Speaker 1: Adcast. All right, Chris, you go, so welcome, Welcome to
Speaker 1: it could happen here a podcast that I think, for
Speaker 1: the first time is just me and Robert. This is
Speaker 1: this is the very first time that this is happening.
Speaker 1: You're you're all here at a moment of legendary significance
Speaker 1: and historic importance. So try to try to face it
Speaker 1: with the requisite all that's all I ask, yes, And
Speaker 1: another thing that, man, this is a terrible transition. Something
Speaker 1: else we're facing with requisite awe is weird shortages of
Speaker 1: goods and price increases. M So it's fucking rad. I
Speaker 1: was just at the Asian market today, Um, and they
Speaker 1: did not have the snack chips that I most prefer
Speaker 1: Now officially a calamity. Um, we've entered crisis of historic proportion. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I don't think we're going to live through
Speaker 1: this one. Nope, we're doing. We can't look at that
Speaker 1: without the asient snack chips. Like it's the ones that
Speaker 1: are like they're like pieces of seaweed but that have
Speaker 1: been temp fried and temper a batter's completely out tragic,
Speaker 1: absolutely tragifying. I think there's a couple of things. I mean,
Speaker 1: you've got a script, so I'll probably just let you
Speaker 1: do that in the not too distant future. But one
Speaker 1: of the things that's frustrating to me, although maybe it
Speaker 1: shouldn't be because I'm probably partly responsible for this, is
Speaker 1: that this is being um this is often kind of
Speaker 1: being talked about with by people online. It's like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's a sign that like society is crumbling, And what
Speaker 1: they mean by that is that like, oh, well, we
Speaker 1: just don't have stuff, like we're we're not able to
Speaker 1: like keep up with with demand, and like the ability
Speaker 1: to produce these things is crumbling. And it's actually much
Speaker 1: more complex than that, and a lot less rooted in
Speaker 1: a lack of specific resources and more decisions made under
Speaker 1: capitalism about how the supply chain would work. And it's
Speaker 1: I don't know, I think it's important because it is
Speaker 1: you can say it still is like a situation where
Speaker 1: this is an example of the system falling apart, but
Speaker 1: it's not falling apart because we don't have the paper
Speaker 1: to make toilet paper with. It's falling apart because decisions
Speaker 1: were made in order to increase the stock prices of
Speaker 1: companies by reducing the amount of products that they kept
Speaker 1: on hand, and that's led to an incredibly fragile system
Speaker 1: that that did nothing well but maximize profits. And I think, well, okay,
Speaker 1: I think there's there's there's a couple of things with
Speaker 1: that that we should talk about. Yeah, because there's a
Speaker 1: lot of different explanations they're floating around for why it's happening,
Speaker 1: and I think some of them are good, but I
Speaker 1: think a lot of them are missing part of the story.
Speaker 1: And I think it's important because Okay, so, like like
Speaker 1: my grandma like called me yesterday, like like called our
Speaker 1: family to like talk about the supply chain problem because
Speaker 1: someone had like she'd been like fed a conspiracy theory
Speaker 1: that like the shortages were because American dock workers like
Speaker 1: didn't want to open containers from China. Uh yeah. It's
Speaker 1: like yeah, like I mean this is not that's not right,
Speaker 1: but it's not like if that had happened, it would
Speaker 1: be like, well, okay, that does scan like yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think yeah, and like I think this is this
Speaker 1: is a moment where yeah, you know, okay, think think
Speaker 1: things are not working how they're supposed to you. And
Speaker 1: there's a lot of sort of competing stories about it,
Speaker 1: one which because which are bad, and I think most
Speaker 1: of the conventional accounts and Wherebert was talking about this, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, even the really good ones. They start with
Speaker 1: sort of the eighties Wall Street takeover corporate America and
Speaker 1: the transformation of sort of all corporate management into an
Speaker 1: attempt to like raise short term stock prices. And you know,
Speaker 1: part of this is lead in production and this is true,
Speaker 1: and this is sort of true, but dismisses about half
Speaker 1: of the story. And and the part of the story
Speaker 1: that it misses that's really important, I think is the
Speaker 1: sort of it's it's the broader like frame in which
Speaker 1: all of this is happening in is essentially the worry
Speaker 1: of how the working class essentially loses the class war
Speaker 1: in the six season seventies. And weirdly, it's also a
Speaker 1: story about for cos boomerang. Yeah, yeah, long, throw in,
Speaker 1: throw in, the music clip that we've all decided is
Speaker 1: going to be the one we put in whenever someone
Speaker 1: talks about FOKS boomerang, which is probably just going to
Speaker 1: be another time machine noise, So real quick employees. Credit
Speaker 1: to Cody Um okay, continue brief refresher on what that is.
Speaker 1: So basically, the Free Coast boomerang is that Okay, if
Speaker 1: if you if if if a government does something like
Speaker 1: repressive like technology, passive technique or passive technology like in
Speaker 1: a colony, like in a war somewhere, eventually it will
Speaker 1: come back and be used against like the citizens of
Speaker 1: that country. And yeah, a great example would be fingerprinting
Speaker 1: was invented for the British like policing um insurgents in Malaysia,
Speaker 1: and is now has them back to every you know,
Speaker 1: colonizing nation now use his finger printing, which is also
Speaker 1: deeply flawed as a technology. But anyway, yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: you know, and I think most people tend to think
Speaker 1: about this is our armed personnel carriers. But we will
Speaker 1: eventually get to this. The boomerang technology here is actually
Speaker 1: shipping containers hell yeah, which have done like irreparable damage
Speaker 1: to the mankind. Alright, alright, I'm ready for this. I
Speaker 1: don't know much about this. Hit me, all right, I
Speaker 1: bear with you with this, because we're we're we're we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about two threads. They're going to seem like
Speaker 1: they have nothing to do with supply chains, and then
Speaker 1: they're all going to tie together. It turns out is
Speaker 1: literally all supply chains. So in the sixties and seventies,
Speaker 1: you have, you know, in very very broad general strokes,
Speaker 1: you have two kinds of class war. The first kind
Speaker 1: is what I'm sort of very broadly calling the war
Speaker 1: and the factories, and this is this is an enormous
Speaker 1: series that sort of strikes outright uprisings as stretch from
Speaker 1: sort of Detroit to tur into Tokyo. And you know,
Speaker 1: the most famous of these is the student sort of
Speaker 1: worker uprising in May sixty eight in France and they
Speaker 1: you know, they're they're they're close enough taking the country
Speaker 1: that like French President Charles de gaul like flees in
Speaker 1: a helicopter to in secret, and like flees to Germany
Speaker 1: in secret, and you know, and that that that that's
Speaker 1: like a big event, but it's sort of it sort
Speaker 1: of fades. What doesn't fade is May sixty eight in Italy.
Speaker 1: And you know that it doesn't fade there because Italy,
Speaker 1: Italy has been in the middle of a strike wave
Speaker 1: since two sixty four. It's the whole sixties that basically
Speaker 1: just strik waves there and you know, they have their
Speaker 1: own sixty and unlike in France where Peters out in Italy,
Speaker 1: you get the just incredibly named hot Hot Autumn of
Speaker 1: sixty nine, which is a hot autumn. Yeah, it's it's great.
Speaker 1: And so basically what happens is you get hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands of workers go on strike, they start seizing control
Speaker 1: their factories. Um, most of most of this is playing
Speaker 1: out in in the Fiat factories. Yeah, it's giant car
Speaker 1: factories in Italy's industrial triangle. And you know, I mean
Speaker 1: they're there for like, they're there for a long time.
Speaker 1: They're into like seventy and eventually they lose. But you know,
Speaker 1: Italy is just sort of rocked by conflict and sort
Speaker 1: of class war stuff, and all of this re culminates
Speaker 1: in yet another enormous uprising in nineteen seventies seven, this
Speaker 1: one driven like in large part by people who we're
Speaker 1: basically just like, funk this, I'm not working in the
Speaker 1: factory anymore. It's awful, which which I think is something
Speaker 1: that like, you know, if you're looking at the mono
Speaker 1: political landscape, you have a bunch of people who are
Speaker 1: going like, funk this, I'm not going to go like
Speaker 1: die in these factories anymore. And those people all have
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases safer employing situations than many
Speaker 1: people today. Yeah. Yeah, it's like it's starting to get
Speaker 1: worse then, which is why people are are frustrated but
Speaker 1: likes yeah, yeah, you know. And and this's sort of
Speaker 1: interesting because there there's a kind of like Vicky Uster
Speaker 1: while I've had on here. It calls it, it calls
Speaker 1: it like the Monkeys Paul thing, where it's like people
Speaker 1: in the seventies and Italy wanted like autonomy and like
Speaker 1: freedom from work, and so what what capitalism gave them
Speaker 1: was like, oh, we'll give you autonomy. We'll just make
Speaker 1: you all contract workers. And now like yeah, you don't
Speaker 1: you don't have to like wake up every morning and
Speaker 1: like go to a job in the factory and leave
Speaker 1: a five or whatever. But now you just you know,
Speaker 1: you're you're a contract worker, so you just have no
Speaker 1: stability whatsoever, and that that's your autonomy. But you know this,
Speaker 1: this is this is really bad for the Italian ruling class.
Speaker 1: Like they almost lose control of Italy three times in
Speaker 1: ten years, and after a seventy seven they're just like
Speaker 1: fuck this and they, i mean, they started to start
Speaker 1: doing mass arrest. They imprison like tens of thousands of people,
Speaker 1: the torture a bunch of people, and you know, but
Speaker 1: it becomes clear that like pure repression is like not
Speaker 1: going to be enough to like just destroy the section
Speaker 1: of the working class movements that you know, God help
Speaker 1: you thinks that you should like run production for themselves,
Speaker 1: and so they start looking elsewhere for answers, and the
Speaker 1: place they find these answers, weirdly enough, is in the
Speaker 1: second set of wars that are going on in this period,
Speaker 1: which are the sort of national liberation wars. And you know,
Speaker 1: these are the national liberation wars. Are these these are
Speaker 1: full scale, like these aren't sort of class warm metaphors.
Speaker 1: These are you know, this is this is giddy be Saw,
Speaker 1: this is Algeria. And you know, importantly, for for our purposes,
Speaker 1: the US fights two of them, which is Korean Vietnam.
Speaker 1: Now Korean Vietnam are strategically really bad places for the
Speaker 1: US to fight wars, like they're on the other side
Speaker 1: of the world, which you know, it makes it more
Speaker 1: difficult to do war crimes because you know, if you're
Speaker 1: fire bombing of village, right, you have to be able
Speaker 1: to move fire bombs, jet fighters and like oil and
Speaker 1: rations to the other side of the world. And this
Speaker 1: is hard about a lot easier when they can commit
Speaker 1: war crimes and like I don't know, Dulouth Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: well like even even like you know, you got to
Speaker 1: commit a war crime in Mexico, It's like, okay, you
Speaker 1: just sign a bunch of people over the border. It
Speaker 1: would be so easy to commit war crimes in Mexico. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and really really up our war crime quoti. Well,
Speaker 1: I we I would say, we do do a lot
Speaker 1: of war crimes in Mexico. It's just that like they're
Speaker 1: done based on by proxies. That's true. But I mean
Speaker 1: we've killed like we've killed like a million people there
Speaker 1: in the last like twenty years. And the war on drugs,
Speaker 1: but yeah, you knows, so the US, you know, the
Speaker 1: U s okay. So it has this logistics problem. In
Speaker 1: logistics problem is that it can't do war crimes enough,
Speaker 1: and so it comes up with a couple of solutions
Speaker 1: to them. One of them is essentially they rebuild the
Speaker 1: whole Japanese economy in order to just use Japan's industrial
Speaker 1: base to fight the war in Korea. And then after
Speaker 1: the war in Korea, and they rebuild the South Korean
Speaker 1: economy in order to you know, fight the war in Vietnam.
Speaker 1: And this works, but it doesn't solve the problem that
Speaker 1: you know, Okay, even even even if you're you know,
Speaker 1: you're you have an industrial based in Japan, right, you
Speaker 1: still need to be able to efficiently move things by
Speaker 1: sea to Korea, and you know, you still need to
Speaker 1: still supplies you need to move from the US. And
Speaker 1: so the solution for this is containery shipping and continerary shipping.
Speaker 1: This is the pivot point upon which the entire history
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century and everything that's happening in the
Speaker 1: twenty one century hinges on like this, this is the
Speaker 1: pivot and you know, like I'm not even this isn't
Speaker 1: even really an exaggeration, because it turns out that like
Speaker 1: the ability to have uniform boxes that you can stack
Speaker 1: on top of each other like legos and put on
Speaker 1: a ship is like like it's like comparable to the
Speaker 1: nuclear bomb in terms of how important it is, which
Speaker 1: is really really used to the only way to get
Speaker 1: things from A to B was a big wooden ship
Speaker 1: filled with dubloons like pile bags and stuff. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know how did we like global commerce work
Speaker 1: before shipping containers, what did we what did we literally
Speaker 1: like you just like sometimes sometimes you would just like
Speaker 1: physically people would just pick up the items and put
Speaker 1: them on the ship, or they would like sometimes they
Speaker 1: put them in boxes or like you would like strap
Speaker 1: them to like the top of the ship. And so
Speaker 1: with the trains a lot they were just like strap
Speaker 1: like machinery like onto a train car. And this was
Speaker 1: like not this is like really inefficient, it's really so yeah,
Speaker 1: And so the US in order to like do war
Speaker 1: crimes in Korea, and then you know, it's just like, oh, hey,
Speaker 1: what if we just make metal boxes and then they
Speaker 1: get they progressively get better and better at it because
Speaker 1: you know, they have to go do more war crimes
Speaker 1: in in Vietnam, and but by the time you're getting
Speaker 1: to the end, yeah, yeah, you know, look lots of
Speaker 1: war crimes that do you need? You need good logistics
Speaker 1: networks to do all of these war crimes. I mean
Speaker 1: it makes sense that that's where we got shipping containers.
Speaker 1: But I didn't realize. I had just assumed it would
Speaker 1: have come out of the shipping industry as opposed to
Speaker 1: like we got to get more missiles over to these places. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well this is the interesting thing. We'll get to this
Speaker 1: in a bit. But basically, like a lot of the
Speaker 1: logistics revolution stuff either comes out of the military or
Speaker 1: is developed by X fascists and and and a lot
Speaker 1: of the reason for this is Okay, I mean this
Speaker 1: is you know, this is the seventies. They're still are
Speaker 1: in d happening like the still actual research and developments,
Speaker 1: but the military is doing just an enormous amount of
Speaker 1: the researcher development for all of global capitalism. And you know,
Speaker 1: and and the other thing that what's happening here and
Speaker 1: you know this this is the sort of cozy boomerang
Speaker 1: thing is that you know, so the container are shipping
Speaker 1: logistic stuf that had been used to just like obliterate
Speaker 1: the global South suddenly starts spreading into capital like you know,
Speaker 1: just into like broader shipping because people look at this
Speaker 1: and they're like, oh, this is efficient. And then the
Speaker 1: contracting companies the US is using this turns into the
Speaker 1: solution to both sort of the war and the factories
Speaker 1: are talking about in in in Europe and the US
Speaker 1: and in like Japan itself, and then also to the
Speaker 1: solution of the national liberation movements and sort of like
Speaker 1: communism in East Asia because you know, Okay, so you
Speaker 1: have this question, right the US, like we kind of
Speaker 1: fight to a draw in Korea, like we kill a
Speaker 1: norm's number of people, but the North Korea, yeah, and
Speaker 1: like yeah, but we don't really win, right, like we
Speaker 1: we we can't actually defeat the Chinese army or yeah,
Speaker 1: and and you know, and we lose Vietnam. And so
Speaker 1: the question is, okay, so like how how are we
Speaker 1: going to stop communism? And the answer, it turns out,
Speaker 1: is to just integrate integrate the communist countries into the
Speaker 1: capitalist supply chain. And I mean there's a lot of
Speaker 1: examples of this, like Market Thatcher for example. It is
Speaker 1: like very good buddies with Nikolai chesscu Ah, that's nice.
Speaker 1: They could be friends despite their the fact that they
Speaker 1: well I guess they weren't really that different as people, No,
Speaker 1: not really, Like basically the difference is that ky lost
Speaker 1: and thus got like murdered on state television on a
Speaker 1: state funeral treatment. That's my official stance. They should have
Speaker 1: for stuff we will talk about in a bit. But yes,
Speaker 1: but you know, the the archetypal example of this is
Speaker 1: actually China, and you know there's a lot of various
Speaker 1: sort of skilled diplomatic work by Kissinger and also the
Speaker 1: US like throughout the seventies just like they're just like
Speaker 1: sending entire factories to China, like like the like they'll
Speaker 1: they'll they'll take an entire factory, break it down, put
Speaker 1: it in boxes, and then just like ship at the China. Great,
Speaker 1: it's the time and yes, so yeah, they're they're they're
Speaker 1: just like sending to knowlogy of China. And the end
Speaker 1: result of this is that you know, China goes from
Speaker 1: like fighting American troops with like like doing bannit charges
Speaker 1: like through yeah, yeah, against the Yeah. I was just
Speaker 1: like yeah to to you know, being an American ally
Speaker 1: in like invading Vietnam as a way to like stick
Speaker 1: it to the Soviets basically. And so you know, so
Speaker 1: the US esensely just integrates China to the global supply chain,
Speaker 1: and they eventually do the same thing to Vietnam, which
Speaker 1: again is another country that they couldn't defeat militarily. But
Speaker 1: what they you know what they actually beat them with,
Speaker 1: it's the shipping container. And before the shipping container this
Speaker 1: would have been impossible, right, like basically it was too
Speaker 1: inefficient and too expensive, like the cost of shipping was
Speaker 1: too high to have all of this production, you know,
Speaker 1: like some half your parts made in China, some of
Speaker 1: them made India's on them made in like Japan's, one
Speaker 1: of the made in Korean, and then shipped them all
Speaker 1: around the world, which is how the modern system works.
Speaker 1: But with with container I shipping, suddenly shipping is really cheap,
Speaker 1: and it becomes much cheaper to pay shipping costs it
Speaker 1: is to pay labor costs. And this is the solution
Speaker 1: to to the sort of war and the factories. You know,
Speaker 1: if workers start making too much noise about pay or
Speaker 1: like again a god forbids start talking about like taking
Speaker 1: control of factories and running the democratically like some kind
Speaker 1: of anarchist monsters, corporation can just move the factories overseas,
Speaker 1: and this becomes an incredibly effective way to just destroy
Speaker 1: the labor movement because anytime, you know, organized labor starts
Speaker 1: making demands, you can be like, well, okay, sorry, we're
Speaker 1: just gonna pack up and we're gonna you know, we're
Speaker 1: gonna go to China. We're gonna go to somewhere else.
Speaker 1: And this coincides with, you know, the thing, the thing
Speaker 1: that gets talked about a lot in the conventional accounts,
Speaker 1: which is the Wall Street sort of corporate takeover, well,
Speaker 1: the Wall Street takeover of corporate America, which is something
Speaker 1: I think that sounds really weird to us now, but
Speaker 1: you know, the whole the whole story here is really
Speaker 1: interesting and extremely long, and if if you want to
Speaker 1: like have a very detailed accounts of how this all
Speaker 1: played out, the book Liquidated by Karen Hoe is just incredible,
Speaker 1: like ethnography and history of Wall Street. She like she's
Speaker 1: a Karen has an anthropologist, and she like went and
Speaker 1: worked on Wall Street and like did ethnography there for
Speaker 1: a bit and it's very interesting stuff, but it's kind
Speaker 1: of outside of our scope. So the very very very
Speaker 1: short version is that the Wall Street bankers basically figure
Speaker 1: out a way to just like buy out corporations, to
Speaker 1: raise a bunch of money and just entirely buy out corporations.
Speaker 1: And then once they have the corporation, right, what what
Speaker 1: what what the you know, this is corporate rating. So
Speaker 1: they're there, they they loot all the assets, they sell
Speaker 1: it off and they try to sell off their stock
Speaker 1: at a higher price. The parcels of this is sort
Speaker 1: of complicated, but the net result of this is that
Speaker 1: Wall Street completely takes over the corporate world in the
Speaker 1: way they hadn't before. Like the Wall streets, the Wall
Speaker 1: Street like finance people are now you know, there're the
Speaker 1: there are the people making off the decisions, and you know,
Speaker 1: and and they're their only goal is to raise the
Speaker 1: stock price, like that's that's the only thing they care about.
Speaker 1: That they don't they don't even care about making money.
Speaker 1: Right if if you lose money and your stock price
Speaker 1: still rises, like you don't care. And those guys start
Speaker 1: looking at a lot of the things that had existed
Speaker 1: in corporations before that things like pensions, uh, particularly things
Speaker 1: like researcher development. They look at it and go, Okay,
Speaker 1: why are we spending money on R and D Like
Speaker 1: this This doesn't this doesn't raise our stock price, This
Speaker 1: doesn't have any immediate shorter and value. So they cut
Speaker 1: it right, They start cutting pensions. They starts just destroying
Speaker 1: the unions, and you know, and and because because this
Speaker 1: is happening at the same time as corporations really like
Speaker 1: get the ability to outsource for the first time. You know,
Speaker 1: they lean into it and they start essentially we're just
Speaker 1: just slashing the aout of people who work for the company, right,
Speaker 1: and so you know and so and instead of having
Speaker 1: direct employees, they start working with contractors, and they start
Speaker 1: moving to the contractors overseas, and you know, and and
Speaker 1: this is this is where we get to sort of
Speaker 1: this whole outsourcing wave because you know, something I don't
Speaker 1: think I talked about enough withoutsourcing is why actually are
Speaker 1: the labor costs lower in the countries that these people
Speaker 1: are are moving their factories to. H And part of
Speaker 1: it is, you know, people talk about development like they're
Speaker 1: moving to undeveloped countries, and you know, part of part
Speaker 1: of part of development is just you know, how much
Speaker 1: technological capacity their manufacturing system has, right, and that you know.
Speaker 1: But but the other part of it is that if
Speaker 1: you move your production to say Columbia, right or like
Speaker 1: you know, you're investing in sort of like cocoa bean
Speaker 1: farming in Columbia and people try to do you need organizing,
Speaker 1: you can hire des squads to murder them. Yeah and yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: It's like you can basically just sort of like you
Speaker 1: can you can outsource the violence, and you can you
Speaker 1: can you know, the corporate term for it is reducing
Speaker 1: labor costs, but really what you're doing is just like
Speaker 1: murdering people with des squads and terrorizing them, and you
Speaker 1: know that that does lower labor costs, right, But you know,
Speaker 1: and I think there's there's another example of this, Like
Speaker 1: this is a lot of what like the killing at
Speaker 1: Tienamen was really about. It was you know, not so
Speaker 1: much in Tianna score itself. If falked about this elsewhere,
Speaker 1: but like the workers that they kill outside of the square,
Speaker 1: like a lot of the reason they're doing very little
Speaker 1: about Tinaman Square other than like protesters China government bad.
Speaker 1: The guy stands up the tank and then yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've talked about this elsewhere more than like the very
Speaker 1: short version is, so there's a bunch of students in
Speaker 1: the square, right, and the students in the square itself
Speaker 1: like basically they kind of went democracy and mostly they
Speaker 1: want like market reforms to go faster. But then outside
Speaker 1: of the square, you know, Fijings, like whole working class
Speaker 1: shows up and there's these enormous demonstrations. They basically start
Speaker 1: like like barricading, like blocks and blocks and blocks and
Speaker 1: like this radius outside of the street and you get
Speaker 1: the sort of like mini commune thing ing. And those
Speaker 1: guys are like, you know, like they're they're they're advocating
Speaker 1: for democracy and the factory like they're you know, they're
Speaker 1: they're talking about things like like I mean, they're they're
Speaker 1: like that, you know, they they they they they have
Speaker 1: their like marks out and they're talking about how like
Speaker 1: they're they're they're calculating their rate of surplus value that's
Speaker 1: being extracted from them by the capitalists. And those are
Speaker 1: the people, like almost everyone who dies at chantament Is
Speaker 1: is from those guys, Like those are the people that
Speaker 1: they just get massacred. And you know, and and the
Speaker 1: reason that happens is that the CCP is looking at
Speaker 1: this and it's like, okay, this, this is this is
Speaker 1: like this this is sort of this is the return
Speaker 1: of organized labor, and we need to destroy it before
Speaker 1: it like gets anywhere. And so they do, and organized
Speaker 1: labor and China just implode. I mean, it was already
Speaker 1: pretty weak because you have a lot of stake control unions,
Speaker 1: but I mean now it's just nothing, and you know,
Speaker 1: and and and there I mean there there have been
Speaker 1: attempts to labor organizing in China sort of recently, and
Speaker 1: like yeah, the to be just rest everyone, right, and
Speaker 1: so you know this this this is how this is,
Speaker 1: this is the price of cheap labor, right, it's just
Speaker 1: incredible state repression. But this is also you know, and
Speaker 1: this is this is a sort of like macro scale
Speaker 1: thing of why the supply chains suck because everyone talks
Speaker 1: about like the efficiency of the supply chaine, but the
Speaker 1: supply chains aren't efficient. They make no sense, right if
Speaker 1: if if if what you're trying to do is move
Speaker 1: something quickly from points A to point B. They make
Speaker 1: no sense because you know, the supply chaines are spread
Speaker 1: all over the world, like in individual parts of being
Speaker 1: made in six countries, right, you have like people will
Speaker 1: like for tax dodge purposes, like they'll have one part
Speaker 1: of a component's built in one country, and then they'll
Speaker 1: move it from another country and to have another part
Speaker 1: of it, and then they'll ship all of it to
Speaker 1: Mexico and they'll ship it across the border and they'll
Speaker 1: have the whole thing be assembled in the USC they
Speaker 1: can say it was made in the US. Like there's
Speaker 1: there's all of these things that are just just nonsense
Speaker 1: right there. They're not they're not efficient at all. It's
Speaker 1: it's completely ridiculous. It's it's this just you know, it's
Speaker 1: just completely absurd web. And and the reason why it
Speaker 1: is designed like this is as as a giant sort
Speaker 1: of kind of asurgency thing. Like the reason the reason
Speaker 1: supply chains are are just bad is because there, you know,
Speaker 1: they they they're not designed to move things that they're
Speaker 1: designed as an instrument to just like solve the problem
Speaker 1: of of of of class power right there there there.
Speaker 1: They're designed destroy unions. They're designed to make sure that
Speaker 1: nobody ever sort of like gets any ideas about widges,
Speaker 1: to make sure nobody gets any ideas about like taking anything.
Speaker 1: And so you know, but this this this can work
Speaker 1: for a while. The problem is again, like they're not efficient.
Speaker 1: It's it's just it just it is not efficient to
Speaker 1: like move have everything made in like six countries and
Speaker 1: then you have to semble them somewhere else. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so you know, it's efficient in the sense that it
Speaker 1: efficiently maximizes the value of stock prices for like stock
Speaker 1: by backs and stuff. And generally what is meant by
Speaker 1: like efficiency in that sense is like what makes the
Speaker 1: seventy people who actually own this company the most money.
Speaker 1: That's the efficient thing, but it's it's horribly inefficient in
Speaker 1: every practical sense of the word. And that this is
Speaker 1: kind of an interesting change because I mean, you know this,
Speaker 1: this isn't to say that like the supply chains that
Speaker 1: worked before this were like better, because they also sucked
Speaker 1: in a lot of their own ways. But all of
Speaker 1: the like efficiency stuff that we're about to talk about
Speaker 1: just just in time production, etcetera, etcetera, Like you know
Speaker 1: what isn't produced just in time? Sorry, but it isn't
Speaker 1: add right time. Yeah, they're they're they're they're not produced
Speaker 1: just in time anymore because the supply chains falling apart.
Speaker 1: That's that's what that is. Our promise about our sponsors
Speaker 1: is that, uh, they're they're not at all in time.
Speaker 1: Who knows when they'll get your products to you. There's
Speaker 1: no way to tell, it's impossible to know. We're back, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're back to talk about how, you know, having having
Speaker 1: developed an entire network of extremely inefficient supply chains that
Speaker 1: just absolutely suck and don't make any sense. Uh, people
Speaker 1: tried to make them efficient. And this this is where
Speaker 1: we go back to Japan because Japan, you know, I
Speaker 1: guess this is this is this is the other Forks boomerang,
Speaker 1: which is that you know, okay, so we we we
Speaker 1: industrialized Japan in order to like fighter colonial wars, right,
Speaker 1: But then you know this turns into this huge like
Speaker 1: Pikachu face moment when Japan suddenly starts like industrializing more
Speaker 1: efficiently than the US does. It's very funny. And then
Speaker 1: and writes a bunch of books that are the premise
Speaker 1: of all of them. Is Japan scary? Yeah, it's very funny. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, like this is interesting. Is this is an
Speaker 1: interesting thing here, which is that like all of the
Speaker 1: panic around China, there was exactly the same panic like
Speaker 1: around Japan in the in like the seventies, and it's
Speaker 1: exactly say like right down to like a bunch of
Speaker 1: socialists going like, hey, look this this is a model
Speaker 1: for anti capitalism. Like people people said that about the
Speaker 1: Japanese model, and it's like it's it's all, it's all
Speaker 1: the same thing. It's just it's just happening again. But
Speaker 1: you know, what what what what what Japan did and
Speaker 1: specifically what Toyota does is create this thing called the
Speaker 1: Toyota production system, which eventually becomes known as just in
Speaker 1: time production. And this if you've read anything about sort
Speaker 1: of the modern supply chain problems, you've almost certainly heard
Speaker 1: of just in time production or or lean production. And
Speaker 1: just in time and lean production are technically difference, but
Speaker 1: the differences don't matter for us. So yeah, and and
Speaker 1: this this stuff is derived from what Toyota was sort
Speaker 1: of doing in the post war era. And basically the
Speaker 1: goal of it is, You're you're never supposed to have
Speaker 1: any inventory that's just sitting there, so that the whole
Speaker 1: distant supposed to be constantly the whole system is supposed
Speaker 1: to be constantly in motion. So you have parts come in,
Speaker 1: they get put into their immediately get put into production line,
Speaker 1: and the finished products immediately shipped out to the stores.
Speaker 1: And you know, the theory is that the stores are
Speaker 1: only going to carry exactly enough products to meet demands.
Speaker 1: And it's supposed to be quote unquote flexible, which means
Speaker 1: that it can react to shifts and consumer taste and
Speaker 1: demand by like increasing or decreasing production, and it can't
Speaker 1: do this. This is what we've been seeing for the
Speaker 1: entirety of COVID, which is that you know that this
Speaker 1: is this is why every time there's a run of
Speaker 1: toilet paper, everyone runs out of toilet paper, because it
Speaker 1: turns out that these systems can't even a ten percent
Speaker 1: increase just completely obliterates this entire system and it just
Speaker 1: collapses and can't produce enough toilet paper. Yeah, and again
Speaker 1: just because it's expensive to store things, it's pricing. This
Speaker 1: is a big part of like why actually the John
Speaker 1: Dear strike, which has the potential to disrupt the status
Speaker 1: quote movement more than any strike in recent history, um
Speaker 1: is so potent because John Deere actors are kind of
Speaker 1: a necessary part of the agriculture industry, not just their
Speaker 1: ability to sell new tractors, but their ability to repair
Speaker 1: the extant tractors. Like if harvest season comes around and
Speaker 1: there's not spare parts to repair tractors that break, like
Speaker 1: food doesn't get harvested, it's a significant issue John Deere.
Speaker 1: We'll talk more about this in another date. But like,
Speaker 1: not only did the most that they could do to
Speaker 1: squeeze their employees to suck out pensions, to cut you know,
Speaker 1: the expenditures on wages, but they they set up their
Speaker 1: factories in such a way that there was no extra space,
Speaker 1: so they could not scale up any of these factories
Speaker 1: to increase demand when they needed to. So that now
Speaker 1: that John Deere's going on strike, if they lose a
Speaker 1: month of productivity, they can't ever catch up. It's impossible
Speaker 1: because they can't actually expand the productive capacity of their factories.
Speaker 1: And because the strike is hitting, they didn't have any
Speaker 1: extra spare parts lying around, so if ship gets broken,
Speaker 1: they can't manufacture the parts necessary to keep tractors functioning
Speaker 1: in a lot of American farms because they didn't store
Speaker 1: any thing, because that was not the most efficient thing
Speaker 1: for the economic bottom line of the CEO who gets
Speaker 1: a hundred and sixty million dollars a year. And anyway,
Speaker 1: this is this is the funny part about this whole thing,
Speaker 1: which is that you know, okay, so this whole supply
Speaker 1: chain system was based around just like destroying destroying the
Speaker 1: organized working class, right, But it's like they were so
Speaker 1: successful at it that they've like turned around and fucked
Speaker 1: themselves with it because like you know this, this is
Speaker 1: this is the thing about about the John Deer strike, Right,
Speaker 1: It used to be you know, back back back if
Speaker 1: you look at like like how how the unions were
Speaker 1: broken in the eighties, or like if you look at
Speaker 1: like the giant like auto strikes you'd have in the seventies, right,
Speaker 1: And companies still do this to this day, but like
Speaker 1: there worst at it. The thing they would do is
Speaker 1: so okay. So you you you know, if you're a company,
Speaker 1: you know roughly when a strike is gonna happen, right.
Speaker 1: And the reason you know when a strike is gonna
Speaker 1: happen is because in the US, like the way labor
Speaker 1: law works is that like you can you can basically
Speaker 1: only strike like when a contract is up. I mean
Speaker 1: you can do wildcats, but it's illegal. But you know, okay,
Speaker 1: so they knew that the audio unions, for example, we're
Speaker 1: about to go we're going to go on strike when
Speaker 1: when the contract like was was coming up, and you know,
Speaker 1: they'd have spies, and you can get a sense of like,
Speaker 1: you know, okay, so are are how likely are they
Speaker 1: to do the strike? And you know so so that
Speaker 1: that that lets you do things like build up an
Speaker 1: enormous sort of inventorio spare parts. It lets you build
Speaker 1: up an inventory of supplies, and it lets you build
Speaker 1: up you know it basically, it lets you build up
Speaker 1: the capacity you need to outlast a strike. But the
Speaker 1: problem with just in times, they can't do that anymore
Speaker 1: because yeah, they they've they've you know, they've they've completely
Speaker 1: fucked themselves by by then the John Deer situation, because
Speaker 1: they hadn't strike, the workers hadn't had gone on strike
Speaker 1: since eighties six. They've been putting funds into their strike
Speaker 1: survival fund for years, but the company had nothing like
Speaker 1: has um. It's rather and this is you know, this,
Speaker 1: this is the other part of of of why everything
Speaker 1: like good that's happening right now is happening is that
Speaker 1: they they they you know, they everything has circled back
Speaker 1: around and suddenly all of these companies are, you know,
Speaker 1: we are incredibly vulnerable to strikes again because yeah, as
Speaker 1: you're talking about the just in time production thing, it
Speaker 1: only works if if everything actually comes in on time,
Speaker 1: right Like if if if any if any individual part
Speaker 1: is late, the whole system starts to fall apart and
Speaker 1: then and then you can't repair it. And you know,
Speaker 1: and there's there's a lot of ways that that this
Speaker 1: this this can be very bad. Um, you know, We've
Speaker 1: talked about the John do you. We talked about the
Speaker 1: labor stuff. The other big thing that's happening is COVID,
Speaker 1: which has happened and continues to happen and has killed
Speaker 1: off just enormous parts of the working class. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like four million dead worldwide or something. And again
Speaker 1: that that's also probably an undercount because that's just direct, guest,
Speaker 1: that's not like, yeah, it's probably like twice that it's
Speaker 1: I mean, we're looking at a minimum of se us
Speaker 1: into the US, and again that's probably a million undercounted
Speaker 1: at least. It's it's a horror show, right, And and
Speaker 1: the people they killed with that, you know, like especially
Speaker 1: in the initial phases, like it was just it was
Speaker 1: just that they took a chain chainsaw to the working class.
Speaker 1: And those are a bunch of people who you know
Speaker 1: that they're they're not replaceable, they're they're very highly skilled,
Speaker 1: and they do a bunch of jobs that absolutely suck.
Speaker 1: And now you know, and one of one of the
Speaker 1: places that this this has caused a bunch of problems
Speaker 1: is in the ports, because the other thing that this
Speaker 1: entire supply game relies on is being able to very
Speaker 1: quickly and cheaply moved parts from you know, China to
Speaker 1: the US, from China to Mexico from like Bangladesh too.
Speaker 1: Like symbolia, you have, you have, you have. You have
Speaker 1: to be able to continuously like keep moving stuff around
Speaker 1: in in you know, you have to continuously keep moving
Speaker 1: ships around and you also have to be able to
Speaker 1: load noneload them. And we you know, we we we
Speaker 1: saw like there there was the that when that ship
Speaker 1: got stuck in the Suez. There is that whole yeah
Speaker 1: that you know that that that was sex asses where
Speaker 1: where when people couldn't get sex asses because the world's
Speaker 1: supply of sex asses for months was on that one ship. Um,
Speaker 1: it was a real crisis for the sex ass community.
Speaker 1: Those are plastic asses that you have sex with if
Speaker 1: you're curious. Yeah, it is. The world appears as an
Speaker 1: immense collection of commodities, some of which are sex asses. Yeah,
Speaker 1: most of which, in terms of the ones that matter
Speaker 1: sex asses. Yes, sex ass industrial complex is really the
Speaker 1: lynchpin of global capital. But please continue. Yeah, well, you know,
Speaker 1: but the sex ass indictial complex falls apart, and you know,
Speaker 1: and it's not just the ship being stuck in the
Speaker 1: suis like made everything way worse, right, But it was
Speaker 1: very funny, Yeah, it was. It was a cually funny,
Speaker 1: but it was extremely funny. The part the thing that's
Speaker 1: like not very funny is that, like, okay, so in
Speaker 1: order to getting this to work right, you have to
Speaker 1: have a bunch of longshoremen. You have to unload all
Speaker 1: of this ship m hm. And you know, one of
Speaker 1: one of the problems that is that is happening in
Speaker 1: the sort of global supply chain right now is that
Speaker 1: the ships can't be unloaded fast enough. And part of
Speaker 1: this is like this job sucks and people just a
Speaker 1: lot of people don't want to do it, and a
Speaker 1: lot of people died and in the and it's causing
Speaker 1: this huge problem, and and there's and then there's there's
Speaker 1: another you know, if you want to take like the
Speaker 1: macro perspective about this, it's that this whole system is
Speaker 1: relying on logistics workers and so it also needs you know,
Speaker 1: you need truck drivers. And we're coming back and you
Speaker 1: know in the US is that there's yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's a sort of a truck drivers now because again,
Speaker 1: their job sucks and they've been like just absolutely screwing
Speaker 1: these people over for decades and decades and decades now
Speaker 1: and turning into the subcontractors just not paying them, and
Speaker 1: you know, and and this and when you know, when
Speaker 1: the when the ports shut down, like not even shut up,
Speaker 1: like when when the ports are behind unloading stuff, and
Speaker 1: when the trucks like that are supposed to be moving
Speaker 1: this stuff, there aren't off of them, and like the
Speaker 1: cost of that increases, it throws off the whole system.
Speaker 1: And that's that's another big part of like why this
Speaker 1: whole thing is is sort of imploding. And and it's
Speaker 1: interesting because I remember this. There was like a decade
Speaker 1: where like every other article we'll be talking about how
Speaker 1: they were going to like automate like truck driving, and
Speaker 1: it was like the truck drivers are all going to
Speaker 1: go out of business because they're going to automated. It
Speaker 1: just never happened at all. And say the same thing
Speaker 1: with with there. You know, there's I mean, there's been
Speaker 1: some port automization, but like not on the scale that
Speaker 1: you know, actually does anything. And part part of the
Speaker 1: reason for that is, you know, I was talking about
Speaker 1: people not investing in research developments. Yeah, so the biggest
Speaker 1: people who aren't doing that are the shipping companies. And
Speaker 1: that's a good time because the shipping basically like container shipping,
Speaker 1: has been taken over by what's essentially just like a
Speaker 1: monopoly of two companies. And those two companies make just
Speaker 1: an indescribable amount of money. They have like a thousand
Speaker 1: percent profits, and they just pay it all out of dividends.
Speaker 1: And so they're not you know, they're not investing in
Speaker 1: any port infrastructure, they're not investing automation. They're just pocketing
Speaker 1: the money. And that means that you know, we have
Speaker 1: all that and they're they're spending in in the case
Speaker 1: of John Deere, which I keep going back to a
Speaker 1: bunch of money lobbying to make it illegal for farmers
Speaker 1: to repair uh their tractors. Yeah, yeah, they're there, you know,
Speaker 1: they they they figured they figured out that like the
Speaker 1: the easiest way to make money is just get the
Speaker 1: state to shake people down for you. It's like funck
Speaker 1: like investing in making anything that we have better. Let's
Speaker 1: just you know, like let's just turn the state into
Speaker 1: a debt collector. And and it's interesting because so this
Speaker 1: this is the part of the supply chain crisis that
Speaker 1: like Biden has been focusing on. But Biden's plan, Biden's
Speaker 1: plans great. Biden's plan is literally make the longshoremen work harder.
Speaker 1: So his plan is here, there are we better, baby, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna we're gonna make We're gonna keep the ports
Speaker 1: open twenty four hours a day, seven days a week,
Speaker 1: and like make people work weekends now. And then he
Speaker 1: also got FedEx Walmart and Ups to do twenty four
Speaker 1: hour or seven day a week shipping. So yeah, the
Speaker 1: solution is literally just like feed more workers into a
Speaker 1: grinder and make them work longer, which is which is
Speaker 1: great and and you know will not in any way backfire. No,
Speaker 1: it's fine. I don't even think we should be talking
Speaker 1: about it. No, it's great, it's gonna, it's it's yeah,
Speaker 1: it's you know, but I get like this is the thing,
Speaker 1: Like this won't work and it can't. And the reason
Speaker 1: it won't work is that, like part of the reason
Speaker 1: there's a shortage is that, you know, it's it's not
Speaker 1: it's not just about the like the fact that people
Speaker 1: aren't paying enough. It's about the fact that these jobs
Speaker 1: are just awful. Like you have people, you have people
Speaker 1: working like twelve hour shifts that start at like six am,
Speaker 1: then they have to wake another twelve hours shift in
Speaker 1: hours later, and that these peop having to do with
Speaker 1: this over and over and over again, and it's well,
Speaker 1: and they don't like the way that these shifts are
Speaker 1: usually put on them. Is that, like you'll find out
Speaker 1: when you come in that instead of working six am
Speaker 1: to four pm or whatever, they're actually gonna need you
Speaker 1: to stay until eight and then they're gonna need you
Speaker 1: to come in. By the way, you're gonna need to
Speaker 1: come in like two hours early tomorrow. So you'll realize that,
Speaker 1: like in between your two shifts, you have a total
Speaker 1: of eight hours to get home and sleep. And if
Speaker 1: you say no, uh uh. While the idea is that
Speaker 1: if you say no, like you won't have the job
Speaker 1: it's required now, the reality is that most of these
Speaker 1: companies are also pretty desperate to have these workers. And
Speaker 1: a lot of these manufacturing and packing firms, it takes
Speaker 1: time to train people up and then they quit a
Speaker 1: couple of weeks in because the work is miserable and
Speaker 1: the schedule is fucking miserable. Um, and it's yeah, it's all,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's simultaneously like deeply inhuman but also
Speaker 1: is leading to a situation. There's a reason why there's
Speaker 1: so many strikes on right now is that there is
Speaker 1: opportunity because in sort of the chasing of short term profits,
Speaker 1: a lot of these fucking oligarchs have exposed themselves in
Speaker 1: a in a pretty vulnerable position. Yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: you know this, this is coming back to a sort
Speaker 1: of the other way that when when there was a
Speaker 1: crisis in in the seventies, the other way they solve
Speaker 1: this was just authoritarianism, right it was you know, is
Speaker 1: this is the pinos a solution, right like, oh, like
Speaker 1: workers are using control compromids, Okay, well just shoot them,
Speaker 1: right and yeah and yeah, and this is you know,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're finally running into a point where you know,
Speaker 1: this is this is the solution they've been trying to
Speaker 1: do now with with with this crisis, is you know,
Speaker 1: the the they're relying on the fact that just the
Speaker 1: workplace is just indescribably authoritarian. I mean, it's it's like
Speaker 1: it's it's it's a dictatorship on a scale that is
Speaker 1: like like even to like the most despotic absolute monarch
Speaker 1: is just like onion saginable, like your boss gets to
Speaker 1: control like when you ship, like they get a control
Speaker 1: when you eat, they get a control exactly what you're doing,
Speaker 1: like at all times, they get control when you do it,
Speaker 1: they get a control like when the next time you're
Speaker 1: going to do it is. They don't even have to
Speaker 1: tell you when it's going to be untel like you
Speaker 1: show up and you know, for the this is this
Speaker 1: is this has been the gamble for for you know,
Speaker 1: capitalism bit tire existence, which is that like you just
Speaker 1: have to take this and eat ship or they get
Speaker 1: to take away your ability to eat, get medical care
Speaker 1: and have a place to leave to live. But that's
Speaker 1: not true anymore. Like you can just say no, you
Speaker 1: can tell them to funk off. You can, you know
Speaker 1: you can. You can, you can organize a union. You
Speaker 1: can just fucking just leave your job, like just leave it,
Speaker 1: fucking walk out. And this is why we focus. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is number one why within the context of unions,
Speaker 1: strike funds are so important, but also why mutual aid
Speaker 1: is so important. Is it it potentially when organized well enough,
Speaker 1: provides people with the option to like, well, how are
Speaker 1: you going to feed yourself? Well there's people in my
Speaker 1: community who want to make sure that I'm fed because
Speaker 1: they believe in what I'm striking for. Um, that's the
Speaker 1: promise of all of that. That's the practical behind the
Speaker 1: kind of high minded you know, anarchists of just you
Speaker 1: know whatever, theorizing is the ability that like, well, this
Speaker 1: actually is a weapon too. Yeah, and I think you
Speaker 1: know what else is a weapon? Christ I hope you're
Speaker 1: not being sponsored some of them. I hope we are. Chris. Look,
Speaker 1: I've I've said before for weapons. I'll read any ad
Speaker 1: for a weapons manufacturer as long as they send me
Speaker 1: some weapons. So come on, guys, get on it. You
Speaker 1: could uh, you could be you could be in the
Speaker 1: middle of this conversation. Rayphaon, you know, send me a
Speaker 1: couple of missile guidance chips Lockheed Martin. You know, you
Speaker 1: want to give me an F thirty five, We'll we'll
Speaker 1: plug you. You know. That's what's that's that's the deal.
Speaker 1: That's how it works. Baby. All right, we're back. Hopefully,
Speaker 1: hopefully you have now heard the advertisement for knife missile
Speaker 1: to knife missile harder now with like five knives, a
Speaker 1: thing that I am not making. It actually exists Yeah,
Speaker 1: people keep being surprised that the r nin X is
Speaker 1: a real thing. And yeah, but there's another one. There's
Speaker 1: there's there's one with more knives. They put more knives. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what do you You're not gonna look again, You can't.
Speaker 1: It's like with apple products, right, planned obsolescence is a
Speaker 1: critical You have to You can't just rest on your laurels.
Speaker 1: You're gonna run out of money. So you gotta make
Speaker 1: another knife missile with a couple of more knives. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just keep keep adding knives. Nothing can ever go wrong.
Speaker 1: Do not ask any questions about why you're developing knife missiles.
Speaker 1: Please send me one and like a drone or three.
Speaker 1: I swear to God I'll use it for legal purposes. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: I guess the last thing that I that that's really
Speaker 1: interesting about this moment that doesn't usually happen is that
Speaker 1: you know, okay, so if you, if you, if you,
Speaker 1: if you, you read your very basic marks, right. One
Speaker 1: of the things Marks talks about is that there's this
Speaker 1: thing called the reserve Army of Labor, which is it's
Speaker 1: just like, you know, there's a bunch of people who
Speaker 1: are just always unemployed and they get along by doing
Speaker 1: sort of like odd jobs, like you know, like my, my,
Speaker 1: my quintessential person for this is like if you ever
Speaker 1: go on a subway, there's you know, it's it's the
Speaker 1: guy selling candy bars in the subway. Yeah right, it's
Speaker 1: people who quasi legal you know, sometimes they just kind
Speaker 1: of like doing whatever, you know, rants we call them.
Speaker 1: In the West Coast, you have a lot of those,
Speaker 1: like yeah, people who tream marijuana for a couple of
Speaker 1: months and then just kind of like crashing you know,
Speaker 1: camp sites the rest of the year or whatever. Like yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of those folks for sure. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: you know, and like the number of these people who
Speaker 1: have been just like kicked out of like the formal
Speaker 1: labor system has been increasing for a long time. But
Speaker 1: what's interesting about this moment is that you know, every
Speaker 1: every strike you see has a second strike behind it,
Speaker 1: and that strike is the informal general strike, which is
Speaker 1: just again people just quitting their jobs and leaving. And
Speaker 1: you have this weird moment where where normally the sort
Speaker 1: of reserve army of labor is this thing that like
Speaker 1: capitalism can always sort of rely on as a way
Speaker 1: to sort of solve its problems. Because it's like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: all right, if if you're not going to do this job,
Speaker 1: we can bring another person. But you know this, this
Speaker 1: is a weird moment where like the reserve Army of
Speaker 1: labor is like fighting on our side. M h. And
Speaker 1: the fact that all of these people are just like
Speaker 1: you know that they're seeing the just incredible authoritarianism of
Speaker 1: these workplaces that just horrific abuse. The fact that you
Speaker 1: know they're they're being in a lot of cases, just
Speaker 1: asked to show up and die, and they're saying, oh,
Speaker 1: is a really sort of is a really incredibly powerful thing.
Speaker 1: And when when when you add that to the fact
Speaker 1: that you know, all these companies have completely screwed themselves
Speaker 1: with how they designed the supply chains, it's it's all,
Speaker 1: it's all come back around and suddenly all all the
Speaker 1: supply chain stuff that they carefully laid out over decades
Speaker 1: and decades decades is a way to just like break
Speaker 1: the union movement and make sure nobody ever asked more wages.
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's it's it's it's been revealed to
Speaker 1: be incredibly fragile and you know, weak to our attack,
Speaker 1: and that leads us, I think, to this other tension
Speaker 1: in Biden's plan to sort of like revive the economy,
Speaker 1: which is that so the US technically speaking has this
Speaker 1: like very large central planning capability, but it only has
Speaker 1: it to like build weapons. So you know, like the
Speaker 1: army has this incredible ability like that. There there's a
Speaker 1: lot of bullets, you know it despite the huge stress
Speaker 1: on the bullets supply chain, it really has scale. You know,
Speaker 1: the prices have increased, but we're we're still still still
Speaker 1: getting bullets. America is great at making bullets. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: less great at keeping tractors working, but be a problem. Yeah,
Speaker 1: then you're like even if even remember at the beginning
Speaker 1: of the pandemic, it was like the US just couldn't
Speaker 1: produce masks, like we said, we we never we never
Speaker 1: like did that, right like that, like the government never
Speaker 1: at any point was like we're just gonna make mass
Speaker 1: and given the people, they just never did it. And
Speaker 1: so you know, our mass supplies, all those supplic chains suck.
Speaker 1: And the only way that like the States can intervene
Speaker 1: and get the supply chains to work is by doing
Speaker 1: one of two things. It's by either doing a thing
Speaker 1: Biden was doing, which is just go to a bunch
Speaker 1: of companies and tell them to make all of their
Speaker 1: workers work harder, which is the thing that like, you know,
Speaker 1: totally won't backfire or explode in his face. And then
Speaker 1: the second thing is for Biden basically to like do
Speaker 1: all this saber rattling about how we have to have
Speaker 1: like medical supply chains in the US because national defense
Speaker 1: or something. And that's the second thing he's trying to do.
Speaker 1: But you know that just that just makes the problem worse, right,
Speaker 1: because what once you once you lose the ability to outsource, you,
Speaker 1: you lose the hammer even beating the unions with. And
Speaker 1: so you know, all all of the sort of all
Speaker 1: of the tendencies that are you know, making things like
Speaker 1: bad and scary right now are also weirdly making this.
Speaker 1: You know, the fact that prices are rising, right, the
Speaker 1: fact that there's all these shortages. It's it's it's making
Speaker 1: this like the best moment two, you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's making this the best moment that and that anyone's
Speaker 1: had in ages to actually try to make something better.
Speaker 1: And and and the important thing is we're starting to
Speaker 1: see it happen. And yeah, and we're we're we're we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk more about St. October and sort of the
Speaker 1: strike wave and the coming you know, weeks and months.
Speaker 1: But yeah, we're gonna we're gonna be hitting this pretty hard,
Speaker 1: even just next week. Um, we have a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff in the pipeline. Kind of wish we've gotten to
Speaker 1: it earlier, but there's a lot of stuff to talk
Speaker 1: about in the world y happening that that's within our milieu.
Speaker 1: It turns out when you're when you're specific focus is
Speaker 1: things falling apart. Uh, you're always behind uncovering all the
Speaker 1: things that are falling on the park. But I think
Speaker 1: it is a good time to to to drive this
Speaker 1: to a close, to drag this episode out behind the
Speaker 1: farm the barn, and and and shoot it and bury
Speaker 1: it in a shallow grave and and break its bones
Speaker 1: with the hammers that the police can't identify it. Chris Um,
Speaker 1: thank you for putting this together. I got anything anything
Speaker 1: else to say? Uh, quit your job, you or you
Speaker 1: and or unionize your workplace and or take it over
Speaker 1: and run it yourselves, because Lord knows the people who
Speaker 1: are telling you what to do, just literally do not
Speaker 1: or if you die. Yeah, I mean with with that Sorry, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I was just gonna Uh, I don't know what I
Speaker 1: was gonna do, Chris, I don't know what I was
Speaker 1: gonna do. Do do Go go do something. You know
Speaker 1: you're you're listening to things, Go do something. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and yeah, and if you want to listen to us,
Speaker 1: do more things. We are allegedly allegedly we we we
Speaker 1: are at cool zone Media on on the Twitter and
Speaker 1: and the you can't prove that in court, it's true.
Speaker 1: Good luck, good luck to them and try to for
Speaker 1: if that we did this. Yeah, that's right, motherfucker's all right. Uh.
Speaker 1: It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 1: Happen here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com
Speaker 1: slash sources. Thanks for listening.