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Speaker 3: How what about Nadella show I got tonight. He is
Speaker 3: a Protestant minister, social activist, Yale Divinity School professor whose
Speaker 3: latest book is called White Poverty. How exposing myths about
Speaker 3: race and class can reconstruct American Democracy? Please welcome to
Speaker 3: the show. Reverend Doctor William Barber.
Speaker 4: Sir A a pleagub The booty's called white poverty. I'm
Speaker 4: holding hell about everything. He's that white poverty. You, sir,
Speaker 4: are famously not twhite. Well, so why write white poverty?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 5: Actually, I come from Caucasian Black and tuscarro and descended.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 5: So, and my people are free people in eastern North
Speaker 5: Carolina A lot of those community and so in some
Speaker 5: ways this book is me, and so to deny any
Speaker 5: part of my reality would be to deny myself. But
Speaker 5: here's the problem. I'm concerned about the way we measure
Speaker 5: poverty in this country is not only a lie, but
Speaker 5: I can say on this show it's a damn lie, sir.
Speaker 3: You can do more than that if you are Okay, Okay, okay,
Speaker 3: we got plenty more roots room for that.
Speaker 5: I only use the ones that are approved by the Bible.
Speaker 6: Okay.
Speaker 5: So, but we say we use official poverty measure says
Speaker 5: that poverty if you make above thirteen thousand dollars a year,
Speaker 5: you're not poor. If you make about thirteen thousand dollars
Speaker 5: a year, you're not poor.
Speaker 1: You're kind of in the lower lower middle class.
Speaker 3: When was the last time they adjusted.
Speaker 5: Well, it's been since the sixties really in some ways.
Speaker 5: And so what happens with that is we marginalize poverty
Speaker 5: and then we racialize it. Whenever we have a a
Speaker 5: brief discussion about polity, because we're very seldom have it
Speaker 5: in the news in political arenas, we put up a
Speaker 5: black woman with the on welfare, which racializes and demeans
Speaker 5: black people, but then it dismisses tens of millions of
Speaker 5: white poor people.
Speaker 3: You right, this sixty sixty.
Speaker 5: Six million of the one hundred and thirty five million
Speaker 5: poor and low Watt people in this country. Sixty percent
Speaker 5: of black people are poor low well, that's twenty six million,
Speaker 5: thirty percent of white but that's sixty six million, forty
Speaker 5: million more. This book says we need to face all
Speaker 5: of our poor and recognize that we have something what
Speaker 5: Desmond because author out of Princeton, calls poverty by America,
Speaker 5: not the poverty in America, but the particular kind of
Speaker 5: poverty by America that's unnecessary and abolishable because.
Speaker 1: It makes no sense.
Speaker 5: In the richest nation in the world, we have over
Speaker 5: one hundred and thirty five million poor, low wage people,
Speaker 5: over forty one percent of our population, and over fifty
Speaker 5: percent of our children, and it's unnecessary. So white poverty says,
Speaker 5: we're not playing the game any.
Speaker 3: Let's not look at this through the prism of race.
Speaker 3: Let's look at it through class. And do you think
Speaker 3: that that division was a purposeful one?
Speaker 1: I think so.
Speaker 5: And to expand race, you have to deal with race
Speaker 5: in America. But what you cannot allow someone to do
Speaker 5: for something this serious where two hundred and ninety five
Speaker 5: thousand people are dying a year from poverty and low wage,
Speaker 5: how many two hunred nine five thousand, eight hundred people
Speaker 5: a day are.
Speaker 3: Dying, are dying from what they would consider probably prod.
Speaker 5: Is the fourth leading cause of death in the country,
Speaker 5: higher than respiratory disease.
Speaker 3: It even impacts respiratory disease because if you're low wage
Speaker 3: and you're living in an area, chances are the pollution
Speaker 3: and the toxes probably higher where you lift all of
Speaker 3: those things.
Speaker 5: And so here we have something that's the fourth leading
Speaker 5: cause of death, eight hundred people a day. When seven
Speaker 5: people died from vaping, it was a congressional hearing, it
Speaker 5: was presidential level.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: Imagine if eight hundred politicians were a day.
Speaker 3: Oh I have well, I can't do that.
Speaker 5: But my point is how everybody would be just up
Speaker 5: and our eight hundred middle class.
Speaker 3: One hundred thousand people, that's clearly epidemic.
Speaker 1: Right. You just talked about crime.
Speaker 5: That's a crime that's a former part and especially when
Speaker 5: it's unnecessary, it does not happen.
Speaker 3: And entrenched, it seems in a lot of communities. It's
Speaker 3: just it's a cloud that never lefts Well.
Speaker 5: The thing about it is John is in every community. See,
Speaker 5: that's the point we're making in the book. Whether it's
Speaker 5: Appalachia where I met women in West Virginia who have
Speaker 5: to sell tacos on Tuesdays, so they have a community
Speaker 5: fund to help women deal with their monthly issues. Or
Speaker 5: whether it's out in eastern Kentucky where I met black
Speaker 5: and white coal miners who watched the minds be taken
Speaker 5: over by multinational companies that moved the union rights out
Speaker 5: of it, or whether it's in the Delta, it's everywhere.
Speaker 5: There's not a counting in this country now where a
Speaker 5: person making seven twenty five that's what the minimum wage is.
Speaker 5: Federal minium wage is seven to twenty five. It's been
Speaker 5: like that for fourteen years. John has been raised for fourteen.
Speaker 3: They're trying to raise the tave in fifteen. I mean,
Speaker 3: the fight is everywhere you go. There's a huge fight
Speaker 3: about trying to bring it to fifteen. And it's going
Speaker 3: to kill all the jobs.
Speaker 5: Which is a lie. Three Nobel Peace Prize economists said
Speaker 5: it wouldn't kill jobs. In fact, would put more money
Speaker 5: in the economy and it would actually expand jobs.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing. We had.
Speaker 5: Fifteen in a union proposed in twenty twenty eight. Democrats
Speaker 5: and every Republican stood against fifty five million people, fifty
Speaker 5: five million people who make fifty two million people who
Speaker 5: make less than a living wage of fifteen dollars out
Speaker 5: Now here's the thing. In sixty three, the March on
Speaker 5: Washington called for a raise of the minimum wage to
Speaker 5: two dollars, which, index with inflation, would be over fifteen
Speaker 5: to day.
Speaker 1: Really yes, and.
Speaker 3: People forget The March on Washington sixty three was titled.
Speaker 5: For jobs and justice, and justice it wasn't just about
Speaker 5: black civil rights. It was about a broad, inclusive, just
Speaker 5: feel democracy. And so here we are in this reality
Speaker 5: and people are hurting everywhere. There's not a county where
Speaker 5: you can work a minima's job and afford a basic
Speaker 5: two bedroom apartment and waiters and waitresses.
Speaker 1: On minimum minimum wage.
Speaker 3: Not a county in the country.
Speaker 1: Not a county in the country couldn't.
Speaker 3: If you had a minimum wage job. There's not a
Speaker 3: county in this country where you could afford it.
Speaker 1: To, not a federal federal noe, you couldn't.
Speaker 3: And this is the working pour.
Speaker 1: This isn't you know.
Speaker 3: I think in the country there's a sense of it's
Speaker 3: an entitlement mentality. That's why there's a certain character flaw
Speaker 3: that keeps you there. These are people that are working.
Speaker 5: The entitlement is and in the politicians that keep raising
Speaker 5: their wages and giving corporations tax breaks, but they won't
Speaker 5: help the working people. That's the entitlement rank. So and
Speaker 5: we're talking about during COVID. COVID did not exacerbate poverty.
Speaker 5: It exposed it. And what we did a study called
Speaker 5: the death during COVID, and we found out whether you
Speaker 5: were in a poor county in West Virginia or a
Speaker 5: poor county in the Delta, poor people died at the
Speaker 5: rate three to five times higher during COVID because of
Speaker 5: their poverty, not because.
Speaker 1: The germ somehow discriminated. But we did access to get well.
Speaker 5: Three hundred and fifty thousand people died during COVID so far,
Speaker 5: one storey said. Study said from the lack of health care.
Speaker 5: And if you don't face this job, this is the
Speaker 5: point of the book. We have to face this, we
Speaker 5: have to look at it. We had fifteen presidential debates
Speaker 5: and the last election forty percent of the adult population
Speaker 5: in poverty, eight hundred people dying a day. Not one
Speaker 5: debate was focused on it. We've not had an Oval
Speaker 5: Office discussion.
Speaker 3: I think why don't politicians value what is an incredibly
Speaker 3: large population in many different I'm sure in swing states,
Speaker 3: So why don't they do? Poor people need better lobbyists.
Speaker 3: What is it that can be done to get a
Speaker 3: politician to listen?
Speaker 5: Well, I think that what we're saying now is we
Speaker 5: just had a study. I asked her to be done
Speaker 5: as a part of our movement Waking the Sleeping Giant,
Speaker 5: and this is what we found out. That all of
Speaker 5: these numbers also tell us that poor, low waste people
Speaker 5: now represent thirty percent of the elector in.
Speaker 3: The country, thirty.
Speaker 5: And over forty percent in states where the margin of
Speaker 5: victory was less than three percent, and it's Texas where's
Speaker 5: less than five percent.
Speaker 1: So what we're.
Speaker 5: Saying to poor and low waste people of every race
Speaker 5: is time to mobilize your vote. There's not a state
Speaker 5: where if twenty percent of poor, low wage voters that
Speaker 5: didn't vote, fifty seven million voted, thirty million didn't then
Speaker 5: the last election. But if twenty percent that didn't vote moved,
Speaker 5: they could change every election. And in most states Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida,
Speaker 5: it's less than four percent. So what we're doing is
Speaker 5: organizing a massive movement. In fact, on June twenty ninth
Speaker 5: in washing DC, there's gonna be a massive poor people,
Speaker 5: low wage workers assembler in marl march on DC and
Speaker 5: to the polls, saying that poor and low wage people
Speaker 5: have to find themselves white, black, brown, Asian Native and
Speaker 5: unite around attacking what we call five interlocking injustice systemic racism,
Speaker 5: systemic poverty, ecological devastation, denial health care, the war economy,
Speaker 5: and the false moder natural religious nationalism. Wow, and John,
Speaker 5: you know in our gender, we're saying to Calton, if
Speaker 5: you want these votes, bring them in at the top level.
Speaker 5: President Biden, bring a group of poor, low wage folks
Speaker 5: and religious leaders to the White House.
Speaker 3: If people even listen to them, do they even? What
Speaker 3: is the response been when you reach out to our
Speaker 3: political class.
Speaker 5: What's the response been, Well, because we've been lied to
Speaker 5: so much, you know these at first they said, well,
Speaker 5: it's not that big, and then we prove that it's
Speaker 5: actually one hundred and thirty five hundred four men, and
Speaker 5: then they don't expect that people are going to organize.
Speaker 5: You know, in a democracy, you have to engage in agitation, legislation,
Speaker 5: litigation and voter participation.
Speaker 1: So what we're saying, the poor and.
Speaker 5: Low waite vote, let's use this power, right, And so
Speaker 5: we're having this gathering before the conventions. We're gonna touch
Speaker 5: fifteen million poor and lower wage voters with the facts
Speaker 5: on where people stay in a non partisan where they
Speaker 5: stand on the issues, and say let's mobilize and we because.
Speaker 1: That's the true swing vote.
Speaker 5: So Linda Lake, who's a major poster, says, the truest,
Speaker 5: most powerful, biggest swing vote right now is poor and
Speaker 5: lower waged people. And you know, John Folk often asked, men,
Speaker 5: you and I have talked about this is does our
Speaker 5: current society required things be like this?
Speaker 1: This was the real Crux sedition.
Speaker 5: And what this book says is, well, it's kind of
Speaker 5: like putting your hand in an electric socket that's connected.
Speaker 5: It requires that you get shot because you put your
Speaker 5: finger there. You don't have to do it. But if
Speaker 5: you keep doing things the way you are doing it,
Speaker 5: you're going to get shot. So if you keep paying
Speaker 5: less than a living wage, if you keep denying people
Speaker 5: health care, if you keep giving greedy, wealthy folk two
Speaker 5: trillion dollars tax cuts, but you won't even spend the
Speaker 5: money to fully fund public education. If we keep doing
Speaker 5: what we're doing, we're going to keep having the level
Speaker 5: of poverty that we're having and we don't have to
Speaker 5: do it.
Speaker 1: It is actually, I believe.
Speaker 5: Criminal a form of a policy violence to continue down
Speaker 5: the road.
Speaker 3: And doesn't it weaken the system as a whole. You know,
Speaker 3: you could almost make the case that if the system
Speaker 3: is requiring a permanent, entrenched underclass, and it makes itself
Speaker 3: ripe for instability. And I'm wondering, is there a way
Speaker 3: to change the mindset because the mindset in America is
Speaker 3: there is a moucher class. These poor people are mutures
Speaker 3: and they're taking resources from me. I work hard, they
Speaker 3: get poor people get healthcare, they get food, they get
Speaker 3: whatever they need. I don't get it. Is there a
Speaker 3: way to change the mentality to view things not as
Speaker 3: entitlements but investments, and maybe to get labor not to
Speaker 3: be viewed as shareholders. That corporations have to view labor
Speaker 3: not as a means to an ends, but as shareholders
Speaker 3: in that and cannot change the dynamic.
Speaker 5: It can, but one of the first things that we
Speaker 5: believe we have to do, and we talk about Maral
Speaker 5: fusion organizing is First of all, we should be examining
Speaker 5: every policy, not by the color of a president's hair,
Speaker 5: or how many porn stars he touched, or how.
Speaker 1: Or what's the gate of his walk.
Speaker 5: Does the policies you propose do they line up with
Speaker 5: a staflishing justice? Do they line up with providing for
Speaker 5: the common defense and promoting the general welfare? Do they
Speaker 5: line up with our deepest marligious right. Secondly, we must
Speaker 5: expose the level of death that's happening, because this is
Speaker 5: not benign. Thirdly, we must make sure that folks see
Speaker 5: at all that it's not one group of people we've
Speaker 5: been lied to so much about. This is an anomaly,
Speaker 5: This is just a small grid. We cannot allow this
Speaker 5: to be marginalizing itmore. And then we must have massive
Speaker 5: organization of poor of every place, every geographic, at every race,
Speaker 5: And in doing that we can put poverty and low
Speaker 5: wages at the center of our political discourse.
Speaker 1: And then yes, isn't that isn't that America?
Speaker 3: First? Isn't that making America great again? Like if you
Speaker 3: hollow out a country, how can you expect it to
Speaker 3: be strong? Wouldn't that be the absolute acme of strengthening
Speaker 3: a country from the bottom up as opposed to the
Speaker 3: top down.
Speaker 1: You would think it would be.
Speaker 5: But if you've got people that are still living when
Speaker 5: they first wrote the Constitution and said even poor white
Speaker 5: men that didn't own jobs or they didn't own land
Speaker 5: couldn't vote. If you have people with that kind of
Speaker 5: mentality that this should be an exclusive democracy, that an inclusive.
Speaker 5: But listen, the numbers tell us though they're more of us.
Speaker 5: The thing is, you can't be lazy in a democracy.
Speaker 5: You got to fight like heaven.
Speaker 3: I mean, the count.
Speaker 1: I mean, and what we're trying to show people. The
Speaker 1: numbers are now. Listen.
Speaker 5: Wisconsin marginal victory twenty thousand vote number poor low wage
Speaker 5: voters didn't vote. Over a million didn't vote. Didn't vote.
Speaker 5: Michigan ten thousand votes. The number poor low ways vote
Speaker 5: a million, Pennsylvania forty thousand votes determined the president number
Speaker 5: poor low wage voted two million, North Carolina one hundred
Speaker 5: and sixty thousand over a million. So it's not a
Speaker 5: big lift. And the number one reason though we did
Speaker 5: a study called Waking the Sleeping Giant, that poor low
Speaker 5: waste people didn't vote. Nobody talks to them politicians don't
Speaker 5: go in those communities. I've gone in communities and people
Speaker 5: literally cry and say red Bober. Nobody comes back here.
Speaker 5: And so what I say to them is, we're back
Speaker 5: here now, but less mobilized, to make sure they never
Speaker 5: forget you again, that they never forget you ever again.
Speaker 6: White poverty abound.
Speaker 7: Now.
Speaker 1: Welcome out to the Daily Show.
Speaker 7: My guest tonight is a global economics correspondent for The
Speaker 7: New York Times and author of the new book How
Speaker 7: the World Ran out of Everything Inside the Global Supply Chain.
Speaker 7: Please welcome Peter Goodman. So, how the world ran out
Speaker 7: of everything? During COVID we ran out of toilet paper,
Speaker 7: baby formula, computer chips. We had cars that were ready
Speaker 7: to run, but no computer chips. What the happened? And
Speaker 7: did we fix it?
Speaker 8: We have not fixed it. I'm sorry to say. The
Speaker 8: vulnerabilities are still there. What happened was a reveal of
Speaker 8: something that had been there for decades. We are dependent
Speaker 8: upon this really improvised, ad hoc rickety supply chain.
Speaker 6: It's really a bunch of supply chains.
Speaker 8: We've been devoted to this kind of reckless, ruthless form
Speaker 8: of deregulation.
Speaker 6: And during the pandemic.
Speaker 8: Just as we were in our darkest hour of need,
Speaker 8: it buckled, and yeah, we ran out a lot of stuff.
Speaker 7: When I was reading your book, I kept asking myself
Speaker 7: the same question, which was, why don't we just make
Speaker 7: this shit here?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 7: Why aren't we making all of the shit here? Well,
Speaker 7: but you you answer that, but explain, explain it. Explain
Speaker 7: to me again.
Speaker 8: We could make more things here, and there's a movement
Speaker 8: to make more things here, and that's helpful. It's in
Speaker 8: the margins. But we're not going back to self sufficiency. Look,
Speaker 8: if there was no trade, you and me wouldn't be
Speaker 8: having this conversation. We'd be out trying to feed our
Speaker 8: families with bark or whatever. Right, And you know I'm
Speaker 8: not that good at growing food.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you're not either.
Speaker 6: So here we are.
Speaker 8: We're dependent upon a gold I.
Speaker 7: I did lose a tomato in the wind last night
Speaker 7: on my rooftop.
Speaker 6: Garden, but good luck with that.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I don't want to try to feed my family
Speaker 8: through my own labor. So we have trade, and we've
Speaker 8: got a lot of jobs in this country that are
Speaker 8: upon a global supply chain. And it's been a consumer
Speaker 8: of bonanza we've just done a very poor job cushioning
Speaker 8: the people who've lost jobs. We don't need to throw
Speaker 8: out globalization, we need to reconfigure it. We need sensible regulations.
Speaker 8: We need working people to get more of a piece
Speaker 8: of the action so we have a more reliable supply chain.
Speaker 7: You tell the story in the book about one company
Speaker 7: that is trying to make these glow in the Dark toys,
Speaker 7: even has a contract with Sesames Trade, and he wants
Speaker 7: to actually use American manufacturing, but can't find American manufacturers
Speaker 7: to do it right.
Speaker 8: I mean, he calls around these are these I follow
Speaker 8: this one container from a factory in China to the
Speaker 8: west coast of the United States and then across the
Speaker 8: continent to Starkville, Mississippi, where his warehouse space. He couldn't
Speaker 8: find somebody to make the molds for these products unless
Speaker 8: he paid twelve times as much as the price in China.
Speaker 8: You try to get somebody to make up kind of
Speaker 8: children's pop up book style package for his products, and
Speaker 8: he was told, this is just too complicated, go make
Speaker 8: this in China.
Speaker 6: It was the path of least resistance.
Speaker 7: You follow this path, this container ship from China all
Speaker 7: the way to Mississippi and literally this is this is
Speaker 7: the path it takes.
Speaker 1: I mean it is.
Speaker 6: It's a harrowing journey.
Speaker 7: And as an American that buys a lot of stuff, yeah,
Speaker 7: I'm going, holy shit, I didn't know that all this happened.
Speaker 7: I just pressed click and then it shows up.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well then it worked.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 7: Do I do we need to buy less dumb shit?
Speaker 7: I know that's like not the most intellectual question. Do
Speaker 7: we need to buy less dumb ship?
Speaker 6: It's a legitimate question.
Speaker 8: Look, I rode for three days with a long haul
Speaker 8: truck driver from Kansas City to Dallas and back.
Speaker 7: That sounds like my worst nightmare.
Speaker 8: It's everyone's worst nightmare, which is why we don't have
Speaker 8: enough truck drivers. And the best part of that moment,
Speaker 8: we're somewhere in Oklahoma and this truck driver looks out
Speaker 8: the window and he says, people just buy too much
Speaker 8: the word you just use. And we could we could
Speaker 8: do well thinking more carefully about what we buy and
Speaker 8: what we need. But let's face it, like we're going
Speaker 8: to keep making stuff, We're going to keep consuming stuff.
Speaker 8: The question is are we going to have a more
Speaker 8: resilient supply chain or one that's just optimized for basically
Speaker 8: big box retailers and investors, because that's what we've had
Speaker 8: now for decades.
Speaker 7: I had before reading your book, I had always kind
Speaker 7: of seen China as this aggressor that has taken American
Speaker 7: jobs and manufacturing. And do you feel that's the case.
Speaker 7: Is that an accurate portrayals I think what you painted
Speaker 7: the picture so well in here was that it's American
Speaker 7: business executives, right, that are saying we can make more money.
Speaker 7: It's not the American worker that's saying this, it's the executive.
Speaker 8: Factory jobs moved to China because publicly traded corporations governed
Speaker 8: by the imperative to lower their costs and produce lower
Speaker 8: priced products, but fattened their margins as well.
Speaker 6: They sent production to China.
Speaker 8: They were encouraged to go there by the investor class,
Speaker 8: and it worked out really well for them. And look,
Speaker 8: this is an old story, right, Chinese labor was brought
Speaker 8: in to build the railroad. Talk about the States, Yeah,
Speaker 8: and the Walmart going to the People's Republic of China.
Speaker 8: That's just a continuation of the old story of basically
Speaker 8: undercutting American labor unions, undercutting American working people. These are decisions,
Speaker 8: you know, the hollowing out of our factory towns that
Speaker 8: are not made in Beijing. These are decisions made in
Speaker 8: boardrooms in New York and Seattle.
Speaker 6: In Congress, It's.
Speaker 7: Not always portrayed that way, right, you know, it's portrayed
Speaker 7: as there's China taking our economy.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 7: But what we have a big debate coming up Thursday night.
Speaker 7: Trump in correct me if I'm wrong, But Trump puts
Speaker 7: some tariffs on China, and Biden has kept a lot of.
Speaker 6: Those, has advanced them, has advanced that.
Speaker 7: What can we expect when this question comes up Thursday night?
Speaker 7: Where do they stand on?
Speaker 8: You know, I don't know how much nuance there will
Speaker 8: be in that debate, but let's face it, there are.
Speaker 7: Very few things I think, well, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 8: There are not many things that garner agreement in American policies,
Speaker 8: but one of them, unfortunately, is the sort of cartoonish
Speaker 8: depiction of China as this job killing juggernaut without any
Speaker 8: of the details that we've already discussed. I mean, I
Speaker 8: think in terms of the differences between these two candidates,
Speaker 8: Donald Trump is a threat to the global supply chain.
Speaker 8: He's proud to be a threat to the global supply chain.
Speaker 8: He likes the photo op of slapping tariffs on steel
Speaker 8: and mugging for the cameras with steel workers going back
Speaker 8: to Wark. Never mind that there are six to eight
Speaker 8: times as many people who go to work at factories
Speaker 8: in America that buy steal as there are people who
Speaker 8: make steel, so those companies are less competitive.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 8: Biden is also bashing China. This is a bipartisan initiative,
Speaker 8: but it's a much more nuanced kind of industrial policy.
Speaker 8: It's less about containing China's rise. I mean, Trump is
Speaker 8: really about let's have a cold war with China. Biden
Speaker 8: is more let's embrace industrial policy. Let's try to make electric.
Speaker 6: Vehicles in the US. These are some significant difference.
Speaker 7: I was in Vermont this weekend performing I eat a
Speaker 7: lot of ice cream in my life. I wanted to
Speaker 7: go see the Ben and Jerry's ice cream factory where.
Speaker 1: It all started.
Speaker 7: These were two men in nineteen seventy eight who started
Speaker 7: making ice cream out of a gas station. And then,
Speaker 7: as I kind of dug into it, I was also
Speaker 7: reading your book. It's kind of a perfect tie in,
Speaker 7: I realized, Oh, they sold the company to Unilever in
Speaker 7: year two thousand and all of a sudden, these two
Speaker 7: men who really care about keeping things local, who really
Speaker 7: cared about social issues. It felt like the big evil
Speaker 7: corporation was constantly pushing back against them and was constantly
Speaker 7: looking at profit margins. Is there something that I can
Speaker 7: feel optimistic about? Is capitalism always just defeat us? And
Speaker 7: these two little Ben and Jerryman scoop it's capitalism.
Speaker 8: I mean, you know, the people who benefit from the
Speaker 8: status quot would have us believe that regulating in taxiing
Speaker 8: and enforcing anti trust laws, we might as well, you know,
Speaker 8: be advocating Venezuela style, you know, I mean, it's just nonsensical, right,
Speaker 8: Capitalism needs markets, Markets need regulation.
Speaker 6: They can't function with that.
Speaker 8: But in terms of what we can do, you know,
Speaker 8: consumers are not going to save us from the vulnerabilities
Speaker 8: in the globally comty.
Speaker 7: We're busy dealing with y So I can I can
Speaker 7: keep buying plastic shit from my four year old daughter
Speaker 7: on Amazon.
Speaker 6: I'm not turning you in. I mean it's gonna take anti.
Speaker 8: Trust enforcement, labor mobilization so that working people get a
Speaker 8: piece of the action, so they're less likely to quit
Speaker 8: their jobs in the middle of a pandemic. I mean,
Speaker 8: you know, Henry Ford, problematic character Newer a thing or
Speaker 8: two about making things in the supply chain, you know,
Speaker 8: he said explicitly as he raised wages for workers in
Speaker 8: twenty fourteen and was called a communist by some. He said,
Speaker 8: I just want to make things reliably. Any business that's
Speaker 8: premised on low wage labor is inherently unstable.
Speaker 7: Right And that's where we're at right now.
Speaker 8: It feels like normalcy is built on this idea that
Speaker 8: huge numbers of people have to do dangerous jobs away
Speaker 8: from their families, with little control or understanding about their schedules,
Speaker 8: and they just have to suck that up for the
Speaker 8: benefit of our sort of just in time, ruthlessly efficient
Speaker 8: that turns out not to be so efficient global economy.
Speaker 7: You personally that I can steal from you? What can
Speaker 7: I do? What do you do? What any habits of
Speaker 7: yours that have changed since researching and writing this?
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean I try to give my business to
Speaker 8: people who are actually in control of their businesses. I mean,
Speaker 8: if you're mostly transacting with big companies that are answerable
Speaker 8: to Wall Street, then you're ultimately transacting with entities that
Speaker 8: are thinking about shareholder interests a bubble. They can't afford
Speaker 8: to be kind to their workers necessarily because their competitors aren't.
Speaker 8: They can't afford to think about keeping production local, they
Speaker 8: can't think about the highest quality ingredients, and they can't
Speaker 8: think beyond the next quarter. So certainly local small production.
Speaker 8: But again, consumers are not going to say of us
Speaker 8: from the vulnerability and the global supply chain. It's going
Speaker 8: to take regulation, it's going to take labor mobilization.
Speaker 7: But it helps to know that my fourteen dollars strawberries
Speaker 7: at the farmers' market is probably going to better use
Speaker 7: than the nine dollars strawberries at the Amazon.
Speaker 6: You need to boltop somewhere else, exactly.
Speaker 7: These are the celebrity prices that I get.
Speaker 6: Look how the world.
Speaker 1: Ran out of?
Speaker 3: Everything is available now, Peter Goodman.
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