crime to fire your gun from a
Speaker 2: car already h.
Speaker 11: And people who have, people who have committed heinous acts
Speaker 11: of violence by violating that law could be and should
Speaker 11: be charged under that law. First of all, let me
Speaker 11: just say, like, if we believe in a car serial state,
Speaker 11: because that's a whole other moral question. However, if for
Speaker 11: the purposes of this conversation, however, if somebody is just
Speaker 11: driving down the street and has a gun in their car,
Speaker 11: does that create you know, are they are you know,
Speaker 11: are they committing a crime that feels conflicting and harmful?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's you know, as you there's a couple
Speaker 1: of things we should talk about here. I think one
Speaker 1: of them is what I what I consider to be
Speaker 1: a kind of a dishonest anti gun control argument that
Speaker 1: comes out from time to time, which is the idea
Speaker 1: that you shouldn't restrict access. You can't restrict access to
Speaker 1: firearms because criminals won't obey those laws. It's true, criminals
Speaker 1: don't obey like people who are committing gun crimes, are
Speaker 1: not obeying the law by definition the people who are
Speaker 1: committing gun crimes. But increased availability access to firearms makes
Speaker 1: it easier for people who are going to be bad
Speaker 1: actors to acquire firearms. Right regardless of what you think
Speaker 1: the legal remedy to that situation is, that is a
Speaker 1: pretty undeniable situation. I consider this to be quite different,
Speaker 1: because what you are saying in this instance is we
Speaker 1: are restricting We have people who are not acting legally
Speaker 1: with firearms they already own, So we are going to
Speaker 1: restrict people who are acting within the bounds of the
Speaker 1: law with firearms they own from behaving in a certain way,
Speaker 1: which I have a serious issue with. But I do
Speaker 1: think that there is a difference between those two kind
Speaker 1: of situations on a pretty fundamental level. I would agree
Speaker 1: and and and the disingenuous, knee jerk response from the
Speaker 1: far right over this, while completely expected, that's exactly what
Speaker 1: you know, that's exactly what they're doing, right, They're equating
Speaker 1: this ill informed, uh poorly worded however you want to say,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're taking this thing and using it as
Speaker 1: a pretense for all their uh far right propaganda extremes,
Speaker 1: you know, calling to impeach the governor because she's you know,
Speaker 1: intending to violate the constitution or some silliness like that,
Speaker 1: which is yeah, which is just yeah, it's that's just
Speaker 1: far right conspiracy mastormation, in my opinion, and it has
Speaker 1: galvanized them. Right, there's been an open carry protests already,
Speaker 1: and the sheriff saying or one of the sheriffs in
Speaker 1: the area saying like, I'm not going to we will
Speaker 1: not be enforcing this law.
Speaker 11: Well and and yeah, and I think that that's actually
Speaker 11: maybe something that for this podcast and for for your audience,
Speaker 11: for those longtime listeners who who followed this show, that
Speaker 11: to me is actually one of the most maybe interesting
Speaker 11: and like crumbles oriented parts of this Yes, yes, absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 11: so yeah. So yesterday the berno Leo County sheriff, who
Speaker 11: is an elected official and it is his county that
Speaker 11: the that this executive order effects, came out and said
Speaker 11: that he would not enforce it. He said that the
Speaker 11: uh he'd got he'd barely gotten a heads up from
Speaker 11: the governor, but he did admit that. You know, she
Speaker 11: she sort of like reached out to him, said hey,
Speaker 11: I'm gonna do this thing. I know you probably won't agree,
Speaker 11: and he's like, yeah, I don't agree, and she's like, okay,
Speaker 11: well we'll figure it out.
Speaker 2: And he was like, okay, I guess we will anyway. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So this he came out, made this announcement he's not
Speaker 2: going to enforce it. The the chief of police from
Speaker 2: the Albuquerque depart has more or less made the same intonation,
Speaker 2: with support from the very progressive Democratic mayor of Albuquerque,
Speaker 2: who hasn't necessarily outright said he disagrees, but has said
Speaker 2: that he's more concerned about his officer's safety. And that
Speaker 2: brings up an interesting point that like, oh yes, like
Speaker 2: like cops trying to enforce this law like that sounds
Speaker 2: like a recipe for disaster, which is which is why
Speaker 2: you didn't see any cops enforcing the the order at
Speaker 2: the protest on Sunday. Yeah, and it is one of
Speaker 2: those like why why would you write like that's such
Speaker 2: a yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 11: So the most recent thing this afternoon is that the
Speaker 11: the state's attorney attorney general, whose whose job it is
Speaker 11: to defend the state or you know, officers of the state,
Speaker 11: has announced that he will not defend the governor in
Speaker 11: his official capacity from the three current lawsuits that have
Speaker 11: all right been filed since Friday. So so yeah, there
Speaker 11: there basically seems to be this complete lack of support
Speaker 11: from the from the parts of government that are supposed
Speaker 11: to do the things you know, yeah, absolutely, and and
Speaker 11: you know, it begs the yeah, it for those of
Speaker 11: us that think about these things, it begs the question of, yeah,
Speaker 11: how far does this go? What is the next you
Speaker 11: know thing that a sitting governor attempts to pass using
Speaker 11: administrative power and then isn't enforced, And what does that mean?
Speaker 11: And how do we care about this one but not
Speaker 11: other things or you know whatever? So those are those
Speaker 11: are the questions that that we're all asking ourselves here
Speaker 11: in New Mexico, And as somebody who works in this
Speaker 11: field professionally, like we've spent a lot of time in
Speaker 11: the last forty eight hours, like asking ourselves those questions.
Speaker 2: It's tough, it's there, there is a there isn't an
Speaker 2: easy answer.
Speaker 5: On this one.
Speaker 1: And this is something by the way, that is I
Speaker 1: think pretty directly relevant to everybody listening because one of
Speaker 1: the stories probably under reported stories. We've talked about it
Speaker 1: from time to time here, you know, it was something
Speaker 1: that kind of was in the DNA of the original
Speaker 1: you know, run of it could happen here, but probably
Speaker 1: we could stand to talk about it a lot more.
Speaker 1: Is the rise of the most common term these guys
Speaker 1: use for themselves as constitutional sheriffs, right, And there is
Speaker 1: this this is a long standing belief on the far right.
Speaker 1: It comes out of really the seventies and eighties is
Speaker 1: when a lot of this stuff started cooking. But this
Speaker 1: belief that has kind of formed over you know, particularly
Speaker 1: the last twenty years, that the sheriff constitutionally is the
Speaker 1: highest law of the land, basically, right. And so you
Speaker 1: can have sheriffs who refuse to particularly and this is
Speaker 1: where it comes in most often refuse to enforce gun
Speaker 1: control laws, right. And this has sort of you've got
Speaker 1: a lot, you know, a lot of some of this
Speaker 1: came got sort of like mixed in with a lot
Speaker 1: of the election bullshit on the right, where like you
Speaker 1: had a lot of sheriffs, you know, there was a
Speaker 1: lot of concern as to how they would respond to
Speaker 1: states and the federal government sort of enforcing, you know,
Speaker 1: or stopping, you know, the Trump administration from doing certain
Speaker 1: things around the counting of votes. You know, there was
Speaker 1: a lot of real concern about that. And I think
Speaker 1: this is something that is going to continue to be
Speaker 1: more and more of a problem because a lot of
Speaker 1: these sheriffs departments are completely out of fucking pocket, right
Speaker 1: these are. And by the way, with sheriff departments, not
Speaker 1: that being part of a police hierarchy in a traditional
Speaker 1: sense provides much restraint, But sheriffs are completely fucking out
Speaker 1: there right like they are there are not It does
Speaker 1: vary from state to state, but there's not any sort
Speaker 1: of like central requirement about like what it takes to
Speaker 1: be a sheriff or a sheriff's deputy. A lot of
Speaker 1: them are just dudes, right Like That's why you had
Speaker 1: it was either in New Mexico or Arizona, like a
Speaker 1: small sheriff's department basically selling to like celebrities. You can
Speaker 1: become a sheriff's deputy here like work a week and
Speaker 1: a year, and then you can carry a concealed handgun
Speaker 1: wherever because cops get that, right, you know, right right, yeah.
Speaker 11: Yeah, So I just want to be clear because what
Speaker 11: you're talking about and how it pertains to New Mexico
Speaker 11: is both one hundred percent correct and has and has
Speaker 11: and has happened here, it could happen here is But
Speaker 11: in the case of this issue right now, bring up yeah, yeah,
Speaker 11: bernal Leo County sheriff took office this year.
Speaker 2: He is a Democrat. He's a man of color.
Speaker 3: Uh not.
Speaker 2: This is not me making excuses for cops, cuse, but
Speaker 2: I just to be clear about this.
Speaker 11: And he is generally disliked by the right and has
Speaker 11: been seen as you know whatever, soft on crime and stuff,
Speaker 11: which he hates and has tried. He's tried real hard
Speaker 11: to sort of buck that position, and and so and
Speaker 11: and that, which which makes this all the maybe worse
Speaker 11: right that that Yeah, yeah, a Democrat elected in a
Speaker 11: democratic county with a you know, the city, the state's
Speaker 11: largest democratic municipality, right, like, for that guy to be
Speaker 11: like yeah, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna do this.
Speaker 11: And and I also there's something that needs to be
Speaker 11: said here. You you cited some great, well tragic statistics
Speaker 11: about my state and specifically about Albuquerque earlier, and and
Speaker 11: this is a public health crisis, right gotten by absolutely yeah.
Speaker 2: It's out.
Speaker 1: When you're seeing the number of homicides basically double, you
Speaker 1: know in the space of a fucking year, that that
Speaker 1: is a that's a crist Something needs to be done.
Speaker 2: Right, right right.
Speaker 11: And and so one of one of one of the
Speaker 11: big things that hasn't I don't think been said loud
Speaker 11: enough is that if if we you know, you know,
Speaker 11: if we all agree that it is a crisis, a
Speaker 11: thirty day ban is not gonna it's not going to
Speaker 11: do anything, and it's certainly not going to address the
Speaker 11: root causes. And I actually, very reluctantly have to hand
Speaker 11: it to the sheriff for his statements yesterday, because, as
Speaker 11: he put it, he has enough crime to deal with,
Speaker 11: He's got enough going on that his deputies have to
Speaker 11: have to deal with right now to then go and
Speaker 11: enforce this arbitrary rule or you know order. It's not
Speaker 11: a it's not a lot, it's but you know what
Speaker 11: I mean. So so that's another thing, right, like, this
Speaker 11: is your You're we're dealing with a public health crisis
Speaker 11: by putting the impetus on law enforcement, which is the
Speaker 11: whole problem with you know, the way that this country
Speaker 11: deals with you know, the quote unquote drug problem. And
Speaker 11: and let's be very clear here, when the governor issued
Speaker 11: her order on Friday, she issued two orders. One is
Speaker 11: called the one with the one with dealing with guns,
Speaker 11: is declaring state of Public Health Emergency due to gun violence.
Speaker 11: But at the same time, she issued one saying declaring
Speaker 11: State of Public Health Emergency due to drug abuse. And there,
Speaker 11: you know, for her, these things are related, and and
Speaker 11: she's you know, she's trying to time together. And I
Speaker 11: think we all know that given the last forty years
Speaker 11: of American history dealing with drugs via you know, law
Speaker 11: enforcement has not done anything to help the problem. And
Speaker 11: so that it just again, this is one of those
Speaker 11: things where it feels counterintuitive for a governor who you know,
Speaker 11: generally the Democrats of this state support, who has won
Speaker 11: by fairly large margins in both of her elections and
Speaker 11: and has a Democratic majority in her legislature.
Speaker 2: That for her then to issue this order and put
Speaker 2: more requirements on her law enforcement that she's expecting to
Speaker 2: you know, also then carry it just doesn't it doesn't
Speaker 2: make sense, right, And so that's where we're all scramblings.
Speaker 1: There's a couple of things that make this so dangerous.
Speaker 1: One is that it's this unnecessary own goal, right, you know,
Speaker 1: as you stated, this is not this and I didn't
Speaker 1: want to be sort of intimating that he was. That
Speaker 1: this sheriff is not particularly tied in directly to some
Speaker 1: of these longer standing weird constitutional sheriff things, but it
Speaker 1: does tie into this this pattern of sort of conservatives
Speaker 1: backing sheriffs against state power and against federal power that
Speaker 1: they dislike. And in this case, one of the things
Speaker 1: that makes this so toxic is they have a point, right,
Speaker 1: this order is not constitutional, and giving them ammunition like
Speaker 1: that is number one. It strengthens right wing organizing in
Speaker 1: a way that is you know, dangerous, but also it's
Speaker 1: completely unnecessary, It's completely it does not address the problem,
Speaker 1: and the problem is is very like, extremely serious, and
Speaker 1: so I find this kind of distracting from realistic solutions here,
Speaker 1: you know, which which by the way, can can you know,
Speaker 1: probably do to some extent involve restricting you know, uh
Speaker 1: certain the ability of people to carry in certain situations,
Speaker 1: to carry in certain ways in certain situations.
Speaker 11: I think one of the yeah, oh yeah, no, no,
Speaker 11: you have well I was just gonna I just want to,
Speaker 11: you know, for for folks interested in, you know, what
Speaker 11: New Mexico has done. Things that have happened in the
Speaker 11: under this administration, are there are There have been some
Speaker 11: advancements that as a gun owner I support. One was
Speaker 11: closing private sales as a thing. You know, I grew
Speaker 11: up buying guns out of the backs of cars. Uh wild,
Speaker 11: I have some wild stories about that, but that was
Speaker 11: a fully legal thing to do. We had private sales
Speaker 11: in this in the state. I've bought a lot of
Speaker 11: car guns.
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah, And it is fun, but we should probably
Speaker 12: probably that's not probably should be probably probably and and
Speaker 12: and especially for those of us that don't have anything
Speaker 12: restricting us from by purchasing firearms, there's no reason to
Speaker 12: not just anyway.
Speaker 11: So so that being said, so the New Mexico did
Speaker 11: did end private sales, So that's one thing, and then
Speaker 11: this last year we instituted It's not a full safe
Speaker 11: storage law, but it goes a long way into instituting
Speaker 11: a safe storage law. It specifically creates a situation where
Speaker 11: if a minor gets access to a gun that was
Speaker 11: not secured and then commits a crime with it, then
Speaker 11: the per the owner of that firearm, is then held liable.
Speaker 11: And it has been used now twice and two fairly
Speaker 11: high pro file tragic shootings in the state. I should
Speaker 11: note here a decent number of the recent spike and
Speaker 11: homicides have been children getting access to firearm zoned by adults,
Speaker 11: either accidentally or purposefully using them to shoot and kill people. Right, yeah,
Speaker 11: so as you yeah, the law, the laws. The law
Speaker 11: is called the Benny Hargrove Act, which was named in
Speaker 11: honor of a of a young man who was killed
Speaker 11: at a middle school by a fellow middle schooler with
Speaker 11: a gun that the guy got off of. You know
Speaker 11: that the kid got out of a you know, a
Speaker 11: bedside drawer. And uh yeah, And as again, as a
Speaker 11: firearm owner, like I'm sitting across from my safe right now,
Speaker 11: I keep my guns locked up. So there are there
Speaker 11: are practical solutions here, yes, And and I know that
Speaker 11: this country has a hard time talking about guns without
Speaker 11: it getting out of pocket very quickly. But there are
Speaker 11: practical solutions we have. You know, one of the interesting
Speaker 11: responses from Democratic lawmakers in the state over the last
Speaker 11: you know, three days has been a call for a
Speaker 11: special session of our legislature to discuss what some of
Speaker 11: those things might be. The trouble with that is that
Speaker 11: in everybody's got this like knee jerk thing and everybody
Speaker 11: wants to talk about crime. I'm using big air quotes
Speaker 11: crime and and which is in direct counter you know,
Speaker 11: counterance to the idea that this is a public health crisis.
Speaker 11: So you know, we have a lot of reservations about
Speaker 11: what what might come out of a session like that.
Speaker 11: We would have to do a lot of work to
Speaker 11: protect you know, some of the things we've we've you know,
Speaker 11: we've done a lot to protect people from the car
Speaker 11: cerial system in this state, which is hell a predatory,
Speaker 11: and so those are protections we want to keep, you know,
Speaker 11: keep in place. But it's easy for the right of
Speaker 11: course to blame like that's the reason, the reason, the
Speaker 11: reason why shootings have increased is because we let people
Speaker 11: who've been arrested for you know, petty theft or something
Speaker 11: out of out of jail, and for some reason that's
Speaker 11: why crime is up. I don't know, it doesn't make sense,
Speaker 11: but anyway, so you know, it's even even with the
Speaker 11: solutions come more problems. But but yeah, there does seem
Speaker 11: to be this the the unintended consequences of this order
Speaker 11: seem to be the not just the backlash, but then
Speaker 11: the sort of non support from folks who would otherwise
Speaker 11: be supporting her.
Speaker 1: So I kind of want to close probably by talking
Speaker 1: about and thank you for that, by the way, for
Speaker 1: that context for talking about what I think is the
Speaker 1: underlying A big part of the underlying cause you that
Speaker 1: is also a big part of a surge and violence
Speaker 1: in a number of states nationwide, which is that like
Speaker 1: people are a lot of a significant chunk of this
Speaker 1: country has become unhinged since COVID. I kind of suspect
Speaker 1: that has a lot to do with it. But you
Speaker 1: are seeing in a number of states a significant amount
Speaker 1: of like anti social violence, violence that occurs because somebody
Speaker 1: cuts somebody off in traffic, somebody gets into an argument
Speaker 1: at a store, you know, somebody gets into an argument
Speaker 1: at a parking lot. There have been a number of
Speaker 1: shootings as a result of this, it's happened. You know,
Speaker 1: this is a big part of the rise and gun
Speaker 1: violence in Texas, which is also tied I think, to
Speaker 1: permitless carry to an extent, but like it is broader
Speaker 1: than that too, Right, this is not purely a access
Speaker 1: to guns, is why a lot of these crimes involved guns.
Speaker 1: But there's just been this rise in anti social violence,
Speaker 1: a lot of which comes out of arguments or perceived
Speaker 1: disrespect between one person and a group of people or
Speaker 1: two people or whatever. And I think this is probably
Speaker 1: tied into with a lot of the you know, increase
Speaker 1: in political violence we've seen, because a decent amount of
Speaker 1: it does arise out of that. And this is part
Speaker 1: of what I think is kind of disheartening about the
Speaker 1: governor's response here, is that this is a very serious
Speaker 1: problem and the kind of knee jerk reactions don't help it.
Speaker 1: But also, like I don't know what does right. You
Speaker 1: can deal with aspects of this problem, Right, maybe if
Speaker 1: people aren't just able to throw a gun in their
Speaker 1: pants and legally be carrying, there will be less of
Speaker 1: these shootings, But that doesn't deal with all of the
Speaker 1: underlying problem. And I don't really know what does this
Speaker 1: kind of like increased willingness of Americans to resort to
Speaker 1: violence in interpersonal conflicts is a real issue.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh man, you said enough.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I think that, you know, I'm thinking of I'm
Speaker 11: thinking about the first time I was able to go
Speaker 11: to a school function of my daughters after after COVID
Speaker 11: orders were lifted. And I remember I was was with
Speaker 11: a family member and they were, you know, they were
Speaker 11: the commenting on sort of people's bad behavior in the auditorium,
Speaker 11: and you know, and I had to remind them. I
Speaker 11: was like, you know, the these people have not been outside, yeah,
Speaker 11: in a year and a half, and you know, and
Speaker 11: like specifically, like some of these little kids that are
Speaker 11: running around, they maybe have never been to a function
Speaker 11: like this, you know what I mean. Like by the time,
Speaker 11: by the time most three or four year olds have
Speaker 11: are going to i don't know, like a baseball game
Speaker 11: or a band concert, you know, they've at some point
Speaker 11: it's the first time, but you know, they get used
Speaker 11: to it, they start to understand the rules of things.
Speaker 11: But yeah, like after you know, if you grow up
Speaker 11: and you're all of a sudden, you're five and you've
Speaker 11: never been to something like this like you don't know,
Speaker 11: you're supposed to sit down and be quiet, listen to
Speaker 11: the thing, right, like you're just just sitting on your
Speaker 11: phone anyway.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I definitely agree with you. I think in
Speaker 2: New Mexico we're not.
Speaker 11: Isolated from other states in the sense that we have
Speaker 11: arise in drug use and related We're not isolated in
Speaker 11: the sense we have a rise in you know, our
Speaker 11: houseless population, uh in in lack of job or at
Speaker 11: least good jobs, and and all of those things come
Speaker 11: together to make life hard, you know. And when life
Speaker 11: is hard, it it impacts people and they make, you know,
Speaker 11: bad decisions. The thing that I think does hurt New
Speaker 11: Mexico and and and is maybe what makes New Mexico
Speaker 11: unfortunately sort of stand out from some of its issues
Speaker 11: is you know, we are a very rural state. We
Speaker 11: have one fairly large city in Albuquerque, but even then,
Speaker 11: the surrounding parts of Albuquerque, just like the rest of
Speaker 11: the state, are very rural, and there's a certain amount
Speaker 11: of you know, we just as a state, we are
Speaker 11: lacking resources and always have you know, we rely so
Speaker 11: heavily on one industry and without without the systems in
Speaker 11: place to ensure that people have a place to live
Speaker 11: or you know, a meal to get ob to go
Speaker 11: to recreation, that they can afford things like that.
Speaker 2: I mean, it is tough. It is just tough out there.
Speaker 11: And I'm I'm privileged and I get to you know,
Speaker 11: I'm I'm raising my daughter in a home that you know,
Speaker 11: we want for very little. But I see it even
Speaker 11: in my in my peer group, I see people who
Speaker 11: are struggling all the time. And yeah, it's just tough
Speaker 11: out there, you.
Speaker 1: Know, it is, it is, And I honestly, you know,
Speaker 1: New Mexico and Oregon are similar in a lot of ways,
Speaker 1: and that they're both very low popular. I think we're
Speaker 1: both at around four million people if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 2: Oh New Mexico is only like two million. Oh you're
Speaker 2: two millions.
Speaker 1: So yeah, even even less so low population states that
Speaker 1: have one big city that kind of dominates politics, but
Speaker 1: a very conservative kind of rural area in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways outside of that, and in both cases, that
Speaker 1: urban area has seen recent massive spikes in interpersonal violence
Speaker 1: and in you know, fatal issues due to drug use.
Speaker 1: Right yeah, now, one of the think obviously, one of
Speaker 1: the things Oregon has coming through it is because of
Speaker 1: all of the retire recent stuff here, like a much
Speaker 1: higher tax base, right, so there's theoretically more resources, although
Speaker 1: I tend to argue very incompetently applied, so most of
Speaker 1: us don't actually get out, but you do have this
Speaker 1: kind of this This is one of these places where
Speaker 1: this urban rural divide is both a lot stricter and
Speaker 1: where this state that is the majority of the population
Speaker 1: and is dealing with such severe issues is also kind
Speaker 1: of the political center or the city is also the
Speaker 1: political center of the state.
Speaker 11: Well, yeah, that and just yeah, you absolutely hit on
Speaker 11: something there. You know, Albuquerque has been historically, you know,
Speaker 11: decentralized due to gentrification for the last generation because of
Speaker 11: exactly what you said, which is that retirement community, you know,
Speaker 11: outside of oil and gas, and then the federal government
Speaker 11: in terms of like the labs and the universities and
Speaker 11: things like that, like retire ease are basically our third
Speaker 11: high miss genera you know, generative avenue agriculture probably in
Speaker 11: there too, but you know what, you get what I'm saying,
Speaker 11: they're a very high portion. And yeah, and and you
Speaker 11: know the Albuquerque that I grew up going to visit
Speaker 11: all of my family in and like going you know,
Speaker 11: going downtown, going you know, down to the International District,
Speaker 11: going near the university. You know, it never felt it
Speaker 11: never felt I hate to use the word dangerous, but
Speaker 11: it never felt dangerous, right, it never it never felt
Speaker 11: that way at all to me. Not that it does
Speaker 11: not that I feel danger to my to my person
Speaker 11: as a you know, as a white sis. He had
Speaker 11: dude with a beard like walking around like I usually
Speaker 11: feel pretty safe in my person.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I can't say that.
Speaker 3: I would.
Speaker 11: I have reflect that from everybody that I know that
Speaker 11: lives there. And people make choices about where they go,
Speaker 11: what time of day, et cetera, et cetera. And a
Speaker 11: big part of that is because of the gentrification that
Speaker 11: has pushed the the you know, native population of Albuquerque
Speaker 11: out into these more rural places. It makes it harder
Speaker 11: to get to you know, get to groceries, get to jobs,
Speaker 11: get to transportation. Yeah, all of those are factors in this.
Speaker 11: And it's and it's not just a one size fits
Speaker 11: all solution.
Speaker 10: Yep.
Speaker 2: Well, Lucas, is there anything else you wanted to get
Speaker 2: into today?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 11: I mean there's always something, but no, this was this
Speaker 11: was great, thank you. Yeah, yeah, I appreciate you giving
Speaker 11: us the opportunity. It's you know, I'm a I'm a
Speaker 11: longtime listener of this show, and when this issue came up,
Speaker 11: I really was thinking about some of those topics you
Speaker 11: brought up, you know, way back in the first run
Speaker 11: of It could Happen Here, and thinking about the that
Speaker 11: conflict that exists between state entities and you know, passing
Speaker 11: laws and enforcing laws and who does that and who
Speaker 11: doesn't and what does it mean if they don't.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, So this will continue to be a topic of.
Speaker 1: Vibrant discussion. So I'm sure we'll well, we'll have you
Speaker 1: back in the very near future.
Speaker 2: Yeah, happy to come back for that.
Speaker 10: Yep.
Speaker 1: All right, everybody, this is the This has been an
Speaker 1: episode of It Could Happen Here? You know, go go, Yeah, Lucas,
Speaker 1: you have any pluggables to plug before we're all out
Speaker 1: of here?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, sure me. If you are interested, I'm on
Speaker 2: Twitter at Lucas Herndon.
Speaker 11: And if you're curious about you know, New Mexico politics,
Speaker 11: progress now New Mexico on all the socials.
Speaker 1: Most excellent. All right, everybody, Uh, this has been an episode.
Speaker 2: Go home, Family, with.
Speaker 13: Hi everyone, It's me James, and I'm joined by and Robert.
Speaker 13: Today we're going to be talking about the border, which
Speaker 13: is where that audio you heard at the start was
Speaker 13: recorded yesterday.
Speaker 2: Hi Sheren and Robert, Hi James. Hello James, thank you, Robert,
Speaker 2: Thank you Serene. It's lovely to have this for one
Speaker 2: introduction time.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 13: So yeah, we're gathered here to go to talk about
Speaker 13: the border. And the reason we are talking about the
Speaker 13: border is because border patrol are doing their thing, the
Speaker 13: thing that they like to do tiemingly like on a
Speaker 13: quarterly basis actually exactly three months after the last time,
Speaker 13: which is to hold people out in the open in
Speaker 13: between the two board defenses in Santi Seddo, just about
Speaker 13: fifteen minutes south of where I live. It's probably worth
Speaker 13: grounding this discussion in the various claims and counterclaims. So
Speaker 13: there are about two hundred people in between the two
Speaker 13: border defenses right now. People I spoke to were from Azerbijan,
Speaker 13: Turkmenistan and Zbekistan, Turkey, Vietnam, Hondoors, Guatemala.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Like, the reason that sometimes.
Speaker 13: These lists of people sound like, you know, you're singing
Speaker 13: Washington bullets is because these are all countries that we
Speaker 13: have destabilized in one way or another, saying we qua
Speaker 13: the United States, not we as call zone media, we
Speaker 13: were spirectually stabilized regimes.
Speaker 2: We've only destabilized two or three countries. Yeah, and we're
Speaker 2: proud of it. Yeah we don't.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we don't.
Speaker 2: Uh, we don't hide it.
Speaker 13: But yeah, we took our shot at Canada, you know. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 13: but we've taken a good couple of swings in a Tamadore.
Speaker 13: I think we land some punches, but who knows, time
Speaker 13: will tell. So, yeah, it's people from like I think
Speaker 13: often the migration is constructed as quite unquoite Mexican, which
Speaker 13: is definitely not the case. I spoke to one family
Speaker 13: from Mexico yesterday. But like, even if you look at
Speaker 13: border patrol statistics, about four thousand out of fifteen thousand
Speaker 13: people apprehended in the San Diego sector in July this
Speaker 13: year of Mexican nationality.
Speaker 14: That's laura than I would assume, to be honest.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I mean, it's just a number of things, right, Like,
Speaker 13: it's these countries, Like climate change is definitely getting worse,
Speaker 13: so migrass is happening from there.
Speaker 2: I see a lot of people from Vietnam.
Speaker 13: I don't have the language skills to speak to them
Speaker 13: in depth, like I was speaking to someone when We'll
Speaker 13: get onto this through Google Translate from Vietnam. But hard
Speaker 13: to conduct a full interview, especially when folks are guarding
Speaker 13: their phone charge, which they are because exactly the same
Speaker 13: as last time, they need the phone to do CBP one.
Speaker 13: They need the phone to interact with their families, let
Speaker 13: them know they're safe. Some of their families, I guess
Speaker 13: don't know that they're traveling. I was helping people charge
Speaker 13: phones yesterday.
Speaker 2: So we can talk.
Speaker 13: Let's talk a little bit about the mutual aid response,
Speaker 13: and then we'll get onto the border patrol, you know.
Speaker 13: So there are two groups down there right now, and
Speaker 13: I think it's very impressive the services they're able to
Speaker 13: provide because because border Patrol all claim these people are
Speaker 13: not detained, that means that they are therefore not obliged
Speaker 13: to provide any services to them. Right So that would
Speaker 13: mean they don't have to give them water, they don't
Speaker 13: have to give them food, they don't have to give
Speaker 13: them shelter or like salitation, which salitation is the one
Speaker 13: that's really hard to cover because everything has to go
Speaker 13: through a fist sized gap in the fence. So that's
Speaker 13: still like an unmet need. But these two groups free
Speaker 13: Ship Collective, they're a free Ship pebe on Twitter, and
Speaker 13: also American Friends Service Committee. I've spoken about them before.
Speaker 13: They're a Quaker group that they're really great, like in
Speaker 13: terms of turning up and helping people who need help.
Speaker 13: They're constantly there and they they're a good place to
Speaker 13: send your money even if you're not a Quaker yourself,
Speaker 13: like check out their Twitter.
Speaker 3: Like.
Speaker 13: Actually, they're probably aligned with a lot of people who
Speaker 13: listen to show on a lot of things. I think
Speaker 13: they're prison abolitionists. So those two groups were there and
Speaker 13: they would At first there was myself, one person from
Speaker 13: American French Service Committee, and two older volunteers who had
Speaker 13: come in about one hundred and fifty to two hundred people.
Speaker 13: So most of the ideas kind of helped because I
Speaker 13: think in that situation is more important out than necessarily
Speaker 13: get the best audio for your podcast. So we handed
Speaker 13: out water, handed out food, handed out those emergency survival blankets, and.
Speaker 2: It was about all we had.
Speaker 13: At first, some like medical stuff people had medical and
Speaker 13: a bit later free ship people came and Xavier came.
Speaker 13: I'm not sure what Zavier's org is, but I will
Speaker 13: tweet it when I find it. I'll put it in
Speaker 13: the show notes to He's great. I've spoken at his
Speaker 13: events before that he holds down by the Border. We
Speaker 13: had a border media round table. He turned up with
Speaker 13: a massive generator, so that was great. We're able to
Speaker 13: charge phones. And what's really I think like notable is
Speaker 13: how much the people in between the fences are able
Speaker 13: to participate in distribution of goods and helping each other.
Speaker 13: So like they have a person who volunteers to be
Speaker 13: the coordinator for the water distribution, and one who volunteers
Speaker 13: to coordinate for the organizing people into lines and making
Speaker 13: sure people don't cut the line right, and then one
Speaker 13: person who was the phone captain who was doing like
Speaker 13: an incredible job of they'd get the cell phone right
Speaker 13: right the name of the person and then sign them
Speaker 13: a number in the line, and that person would also
Speaker 13: have that name and number written on their hand, and
Speaker 13: it's written in duct tape that's taped to them and
Speaker 13: taped to the phone. And then when their turn to
Speaker 13: charge comes, he would shout the name of the number.
Speaker 13: They would come from wherever they were in between the walls.
Speaker 13: They'd come and we would charge the phone, and then
Speaker 13: once they've got above fifty sixty percent, we'd switch it
Speaker 13: out and he'd call them again and they come get
Speaker 13: their phone. So lots of that is stuff that was
Speaker 13: learned in May and has been like implemented again much
Speaker 13: more like. It's less chaotic than it was before, and
Speaker 13: fewer people are able to provide better help, which is
Speaker 13: really good that it doesn't mean that those people don't
Speaker 13: need like donations, because they do. I know, the free
Speaker 13: ship people came with dozens of blankets, but there weren't
Speaker 13: enough blankets for everybody, so we were prioritizing families with
Speaker 13: children and pregnant women to have a blanket. It was
Speaker 13: cold yesterday, it was raining, and people didn't have anything
Speaker 13: to shelter under. There were a few tarps, but not
Speaker 13: very many, and it's a pretty like there were very
Speaker 13: young babies there. Right, it's a pretty difficult place to
Speaker 13: sleep with like, people were very keen to get their
Speaker 13: hands on cardboard boxes to lie down on to sleep.
Speaker 13: That gives you a sense of how kind of underserved
Speaker 13: they are. There's obviously no toilet facilities because you're just
Speaker 13: in a dusty kind of desert area by the border.
Speaker 13: So if people are familiar with Las Americas, the Discount Moll,
Speaker 13: we're like maybe a mile west of there along the
Speaker 13: dirt road and it's just kind of dusty field, so
Speaker 13: very rocky, very difficult people to sleep, very exposed to
Speaker 13: the elements. Right, it was hot today, like I was
Speaker 13: out earlier, and it's ninety one, so they won't be
Speaker 13: having any shade today.
Speaker 2: They didn't have any shelter from the rain or or ways.
Speaker 13: To keep warm last night. They're not allowed to start
Speaker 13: fires either, even if they have them means to do so.
Speaker 13: So the situation of these people I think is something
Speaker 13: worth discussing because it's not exactly super duper clear what
Speaker 13: role this plays in the immigration process. And there were
Speaker 13: a couple of examples to illustrate that. So I was
Speaker 13: able to talk to one person. They presented themselves from
Speaker 13: like they came into the parking lot walking and they
Speaker 13: looked looked very concerned, and so I approached him as, hey,
Speaker 13: do you need anything?
Speaker 2: Can we help you?
Speaker 13: And they had experienced some kind of medical condition and
Speaker 13: been taken to hospital, which Customs and Border Protection will
Speaker 13: do that, right, Like, if those people are there and
Speaker 13: they're having an emergency, they'll open the gate, take that
Speaker 13: person out and transport them to hospital somewhere in San Diego.
Speaker 13: That person had then been released from hospital to a taxi,
Speaker 13: which hospitals in San Diego have a habit of doing this.
Speaker 13: They'll dump homeless people.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 13: If you anyone in San Diego will have seen this,
Speaker 13: you'll be familiar with like people dumped out of hospital
Speaker 13: in Hillcrest wearing a hospital gown and maybe having very
Speaker 13: little other possessions. Maybe it's every single day this happened. Unfortunately,
Speaker 13: people have passed away on being released by the hospital
Speaker 13: before in Hillcrest. So they release these folks and I
Speaker 13: guess they often give them a bus pass or they
Speaker 13: pay for a taxi. In this case, they paid for
Speaker 13: this person's taxi. They asked for a taxi to the border.
Speaker 13: The command of English was pretty limited, so they asked
Speaker 13: for a taxi to the border. They were taken to
Speaker 13: like the formal border crossing at Seni Shudur, which is
Speaker 13: a mile and a half east of where we were.
Speaker 13: And then they walked down the dirt road to where
Speaker 13: we were. But obviously because there was a fence in
Speaker 13: between us and the people being quite detained, then they
Speaker 13: weren't able to access that area, right. So that leaves
Speaker 13: them in a conundrum, right that they're now in the
Speaker 13: United States without without any status, they were able to
Speaker 13: want Body of Troll agent advise them to return to Mexico.
Speaker 13: Obviously that would constitute an entry to Mexico in between
Speaker 13: ports of entry. Right, you'd be illegally entering Mexico. It's
Speaker 13: not Bord of Patrol's job to enforce Mexican laws. But
Speaker 13: that person was in the United States and presented a
Speaker 13: claim for asylum.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 13: They had a cell phone and they were using Google Translate,
Speaker 13: and they literally I could see it. It was like,
Speaker 13: I'm afraid to go back to my country. I'm afraid
Speaker 13: I will be hurt if I go back there, which
Speaker 13: is like a pretty textbook asylum claim.
Speaker 2: I would like to claim asylum.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 13: And on making that claim, a Border of Patrol agent
Speaker 13: returned them to the area in between offenses, right, which
Speaker 13: would suggest that like this is a holding facility to
Speaker 13: Border Patrol for people. I just want to read the
Speaker 13: statement that Border Patrol made to me this morning. This
Speaker 13: was like a couple of hours to one recording this,
Speaker 13: recording this on Tuesday. CBP has built and retrofited facilities
Speaker 13: along the Southwest border to enhance our capabilities in this regard.
Speaker 13: CBP has also significantly increased the number of medical personnel
Speaker 13: along the Southwest border and those providing other wrap around services,
Speaker 13: all to better support ensuring getting people appropriate care as
Speaker 13: quickly as possible. Border Patrol has prioritized the quick transportation
Speaker 13: of migrants encountered in this environment, which is partially dangerous,
Speaker 13: particularly dangerous uring current weather conditions, to border patrol facilities
Speaker 13: where individuals can see medical care, food, and water. It
Speaker 13: is important to note that migrants who are between the
Speaker 13: border barriers are not in border patrol custody and are
Speaker 13: at liberty to return to Mexico if they desire. We
Speaker 13: have some audio of border patrol addressing the migratine between defenses.
Speaker 13: So Daniel's going to drop in right after this.
Speaker 15: Bracelet listen. We take as soon as we can. Well,
Speaker 15: so there's too many of you.
Speaker 2: We can't do this fast.
Speaker 15: Why sit here and talk to you the last time
Speaker 15: we have to take people we're not designed to take
Speaker 15: hundreds of people working as first as we can be patient.
Speaker 3: And I can tell you.
Speaker 13: This, they're shouting at them. They're shouting at them in English.
Speaker 13: They're not really giving any clue. So the people obviously
Speaker 13: have questions. Right they've entered, lots of them have been
Speaker 13: given bracelets when he's talking about the bracelets, and people
Speaker 13: will have heard that in the intro to that they
Speaker 13: were taking people with white bracelets. Those have a day,
Speaker 13: right the day that you entered, so like it might
Speaker 13: say Monday or Sunday or today. Obviously it's Tuesday, so
Speaker 13: they would get a bracelet which has a color and
Speaker 13: a day, and they proscess people in order of priority.
Speaker 13: The people who arrived on Monday. First sale process on
Speaker 13: accompanied miners. I didn't see any obviously, some eighteen year
Speaker 13: old people. It could be hard to tell how exactly
Speaker 13: old they are, but seventeen whatever, But I didn't see
Speaker 13: any people that young on their own. After that, they
Speaker 13: will process single mothers with children, sat a few of those,
Speaker 13: quite a few of those. After that, they will process
Speaker 13: like a family, which they defined to consist of a
Speaker 13: man or women and children. After that, they will process
Speaker 13: men on their own. I guess women on their own,
Speaker 13: then men on their own. They had initially separated people.
Speaker 13: They had people just like they had last time, right
Speaker 13: in like families and those with children, and then single
Speaker 13: men were somewhere else. But it seemed like people were
Speaker 13: able to come to travel in between the fences down
Speaker 13: to the place where I was, because that was the
Speaker 13: only place that they were able to access services, right,
Speaker 13: And I guess the claim of border patrollers that these
Speaker 13: people could go back to Mexico. So I'm not sure
Speaker 13: how because obviously that they're in between these thirty foot
Speaker 13: walls right right, you could go around the end.
Speaker 2: That's how people come north.
Speaker 13: But that's quite a hike, especially if you haven't got
Speaker 13: any water and food and stuff. So yeah, it's this
Speaker 13: is what they've claimed. It's worth noting that like Border Patrol,
Speaker 13: a number of representative from the Hispanic Caucus like requested
Speaker 13: Border Patrol clarify this after what happened in May, and
Speaker 13: their letter they noted that the conditions violate agency guidelines
Speaker 13: for detention, which they do, and that Border Patrol isn't
Speaker 13: supposed to hold people in its own custody for more
Speaker 13: than seventy two hours, which some people were held for
Speaker 13: longer than that in May, and CBP responded, I'll just
Speaker 13: read it out. The individuals in question had not made
Speaker 13: contact with US Border Patrol personnel and were not constrained
Speaker 13: from further movement. At the time of this incident, the
Speaker 13: US Border Patrol San Diego sector facilities were experiencing capacity
Speaker 13: issues and some transportation challenges which have thinks been remediated.
Speaker 13: Border Patrol agents encountered and apprehended these migrants as soon
Speaker 13: as there's operationally feasible to do so. Again, like they
Speaker 13: were dropped off in May by Border Patrol vehicles in
Speaker 13: the place where they were being detained, And it's simply
Speaker 13: not factually correct to suggest that they had not come
Speaker 13: into contact with Border Patrol.
Speaker 2: I have video of it. I've published video over on Twitter,
Speaker 2: We've used audio of it on the podcast. I think
Speaker 2: it's just not true. So Border Patrol.
Speaker 13: Essentially are claiming that this isn't happening when it continues
Speaker 13: to happen, right, and this time they've taken that to
Speaker 13: it's like they've already doubled down on that status. I
Speaker 13: guess because they're not providing any services, which is probably
Speaker 13: a good time for us to hear from some products
Speaker 13: and services. Oh yeah, fucking magic. Look at that taking
Speaker 13: a factory lap. I'm quitting now, gust again. I enjoy
Speaker 13: these adverts.
Speaker 2: Yeah it's me, I'm back. Everyone else is still here too.
Speaker 13: Now we're talking about the mutual aid response to what's
Speaker 13: happening at the border, right And as I said, a
Speaker 13: border patrol arn't providing anything.
Speaker 2: And as I said, at least.
Speaker 13: When I left, I left after it got dark, quite
Speaker 13: a long time after it got dark last night. It
Speaker 13: was there for probably seven six or seven hours, and
Speaker 13: I saw more and more people arriving in that time,
Speaker 13: and it was a really wide dispersed group of people.
Speaker 13: I would say maybe the majority was Spanish speaking, but
Speaker 13: a lot of people with Vietnamese. I was speaking to
Speaker 13: some Francophone African people at various nationalities right before I left,
Speaker 13: Like I said, lots of people from Tadjikastan, Azbekistan, as Abijan,
Speaker 13: places like that. Those people were pretty prominent. So it's
Speaker 13: fairly hard for volunteers to communicate with all of them.
Speaker 13: And they don't have any information right about what's happening
Speaker 13: to them. Can they expect to be separated? In some
Speaker 13: cases they can I can they expect how long can
Speaker 13: they expect to be there?
Speaker 2: We don't really know, right.
Speaker 13: I heard one Border Patrol agent saying that some of
Speaker 13: the people who arrived on Monday could expect to be
Speaker 13: taken out maybe by Wednesday, So that's at least two
Speaker 13: hours two days, right. So all of the services they're
Speaker 13: being provided, they're being provided through mutual aid right now,
Speaker 13: which is exactly the same thing that happened last time.
Speaker 13: Right Sometimes, Border Patrol last time gave them a granola bar.
Speaker 13: We haven't come back with their granola bars this time.
Speaker 13: And I think it's really worth us like taking a
Speaker 13: moment to consider the scale of what like two hundred
Speaker 13: people is not that many people, but it was more
Speaker 13: than two thousand people in May, and that was provided
Speaker 13: for by mutual aid. And I think it's a really
Speaker 13: good like getting off point for maybe us to have
Speaker 13: a talk here about how we do mutual aid, because
Speaker 13: the only thing that enabled like little babies to have
Speaker 13: like a blanket is some one messaging someone else on
Speaker 13: signal and being like, hey, this is happening again.
Speaker 2: Do you have stuff? Can you come down?
Speaker 13: And someone who I don't know, weeks ago I guess
Speaker 13: was like, Oh, these people are doing nice things, let
Speaker 13: me send them some money, because without that, those people
Speaker 13: would just be sleeping in the in the in the dust.
Speaker 13: I think it's really it's it's admirable, I think, And
Speaker 13: it's something that like, I don't know how to say this,
Speaker 13: that we should take into consideration when we're discussing things
Speaker 13: like religion and then like doing discourse, and like it
Speaker 13: could be really easy to get like into a like
Speaker 13: full readit atheist mode.
Speaker 2: I'm not a person who believes in religion particularly, but like.
Speaker 13: The only people who are helping at some point are
Speaker 13: people who are at least part of religious organizations.
Speaker 1: Look, I think that the perfectly consistent stance to have
Speaker 1: is that like, if someone is showing up and providing
Speaker 1: people with necessary assistance and not not asking for anything
Speaker 1: in return, including the ability to prostlytize, then I don't
Speaker 1: give a shit what right, Like, I don't care if
Speaker 1: they're from a church. I don't care if it's like
Speaker 1: you know, some week, like, as long as they are
Speaker 1: showing up and helping people in desperate need and not
Speaker 1: demanding some sort of something from them, including like you
Speaker 1: know them listen to a spiel. I don't really you know,
Speaker 1: it could be a church. Who gives a fuck, right, like,
Speaker 1: I'm glad they're there, you know, yeah, totally, it can
Speaker 1: be a church. There were mosques there last time. I'm
Speaker 1: sure that they were like synagogues, and yeah, fucking kudos
Speaker 1: to those people, right, yeah, you know, like that's good,
Speaker 1: glad they're there.
Speaker 13: Yeah, those Yeah, those people are doing anarchism too, even
Speaker 13: if they wouldn't call it that or whatever. Like, you know,
Speaker 13: the more we can create networks that look after each
Speaker 13: other without trying to control each other, then the better
Speaker 13: of a place we make the world. And that's what
Speaker 13: those people are doing, and we should all celebrate that
Speaker 13: and support them however we can. And I guess so
Speaker 13: as of today, there are still people there, and they
Speaker 13: still seem to be putting people in there. I think
Speaker 13: it's not supposed to be too hot this week, like
Speaker 13: we had triple digit days last week. I think over
Speaker 13: the weekend was pretty hot.
Speaker 6: Yeah it was.
Speaker 13: It was very hot of the weekend. So like the
Speaker 13: possibility for this to get much worse is still there, right,
Speaker 13: the possibility for people to get the person I spoke
Speaker 13: to you who had to go to hospital, had become dehydrated,
Speaker 13: Like that's how they needed because you don't when people
Speaker 13: were when we first at least when I first got there,
Speaker 13: people were very hungry and very thirsty and like really
Speaker 13: desperate for a drink of water because often they'd come
Speaker 13: from some of those other holding areas and like walked
Speaker 13: down because this was the only place where they could
Speaker 13: access stuff. So like, yeah, I guess the potential for
Speaker 13: this to turn into something as sad and completely unnecessary
Speaker 13: as what happened May is there again.
Speaker 14: Yeah, so you mentioned that there's no shade, like no
Speaker 14: shaded areas, So when it's triple digits, like there are
Speaker 14: kids and babies and everyone's outside, Yes, that is just
Speaker 14: I mean, it's terrible regardless, but like that in particular,
Speaker 14: that's like brutal.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I mean I think I've shared these pictures with
Speaker 13: you guys before, but like in Hacumber in May, people
Speaker 13: were making little kind of a frames and lean to's
Speaker 13: and out of osuitillos and cacti and stuff just trying
Speaker 13: to get out of it. It was very hot then
Speaker 13: out there.
Speaker 2: I mean the photos you.
Speaker 14: Sat recently, there's like a there's a photo you sat
Speaker 14: with the child's hand, like coming out of the the fence.
Speaker 2: That have made me emotional.
Speaker 13: Yeah, it makes me emotional, honestly. Like I think I've
Speaker 13: said this before, like in interviews, and I did an
Speaker 13: interview with Roy Pecktrest about this, but like I would
Speaker 13: rather go somewhere dangerous and have dangerous things happen, and
Speaker 13: then see a little kid have to be cold, not
Speaker 13: be able to help them, or like just be sad,
Speaker 13: like it's not a fun place for children, And that
Speaker 13: fucks me up in a way that like.
Speaker 2: That's yeah, I would.
Speaker 1: I would so much rather be like physically uncomfortable or
Speaker 1: in danger than like be in a perfectly safe place
Speaker 1: where you're watching kids suffer.
Speaker 2: Like that's the rough thing.
Speaker 1: I've been to a lot of refugee camps, and it's
Speaker 1: always like, you know, it's weird because I've also seen
Speaker 1: a lot of kids like in active combat zones. And
Speaker 1: don't take the wrong thing out of this, but like
Speaker 1: the the kids who have been stuck in a camp
Speaker 1: with like no chance of ever getting out seem like
Speaker 1: more depressed in a lot of ways than the kids
Speaker 1: who every day you know they're they're in you know,
Speaker 1: part of the city, even though like the city is
Speaker 1: a dangerous place to be. They they're they're moving around,
Speaker 1: they're usually doing stuff. Obviously it's a much more worse
Speaker 1: situation in a lot of ways. But like the degree
Speaker 1: to which being in this limbo messes with their heads
Speaker 1: and depresses them and traumatizes them is And again I'm
Speaker 1: not saying like it's better for kids to be in
Speaker 1: an act of war zone, but like that is trauma
Speaker 1: as well, and I think in a lot of ways
Speaker 1: an equivalent trauma. Even though the danger to their body
Speaker 1: is less, the trauma they face being stuck in a
Speaker 1: place and not having any idea what the future is
Speaker 1: and not having any ability to influence it. Really right
Speaker 1: being you know, these kids up at this fence are
Speaker 1: totally they have no control over their future or their lives.
Speaker 13: Really, I think that's the really like it strips people
Speaker 13: of their agency, which is a really degrading thing to do.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 13: You're forcing these people they can do everything right. That
Speaker 13: person presented every perfect affirmative asylum claiming you know, and
Speaker 13: yeah it doesn't matter. And I think that's very hard,
Speaker 13: especially I imagine it's very difficult. I'm not a parent,
Speaker 13: but I imagine that, Like if you are a parent's dad, yeah,
Speaker 13: you know, you just want your kids to have a
Speaker 13: safe place to grow up. And like, I don't know,
Speaker 13: it's the first time I ever realized that I was
Speaker 13: having a trauma response, and it was not a good one.
Speaker 13: Was in twenty eighteen with the migrant caravan, when like
Speaker 13: I had been there was one little child where I
Speaker 13: speak about a lot, but like, she was obsessed with
Speaker 13: my hair. If people haven't seen paces of me have
Speaker 13: long hair, and like wanted to braid my hair every
Speaker 13: time I went there. And so she'd come and she'd
Speaker 13: sit on my shoulders and I would just do shit,
Speaker 13: and she would braid my hair while I was you know,
Speaker 13: handing out water bottles or you know.
Speaker 2: Talking to people, doing what I could do.
Speaker 13: And like I saw that girl every day for months, right,
Speaker 13: And then I remember once coming back to a Christmas
Speaker 13: party and just wanting to fucking scream at everyone. It's
Speaker 13: a juxtaposition from being seeing this little kid like deprived
Speaker 13: of so many things that chord should have warmth and
Speaker 13: shelter and good food and a safe place to be,
Speaker 13: and then going home, you know, twenty it drive across
Speaker 13: the border drive home and see people just like going
Speaker 13: about their lives. It's it's a really challenging yeah, duality.
Speaker 13: We can't stop it, right, Like it's not in our
Speaker 13: power to stop this, but like, and it is in
Speaker 13: our power. One of the things I hate people being
Speaker 13: like it's like welcome to America. Like it's a pretty
Speaker 13: fucked up way to be welcome to America, right, But like, like,
Speaker 13: I'm an immigrant. My my arrival here was very different,
Speaker 13: Like Sharin, you came here when you were younger, right,
Speaker 13: I was.
Speaker 14: I didn't immigrate myself. I was born here a month old,
Speaker 14: moved back from my parents, immigrated.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So you can be president, that's important.
Speaker 14: Oh yes, I can be president.
Speaker 2: You can be president, but not James, which is which
Speaker 2: is good? Which is good?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, in general that is my goal for you, James. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I can see. I'd really crush it in that round.
Speaker 2: I do love a good law Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Charene can take out Ted Cruz who you can. You
Speaker 1: can be Charene's John Mitchell. Wow, it's a fun little
Speaker 1: water gate ya for every I will be hiding Karen's
Speaker 1: secret meetings.
Speaker 2: I'm hoping for Haldoman myself. That's the Oh, that's the
Speaker 2: guy to be.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I want to go back for like further than that,
Speaker 13: you know, like when presidents were chads and like Roosevelt
Speaker 13: got shot five times. I can see Scharene having that
Speaker 13: kind of energy. Sure, yeah, we're all in on Charen
Speaker 13: maybe best too, Yeah, don't choose Serene.
Speaker 2: A book was enough for Teddy Roosevelt people. It's changed.
Speaker 13: Return no jokes aside, Like I came to America very
Speaker 13: differently from this, and like, uh, I recently became a
Speaker 13: citizen after a long time, and like you always feel
Speaker 13: very precarious when you live here and you're not, so
Speaker 13: I just want Like one thing that I noticed was
Speaker 13: that so many of the folks down there at one point,
Speaker 13: all of us one point I don't know, were also
Speaker 13: people who had come here themselves and like had different
Speaker 13: stories and we talked about. Like another thing I think
Speaker 13: is really important, actually it's like just because people are
Speaker 13: in a shitty situation doesn't mean that they are not
Speaker 13: like people. Like sometimes it can be really easy to
Speaker 13: be like bottle of water, by bottle of water, hego,
Speaker 13: bottle of water, chairs, like let's want to fucking talk
Speaker 13: to you, and like how is your day, or like
Speaker 13: what's your favorite football team?
Speaker 2: Like like that can be a really valuable way of.
Speaker 13: Being like, look, I understand that the government is treating
Speaker 13: you like shit right now, and that's not with my consent,
Speaker 13: Like I are.
Speaker 14: Human connection because they aren't treated like humans. So it's
Speaker 14: like nice to remember that's like, oh, I'm.
Speaker 13: Like yeah totally, someone seeing me, yes exactly, and just
Speaker 13: being like we're in community, like we are here to
Speaker 13: do whatever we can to make this a little bit
Speaker 13: less fucking barbaric. Like I always think I should buy
Speaker 13: like soft toys for the kids. I've spent a lot
Speaker 13: of money on soft toys for kids over the years.
Speaker 13: But remember one time we cleared out at Costco in Tiuan,
Speaker 13: Like I had them morning the bed of a pickup
Speaker 13: truck and they were like trying to fly out as
Speaker 13: we drove down the freeway.
Speaker 4: It was a good time.
Speaker 13: But yeah, it's I think that common humanity is super
Speaker 13: important if people have language skills and they want to help,
Speaker 13: Like there are always organizations to help migrants, so American
Speaker 13: Friends Service Committee is a really good one. I don't
Speaker 13: think they would care if you were not a person
Speaker 13: of faith. I think lots of the people helping out
Speaker 13: with them are not They're just nice people.
Speaker 14: So there are so many languages apparently that need translating,
Speaker 14: Like it's not just Spanish. I think a lot of
Speaker 14: people assume it would just be like I don't know Spanish,
Speaker 14: I'm not going to go. But so many other languages
Speaker 14: that would be helpful.
Speaker 13: Yeah, Like I speak French, and I honestly spent as
Speaker 13: much time at the board of speaking French as Spanish.
Speaker 13: I have like passable communication in Haitian creole, and they
Speaker 13: can sort of if some people speak like more formal French,
Speaker 13: who a Haitian, so I can speak to them, But yeah,
Speaker 13: I don't speak Taiji, ko Uzbek or Russian or Vietnamese,
Speaker 13: so like, yeah, those people are therefore it's harder for
Speaker 13: them to access solidarity right and to talk to people
Speaker 13: and to be seen, Like we can try our best
Speaker 13: with cell phone apps. The person who had been taken
Speaker 13: to a hospital was Vietnamese and was just doing a
Speaker 13: star Wark job of like obviously they were to the
Speaker 13: north of the border, so among the volunteers basically, and
Speaker 13: we were using our phones to talk and they were
Speaker 13: helping us distribute shit right, and then helping explain to
Speaker 13: the Vietnamese people, hey, like you have to be in
Speaker 13: this line if you want this, at this line if
Speaker 13: you want that, and like, so that was nice, and
Speaker 13: it's always like great to see like people empowered by
Speaker 13: that process, Like they're not just like asking for stuff,
Speaker 13: they're also helping get other people stuff, and I think
Speaker 13: that that helps both parties. So like this is means
Speaker 13: of like I guess like people call mutilated solidarity not charity,
Speaker 13: which I think that illustrates really well. You know, like
Speaker 13: all these people are there to be in solidarity with
Speaker 13: people who they consider to be members of their community,
Speaker 13: not not to like gain some carmic reward or whatever
Speaker 13: like people, And I think that's a really laudable thing.
Speaker 13: It's something we should all participate in if we can.
Speaker 13: I understand that everyone's near the border, but like, yeah,
Speaker 13: we can't change this that we're all supposed to vote
Speaker 13: for Joe Biden because he wouldn't be a piece of
Speaker 13: shit to migrants, and he's been a complete piece of
Speaker 13: shit to migrants for the entirety of his time in office,
Speaker 13: and I sincerely believe he will be a piece of
Speaker 13: shit to migrants if he is elected again. So you
Speaker 13: can't fucking change this by voting for someone.
Speaker 2: I wish you could.
Speaker 13: I wish it was that easy, but like I sadly,
Speaker 13: it requires your active participation. And yeah, I'm just constantly
Speaker 13: impressed by people who will. Like the people from Free
Speaker 13: Shiit Collective, they bought their entire family right them a message.
Speaker 13: They were like, yeah, we're on our way, what do
Speaker 13: you need blankets? Okay, we have like one hundred blankets
Speaker 13: and a generator. And within an hour at least some
Speaker 13: of those people, I had a warmer place to sleep.
Speaker 13: Right before that, I was giving out the blankets I
Speaker 13: had for camping in my truck. But I have two
Speaker 13: sleeping bags in my truck.
Speaker 2: It's not enough.
Speaker 13: So yeah, I think that's something we can all do
Speaker 13: in our own communities. But right now, again, I guess
Speaker 13: Biden's administration are back on the bullshit at the border,
Speaker 13: and it's.
Speaker 2: Important that people just pay attention to it.
Speaker 13: Right I guess you could write your Congress people, but
Speaker 13: they didn't do shit last time, they won't do shit
Speaker 13: this time. But people can show sort of diarity in
Speaker 13: any way or lend their language skills. I think now
Speaker 13: it's a really important time to do that.
Speaker 14: Yeah, it's SIT's frustrating because the border in general just
Speaker 14: becomes like a political talking point, right, like Biden uses
Speaker 14: it for his benefit and then it's like I'll pick
Speaker 14: it up when I needed to get Yeah, whatever it is,
Speaker 14: it's pretty infuriating.
Speaker 2: It's fucking not.
Speaker 13: Yeah, it's incredibly infuriating for me to see like a
Speaker 13: guarantee you, I was stand there yesterday when no other
Speaker 13: media folks will be there today. Folks who haven't been
Speaker 13: there since May will roll up again, right, who haven't
Speaker 13: covered the border, who don't have a working knowledge of
Speaker 13: like what's happened since Title forty two, which is the
Speaker 13: apprehensions have dropped, by the way, like travel across the
Speaker 13: border has got a lot lower since Title forty two,
Speaker 13: which is what we were told that to opposite of
Speaker 13: what every op ed told us was going to happen,
Speaker 13: because people maybe should not be righting about the border
Speaker 13: when they live in DC.
Speaker 2: Or New York.
Speaker 13: But yeah, Biden will come back to the border next
Speaker 13: time he gets attacked by Republicans on boarder stuff. And
Speaker 13: until then, like these people will be treated as if
Speaker 13: they're numbers or if they don't matter, and like each
Speaker 13: of them has a story and a reason for being here,
Speaker 13: and they're not just numbers, they're all people. And every
Speaker 13: time someone dies trying to come to this country to
Speaker 13: be safe, it's a tragedy, and it's a preventable tragedy.
Speaker 13: And it's one that the Democrats are just as complicit
Speaker 13: as Republicans in. Yeah, you know, we've spoken a lot
Speaker 13: about groups you can you can go to, right, Like
Speaker 13: we spoke about border Kindness, we spoke about Borderlands Relief Collective.
Speaker 13: Like there are a million and one ways to help.
Speaker 13: I won't detail them all now, but yeah, it's something
Speaker 13: that like we can't erase the Like I feel genuinely
Speaker 13: ashamed every time I'm down there, you know, to be
Speaker 13: American now. But it's just hard when people are like, hey,
Speaker 13: what's going to happen, you have to be like, well,
Speaker 13: we don't know, but like you might be separated from
Speaker 13: your family, you might be detained. They're probably going to
Speaker 13: take most of your clothes. They might take your belt off.
Speaker 13: You know, you can wear one jacket, one shirt, your pants,
Speaker 13: and your shoes. They might take your shoelaces and venues
Speaker 13: go into the fucking abyss of processing.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 13: There might be years till you get your core date
Speaker 13: and you might not have a right to work until then.
Speaker 13: But it might cost you twelve grand to get a
Speaker 13: lawyer to represent you. How do you get that money?
Speaker 2: Fucked you?
Speaker 13: I know, you know, And yeah it's deep. I feel
Speaker 13: really ashamed, but yeah, all we can do is just
Speaker 13: try and help however we can.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, all right, Yeah, sorry that was really depressing,
Speaker 2: was that? No, No, it's good.
Speaker 14: I really admire that instead of like kind of wallowing
Speaker 14: in the shame, You're like, I actually want to do
Speaker 14: something and it's okay that I feel shame.
Speaker 2: That's valid.
Speaker 14: It's both things can be true. I can be helpful
Speaker 14: and I can also have perspective on it.
Speaker 13: So yeah, yeah it helps to help helps me. It
Speaker 13: helps other people to feel active, not like acted upon.
Speaker 13: And that's why folks on who are migrants want to
Speaker 13: also participate in migrant aid right, like even folks are
Speaker 13: in between the war right now, like organizing that the
Speaker 13: phone charging queue because it helps to not just feel
Speaker 13: acted upon and remove the agency.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so yeah, do you.
Speaker 13: Mutual aid if you can?
Speaker 10: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Be nice? Yeah, be nice. Buck the border patrol.
Speaker 13: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: I think that that more or less covers it.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's our message, that Sharin's
Speaker 13: presidential slogan.
Speaker 14: Yes, that's my campaign.
Speaker 2: I'll work on that.
Speaker 6: Okay, yeah.
Speaker 2: Five, it's it's another union episode of Vick had happen
Speaker 2: here in the podcast where we do a lot of things,
Speaker 2: but one of one of which is talking about unions,
Speaker 2: one of which is not doing great intros, it's me
Speaker 2: and Mia Wong and today I'm here to talk about
Speaker 2: a union and a strike and a bunch of other stuff.
Speaker 2: And with me to talk about this is Tyler Fellini,
Speaker 2: he was an organizer with Portland Jobs with Justice and
Speaker 2: also a former New Seasons worker. And Alex Gage, who
Speaker 2: was an organizer in store rep for the New Season's
Speaker 2: labor union shop in ourber Lodge. Yeah both YouTube, Welcome
Speaker 2: to the show. Yeah, thanks for having us, happy to
Speaker 2: be here. Yeah, I'm glad, glad to talk with you too.
Speaker 2: So I guess before we get into the sort of
Speaker 2: current stuff, I wanted to talk a bit about how
Speaker 2: how the certain New Seasons union was formed and you
Speaker 2: know what that sort of process looked like and how
Speaker 2: it's been going since then.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I can speak to that.
Speaker 16: So the initial unionizing effort started at the store that
Speaker 16: I was working at, seven Corners, and we actually the
Speaker 16: first conversation we had was April first, the same day
Speaker 16: that Amazon labor union went public and won their electional
Speaker 16: so there's like a really inspiring moment for us. That
Speaker 16: spurred a conversation on the shop floor with a couple coworkers,
Speaker 16: which quickly escalated to six of us meeting in a
Speaker 16: nearby co workers backyard. We talked about the issues, and
Speaker 16: we were all hitting the same things, you know, Like
Speaker 16: we were all upset with the tenants policy, the way
Speaker 16: that New Seasons was treating us and had been treating
Speaker 16: us during COVID. We're also upset with our pay, which
Speaker 16: is obscene and does not keep up with the cost
Speaker 16: of living in Portland, organ which is a very expensive city.
Speaker 16: So and we were also really upset with the healthcare
Speaker 16: that we have offered and how it's kind of deteriorated
Speaker 16: over the years, especially for New Seasons as a company
Speaker 16: that has a lot of people who've been there for
Speaker 16: years and so there were a lot of people who've
Speaker 16: seen just the downward decline. So those early meetings went
Speaker 16: really well. We talked to coworkers on the floor discreetly
Speaker 16: and everybody was resonating with what we were saying. We
Speaker 16: made a lot of progress really fast, and then we
Speaker 16: had a meeting at a local bar here in Portland,
Speaker 16: Workers Tap, which huge shoutout of them. They are an
Speaker 16: amazing space for a lot of burgeoning independent unions to
Speaker 16: have some of their early meetings. So we met there
Speaker 16: with more members at our store, the Seven Corners location,
Speaker 16: and I think we had like thirty people there, which
Speaker 16: is a huge turnout for a.
Speaker 6: First showing of a meeting.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 16: And then from there we moved pretty fast to getting
Speaker 16: cards signed for showing of interest, and so in less
Speaker 16: than two months we were actually filing our petition with
Speaker 16: the NLRB, which is unheard of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's amazing, especially for a grocery store union. That
Speaker 2: is wild.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 16: As soon as we went public, workers at all these
Speaker 16: other stores reached out to us. Our Instagram blew up.
Speaker 16: People were excited but wanted to figure out how to
Speaker 16: do it at their store. So we were kind of
Speaker 16: simultaneously trying to balance the plates of like keeping our
Speaker 16: store going and also helping other stores go and you know,
Speaker 16: by the end of the summer we rolled into we
Speaker 16: had our election, I want to say in September, and
Speaker 16: by the end of the summer there were multiple stores
Speaker 16: that had gone public and announced.
Speaker 6: And here we are.
Speaker 16: You know, it's barely been a year since our first
Speaker 16: election win. It's barely been a year since then, and
Speaker 16: we have over nine hundred members, almost a thousand members
Speaker 16: in this very new union.
Speaker 2: That's incredible. That gets into another thing I'm interested about,
Speaker 2: which is Portland's the city that has been in the
Speaker 2: last I mean, I would say probably the last five years,
Speaker 2: but especially in like the last couple of years, it's
Speaker 2: been really really active in terms of in terms of
Speaker 2: union organizing, in terms of sort of especially especially independent unions,
Speaker 2: there's been an enormous number of them. The actual number
Speaker 2: of workers being organized is really high. And yeah, I
Speaker 2: mean you talked about having like having this bar as
Speaker 2: a sort of space you could do meetings. Has there
Speaker 2: been any other stuff, I mean, from from other independent unions,
Speaker 2: from other I mean, just from the fact that there's
Speaker 2: so many like things happening that have like changed the
Speaker 2: dynamics of how these union organization drives have been going.
Speaker 16: Yeah, So early on, you know, we were weighing our
Speaker 16: options as far as like did we want to join
Speaker 16: an existing union or go independent?
Speaker 6: Like what did we want to do there?
Speaker 16: And a lot of that information is hard to find
Speaker 16: if you don't know the language that you're looking for,
Speaker 16: it's not really accessible to the average worker. But we
Speaker 16: found a lot of solidarity in folks who had been
Speaker 16: involved in other independent union efforts. Specifically, we met with
Speaker 16: Mark and Luis at a Burgerville workers union. They offered
Speaker 16: a top Yeah, they were great. They were some of
Speaker 16: the early folks to reach out and help us. We
Speaker 16: were also able to talk to some of the folks
Speaker 16: at ILW Local five that represents palasworkers and many others
Speaker 16: and get some support there. Portland is definitely a labor town,
Speaker 16: uh And the solidarity that we felt kind of across
Speaker 16: the board was great, you know, especially like early on
Speaker 16: when we had a lot of questions and we didn't
Speaker 16: have any answers and we didn't have many resources to
Speaker 16: you know, hire a lawyer and ask them.
Speaker 2: Uh. So I want I wanted to go back a
Speaker 2: little bit to talk about sort of the influence of
Speaker 2: the sort of influence of the news about the Amazon
Speaker 2: labor union going wide and how that sort of worked.
Speaker 2: Have you seen a sort of similar thing with other
Speaker 2: like not just sort of not not just New Seasons shops,
Speaker 2: but have you seen other shops that sort of like
Speaker 2: decided to start organizing after y'all came out.
Speaker 16: I think that there is a general energy among the
Speaker 16: rank and file, right that some of the old ways
Speaker 16: that unions are organizing were not the most representative of
Speaker 16: the workers, which is in part you know, the eighties, right,
Speaker 16: and so kind of why we've seen sort of union
Speaker 16: representation stagnant. But we're seeing a major shift, right. We've
Speaker 16: got a lot of educated workers doing low wage jobs,
Speaker 16: which that condition existed in the nineteen thirties and led
Speaker 16: to a major explosion in militant unions. So I think
Speaker 16: there's a major parallel there, and it's not just Amazon
Speaker 16: liber unions. Also, you know the Starbucks workers know campaign
Speaker 16: it's huge, right, and those are workers who service workers,
Speaker 16: restaurant workers historically have been left out of labor or underrepresented,
Speaker 16: similar to healthcare workers and just care workers generally, And
Speaker 16: that I think is kind of the stereotype of like
Speaker 16: the working class as like a trad white guy in
Speaker 16: a factory and we're seeing that severely upended right now,
Speaker 16: which is really exciting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but that's that's a That's another dynamic I think
Speaker 2: is really is really interesting, particularly in Portland, is that
Speaker 2: it seems to be a lot of independent unions. And
Speaker 2: it seems to be I think partially because even in
Speaker 2: the midst of the fact that like very clearly people
Speaker 2: want to organize, there's been a lot of conservatism on
Speaker 2: the part of the sort of like larger distant unions.
Speaker 2: You don't really want to like throw an enormous amount
Speaker 2: of money into these organizing drives, which means, you know,
Speaker 2: if if the stuff is going to happen, it's it's
Speaker 2: it's the independent unions. And yeah, I don't know, like
Speaker 2: I I think I think your point about sort of
Speaker 2: I think your point about the sort of both both
Speaker 2: the highly educated workers thing and the way that you know,
Speaker 2: sort of what's constitutionally considered a worker and what unions
Speaker 2: are willing to sort of throw money at or tied together.
Speaker 2: Because yeah, I mean, you know, like the shops that
Speaker 2: you're working in, the shops are getting organized just aren't
Speaker 2: the kind of thing that anyone's been organizing for like ever,
Speaker 2: it's very at least not since like the eighties.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and I think it makes sense why they don't organize.
Speaker 10: It's freaking hard. It's a lot of work, and there's
Speaker 10: a lot of turnover, and you don't see those same faces.
Speaker 10: That's why we can get from having our first meeting
Speaker 10: to filing for election in two months, because if it
Speaker 10: doesn't happen in two months, it's never going to happen.
Speaker 10: And we get it done, we get it done fast,
Speaker 10: and then we see all these other like as a
Speaker 10: grocery store, we get deliveries from Bigger Union, you know,
Speaker 10: drivers and such, and we've seen what's happened with their
Speaker 10: campaigns where if they're not like totally invested, they can
Speaker 10: get decertified within a matter of weeks. But we haven't
Speaker 10: had any of that yet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is really impressive. And you know, that's another
Speaker 2: thing I'm interested. I've been asking a lot of people
Speaker 2: because turnover is one of the big things that's been
Speaker 2: sort of you know, it's it's been the wall that
Speaker 2: the existing units hit and we're like, this is too hard,
Speaker 2: We're going to go do something else. And I've been
Speaker 2: I'm wondering how y'all have been dealing with the turnover problem,
Speaker 2: because it's I mean, it is definitely something that's difficult
Speaker 2: to deal with, but you know, it's it's not something
Speaker 2: that makes it impossible. It's just hard, and I'm yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm interested in what your sort of strategies to manage.
Speaker 4: It have been.
Speaker 2: I think it's a matter of passion.
Speaker 10: I think Tyler is a great example, like is no
Speaker 10: longer a member, but sees this as like the way
Speaker 10: that we can move our society forward in general, Like
Speaker 10: the labor struggle is the struggle, Like there's no war,
Speaker 10: black class war. If we don't do this, what are
Speaker 10: we doing here? So wait, we stick around and we're
Speaker 10: doing this for free. We're not getting paid for it.
Speaker 10: We're doing it because it's the right thing to do.
Speaker 16: When our lodge in Grant Park had their walkouts on
Speaker 16: Labor Day weekend, there was a customer at Grant Park
Speaker 16: who called out to us that, you know, we should
Speaker 16: just go open up our own workers co op, And
Speaker 16: my response to him was that, you know, if we leave,
Speaker 16: there's just another batch of workers that are going to
Speaker 16: go through these conditions. Like the goal is not that
Speaker 16: like I wanted to be great for me, like I
Speaker 16: don't even work in new seasons anymore. I wanted to
Speaker 16: be great for my former coworkers who are still there,
Speaker 16: and for the people that I don't know who are
Speaker 16: going to come behind them.
Speaker 6: And that's that's how you get around the high.
Speaker 16: Turn over pieces like the passion and dedication and I
Speaker 16: have to make conditions better for the people coming after you,
Speaker 16: which is really antagonistic to the way capitalism wants us
Speaker 16: to be very individual like oriented, right, Like we just
Speaker 16: care about ourselves and our day to day. But that's
Speaker 16: the really great thing with like the worker power, right,
Speaker 16: is that you know, collectively we are so much stronger.
Speaker 16: Collectively we can actually stand up to the boss and win, right,
Speaker 16: And and that means just reorienting how we think about
Speaker 16: the world, right, Like, like this job sucks.
Speaker 6: How can I make this job better? I can just
Speaker 6: quit and go get a better job.
Speaker 16: But if I change this job, then the people who
Speaker 16: are still here also get better working conditions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think that there's kind of there's there's
Speaker 2: a kind of flip side of that too, right, which
Speaker 2: is that you know, even if you like you know,
Speaker 2: like turnover just is inevitable to some extent, even even
Speaker 2: if you have people who like want to stay and fight, right, like,
Speaker 2: people are just going to have to leave. But on
Speaker 2: the other hand, you know, if you if you're if
Speaker 2: you're in a unionized workplace, and if you're pecifically if
Speaker 2: you're if you're in if you're in a union that
Speaker 2: has the sort of militant culture, what you're doing is
Speaker 2: you're you know, you're changing the actual like class itself,
Speaker 2: right because you know, like now now you're worker who
Speaker 2: like you know, I don't know, is moving to Arizona
Speaker 2: or something. Right, they're they're they are now also much
Speaker 2: more built and have have this sort of experience of
Speaker 2: organizing that they made that they may not have had before.
Speaker 2: And this, you know, it's like you're the any any
Speaker 2: any individual movement you're doing in one place is building
Speaker 2: up the entire class.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and we can see that we've like been attracting
Speaker 10: people who are interested and becoming involved in a movement.
Speaker 10: And you know, whether they just graduated from college or
Speaker 10: they had some sort of distant relative who was in
Speaker 10: a union, they come to new seasons thinking, oh, I
Speaker 10: want to get in on the beginning of this, and
Speaker 10: we've seen like a big push of that recently, and
Speaker 10: people who leave they want to go, you know, organize
Speaker 10: their next workplace, you know, regardless if they were fired
Speaker 10: or whatever.
Speaker 16: They they want to.
Speaker 6: Keep it going. So and I think to build on
Speaker 6: that too.
Speaker 16: You know, salting is a practice that traditional unions typically
Speaker 16: do to kind of change a workforce. And when you salt,
Speaker 16: usually you're paid by the union to go in there,
Speaker 16: and so you're getting paid by the employer to be there,
Speaker 16: and the union is paying you to organize. But we've
Speaker 16: seen a shift now where people are voluntarily salting. Right,
Speaker 16: People come like out that to get a job, they
Speaker 16: don't need the money motivator. They just want to function
Speaker 16: up right, They want to change things and like be
Speaker 16: antagonistic towards the boss. And I think to me, to
Speaker 16: go back to an earlier thing you asked about, like
Speaker 16: kind of like why Portland, right, Like, I think one
Speaker 16: thing about Portland is people in Portland love a protest, right, Like,
Speaker 16: we don't need much of a motivation to go through some.
Speaker 6: Rocks at popped, Right, That's kind of in the culture
Speaker 6: of Portland.
Speaker 16: And so there is this this orientation towards struggle that
Speaker 16: does exist, and right now that energy you know, we
Speaker 16: we went through the George Floyd uprising and a lot
Speaker 16: of energy has been funneled into labor, and it's been
Speaker 16: new voices in labor. It's not the same like you know,
Speaker 16: ten people now kind of talking. It's all of this
Speaker 16: new energy. And for the most part, most of Portland
Speaker 16: labor is being very accommodating and making room for those
Speaker 16: people to get in there and be heard because folks
Speaker 16: recognize that they're on their way out right, you know,
Speaker 16: Folks in their fifties or sixties, like they're they're towards retirement, right,
Speaker 16: and so it's as younger folks coming in that are
Speaker 16: going to change.
Speaker 4: It, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think there's an interesting dynamic with this too,
Speaker 2: which is that, you know, okay, one of the one
Speaker 2: of the sort of conditions of the last sort of
Speaker 2: like forty fifty years of capitalism, like is this sort
Speaker 2: of high total turnover rates? And also is this, you know,
Speaker 2: is this thing where you are, like you as an
Speaker 2: individual worker are shifting jobs really really quickly, and that
Speaker 2: you know, that's in some sense an issue. But that
Speaker 2: also means that like I don't know, like if you
Speaker 2: have a bunch of people who you know, spent like
Speaker 2: spent one hundred days fighting the Feds and you know
Speaker 2: still still may like have have developed just like the
Speaker 2: sort of bilted hatred of the cops and you know,
Speaker 2: I've developed sort of and into capitalist politics. Yeah, you
Speaker 2: get more of the sort of salt stuff you're talking about,
Speaker 2: because like, you know, screw like you know, you're if
Speaker 2: you're gonna be working like a ship job anyways, you
Speaker 2: might as well like go work one where you're saulting
Speaker 2: and starting a union because there's not actually like I
Speaker 2: don't know's it's not. It's not it's not like you're
Speaker 2: like getting career advancement in the service job, right, And yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean that seems to be driving like at least
Speaker 2: some of the sort of of how this kind of
Speaker 2: like how the independent union union organizing in Portland's been moving. Yeah.
Speaker 10: I think I'd also like to point out though that
Speaker 10: like a lot of people for our union, specifically New
Speaker 10: Seasons has always been like the progressive business and you've
Speaker 10: always had a reputation of like being a great place
Speaker 10: to work. They're really inclusive or whatever. So that's what
Speaker 10: attracts like a certain crowd of people, and when they
Speaker 10: get there and they realize that, like they're getting screwed over,
Speaker 10: just like any other place that they've ever been at,
Speaker 10: that like fosters this new feeling of like, well, I'm
Speaker 10: vulnerable no matter what I do, Like there's no where
Speaker 10: I can turn to trust my employer, and how do
Speaker 10: I preserve what little dignity that I do have at
Speaker 10: this workplace? Because generally speaking, like our jobs are pretty
Speaker 10: okay minus like the corporate business side of things, like
Speaker 10: most people enjoy going to work, maybe, but they they
Speaker 10: want to enjoy going to work. So having that like
Speaker 10: kind of double edged sword has been a cat for
Speaker 10: us to just built.
Speaker 6: On what Alex said too.
Speaker 16: I think it's really interesting that a lot of the
Speaker 16: surge in new like independent union stuff has been you know,
Speaker 16: new seasons, Starbucks to a degree, Rii, Trader Joe. It's
Speaker 16: all these places, these progressive workplaces, right, And what's happened
Speaker 16: is that so often we've had interactions with customers where
Speaker 16: they go, wow, I assumed that the prices were so
Speaker 16: high because your wages were high, and really, dude, like
Speaker 16: most of us can't afford to live in the city, right,
Speaker 16: most of us are using Yeah, and it's just not
Speaker 16: it's not true, right, And so you know, it's workers
Speaker 16: who get jobs at these progressive places that drank the
Speaker 16: similar social kool aid that the customers drink. But assuming
Speaker 16: that these businesses have good business practices, and what's happening
Speaker 16: is that they're just getting greedy, right, This is the
Speaker 16: case everywhere.
Speaker 6: It just hits a.
Speaker 16: Little bit different when your employer pretends your friends and
Speaker 16: then stabs you in the back.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Not all workplaces have this kind of like oh, we're
Speaker 2: like progressive sort of vibes. But I feel like businesses
Speaker 2: that have that reputation are also more just more vulnerable.
Speaker 2: It's not just that like their workers like realize howyocritical
Speaker 2: it is. It means that they're It means that they're
Speaker 2: more vulnerable to sort of like damage to their reputation
Speaker 2: when people find out that, like oh my god, hold on,
Speaker 2: you're making how much money? Like yeah, and I think, yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't know, I'm interested, like how how effective has
Speaker 2: that been for you? Sort of like leveraging that.
Speaker 6: I think it's been really effective.
Speaker 16: I mean, you know, and not just as I think
Speaker 16: a really good example of exactly what you're talking about, right,
Speaker 16: is the shareholders of Starbucks are holding Howard Schultz accountable
Speaker 16: because he is wrecking that company, right. And so with
Speaker 16: New Seasons, what it means is that they play a
Speaker 16: very sneaky game. They fight us in the back room.
Speaker 16: They make sure it's not public facing anything we can
Speaker 16: do to attack their public image, like it hurts. I
Speaker 16: will say too that you know, we're kind of standing
Speaker 16: on the shoulders of Burgerville Workers Union here where Burgerville
Speaker 16: was built on this reputation of like local friendly, like
Speaker 16: we're the alternative to like corporate fast food, and they
Speaker 16: had security guards and strikebusters literally fighting with picketers in
Speaker 16: the past and it tanked the reputation.
Speaker 2: And so New Season's.
Speaker 16: Management has clearly looked at what Burgerville management did and
Speaker 16: been like, we're not going to do that. It doesn't
Speaker 16: stop them from being pitty. They're just they're more polite
Speaker 16: when they're pretty to us. They're still just as shitty.
Speaker 2: They're just they smile while they stab us in the back. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So on the subject just of stebbing us in the back.
Speaker 2: So there's been a bunch of stuff going on recently.
Speaker 2: I was wondering if you could talk about like the
Speaker 2: I don't know, the recent unrest question mark need to
Speaker 2: figure out a better way to phrase this.
Speaker 10: But yeah, yeah, so yeah, we've been building up. We have,
Speaker 10: i mean since day one of bargaining, which started back
Speaker 10: in like December or January.
Speaker 6: It started in January.
Speaker 10: Yeah, So we we've known that eventually it's going to
Speaker 10: get to a point where we're going to need to
Speaker 10: show some force. So, you know, we go in there
Speaker 10: with good faith, and little by little we find out
Speaker 10: that the smallest ask is going to be impossible, and
Speaker 10: we find out that they're going to do whatever they
Speaker 10: can get away with every time they can. So they
Speaker 10: started with I mean, they did all kinds of things,
Speaker 10: but the one catalyst is they changed the attendance policy
Speaker 10: for non union.
Speaker 3: Workers and non union stores to.
Speaker 10: Make it more lenient, which was one of the issues
Speaker 10: that we campaigned on was the attendance policy because it's
Speaker 10: ridiculous and people get fired all the time. So we
Speaker 10: demanded the bargain. They didn't have a response. We brought
Speaker 10: it up in bargaining at the bargaining table. They said
Speaker 10: that they would work on something that we could implement
Speaker 10: before we ratify the contract, but they had to put
Speaker 10: it through their DEI lens and they had to yeah, yeah,
Speaker 10: and you know all the things that corporations say to
Speaker 10: delay it and kick the can down the road. So
Speaker 10: we're Dylan good faith saying like, okay, you know, go ahead.
Speaker 10: So then we did a petition where all the stores
Speaker 10: individually had people sign a petition. We got hundreds of signatures,
Speaker 10: and then we did a march on the boss asking
Speaker 10: them to sign this MoU that a memorandum of understanding
Speaker 10: saying you will give us that same policy. We filed
Speaker 10: a ULP saying like this is illegal, it's obvious discrimination,
Speaker 10: and then they just kept saying, Okay, we're working on it.
Speaker 10: We're working on it, We're working on it.
Speaker 2: So they never did.
Speaker 10: Then we did a rally and we showed up at
Speaker 10: the headquarters with I don't know, probably two hundred of
Speaker 10: us hell yeah, and marched up to the office and
Speaker 10: chanted and made a scene and told them they have
Speaker 10: one more chance to sign the MoU. They didn't sign it.
Speaker 10: So then we organized the strikes at the two stores
Speaker 10: and gave them one more chance to sign the MoU.
Speaker 10: They didn't sign it. We already knew they weren't going
Speaker 10: to So yeah, we shut down those stores for the
Speaker 10: rest of the day at Grant Park and for one
Speaker 10: hour at ourbor Lodge.
Speaker 2: And it was powerful.
Speaker 14: We had a lot of support, a lot of people
Speaker 14: showed up.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and to build on that too.
Speaker 16: You know, there's things coming up that we can't talk
Speaker 16: about yet, but I would say that, Alex, do you
Speaker 16: want to talk about the practice picketing?
Speaker 6: I feel like we could talk about.
Speaker 10: That, Okay, so we actually can talk about We've just
Speaker 10: filed a ULP, yeah, last night for bad faith bargaining.
Speaker 2: Yeahs an unfair labor practice.
Speaker 10: Yes, thank you. I get caught up in the jargon.
Speaker 10: So we just filed that last night for bad faith
Speaker 10: bargaining yep, because they gave us the most ridiculous policy
Speaker 10: for attendance. It's basically regressive bargaining, which is totally unfair.
Speaker 2: Yeah, do you want to explain what that is?
Speaker 16: Basically, the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board. They oversee
Speaker 16: unions and the relationship between unions and employers. They demand
Speaker 16: that both sides come in good faith, basically like don't
Speaker 16: screw around, don't waste each other's time.
Speaker 6: The goal is to move towards some sort of comp and.
Speaker 16: An agreement, and regressive bargaining is when you backpedal and
Speaker 16: you offer something that is worse than what was offered.
Speaker 16: The attendance policy is, in my opinion, definitely worse.
Speaker 6: It is no better.
Speaker 16: I think it frankly takes the shittiest things of the
Speaker 16: past two policies and put them together. So it seems
Speaker 16: pretty clear to us that it's regressive. And then we
Speaker 16: can argue that New Seasons is not acting in good faith.
Speaker 16: They are acting in bad faith, which is illegal according
Speaker 16: to the NRB. And so what we are allowed to
Speaker 16: do is file an unfair labor practice, which basically, you know,
Speaker 16: it doesn't hold a lot of weight materially, however, symbolically
Speaker 16: it looks really bad. And so again going back to
Speaker 16: like Mia, what you were saying about kind of like
Speaker 16: their image, right, Like these kind of progressive corporations, they
Speaker 16: don't want to look like the bastards they are.
Speaker 6: And a ULP makes it pretty clear, Hey, this person's.
Speaker 16: Being a jerk, this company is being a jerk. So
Speaker 16: the more ulps that we get filed that like, we win.
Speaker 16: On the bigger case. We can paint that New seasons
Speaker 16: is actually being really unfair to us.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 10: So then based on that, we're getting strike ready. We're
Speaker 10: making sure everybody can show up and be ready to
Speaker 10: assert our stance. We're not going to just lay back
Speaker 10: and let them take over. So we're going to do
Speaker 10: some practice pickets. And I'm sure even hearing that a lot,
Speaker 10: which is great for I mean, and if you want
Speaker 10: to bring it back to like the higher turnover rate
Speaker 10: and like, you know, the general apathy that you see
Speaker 10: in any union, people are just kind of afraid to
Speaker 10: be active. So we're looking at practice pickets as a
Speaker 10: way to get people involved in a really low risk activity.
Speaker 2: Can you explain how that works? Yeah, So what we're
Speaker 2: going to do.
Speaker 10: Is each store will do a picket, but that picket
Speaker 10: will not be a strike.
Speaker 3: That picket will not.
Speaker 10: Encourage shoppers to leave or discourage shopping in any way.
Speaker 10: We're not calling for a boycott. We're just simply doing logistically,
Speaker 10: what does it look like if we do a picket
Speaker 10: at each store in the most peaceful way possible, and
Speaker 10: then we do that at every store and we kind
Speaker 10: of gauge, like, you know, how ready are we.
Speaker 16: And by doing that too it's a show of force
Speaker 16: to the company, right, Yeah, it's not We're not doing
Speaker 16: anything illegal. It's effectively an informational picket. So legally there's
Speaker 16: nothing that New Seasons can do to any of the
Speaker 16: workers who participate in it.
Speaker 6: However, they will absolutely see that we are prepared.
Speaker 16: To do it. The team Staris recently did this for ups.
Speaker 16: A lot of teachers' unions have done similar things. It's
Speaker 16: a really can go a force to kind of leverage
Speaker 16: your people power and show the management that you're ready.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it has another it has another effect too,
Speaker 2: which is something that you know, the the kind of
Speaker 2: basic cultural understanding of you know, what unions are, how
Speaker 2: they function, what you need to be doing any given scenario,
Speaker 2: like me just physically, how to like do picketts, what
Speaker 2: you logistically need to do. That stuff has all sort
Speaker 2: of faded from like the height of union sort of
Speaker 2: culture in like the sixties and seventies, and that's something
Speaker 2: that you have to rebuild because you know, and and
Speaker 2: and then and this is this is something that's both
Speaker 2: both in terms of the people in the union. That
Speaker 2: sort of knowledge isituitional knowledge has to be rebuilt, and
Speaker 2: it also has to be rebuilt in the public because
Speaker 2: people sort of just don't you know, like you support
Speaker 2: for unions is really high, uh, but people don't understand
Speaker 2: exactly what like you know, people, people don't understand exactly
Speaker 2: what a union is doing any given time, or like
Speaker 2: how it functions and things like that.
Speaker 4: And you know, then this is this.
Speaker 2: Seems like a really good way to like, you know, like, hey,
Speaker 2: this is a picket. This is what happens when there's
Speaker 2: a picket. This is an informational picket. We're gonna give
Speaker 2: you information. And yes, it seems like a good thing
Speaker 2: for building up that kind of culture on both ends.
Speaker 16: And it's a really good opportunity to talk to customers
Speaker 16: get them involved. That's the thing that's that you know,
Speaker 16: New Seasons kind of tagline as the friendliest store in town.
Speaker 16: And then the way that they built that, Yeah, the
Speaker 16: way that they built that reputation though, was by really
Speaker 16: encouraging workers to develop deep relationships with customers. And so
Speaker 16: we're using that to leverage against the company now and
Speaker 16: saying like hey, like you.
Speaker 6: Know you like me, like you know me by name,
Speaker 6: and I know you by name.
Speaker 16: You don't know the CEO by name, like let's talk
Speaker 16: Let's talk about like what we're asking for and what
Speaker 16: you as a customer can do to support us in
Speaker 16: a way that doesn't feel antagonistic. Right, Like like when
Speaker 16: we had the when we had the walkouts on Labor
Speaker 16: Day weekend, you know, we did a debrief and we're
Speaker 16: kind of like, how do we, like, how do we
Speaker 16: engage with people where we can hold onto our values
Speaker 16: and still feel like we're being effective. And Randy, a
Speaker 16: worker at our lodge, his solution instead of calling people
Speaker 16: who cross the picket line scabs and like you know,
Speaker 16: harassing that way, you know, he was like, I just said, like, hey,
Speaker 16: I'm disappointed in you, and I think that like like yeah,
Speaker 16: like let's just like we're gonna just like if you're
Speaker 16: going to cross the picket line, I don't need to
Speaker 16: hurl insults at you. I'm just going to guilt trip
Speaker 16: you and let you know that like I'm disappointed in
Speaker 16: you and like you will feel bad as you're shopping.
Speaker 16: And I think that like that's sort of how we
Speaker 16: can align the progressive values that attracted people to New
Speaker 16: Seasons to work there in the first place with how
Speaker 16: we do actions while still being militant, right, we don't
Speaker 16: want to be soft.
Speaker 6: We just got to make sure that like it vibes
Speaker 6: with what we're about, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's that's another you know, I think this
Speaker 2: this also gets back to the sort of culture part
Speaker 2: of it, which is like, yeah, like rebuilding the standard
Speaker 2: of do not cross a picket line is a thing
Speaker 2: that has to be done because that's again that's another
Speaker 2: thing that has sort of faded. And yeah, like guilt
Speaker 2: tripping people is a good way to do it because yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, like sort of especially especially sort of like
Speaker 2: middle and upper middle class progressive people, like really really
Speaker 2: there are a lot of their politics is about wanting
Speaker 2: to feel good about themselves and you know, make make.
Speaker 10: You they can see Yeah, I think if they can
Speaker 10: see themselves in us too, they will relate and they
Speaker 10: they won't want to go against their own values, which
Speaker 10: is our values, because that's the culture of Portland generally speaking.
Speaker 2: Did you have anything else that you want to make
Speaker 2: sure to get in before we wrap up?
Speaker 10: Yeah, we would love to push our gofund me.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 10: That can be found at our website, which is really
Speaker 10: hard to find.
Speaker 2: Is it a slut or but yeah, you have to
Speaker 2: type it in.
Speaker 16: You can't just google it.
Speaker 2: Okay, well we'll put it. We'll just we'll just put
Speaker 2: a link to it in the okay, cool.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 16: Yeah.
Speaker 10: If anybody you know we're out here being independent union.
Speaker 10: We have no money. We're just looking for maybe some
Speaker 10: sort of strike fund for those in need when we
Speaker 10: are strike ready, and also you know, materials, whatever people
Speaker 10: can donate would be amazing.
Speaker 16: Final notes I would say too, is that you know
Speaker 16: when we started this, I mean, we're an independent union
Speaker 16: of grocery workers, right.
Speaker 6: We did all of this in our volunteer time.
Speaker 16: None of us are lawyers, none of a lot of
Speaker 16: us had never been in a union before or had
Speaker 16: very limited experience. We build this all from the ground
Speaker 16: up with tons of volunteer hours of our own time
Speaker 16: after work. And we have gone toe to toe with
Speaker 16: Ogle Tree Deacons, who is one of the largest anti
Speaker 16: union law firms in the country. That's who New Seasons
Speaker 16: has retained. We've gone toe to toe with them. We
Speaker 16: have a lawyer now who is really graciously kind of
Speaker 16: letting us write her in IOU for the time being,
Speaker 16: But even before her, we were still able to hold
Speaker 16: her own against a major anti union law firm. Right,
Speaker 16: there is power in workers coming together collectively. It's not
Speaker 16: as easy as it should be to find that information,
Speaker 16: but it is out there and there are people who
Speaker 16: want to share it, and I would say that, like,
Speaker 16: for me, the labor movement has been a really empowering
Speaker 16: place to come into. You know, I have a lot
Speaker 16: of experience with sort of like leftists, like street activism,
Speaker 16: but I think that for anybody who wants to be
Speaker 16: involved in the struggle and is also like looking for
Speaker 16: ways to make.
Speaker 6: In rigs and develop community like.
Speaker 16: Labors where it's at right, I mean, we all work
Speaker 16: and to a degree, we all hit our jobs and
Speaker 16: have something to complain about, and like that's a commonality
Speaker 16: that stretches across the aisle and allows for a lot
Speaker 16: of solidarity in a way that the culture war really
Speaker 16: doesn't want and really, like you know, it's by design, right,
Speaker 16: the capitalists want us fighting against each other, and the
Speaker 16: labor movement is a way for the working class to
Speaker 16: unite because it's it's about class far.
Speaker 2: You know, yeah, here here, yeah, and you know this
Speaker 2: this should go without saying. I'm going to say it anyways,
Speaker 2: you also listener at home can do this too. There
Speaker 2: is you know, there there there there. There is nothing
Speaker 2: sort of magical or special about the people who do
Speaker 2: union organizing other than the fact that they decide to
Speaker 2: organize a union. So you can do this too. You
Speaker 2: can form an independent union and yeah, you can go
Speaker 2: hand your bosses a fucking gass and get better, you know,
Speaker 2: get better working conditions and get better things for you
Speaker 2: and your entire class in the process.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 16: I would say Labor Notes is a great resource for
Speaker 16: early information. The Coalition of Independent Unions is on Instagram
Speaker 16: and workers from around the country have reached out to
Speaker 16: them for advice. You know, on Instagram you can ask
Speaker 16: us questions. Reach out to independent unions and ask them questions.
Speaker 16: This is a labor movement made up of the workers
Speaker 16: for the workers. We want more workers to organize.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think on that note, Yeah, this has
Speaker 2: been Nike to happen here. Go into the world and fight. Yeah,
Speaker 2: thank you, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Maya Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every
Speaker 1: week from now until the heat death of the universe.
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